I have been reluctant to write the last article in my Ozempic series but since a few readers have taken the time to write and ask about it, I guess the time has come. To recap, the first article, posted in February, recounted my decision to try semaglutide, my quest for a provider, and my first weeks on it. In the second article, posted in April, I declared victory. At my lightest, I weighed 125, which was 17 pounds less than I started. 

I stayed on the drug for a total of seven months, with a top dose of 20 units/week. After I finished my second bottle, having spent a total of $750, I decided to stop taking it. From April to August, I bounced around within three pounds of my low weight. I had seemingly developed a tolerance by then. I still occasionally experienced what I think of as the Ozempic effect — when you prepare or order a plate of food, then look at it and realize you can barely put a bite in your mouth — but mostly I just ate the way I normally do, though a little less. I’ve never really liked sweets (my sainted mother effectively brainwashed me in this area), and usually make what they call “good choices” about food. 

My downfall as far as calories are concerned is alcohol. If you recall, in the first article, on Day Seven, I wrote that I had lost my ability to down a bottle of wine in an evening, and felt like one or two small glasses was plenty. Hard liquor didn’t appeal. Unfortunately, that wore off a long time ago, and cheap Chardonnay, gin and juice, and the occasional margarita have been on the menu. Sometimes, this gives me the munchies, and I’ll snack on pistachio nuts or pretzels or nachos, generally avoiding binge-adjacent quantities.

The last few weeks on the drug, I tried a higher dose, 20 units, to see if I could get it to work again. It really didn’t. At the higher dose, I was exhausted all the time, which was the one side effect I often experienced, and I was still hovering around the same weight. I wasn’t eager to go to an even higher dose or spend any more money.

Yet I worried about going off, wondering if I’d quickly gain back the whole sack of potatoes. Since it’s only been three weeks, it’s still possible. Most mornings, I still weigh about 128, but I did spy 130 at some unlucky point. Being on Ozempic, you get spoiled by not having to really try at all and the challenge when you’re off it is to remember how to exercise self-control. For a hot minute, I thought I might go back to food logging with an app (I’ve used MyNetDiary on and off) but I got fed up with it quickly. I’m still doing hot yoga and yoga sculpt several times a week, reliably the most senior of the citizens in the CorePower classes I go to at the Rotunda. Surrounded by lithe youngsters in leggings, sweat pouring off me in rivers, I think, good for you, Marion. At least you’re here. 

I do feel semaglutide is pretty magical. I lost weight almost effortlessly and had no terrible side effects. I don’t know why anyone with weight issues wouldn’t try it, if they could afford it. I’m cautiously hopeful that I’ll be able to keep off the majority of the unwanted pounds. If my set point — the weight your body wants to be at — did decrease by 10%, as Dr. Varano suggested it might, I should be okay. 

I checked in with several of the friends who jumped on my bandwagon, and here are a few updates. 

Friend One hit his goal in about six months, having lost 32 pounds, and is finishing up what may be his last bottle. It’s been pretty easy to maintain the loss as he titrates off the drug, he told me in a text. “I’m sliding out at 10 units per week (but sometimes I cheat and do 12.)  Appetite’s not back to eating everything under the sun like before but I am a bit hungrier. Having to be a bit more aware of how much I eat since the appetite door is no longer getting slammed in the face like when I was doing 30 plus units. I’m actually thinking about getting a new vial but more than likely won’t.”

Friend Two, who you may recall was warned she might have a hard time losing the weight because her fat is visceral rather than subcutaneous, actually did have a slow start and a lot of side effects, including serious fatigue and stomachaches. But at this point, she has lost 20 pounds in six months, and is determined to lose another 10 or 15. She is doing 40 units a week, in two 20-unit shots, which is a pretty high dose. She already looks great, is getting double takes from neighbors, who inevitably ask, “what did you do to your hair?” She does not reveal her secret, fearing the pushback one typically gets from the many people who oppose weight loss drugs, either on moral or medical grounds. This can be tiresome. She is wondering/worrying if she will have to stay on it forever, but for now is just soldiering on.

Friends Three and Four got on semaglutides a little later than those two, and they are using Henry Meds online rather than our guy in DC. Friend Three, who does plan to stay on the drug “forever,” reports by text: “My experience with generic semaglutide has been positive.  I’ve lost 30 pounds so far and probably will lose about 5 more before I plateau.  My only side-effect has been mild nausea the morning after I take the shot and I have learned to take an anti-nausea pill the night before to deal with it.  The drug hasn’t really changed anything about which particular foods I enjoy, I just want less.  This is ideal.  It seems to me that the $300/month I spend on the drug is roughly offset by decreased grocery, restaurant and bar bills.  Even Steven.” 

Friend Four, his wife, is three months in and has lost 10 pounds but feels she is on a steady downward trajectory.  She thinks that the drug might be making her a bit more tired in the afternoons.

And there you have it. I do love the idea of the 300 dollars per month being offset by reduced expenses on face-stuffing. And that guy is a scientist, so he’s probably right. Perhaps if I start puffing up, I’ll pony up.

The following essay first appeared, in a slightly different version, in the print-only literary journal, AGNI 99. It’s an abcedarian, which means there are 26 sections, titled in alphabetical order. It encompasses several journeys, among them mine from Asbury Park to Baltimore.

Asbury Park

I usually say I am from the famous beach town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, because people have heard of it, mostly thanks to Bruce Springsteen. But Bruce is actually from Freehold and I am from the suburban edge of Asbury’s zip code, an inland area nonetheless called Ocean Township. In fact, I am second-generation Asbury, my grandparents having raised their four children there decades before Ocean Township was even a twinkle in its developer’s eye. My father, their eldest, played quarterback for the Asbury Park High School football team. His name was Hyman, for reasons I will soon explain. 

Best Friend’s Mother

From fifth grade on, my best friend was Sandye, who lived on the other end of Dwight Drive, which the internet confirms is .9 miles long and has seventy-two houses in all. We were #7; they were #64. Of all the people who lived in these two houses since 1960, the last one left was Phyllis, Sandye’s mother. After my mother died in 2008 and we sold her house, I was able to maintain the illusion of going home by visiting Phyllis with Sandye at #64.

Clams

At the Jersey Shore in the years of my childhood, steamed clams were often served in bright-colored plastic sand buckets, and came with hot clam broth and melted butter. My parents ate them at a place called Dave and Evelyn’s, and later, just Evelyn’s. My parents remained Hy and Jane, though their union also had its embattled aspects.

Recently I have been craving steamers, hunting for them on menus in various seaside locations. When I found them in coastal Delaware, I got a dozen on a plate for more than twice the price of the old sand bucket. 

Directions 

To get to the street I have not lived on since 1975, but will always think of as home, I would for many years take Exit 7A off the New Jersey Turnpike, heading east on Interstate 195 to Shore Points, though if I were coming from the north, I would get off the Turnpike at Exit 11 and take the Garden State Parkway to Exit 105, Eatontown.

I know it’s a joke to identify yourself by what exit you’re from in New Jersey, but these directions have come to feel very sentimental to me. I felt like I might burst into tears as my daughter, also Jane, followed my instructions to take 7A when we recently traveled from Baltimore for a short visit I feared might be my last. I was grateful she didn’t insist on using the GPS, as the kids often do, and thanked her for believing that I knew how to get there. “Of course,” she said kindly.

Eternity

It’s as if my parents still live on Dwight Drive, though my father hasn’t lived there, or anywhere else, since 1985. Both of them died in the house, in their bedroom, in the bed of which I still use the headboard and frame. When I am on Dwight Drive, I feel strongly that they are there somewhere. It is, after all, the last place I saw them, which is where you should look for things you have lost. When not on Dwight Drive, I conjure them through various fetishized practices, for example by eating peanut butter and bacon on rye, a combination my father enjoyed (though not with vegetarian bacon, as I make it), or by using odd expressions of my mother’s, like “Dopey Dildock” or “starving Armenian.”

Forefathers

To get to Dwight Drive, the Winiks first had to leave Lithuania and, in the late nineteenth century, one of them did. Facing conscription into the Russian army and the constant threat of Cossack pogroms, the first Hyman Winik—my father’s grandfather—walked more than 150 miles from Jonava to Riga, where he stowed away on a mercantile ship. When he was caught, he managed to communicate that he was a carpenter, so they put him to work repairing the masts, keeping him in the brig at night. Knowing he’d be turned over to the police when they returned back home, he tried to jump ship at every port, getting himself into one scrape after another, but always avoiding disaster through his charm and skill.

Gravel

One of my earliest memories: before Dwight Drive was paved or even named, it was made of gravel, and the van that took me to nursery school bumped over the white stones. The street was called RD #1, and our mailbox was 104C. Along with asphalt came the name Dwight, with three short intersecting streets, evenly spaced: Doreen, Donald, Dennis. I remember my father telling me these were the names of the developer’s children. I poked around on the internet to see if I could confirm this but, if the information is there somewhere, it is well-hidden. 

Hollywood

Curving behind Dwight Drive for its entire length is a world-class private golf course called the Hollywood Golf Club. The course was fenced off from the backyards of the houses on Dwight Drive, but behind our house there was a gate. This is because my parents were longtime members of the club; my mother was a gifted golfer, in play for the annual championship against her rival, the great Bobbie Doubilet, and my father, known for his charm and skill, was the head of the House Committee. 

Both my sister and I got married at Hollywood, we held my mother’s memorial service there in 2008, and I have been back only once or twice since. On this recent visit, my daughter and I stood at the north entrance, now impregnably gated, peering at golfers on the practice tee. 

On its south side, Hollywood directly faces another golf course—one that did not originally accept Jews as members. 

Ikh farshtey nisht

When Hyman Winik’s ship reached Sydney, Australia, he had his last chance to escape, since from there they would return to Riga. During the shore stay, he managed to sneak off the boat and found his way into a commercial district. He had a plan. He entered a dry goods store where he swiped a few things off the shelves, stuffed them under his clothes, and made for the door. “Stop, thief,” shouted the shop owner, Philip Symonds. Submitting quickly to capture in hopes of avoiding return to Riga by being jailed for a petty crime, Hyman could only shake his head in response to Symonds’ interrogation. “Ikh farshtey nisht,” he said in Yiddish. The shop owner’s jaw dropped. “You’re a Jew?”

Jody and Jodee’s Fishery

During this recent short visit to #64, I mentioned my craving for steamers to Sandye as we were heading to the beach in Asbury. Like clams, going to the beach costs a lot more than it used to: four dollars an hour for parking and six per person to get on the beach. Afterward we went to a great local seafood store called Jody and Jodee’s Fishery. The clams were $13 a pound but we got them anyway. 

The steamers were as Proustian as can be, briny madeleines of memory: from the little brown sleeve you have to peel off the neck and when they hit the back of your tongue it’s like a brief burst of ocean. Like the hot dogs at the Windmill, like the coleslaw from Mac’s Embers, the corn from Snooky’s or Quackenbush, the pizza from a place that was actually called Memory Lane, the extra-large chocolate chip cookies from Delicious Orchards—the menu in the ghostworld food court of my childhood. 

Kin

Having emigrated to Australia from a Russian shtetl himself, Phillip Symonds embraced the young stowaway like a long-lost relative. He took him upstairs to his home above the shop to meet his family—a wife and eight children—and kept him hidden there until the ship had sailed and Hyman was a free man. Symonds immediately put him to work in the dry goods store, and clever Hyman greatly increased its profits and reputation. He married the oldest Symonds daughter, Mary, and they had a son whom they named Leslie. As the clan expanded, Hyman began to doubt that the dry goods operation would be able to support them all.

Last Time

Phyllis left Dwight Drive last winter. Her beautiful house and garden were too much to maintain and she hoped to have more fun in a senior living community (though so far this hasn’t quite materialized.) Every single thing in that house was special and unique, from the plywood underfloor Sandye hand-painted for the kitchen to the high-ceilinged sunroom for crafts Phyllis designed, overlooking the deck and the yard. Phyllis’s TV room featured the most comfortable sectional couch I have ever encountered. “Can I have that couch when you move?” I asked her a few months before the move. “Everybody wants that couch, sweetie,” she said.

That visit to #64 in the summer of 2023 turned out to be my last. Sandye and I ate steamers from Jody and Jodee’s at Phyllis’s kitchen table, sitting across from our two clam-averse daughters. This alone felt like a miracle, since the four of us had had a terrible falling-out during the pandemic, now pretty much, but probably never completely, healed.

MARION + NANCY 1960

My father carved these letters into the original sidewalk in front of #7 the day it was poured. Nancy had been born in January and I turned two that May. We moved to what was then RD #1, Box 104C from an apartment next to Washington Square Park that is now an NYU dorm. I have the feeling the engraved letters and numbers are no longer there, gone for quite some time. And yes, when I look on Google Earth I can see that the current walk is made out of paving stones, not the poured cement I remember. I also see what’s left of the “rock garden,” a little hill of boulders and bonsai-ish shrubs at the side of the front yard, which came with many interior renovations and a granite fireplace as part of the great 1971 remodel.

Nancy, herself

What would I do without my sister, who shares the precious vanished world of our familial past? To whom I can say, Remember Daddy’s carving in the sidewalk? Remember the flowering cherry willow he planted in the front yard, of which there is also no longer a trace? Remember the day the kelly green Formica was brand-new, and you put the hot pan from boiling water to make Jell-O down on it? Remember the phone on the wall of the kitchen with its very long cord? Remember the fat dachshund, Noodles, and the crazy fox terrier, Kukla, and the beautiful, black-and-tan miniature dachshund Schnapps, who went blind in her old age but flew around the house so confidently you couldn’t tell?

Obsessions

I get my relationship to work from my father and my relationship to alcohol from my mother, and in these ways I keep them close. There is also my dachshund, Wally, who followed my dear dachshund, Beau. I may have to live without parents, but never without a dachshund.

Phyllis

There may be a reason Phyllis has outlasted the rest. In the 1970s, she was the first person I knew to buy whole wheat bread and take vitamins and follow the advice of Adelle Davis. I have wonderful memories of a ratatouille-type dish she would make and freeze in foil pans, using vegetables she grew in her garden. In her late eighties, she has retained so much of her beauty—her gorgeous Jewfro, her heavy-lidded amber eyes and swooping cheekbones — and her style. 

Quake

Hyman Winik had heard rumors that there were great opportunities in South Africa, which was rebuilding after the Boer War. So off they sailed: he and his wife and son, the Symonds parents, and several of the other children. They stayed in South Africa long enough for my grandfather, Cecil, to be born there, but when news of the 1905 earthquake and fire in San Francisco reached them, Hyman got dollar signs in his eyes again and the clan went back to sea.

Research

Though I cannot call anyone to verify the details of the Hyman Winik story, which came to me via my grandmother and my great-aunt, both long gone, I have just called Jody and Jodee’s to ask about its unusual name. It turns out a fisherman named Jody DiStasio founded the store in the 1980s, and when his son Jodee took over, he added his name to the sign. After this phone call, I was able to find Jody DiStasio’s 2019 obituary on the internet, and when I saw a picture of him with a big fish, I felt sad that he was only sixty-one when he died. 

Since I was on a roll, I tried calling Phyllis, to see what she knew about the Dennis/Donald/Doreen situation. She had heard the same rumor, but nothing more. 

Stalker

With Phyllis gone from Dwight Drive, I will have no reason to go there. What will I do, park the car in front of #7 and stare like a stalker?

Jane did this once, the one time she was on Dwight Drive without me at Sandye’s daughter’s birthday party, and the people came out and invited her in! Jane took two pictures, which I just spent an hour digging up. Amazingly, the current owners have kept my mother’s kelly green Formica and bright white cabinets with Lucite handles in the kitchen. The faux white brick flooring is gone; I don’t know about the Vera flowered wallpaper but surely the wall phone is long gone.

Trouble at the Top

After establishing himself in San Francisco, Hyman found a new way to make a living, opening the first nickelodeon theater in the area, which prospered beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Having become very rich, Hyman sent to Lithuania for his family, and one of his brothers married one of the Symonds sisters. By then he had obtained the worldwide distribution rights to films of Charlie Chaplin, and mingled with Hollywood folk and real royalty, supposedly loaning money to Darryl Zanuck. I have seen a home movie of Hyman and Charlie at Buckingham Palace. The family moved to New York, where Hyman believed the biggest deals were made, but at some point, he ended up at cross-purposes with Chaplin, who sued my great-grandfather for a quarter of a million dollars, which probably would be about a billion dollars today. He had a nervous breakdown and died at forty-two, leaving four sons born on four different continents. 

Unhelpful

Ever since I started working on this essay, my subconscious has been scrambling to help, digging through the files for long-lost scraps of memory. Unfortunately, it has gotten stuck on “ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ,” as sung by Big Bird in 1969–the Sesame Street alphabet song, in this case both an earworm and a rabbit hole.

Violins

My grandmother Gigi, Cecil’s wife, who told me most of what I know about our genealogy, claimed that Hyman’s widow, Mary Symonds Winik, never owned a permanent home or a piece of furniture of her own. After her husband’s death, she resided in a hotel they owned in Miami and spent much of the rest of her time on cruise ships. She was leaving from New York Harbor the day Gigi went to tell her that she was pregnant with her first grandchild. If it was a boy, Gigi was concerned to know whether tradition would require her to name him Hyman after the deceased patriarch, or if Mary would endorse the idea of using a more American name that began with the letter H, as many Jewish people had begun to do. 

“It would mean so much to all of us if you would name the baby Hyman,” said her mother-in-law. Tragedy! Poor Gigi was in despair. Whenever she recounted this story, she would imitate Mary’s imperious Australian accent.

Wondering

Why don’t I consider the place I live now, where I’ve been happily planted for fifteen years, my home? Sweet Baltimore, whose bad news travels around the globe at the speed of light, and where I have a dear little house in a peaceful neighborhood of tall trees and lush gardens. This city powerfully retains its natives, who identify themselves by where they went to high school, but it is far too late in the game for me to become one of them.

X

It wasn’t until my father was eighteen and about to enlist in the Marines that Gigi told him he was not Hyman at all. The birth certificate she produced for “Baby Winik” indicated no first name. So actually, he could choose anything at this point!

“It’s too late,” said my dad, and he remained Hyman evermore. 

You Never Know

My father never met his grandfather Hyman–just as I never met my grandmother Marion, my mother’s mother, whose name I share. In the afterlife, I hope to throw a family reunion on Dwight Drive where we can all get together and enjoy steamed clams in the kelly green kitchen, though I’ll have to find out if Hyman the First is kosher and I imagine Young Jane will want to explain to Big Jane that we no longer use the expression “starving Armenians.” Perhaps Jody and Jodee can bring the clams over personally, in sand buckets, with 1970’s pricing.

Zip Code

The day I started writing this essay, I spent a happy quarter-hour staring at zip code maps on the internet–my magic carpet and my genie. I saw Dwight Drive, sharing the 07712 zip code with Asbury Park, and I saw other street and place names that retain incantatory power for me: Deal Road, Monmouth Road, Whalepond Road, Cold Indian Springs, Allenhurst, Elberon. I remember how badly I wanted to get away from this place when I was an adolescent and look at me now, a restless immigrant roosting in 21210, dredging up names and numbers to reclaim a lost world.

Readers of this column have followed the adventures of my younger son Vince and his longtime girlfriend Shannon for many years now. They met in middle school, became an item in high school, and now, in their mid-thirties, have married. There have been many colorful stories along the way. The first appeared in this space in 2012, when I wrote about an eventful evening during their college years. Overnight Parenting Adventure: Spring Break Megachallenge finds the young lovers, here called “El Capitan” and “Blondie,” navigating a rough patch. Vince’s brother appears as “Donald Trump” (this was well before the man had destroyed our democracy and collective sanity) and little sister Jane, somewhat inexplicably, as “Nipsy.” If you have time, it is pretty effin’ funny. 

Fast forward to 2017; they’re well into their long stretch as a long-distance couple, Vince living in Brooklyn and Shannon in Baltimore. Here’s the beginning of Surprise Party Surprise.

For Vince’s 27^th birthday, his longtime girlfriend Shannon decided to throw a surprise party. Shannon is a gorgeous blonde and a smart cookie too, but her real superpower is worrying. She can worry ordinary people under the table. As you might imagine, planning a surprise party gave her some material. Whom to invite, and how many, and is this everyone? Can they all keep a secret? Might Vince find out some other way? Let’s say it comes off — does he even want a surprise party? Vince can be a crank. As one of his friends recently pointed out, Shannon is “the only person Vince is actually nice to.” Where to have it, what to serve, how much is all this going to cost?

Shannon worried lavishly about all of these things and many others. But the thing that went wrong was something that never even crossed her mind.

You can read on to find out just how this turned out, then move on to the truly unbelievable sequel: Another Airbnb Disaster.

The themes of the preceding two stories are of particular interest in light of the fact that Shannon and I just spent the last two years planning a much, much bigger party than Vince’s 27th birthday. And a more successful one, thank heaven. It was held at a beautiful place in South Austin called The Vineyard at Chappel Lodge. The ceremony was held under a gorgeous oak tree (the bride had always dreamed of being married under an oak tree) and performed by our dear family friend, Sam Shahin, a New Orleans-based drummer of note. 

There were 140 human guests, the couple’s dog, Cole, and amazingly, an owl who observed the entire thing from a branch overhead. Many felt this might be a representative of the groom’s father, the late Tony Winik. Maybe so. In any case, Tony was also represented by an old friend from New York, who covered drinks for the entire assemblage at the night-before party at the Embassy Suites. (Today’s modern weddings involve at least a full weekend of events, including afterparties for both the afterparty and the day-after party, and believe me, we toed the line. Sorry ma’am, we’re musicians.)

With the invaluable help of a childhood schoolmate of the boys’, Camille Ross, now Austin’s top wedding planner, all the details went off without a hitch. The food, Mexican and barbecue catered by Valentina’s, was hoovered down to the last grain of rice. As for me, from getting my hair and makeup done in the gorgeous bridal suite to dancing with my son to Blink-182’s “Anthem” and getting the guests up to mosh with us, to whatever happened at the afterparty at the Armadillo Den which I’m sure was great (I was there, sort of) — I loved every second.

One of the things I worried about in advance was my appearance, as those of you who have been following the Ozempic saga know. You even know I had to get my dress altered to fit my slimmer figure. And, ta da, here it is. Thank you, Medical Cosmetic Enhancements. I felt enhanced.

Another thing on my mind in the days before the event was my welcome speech/wedding toast. Shannon and Vince felt strongly that they did not want a long series of speeches and toasts. For one thing, the members of Shannon’s family are pretty shy. No way they were talking. As for everyone else, well, you never know what crazy crap your drunken guests are going to start spewing if they get their hands on a microphone and a champagne flute. I’m still traumatized by having heard a Pennsylvania brother-of-the-groom describe his newly married sibling’s early toilet training issues. I have also witnessed very ill-advised and detailed accounts of the bride and/or groom’s love lives prior to finding The One. “Trying to be funny” … not always a sound approach.

And so it was that I became designated as the only speaker. Between that and the fact I’m, like, a published author and everything, I felt expectations would run pretty high. Super-nervous, I tried out a few test versions that seemed to suck. And then I had the idea to turn to a less-widely-publicized interest of mine, songwriting. Here’s how it went, with more pictures, most taken by Scott Van Osdol, our dear friend since the 1980s. Tony was the best man at his wedding.

Hi, I’m Marion Winik, mother of the groom, and I’m honored to represent the Winik and McKenna families in welcoming you to the celebration of the marriage of our dear Vincent Valdric and Shannon Marie. I speak for all of us in thanking you so much for making your way to this beautiful spot to be part of this magical day so many years in the making.

I also speak for some who are not here, including many loving grandparents and most especially, Vince’s father Tony. He is represented here today by his mom, Grace, and brother Sam, and I hope all of you who knew him will hold him in your hearts and channel his blessings for the kids. He may also want to give you his drink order.

As some of you know, Vince was born just a few miles from this spot in a blue bungalow in the Brykerwoods neighborhood. Literally, born in the house. When we moved from there to a mansion in a cornfield in Southern York County, Pennsylvania when he was nine, we confronted some very different customs. Instead of bikes, the kids drove four-wheelers! Their hard boiled eggs were bright pink! Surprisingly they celebrated Mardi Gras, but not with parades, or beads, or cocktails–no, they eat doughnuts! Big yellow potato doughnuts! And most importantly for our purposes today, most of them seemed to be married to their childhood sweethearts. We got a couple of those right here. Give it up for Donna and Ed! This amazed me. Is it something in the water? Turns out, maybe so, as anyone who has seen the early photos of Shannon and Vince as floppy-haired little kids on their website. 

Their official relationship, as I understand it, began in junior year at Susquehannock High School, and since then has survived and thrived over seventeen years, five colleges, six states, four bands, seven or eight social media platforms, and one global pandemic, which was responsible for cancelling the 2020 world tour of The Killers and thus foiling Vince’s original plan to propose to Shannon in Sweden that year. (He was working for them as a guitar tech back then.)

So… Vince bided his time. And two years later, when The Killers finally made it to Stockholm, Shannon got quite a surprise at the famous Maribergets lookout, where Vince dropped to one knee, pulled out a ring and asked her to marry him. 

At that point, we were 15 years in so why rush things? Two years of wedding planning ensued and that bring us finally to this blessed day, in our beloved town of Austin which Vince and Shannon have chosen as their home.

Though wedding speeches often contain some advice about marriage, or wisdom about what makes a relationship work over time, obviously Vince and Shannon have a better grasp on that than me or most of the rest of us. And though I’m glad they decided to make it official, we are already family. Shannon has been a daughter to me as long as I have known her. I am so proud of her and all her accomplishments. I’m still bragging about when she won the prize for best designer in her class in grad school at the University of Baltimore. I know Donna and Ed feel the same about Vince. 

So now, I will perform a sacred ritual to welcome Shannon to our family. It is required of every Winik, human or canine, that he or she have a theme song. We can sing them all later, if you like, but for now, here’s Vince’s.

My name is Vincie la Voo and I am here to poopoo
I am coming to town and I am wearing a crown
I can’t even talk and I’m just learning to walk
but I can boogie woogie woogie til the sun goes down
Vincie la Voo – poo poo
Vincie la Voo – woo woo
Vince la Voo – yoo hoo
Vincelator Vincelator Vincelator Vincie la Voo

And look, this song turned out to be prophetic as Vince grew up to become the original designer and inventor of the poop emoji and has built an entire career on “boogie woogie woogie til the sun goes down.”

And now, for the first time ever, Shannon’s official theme song.

Along comes NayNay, bright as a star
Along comes Nooners, drivin the car
Along comes Naequan, bringin the bar
It’s Shannon – and she’s plannin’
to blow your mind.
Southern York County, born and raised
Pennsylvania, don’t be fazed
Austin, Texas, so amazed
It’s Shannon – and she’s plannin’
to blow your mind.
Soccer princess on the field
Designer diva, signed and sealed
Heart of gold ‑ nerves of glass ‑ will of steel
It’s Shannon – and she’s plannin’
to blow your minds.

Welcome to our family, Shannon, and welcome to our wedding, guests! 
A joyous day Calloo Callay! Here’s to the bride and groom.

Want to congratulate Vince? You’ll find him on tour with Me Nd Adam, right now. For a full listing of venues and tickets, go to mendadam.com.

FRI, MAY 10 Charleston, SC
SAT, MAY 11 Atlanta, GA
WED, MAY 15 Richmond, VA
THU, MAY 16 Baltimore, MD
FRI, MAY 17 New York, NY
SAT, MAY 18 Philadelphia, PA
WED, MAY 22 Hamtramck, Ml
THUR, MAY 23 Chicago, IL
FRI, MAY 24 Minneapolis, MN
SAT, MAY 25 Kansas City, MO
SUN, MAY 26 Oklahoma City, OK
FRI, JUN 28 New Orleans, LA
SAT, JUN 29 Houston, TX
FRI, JUL 12 Dallas, TX
SAT, JUL 13 Austin, TX

It has been twelve weeks since I visited the office of Dr. Drew Varano and did my first shot of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic — this is the follow-up I promised, and the news is good. I have lost about 17 pounds. I got down to 125 which I never thought I’d see again in this lifetime. I had to take the dress I bought for Vince’s wedding to be taken in through the bodice, and it looks much cuter than it did before. For the rehearsal dinner I will be wearing a beautiful gold satin Tahari top I bought for my 40th birthday party (on the back patio of a long-gone lesbian bar in Austin called Chances, sigh)… which I am able to zip for the first time in many moons. With gold sandals and skinny black pants with gold buttons. Very New Jersey mother of the groom.

Don’t worry, I’m not anywhere close to super skinny. My elderly skin is what it is—between four deliveries and a very sloppy appendectomy, I could never have a flat stomach again—but I feel great and am much happier with the way I look than I was in January.

As I told a friend recently over Mexican pinto bean bowls with all the toppings, it was easy. This friend has been struggling along with the Weight Watchers app and the tortures of self-discipline for a while now, and I was like, why? If you have the money, this is the way to go. 

Yet it’s too early to fully declare the win. I don’t know how it will go after I stop taking the drug altogether. Will I gain back some of the weight? Will I gain back all of it? Will I see any permanent changes to how much I eat and drink? Will I keep up with the consistent exercise I’ve been doing, hot yoga or sculpt five or six days a week? Will some horrible long-range side effect eventually crop up, as one commenter on the previous post suggested?  

Well — I’ll get back to you on most of that in a few months. For now, we’re just saying Yay. 

I took some notes starting with Week 6, which really aren’t all that interesting, so you can stop reading here if you don’t need the details, or skip ahead to the end to hear about how maintenance is going to work.

Week 6 and 7
Back in Week 6, I didn’t realize just how much liquid was in that little bottle and I started worrying that I would run out and have to buy more. I decided to drop to 5 units. I found that my hunger and “thirst” (for alcohol) increased a bit, though nowhere near pre-Oz levels.

I went down to Dr. Varano’s office with a friend, the third friend I’ve gotten on this party train with me. Ansley warned her that she has a kind of fat that is much harder to lose, visceral as opposed to subcutaneous, so she will probably have to take higher doses for a longer time. This was a bit discouraging but it turned out to be true so it’s good she said it.

I confirmed my six pound weight loss on their scale, and measured 3 inches smaller on waist and bust; hips same.

I forgot to ask about B12 when I was down there, recommended for fatigue, but then a friend showed up with a bottle of B12 and I’ve been injecting it intramuscularly about once a week. It might be helping but it’s hard to tell. 

At the end of Week 7, I went to an amazing wedding in Louisiana which involved lots of eating and drinking, though nothing like what I would have done normally. There was a point when I pretty much had to abandon a bottle of Miller Light halfway through because I couldn’t see taking another sip. That has literally never happened to me before.

Week 8
Having gained 2 pounds from the wedding weekend, I went back up to 10 units.

Week 9 and 10
(email to Dr. Varano’s office)
Great news. After weighing about 131-132 for the past 4 weeks, this morning I weighed 128.6! My original goal was 125. I’m not sure how much is left in the bottle, or how much to take this week.

They explained that there were 200 units in the bottle originally, so I still had over half left! Looking at my weight loss, which had pretty much plateaued, Dr. V. told me to go up to 15 units. (FYI, I have emailed these people A LOT, and either Varano or one of his assistants responds very quickly, every single time.)

This week I went to New York to accept my Service Award from the National Book Critics Circle. I wore a Nicole Miller cocktail dress with a Parallel jacket, which my agent and editor bought me at Bergdorf Goodman to wear on my book tour for Telling back in 1994. Proving once again that good clothes never die. The rest of the time I was in NYC, Sandye and I gave back-to-back dinner parties with front-to-front cocktails but fortunately, as noted earlier, excess isn’t quite as excessive when you’re on semaglutides.

Week 11 
Though I’ve had no other side effects to speak of, waking up in the middle of the night or very early morning has bothered me the whole time, cutting through the power of my various over-the-counter remedies (Benadryl, melatonin, doccylamine succinate.) When I mentioned this to my email pen-pals in DC, they said insomnia is not a typical side effect, and B12 should be helping with it, but also phoned me in a scrip for Ambien! Told me to start with half.

That actually didn’t work but a whole one sure does. And so far I have not left the house and paraded down the street naked, at least not that I know of.

Week 12 Ta-da!
I hit 125 for a few days running, and got this email from Dr. V. 

Congratulations! It took a little over 2 months and you lost almost 20 lbs to reach your goal. I would suggest continuing the 15 units this week then do 15 units every two weeks instead of weekly. This should keep you around 125.

The theory of “set point” is that your brain is like a thermostat and your body is the room. If your brain wants you to be 145 lbs and you get down to 125 lbs, even if you eat less and do all the right things, your metabolism slows down as your body wants to get back up to the set point. This is why when people go off the medication 2/3 of the weight can come back within a year. But if you can maintain a lower weight for 6 months, your set point resets about 10% lower.

The goal of maintenance is to keep you in that 125 lbs range for 6 months. We will continue to use  your current vial till it’s empty (they are usually good for 75 days past the “use by date”), and we offer a lower price during the maintenance period. We will go over that with you when you are ready.

I’m glad your sleep has improved!

That 10% sounds a little grim. I’m going to hope my old set point was actually 135, which is what I weighed normally before whatever holiday debauchery caused me to crest 140 in January. If it were 135, the new set point could be as low as 122.

So here is my chart as it looks now. As you can see I bounced back up to 127 by the time I did my weigh-in earlier this week, and have since been hanging out there. I blame those two margaritas I had with my ceviche at Calle last night. But I actually feel very trim and good in my body, instead of miserable every other minute, which I was back in January. I can actually do the cardio part of yoga sculpt (jumping jacks, burpies, football run, etc.) without old-lady modifications, which is a big change in my fitness as opposed to just my weight.

So far, the verdict for both the results and the process is: SO WORTH THE MONEY. Which, if you recall, was $625. 

Here’s a check-in from a few of the other people I have taken with me on this yellow-brick road.

Friend 1: “I’m on week 9. So far I’ve lost 19 lbs. Still at 19 units but I have a feeling I’ll be going up to 28 units as I’ve kind of stalled out and my appetite is coming back a bit. I do plan to keep going at least another 13 lbs worth.”

Friend 2: “After starting the drug in L.A. and losing 7 pounds, I re-started with the DC doc, so much less expensive and more convenient. Recently I was off it for a few days and gained a few pounds (it was Easter), and I think it’s because I had lost the constant vigilance, always being mindful of what and how much I eat. When you’re on semaglutide you can eat whatever you want, you’ll never overdo it. When I was off for that short period, I continued eating what I wanted and gained 2+ pounds. Now I am back on the drug at 38 units and have lost 3 pounds since April 1. On a positive note, though, after I stopped the first time, my old habits of watching what I eat at all times seemed to be intact… I was able to maintain the 7 pound loss for 2 1/2 months. Nothing feels as good as fitting in my clothes.”

Friend 3: An older neighbor sent me an email a few weeks ago, saying she’d been on Mounjaro for over three months, lost only 6-8 pounds, and now can’t refill her prescription due to shortages. With her BMI of 33, she should have been able to get insurance coverage, but Medicare wouldn’t pay. So she was raiding her retirement and paying top dollar. I told her to “call my guy” … turns out they can get a compounded version of Mounjaro for her, and will put her on a higher dose. (Key aside: The compounded drugs distributed by Dr. V. have no effect on the supply chain shortages of the name-brand GLP-1’s that are impacting diabetics.)  

Friend 4: “I’m the one who went on the field trip to the clinic with Marion. I am on week 7 at 19 units; a second bottle is being shipped to me now and I may be moving to a higher dose. I am down 9 pounds and have 11 more to go. It feels amazing to not be ruminating about food all day. It has given my brain a chance to take a break from old pathways and develop new eating habits. I feel healthy and optimistic though no big difference yet in how I experience my body. The B12 shots are a nice energy stabilizer.”

For the next installment of this series, probably in another four to six weeks, I’m hoping to do a Q&A. If you have a question about my experience or about either of the articles so far, would you please put it in the comments? Or you can email it to me, if you prefer, at mwinik@ubalt.edu. In the meantime, you might also want to watch Oprah’s recent special on the subject, now streaming on Hulu.

Are Ozempic-type drugs right for people who have 20 pounds or less to lose, and a limited budget? First in a series following one pilgrim’s progress.

No matter how overweight they are or aren’t, most people have spent a few birthday candle wishes on the dream of being magically slim. But only in fairy tales is such a transformation painless and easy. If you’re like me, you’ve devoted a significant percentage of your life to worrying about and dealing with your weight. I started in early childhood.

This is why, in the five weeks since I first shot this stuff into my inner thigh in a doctor’s office in D.C. and then almost effortlessly lost 10 pounds, I have come to feel I am in Oz. 

Short for Ozempic. Brand name for semaglutide, the weight loss drug that’s been in the news as Oprah, the Kardashians, Jonah Hill and Amy Schumer flaunt their svelte shapes. I somehow didn’t pay much attention to it until this past January I set eyes on a friend who had lost a great deal of weight and looked fantastic. The resolution to get my hands on the magic potion began to form.

Ozempic was originally designed for Type II diabetics, and according to a recent New York magazine article titled “What if Ozempic is Just a Good Thing,” it is now considered a miracle drug for those who are dealing with obesity and complications such as kidney disease and heart disease. As one might expect, it is paid for by insurance if one’s BMI falls into the Obese range — but not if it doesn’t. 

Though I used an online calculator to determine my BMI was not Obese, rather on the line between Normal and Overweight, I was not happy with my shape. I had recently gone from the mid-to-low 130s, not ideal but okay for my 5′ 2 ½” height, up into the 140s. I eat a whole foods, home-cooked, mostly vegetarian diet, and go to hot yoga class several times a week, but I drink too much and I’m 65. It’s very easy to put on pounds at my age, and increasingly hard to take them off. I have been losing and gaining the same few pounds every year or two, usually by cutting the booze and going on cabbage soup. With my new, fatter self, this was not going to be enough and I couldn’t seem to get it together to do it anyway. And I have two big weddings coming up this spring.

It was when I heard that Oz makes you not just un-hungry but also takes away your desire for alcohol, possibly even opioids, possibly even other compulsive behaviors, that I knew I had to get my hands on it. To put it plainly, my whole life has been driven by desires, to the point that I have no idea who I would even be without them. (I haven’t done hard drugs in 40 years, but I have an ancient history with them and actually only got off Vicodin, prescribed for chronic pain, right around the time doctors stopped easily writing prescriptions for it.)

At this point I was not taking no for an answer.

Getting Started

I determined early on that without a prescription the drug costs as much as $1000/month, so tried emailing my doctors. I have two of them, and both wrote back they could not prescribe Ozempic for me since I am not obese. One added that she’s not a fan. “My concern is that once you drop the weight and stop the drug, the weight often rebounds. This is not good for your body/metabolism. There’s also concern that the weight loss is most often muscle and there’s known to be a negative impact on bone health as well. If you’re doing strength training 2-3 times/week and eating a mostly plant-based whole food diet, you’re doing the best thing possible to support your health.” Also, she noted, it’s very expensive.

She was not the only one against it. Every time I brought it up, I was told that I’m so tiny! And that it’s dangerous, and costly, and I’ll have to take it forever if I want to keep the weight off. Also, haven’t I heard it’s taking drugs away from diabetics? 

Yeah, well. People who think I’m so tiny are not looking at these thighs or trying to button these pants. As for the possible dangers and side effects — meh, I’ll take my chances. As for the diabetic shortage, online research shows the drug companies are scrambling to address it, ramping up production to meet strong demand. (Now there are three semaglutide drugs, Mounjaro from Eli Lilly in addition to Ozempic and Wegovy from Novo Nordisk.)

The one thing I agreed with for sure was the money complaint. I couldn’t see paying $1000 a month, but maybe I could find a better deal. If I did, I thought I might just treat myself to it. I’ve been spending so much money lately on my son’s upcoming wedding and my daughter’s grad school and other things like that — instead of the constant scrimping, how ’bout I do something for me? 

If only my dear mother were alive, she would certainly support the idea. Back when I was a chubby 10-year-old, she took me first to Weight Watchers, then to a diet doctor to get dexedrine and a bunch of other candy-colored pills. The outome of this was not weight loss, but life-long obsession, including a version of bulimia in my 20s and 30s. In some ways, I feel I’m on the other side of all that, but at the same time it’s coming full circle. 

I think Mom could live with the paradox, as can I. 

After a few more futile emails with medical providers, I moved on to my best friend Google. One of the online vendors I found, Henry Meds, had an introductory discount deal but you had to pay before you even got on the phone call. This did not feel right. I just kept Googling different search terms until I found a doctor in Washington, D.C. who offered generic semaglutide for about $300/month. Ta da!

The office of Dr. Drew Varano, Medical Cosmetic Enhancements, offers everything from liposuction to Botox to laser tattoo removal to many treatments I never even heard of. (I later learned this type of place is called a medi-spa.) When I submitted an info request, I got a call from Dr. Varano, who explained how the drug works and what the side effects are. You can read all this elsewhere, so I’ll skip it here. He explained that he dispenses a generic version of semaglutide, which is not yet FDA-approved and cannot be prescribed to diabetics (so no connection to shortages), which may also be why it is so much cheaper.

In fact, it costs $312/month for the first two months, including medical supervision, and you sign up in two-month increments. We didn’t focus on the financial aspects during this call but I later determined that after the introductory deal, the tab is $335-400/month, depending on your dose. The initial intake visit is typically in his D.C. office; after that it can be on the phone and medicine can be shipped (for a $50 fee, plus $15 for the syringes.) He also mentioned that he would need current bloodwork, which seemed reassuring. 

I asked about the problem of gaining weight back. He said if you can stay at the goal weight for six months, you’re more likely to change your body’s set point, and he offers a low-dose, less expensive maintenance program for that situation. (Also, since I spoke to him, a friend told me she bought a month’s worth of the drug in L.A. last October, lost 7 pounds and has kept it off. This was good to hear. She told me of a few other success stories in our general circle. I’m not early to the party.)

I made an appointment for the very next day, mentioning it only to my daughter to avoid further pushback.

Day One 

Feeling I would certainly need my emotional support animal on this excursion, I took Wally along for the ride, wearing the Support Dog costume I bought him on Amazon. As advised, I parked at the Trader Joe’s on 25th Street and proceeded around the corner to a high floor in a fancy building, where both Wally and I were greeted with enthusiasm.

I never saw Dr. Varano, but had a session with Ansley, a personable young woman with shiny brown hair, no makeup, and a slim figure, who took my weight, measurements, and a series of headless photographs I did not want to see. We talked about my goal to lose 20 pounds, which she seemed to think reasonable, and my desire to look decent in the wedding pictures this coming April. I looked about as good as I could look at Hayes’s wedding in 2017, I told her, and would love to do the same at Vince’s.

Have you ever injected yourself? Ansley asked me. I snorted, but didn’t go into detail about why I am such an expert on getting the air bubbles out of the syringe. She walked me through the process of taking my first dose, a quick stick in stomach, arm or thigh. For some reason, she confided, inner thigh seems to work best… so I chose inner thigh. I will be repeating this process in one week’s time at home, by which time, she said, I’ll have possibly lost 6-8 pounds. Whoa.

During my second week, I’ll have a telehealth visit to discuss my progress, in particular whether I should stay with 10 units (.25 mg of semaglutide) or increase my dosage — depending on whether I’m losing, how fast, and whether I’m experiencing any side effects. 

I left the office of Medical Cosmetic Enhancements $625 poorer, but in good cheer. At checkout, I make sure to clarify when I would have to cancel to avoid the $195 recurring charge that begins in late March. There’s enough in this bottle to last as long as 10 weeks and I think it’s possible I’ll be done by then. I hope so. 

Day Two – Five

At the first meal after the injection, I find I can only eat about half of the bowl of tofu bulgogi I served myself, along with a mini glass of wine. I don’t feel overfull or sick — just not too hungry or thirsty. This was strange. I just don’t really want any more.

Through the week small meals and light sipping continue. No nausea or constipation, which were mentioned as the primary side effects. The only problem so far is sleep. I feel tired early, like before 9, but sometimes wake in the middle of the night, then sleep in a bit in the morning. Nothing too serious, though; I’m trying various over-the-counter remedies to deal with it.

Day Seven

I’m down six pounds and I feel great. I’m still thinking about food and recipes and enjoying eating, but I just don’t want as much as usual. Two or three small meals a day, no urge to snack. The effect is dramatic with drinking — after a small glass of wine or two, I’m done. But if, as the night goes on, I still have the urge to put something in my mouth, I have a cup of tea, or one of my Werther’s sugar-free caramels. It’s nothing like the actual munchies.

Friday night was a test of sorts, as I cooked dinner for my foodie friends in D.C. — people with whom I’ve enjoyed some of the greatest food-and-drink-oriented excesses of my life. I schlepped down my pizza stone and peel, a bowl of Neapolitan dough already on the rise, and all the ingredients to make both a Frank Pepe-style clam pizza and a Philly-type tomato pie. Rainbow chard on the side. Also some homemade pickles and Amish beet eggs to nibble as appetizers. We drank wine with dinner and bourbon on the rocks during our double feature movie night. (Nyad, meh; Logan Lucky, as great as ever.) I had a little of everything, and it was fine.

I’m still eating the foods I love — been going to yoga almost every day — and generally feel like I’ve been touched by a magic wand. If this drug really works like this for overeating and drinking, I feel like the government needs to subsidize it and give it to anyone who wants it.

Day Eight

Sill six pounds as of this morning, and I just took the semaglutide out of the fridge and did my first shot at home. It was easy. Later in the morning, I had a serious conflict with a friend and was in tears most of the rest of the day. I kind of gulped both breakfast and lunch almost didn’t go to yoga, though did in the end. In the evening I had a dinner date with two dashing older ladies of my acquaintance; was looking forward to a cocktail and a fancy meal as a break from the woe. We went to Alma de Cocina, which had that very day heard that it was a semifinalist for a James Beard Award. I had a margarita, a glass of wine, a sushi-inspired appetizer, and a complicated eggplant entree with a rich goat yogurt sauce. Left a couple of bites on the plate. Tasted one spoonful of each of my companions’ desserts.

Day Nine

Somehow was not surprised to see one pound come back this morning; not too worried about it. This is why you’re not supposed to weigh yourself every day. 

Day Twelve

After a day-long bout with digestive traffic jam, I am seemingly cleared up and down seven pounds. Bought prunes, as Ansley had recommended. Last night was another test because friends here for margaritas, chili and Scrabble. Kim could not fathom how it could take me so long to drink one margarita — but in fact it lasted all night. We had a good, emotional conversation about how it can be challenging for people with more serious weight problems to deal with people like me, who are more neurotic than truly overweight. 

Had my neuroscientist friend over for breakfast — he was telling me that they are even thinking this drug might help with compulsive behaviors like shopping and gambling. Also that the GNP of Denmark, home of the maker of Ozempic, is through the roof! 

I now weigh my “normal” weight of the past several years, so it will be interesting to see what happens from here. I’m still doing hot yoga almost daily, and it really is much easier and more enjoyable without those last seven pounds. CorePower is having their annual month-long challenge. I signed up to take 20 classes in 30 days, which I’ve done the past several years in a row, and my arms are looking a lot better.

Day Thirty

As Week 5 unfolds, my weight has gone down to just over 130 — a twelve pound loss. Emanuelle, the telehealth person from MCE, has recommended I stick with 10 units. Meanwhile, I took a quick trip to Kansas City for the AWP conference… did not drink a lot or attend anything that happened after 8 in the evening, but did not see this as a problem. 

While walking down the crowded hallway with a friend, I mentioned that I’m on Ozempic. Another woman turned around and said, So am I! We compared notes— and this actually happened twice. I also traveled to Boston to see my grandchildren, where I spent three days cooking everyone’s favorite foods. Ozempic has not changed my interest in thinking about, making, and eating good things — I just don’t eat a lot of them. Similarly, I still like to drink. But a bottle of wine lasts four days instead of four hours.

I have now sent three friends down to Dr. Varano, and plan to accompany one who has an appointment next week, just for moral support and to check in with my measurements. (I’m also going to consider getting the $25 B12 shot they can give you to combat the fatigue side-effect.) I still have a good bit of stuff in my little bottle in the fridge, and am scheming to see if I can avoid spending any more money. I think it is possible. I asked Emmanuelle if people have ever been successful with “one and done” and she said that if they don’t wean off carefully, they’re usually back in a couple of months, having regained not all but some of their lost pounds. I suggested a plan of cutting to 5 units next week, sticking with that for a while, then alternating weeks until the bottle is gone. That would cover a total period of more than three months. I wouldn’t mind losing a few more pounds, but feel so much better now than I did when I started that I probably don’t need to lose more than that. Yoga every day has made a difference. And I love not sucking down 500 empty calories of booze every night, I’m sure it contributes to my overall well-being. I hope this sticks in my post-Oz future.

Right now, I’m a poster child for people who have a less-than-critical weight problem and limited funds. But I will report back in a month, and perhaps again further on, because long-term results are the real test.

Editor’s note: The story of Winik’s weight loss journey continues here, in a second article in the series. In May 2024, she reviewed Johann Hari’s “Magic Pill” for the Washington Post. The book chronicles Hari’s own experience with semaglutide, the generic version of Ozempic and similar drugs. Readers can find that review here and sign up for notices of Winik’s other columns at marionwinik.com.

I’ve just returned from Thanksgiving festivities in Austin, where my son Vince and his fiancee Shannon hosted our entire immediate family for the grand event, including elaborate pre-game and post-game activities. Joining them at their little Oak Hill rancher were older brother H and his Boston-based family of four, including an adorable two-year-old and a three-month-old angel; his wife Maria’s mother, Maria Rosa, who divides her time between Miami and Ecuador; little sister Jane, currently working her heinie off at Columbia Journalism School in NYC, and the ol’ matriarch from Baltimore, yours truly. Wallace and Finn, two well-connected, East Coast-based dachshunds, flew in to join the host pup Mr. Cole E. Bear.

I started cooking pretty much the second I got there on Tuesday, working my way from braided challah and cornbread-for-the-stuffing through favorites like Laurie Colwin’s spinach-jalapeno casserole and Jim Shahin’s World’s Greatest Chutney to dishes associated with beloved dead people, such as the creamed pearl onions my mother used to love and a roasted vegetable medley the boys’ late father knew as Queen Yam. Vince ordered a giant smoked Greenberg turkey by mail, and also spatchcocked a chicken and cooked it jerk-style on the grill.

I will not bore you with the full agenda but will reveal that at the awards ceremony following the weekend, H and Maria got Most Luggage; Vince and Jane tied for Latest Bedtime/Most Tequila Shots; Maria Rosa got Miss Congeniality, the three-month-old took honors for Best and Cutest Baby Who Ever Lived, and her two-year-old brother won the Gratitude Cup by saying he is thankful “for nature.” Shannon received the Golden Paws, a special award for interspecies hospitality, and I got Kitchen MVP. I also won this stupid video game we play, Quiplash, for the first and probably last time ever. 

Now here’s the other Big Turkey. On one of our many journeys between Vince’s house and H’s AirBnb in the mammoth Chevy Tahoe rented for the occasion a question was posed: Why oh why was the New York Times running the ouster of Sam Altman as the top headline for days on end? Was it just a scheme to distract us from the war? How could it be this important?

This led to Maria Rosa asking more general questions about AI, H taking a shot at explaining it all, and my recounting a funny event I had been part of at the University of Baltimore during the recent “Ethics Week.” Billed as “MFA Faculty vs. Chat GPT,” it featured the four of us profs reading examples of our work alongside Chat GPT’s attempts to simulate or complete them. It wrote a new ending to Betsy Boyd’s bowling alley story, took a shot at finishing a chapter of Jane Delury’s novel “Hedge,” wrote an elegy for Prince in the manner of moi, and most thoroughly embarrassed itself trying to write a poem in the style of Steven Leyva. Here’s the first verse:

In the city’s pulsing heart, I stand,
Where dreams and shadows intertwine,
A tapestry of life’s grand design,
In the style of Steven Leyva, I’ll craft this rhyme.

Let me say that there is literally NOTHING in common between this quatrain and the poetry of Leyva. Let me also say that this contraption really loves the word “tapestry,” or at least believes that including the word tapestry in a piece of writing guarantees automatic literary cred, since it was used in all four examples. Basically, it boils down to this: The predictive technology it is based on makes it absolutely sure to generate one cliche after another, after another, after another. There is no heart that does not pulse, no shadow that does not loom. Also for sure is that it will say nothing that has not been said before.

The world of literature is safe!

When she got home, dear Maria asked ChatGPT 3.5 to summarize our holiday in the style of her revered mother-in-law, MW. Here’s what it wrote, uncut and unedited.

“Amidst the clatter of kitchen chaos and the comforting aroma of roasting turkey, our Thanksgiving unfolded like a well-worn family saga. Laughter echoed as relatives swapped tales, creating a patchwork of shared memories and newfound hilarity. The dining table, adorned with mismatched plates and a centerpiece of autumnal hues, served as the epicenter of gratitude. As we navigated the delicate dance between tradition and novelty, each dish became a chapter in our collective narrative. The warmth of familial bonds mingled with the savory flavors of homemade recipes, creating a tapestry of love that transcended the mere act of feasting. In the gentle glow of flickering candles and the hum of post-feast contentment, our Thanksgiving emerged as a testament to the enduring magic of togetherness.”

A tapestry of love! Of course! An epicenter of gratitude! If I ever use these phrases someone please shoot me immediately! Autumnal hues? Warm bonds mingling with savory flavors? At this point I was having a stroke. (By the way, the plates did match.)

But, said Maria… isn’t it kind of sweet?

Aw shucks. Here’s to the enduring magic of togetherness, long may its testaments emerge.

After the cobbler made his final pronouncement, I had to accept the situation. With one so mangled, the other was useless. As heartbreaking as it was, the shoes would serve no further earthly purpose. I squeezed my eyes shut and turned away as I gingerly dropped them behind my back into the kitchen garbage can. Two weeks after their sad accident, I had finally put them behind me.

Or so I thought.

Non, non, non, they wouldn’t have it. All that night, I couldn’t sleep, tossing, turning, sweating, finally realizing that sound from the kitchen was not the possum breaking in to eat the cat food again but their little voices, screaming for help. Get us out of zees trash can, you beetch!

And so I picked them out from the butternut squash peels and the coffee grounds, brushed them off and set them on the table. Where is zee bag? they demanded.

The bag, the bag. I retrieved their lovely printed pouch and draped it beside them. Pah, they said. 

This is where they have been for weeks now, an altar to my shame. And yet it is clear they are not satisfied. They want more. They want their story told. Okay, you crazy French chaussures, here you go.

Once upon a time, a cheap old woman had nothing to wear to a fancy party in New York City. Well, not “nothing.” She pulled a few items out of her closet. A floor-length blue gown she’d bought for her son’s wedding: too dressy. A vintage prom dress with gold beading she’d inherited from a dead friend: too depressing. And probably too small. Another sparkly Goodwill number: maybe? With the right jewelry?

The cheap old woman decided to take all three dresses to the castle, i.e., the home of a good and generous friend with an extensive wardrobe who had helped her out with accessories in the past. As she stood in the mirrored dressing room attempting to wriggle into the vintage prom dress without detaching its dangling beads, her friend was struck by a thought. After briefly disappearing into the upper reaches of the castle she returned with an outfit so lovely the cheap old woman gasped. It was a beautifully tailored sleeveless sheath with a matching coat, both in an iridescent green-gold fabric with a blue floral pattern, purchased in a Paris boutique in the early 90s. 

Would it fit? Yes it did! 

Was it too long? Not too too! 

What about jewelry? The two friends oohed and aahed over several stunning necklace options. And there was a bracelet, too. Yes! said the munificent señora, stuffing the jewels into a black velvet sack. Wear all this to the ball!

But what about shoes? By this time the event was only two days away. I’ll go to DSW tomorrow! the cheap old woman cried. Wait, said the friend. What size are your feet? 

She produced from her magic closet a pair of elegant, high-heeled navy blue Pas de Rouge sandals with fuschia insoles and snakeskin heels. They’re a teeny bit tight on me, she said. Try them.

Though her toes did not quite emerge in the cut-out at the tip, once strapped on, the shoes were easy to walk in. The friend dropped them into their custom-printed coral-and-white drawstring shoe bag with a smile.

Disguised as an elegant countess, the cheap old woman had a fabulous time at the party, though she regretted having brought no baggies to take home the magnificent leftovers. Her glamorous outfit elicited much acclaim from the New York literati in attendance. In a video clip taken late that night at a midtown Korean karaoke club, the beautiful coat, with its wide lapels and slash pockets, is still going strong. You can hear the tapping of the blue high heels on the hardwood floor beneath a vigorous rendition of Little Red Corvette.

And so to bed, on a couch in Queens in the apartment of a sweet lesbian couple and their little dog Violet. Who unfortunately is the villain of this story. For in the morning, only one sandal lay beside her suitcase where she had taken them off. When the other was found, it had been chewed to bits in three different places. 

Violet’s owners were stunned — though she was known for carting things off, she had never destroyed a shoe before. Everyone regarded the wreckage of the delicate suede straps with horror. Gloom descended on the apartment as the woman steeled herself to write the awful text to her generous friend and offer to Venmo her the hundreds of dollars she knew the shoes had cost, based on a Google shopping search.

Of course the friend was kind beyond belief, reminding her that the shoes had been a little small anyway, In my world, she wrote, the loaner assumes the risk! She urged her friend not to worry about it anymore. And added a heart emoji.

This was of course impossible, as it has been since Shakespeare’s time. Quoth Polonius to Laertes: Neither a borrower nor a lender be, For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

And sanity, too, apparently, once you’ve got talking shoes in your kitchen trash.

* 

For about two weeks after the party, I tried not to think about any of this. Then on the day I took the beautiful dress to the dry cleaner, I also took the shoes to the Russian shoemaker down the street. Just in case.

The shoemaker looked at me incredulously, his long-lashed eyes wide under the brim of his cap.

“Surry, dere’s nuttink to do,” he told me in his thick accent. He turned the torn sandal this way and that, fingering the areas of devastation. “First uff all, dis blue suede—”

I cut him off. “I understand,” I said, shrugging miserably. “I knew there was no hope.”

That night, I put them in the trash. And took them out again. And so began my penance. Though they have issued no further instructions, I plan to leave them on display in my living room indefinitely — art installation, cautionary tale, muse. Or as my friend Jim Magruder said, nodding knowingly when he heard this story: grist.  

I usually love coming to the Delaware beach in the fall but this year the timing hasn’t quite worked out for me, weatherwise and otherwise. After happily squandering one sunny day outdoors, I’ve spent more than a week staring out the window at the wet, flattened dune plants and the wild gray ocean beyond them. In the meantime, I have read six books, taught three Zoom classes, and watched one limited series on TV. (“Alias Grace”; not great but not terrible.) I’ve made two pots of soup, a batch of Smitten Kitchen corn fritters, and several cans of tuna; there are four slices of leftover Grotto Pizza in the fridge I hope to get to today. When I arrived in Dewey, I was a couple of weeks into a weight-loss plan that eschewed alcohol but after ten days of gray I realized I don’t have a scale here and someone’s gotta finish that Bota Box.

I did have some visitors, but they left, and I can’t say I blame them. My sister beat me at Scrabble, so went out on a high note. My friend Jennie was so terrified by the howling winds overnight that she built a “fort” in the back bedroom by closing the accordion door, barricading the windows, and draping blankets from the upper bunk bed to surround the lower. She hid herself in there until morning and left after breakfast.

Yesterday, unfortunately, I grated my index finger instead of the Parmesan cheese. Oh, dear. Though the dog has put all four of his feet down against leaving the house except to pee, I dragged him along to DB Convenience, the only establishment open in the little roadside strip mall. $7.99 for band-aids seemed exorbitant, so I came home and fashioned a surprisingly serviceable one out of duct tape and a piece of paper towel. 

I wait every day for new puzzles from the New York Times and check the Weather app at least once an hour. By this time, the little icon for wind is printed inside my eyelids.  Sunrise and sunset, usually the highlights of my stay at Surfside Plaza, have been purely conceptual.

But I’m burying the lede here, since something very exciting happened to my family one month ago today. I was happy to be reminded by my daughter-in-law that this calls for a poem, since I wrote one last time, remember? And somehow now, having written the poem and painted the pictures, the terrible week doesn’t seem so terrible after all.

Everything I Know

is not much. Otherwise I might not be at the howling beach
in a deserted condominium in a week-long storm. The locals
have tried to help me out — there’s a half-price burger special 
downtown on Mondays, they say, and 20% off lifeguard onesies
and tiny t-shirts that say Mermaid in Training. Beyond that,
they advise a nap. 

And that’s your department, baby, effortlessly slipping 
in and out of consciousness, all seven pounds of you draped 
over my shoulder, a pink-swaddled cloud. They are certainly taking
good care of you up there in Brookline: two infant gyms, 
a fine knitted hat, a carseat that turns into a stroller, 
a towel that turns into a bunny, a little boy who turns into
a brother. A mama, a papa, a puppy and two eager grandmas, 
one of whom snapped

a picture when you looked into my eyes. 
I was already yours forever. Happy to teach you everything I know, 
which comes down to some rather frightening cautionary tales
and a recipe for lentil soup. I grew up at the beach, I tell people,
so nahhhhturally I love the off-season. Bundled teenagers 
on the boardwalk in the snow circa 1973. Fifty years later 
the Atlantic waves are still extravagantly crashing, though
climate change puts a crimp in the romance, and calling it Ophelia 
doesn’t help.

But let’s not go there. God only knows what you will see 
in your long luscious life. (As your grandmother, I’m
reminding God: Long! And luscious!) After all, people 
have been scurrying around the globe for centuries 
so you could arrive in Brookline, Massachusetts
with the names of a Latin princess and a Lithuanian Jew.
May the kishkas of your mishpocha and the corazones
of your madronas gird you and protect you, and if you are 
someday a lonely old lady on a wintry beach in a windswept 
condo I hope you remember the comforts of poetry. And 
postcards. I’ll be somewhere, watching. 
Don’t forget to write. 

                                                    for E.C.W.

I thought I wanted to write a column about gender affirmation care for trans adolescents. I have since figured out that there is no need for me to write such a column, or more accurately, what I now want to write is very different from what I originally thought. This is a cautionary tale about how we form opinions — and possibly a more promising one about how we learn.

This past weekend, I spoke with a friend at a barbeque who is working on an article about the debates surrounding medical procedures for trans people. I was particularly interested in the situation regarding adolescents, whose parents face complicated, confusing choices as well as scary statistics about the suicide rate among trans kids. “Would you rather have a living daughter or a dead son?” is the way the question is sometimes posed to parents who resist their child’s gender journey, which might move from name-changing and wardrobe selection to taking puberty blockers and hormones and wanting to have gender-affirming surgeries. And, as I later read in a Reuters long-form investigative piece, the majority of kids currently seeking treatment are assigned female at birth, a statistic that has flipped in the last decade. 

As the conversation continued, with everyone worrying about the possible backlash our friend might invite by wading into these waters, I drifted immediately into a line of thinking that I will call “How Is This News Really About Me?” As I considered these young transition seekers, I remembered my strong feeling as a preteen that I didn’t want to be female —that I was more male than female. I even told people to call me Mike one summer at camp, and cultivated what I saw as “macho” behaviors, like pulling off bottle caps with my teeth. I’ve heard similar stories from many women over the years. A lady who came to clean my house in Glen Rock once told me that despite her triple-H bra cup she’d always felt she was more man than woman. 

I think many girls experience a sense of unease when we lose our originally androgynous bodies, our tomboy selves, and become saddled with the physical and social realities of having a woman’s body. Coming-of-age stories for girls are full of the dismay caused by budding breasts, menstruation, unwanted male attention — a whole raft of appalling downsides. Not to mention the social expectations around femininity, which, as noted, made me want to open bottles with my teeth, and later develop an eating disorder. Whatever womanhood was going to be, it seemed impossible I would succeed at it. 

But, look! I was so wrong about that! And doesn’t this relate to what trans kids might be feeling and how their lives might unfold? I bet it does, I thought. Maybe, I mused, I should write about this!

But knowing how easy it would be to do nothing but get my ass canceled by even broaching the topic, I consulted my neighbor and dog-walking partner Karin, an academic who works on sexual minority issues. Her reaction was dubious — was it possible I am not the best person to write about this topic? — and she suggested I try to talk to some trans people before moving forward.

Yes, good idea! I contacted Josh Cole, a trans writer and activist who came through the creative writing program at the University of Baltimore, explaining my angle and assuring him that I was not planning to take a side.

“My job,” he wrote back, “is to make sure kids like me don’t kill themselves because they can’t receive care. There is no such thing as not taking a side. It is a cis privilege to not take a side or to not have an opinion. Not having an opinion is, in itself, an opinion.” He compared the gist of my argument to thinking that abortion should be illegal because you yourself don’t want to have one. He also sent a bunch of links and resources he thought could be helpful to me. 

To begin what I now realized was a necessary process of educating myself, I started with the website of Schuyler Bailar, Pinkmantaray. Then I read an article about gender-affirming care in Texas that refocused my concern on protecting trans kids from people like Greg Abbott, as well as the Reuters article I mentioned earlier.

While I was trying to learn how to support trans people —and I picked a good time for it, with anti-trans bills being passed all over the country — I watched a couple of episodes about the J.K. Rowling controversy on the great Baltimore-based YouTube channel, ContraPoints, the video essays of a trans cultural critic named Natalie Wynn. J.K. Rowling has become the queen of a movement called “trans-exclusionary radical feminism,” (TERF) which has more problematic aspects than I can possibly go into here — check out ContraPoints or other resources for details. Within the first three minutes of the show, in reference to the 1970s anti-gay activist Anita Bryant, Natalie says, “I think it’s really noble how she’s able to project all of her emotional baggage onto the marginalized group whose rights she’s trying to take away.”

My jaw dropped.

Thank you, Natalie. You have explained so many things to me over the years. And your penchant for sorting carefully through the logic of fallacious arguments inspires me here. To the extent that my epiphany inspired empathy, it’s a beginning. But it’s not enough. The inner lives of 1970s apples can’t be assumed to have direct implications for 2023 oranges.

What’s more important is what trans kids have to say for themselves. When I asked my daughter Jane’s dear friend Jamie, 22, to comment, he recalled for me the “the heavy reality” of his early transition, and the immediacy of his need. “It was life or death for me. Gender-affirming health care is the only reason I have flourished in the ways I have, and have been able to experience all the beauty that follows the pain.”

Perhaps I do, after all, have one piece of emotional baggage that might be relevant. As a person who tried to kill herself in 7th grade—not because of gender dysphoria, and who can say at this point what-all was in the mix of my abject misery—I understand that the stakes are very high. The landscape of 2023 is quite different than that of 1970, but the adolescent capacity for self-annihilating despair and impulsive solutions seems to be about the same. No matter what age you are, it can be so hard to see past the immediate present. The most important thing in this situation is that trans kids get the care and support they deserve.

Editor’s note: This column won second place (Division C) in the Headline category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2023 Contest. Read our other award-winning pieces here.

Under the Tuscan Sun is a 1996 memoir by Frances Mayes about fixing up a house in the tiny hill town of Cortona, Italy, a beautifully written love letter to the country, its food and what Mayes calls “the voluptuousness of Italian life.” It is also the name of a 2003 movie which, as one critic tartly put it, has “as about as much in common with Frances Mayes as it does with Willie Mays.” For some reason, the movie people decided to pitch Mayes’s true story over the side and concoct a bummer of plot about a failed vacation romance. 

They also dispensed with reality in other ways. After watching the surprisingly bad movie, I read an article that explained that the majestic fountain it features, seemingly at the center of the main piazza, was made of papier mache and existed only during the shoot. And despite the fact that the story was set in the 1990s, all the locals who appeared in the film were told to wear their parents’ or grandparents’ clothes.

As I saw upon my arrival last month, Cortona has always been attuned to the possibility of invasion — it is almost half a mile above sea level, with a view that let you see people coming when they’re still 50 miles away, and a wall that completely surrounds the town, built by the Etruscans in the 4th century BC. Now it’s big red tourist buses Cortonians spy in the distance, wending their way through the Val di Chiana to park in the lot outside the city walls. Cortona has been dealing with the fallout from both book and movie for decades now, which its citizens seem to both appreciate and be exhausted by. The tourists have passed judgment in return. Cortona? You can do it in a day. As long as you don’t waste too much time looking for the fountain.

Maybe you can do it in a day (or even 2-3 hours, according to one website), but I just got back from spending a lovely week there. Having grown up in a tourist town myself, I have a nostalgic appreciation for the jaded attitudes of the locals and the well-thumbed feel of long-discovered charms. 

Furthermore, this particular week was planned more as a writer’s retreat/hangout than a sightseeing/touring expedition, so it didn’t matter that there isn’t much to do in Cortona beyond living la dolce vita: enjoying the amazing views, eating, drinking, and strolling the ancient cobbled streets, though getting around in Cortona is quite a bit more aerobic that what is usually meant by strolling.

The person who invited me to join this trip, Kate Nason, is familiar to readers of this column due to her appearance in an earlier installment, The Writing Teacher, The Drama Teacher, His Wife, and Their Babysitter. Kate has long since replaced the husband who cheated on her with Monica Lewinsky (wha —? well, it’s all in that column if you missed it, and Kate’s memoir is now available in print and audio) with a wonderful husband, an artist/urban planner named Tad Savinar. Kate and Tad live in Florence several months a year, Kate speaks Italian, and I’ve been secretly hoping to visit with her over there for a while.

So here’s how it came about. Back when Kate was a recently-betrayed single mother supporting herself and two kids in Portland, Oregon, she had a business sewing handmade upholstery and window treatments, and a client named Stacey came to her with a complicated project using antique Italian lace. When it was finally done, Stacey wondered how she could ever adequately compensate Kate for such intricate and beautiful work. Then she said, Oh I know! How about a week in the four-bedroom medieval palazzo I own in Cortona, which normally rents for many thousands per week?

That was almost five years ago, and what with the pandemic and other vicissitudes, Kate was not able to take advantage of her villa week until this year, tacking it on to the end of her and Tad’s annual visit. However, Tad said he had no interest in going to Cortona. I don’t know why. It could be that he saw that awful movie.

So Kate invited a few lady writer friends, and the three who ended up making it were: Holly Lorincz, a bookstore owner and ghostwriter from Manzanita, Oregon; Shawnee Shahroody, a somatic leadership coach and aspiring novelist from Bozeman, Montana; and yours truly. We were to meet in Florence the Friday before Easter weekend, spend one night there, and then travel together to Cortona on Saturday, remaining for a week and returning to Florence for one last night at the end.

I was a bit unsure about a week-long mystery date with people I didn’t know well, but finally, since my invitations to visit Italy are few and far between, it seemed foolish not to seize the day. 

Getting There Is Half the Fun

Because I could not find any way to fly efficiently from Baltimore to Florence (long layovers, crazy routes, etc.), I decided to fly to Milan, where there is a train station in the airport with a high-speed express to Florence. When I looked up the schedules, it seemed there were many opportunities daily, so rather than gamble on an exact arrival time, I decided to buy the ticket once I got there. 

Unfortunately, once I arrived in Milan and located this train station (by asking 8,000 people for directions with my single sentence of Italian – Dov’è la stazione?), I learned I would not be able to get a ticket to Florence till Monday. All the trains were sold out because of the Easter holiday. I was dumbfounded. Taking pity on me — an old, rumpled, desperate, American lady on her own — the salesclerks conferred and advised me to travel to the central station in downtown Milan and check with the other Italian train company. They couldn’t promise anything, of course, but at least I’d be in Milan, and not at the airport for the weekend.

At this point I saw that I had two options — take their advice in a spirit of hysteria and panic, or take their advice in a spirit of well, at least I’m in Italy. I went for Option 2. And on the hour train ride into the city, I met two adorable girls from Naples who were returning home from Tokyo. They looked up the schedules on their phones and saw that I would very likely be able to score a seat on the other train line. When we got into the station, they led me to the kiosk, which was a striped cardboard box with a man sitting in it, to buy a ticket. I hated to be separated from them. Ciao, bellas!

Florence? Today? Really? The bespectacled young clerk in the box made sure to let me know that this was both nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive with a protracted series of grimaces, grunts and sighs. As the line behind me got longer and longer, I kept turning to shrug apologetically — but the Italians seemed considerably less concerned than say, New Yorkers, might be in a similar situation. 

Finally he sold me a three-part ticket which, indeed, cost three times as much as the ticket would have cost under normal conditions, 150 euros instead of 50. The first leg of the trip was first class, the second was standing room, the third was regular coach, but miraculously it was all one train — no changing required! And, because I was holding a first class portion, I got to await my journey in the VIP Lounge up on the mezzanine overlooking the train station, where there was free cappuccino and foccaccia and a nice clean bathroom. 

And then I got on the train, and though I dutifully moved my seat three times, no one ever looked at my ticket — not on this or any other train I took in Italy. And despite the claims of sold-out seating, there were more than a few empty spots. I probably could have jumped on that one at the airport!

Third Time’s the Charm

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in Florence so after all the planes and trains, I decided to drag my suitcase across town rather than take a cab. As I meandered through the piazzas and across the pontes, a couple of previous trips to Florence started coming back to me. I had somehow forgotten to remember the fabulous, disastrous junket with the Clicquot champagne people in 2005 which was the beginning of the end of my second marriage. And another one, fifteen years before that, pregnant and traveling with my first husband Tony, my best friend Sandye and my two-year-old Hayes, the latter chasing pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. 

As these memories came flooding back, I noted this current trip was firmly situated in the post-marital phase of my life, which I have to say is short on drama by comparison. Gone with the hormones, as it were. I can’t say I miss it all. Oh, maybe I do, a little.

Kate had said to find her in the Piazza Santo Spirito, but since I didn’t spring for an internationaI phone plan, I had to track her down the old-fashioned way — by circling the perimeter, yelling “Kate! Oh, Kaaaa- aate!” When I passed through a spot of wifi, a text came in saying she’d had to pee and so gone back to the Airbnb at Borgo Tegalaio 29. I found that address — but not her. Turns out there are double street numbering systems in Florence. A red 29 is residential. A black 29 is business. I was at a blue 29, so who the hell knows. It just took a bit more hollering — and Kate appeared. 

Kate is a small, elegant woman, a person who looks like she spent her early career in the L.A. art scene, which she did. All her clothes are beautiful, pressed, and either black, white or beige. Her hair is perfect, her glasses are cool, and her cream-colored trench coat is stunning. Her purse is delectable.  

My signature look could be kindly described as “ragamuffin,” and in this moment was the subcategory known as “Eddie Bauer travel ragamuffin,” perked up with a stained hand-me-down blouse from my daughter Jane’s friend at Bard.

Eventually Kate and I found each other, and after a brief stop in the tiny Airbnb where she was letting me crash with her, we met up with Holly, who had put herself up in some Medici palace-type hotel across the Arno with her Marriott points.

Holly! I love Holly! She is an imposing woman of Norwegian extraction, with hair, skin and eyes in varying shades of ice and gold, and I knew from our first meeting back in Oregon that she is a genius. At the time, she owned two whiskey bars and a bookstore with her literary agent husband, and has since sold the whiskey bars, perhaps funding the afternoon I am about to describe. She also showed me the beginning of a memoir about being a ghostwriter which was stunning. It opens in the voice of a little girl in her father’s marble studio, and once you are completely swept into this scenario, it turns out that it was a ghostwriting project she never finished because the woman who was once that little girl died. I was convinced this project would be a hit, but she was only now getting back to it, after selling whiskey bars and ghosting a different book about a revolutionary treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Holly and Kate and I had lunch at Obica, an elegant restaurant built around a sunstruck courtyard, which Kate likes because they have great salads, and Kate is severely gluten intolerant. As we would soon find out, Shawnee also doesn’t eat gluten, so throughout the trip, all our shared pizzas and pastas were senza glutine. You know what, you could not tell the difference. I never would have imagined being gluten free would be easier in Italy than in the U.S., but it certainly seems to be.

At the end of our lunch, my companions were sort of surprised that I had the waiter pack up the last two slices of pizza and bits of salad — but yes, I did, and yes, I carted them around all afternoon, and yes, I did eat it all for breakfast the next day. My relationship to leftovers — the words “passionate” and “committed” come to mind — is something that takes a bit of getting used to. But we had a whole week ahead of us.

Kate’s Shopping Secrets

If you have any doubt that Italy is the design capital of the world, Florence will prove it in a matter of blocks. Pucci, Gucci, Dolce e Gabbana, Max Mara, Ferragamo and others are all lined up shoulder-to-polished-granite-shoulder on the Via Tornabuoni, and the windows are just magnificent. At Gucci, they had redone the carpeting, upholstery and wall treatments to match the black-and-white geometric patterned dresses in the window. 

And so, we shopped. Holly was interested in buying some of Florence’s famous leather goods, and Kate had just the place for it. At a store called Il Bisonte, the source of Kate’s luscious handbag, we were warmly greeted by the sales staff, particularly a devastatingly handsome Frenchman named Axel. What’s this? — my hormones briefly returned for a visit as I fell madly in love with Axel and began babbling in French. Holly and Kate bought gorgeous briefcases for their laptops, and I bought a pair of driving gloves for my daughter Jane on clearance. I also discussed with Axel at length the possibility of purchasing a 2,000 euro bespoke leather golf bag for my son Hayes — God knows what I would have bought from this man if we had stayed there long enough.

Next, Holly needed a coat. Kate gets her coats at Max Mara. Soon Holly was decked out in a truly fabulous cream wool coat that matched her Nordic palette perfectly.

Though I got a contact high from the speed and definitiveness of Kate and Holly’s shopping, I resisted outfitting myself similarly. You’ve heard the saying, “this is the reason we can’t have nice things.” Well, it’s me. I am the reason. It would be a matter of hours before my laptop case would be ink-stained and grimy as I wept over the oil spots on my new coat. (I’m not kidding. Yesterday I arrived at a funeral only to find that while giving myself a manicure, I had drizzled pink polish all over the lapels of my black blazer and the bosom of my dress.)

At this point, our fourth member appeared on the scene. Fresh from Bozeman, Montana, Shawnee Shahroody, ladies and gentlemen, half Iranian, half mountain woman, a person with such a good heart that you can discern it even before you learn of her devotion to social justice and trauma victims. We celebrated her arrival with afternoon cocktails on the terrace at Gilli, our Aperol spritzes glowing in oversized stemmed glasses festooned with orange slices. 

As I usually do, I volunteered to keep track of expenses for the trip and help figure out the evening-up later. Also as usual, everyone was happy to let me do it. But then Shawnee made a suggestion that, for me, will definitely be life-changing. She recalled some travel companions using an app called Splitwise to automate the expense-sharing process. Imagining how complicated a week-long operation like ours could get, I downloaded it right away, and it turned out to be beyond my wildest dreams. What if only three of the four people go out? What if you want to give someone a break because they didn’t drink? What if Kate buys cough medicine for Shawnee on the side? What if you could consolidate all the who-owes-who-what so that at the end, each person pays back only one other person? Yes, it does all this, and it is a lot easier to deal with than drunkenly scrawled columns of numbers on a stained placemat.

Some people get excited about beautiful clothing and leather goods — others reserve their enthusiasm for free iPhone apps. Takes all kinds…

While we were at Gilli, torrential rains began. Umbrella vendors sprang up like mushrooms — guess who didn’t buy one. Shawnee went back to her hotel to recoup, Holly and Kate and I went to an adorable spot for dinner called Gurdulu, where we were waited on by a 16-year-old, his first night on the job, so damn cute. This is when I first became aware that a glass of good wine in even a high-end Italian restaurant is rarely more than 5 euros ($5.50). So you can have two, no problem! 

Do I Snore?

At Kate’s cute little Airbnb, there was a queen-size bed as well as a daybed I had planned to sleep on — but there were no extra sheets or blankets at all, so I shared with her. I insisted that I never roll around in my sleep and wouldn’t be a bother— then was quite embarrassed when she told me the next morning that my snoring had been so prodigious that she was sure the people upstairs had been up all night, too! 

This was the first time I’d ever been told that I snore, so I was perplexed. It seems I also snored the next night in Cortona, where I had my own room but Kate could hear me downstairs. But after that it apparently stopped. Who knows. She really should have just kicked me, as she says she does her husband.

In the morning we grabbed a cappuccino at Kate’s favorite spot, Caffè Ricchi, which I could see would be a perfect place for writing one’s memoirs, then met up with our group at Holly’s hotel. A driver with an excellent playlist took us out into the countryside, across the valley, and up, up, up to Cortona. Yes, we are finally there! Thank you, patient readers.

Under the Tuscan Clouds 

Cortona is a warren of narrow, cobbled streets, only one of them — the main shopping street, the Via Nazionale — relatively flat, the rest pitched at various steep angles. Only taxis and other essential vehicles are allowed inside the walls, and even those cannot turn into the majority of streets. Ours, the Via San Marco, was one of the impassables, so we were dropped off at the end of a long block. My shopaholic pals had plenty of luggage, but gamely schlepped it all. 

And so we arrived at the regally appointed Casa San Marco, the second and third story of a 16th century rowhouse (well, that’s what we would call it in Baltimore.) Though everything about this place was superlative—photos and info on this website— my favorite things were: the kitchen (filled with light; huge; better pots and knives than I have at home; cabinets stocked with magnificent sets of dishes and glassware), the balcony (more on that in a minute), and the bathroom (a white marble altar to hygiene, with a vintage lace gown hanging on the wall for decoration.) We each had our own room — mine and Shawnee’s were in the gables on the third floor. The bed linens and towels were luxurious, all the furniture and fittings elegant, welcoming and full of character (and how the hell did they get it up here?)

The small library included a first-edition hardcover of Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter’s amazing novel, which I had only moments earlier, on the ride from Florence, declared my favorite book of the 21st century. This pretty much sealed the deal. 

Kate had cleverly arranged for us to be picked up and taken to the grocery store our first afternoon in town, as Cortona’s Conad is down in the valley outside the city walls, and impossible to manage on foot. A handsome driver in a black Mercedes van (as it turns out, all the taxi drivers in Cortona are handsome, and they all drive black Mercedes vans) arrived as scheduled. 

Shopping with our foursome was a madcap adventure. I had a few ideas of meals I wanted to cook — pasta with tuna and olives, shakshuka, something with quinoa — and everyone else had lots of things they wanted, too, some sensible and some mysterious. I don’t know what Holly thought she was going to do with the cut-up butternut squash or exactly what Shawnee planned for the giant pouch of unsalted walnuts and almonds. Perhaps they already suspected I would figure it out for them. I swooned over the array of anchovy options in the deli case, the purple Sicilian artichokes… what a store! Kate selected our cheeses with the surety of one who has been visiting Tuscany for decades.

While I had begun drinking tap water in the train station in Milan—I asked people, and I swear they said it was okay — and had no ill effects, the other travelers were sure that this was insane and that even Italians don’t drink the water. I didn’t argue, having been on numerous trips to Mexico and elsewhere where everyone but me was laid low. Though recent decades have offered substantial evidence that I’m not the immortal I used to think I was, my gastro-intestinal system still performs miracles.

As they were loading the baskets with plain and fizzy water, I hit the wine aisle, where Chiantis, Montepulcianos, Bolgheris and other Tuscan vintages started at a few euros a bottle. Yeah, baby.

Back at the house we had the first of many extremely happy happy hours, laying out in the salon that opens onto the balcony a decadent spread of meats, cheeses, olives, nuts and the world’s most incredible rosemary potato chips, which we all became quite addicted to. The balcony is narrow, so we lined up four chairs and little tables, and basically dangled off the side of the building. Kate is allergic to wine, so she drinks vodka with grapefruit and Campari, and some of us converted. Many pompelmos were squeezed as the week went on.

Our first dinner was at a lovely place called Bistro Cortona, almost straight down the mountain from us, accessed by steep stairways and viccolos. We were greeted by the owner, a dapper former graphic designer named David, whose enthusiastic solicitude was unmatched during our visit — so we returned for our last dinner, too. One of the Bistro’s specialties was “pinsa,” a type of pizza made from a combination of flours, fermented for 3 days, and baked at a lower temperature than usual. The gluten-free version was outstanding. I also tried spaghetti colatura d’alici. Colatura d’alici is the Italian version of fish sauce; this dish combined it with garlic, olive oil and toasted breadcrumbs. Great example of the stunning simplicity of most Italian food. 

The first night marked the beginning of the Thermostat Wars. Because Casa San Marco is a very old house with high ceilings, made entirely of stone, it’s not surprising that the top floor is warmer than the one below. The early April weather in Cortona was chilly, very much pre-spring. While Kate gets cold very easily and Shawnee and I get hot very easily, we did not choose our bedrooms accordingly. Kate and Holly were down and Shawnee and I were up. This, plus the fact that we were going to be paying a heating bill at the end of the week, led to quite a number of late-night and early-morning adjustments to the little dial outside the kitchen.  

We were also pretty hard on the house’s hot water supply and called the caretakers on Sunday to see if we could get more. The woman came over instantly, bringing her husband because, as she said, the balcony has the best view in all of Cortona! This made us happy. Also, he somehow got us more hot water. They were very solicitous and sent other people to check on us later in the week, each of whom got us even more hot water. It almost felt like we were in a Frances Mayes memoir. Or my all-time favorite in the living-abroad genre, Cooking With Fernet-Branca. 

Of Course We Became Best Friends Forever

So, it turns out I needn’t have worried about spending a week with strangers. Somehow our group of four, with our different temperaments and eccentricities and internal clocks and thermostats, melded almost instantly into devoted companions.

Everyone spent some time each day writing, and we had a couple of readings in the salon, where we heard and commented on works in progress. Getting to know each other’s writing brought us closer together, as did the various pieces of good news and bad news that came in during the week. Holly heard very annoying things regarding some jackasses she had done work for a while back and we all furiously empathized. Kate was contacted by a journalist who was crazy about her memoir and wanted an interview — we were thrilled for her. I got word that the book I’m editing with Naomi Shihab Nye, collecting the writings of our late friend Ann Alejandro from Uvalde, passed peer review at Texas A&M Press. The four of us worked together on the pitch letter for Shawnee’s debut novel, which is a murder mystery with themes of social justice and self-realization. 

Due to poor planning, I somehow ended up with a cascade of imminent deadlines: reviews of books by Richard Russo, Ann Patchett, Tim Murphy, Dennis Lehane, Lorrie Moore and Brenda Janowitz were all due that week or immediately following. The ladies  were very tolerant of my dragging my iPad everywhere we went and somehow I got it all done.

Everyone but me got sick, briefly — Holly with a ferocious 24-hour stomach bug, Shawnee with a head cold, and then Kate was struck down hard by something which might have been exhaustion right at the end of our visit. Everyone handled their various indispositions so gracefully you almost forgot how it would have been if the sick people had been, say, men. Or children.

I cooked! A lot! And since we ended up feeling that some of the restaurants in Cortona were underwhelming, these home cooked meals were a big hit. Quinoa with leftover chicken and roasted butternut squash (there you go, Holly.) Pasta with tuna, olives, tomatoes and anchovy. Shakshuka with fresh ricotta salata, which is not like any ricotta I have ever tasted. So, so good. Kate and I together made Stanley Tucci’s pasta fagioli, as there was a copy of his memoir in the salon, and she also made an amazing radicchio and pistachio salad to go with the gluten-free pizza we ordered for take-out. The last morning, I made an artichoke-tomato gratin that used up all the leftover quinoa, cheese, rosemary, and even the goddamn walnuts. The only thing that went in the trash was some mediocre restaurant pasta we never even should have had wrapped up.

If you ever do go to Cortona, the one other restaurant I’d recommend besides our beloved bistro is Ad Bracceria, located in a candle-lit cave. We had a three-hour Easter lunch alongside a huge, loud Italian family, and another group with a dachshund. We also had great experiences at a cozy, slightly formal cappuccino spot called Tuscher. Try the frittata. 

The ladies continued shopping! Everyone got cashmere sweaters, and Holly bought some statement jewelry. I purchased  lovely illustrations of medieval Italian villages for my grandchildren’s bedrooms from an artist couple who were showing their work at the church. We had planned only one outing, which was on Wednesday, when a handsome man in a black Mercedes van took us to Deruta (ceramics) and Assisi (sightseeing). I bought several pieces in Deruta, and a St. Francis sandal keychain in Assisi. Otherwise I confined my shopping to the Molesini empire in downtown Cortona: they have a family-run bodega, a fruit and vegetable market, a wine shop, and a deli counter, all just down the hill from us in the Piazza Signorelli (where the fountain from the movie is not.) I was down there getting grapefruits almost every day.

Our driver told us about a hike we could do from Cortona — a few kilometers up and around the side of the mountains to Le Celle, a hermitage established on the spot where Saint Francis rested during his long walk from Asissi. Shawnee and I walked the breathtaking route one morning. With creamy stone buildings set into the side of the mountain, enchanted-looking paths into the woods, and stone footbridges over a thundering creek, the hermitage looked like Northern California and felt like total spiritual renewal. I’ll never forget it.

The End

If Beautiful Ruins wasn’t enough, our last happy hour at Casa San Marco was graced with a double rainbow. God. Okay. I get it.

Then we packed up, finished our leftovers, and went back to Florence on the train, bidding adieu to Holly at the station, as she was heading off for a few days at a spa. Kate, Shawnee and I hit a few of Kate’s favorite Florentine spots, including a return to Il Bisonte so Shawnee could get a leather bag. Axel wasn’t there, I’m sorry to say. And the next morning I left my dear friends, heading home through Lisbon on Air Portugal, a bare-bones type carrier that landed so far from the main terminal at Dulles that I found myself ending with the same question I started out with. Dov’è la stazione?

Other questions, though, had been answered. Like, if you somehow get the chance to spend a week in Cortona, Italy, at the fabulous Casa San Marco, should you go? Don’t stress about it as long as I did. Just say yes.

My most recent attempt at online dating, which follows earlier unsuccessful sorties, has crashed and burned somewhat spectacularly, with my being banned from Bumble. I’ve never been banned from anything before, so I’m feeling kind of modern. 

I wish I could say why it happened but I cannot, as there was neither a warning nor an explanation. I was right in the middle of typing an answer to a question from “Christopher” about whether I have any pets when the Bumble app shut down and locked me out. Though I can’t say I’d been using the app religiously, I did check in once in a while, and was thinking of paying for access to my latest accumulation of 50+ likes, which you can’t see unless you pay. The thing is, if I had swiped right on them the first time I saw them, I would have been prompted to start a chat. In other words, I’d already rejected them once.

And now I am blocked! Though I emailed Bumble three times asking why, they say they can’t tell me due to privacy concerns. The form letter assured me I’d been reported multiple times and referred me to a list of reasons one’s account might be deleted. I know I didn’t use hate speech, or try to collect money, or talk dirty, or send spam, or post inappropriate photos. The only thing I can think of is that maybe one or two times I gave out a link to my website, thinking it a quick way for a fellow Bumbler to decide if they really wanted to get involved with this “Marion Winik” person. But my website has information about my books, with links to Amazon, so maybe they pegged me as using Bumble to sell a product? 

I checked around, and found that most of the people complaining about being banned by Bumble are men. One of the few women who have been exiled could only surmise that she had shown too much cleavage in a profile pic. Another suspected an ex-boyfriend had maliciously reported her. Others say that any prospective match whom you stop replying to or offend in some other way can get you knocked off the site.

Ah, so maybe it was Robert of Bethesda. We were talking about a coffee date in Baltimore, and though we didn’t confirm it, or trade phone numbers, or communicate at all in the days prior, the day I got banned was the very day we had talked about meeting for coffee. What if he drove up here and sat at Artifact with no way to contact me? I’d feel really bad about that but I’ll never know now. In any case, the great love between Robert and me almost certainly would have gone in the bucket with these failed connections:

–  I spent many hours texting with a cheery widowed crossdresser from Washington D.C. who runs a government agency. He told me he hasn’t had “what would be called normal sex” in many years, and he gave me a bit more detail which I won’t go into here. For a couple weeks, he texted me morning, noon and night.

– I had lunch with a portly Pittsburgh Steelers fan recently retired from the Methodist ministry. I give him advice on his planned historical novel.

– I met a man from York, Pennsylvania who had lovely blue eyes and an unfortunate skin condition. He marveled that I am able to live in the city of Baltimore, what with all the shootings and carjackings and such. On the other hand, he bought me three glasses of wine.

– Eventually, as the texting continued, the crossdresser and I met in person. He was a petite yet fleshy fellow, and though he had listed Harvard as his alma mater he now explained he was in fact was a graduate of Catholic University who had attended a brief extension course at Harvard. Nothing against Catholic University, but still…. In any case, after our sad meet-up, the texting stopped. I had had my darling Wally along with me so he could probably tell I am already taken.

– A man who used to date a psychedelic shrink with an eighty-acre wellness ranch in rural Louisiana explained to me that after she helped him cure his toenail fungus, she lost interest in him. This person was actually the most viable prospect I met, but we experienced no fireworks when we met for a bagel. We remained in communication for a few months, at which point it turned out he had read one of my books and wanted to meet for lunch. When the day of the lunch came, he called to say we should probably cancel because he has been seeing a woman from Annapolis. Well, okay then. But the next week, he sent pictures from Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Possibly I will hear from him again.

– While I was visiting my son and future daughter-in-law in Austin, I got a flurry of very nice-looking and -seeming matches that I couldn’t do much about because I was only in town briefly. This also happened when I was in Boston for a weekend. Apparently dating in either Austin or Boston would be more fruitful for me. Let’s put a pin in that, as they say.

The question is — why? Why, why, why did I even think of getting involved with this crazy shitshow again, after a decade of adjusting pretty happily to single living? How did I suddenly decide I’m alone in a bad way, that the fact that my only intimate relationship is with a dachshund is not okay? I’m not even living alone right now. Jane is here, roosting temporarily as she figures out next steps, involving grad school, a serious boyfriend, and a job that may change from remote to in-person. Ah, twenty-two.

Right around the time I joined Bumble last November, I read an article in the New York Times about a “huge, kind of explosive, social and demographic” change. Thirty-six percent of Americans over 50 live alone — currently 30 million people. While older people have always been more likely to live alone, the article pointed out that baby boomers like me have made life choices that are greatly increasing the likelihood of that outcome. “Even with an active social and family life,” it says, “people in this group are generally more lonely than those who live with others.” 

Though the article didn’t get into online dating, I feel like we could finally be closing in on an answer to the question posed so memorably by Paul McCartney in Eleanor Rigby. All the lonely people come from Bumble and OKCupid.

Though I spent the whole first part of my adult life as part of a couple, by the time I turned fifty, I was widowed once and divorced once, and have been single ever since. I’ve been living alone since Jane left for college in 2018. I wrote an article about a month in about how surprisingly fine it was. “Perhaps that’s the dirty little secret that’s being covered up with all this cultural anxiety about empty nesting,” I gloated. “You finally get rid of the little brats and eat whatever you want for dinner. Mwah ha ha ha.”

Well, it’s been a long time since 2018. 

I sharply experienced the onset of Empty Nest, Part 2 while I was visiting my son and his wife and baby boy in Boston last October. Despite all of their kindness and adorableness, I started to feel a little low. I had to run across the street and pace the aisles of Target for some anonymous crying. I also cried most of the way home on the airplane. It wasn’t because I totally ruined the Singapore noodles (they literally dissolved the entire dish into glue due to incorrect soaking procedure) or because my dear little grandson was a bit wary of me (he doesn’t see me often) though these things doubtless played a role. 

I could tell it was something old, some buried button getting pushed. After some scribbling in a notebook, I thought what might be hurting me so is the recognition of the sweet little triangle of trust and intimacy that my son and my daughter-in-law and their baby have, which I’m not really part of, and it’s been a long time since I was part of any polygon of love at all. 

This is when I decided to go looking for “my person” again, and came up with the idea to join a dating app, meet my new soulmate and fix the whole problem! I chose Bumble because I heard that the woman has to make the first move, preventing the discouraging inbox-full-of-randos situation.

The Bumbling went poorly, as described above, and I forgot to even look at the app for weeks at a time. But then this past weekend, my Boston son took his little family to visit my Austin son, and my daughter was down in North Carolina with the family of her boyfriend, and I found myself on the couch in Baltimore with a black dog and an orange cat thinking I must have made some mistakes along the way. 

The fact that my family is spread out all over the country can be traced to my initial choice to move away from the place I grew up (Asbury Park, NJ), then to move again from the place my sons were born (Austin, TX), and then to leave that garden spot (Glen Rock, PA) to raise their little half-sister in yet another place where we have no family connections. This last would be Baltimore, MD, home of the not-so-sexy Bumble line-up.

Since it’s too late to start over and never leave New Jersey in order to establish an ancestral home for my family, and in no universe that I know of could my first husband or my second marriage have been saved, there remained just one solution. Therapy, you’re thinking. Hell, no. Back to Bumble! I checked my open chats and saw that the venture capitalist in Austin had at some point lobbed a conversation-starter about my pets. But before I could reply, or look at my new set of hunky Baltimore options, the app shut down and I was banned for life. 

My daughter made me feel better by telling me she’s been blocked by Tinder more than once, and you just get a new phone number from Google Voice and start over.

Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ll be returning to the apps, unless at some point I move to a buzzier hive such as Boston or Austin. But really, if I’m going to get another chance at coupledom, I think it’ll take something like what happened to one dear old friend — she was tracked down on social media by a cute Quebecois man she had a fling with in the 1980s, and now she’s practically living in Montreal. 

In the absence of that kind of fairy-tale intervention, I will remind myself of the luck I do have. There is so much of it. I just have to think for a second of what real sorrow is to put my recent feelings in perspective. The glass is way more than half full, Eleanor, so quit your bitching. 

At a recent high-spirited local production of Head Over Heels, which is what they call a “jukebox musical,” combining the hits of The Go-Gos with a book written in blank verse by local playwright James Magruder, the program contained several Announcements. First was “A Note on Gender.” It began, “As the city’s queer theater company, Iron Crow Theatre is thrilled to produce Head over Heels, one of the first Broadway musicals with multiple non-binary or gender non-conforming roles.” 

Hooray for that. Jim’s play is exuberant and even loopy about the various possibilities of what the program goes on to call “the intersectionality of gender, gender identity, gender expression, sex, and sexual orientation.” You really have to see it to believe it.

Hooray, too, for the “Note on Production Safety” which followed, explaining that cast members received anti-harassment training and that a Fight and Intimacy Director was involved in staging all scenes where appropriate.

Then came the content warnings. “The production includes sexual themes, jokes and undertones, kissing, simulated intercourse, violence and death. The production design includes the use of loud sound effects, haze, bright, strobing, reflective lighting, and the use of props that sound similar to that of a gunshot.”

Wow, that was a lotta content warning, I commented to another guest at a post-performance reception at Magruder’s apartment that included so many Baltimore literati that one could not help imagining what would happen to the regional writing scene if a bomb went off.  (Now this article needs a content warning.) 

He agreed with me that the sexual content seemed rather tame. “Though perhaps I’m just sort of… louche,” he added.

“I don’t think so,” said I. “I mean, no hanging weiners, no flying boobs, how much warning do you really need for double-entendre and hip-swiveling?”

This led us to a more general discussion of trigger warnings. Like me, my new friend is a creative writing professor at a local university. He remarked that for his students, it’s the done thing to include trigger warnings at the beginning of a piece even if not required in the syllabus, and only in one case has someone chosen to leave the room rather than be exposed to whatever was coming.

I agreed that trigger warnings are popular among my students at the University of Baltimore, and commented that the attitude towards such warnings seems fairly neatly divided along generational lines, with baby boomers often feeling that the young are a bit snowflake-y about depictions of sex, violence and bad behavior, while the young firmly believe in the importance of not springing possibly disturbing material on people with heaven knows what traumatic experiences in their past.

“But maybe it’s partly an age thing,” I ventured. “They’re just not used to it.” I remembered that once upon a time, I was not used to it at all. In 1976, eighteen-year-old me was deeply shocked by the depiction of gun violence of Taxi Driver, the first time I’d seen things like brain splatter. According to the IMDB Parents’ Guide, “This film really isn’t that violent until the end where it becomes unexpectedly and realistically graphic. A man shoots another man in the stomach. We see a bloody wall, bloody footprints, another wall that is particularly gore-covered, and a few gory corpses. This is very graphic.”

Oh, it was. I was reeling for days. But it was nothing compared to my reaction three years later to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. It’s hard to describe how affected I was by the movie, or it would be, if there were not an artifact of my reaction. I was so upset that I wrote a poem about the film dedicated to Martin Sheen. Then I designed a bright red poster with stylized white explosions running its length with my poem printed over them. I paid big money to have these printed and did everything in my power to get one to Mr. Sheen. Failing at that, I gave away a couple hundred. Such were the lengths to which I went to process my trauma. 

Remembering this, I decided to dig up the poem (no more posters, sadly, but it was included in my first book, published two years later) and re-watch Apocalypse Now. “There Are No Gentle Machines” appears below. Clearly, I was completely freaked out.

I think Apocalypse Now was the first war movie I ever watched, and watching it again with my daughter last night, I found the battle scenes assaultive, disgusting and sad but nowhere near as traumatizing as what I experienced in 1979. I think that is largely due to exposure. As the poem predicts, I eventually did watch enough television. In the years to come I would be able to watch and even enjoy, say, Quentin Tarantino films, without feeling the need to write poetry or contact the actors involved. Basically, I no longer interpret brain splatter as brain splatter. 

My daughter Jane had thought she wanted to watch Apocalypse Now with me, but she got up after the fairly early scene where a regiment of surfing fans commanded by Lt. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) takes out a South Vietnamese village by dropping bombs and shooting from helicopters. The explosions, the gore, and the terrible sounds are possibly as intense as any ever recorded on film. She said it was not her kind of movie.

Jane and I recently visited Vietnam, including a boat trip on the Mekong River and a tour of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon. Though the production notes provided with the streaming version of Apocalypse Now call attention to various technical errors, it looked to us as real as can be. In fact, between this movie, The Deerhunter, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket — and having grown up during the war itself — I was surprised to find the Vietnamese people so welcoming and friendly towards Americans. And yet they are.

Speaking of the production notes, I watched the movie partly on a 55″ TV and partly on a laptop, and I stopped frequently to read commentary and look up actors. This makes for a completely different experience than one has in a darkened cinema facing a wall-sized screen. On the other hand, I learned all kinds of interesting things, like Marlon Brando got so fat before arriving on set that Coppola — who had to mortgage his winery to finish production — was compelled to shoot around his gargantuan belly. Laurence Fishburne, who is amazing as the young soldier they call “Clean,” was only 14 years old when shooting began. The famous opening scene with Sheen going mental in his hotel room was completely unscripted and was filmed when Sheen was blackout drunk. He actually did punch the mirror and split open his hand, began sobbing and tried to attack Coppola. (Where was the Fight and Intimacy Director?) Eventually, Sheen had a heart attack during the filming and some scenes had to be shot using his brother, Joe Estevez, as a body double.

This brings us to the interesting realization that the movie is essentially about post-traumatic stress disorder: their war experiences have driven both Captain Willard and Colonel Kurtz insane. 

Well, draft cards don’t come with trigger warnings, as my daughter pointed out. Nothing protects us from real life. But should we be protected from art? Jane also reminded me that in 2013, well into my current jaded and toughened incarnation, I had to briefly walk out of Dallas Buyers Club because I was crying so hard that I felt I might be disturbing other people in the theater. At the end, I had to be physically supported to get out of the building. The depiction of Jared Leto’s death, and his persona in the movie, brought up intense memories of my late husband Tony, stored recollections and feelings I hadn’t been close to in a long time. 

Indeed it seems I have had the experience that trigger warnings are warning us about, more than once. Some people would prefer to avoid these experiences, or at least to be prepared for them. Personally, I prefer to absorb them, not evade them, and would rather be taken unawares, so as to avoid putting buffers and hackles in place. That’s why I often don’t read reviews before taking in books and movies. I’m still worried about the encroaching emotional deadness I imagined in my old poem. Being triggered makes me feel more human. I can handle it.

Nonetheless, having thought about all this, I feel less inclined to be dismissive of the idea of trigger warnings — even if it’s a long way from Head Over Heels to Apocalypse Now.

Last spring I took an online storytelling class with Mike Daisey, thinking that somehow it might help me figure out how to write fiction. This was not the intended direction of the class— Mike is a well-known Spalding Grey-type monologist — but one of the assignments he gave did seem to lend itself toward my nefarious purposes. The prompt was: tell two truths and lie, and make a story out of it. We weren’t supposed to write our stories down, but I did anyway.   

This is autofiction! I thought, and was all excited about my results. I sent the story off to four different literary magazines, including a local one where I kind of know the people. Every one of them rejected it. No one said why. I’m guessing … it reads too much like a personal essay? it’s too political? I don’t know, but if you want to tell me in the comments, please do. The version here is slightly different than the one I submitted, thanks to a suggestion from my friend the writer and teacher Susan Perabo. (That’s a link to order her books from the Ivy. If you are a short story lover, her collections are stunning.)

There’s more than one lie in here, as faithful readers will recognize, but there is plenty of truth, too. The neighbor is real, though I changed his name, and the golf course is real, too, but the incident that happens there is invented. I changed some of the facts of my own history, just because — for once — I could. In fact, I already used the truth-and-nothing-but version of this material in a personal essay called “Where Mommies Come From” more than 30 years ago. (It’s in Telling.) Now you see, this is why I’m trying to write fiction. Because my whole life is already used up. Most of it, more than once. More than twice!

This week I am giving thanks for the Baltimore Fishbowl and its readers, where my writing and I have had a home for 11 years.

***

Cuernavaca

It was shortly after I finally became a mom myself that I found out my childhood neighbor Matty O’Malley had become a national player in the Christian pro-life movement. In fact, I was nursing my newborn daughter in front of the TV when, oh my God, there he was.

“We’re here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with Reverend Matt, the founder of Operation Savior,” said the anchor. He swung the mic around to a face I hadn’t seen in decades. The concerned brown eyes, the dark curly hair, the boyish freckles — it was him, all right. He lifted his mayonnaise jar right up into the camera lens. 

“This was somebody’s daughter,” he said, pointing to the glob floating inside. “How does that woman even sleep at night?” 

They cut to a shot of the clinic entrance, where some poor hunched-over couple struggled through a crowd of self-righteous assholes shouting and pumping their gruesome signs in the air.

I read somewhere that the pro-life movement contains many women who have had abortions, reacting to their own sorrow and guilt by trying to make sure other women are forced to carry pregnancies to term regardless of their wishes. I wonder if this can really be true. Sorrow and guilt, okay, but thinking you should decide for other people?

The baby I was holding in my arms the night I saw Matty on TV was my first child, but far from my first pregnancy. That had befallen me my junior year of high school, the bitter culmination of a long, unrequited crush on Hank Rosenblum, who played the lead in our production of South Pacific. For three years I had been involved in the Drama Club for the main purpose of increasing my proximity to Hank. This year I had struck gold — not only had I been cast in the musical as Islander #3, but in our chemistry class, I had been assigned to be his lab partner. 

Doing our lab reports together, running lines, I waited hopefully for signs that Hank was starting to fall prey to my charms, such as they were. But what were they? I couldn’t have told you. A zaftig girl in a scoop-neck leotard and hip-hugger jeans, my messy hair falling over my round black glasses and my ungainly Jewish nose, I walked the halls of the high school consumed by jealousy of my prettier, thinner classmates.

I saw the cast party, which was to be held at Hank’s house, as my big chance at romance. After weeks of anticipation, after hours of trying to decide whether the blue sweater with the cats on it made me look fat, I was so worked up by the time I got there that I basically attached myself to the keg and poured booze down my throat. In fact, I drank and smoked so much that I ended up asleep on the couch after everyone was gone, and wait — um, it seemed like Hank was sort of climbing on top of me. Holy shit! I certainly didn’t want to throw things off by bringing up birth control, and I so much wanted this three minutes of painful poking to be love that I almost had myself convinced. 

When I finally got the nerve to tell him, over our Bunsen burner and our Florence flasks, that my period was late, he looked at me with irritation. “Why tell me?” he said. “How do you even know it’s mine?” Well, I knew, but going into it was likely to yield nothing but even greater humiliation. I was on my own —no money, no driver’s license, no nothing.

After a week of silently quivering with panic, I broke down and confessed to my parents. They were quite exasperated but crystal clear about our next steps, moving with alacrity. This would have been true, I think, even if Roe v. Wade hadn’t come down from the Supreme Court that very January. Off we would have gone to Cuernavaca or Toronto. In any case, it was Bye bye baby and hello Copper 7, which was the name of the IUD they installed back then.   

That Copper 7 must have gotten a little worn out from what I put it through over the next five years because one day, it took an unannounced vacation. At the time, I was so sure I couldn’t get pregnant that I didn’t worry when my period was a month late, and by the time I figured out what was going on, it was a week before my college boyfriend and I were off to India to meet our guru. Again I had to turn to my parents, who pulled strings to get me an abortion over the Fourth of July weekend. This time I was familiar with the sense of loss that descended on me. The fact that not only was it the second time around, but now I was 21, not 16, surely capable of taking care of a baby, put a harsh edge on the whole thing. 

On the other hand, it was clear that my boyfriend felt nothing but relief. This was one of several things that sent us on our separate ways once we got to the ashram. He ended up leaving for Tibet with a skinny girl from Germany. I threw myself into meditation and yoga practice with a vengeance, desperate to escape the prison of my earthly incarnation and my ferocious desires. 

I was a lot more careful about birth control after that, and spent most of the next two decades thinking I might not have children, a choice not so uncommon among women writers of my generation. But when I met the love of my life at 39 and surprised us both with a positive pregnancy test, no shotgun was required to send us to the Justice of the Peace. The last thing I expected was to turn 40 married and pregnant. The whole sequence of events seemed like a magical gift from the universe, and the nine months of that pregnancy were the happiest, healthiest and most wholesome of my life. 

This period came to an abrupt end when we learned at a final check-up during Week 40 that the baby — our life-changing, destiny-making baby — no longer had a heartbeat. It’s hard to explain, or even remember, how terrible this was. We had drawers full of tiny clothes and nursery walls painted with ducklings. We had a name, a name I never say. 

I could have interpreted this tragedy as some kind of devil’s due, I guess. That I had to pay for the babies I willingly gave up with the one that was taken. But I didn’t think that, or if it occurred to me at all I didn’t believe it or dwell on it. What I thought was: I want a baby. I want a baby now. I was running out of time. Despite some crap I read about needing months to grieve, I focused on getting pregnant again as soon as possible. 

It worked. The baby girl I was holding in my arms when I saw Reverend Matt on TV was born less than a year after her older brother came home in a ceramic urn, and we threw ourselves into loving her as if we were on fire and she were Lake Michigan, cool and endless.

*

With all the trouble going on these days vis-a-vis abortion rights, I’ve been looking for Matt to pop back up in the news, but I haven’t seen him. 

The night after my high school abortion, bleeding into a thick pad, I felt worse than I knew how to bear. To avoid my mother’s combination of solicitude and irritation and my father’s bad jokes about the mystery daddy, I went out on the golf course that ran behind our development. It was a private course but in the night-time hours, it was hang-out central for kids from our neighborhood, who knew every gap in the fence, every spot to settle in with a six-pack. At my house, we had our own private gate, because my mother was the club champion. 

I had stolen a Merit menthol from her pack and planned to smoke it on the wrap-around porch of the halfway house. I stumbled out through the fringe of trees around the ninth tee and plodded up the fairway, my arms wrapped around my belly, weeping. Somehow the baby was more real to me at that point than it had been before, when I knew it was just a microscopic blob of cells. Now that it was gone, it was safe to torture myself by trying to imagine the sweet little infant I could have held in my arms.

As I neared the little white house beyond the green, I saw there was a group on the porch already. I abruptly canned the sobbing and veered away, but too late. Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder and it belonged to Matty O’Malley. 

“What’s going on?” he said. “Are you okay?” Matty was several years out of high school by then, but still living at home two doors down, working with his dad servicing vending machines. Because I was close friends with his little sister Angela, I was over at their house a lot, but he and I had never really made a connection.

“I’m fine,” I said, turning away.

“Really?” he scoffed, but not unkindly. “Sure doesn’t seem like it.” 

I looked up and saw his eyes were full of concern. Why did he even care? I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. It occurred to me that he sort of looked like Hank Rosenblum, tall, dark curly hair, the Jewish and Irish versions. 

“Can I give you a hug?” he said.

Yes, please. But when the wonderful and therapeutic hug was over, he suggested that I come with him to church on Sunday. He’d recently gotten involved with a Pentecostal group that met in a tent a few towns over.

“Um — I’m Jewish,” I stammered.  

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter,” he told me. “Don’t overthink it.”

In truth, I was a little curious about what went on in that tent of theirs. I had heard people were overtaken by the spirit and rolled on the ground speaking in tongues. I very much wanted to be overtaken by something — could this be it? For the rest of the week, I was distracted from my misery by wondering if the navy blue sweater with cats on it made me look fat.

Unsurprisingly my life was not changed by the Pentecostal service. In fact, I was horrified. Between the goofy music, the clapping and shouting, and, yes indeed, the people throwing themselves on the floor, rolling around, twitching and babbling — it really didn’t look all that different from Debbie Linden’s bad acid trip, which had scared the shit out of all of us. I was very glad Angela had come along so I had someone to make faces at and a hand to clutch. 

I don’t even remember seeing Matt again until the night he appeared on my television so shortly after my daughter was born. My baby girl, a miracle coming to end a nightmare, joy emerging from pain and blood and tears. But, as it’s turned out, she has grown up in a world full of people who think they know how she should live. People who might, if she disagrees, bring a dead baby in a mayonnaise jar to convince her. People who seemingly, amazingly, are now in charge.

Well, people. I had my own dead baby, and he told me something very different.

The sorrow I felt about the pregnancy I ended at sixteen was not because I made a mistake I would regret for the rest of my life. Both abortions were wise decisions — privileges, almost — that created space and time for me to finish growing up before I took on the challenges of motherhood. Which can include grievous loss. Which asks for everything you have and puts it all at the mercy of a cruel universe. I took my time, but I got there. 

I am done with reproduction myself, but my baby girl is a young woman now. Unfortunately, she is less free and less safe than I was at her age, less free and less safe than women in Cuernavaca and Toronto. And that makes me furious. She, actually, is somebody’s daughter.

***

Some afterthoughts

There is a story floating around, either partly or completely apocryphal, that at some point in their youth, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, Donna Tartt, and Elizabeth McCracken got together and made a pact not to have children in order to devote themselves to their art. Actually of the four, I believe only McCracken did end up with kids. As much as this story is likely completely false (according to Ann Patchett, it is — I asked her during an interview, since she has an essay about not wanting children in her most recent collection, and she just laughed.) Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating story and it was somewhere in my head when I “lied” about my own childbearing history in the above. I bet a real fiction writer could do something interesting with this pact idea.

And no, I’ve never been to India, but my college boyfriend did leave me for a German girl named Zenzi.

Guided tours have never appealed to me, as I hate being told what to do and the thought of schlepping around foreign countries as part of a clump of tourists doesn’t quite fit in with my romantic notions of myself as a traveler. Hitchhiking through East Germany, working the breakfast shift at a beach bar in Puerto Angel, speaking just enough of whatever language to get by… at least in my twenties, this was the way I rolled.

Nonetheless, I just got back from a guided tour of Vietnam. And it was amazing.

As weird as it may sound, as a child during the years of the Vietnam War, I learned the names of its towns and cities in somewhat the same way I learned the vocabulary of golf. Birdie, eagle, double bogey. Danang, Khe Sanh, Hanoi. The language of the grownups around me, the words that blared from the television. Over time, this early immersion created a kind of tenderness toward both golf (theoretical — I don’t play or even watch) and Vietnam. 

Hue. Gulf of Tonkin. Mekong Delta. My Lai.

I was nine years old in March 1968, the time of the My Lai massacre. I was acutely aware and deeply horrified by its details, and I was inspired as only a nine-year-old can be by the passion and grooviness of the anti-war movement. In the decades since, I learned to love Vietnamese food, and got some idea of the particular beauty of Southeast Asia. Ultimately all this coalesced into a strong feeling that I had to go to Vietnam myself. I had to see the places, meet the people, eat the food, spend money — a tiny, possibly silly, one-woman mission of reparation. 

But I didn’t want to go alone, so I told my daughter Jane, who finished college this past June, that I would take her to Vietnam for a graduation present. When I started trying to plan the trip, I quickly got overwhelmed. Research indicated that we should travel from Hanoi to Saigon, and that we should stop at several places along the way, and clearly a truly mind-boggling number of arrangements would need to be made using the internet because at 64, I am not hitchhiking in East Germany anymore. But ever since I booked a rental car for the wrong month of 2009, causing me to be stranded indefinitely outside Boise, Idaho, I have been edgy about internet arrangements. So what about, um, a guided tour? 

I landed on Intrepid Travel, a company based in Australia, which offered a 12-day “Vietnam Real Food Adventure.” The itinerary was just what I had been beginning to figure out on my own, except a lot more detailed and better. And as the comments on the site made clear, having a native guide would make all the difference. So we booked the trip, then Jane got a summer job so we rescheduled the trip, then my neighbor Pam decided to come too, and then, to my surprise, she talked my sister Nancy into joining us, and then because of Nancy’s tax deadlines, we rescheduled it again, and then finally, e-visas and passports and vax cards in hand, we went.

Short version: it was great. The food was delicious, the people were lovely, the scenery often stunning, and our guide was nothing short of perfect. 

Long version: I wrote it all down in way more detail than you could possibly want to know, especially considering everything went so smoothly that there’s no interesting drama to report. 

The medium version follows, illustrated by photographs we shared on the WhatsApp group we made for the trip, the Intrepid Motorcycle Club. Photo credits to Jane Sartwell, Ross Barnard, Pam Stein, Nancy Seeback, and Jen Rollins.

Day 1: Hanoi, Sunday

The first meeting of the tour group was Sunday night, but we had to leave Baltimore at 3 am on Friday morning to get there for it. We flew Dulles to Dallas, then Dallas to Tokyo. The food on Japan Air Lines was mildly disgusting — a weird pasta salad, a blob of smoked salmon, corn pudding, can’t believe they eat any of this in Japan — but the free brandy on ice, which I learned about from the guy sitting next to me, was the highlight. Jane had vowed to sleep through most of our 24-plus hour trip. It took Klonopin, Flexoril, Xanax, Ambien, ibuprofen, brandy and beer, but by God she did it. And survived.

Intrepid had booked us into a sweet hotel called the May de Ville, where I had my first encounter with the wonder that is Vietnamese hotel breakfast, seemingly included with the room everywhere and often pretty extravagant. Thick, chocolatey Vietnamese coffee, which you can have with sweetened condensed milk, regular milk, or black, French rolls (“banh mi” actually just means baguette), omelettes, gratin potatoes, bacon, yogurt, plates of dragonfruit, mango and pineapple, and, always, pho. Pho is the standard way to start your day in Vietnam and if you’ve never thought of noodle soup as breakfast, you soon learn it goes down easy. 

The minute we walked out the door of the hotel, we we were initiated into the extreme sport of street-crossing in Vietnam. There are rushing hordes of motorscooters everywhere at all times and very few traffic signals, even fewer that are obeyed. In fact, crossing streets was the scariest aspect of the whole trip. Later we would learn to cling to our tour guide like a family of terrified ducklings, trying hard to obey his orders not to run, but proceed in a stately manner, with one arm outstretched, palm flat, as the phalanx bears down. 

We spent the day wandering the Old Quarter of Hanoi, dazedly window-shopping. In the afternoon I fulfilled my dream of getting a mani-pedi, which I suspected might be a good thing to do in Vietnam and I was not wrong. My manicurist, Uyen, managed to be very funny without having a single word of English except “No.” She spoke into her Google translator app and the robot voice spoke to me, and then we did it the other way. “Do not arbitrarily move your hands from my lamp.” 

That evening we met our guide, Bon Can, and the two other members of our group, an Australian couple named Jen and Ross. Only six people on the tour and four of them are us, what luck. Bon is a cheerful, down-to-earth, well-spoken and (as we would learn) virtually imperturbable man in his late 40s who radiates good vibrations and savoir-faire. He told us how he grew up with nothing in the country outside Hanoi, carrying his flipflops under his arm to school so they wouldn’t wear out too quickly, having only one suit of clothes for a whole school year, and being very cold all winter long. 

He also filled us in on all kinds of basics, like the street-crossing, and not confusing the 1,000 and 10,000, and 100,000 dong notes, (100,000 is just under 5 bucks; you see 1,000s lying in the street and no one picks them up.) Don’t cross your fingers for luck because here it means fuck you and don’t say “yum” because it means “I’m horny.” About the Vietnamese War, he said, we don’t worry about that anymore. You cannot change the past.

This seemed unlikely if not all-out impossible, but eventually the welcome and kindness we received from all the people we met, including many who were born or grew up during the war, made me feel that amazingly, it must be true.

Then we all put in $38.40 or 870,000 dongs each, for a tipping kitty, and headed back to the Old Quarter for our first dinner. Hanoi Food Culture was a sweet, simple spot with staircases that smelled of cinnamon, and our dinner a family-style tasting menu. Highlights were the appetizer courses — fresh and fried spring rolls, and green mango salad. Also the giant heads-on shrimp. 

We got to know each other a little better — Jen and Ross are both widowed, friends set them up four years ago, and they’ve both recently retired, she from speech pathology and he from cinema management. Jen’s brother is the author David Rollins, the Tom Clancy of Australia, well-known in the States. We had a good conversation about books, maybe the first of many. 

Day 2: Hanoi, Monday

A full day of Real Food Adventures kicked off our week, many of them enjoyed while seated on the brightly-colored plastic kiddie dining sets that are ubiquitous here. 

R.F.A. #1 was the official breakfast of Vietnam, served in a pho restaurant near the hotel — classic Northern style, which apparently involves fewer herbs, bean sprouts and other toppings than you get in the South. Afterwards, we visited a covered food market where meat, fish, grains and vegetables are sold. We tasted banana flowers and dragonfruit and longans (these are nothing new to the Australians.) It was dim, smelly, and to me, rather nauseating, with water pooling on the rough cement floor and the occasional escaped fish or eel flopping around in it. There were butchered animal parts all over the place and frogs in bags. Jane and I were thrilled to leave. Jen, who makes her own cheese, said she loved it. 

We continued along, visiting stalls on the street that sold all manner of things, then got in an airconditioned mini-bus and headed over to a coffee shop for R.F.A. #2: a sample of “egg coffee” which apparently went viral when Kim Jong-un was here for a summit. The barista gave us a demo of whipping the hell out of a couple of yolks, adding coconut syrup, honey and a shot of espresso — basically a very rich coffee-flavored eggnog. Meh.

R.F.A. #3, rice-flour crepes, was a favorite. The crepes are made on a flat round skillet like regular crepes except with steam underneath, then they sprinkle on fried shallots, shrimp, pork, chicken, or some combination, and roll them up, and serve with nuoc cham. A couple came in — apparently mobsters or movie stars, plenty of bling and fancy clothes — the first visibly rich people we’ve spotted, despite much talk of wealth accumulated via real estate ownership. (Bon very into providing economic info, such as price of cars, and operation of half-socialist, half-capitalist economy.) 

R.F.A. #4 was out in the suburbs, a tea house in what was described as a Soviet-funded apartment complex, a dusty, paint-peeling row of five-story buildings, some with extravagant bowers of plants pouring off the balconies. The tea room had low tables with cushions on the floor and a gentle young woman named Giang made us two types of tea. She poured hot water over each tea seven separate times, and we drank each infusion out of tiny cups, the flavor surprisingly getting stronger each time.

R.F.A. #5 would prove to be my least favorite of the whole trip. It is known simply as Sweet Drink, and it involves choosing from an array of mixin’s: jellied beans and cubes of gelatin and weird puddings and other colorful but nasty ingredients which are layered in a glass, then topped with very sweet coconut milk and ice cubes. It almost seems like something you would have to eat on a dare.

R.F.A. #6 was outside of town, far off the beaten track. The venue was a wooden structure built over a swamp — including a floating dock, and a cement-floored room with three walls, low table and cushions on the floor. A rather ethereal young man served us glasses of craft beer made from some thick-skinned pink berry. He told us the recipe was based on the life of his ex-girlfriend. He makes a different variety each week, he says, each with a different story. 

That evening we four Americans went off-tour to see the traditional Water Puppet show in the Old Quarter by the lake, recommended by Jane’s dad’s girlfriend who is a Vietnam maven. This was a good example of how Bon was happy to integrate non-itinerary items into the itinerary from time to time. It was magical, seen from our $8 third-row center seats, with a band playing traditional instruments and singing, and a pagoda backdrop over a deep blue pool. 

Adorable brightly painted puppets swam out and performed water dances. In one part, incandescent red dragons spat fireworks and streams of water. Four boys frolicked, a couple of phoenix birds made a baby, fish flopped and flew. At the end about 10 puppeteers came out from behind the curtain, standing hip deep in water. 

Day 3: Halong Bay, Tuesday

Today I began to appreciate the joy of having little idea of what is coming next, then having it be something wonderful you never would have been able to imagine or picture.

We left after breakfast on a mini-bus for the four-hour trip to Halong Bay. The ride was broken up by a stop at a ceramics cooperative, where we saw the process of making giant urns, the slip poured into molds, dried, refined on wheels, then painted by hand with breathtaking dexterity and speed, one person turning out 45 – 52 giant urns per day (!?!) with practiced whisks of a feathery brush. 

We arrived on the dock for our cruise on Halong Bay, where over 2000 limestone islands rise from the emerald green waters of Bac Bo Gulf, dotted with beaches and grottos created over thousands of years by waves and wind. We boarded a charming wooden boat, the Bien Ngoc 10 (Sea Pearl), written in pink cursive on the prow of the top deck. On the main floor is the dining room and bar, and nine compact staterooms are spread over that floor and the one below, each with large windows on the view. I thought the very firm beds were great but Pam and Jen later disagreed with me heartily. On the top deck are chaise lounges, potted plants and an awning, plus arching pole-lamps for evening.

We were served a fine multi-course lunch by a very nice man again named Thang. He was lanky and cadaverous, quite witty and a great bartender. A table was set with linens on the main floor. There were little dishes with salt, pepper and lime — you mix it together to make a dipping sauce. The local Halong beer became our favorite so far. We had shrimp and crawfish, both of which were cooked in savory, buttery sauces. There were fried spring rolls, rice, curried vegetables, morning glory greens, cucumbers with peanuts in a light sauce, carved apples for dessert.

After lunch we visited a cave, Sung Sot or Cave of Surprises, which was like a tour of Mars, really quite spectacular. Steps led up and down through giant caverns and corridors with stalagmites and stalactites, ceilings that looked like meringue made of stone. 

Next stop was Titop Beach, named for a Russian astronaut. Ships of various sizes anchored out in the bay and lots of people of numerous nationalities were enjoying the sandy beach and perfect body-temperature of the bay. The water felt so good after being hot and sticky most of the time for the past few days. We soaked off the heat and grit of the city for a good long time, approaching sunset. 

It seemed that there might not be a pretty sunset because the sky was cloudy, but as we took cocktails up to the top deck we were surrounded by a gorgeous silvery light — sky shaded lavender and pink, the rock formations that poke up from the bay shadowy blue-gray. We played Scrabble and Jane had a Halong Dream, a tasty blue drink in a martini glass.

Dinner was another Halong Dream — more shrimp, an oyster Rockefeller wrapped in foil for each of us, squid cakes and delicious fish… for Jane the vegetarian, sweet potato tempura that she loved.

To read about the remaining nine days of Marion Winik’s trip to Vietnam, click here.

Last week, while I was driving to yoga, the dog got out. Not my dog, but the dog in the audiobook I was listening to, “The Family Chao,” by Lan Samantha Chang. This was a problem. I stared accusingly at the dashboard of my car, through which the audiobook app was playing, as if it were responsible. Now how am I going to go in there and erase my mind of distractions and leave it all on the mat, etc., with this dog on the loose God knows where?

(Note: the following contains spoilers but not ones that will actually ruin the book for you. To prove it, read any review, none of them even mention the dog.)

Thankfully my own dog was safe at home in his favored spot atop the back of the couch. Altitude means a lot to a dachshund. But poor, fictional Alf, a French bulldog belonging to the Chinese-American owners of a restaurant in small-town Wisconsin, was padding off into a snowstorm, his tracks covered by fluffy flakes as soon as they were made. As I turned off the car, other characters in the book were reassuring James Chao that the dog knew his way home and that everything would be fine.

James was not so sure, nor was I. 

When something like this happens in a book, my nearly superhuman ability to suspend disbelief becomes something of a problem. I am at the mercy of the author, just as I am at the mercy of the gods in real life, and as this event occurred not very far into the book, I had not yet been able to determine what kind of god this Lan Samantha Chang actually is. Is she a merciful god or a cruel god? Would she sacrifice a dog to the need for literary gravitas? This is her fourth book, but I haven’t read the earlier ones so no help there. Apparently she is the head of the Iowa Writers Workshop, practically a gravitas factory. That doesn’t bode well.

Deaths in a novel undoubtedly get it taken more seriously by readers and reviewers, and a dog is on the low-stakes end of what can be sacrificed in this campaign. There’s nothing to up the fictional ante like killing a toddler. I will never in two million years enjoy a book like, oh my God, I’m blocking the name, but it’s Norwegian. A little kid — not a toddler, but definitely too young to be left home alone — is left alone by his single mother in the dead of winter. And guess what? He freezes to death in their driveway! Here we have not only dead kid, but mother’s fault. A surefire formula for greatness. In fact, I was forced to read this book because other people on a prize committee thought it might very well be the very best book of the whole year. I will say right now that for me such a plotline makes such a designation quite impossible. 

So now in addition to everything else that is preventing me from relaxation and concentration, I have a dog face floating behind my eyes during savasana, and far from banishing this vision so I can feel gratitude for my practice and absorb its benefits, I notice that my subconscious has sent up the wrong breed of dog, one with floppy ears. That’s no French bulldog, dummy. By this time we’re pressing our thumb knuckles to the seat of intuition between our eyebrows and I’ve blown the whole thing. 

For me, the uncontrollability of fictional plots brings out primitive urges like those that led ancient people to sacrifice sheep to influence their deity. (Now, perhaps, you’ll take this essay seriously — it has dead sheep in it!) Yet I know that no offering or ceremony is going to affect the fate of this dog. With fiction, you don’t even have the illusion of control or free will, as in real life. Whatever has happened to Alf is set in stone.

But Lan Samantha Chang has, in her wisdom, completely dropped the matter for several chapters so she can focus on the Brothers Karamazov-type plot she has arranged for her human characters, brimming with simmering familial rivalries and hatreds, purloined fortunes, star-crossed lovers, and extremely appetizing Chinese food, all of which in my mind is now taking a backseat to the dog problem. Listening to the book as I prepare an aspirational stir-fry, I actually yell at my phone. “C’mon, lady!”

But then turns out that the temporary back-burnering of developments re: Alf may be intentional, because what happens next is simply beyond belief. THEY ACCIDENTALLY EAT THE DOG. Some people in their neighborhood who have hated them for years bring a package of “mutton” for them to cook at their annual neighborhood Christmas party, and they unquestioningly toss it right in the pot. Midway through the meal, someone suggests the stew is made of dogmeat. Given the lost dog, this charge has legs. Puking and infamy ensue. 

Well, at least I now have a much better idea what kind of god this author is. My hopes for everyone in the book dim substantially.

Aside from the dog-eating, this Christmas party is also the prelude to a murder, in this case killing a human character so repugnant that for me, as for the characters in the book, his death is completely angst-free. Alf’s fate becomes a major element of the racist dialogue that floods the internet and the courtroom as the murder trial of one of the dead guy’s sons goes forward. While I’m glad that Alf’s plot line hasn’t been dropped altogether, I feel as if he is being used in service of the author’s comedic and political agendas. At the same time, I pick up some signals that he may not be dead at all. 

I will not say exactly what happens to Alf, but I will say I don’t love it. Unfortunately for readers like me, few books can deliver literary gravitas AND a happy ending. All but a handful of authors have to make a choice. Lan Samantha Chang definitely goes for the former, though she’s no Norwegian, thank God, killing only characters we hate or don’t care about, and sprinkling a little hope around for the benighted survivors. Plus inspiring us to redouble our efforts to find a really good Chinese restaurant in our various hometowns.

And now I must go to yoga before disaster strikes in the new Jane Smiley novel.