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I submitted the following to the Columbus Dispatch as an entry to their Valentine's Day Essay contest. It was chosen as one of the winning entries and published in the Dispatch on February 14, 1998: On February 14, 1975, romance was not exactly in the air on the American army post in Aschaffenburg, Germany. Back then there were few women in the military and none of them stationed in Aschaffenburg. I was one of a handful of civilian women employed on the post, but I ran the post wood-working shop and was strictly a jeans-flannel-shirt-tennis shoes kind of a girl. I was every soldier's pal but nobody's sweetheart. That is, until this particular February 14, when a young lieutenant with whom I'd struck up a friendship stopped by my shop with a bouquet of daisies and a small gift-wrapped package. "I hope you don't mind they're not roses," he said, offering me the bouquet. "You just strike me more as the daisies type." Then he gave me the package. "I didn't think you'd like perfume or jewelry, but I saw these at the PX and right away thought of you." I unwrapped the package to find a pair of regulation black leather army gloves with olive-drab green wool inserts. "These will keep your hands really warm when you ride your bike to work", he said. Those gloves did in fact keep my hands warm for years, and I don't think any gift since has warmed my heart as much. And on the day my lieutenant and I were married, just a little over two years after that memorable Valentine's Day, I held a bouquet of daisies.
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So a couple of Saturdays ago Theresa and I were at Polaris Mall looking for a bridesmaid dress for Theresa to wear to her sister Claire's upcoming Arizona wedding, the requirement being anything in a shade of green. Our hope was to find something reasonably priced, something from JC Penny's or Sears, maybe we'd even go as far up the spending ladder as Macy's. We schlepped our way from establishment to establishment to establishment finding, of course, no dress in any shade of green, save one neon green number on the clearance rack of JC Penny's that looked as though it had been designed to be worn by an 80-year-old floozy. We hadn't planned on shopping at Von Maur's - a wee bit pricey for our typically plebeian tastes - but as we trudged despondantly past the store on our way to the mall exit there emminated from within a waft of wonderful piano music the style of which tipped me off that my friend and piano mentor Elmer Cabotage* must be at the keys. *Elmer Cabotage, concert pianist, composer, master teacher and master of the Chopin etudes, is a gift to the planet. And a really nice guy. He plays live at Von Maur's every Wednesday from 11am-3pm and almost every Saturday from 2-5 pm. I suggest to everyone who is lucky enough to live in Columbus to go hear Elmer play some time. You can relax on the comfy couches around the piano and listen to the music. Elmer's playing is ethereal, like an ice cream sundae for your soul, ony it won't make your soul fat.  Elmer Cabotage, master pianist, far left, and me, not master pianist, far right, about a million or so years ago. The kid in the plaid shirt, Jonathan Jurgens, went on to become a tenor with the Indianapolis opera. So anyway, we decided to pop into Von Maur's, say howdy to Elmer, listen to him play, and forget our travails for a little while. We entered the store, but on our way to the piano we caught a flash of green towards which Theresa and I were pulled as if in the grip of a Vulcan mind meld. As we approached it became clear that the enticing flash was originating from the swimsuit department, but it didn't matter; we saw green and our wills were no longer ours. The green turned out to be coming from a row of swimsuit cover-ups. But what beautiful swim-suit cover-ups they were! Why, they could almost pass for...bridesmaids dresses! Now, $58 is an obnoxious price for a swim-suit cover-up, but for a bridesmaid dress? Whoa, steal of the century! Did we buy that $58 swim-suit cover-alias-bridesmaid dress? Oh, Mama, you know we did!  In the dressing room at Von Maur's, me photo-bombing Theresa's selfie in her "bridesmaid dress" (wink, wink!) So anyway, while I was waiting in the Von Maur's dressing room while Theresa tried on her dress there passed by me this woman wearing the most perfect black top with beads and sequins. I watched her do a couple of turns in front of the dressing room mirror and, really, this top looked just great on her! I couldn't help wondering how that top would look on me. By chance (or was it?) there was a sales lady hanging around, so I asked her if there might be another such black top in my size in the store. She said that by chance (or was it?) there was just one more of those tops left, on the clearance rack, and probably just my size! She zipped out to get it for me and the next thing you know:  Yep, I bought it! $34, reduced from...oh, well, I don't know what! In retrospect I wondered if Von Maur's hired good-looking ladies to traipse around the dressing rooms pretending to be customers wearing their clothes to entice likely schmo's like me into buying their stuff. Well, if they do it worked! I figured this could be the upper half of my mother-of-the bride outfit. Theresa, however, insisted that the ensemble looked great as it was, sneakers and all! Which got me to wondering...might it actually work? Is there any way in the universe I could get away with wearing grey jeans and sneakers to my daughter's wedding? I mean, how comfortable would that be? I kept turning the question over and over in my mind for the rest of the afternoon: how would that outfit look at a wedding? That night Tom and I were going to the Columbus Symphony, and just before we left, the light bulb went off in my head, and so:  What do you think? Maybe some sparkelies glued to the sneakers?
 So back when I was in middle school it was the Beatles instead of the Bieb, but I figure that some things haven't changed. For example, I imagine that the social shark-infested waters of middle school were no easier to navigate fifty years ago than they are today, and I'm guessing that, given the more limited opportunities and archaic technology, the 10-to-13 year-old crowd of my day were equally harsh, clique-y, and adept at making each other's young lives social-rejection hell. But I am only guessing; I mean, you couldn't actually prove any of it by me. Because I had a special immunity, a kind of social Kevlar which permitted me to bobble about the 'tween shark-tank blissfully oblivious and relatively unscathed. It was this: I had a best friend. Did you ever see the movie "Dick" with Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams as the best friends? That was my friend Michelle and me in middle school. Except that we never accidentally baked a batch of pot cookies or got in trouble with the secret service, though, like the movie best friends Betsy and Arlene, we did once write letters to the President (Kennedy). We mostly spent our time practicing our dance moves to Beatles records in front of the magnificent mirror that took up one wall of Michelle's living room; walking to C&M, our neighborhood deli of choice, for a popsicle or a Tastykake; sewing miniature clothes and collecting fashionable outfits for our Barbies..alas for us, Barbies and Beatles did somewhat overlap. About the worst thing we ever did was catch a bad case of poison sumac from scavanging through a mangy field for old soda bottles to return to the A&P for the deposit money. We were good girls. So individually, Michelle and I were probably too naive and ingenuous, too close to the antithesis of what was considered "cool" among the pre-adolescent crowd of the early 1960's to have advanced very far up the middle school food chain; but together we were accepted among our classmates as a unit. And who cared if we weren't? With each other we were comfortable and complete as two Twinkies sealed in their cellophane wrapper. I can remember that besides us there were at least two other best-friend units among the girls in our class, as well as a pair of twin sisters who more or less operated as a best-friend unit. We were part of the Twinkie Elite. And perhaps would have stayed that way had we not been split up for high school, Michelle taking the city bus each morning to the local parochial high school while I traveled twenty miles and back by commuter train every day to a private school across town, where I did at times feel like a squishy, cream-filled oblong thrown in with a batch of smart cookies...and with good reason: being on my own I had a lot of figuring out and growing up to do. Didn't we all? Good-bye twelve, good-bye thirteen, good-bye Barbies, good-bye Beatles, good-bye Twinkie...hello life!  Sweetest Comeback In The History Of Ever:
Michelle and me , Twinkies again, at my mother's 90th birthday. 
So Tom's repainting the living room and I wanted the same color we already had, a pale green shade called "Man In The Moon" that I bought years ago from Meijer's, back in the day when Meijer's carried paint. So what was I to do about the fact that I wanted an obsolete paint color? Just resign myself with a "that's life" shrug and settle for something close? No, of course not. I went to Home Depot, told them I wanted an obsolete paint color of a brand they didn't carry, they typed the name of the color into their computer and, voila, just like that onto the screen popped the recipe for mixing my color. How utterly amazing! How satisfying!
So satisfying, in fact, that once again I found myself wondering, with all the exisiting devices to accommodate my lifestyle, lighten my work load, keep me entertained and connected to everyone else on the planet and in an almost constant state of near instant gratification, why aren't I more satisfied? Why aren't we all more satisfied? Why aren't we all calm and content and relaxed and gratified every waking minute, considering that: -we can obtain a delicious meal in minutes , any time, day or night -if we need cash we don't have to make sure we make it to the bank by 4:00 pm Friday. -we don't even need cash. Practically ever. -we can find practically anything we could think of wanting and buy it without leaving our house. -we can learn the answer to almost anything we seek to know without leaving our house. -we can have thousands of friends and communicate with them all without leaving our house. -we can phone, text, email, tweet, facebook, instagram, linkdin, blog, and probably do dozens of other high-tech feats of communication that I don't even know about. -if we feel like leaving our house we have our GPS to get us effortlessly from point A to point B, and I won't even go into what our phones can do for us, except for that one phone app I just learned about called Shazam, so amazing that it absolutely deserves a shout-out, because it gives your phone the ability to hear immediately identify the name of any tune within its range. But why go on, we could all come up with hundreds of conveniences that should keep us 'round-the-clock satisfied. So why aren't we? Or are we? ( Am I maybe just speaking for myself?)  What's left of my old Beatles collection I first saw them in a magazine: Time or Life, or Look, I don't remember, my parents used to get them all. And I used to sit at the kitchen table and read them, or at least look at the pictures.
On this particular occasion I was studying the photo of the four guys with the long hair when my mother stopped to look over my shoulder. "Look at them," she laughed. "They look like little page boys from King Henry's court." I agreed with my mother (something I was still doing at that time in my life), even though I didn't know who King Henry or what a page boy was. I was twelve years old without a clue who I was, let alone King Henry and his page boys. But I read and re-read the article, several times, in fact, and the more I stared at the photos of these four guys, the Beatles, the cuter they looked and the more intrigued I became. I started surrepticiously listening to my mother's radio station but never heard their songs. I'm not sure who connected me to the Philadelphia rock station WIBG, but it was from the disc jockey named Hy Lit (or, as he called himself, and subsequently all of us, his 12-year-old fans called him, "Hyski-a roonie-mcfatio-zoot") that I got my first taste. I was immediately hooked. And of all the WIBG ( or "wibbage", as we called it) Good Guys (as disc jockeys used to be referred to back then) 'Hyski" was my preferred dealer. Now, every 12-year-old girl back then loved the Beatles, even though (or maybe because?), as my old grade-school chum Michelle recently reminded me, we were barely out of Barbies. But those other girls didn't love the Beatles the way I loved the Beatles. I had Beatles pins, sweatshirt, posters, magazines galore, every record they made as soon as it came off the press, wallpaper - Beatles wallpaper for goodness sake! (Romaine - do you remember that Beatles wallpaper that I made Mom put up in our bedroom?) To say I was obsessed with the Beatles was probably accurate. But looking back in retrospect I believe it was more than that I loved their music and thought they were cute. I believe that for me the Beatles opened the door to adolescence. They gave me an identity: I was a Beatles fan. I now had some sense of myself, a way to present myself to myself and to the world. And I did. Boy, did I! There was one other girl in my seventh grade class whom I'll call Peggy (changed her name, she'd probably want it that way) who was in competition with me for being the most hard-core Beatles fan. But then one day she came into school bragging that the night before there'd been some kind of gas leak at her house and her parents tried to make her get out of the house until the gas company got there to fix it because the house could blow up, but Peggy stayed inside in her bedroom because she couldn't leave all her Beatles stuff so she decided that if her Beatles stuff was going then she was going with it! I remember being in awe of Peggy (and goofy enough to have asked her whether her house ended up blowing up). I relinquished to her any pretensions to the position of The One Who Loved the Beatles The Most. But by eight grade things were different. I was different. And at the beginning of my freshman year of high school I prevailed upon my mother to take down the Beatles wallpaper. Immediately. She did. I still loved the Beatles. Fifty years later I still do. Just not enough to have them staring at me from the wallpaper in my bedroom.  Since his death last Sunday almost everything that can be said about Phillip Seymour Hoffman has probably been said. And yet five days later many of us still haven't run out of disbelief, sadness, and words for this great actor.
On Sunday morning when my nephew Randy informed me that Phillip Seymour Hoffman was dead my first reaction was that my nephew was joking; my second was that it couldn't be true, it must be a mistake. I believe many thousands of people felt that way. And yet as soon as the reality of his death was absorbed, who among was the least bit shocked that Phillip Seymour Hoffman died from a drug over-dose? A couple of days ago my Panera Posse and I were mulling over this actor's addiction to and ultimate death by heroin, and over the question of why so many Hollywood celebrities are in the grip of substance abuse and addiction. I said that I belived that these people, though rich, famous and successful are not getting the medical treatment they need to heal their mental or emotional illnesses. And so they self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Then they end up in these obviously ineffective celebrity rehab centers when what they really need is to be seeing a psychiatrist. How sad it is, I said, to be someone who has everything money can buy but no one looking out for their well-being. One of my friends disagreed, saying that the reason there's so much substance abuse in the entertainment world is that the drugs and booze are everywhere and with unlimited availablitity. That simple: the stuff is there for the using and so everybody uses it. My friends and I wondered, though, if everybody in Hollywood uses drugs or if it just seems to the rest of us that they all do. We wondered if there's any celebrity out there who's never used drugs at all? I wondered if nowadays there's anybody (besides me and my little group of ladies) out there anywhere who's never used drugs at all? One of my friends, a nurse, pointed out that heroin is in a class by itself. It's one of the most addictive substances on the planet and once you're addicted to it you're addicted for life. Even after you've succeeded in getting clean, every day of your life will be a struggle not to fall back. You may succeed in staying off the drug for years, but a single lapse and you'll be hooked all over again. In the days since Phillip Seymour Hoffman's death more news stories have come out that in fact heroin use is at a crisis level all across every level of our society, from the poor to the middle class to the rich and famous. There are a lot of suffering souls out there. My name is Patti Liszkay, and I'm a men's room crasher. Yesterday, once again the single-person ladies' room was occupied and there was someone in line in front of me. Once again the single-person men's room was empty. Once again I sashayed into the men's room. Once again, I didn't get arrested for it. Nothing happened. Except that I didn't have to wait in line to use the bathroom. Which begs the question, actually two questions: When there are two individual- commode public bathrooms side by side why can't anybody go into either one? And why should we gals have to queue up when there's a perfectly usable facility going vacant one door over? To quote The Dude's famous line from the movie "The Big Lebowski", this aggression will not stand, Man. At least not for me. So whenever the women's side is locked, I always stake my claim on the men's side. It makes no sense not to. Yet I wonder every time: is it illegal? I wasn't always such a restroom renegade. About 40-some years ago back when I was a young waitress in a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop at a truck stop along the Roosevelt Boulevard in Northeast Philadelphia, my manager, James, an African American gentleman from Virginia Beach , caught me during my break waiting outside the occupied employees' women's restroom. "Why don't you use this one?" He asked, cocking his head towards the men's room. My jaw must have dropped and my eyes bugged, for I was 18 years old and horrified at what he'd just suggested. "Why not?" he continued, " Men's room is just as clean as ladies' here. You don't have separate bathrooms at home, do you?" Of course there was no arguing his logic, but he was bandying about the proposition of breaking the most primordial of taboos. To James my using the men's room may have been sensible, but to me it was unthinkable. And so it remained until a few years ago when I was out at a restaurant with my daughter, who had just returned from a year of working in the jungle in Nicaragua. At one point she and I headed back to the ladies' room together to find that it was of the single-occupancy variety and occupied. My daughter said, "Oh well," and stepped over to the men's room. "What are you doing?!" I cried. My daughter looked back over her shoulder as she stepped through the mens' room door and answered with the same question that James had posed all those years ago: "Why not?" And because I was at a point in my life when so many mellowing years separated me from the green youngster I'd been the first time that question was put to me, that this time the question served as a moment of epiphany and liberation; and as the ladies' room was still occupied when my daughter exited the men's room, she held the door for me as I entered. And I've been entering ever since. And though I realize, as my daughter pointed out to me last night when I told her the subject of today's blog, that revealing to the world our identity as men's room crashers could jeopardize our advantage if others of our sisters around the planet decide to join us in this practice, still I'm going to take a stand: I hereby propose that gender-designating single-commode public bathrooms go the way of covered wagons and Facebook. These one-seaters should still exist in pairs, but not as men's rooms or ladies' rooms; they should be called everybody rooms, and no more pictures of gentlemen, ladies, or icons germane to either, only one of these on the door:  After all, who among doesn't feel like that ^ whenever we discover an unoccupied bathroom?
 I believe that some people have the cooking gene, some people have the cleaning gene, some have neither and a few have both.
My mother was one of those rare earthlings who possessed both. When I was growing up every dinner was a banquet complete with a home-made dessert, and my mother and father (he was a good cook and baker, too) could throw together a dinner party like none other. And my mother kept our house spotless, if not clutter-free - well, five kids and a husband who always needed to be surrounded by his books and papers - it was a healthy clutter. I'm not sure how she kept our house so clean, though... but I guess that's because I myself totally lack the cleaning gene. It's not that I don't try : I vacuum almost every day and clean the linoleum on a reasonably frequent basis; all right, I guess I'm a little more lax on the dusting. I guess I just feel like if you clean the floors often then the dust, when it's piled up so high that it falls to the floor, will be taken care of when you clean the floors. And though I'm always scurrying around trying to pick up, straighten up, neaten up and semi-organize our living space, our home still has this everything-thrown-about look. I just have to chalk it up to my lack of housekeeping skills that is symptomatic of those lacking the cleaning gene. Of course, it doesn't help matters that Tom has the pack-rat gene. He hates to throw things away, especially old books and papers, his heart-links to people, places, and times gone by. And so every surface is cluttered. If I buy a cabinet or set of drawers in which to stash away the clutter, as soon I fill the drawers or cabinet the clutter magically starts multiplying so that by the next day the surfaces are again covered in clutter. And yet I can't shake the feeling that it's not really that we have more stuff than everybody else; I just can't seem to make the "a place for everything and everything in its place" concept work. I sometimes think its that the clutter knows that I lack the cleaning gene and therefore believes that there's no need to respect me or my efforts. I clean up a mess, it brazenly moseys on out again. In my house the mess knows no fear. On the other hand, I do have the cooking gene. I can whip together a buffet for 50 people like ringin' a bell - and using the most basic, bottom-of-the-line utensils: hand mixer, a big knife, a little knife, rolling pin, mixing bowl, and cookie sheet are about the most high-tech tools you'll find in my kitchen. Even though I work evenings I have a home-cooked dinner ready almost every afternoon before I leave to start teaching. I have a hard time making small amounts of anything. And yet I don't love cooking. Everybody thinks I do but I don't. I don't even especially like cooking. But I like eating. I really like eating. But then again, so does everybody else, right? So why am I so tied to cooking, and to cooking so prolifically? Why can't I not cook prolifically? Why can't I just prepare simple, calorically adequate fare? I don't know. I guess there's no escaping one's genetic predestination. 
Last week during the weekly hang of my Panera Posse, as we passed around our thoughts on all kinds of things, someone brought up that old standard piece of pre-wedding advice: never marry someone with the idea that you'll get them to change once you've tied the knot.
Of course the irony embedded there is that people, married or not, often change over time on their own, for better or worse, as they deal with the challenges of new situations or the sameness of old ones. But if people married or in a committed relationship can't make each other change, I believe that they can train each other. In fact, I believe that successful mutual training is a necessary element (among others, of course) for a successful long-term committed relationship. Training within such a relationship involves each partner learning: 1. how the other expects, or will tolerate, being treated; 2. what pleases and displeases the other, and whether it matters; 3. to accept and/or accommodate the other's ways; 4. to speak and behave in such a way that makes getting along possible; 5. when to apologize and whether or not one can get away with never doing it; 6. to forgive, or whether one can get away with never doing it. I once asked a man from my church who was married for over fifty years what advice he could give on having a long marriage. He replied: "Well, I just learned that the kinder I treat her, the kinder she treats me. And the kinder she treats me, the kinder I feel like treating her." And I thought, Ah, there's a couple who've trained each other well. On the other hand, I know or have known other couples who've been married for many years, one of whom treats the other, or who both treat each other, with far less care than the man from my church advises. I expect those couples trained each other just as well, but differently. Still, if I might evoke my pie crust analogy from a couple of blogs ago: people who are handled roughly become tougher and weaker at the same time; less resilient, more crumbly. Not that even the nicest-to-each-other couples are composed of two perfect human beings; there's none among us whose bad bottled-up genie doesn't once in a while make an escape. We all make mistakes, say a wrong or hurtful word to each other, indulge in some inauspicious behavior; that's what it is to to be human. And that's when it's time to pull out training numbers 5 and 6.  There are few earthly delights I rank above a pot-luck-snack movie night with a bunch of friends at someone's house. And it's even better when one of us has brought along an engaging, thought-provoking movie (Okay, I'll 'fess, it's usually me who brings the designated DVD; I'm kind of the resident film-buff-indie-geek) that keeps us hanging around discussing, dissecting, and deconstructing the characters and events we just watched.
My posse pal Jean hosted one such successful movie night last Thursday: all the elements came together most auspiciously: delicious and plentiful snacks, good company, and a movie called "City Island" that we ended up discussing, dissecting and deconstructing over the post-movie-snack* portion of the evening. *As opposed to the "pre-movie-snack" portion and the "intra-movie-snack" portion. Intra-movie and post-movie and snacks are not necessarily de rigueur under all circumsances, and the pre-movie snack can be switched out for a pre-movie dinner or pot-luck if the host choses that alternative. However, neither the snacks nor dinner are required for a good movie night. The real treat is a great movie. Anyway, about "City Island", a serious comedy with Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Alan Arkin, Emily Mortimer and others : First of all, who's heard of City Island? Who knows what and where it is? Not me before I saw the movie. But City Island is a real place in New York, an island about a mile long and half a mile wide off the coast in the Long Island Sound. And though it's technically part of the Bronx it looks like a small New England fishing village. (Or at least it did in the movie. In fact, it looked so pretty in the movie that I now regret that I never heard of it before, or visited there back when I used to visit New York on a now-and-then basis those times when one or the other of my children were living there. I kind of want to go there now!) So anyway, in the movie "City Island", against this peaceful, lovely backdrop of beach, fishing boats and clapboard houses rages the angst of a family where everyone, father, mother, and two teen-aged children, hold secrets about themselves that they so fear the others learning that they constantly push against each other, lie, and engage in cover-ups and behaviors that cause misunderstanding and unhappiness. Ironically, there are two other characters in the film whose life mistakes and physical imperfections are an open book: one an ex-con, the other a morbidly obese woman. The ex-con can't hide and the obese woman has no desire to, as she broadcasts her own video cooking blog. It's to these two social "misfits" who are in fact healthier than they are that the family members gravitate, though the fact that they do so becomes part of the collective secret. There's also a mysterious would-be actress in the whole equation. It's a good movie: good characters, good story, and you'll learn of the existence of a place you probably had never heard of. So check out, "City Island", even if it's for a movie night with yourself. I have plenty of those solo movie nights, too! |
"Tropical Depression"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BTPN7NYY 
"Equal And Opposite Reactions"
by Patti Liszkay Buy it on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa or from The Book Loft of German Village, Columbus, Ohio 
Or check it out at the Columbus Metropolitan Library
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