Interlude

Even then, it was an old song – an old song on an old cassette tape with old ties to a past life. Several lives ago, by then. It didn’t break my heart way back then, and it wasn’t breaking my heart now, either. Just kind of tugging at it around the edges, like poking at a loose tooth or something. The little thrill of making it bleed. Another goodbye…one I hoped would be temporary but knew was necessary.

Mr. Black sat next to me in my car in his alley, waiting to be dropped off but indulging me for some reason, letting me rewind the song and play it again. And again. Turns out he knew the real story behind the song, and we sat there talking about this old band for a while, as if that were all there was to talk about.

Philly summers are the worst. The absolute worst. The whole city kind of hangs under a hot, grey, polluted haze of humidity. I won’t miss this, I kept thinking, though it was hard to imagine anything else. I couldn’t quite see beyond the immediate months ahead, when he’d leave for Seattle and I’d be stuck behind in this stark city, alone. Again.

We took a trip to New England that summer, sweeping each other temporarily away from it all. A sunny small-town 4th of July parade Vermont, a freezing cold picnic in New Hampshire, days of rocky hikes and violet-blue sea in Maine, swimming in a motel pool at sunset.

I had marriage proposals on my mind, even though I knew he never would. I couldn’t help it. There’d been so many office wedding showers and engagement parties that summer, it was hard not to imagine my own relationship in those terms. This would be the perfect place, I kept thinking, standing on various rocky edges in the midst of some breathtaking scenery or other. He didn’t ask, of course, and I didn’t dare bring it up.

You don’t fall in love with someone at age 28 expecting it to be perfect. Although Mr. Black and I came awfully close in those days. It felt like a small miracle, after all the dating angst and absurdity I’d been through, that I could simply meet a wicked-smart pop culture geek like myself and fold so uncomplicatedly into couplehood. It seemed to defy gravity.

So when, after about three months of dating, he told me he’d be moving to the west coast that summer, I wasn’t too disappointed. As other shoes go, that one was a relatively light drop. He took it seriously. Asked me if I wanted to stay together. Said he’d be up for the long-distance thing if I would. And maybe…just maybe…I’d be interested in joining him there someday.

We didn’t even consider moving together. It seems strange to think about it now, but in those days we clung to our independence almost superstitiously. Moving with him would have been too…establishment, or something. I guess I just wasn’t ready to leave yet. Wasn’t ready to toss all my eggs in that basket. But I was ready to take a big New England road trip with him that summer. And, apparently, I was ready to at least fantasize about marriage proposals.

We spent that last night in Boston, staying with friends of his from college. Out of nowhere, his old girlfriend’s name came up in conversation. He was visibly rattled – way more than was polite, really. I pretended not to notice. But…you know. I noticed.

The friends went to bed and we stayed up late on their living room floor, talking about her in the dark. I used to do this sort of thing full-time when I was younger and, perhaps, stupider. Spent hours talking to men I loved about the women they loved, being the Good Friend. But that night in Boston, doing the same old thing with the guy I loved more than anyone, ever – the guy I thought was different, the guy I wanted to follow to Seattle – well, I didn’t quite have the stamina for it anymore. I was nervous and shaking, nauseated. Finally I told him we had to stop. He was kind about it. Surprised. Reassuring. Still, I felt like I’d been split in half.

We drove back to Philly in silence the next day. One more month. I drove him to the post office to ship his boxes (and boxes!) of books. I helped him make posters for his yard sale. I tried not to let the ex-girlfriend thing haunt me, but it did, of course. There were long, needling conversations seeking reassurance. There was sitting in my car in his alley, listening to that song over and over again. There were plenty of light-hearted moments too, beach trips and such. But mostly it was just him preparing to leave and me preparing to be left.

There was an indignity to it, for sure. But I looked it in the face and swallowed it down –the first of many, many compromises this relationship would demand of us both; that any long-term relationship demands. I’ve learned, since then, to speak up. Straight from the heart in the language of reason. I can’t imagine holding back from him now the way I did then. But I was still finding my way back then. I was learning how to trust another person with my feelings, erring on the extreme side of caution, waiting for someone else to make the first move, hoping they’d get it right.

And so, one miserably grey, stinking-hot August day, I found myself standing in the Philadelphia airport with my forehead pressed against the window, watching him walk across the tarmac toward the tiny plane that would take him to Newark to catch a direct flight to Oregon, where he’d spend some time with his parents before the big Seattle move. He was wearing his suit so he wouldn’t have to pack it, and it contrasted adorably with his fringy too-long hair blowing in his eyes as he looked back toward the airport, squinting, maybe trying to get one last look at me.

And then it was me. Just me.

But not for long.

Beyond the Broom Closet

“It was basically a glorified broom closet,” the speaker says, recounting her own experience as a child in a special education classroom. She describes sitting in that room day after day with the other children who didn’t fit the mold, sometimes completely unsupervised. There wasn’t much learning going on. They were there to be kept out of the way. She’s not sure, even now, why she was assigned to special ed in the first place. Perhaps some quirks of temperament mistaken for a disorder? Perhaps the fact that she was a late reader?

It’s heartbreaking, of course. Maybe a little less so in the context of this multi-speaker presentation, which is a self-congratulatory parade of our city school district’s accomplishments in special education. We’ve come a long way, baby, from those broom closets. Special ed students are in general ed classrooms at their neighborhood schools now! And the teachers (who are totally happy to have this new challenge and never say hurtful insensitive things to the kids’ parents or mistake their disabilities for discipline problems, right?) are coming up with innovative ways to nurture and teach them! We even have instructional coaches to help schools get the inclusion thing right! Except…well, we just lost funding for that last one.

Somewhere beyond the broom closets and the mess we’re in now, I know The Boy’s going to be okay. Although I doubt he’d be okay under our district’s new “Send ’Em All To General Ed and Let the Teachers Figure It Out” plan (or ICS – Integrated Comprehensive Services, as it’s officially called). No, even at our Very Special Alternative School with a truly amazing resource room teacher, it’s been a tough year. Wonderful as she is, that resource room teacher is spread incredibly thin. And the rest of the school’s teachers and staff? Variable at best. Kindergarten was great. First grade? Well…

Let’s face it: Aspergers isn’t easy. It doesn’t look like a disability. Sometimes, frankly, it just looks like a smart little boy being a tremendous asshole. Sometimes it looks like any other Lego-loving kid. He can almost blend right in.

Until there’s a fire drill. Or an unexpected break in routine. Or anything that involves handwriting or drawing within the lines. Or classmates who have figured out how to tease and provoke him without getting in the least bit of trouble themselves. Or a principal who writes off that teasing as “normal” behavior and tells me this boy – who is trying so hard just to show up every day and be at school like the other kids – just needs to learn to deal with it.

At first, I didn’t want to change schools. This is his school, I thought. You guys step up. We’re here, we’re on the autism spectrum, get used to it! Which, I guess, isn’t much different from what the school district is trying to do. Cram these kids down an ill-equipped school’s throat because, in theory, the schools should be able to handle it.

Then I learned that some other schools in our district offer a middle ground between the broom closet and ICS. They have autism inclusion programs. The kids are still in general ed, but there’s more adult support. There are more services and pull-outs. Unlike our current school, where he’s expected to blend in and see the resource room teacher twice a week, these kids are an intentional part of the community. The teachers, the principals, the other kids and their parents – while still variable, I’m sure – know what Aspergers looks like. And he wouldn’t be the only one.

I broached the topic with The Boy. How would he feel about moving to a new school next year? One where there are other kids with Aspergers, too? And The Boy – who typically freaks out at the slightest change in routine, who’d wanted nothing to do with that “highly gifted” school he also tested into – got a very hopeful, thoughtful look on his face, and said he would like that a lot.

By the time I learned of these programs’ existence, there were only a few days left in the enrollment period to make the change for next year. With help from the resource room teacher and an old preschool friend who teaches at one of these schools, we raced through the obstacle course of red tape at break-neck speed to get his paperwork to One School Board Plaza by the deadline. And now…I’m on week 5 of the 7-week wait to find out which school he’ll be reassigned to. I’m feeling exhilarated and cautiously hopeful.

Too bad the school district wants to phase out these autism inclusion programs. They’re just too broom closety, I guess. Or too expensive, maybe. I really don’t know why.

But I do know the district’s gotten a big pushback from autism parents around the city, and there’s some indication that they’re starting to at least think about listening. Although there wasn’t a whole lot of listening going on at that presentation, touting ICS’s success at a handful of schools where it’s actually working. At least the director of special ed acknowledged, with an apologetic look on her face as she encouraged us parents to keep faith in the program, “We know it’s not perfect.”

Driving home, it’s the broom closet story that sticks with me. The speaker had marveled in outraged disbelief that self-contained special ed classrooms still exist, as if we were talking about dunce caps or something.

But it’s not the self-contained part that makes it a broom closet. Those rooms have dedicated special ed teachers who see the good in these kids and help them overcome their unique challenges without the distraction of a crowded, chaotic classroom. I don’t buy the “All Education is Special” line any more than I would buy “All Doctors are Surgeons” from my health insurance company. (Not to give them any ideas!)

Throwing my boy into a general ed classroom to see how he fared was worth trying. There were definitely a lot of positives, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity. But we’ve learned that without an experienced teacher who sets the tone for acceptance, without extra support from adults who get him – it doesn’t work. Aspergers is, absolutely, a special need. We’re not ashamed of it. It simply is.

A separate program doesn’t have to be stigmatizing. In fact, I see it as empowering. We’re not slinking off in shame. We’re taking our business elsewhere. I refuse to have our metaphorical wheelchair forced up a flight of stairs when we know there’s a ramp somewhere.

And in a few short weeks, we’ll find out which “ramp” it’s going to be. Stay tuned…

Deadbeat Club

Twenty years ago today, I bobby-pinned on that mortarboard with the little ’91 tassel and lined up with my fellow V’s and W’s in the back corner of campus by the dining hall. The day itself was sunny and green, but stark somehow. Removed. There were bagpipes. Archways of blue and green balloons. Our families in the audience, our dorm rooms packed up and nearly vacated. But not quite.

We’d pretty much spent that whole year saying goodbye. Fall began with fretting over GREs and What Will I Be When I Grow Up and “Holy shit now we have to grow up” and all the accompanying undergrad angst. The eighties were over. Bush the Elder’s kinder, gentler Gulf War was looming, which seemed like a much bigger deal at the time. (How were we to know?)


So we formed our own comedy troupe and performed in the campus coffee house. We wrote plays, or acted in them, or directed. We walked around campus with a giant inflatable dinosaur. We covered the living room floor with all the mattresses and slept there for a week. We made terrible, terrible puns. We rescued a broken plaster pizza guy from the trash and named him Luigi. We watched MTV and Saturday Night Live, idolizing Dennis Miller. (How were we to know?) We embraced all things ironic and absurd, all the while clinging to each other rather self-consciously with the distinct sense that this might be as good as it gets.



And what were we so afraid of? Growing up? Selling out? Losing each other to geography? Forfeiting an identity that had only just begun to emerge?

Here’s what it was for me: The feeling that you could be weird and fabulous; geeky and popular; absolutely 100% yourself and people would still find something to admire about you. That’s what I was afraid of losing. I think I really believed that if I lost the people who helped me learn that in the first place, I’d lose it for good.

And I guess in some ways, I really did. That time, those friendships – it truly did end. Whether we stayed in touch or not, whether we found each other on Facebook again or not, that level of idealism and sheer mad joy simply cannot be sustained over time. It just doesn’t go that way.

I remember going to a party my first year of graduate school where they played the entire B-52’s Cosmic Thing album and not one person got up to dance. Too busy name-dropping or canon-bashing, no doubt. Too busy undermining each other’s confidence. I had to learn, of course, how to be the first one to get up and dance. It wouldn’t be long before I’d lead a small band of rebels out of a stuffy English department function to splash in the fountain outside.

These days I rarely have the energy for such insurrections. Sometimes I think my grasp on irony and absurdity is slipping, giving way to earnestness with age – and a guarded earnestness, at that. Love used to pour right out. I guess that’s easy to do when you know it’s all going to end in a matter of months anyway. Now if I catch myself feeling anything with the old naïve open heart, I tend to keep it to myself.

But I have managed to bring the spirit of my old tribe with me. That place, those people, those years – they made me see that it was possible at all. They inspired me to hold uninhibited joy as an ideal, and to seek it and appreciate it when it happens. And yes, even in Real Life Adulthood, it does happen. In cubicles and lunch hours with co-workers. In writing workshops. At Teacher Tom’s co-op preschool. On Offsprung, the parenting Web site that inspired me to start writing again. And at home, of course, with my dear Mr. Black.

As for the part that really is over…the risks I’d never take again, the dreams I’ve stopped chasing, the friends I’ve truly lost… How glad I am to have had even a glimpse of such love and excitement. That was our time, and it always will be. It can be over. It can be twenty years past.

Funny how the mere thought of being 40 someday was enough to make us all go fetal in those days. But now? Well, I’m sitting here forty-one and, honestly, a lot happier than I was 20 years ago. Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about my family and our mainstream pursuits, cutting the crusts off sandwiches and so forth. So what? Turns out it doesn’t actually rob you of all that’s unique and wonderful about you. It’s still there. And my kids will always, always get up and dance to Cosmic Thing.

Happy 20-year reunion, my Deadbeat Club.

Niagara FAIL

Let’s face it: I’m kind of a bitch. I don’t notice it most of the time, you know, since I’m me and can’t help but empathize with myself, well-versed in all the little nuances and justifications. But there have been times when that bitchiness was so over-the-top that I cringed in embarrassment even as it was happening, stuffing it away in the brain’s shame closet forever after.

Which is why I’ve never told you the Niagara Falls story. But now, I think it’s time.

First of all, in my defense, I was 23. In geek-girl years, that’s like 12 or 13. I was more or less happily single, in my final year of grad school, sharing a wacky apartment with a good friend in a sleepy university town in New York.

This was in the early 1990’s, long before the dawn of Facebook. If you wanted to get in touch with old friends, you had to call them. Or write them a letter. Or actually visit them, which involved unfolding actual paper maps and driving for hours while listening to your cassette mix tapes.

It wasn’t unusual to have platonic male friends from past lives sleeping on our living room floor on any given weekend. And, from time to time, it wasn’t terribly surprising if said platonic male friend ended up sleeping, well, not on our living room floor. Very rarely, if the planets aligned just right, that friend might make a few more visits. Next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a boyfriend. You didn’t plan it. You didn’t even particularly want it. But having romantic companionship is so much nicer than not. Why not give it a try?

I wasn’t unattracted to him. Ages ago, when we’d first met, I’d actually had a flaming crush of doom on the guy. It broke my silly teenage heart when he wanted to be “just friends.” So why, having finally won him over, did I cringe when he put his arm around me walking down the street? Why did the charisma and endless stream of jokes that once impressed me now mostly just exhaust and annoy?

I tried to outsmart my own resistance. There were good things here. He was creative and funny and cute. We’d do stuff like walk to the public library in the snow and check out armloads of children’s books. We even tried on funny hats together, romantic comedy montage style. There was so much to like. If I could just get past my not-completely-attracted-to-him problem, we’d be perfect together.

A sensible person would have cut their losses and set the guy free. Instead, I decided we needed to go on a road trip together. To Niagara Falls. The same weekend that weather forecasts were predicting the blizzard of the century.

Obviously, it was an idiotic plan from start to finish. Let me try to make sense of it: Ignoring the forecast of snow? We’d had a few “false alarm” weather reports that winter calling for pounds of snow that never actually fell. And it was March now, almost spring for Zod’s sake. I was certain – absolutely certain – that it wasn’t going to snow that weekend. As for the road trip itself? I don’t know. I just loved “the road” so much in those days. I guess I’d hoped the exhilaration I felt for road trips would somehow spill over into my feelings for him. Besides, I’d never been to Niagara Falls.

That first night we zoomed across the state of New York under a clear night sky, laughing and telling each other stories. It was working. I was happy and excited and truly enjoying his company. We were positively giddy when we finally rolled into town, driving down the deserted streets, looking for a hotel.

But the next day, things took a rapid turn for the worse. Still no snow, but the blizzard was imminent. At least that’s what everyone was saying at the hotel. Somehow, I stubbornly believed that snow was just an idle threat. He wanted to head back home before the blizzard hit. I wanted to at least see the waterfalls first. So we drove out to Goat Island and strolled into the bitterly cold morning.

Years later, I would tell this story to an incredulous, sputtering Mr. Black. It wasn’t the fact that I’d dragged some poor boyfriend to Niagara Falls on the eve of the Storm of the Century that bothered him. It was the fact that we’d made it all the way to Goat Island and somehow – don’t ask me how – never actually saw the waterfalls.

We looked. Really, we did. At one point, we thought maybe we saw waterfalls off in the distance, but we were mistaken. All we could see was a nice little picnic park, the churning river, and an ice-white sky getting ready to dump ten tons of snow on us. We must have been looking on the totally wrong side of the island. Maybe if we hadn’t been so busy worrying and bickering over what to do, we might have tracked the damn waterfalls down.

Instead, we decided to drive home in the hopes of beating the snow. There were just a few stray snowflakes falling. I’d driven in worse. But it got heavier quickly. I’d never seen snow fall so fast, in fact. It was relentless. About an hour into the drive, it was blowing all across the road, barely a scrap of pavement in sight. Stubborn as hell, I pulled into a rest stop imagining we’d wait for the snow to stop and then drive home. But after many cups of coffee and futile staring out the window, the boyfriend convinced me to book a room at a nearby Days Inn – a short but incredibly harrowing drive.

Looking back on it now, with my recently-acquired fretful mother sensibilities, it feels even more harrowing. What if there hadn’t been a hotel nearby? What if we’d had an accident? What if I’d died in Middle of Freaking Nowhere, NY with a soon-to-be ex-boyfriend just because I’d been so driven, so stubbornly determined to escape boredom and restlessness at all costs? Stupid, stupid girl.

That Days Inn would be our home for the next two days as the Storm of the Century raged on. I tried to get some schoolwork done in between bouts of staring dejectedly at the Weather Channel. Eventually I gave up and switched to cartoons, a Mary Tyler Moore marathon, and getting my butt repeatedly kicked at Scrabble by the boyfriend. Any lingering delusions of happy couplehood had pretty much faded for both of us, but we nursed it along anyway. The sheer boredom of being stuck in that beige bedroom miles from anywhere was a bitter little aphrodisiac.

Bitter irony, really. With the right person, getting stuck in a hotel room for days on end could have been a fantasy-come-true. Instead, I found myself yearning for the drudgery of singlehood apartment life. I wished I was watching stupid TV with my roommate, or stomping through the snow to one of our town’s many eccentric old diners for coffee and a grilled corn muffin. Even when my roommate told me over the phone about her ordeal trying to borrow a snow shovel from the cranky neighbors, I yearned for home.

On day three, the sun returned and the New York State Thruway opened again. We drove home in relative silence. I don’t remember when or how the official breakup happened, or if we ever officially acknowledged it at all. All I remember is an awkward brunch in one of my favorite diners, slogging through the slush to my Shakespeare seminar, and never seeing the guy again.

I didn’t feel much guilt at the time…just glad to be out from under the weight of his disappointment and the aftermath of my own terrible, terrible decision-making. But I did take notice. I spent a lot of my dating career being the one to get hurt. But I did my share of hurting, too. I’m not sure which is worse. When your heart is broken, all you have to do is heal. But when you’ve hurt someone else – with selfishness and stubborn, misguided determination to turn winter into summer through sheer will – well, the path is a little less clear.

I never did make it back to Niagara Falls. Living in Seattle now, it seems pretty unlikely that I ever will. I still can’t believe we were right there and never saw it. Traveled all that way and then just left without getting what we came for, only to get stuck in the snow and face up to an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes it’s just better to be home alone. I guess there’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Life is Like a Box of . . . Tulips

Maybe it was a rare moment of male “nesting.” More likely, some sale on mystery tulip bulbs at Fred Meyer was too good to pass up. Whatever the reason, Mr. Black spent one autumn afternoon in 2003 planting bulbs all over the front yard. Our neighbors gave us some of their extra bulbs, too.

I was pregnant with The Boy, just entering the dreamy second trimester and blissfully ignorant of so many things. I didn’t know what color those tulips would be when they came up. I didn’t know I’d be losing my job in a few months. I didn’t know our underground oil tank was leaking, or that we’d discover this fiasco mere weeks before the baby would be born. And I certainly didn’t know how intense and relentless the undertow of parenting a new baby was going to be.

I didn’t know how much I was going to love it, either.

Mr. Black drove us home from the hospital in my trusty old Volvo. I sat in the back with The Boy in his infant seat, bracing myself in terror each time we hit a bump, checking to make sure the baby was still okay. He was, of course, snoozing away with those velvety eyelids. Soon, we were home.

And there were the tulips! For weeks I’d been watching them inch their way up from the ground. Now, seemingly with the birth of our son, they’d burst into bloom – red, yellow, orange, pink, scattered amid the cool greens and greys of the shrubs and bare branches on that cold spring day. Welcome home, little baby.

Those tulips would return every year, blooming just in time for his birthday. I’d see them and instantly remember the early baby weeks: Those first tentative walks up and down the street with him in the sling. Marathon breastfeeding sessions in front of “Love Boat” and “Little House on the Prairie” reruns. The psychedelic depth and dimensions of sleeplessness that the mere word “sleeplessness” doesn’t even begin to describe. The near simultaneous waves of anxiety and overwhelming love.



With each birthday, though, we get a little further away from the baby nostalgia and a little closer to “Who is this kid and what is he becoming?” The day before his third birthday party, for example, I had to drag him out of a group playdate for ferociously tackling the other children. Before his fourth, I was getting e-mails from his preschool teacher about his aggressive behavior and tantrums. Right before he turned five, we had our first diagnosis – an incorrect one, it turned out, that only caused more confusion and worry than necessary.

Even now, knowing that it’s simply the gifted/Aspergers combo and not some demonic possession or epic parenting fail…it’s still hard to get the birthday warm fuzzies for this kid. There’s lots celebrate, of course – his joy and sweetness; his pure love of math, Legos, and any kind of building project; his burgeoning interest in all things non-fiction, from world religions to oceanography; the fun he has with his little sister.

But I’m so worried about him, too, and the worry tends to override the other things. He still hits. He blurts out hurtful observations. He delves into his interests to the exclusion of just about anything or anyone else. He can be moody and sullen as any teenager, using his sharp vocabulary to pick semantic fights with me. Sometimes I try to talk to him and all I hear is the voice of a nagging, ineffective mom with a screw coming looser every day. I’m glad we finally have access to services at the school, because much of the time I have no flipping idea what to do.

But last fall, when things were particularly bad, I was sure of one thing: I wanted more tulip bulbs. The old ones hadn’t been blooming much lately, crowded out by the encroaching trees and shrubs. And when they did bloom, that clash of colors that I’d found so charming before just didn’t work anymore. I didn’t want mystery tulips scattered all around. I wanted unique, color-coordinated tulips that I picked out myself. So, while I sat at my desk hoping the school wouldn’t call that day, I pored over pages and pages of tulips online. I studied and compared, finally deciding on a girlish cotton candy pink and a subtle, creamy yellow fringed variety.

The Boy helped me plant them. He insisted on making a pattern with the pinks and yellows, which wouldn’t have been my choice. But I let him do it anyway, because it was good to see him feeling so proud and self-assured about something…anything. We even worked it into a homework assignment about patterns, and he did a very detailed drawing of each bulb in the ground.

And now, just in time for his seventh birthday, here come my new tulips! Except…they’re not what I ordered.



Instead of the yellow-creamy-fringey ones, we’ve got these coral pink ones with pointy petals. They clash with the cotton candy pinks, which are a little more two-tone than they looked on the Web site. And we planted them way too close together. It’s not what I was expecting at all.

Well. Is any of this what I was expecting? I suppose not. Turns out those tulips are my own little version of Forrest Gump’s box o’ chocklits. You never do know what you’re gonna get, do you? I know, I know. But when real life gives you a heavy-handed metaphor like that, you take notice.

My tulips are a well-intentioned, joyful mess out there. But The Boy is so proud of them. And I’m so proud of him, quirks, challenges, and all.

He’s working so hard to adapt and cope. Think of how hard it is to change our own thinking about something (even something minor, like letting one’s partner load the dishwasher the “wrong” way). Now imagine doing it as a first grader. Seems damn near impossible, doesn’t it? But he’s doing it. I can see him putting his new coping skills into practice. Every professional he’s worked with remarks on how sweet he is, how eager to please. And they’re right. There’s a lot of love in this kid. Joyful, messy, imperfect love.

Happy seventh birthday, little boy. Let’s see what comes next.

Floor Pie on Salon

Gentle readers, I had my first piece published on Salon today. Couldn't have done it without your support and encouragement! Go check it out if you like, and I'll have something new up here in a few days!

More Than a Shark Jump

I’ve been into Happy Days lately. Like, really into Happy Days, far beyond typical Comfort TV indulgences. I skip The Daily Show so I can catch bad Season 9 reruns on The Hub. I seek out those cringe-inducing musical numbers on YouTube. I pore over the episode guide on Wikipedia, trying to get the series narrative straight. Somehow it’s become hugely important to learn things like: How many episodes featured Suzi Quatro’s Leather Tuscadero, and was I in 3rd or 4th grade when they aired?

What can I say? I’m a midlife-crisis-bound Gen X girl, and Happy Days is my Rosebud.



There wasn’t a lot of TV in our house when I was a kid. Maybe my sisters and I watched the occasional Mary Tyler Moore or Rhoda with our mom. But that ABC Tuesday night line-up was all ours – our first childhood foray into prime time “appointment television.” And when The Fonz jumped that shark, we were on the edge of our freakin’ seats. Cynicism would come later.

We loved Fonzie’s folk heroism, the delightfully predictable jokes and catchphrases, the comic mayhem. We loved the 70’s girl power of Pinky and Leather (and occasionally Joanie and Marion). We loved that the show let us identify with teenagers – they’re like grown-ups, but they’re still kids! They went on dates. They had wacky adventures. They helped their local restaurant owners out of jams. It was everything a child might wish for her teenage future: adventure within the safe status quo, all under the guidance of a nurturing-yet-hilarious support system.

Ironic, then, that the real “shark jump” of the show (not The Fonz’s literal water-ski jump over the shark, but when the quality went downhill) coincided with the onset of my actual adolescence. Just as I was realizing that tweenhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, Happy Days’ representation of teenhood started flat out sucking. Recycled plots, or downright improbable ones. Everything seemed a little less full; a little more contrived. And Joanie’s 1980’s good-girl perm looked as awkward on her as it did on me. So disappointing.

Maybe by age 10 or 11 I was simply becoming a more sophisticated viewer. But I think the show was taking a pretty serious nosedive by anyone’s standards. I mean, come on…Richie leaves and his cousin Roger moves in? But Lori Beth keeps hanging around, eventually marrying Richie in by proxy? And then Joanie leaves and her cousin moves in? Really?

It was like the loss of childhood innocence itself. The stuff we used to take at face value now seemed absurd and suspect. The circus, Disney movies, even our beloved Jersey Shore – nothing amazed and delighted quite like it used to. Though I didn’t have the words for it at the time, I remember having a distinct sense that my life would never be quite as simple and joyful as it was when I was a little girl. And so it was with Happy Days.

The one bright light in all of this, of course, was our generation’s Bella and Edward:



Now there’s an area where I was still willing to suspend disbelief! So much was wrong for me in 7th grade. But the notion of Joanie and Chachi, with those intoxicating gazes into each other’s eyes…somehow it just lifted me up.

It wasn’t about Scott Baio. Maybe I’m the only one, but I never had a crush on the guy. (And you know I’d tell you if I did!) No, I was just deeply intrigued that such captivation with another person was possible…that one could adore that much and simply be adored back. It was a glimpse of intense romantic love, wrapped in the safe context of a prime time parent-approved family sitcom.

And that’s all fine for a 12-year-old girl in the early 80’s. I just wonder why I’ve been so intent on reconnecting with these shows now? Why all the late-season Happy Days and Joanie Loves Chachi? Why the nostalgia for the unhappy chapters in my girlhood and the lame TV shows that got me through it?

Maybe that’s the answer right there. 41 is the new 12. Once again, I’m facing a transition of sorts. Not only are the carefree 20’s long gone, but so are the 30’s – my years of early marriage, early parenthood, and the novelty of “Hey, I’m mainstream now! But I’m still cool. Check me out, blaring my Sleater-Kinney on the way to the pediatrician’s office.”

Sure, there’s still plenty of joy to be had. But none of this will ever be new again. The challenges just keep on coming, and they’re only going to get bigger. In the midst of this tough year we’re having, it’s downright comforting to remember how similarly stark my tweenhood was…and how I managed to hold it together and find little joys and comforts throughout.

My sudden fascination with Happy Days is more than just pop culture geekery. It’s about reacquainting myself with my childhood innocence, and how I stayed strong through the loss of it.