ACT ONE: My husband and I decide to trade in both our cars and get one new one after we finally figure out we can do it without killing each other. That’s why we are in the Acura dealership when the email comes.

I read it while I am in the women’s room. I can’t tell whether I want to burst into tears or laughter or both. I rush out, hoping to tell my husband the news, but I can tell it’s too late. He already has a big grin on his face and he’s wiping his eyes.

So, he and I sit there, listening to the sales guy talk about the benefits of Acuras. From time to time, my husband and I exchange glances and burst into fits of laughter. The Acura guy must think he’s landed a couple of lunatics, but we can’t help ourselves. It’s so hard to behave yourself in public when you’re really happy.

The next day, we talk to the author of the email, our daughter’s boyfriend of three years. Sure enough, Bennett is about to pop the question.

“I won’t offend your liberal sensibilities by asking for your permission,” he says. “But I wanted to let you know and get your blessing.”

We tell him how happy we are. It’s wonderful to see your kid with someone who loves her so much, someone she fits so well with.

“When are you going to do it?” I ask, straining to appear nonchalant.

A few minutes? A couple of hours? I am ready. I’ve always wanted to scream like Benjamin’s mother in ‘The Graduate.’ I’ve been thinking about it, priming my vocal cords, for years.

“Oh, sometime this week,” he says. “I’m not sure when. It’ll be soon, though.”

I point out that the next 30 minutes would be even sooner. “How long do I have to keep this secret?” I whine.

Bennett tells me to hang on and just be patient. He and our daughter are heading to Charleston later in the week and he’ll be scouting out appropriately romantic locales there.

“Charleston? Really? You mean where the Civil War started?” I ask helpfully.

Bennett pleasantly agrees that yes, indeed, the Civil War started there. He promises he’ll avoid Fort Sumter as a proposal site.

He still doesn’t budge on the timing, though. Oh, brother: yet another soon-to-be family member I can’t push around. I supposed I might as well get used to it, since I am determined to be a really great mother-in-law and everything.

We hang up.

“How are we going to keep from spilling the beans?” I ask my husband, the pronoun expert, who is tactful enough not to point out we aren’t the problem, I am. “I’ll go nuts,” I add.

I already know I can’t talk to our daughter for the next few days without totally blowing it. That girl is an emotional bloodhound, brilliant at sniffing out secrets. I should know; she’d learned most of it from me. I may have taught her too well.

ACT TWO: Decisive action! My husband and I decide to buy an Audi, not an Acura.

Elsewhere — and I won’t mention any names — inaction. Bennett and our daughter go to Charleston. So does Tropical Storm Andrea.

I have been silent as a sphinx. I have only told my friends Betsy, Jeannette, Hester, Jim, Michel, and some total stranger in front of me in a movie line. My husband, in contrast, is a real blabbermouth. He’s told half the psychology department at the University of Texas, his golfing friend, and somebody who cut his hair. Men have no self-control. It must be because they don’t go through childbirth; women know how to suffer in silence.

Bennett sends out a secret communique to me, my husband, our son, his parents, and his brother. The weather is bad, he says. He may have to delay the proposal.

Our son helpfully responds the weather forecast in Charleston shows only a 20% chance of rain. What’s the problem?

I chime in, using my mathematical skills to say this means Bennett has an 80% chance of proposing the next day.

Bennett’s mother responds that we should remember Bennett is at his best when the pressure’s on.

Fine, I email back. But the rest of us are cracking under the pressure. Who knows how long we’ll be able to keep our mouths shut?

ACT THREE: Bennett proposes. Our daughter accepts. The venue, along the Battery and not at Fort Sumter, is perfect. It isn’t raining. The ring is beautiful.

We are all deliriously, ridiculously happy. We tell even more people. We’re probably boring everybody to death; we’re going to have to cut it out.

Talking to friends who are roughly my generation, we puzzle about the younger generation. They’re so much more formal than we were when it comes to the rituals of engagement and marriage.

We recount what it was like in the 60s and 70s, when you rolled over in bed and suggested to the person next to you the two of you might get married. Somebody mentioned it, somebody agreed, lots of gallon jugs of wine were bought, homemade vows written and exchanged, a minister or justice of the peace appeared, the honeymoon was at some cut-rate motel.

At a superficial level, everything has changed. At a deeper level, though, the couple and their families are still looking for the same thing.

So, this is Act Three and the curtain’s supposed to fall — but if you know anything at all about marriages and relationships, you know the play’s only beginning. Let it be a long and rich one.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read more about mother-daughter jaunts

Well! I think I have my routine at restaurants down pretty well. Here’s how it goes.

I enter.

I am seated.

I look at the menu.

I get a boring beverage like water or Diet Coke.

Then I ask the waiter or waitress as nicely as possible, since I am semi-screaming already, “Can you please turn down the music?”

You see, it’s deafening in there. Hell, it’s deafening everywhere these days. I think they want it loud, because that shows a place is happening and successful, full of people screeching important things at one another, their voices ricocheting off the concrete, their silverware clattering, their goblets overflowing, their laughter raucous and high-pitched.

And the music? Jesus, the music. I have no idea what it is, since I am a musical dolt, the kind of person nobody wants in a happening restaurant, especially in the Live Music Capital of the World. All I know is, the music is ear-splitting, pulsating, relentless. It assaults your ears, it vibrates through the floors, it takes up cacophonous residence in your head like one of those old Excedrin commercials.

“Can you please turn down the music?”

I say it nicely. Firmly, but with a breezy we’re-all-in-it-together bonhomie. Surely the waiter or waitress is sick of it, too. Weary of all the screaming and pulsating and aural gyrations, trapped like a rat in a lab experiment testing how much racket it takes to make a rodent non compos mentis. Surely!

Sometimes, yes. Yes, of course, the music will be turned down! Pronto! Bien sur! Oh, and do you want your water sparkling or flat?

Sometimes, no. Rolled eyes, subtle smirk, just a soupcon of ageist condescension. “We’ve already turned down the music once,” a waitress announced recently, which made about as much sense as a filthy child telling you he just took a bath last week, so what are you freaking out about, you old bat?

But never mind. I am getting a headache. I am tired of being patronized and deafened. I don’t care how great the food is. I am already looking forward to leaving, to that transcendent moment when we step outside and the roar subsides and our ears cease ringing.

My husband and I muse about a restaurant that would be perfect for people like us, people our age — a quiet and hushed space with soft music, bigger lettering on the menus so you can read it in the candlelight, servers who are respectful but not overly unctuous, who like us because we’re polite and presentable and not overly demanding and we always tip 20 percent unless they’re total dicks. Oh, yes, the kind of place where the hum of quiet, intense conversations and shared and muted laughter — which is music to me, music I do appreciate — lingers in the background.

This isn’t the Early Bird special — not yet, anyway. I prefer terms like quiet and sophisticated and elegant.

But then (I lecture myself), I don’t want to get too hyper-sensitive, too defensive about this whole aging business. I don’t want to assume a waiter or waitress isn’t thrilled to serve me because I am of a certain age and bitch about the volume; maybe it’s really because I’m a Sagittarius and a left-winger. I want to be open-minded, after all. Open-minded to the point of porousness.

But then (I go on), maybe this is all how it happens as you get older. The world gets louder and faster and more frenzied. Or maybe it’s always been that way and you’re finally noticing it, you’re finally falling just a step behind.

So what do you do? You speed up, of course. Apologize when you slow the pace. Push yourself more. Ignore the loud music; pretend you love it; beat your foot in time to it; grin like a half-wit.

Good grief, who are you kidding? This isn’t enjoyable. This is uncomfortable, this is hard work. To hell with trying to catch up with the loud, spinning world, you decide peevishly; you will go your own (increasingly poky) speed and let it blast and spin and gyrate past you. You will take your business and go elsewhere (where? you don’t know). Good riddance; so long, suckers; don’t forget to text.

But — niggling questions sprout like weeds. Is this how you grow old, withdrawing a little more each year from the world? How often do you keep venturing into the world and asking to be accommodated (turn down the music, slow your pace, quit mumbling)? How often do you just suck it up and hope nobody notices? Were you really there and does it count if you always leave early? What’s the difference between being a realist and a surrender monkey?

My husband thinks I take things too hard, analyze them too much, overreact. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Just because the music is too loud and I’ve been launched into a full-blown existential crisis — you call that overreacting?

We’ll have to talk when we finish our meal and go outside.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about grammar, punctuation, and life

We spent Memorial Day weekend at a beautiful ranch in Texas’ Hill Country, far away from highways and civilization. When the clouds blew away, we could see the stars. We had long, leisurely talks with good friends, sitting on a porch or in front of the fire. No, it wasn’t officially cold enough for a fire, but like Richard Nixon, I am always up for a fire as long as somebody else makes it.

The only flaw in the weekend was my developing an overly intense relationship with a key lime pie. We’d bought the pie at the Pink Pig restaurant in Fredericksburg after I made sure the crust was made out of graham crackers.

It occurred to me that the pie would be a nice — even generous — contribution to the general welfare of the weekend. Nobody except my husband knew that key lime pie is my favorite dessert on the planet, but now that I’ve spent two days hovering around it and probably eating half of it (and I do not exaggerate when it comes to dessert), my cover is blown. Some contribution to the general welfare.

But what is a personal blog if not an opportunity to rat yourself out? If I commit a felony one of these days, my lips are cemented shut. But confessing idiotic misdemeanors is my life.

All of which brings me to Paul McCartney, obviously.

He came to Austin and performed for two nights right before the holiday weekend. As usual, I’d neglected to get tickets and the shows sold out. They were wonderful, electric shows. I know that, since every other one of my so-called friends on Facebook posted photos and rave reviews.

After a while, I started to get a little resentful. Why them and not me? It wasn’t fair. Paul had always been my favorite Beatle. And since I recently met the Beatles’ former secretary, Freda Kelly, I was kind of part of their inner circle and everything.

I was pondering the unfairness of the universe, when it occurred to me that Paul might possibly be staying nearby. After all, we live next door to a luxury hotel. Maybe Paul was there — staying just a few hundred feet away from our apartment. Paul! I couldn’t think of a celebrity bigger to a woman of my age. Who cared about popes and kings and Nobel laureates? This was a Beatle.

So I started skulking around, looking for information. You might call it snooping, but I call it journalism.

Yes, Paul was staying in the hotel, I learned quickly. In fact, one of my neighbors had come within a few feet of him the day before — a few feet! Paul! — as he exited a black Suburban. I milked our neighbor “Mark” (his real name) for as many details as possible (e.g., color and make of car, arrival time and place, etc.)

“Mark” was basking a little too much in the whole glory of the moment, if you asked me, recounting over and over how he’d waved at Paul and given him the thumbs-up. “And Paul waved back,” “Mark” reported 30 or 40 times for a small crowd in our lobby.

“God, ‘Mark’ is such a celebrity whore,” I complained to Colin, one of the men who works in our lobby. “Remember when he crashed his bicycle just so Lance Armstrong would notice him? He’s shameless.” Colin nodded with an air of studied neutrality.

But, really, the more important point was that “Mark” had seen Paul and I hadn’t and the universe was massively unfair. To rectify matters, my friend Pat and I agreed we’d set up a mini-stakeout for Paul, close to the area where “Mark” had seen him the day before. We’d meet at roughly the same time, 5 o’clock.

“I’ll bring my dog,” Pat said, “and we’ll pretend to be walking him.”

In the meantime, I hung around the hotel a little, trying to look nonchalant. After all, at my age, I didn’t want to develop a reputation as a stalker. But no Paul. I nodded to two policemen as I left, and ran back to my apartment since it was almost 5. The phone rang. “I have to go,” I told my daughter after we’d talked a few minutes. “Paul may be leaving soon. I don’t want to miss him. I can’t think of any celebrity I’d rather see than him.”

“I wonder how many millions of women your age feel the same way,” she said.

Outside, I sat down on a bench, pretending to be engrossed in my cell phone. I watched the drop-off area through my dark glasses and waited. And waited. Paul didn’t show up. Neither did Pat. Neither did her dog.

Two women and a dog might have lingered out there without looking desperate and sad. But one woman with a dying cell phone who’d been stood up by a friend, a dog, and a Beatle looked kind of pathetic. I thought about my daughter’s remark about the millions of women who  idolized Paul McCartney like they were still teenagers and the Beatles were still alive and together. It was kind of depressing, just like being 15 had been.

About that time, Colin rounded the corner. I was caught in flagrante. How mortifying.

“What are you doing?” Colin wanted to know.

“I am contemplating my total insignificance in the universe,” I said.

“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll just get upset.”

Later, I heard that Paul had left the hotel minutes after I did, escorted by the two policemen I’d seen. I’d missed him by just a few minutes. “I think he was in a white car this time,” someone told me.

It was disappointing and semi-heartbreaking for another five minutes, but then I got over it. That’s what it’s like to be 63, when confessing idiotic misdemeanors is your life. After three-day weekend in the country with good friends and half a key lime pie,  you can bounce back from just about anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read the tragic story about the local woman who refused to come out of fetal position

Every time I turn around, some new authority is howling about how everything that’s wrong with our society — namely, obesity and fraying families — is because nobody cooks any longer.

All our problems will be solved, we are told, if we just shop organic, gather around the gas range while we cut, parse, steam and bake, and put a healthy dinner on the table. Oh, and that would probably be an attractively set table with good china, fresh flowers, and napkin rings. Lively conversation will ensue and everybody will get thin and happy.

Good grief. I know I am supposed to be deeply relieved by this new batch of organic wisdom. But I’m not. Instead, it flings me into a neverending shame spiral.

If the answer to the failures of the world is home cooking, then I might as well hang it up. I come from a long line of horrible cooks. In fact, I can’t quite decide which of my grandmothers was the worse cook.

I spent hours at my maternal grandmother’s table, going eyeball to eyeball with a slimy mound of okra, which I refused to eat. Eventually, I was sent to bed with an empty stomach, which was supposedly my punishment, but I never really saw it that way. My paternal grandmother spent most of her time chain-smoking Parliaments, which meant she was too preoccupied to cook, but at least we never had any okra faceoffs. Anyway, Granny’s idea of a vegetable was a French fry.

My mother’s cooking philosophy was to shove inexpensive pieces of meat into the oven and blast them at high heat till they resembled an old pair of shoes. We often went off to Sunday school, then church, on weekends with the oven roaring for hours. We’d return and Mother would peer into the oven and announce the roast beef wasn’t quite done yet. By then, it would have shrunk to the size and consistency of a molten baseball. Extremely well-done meat has always been confused with Methodism, in my mind. Also, Mother always tied string around her roast beefs; my sister and I never knew why, but this may have had something to do with Protestantism, as well.

I bring all this up simply to show that bad cooking is part of my DNA and you can’t argue with fate or genetic material. I have tried to cook over the years, God knows I’ve tried. But even when it’s turned out marginally well, I have always hated to cook. In my own kitchen, since my husband likes to cook, I am the designated sous-chef and scullery maid. This makes me happy. I don’t have to cook and I don’t have to think.

After a recent and lengthy call to action ye cooks of America in the pages of The New York Times, which suggested society should pay people to cook at home, for crying out loud, one courageous woman wrote a letter to the editor in protest. I hate to cook, she began her letter. Have I made it clear I loathe cooking? she reiterated midway through the letter, ending it with a simple, straightforward, I really, really hate to cook.

I was thrilled to read that letter, but then it got even better. On Mother’s Day, a charming and perceptive young woman wrote a Times op-ed piece entitled, My Mom Didn’t Cook. So What? Her family lived on the Upper West Side, the young woman wrote, and her mother excelled at takeout. She was a great mother! She didn’t have to cook!

Exactly! We are out here, I thought, nodding my head as I read. Yes, we are out here, the nameless millions who hate to cook. We have been shamed for too long by the Martha Stewarts, the Mark Bittmans, the hostess-with-the-mostess types. We can’t stand the heat, we’re thrilled to get out of the kitchen, and we’re not going back.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Here’s another non-cooking story

2009.  I came up with a rule a few years ago. It was one of my usual half-baked ideas to improve my life — like going gluten-free or overdosing on kale — that usually has the shelf life of a ripe banana.

But, no. This plan was a little better, I thought, a little more life-enhancing. At a point in my life when illness and death and grief weren’t the surprise visitors they once were, when the casualties were increasing among people I loved, the people I didn’t love, the total strangers in the obituary columns who were my age or younger, maybe I should do some things a little differently.

I wouldn’t stop going to funerals and hospitals, God knows. But I could make it a point to show up at happy occasions — the parties, the celebrations, the anniversary dinners, the weddings — with the same sense of commitment I brought to marking the end of someone’s life. Why not celebrate when I could, as often as I could?

One of the first happy occasions I insisted on going to was the 25th anniversary party for our old friends, Dan and Toni. It was in Boston during the summer of 2009. As usual, my husband and I could have come up with a lot of excuses not to go, since it was a long trek for a short party, and there’s never enough time and money. But I was brimming with the conviction of my new, life-enhancing idea, so we went.

We went, we had a great time, we drank too much, we toasted, we told stories. Dan and Toni were such a perfect couple that most of the married couples in the audience developed a massive inferiority complex in a matter of minutes. Dan and Toni basked in their mutual adoration; they glowed with happiness; they had two almost-grown daughters who were perfect, too. If we all hadn’t loved them so much, we would have had to kill them.

We went home. I congratulated myself again and again on my wisdom about showing up for celebrations. Hadn’t I been proved right? Our Boston trip had been lovely.

2013. As I mentioned, illness and death and grief are no longer the unexpected visitors they once were. But they still shock and unsettle when they appear, no matter how old you are.

My husband and I are back in Boston with Dan and Toni, this time at their house.

We have known them since they first came together, decades ago, as a young couple. We knew them as a couple in their prime, both with demanding careers and strong ambitions, bringing up a family. Now, we know them in their last months or weeks together. We are seeing how it will end.

My husband, who talks to Dan every couple of weeks, already told me that Dan and Toni were passing some evenings by reading aloud love letters they exchanged when they were first in love and separated for a summer. This, at least, is something Dan can still do. He’s almost completely helpless now, his body ravaged by ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, which was diagnosed two-and-a-half years ago. He uses an oxygen mask connected to a machine to help him breathe as his lungs give out.

When Dan has to wear the mask, Toni or his caretaker position a microphone in it so that his voice booms out from a nearby speaker. His same voice, his same mind — sharp and witty and probing. Hearing him so minutely, listening to his regular breaths, feels as if we are all inside his head. We can temporarily forget he’s in a wheelchair, his head propped up, three of his four limbs useless.

Today, Dan wants all of us to tell him a single adjective or so we think defines us. Then, we will tell him the single adjective that best captures his essence. My husband comments that Dan never had any use for personality psychology before: What’s this all about? A single modifier that captures a person’s essence? Where did that come from? Dan tells my husband to shut up and think.

This conversation — our last, we know — is like that. By turns, it’s deeply serious, raggedly emotional, searing, brutal in its detail — then casually profane, acerbic, lighthearted, gossipy. After all, we’re old friends. In many ways, our conversation is relaxed and familiar, reminiscent of other times. We’ve been here before, right? No, we’ve never been here before. Not like this.

Dan thinks I’m worldly, which I think is a crock. I was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, I remind him. I can’t be worldly. Sophisticated, then, he says — another wrong answer. I want to be compassionate and perceptive. Nobody says that, though.

Dan says Toni is effective, which doesn’t entirely please her. She wants something more. He says my husband is curious; my husband is fine with that. Men are so easy.

And Dan himself? This is what the game is about, we all understand. Who is Dan to us? How will we remember him? How well have we understood him? Can we give him what he wants to hear? Will it be enough for him? We have to be honest, of course. None of us has ever had much use for artifice. Fuck artifice.

Witty, we say. Inventive. Intellectually curious. Playful. We go on and on, thinking, fumbling, failing.

How does he want to be seen? we ask. He wants to be clever, he says.

Clever! My husband and I shake our heads at this. Of course Dan is clever. Everybody knows that, which is why we didn’t mention it. It’s just that clever isn’t enough. He’s so much more than that. Clever’s a beginning, not an ending. We don’t want to leave it there.

The evening passes. It was, I tell my friend Marie the next day, an incredible time, both wonderful and terrible. The two were intermingled so tightly, you could never have separated them. Funny I had thought that you could only celebrate the unambiguously happy occasions. But this was its own kind of celebration, vibrant and gut-wrenching, joyous and bleak.

I would describe the four of us old friends as being agnostics — irreverent agnostics, at that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t find a certain holiness in our lives. Sometimes, we find ourselves surrounded by everything we consider holy — like a long and loving marriage, deep friendship, a shared past.

Clever, holy, however you describe it. Sorry, Dan, but a single word just isn’t enough.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Funny how even expected news can change your life

Jennifer Margulis is an award-winning journalist, health activist, wife, and mother of four. She’s also a friend of mine; we don’t agree on everything, but I greatly admire her intelligence, commitment, integrity and passion.

Margulis’ most recent book, The Business of Baby: What Doctors Don’t Tell You, What Corporations Try to Sell You, and How to Put Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Before Their Bottom Line, will leave you outraged — especially if you’re a woman who’s ever given birth. Driven by economics, student loans, fears of litigation, coziness with the drug industry, and pure arrogance, American obstetricians seem never to have encountered a pregnancy they don’t want to repeatedly test and re-test, just to make sure. After all, somebody has to pay for those fancy ultrasound machines in their offices.

This is what happens, Margulis says, when every pregnancy is automatically medicalized and viewed as an illness — even though human beings seem to have pretty reliably populated the Earth over the millennia, with or without medical intervention. And what do we end up with in our well-educated, immensely rich country? More expensive health care, more medical interventions, and a maternal death rate four times higher than Bosnia and Herzegovina’s.

Not to mention our world record rate of C-sections, which is now up to one in three. As one of Margulis’ subheads dryly notes, American obstetricians and pediatricians tend to be keen to intervene.

Anyway, I highly recommend Margulis’ book, which focuses on a segment of the problems in American health care — but illuminates the entire industry. Reading it, you will find yourself nodding angrily, recalling your own experiences with the medical industry, its expensive guesswork, its reluctance to be questioned, its endless waits, its intimidations.

I know, I know — there are many wonderful doctors out there, some of whom I’ve been fortunate to see. But look around, read about the U.S.’s  health statistics and outcomes and expenditures, and you want to book a one-way ticket to Scandinavia. The system is corrupt and we’re all part of the system — until, as Margulis suggests, we begin to stand up to it and question it.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read more about the runaway medical train here and
here at the end of life

Flying business class is bad for the soul. I really believe that. It invariably turns a person like me — an avowed, all-power-to-some-of-the-people liberal — into someone who feels a little too good about herself since life has suddenly given her more legroom. It’s deplorable.

Deplorable and, again, bad for the soul — but good lord, but it’s great for the body. That’s why I try to upgrade every chance I can get on long, trans-ocean flights. I can always work on my unenlightened soul later, I figure, after the plane has landed. I am at an age when my soul is a lot more malleable than my body.

So, there I was, having wormed and certificated my way into business class, flying from Rome to Chicago. I read my book — The Man Who Saved the Union, H.W. Brands’ excellent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, to be precise — till my eyes began to cross.

Looking around, I noticed everybody else in business class was watching movie videos. I guessed that this was why you no longer have fascinating conversations with seatmates, since everybody is running his own, personal movie universe, but whatever. After I finally figured out how to turn on the audio, I joined the rest of them.

Here’s what’s odd — and strangely communal — about it: If you’re willing to crane your neck and get really brazen and shameless, you can see most of the other passengers’ screens. You know what they’re watching, what they’ve picked out, how they’re choosing to spend their time. It doesn’t take the place of a good conversation, but it’s its own odd form of modern-day communication.

Catti-corner to me, a woman’s screen showed a scene very familiar to me: A ship is passing by the Statue of Liberty, as its passengers stare silently at the towering figure. Look, there’s a very young Vito Andolini, soon to be renamed Corleone! It’s The Godfather, Part 2, one of my favorite movies on earth or in the skies — along with its predecessor, of course — which I have watched often enough to be a little embarrassed by it and realize I take a little too seriously, but that’s the way it goes.

I hadn’t seen the movie in ages — i.e., for at least a year — so, I knew I had to watch it again. I cued it up and sank back into the seat. That’s where the semi-public aspect of this individual movie-viewing became stranger. The guy next to me had awakened from a deep slumber, torn off his sleep mask, and plunged into watching Django Unchained, which was a perfectly good movie, but no Godfather or anything. So, I mostly watched my own movie and mused about the fact that had Francis Ford Coppola and the Corleone family been Southern Baptists, much of movie’s intertwined splendor, ritual and gore would have suffered greatly. Face it: Catholics know how to put on a show.

I tried to concentrate, but it was hard, since I practically had the movie memorized already, and besides, the woman catti-corner to me was displaying what would be going on in 45 minutes. (“I know it was you, Fredo! You broke my heart! You broke my heart!“)

But I persisted. The Catti-Corner woman finished Part Two, the guy next to me enjoyed his Django bloodbath, and overhead, The Life of Pi started up. By the time Fredo was sleeping with the fishes on my screen, the Catti-Corner Woman had cranked up Godfather, Part One, the guy next to me was glued to some lightweight comedy — revealing he wasn’t a serious cineaste, which I found a little embarrassing — and I was plunged into a dilemma. What now? I was too tired to read, too tired to sleep, I’d just seen Godfather One a few months ago and, besides, who wants to be a total cultural copycat?

Forget it. I chose one of my other all-time favorite movies, Chinatown, and tried to ignore the fact Roman Polanski, the film’s director, was a child molestor. It’s still such a stunning movie, engrossing, beautifully written, wonderfully acted, and John Huston wins my vote for the creepiest film villain ever. ”I don’t get tough, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does,” Faye Dunaway tells Jack Nicholson in a world-weary line I am still hoping to use in my own life.

On Chinatown, the illicit waters flowed, the trumpet wailed softly, and the darkness gathered. John Huston revealed that, ”See Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of … anything!” I wondered briefly whether a film without a felon as a director could have featured such a brilliantly chilling line.

Catti-corner, even though I couldn’t hear him, Brando was announcing that, “Tattaglia is a pimp!” after one of my favorite scenes in which the mafia chieftains embrace. On both screens, the guns blazed and the blood exploded, and the pilot announced we were making our initial descent into Chicago.

“You made it through both the Godfathers,” I mentioned to the Catti-Corner Woman as we exited. “I am so impressed. I only made it through the second one.”

An 11-hour flight in business class, and that was the only conversation I had with anyone. We left the plane, both of us humming the same song. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to think, since communication is good for the soul, even when you’re in business class.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read more revelations from a highly imperfect traveler

I never traveled outside the country till the early 1970s.

By then, I was in my early 20s and it was embarrassing to be an American. After all, the Vietnam War was still raging and the U.S. had been deeply shamed by the racism exposed by the civil rights movement (this was before an influx of workers from Africa and the Middle Europe had migrated to Europe, and Europeans had been forced to acknowledge their own intolerance and racism; individually and collectively, we all pay for our culture’s sins, I’m inclined to think).

Usually, my boyfriend and I tried to pass as Canadians back then. That involved looking as inoffensive and pale as possible. More than anything, we didn’t want to call attention to ourselves; the last thing on earth we wanted was to be seen as loud, obnoxious, Ugly Americans.

The years and decades pass and some things change and others don’t. The Vietnam War is long past and we’re longer in the tooth, but by God, we’d still rather croak than go the Ugly American route. If we have any complaints when we’re out of the country, we voice them politely and very quietly.

Which is what I was trying to do last week in Rome. The hotel we’d booked had been — to put it mildly — a disappointment. The lobby was a fifth-floor desk with a couple of brochures, the room small and loud, the molds so overwhelming I had a blinding headache.

So there I was, asking the young woman behind the counter to waive my upcoming night’s fee so I could stay somewhere else. Not that I knew the Italian words for “mold” or “headache” or “somewhere else.”

As we were talking, the deathtrap elevator suddenly jolted to our floor and its doors banged open. A man and woman of about my age stumbled out, strewing luggage on the floor. The woman screeched to a halt and threw her hands into the air.

“My God, Maury,” she announced. “You call this a hotel?”

Ignoring the hotel clerk and me, she shuttled past us. Her head preceded her body like a submarine periscope, crowned by short hair that was the deepest black I’d ever seen. Her voice was an intriguing cross between a gym teacher’s bellow and a broken foghorn, with a little seagull squawk thrown in for punctuation.

“This isn’t a hotel,” she announced. “This is a joke!”

“Madam — ” the hotel clerk began.

The woman flung open the door of a nearby room. She promptly went all-foghorn all the time.

“MAURY! LOOK AT THIS ROOM, MAURY! I CAN’T STAY HERE!”

“Madam, please. The room hasn’t been cleaned yet — ”

Maury, large and disheveled, stayed by the elevator, flanked by suitcases and staring intently at the wallpaper.

“MY GOD, MAURY! GET BETSY ON THE PHONE! WE’RE FIRING HER ASS! I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE BOOKED US IN THIS DUMP!”

“Madam, please — ”

“OUR TRIP IS RUINED, MAURY!”

The woman continued thrashing through all 50 feet of the hotel’s only hall, screeching dismay and issuing increasingly dire threats about Betsy. Meanwhile, Maury kept a close watch on the wallpaper.

“WHEN I SAY A FOUR-STAR HOTEL, THAT’S WHAT I WANT! THIS IS A JOKE, MAURY! YOU HEAR ME? A JOKE!”

I sneaked a glance at the hotel clerk — whom I’d seen earlier vacuuming and stripping a bed in one of the rooms. Her cheeks had paled and her voice had gone hoarse. She looked on, open-mouthed and resigned, as Maury’s wife stormed through the hall, like it was Normandy on D-Day.

I stood there silently, with my mold-y, sinus-y headache beating a tympani in my skull and a growing certainty in my gut: I wasn’t going to be continuing my own protests, however polite and reasonable. I just didn’t have it in me.

Individually or collectively, I was going to be paying for my own culture’s sins that night. It seemed like the least I could do.

I nodded at the hotel clerk as I left. Maury and The Foghorn were too busy to say arrivederci.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read this post about The Woman Who Learned to Dream in French

It was my brother-in-law’s 60th birthday, so we celebrated.

You might feel a little sorry for us since we’re all so old (he is, after all, my husband’s younger brother), but you can cut out the sympathy bit and save it for when we’re all dead. Right now, we’re all doing pretty well and, the truth is, if you’ve been fortunate, you can afford to spend your blockbuster birthdays in better places than you could when you were, say, 25.

Which brings us to Italy — specifically, the Amalfi Coast. That’s where we went. It’s easily the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever glimpsed, with heart-stopping overlooks and tortuous roads, grottoes, cobblestone streets, historic and charming towns, and azure waters. The surroundings are simultaneously so gorgeous and treacherous that you need to stop ogling them now and then so you won’t plunge over a cliff or get sideswiped by a bus.

Also, the food is wonderful — and probably even healthy, if those latest rumors about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet can be believed. I like those rumors, even if my own diet tilted heavily toward the gelato. Carpe dulce de leche!

To get to the house my brother- and sister-in-law had leased, you had to descend down a billion steps, give or take, from the road. I think they called the steps rustic in the brochure, which beats a lot of other more appropriate modifiers like deadly or harrowing. The first day I descended them — with rain beating down and the wind howling and the surface slippery and my neuropathic feet skidding — I decided I’d just stay down there for the rest of the week and just send out for pizza. Kidding, almost.

(So you can see that I’m not completely exaggerating, as usual, here are some of the stairs, which go on and on forever, too far for any camera to capture:)

The next morning, in a better mood, I trekked upstairs with the other guests and didn’t die en route. The staircase comprised 237 steps, someone calculated, which was the equivalent of eight flights of stairs. It made me feel both better and worse to hear that.

The days passed — glorious, sunny days of stunning views and steaming pasta. I traipsed up and down the staircase a couple of times a day. I didn’t grow to like it and I didn’t get any better at it.

“I thought I was in better shape than this,” I complained to my husband, who has an annoying habit of getting up early and jogging every other morning whether we’re in West Texas or Amalfi or New York City. “I’m on the elliptical a lot. I should be in great shape.”

He told my my problem was that I didn’t push myself enough on the elliptical. All I did was climb on it and read a book for 45 minutes. What I really needed to do, he said, was to sweat and be miserable and hate every minute of it — the way he did. That way, I’d improve my cardiovascular health and probably be leaping all over the staircase and throwing a party right now.

“You know I don’t like to sweat,” I pointed out. “If I exercised like that, I’d never go to the gym. I’d stay on the couch eating bon-bons all day and trying to get over the trauma.”

He just didn’t understand, I told myself, that my whole theory of exercise – which I’ve honed over a lifetime — was to pretend I wasn’t exercising while I was exercising. After all, I don’t like to suffer. My so-called regimen was kind of like reading a book that was bouncing up and down. Some days, in pursuit of what I call cross-training, I would actually get off the elliptical and amble to the stationary bike, where I could read even better.

As long as I didn’t know I was exercising, I would continue to do it, I reasoned. It was kind of like sneaking kale into a shake and pretending it was quite tasty and not even good for you. (It even had the added benefit that you didn’t have to spend the rest of your day picking kale bits out of your teeth.)

Anyway, it’s funny how travel — especially foreign travel — has a way of making you confront unpleasant truths about yourself. Somehow, the absence of the familiar can strip you bare of all pretensions.

For example: You think you speak passable French, which used to be the truth. So who is that idiot, then, who is tongue-tied and panic-flooded in the middle of a haughty boutique on the Left Bank after she has started the conversation with a pretty good Bon jour? Oh, yes, that would be moi.

And now, this: the allegedly fit woman who had thigh spasms over a few rustic steps.

I suppose I could have ruined the whole trip by deciding I was in pathetic shape and needed to completely overhaul my life and routine and devote the last few good years of my life to suffering and sweating and pure misery. Or I could just continue as I was, reading and bumping and ignorant in the gym, and suggest to my brother-in-law that for his 70th birthday we decamp to some equally picturesque joint with an elevator.

As you can imagine, I didn’t have to think about that one too long.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

For another enlightening post on travel, read I am My Own Sherpa, Among Other Things

Deep Background. Well, it all started when my friend Melanie McMinn, auteur of the wonderful blog, the Frugal Kiwi, embarked on a new diet.

(I call Melanie a friend. She is, even though we’ve never met in person and we live on opposite sides of the earth — she’s in New Zealand, I’m in Texas. But, reading someone’s blog, you get to know her. Melanie is always doing something revolutionary, as far as I’m concerned, like raising chickens or creating a wide variety of crafts or rebuilding her house — usually, all at once. Speaking as someone who can barely pry the lid off takeout containers, I’m humbled every time I see her latest marvel.)

Anyway, Melanie’s struggled with a number of serious health ailments and misdiagnoses over the past few years. She and her husband have scoured the Internet, looking for help. Most recently, adding salt to her diet has greatly diminished her crippling migraines. To alleviate other disabling symptoms, Melanie has begun a fairly radical new diet called the Wahls Protocol. (Read here about Terry Wahls, the physician who credits this protocol with dramatically improving her multiple sclerosis.)

All of which is well and good, but you might reasonably ask the question what on earth this protocol has to do with me. Hell if I know. But, once I read Melanie’s blog, I knew I wanted to try it. Or, more precisely, a watered-down version of it — since the diet requires eating three cups of kale-like vegetables, three cups of broccoli-like vegetables, and three cups of berries.

I mean, why not?

Even Deeper Background. I suppose I should level. Basically, I hate vegetables.

As my husband has very unhelpfully pointed out on numerous occasions, my preferred diet is white and beige, since carbohydrates are my life. He has also suggested I was a bad vegetable role model for our children (although, admittedly, I do have other good qualities, just about all of them non-dietary). I believe this relates to my native American blood; I have often thought I could live quite happily on an ice floe, eating blubber on a nonstop basis. But whatever.

Anyway, right now strikes me as the time of life when I’m willing to try almost everything — even vegetables. What do I have to lose? After all, I recently embarked on a gluten-free diet, since my friend Carol told me the regimen would give me more energy and cure my aches and pains. So, I tried it — kind of — for a few weeks, but never noticed much of a difference. (Update: said gluten-free diet hit the rocks when a new ramen restaurant opened nearby. Nothing can stand between me and a good noodle.) (Also, when I read that Gwyneth Paltrow was gluten-free, I knew I had made the right choice.)

Reality.  Kale seemed to be the answer to my new dietary regimen. Sure, I had never eaten kale, but everyone knows it’s a super-food. Our daughter, who was visiting, helpfully baked me some kale chips; they were quite good if you dumped enough olive oil and salt on them and tried to forget what they were made of.

I also drank smoothies made from kale and blueberries and yogurt every morning. I roasted broccoli, I tossed spinach, I sauteed brussels sprouts. At night, I even sneaked some vegetables so I could meet my cup-a-day requirement. I can’t tell you how low your self-esteem plunges when you realize you have become the kind of person who is sneaking cruciferous vegetables.

I went to Whole Foods to buy kale chips after our daughter left; I knew I was too lazy to ever make my own. Besides, how expensive could they be? Answer: They cost a frigging fortune. Five, six, seven dollars for a small package. I bought them nevertheless. I was still that naive, that hopeful.

I think it was the barbecued kale chips that did me in. Or maybe it was the zesty nacho kale chips. Whichever. They both sported the attractive appearance of animal vomit. They didn’t taste much better.

I gave up. I realized that even though I was at the time in my life when I would try anything, even kale, I was also at the time in my life when I could hoist the white flag and walk away if I felt like it.

Recently, I got an email from Melanie. She’s doing wonderfully on her new diet — feeling much better, pushing onward. I was thrilled to hear it. It made me realize one of the things I appreciate the most about her: She can do things that are impossibilities to someone like me. I’m going back to my white-and-beige diet, which is where I doubtlessly belonged in the first place.

(Copyright 2013 by Ruth Pennebaker)

Read about being bludgeoned to death by exclamation marks