The Tipping Point

I've been accused of being consistently inconsistent, and my tipping habits are no exception. Now, when I was a waitress, my feelings on the subject were clearly defined: if you don't want to tip at least fifteen percent, if you just can't part with that much more money, then you should eat at Burger King where you belong. I still believe that, when it comes to waiters, who earn only two something an hour (this may have gone up, but waiters earn a measley wage, based solely on the idea that the customers will subsidize it.)

I can also live with the fact that there are cheap people in the world. Stingy narrow people who don't follow social conventions tend to live in small worlds, where miserly concerns eat up the land and much of the air and water. There's not much benefit in being one of those people.

So what's the problem? My coffee addiction and our wonderful campus coffee shop which sports the trendy name, Perks, and offers up freshly roasted and ground fair trade beans. I'm there every day, sometimes twice, forced to look at the tip jar on the counter, brimming, most of the time, with dollars put in by generously paid state employees, students who drive nicer cars than I do, and other kind people who want to do everything they can for poor working students.

The tip jar annoys me. Perks is pricey, and while I can't do the kind of mathematical gymnastics that would allow me to figure out what the percentage of a dollar tip on a dollar-fifty total is, I know it's way more than 20%. Not only that, but I often have to wait forever for the student worker to make complicated blender drinks for the people in front of me in line. All I want is a plain old cup of coffee with room for cream. At the bagel-and-wrap place next to Perks in the food court, the staff take a great deal of time and care getting the orders just right, down to how much cream cheese, what kind of lettuce, any pickles? But most of these food service workers are not students. They probably earn a dollar or two more than minimum wage, with no benefits. There is no tip jar on their counter.

So in fairness, I think it's okay not to tip, but I can't. Sometimes I don't bring my purse (we have dining cards), sometimes I give change only. But I know how much people hate cheap tippers, so more often than not, I stick a dollar in the jar.

He Said, She Said

A typical phone call with my sister lasts about forty minutes. We talk about what her husband has done most recently to annoy her (maybe the tent in the backyard), how her kids are feeling and what they are doing, what happened at work, what's on sale, who she saw at the grocery store, what our mother has done most recently to annoy us (we don't know where she lives since she got married), what our father said to the mechanic (really? he said that? let's hope they didn't loosen something under the hood that makes the brakes work), what our grandmother has done to annoy our mother and possibly us (like not answer the phone to get attention), how I am, how the dog is (he was recently skunked), her in-laws, what's on TV, what's for dinner, what we had for lunch, have we lost any weight, some recipe on the internet for apple cinammon muffins and much much more.

Tonight my brother called to tell me to Tivo a really funny episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." Then he hung up.

Best Laid Plans

I thought of my aunt while washing my hands in the neighborhood hamburger-ice cream place. It was the type of place she would have liked. Good food, reasonable prices, clean. I like it too, and for the record, I had a chicken sandwich on a wheat roll and soup.

The restroom annoyed me. First, the faucet was on a spring loaded timer that lasted maybe 12 seconds. Enough time to rinse maybe two fingers, which meant I had to keep touching it while washing my hands. Now I am very neurotic for a slob, and hate to touch the faucet after washing my hands. I like to use a paper towel to shut off the water. Because you turn the water on with your dirty hands and so does everyone else. Only there were no paper towels, just one of those air dryers, the kind that take 15 minutes, while women stand outside the one and only restroom and jiggle the door knob, saying is anybody in there. They invariably have a five-year old in tow, who is crossing their legs and saying "Mommy, I have to go NOW." So I wiped my hands on my pants, which were a stretch blend and not very absorbent and thought of my aunt, who was cheap.

She was also tough. My parents used to threaten to send us over there when they didn't know what to do with us. I didn't get it as a kid, but when I visited my cousins, she sometimes made me vacuum. Because my mother didn't make me do anything. My mom liked things done perfect, and fast, so she could coffee klatch with her friends. Making her kids do chores was harder than doing them herself, and now I chuckle at the obvious tension between my mom and my aunt. Anyway, my aunt was famous for not allowing her four daughters to wash their hair in the shower. They were only allowed to do it every other day, in the kitchen sink. Also, if they wanted to invite a friend for dinner, they had to split their portion.

My aunt saved up what we spend-thrift debt-ridden relations considered a small fortune. She retired young after being widowed in her early sixties, made a "friend," and traveled. She walked three miles a day, watched what she ate, argued with her grown daughters and was always on my side. She was prepared to live as long as her mother, who is now 94. She even had long term care insurance, so whe wouldn't lose her assets if she had to go into a nursing home in her old age.

The insurance came in handy when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 64. She was dead in less than a year, and she took whatever made my grandmother my grandmother with her when she died. I still find this shocking, sad, unbelievable.

It blisters with irony, but I've decided to strive for insouciance instead. A lovely word, lovely in spirit, like Audrey Hepburn in sunglasses and heels, having a cocktail with the actor who played the straight hunky version of Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I want light and air and a little bit of fun. Because no matter how you plan, life is too long or too short, and hard and you need to have all the fun you can while you can, while you can still move your arms and form sentences and recognize the people you gave birth to...

With a Little Help From My Friends

I love so many things about being a writer...

• Chatting with my writer friends (where is everyone tonight? )
• Emailing my writer friends
• Critiquing stories written by my writer friends
• Reading the blogs of my writer friends
• Commenting on the blogs of my writer friends
• Reading the comments left on my blog by my writer friends
• Talking about books with my writer friends
• Talking about music and movies with my writer friends
• Talking about nonsense with my writer friends (Jed and I recently talked about how to become a witch...)
• Great articles from my writer friends (Letter to an MFA--pdf), and thanks, Deonne, for this great piece detailing common mistakes, commonly made by me.
• Hearing about great writer events like when Mitch saw Martin Amis at the New Yorker festival...

Funny how I never seem to get much writing done...I blame my job.

Note: It is possible that Jed and I had a conversation recently on this topic, but I can't remember any specifics...

What Watching Some Guy Drop a Football Taught Me About My Writing

Today I went to visit my grandmother who is in a nursing home. At 94, she's been diagnosed with dementia and usually can't remember my name, where she is or what she's doing there. "Do you work here now?" she kept asking me. She also kissed my cellphone screen when I showed her pictures of my niece and nephew.

She was sitting in a lounge with several other elderly women, all in wheelchairs--the staff like to keep the residents in the lounge, for company, and so they don't fall while alone in their rooms. "I'm being punished," my grandmother whispered to me. Several times, I asked her why, what happened, did she think she did something wrong, did someone hurt her? As it goes these days, she couldn't explain, offer details, or remember what had happened earlier in the day. The Bills were on TV, the women mostly dozed like cats in the sun; it was a lovely day, weather-wise. When a wide receiver caught a pass and broke for some yardage, I got excited. Go, I thought, after a penalty sent them halfway to the goal, first down. The receiver was intercepted in the end zone. "I'm being punished," my grandmother told me again. "Because you're watching the Bills?" I asked.

The announcer explained that the Bills receiver just didn't fight hard enough for the ball while it was in the air; the defender wanted it more. I thought about this after taking my grandmother downstairs to watch a man with a guitar perform songs I haven't heard since third grade, when we sang them in chorus. Oh Susanna, Love and Marriage, The Yellow Rose of Texas. Any Emily Dickinson poem can be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas. I ran "because I could not stop for death/it kindly stopped for me/ the carriage held but just ourselves/and immortality" through my head as my grandmother nodded off, holding my hand, and I thought about that receiver and the trouble I've been having with my writing lately.

Conclusion: I need to fight harder for my stories. I need to want them to work more than I don't want to try and try and try and try and still not be there. I need to give everything I have to pull the truth and the arc and the right moments out of the air so they work. Because life is both too short and too long all at the same time.