Palmas Del Mar is too far

At the end of yoga yesterday, when the teacher said to think about what you need to do and how you are going to do it, a thought popped into my mind: "I need to dust this room." So when she unmuted us at the end (Zoom yoga being the new normal), that's what I said I needed to do.

My living room is in one way the best room to do yoga in and in another way not so great. I can put my laptop on my grandmother's coffee table and lie down on the rug and have plenty of room. The rug is so worn in the middle that I really should replace it, but I got it with my mother and I don't want to do it. Also the chairs from the kitchen, and a bunch of boxes, are stacked along the wall. Since work had to stop in the kitchen, I haven't had a chance to move anything back. The feng shui is not great.

Corey, the model who my mother painted, looks down at me from the wall. His expression doesn't change (duh) so if I wobble, he doesn't seem to care.

I took the framed photos and other stuff off the tables and dusted. Then I picked up a few things that were lying around and went to put them into the cabinet that had been in the "so-called den," the transformed bedroom that my sister and I had shared. I opened the side door of the cabinet. A whole bunch of photos were stuffed in there. Ah, the passive, a lack of responsibility. Who stuffed them in there? They included all the old family photos, including the one of the family, in Leipzig, at their last dinner before the Holocaust stole many of them. OK, so, drumroll...I put them in there. I took them out and put them back. There was also a sort of hat box thing full of photos that my mother had thrown in there.

People, if you are cleaning up a little, what are you doing with all the photos? In addition to the ones in boxes, there are framed photos that my parents had put up behind the bar at Atlantic Beach. (Yes, when they bought the house, it had a room with a bar in it, what can I say? ) What do I do with the framed photos? Here is one of me, in Central Park, either daydreaming or concerned about a pigeon.

I took one out and looked at it for a good long while. I took a photo of it and sent it to the kids.

It is me with the three of them on a big bed. Katie is about six months, so Joe and Ben are 4 and 7. Ben is a reading a book that interests Katie. There is a New York Times on the bed. Ben has the same smile as he does today. Joe is looking at Katie and maybe still wondering where she came from. I remember the T-shirt that Joe is wearing. It's of the New York skyline. I seem to have been drinking a Heineken. My legs looked nice and tan. Now the bottoms of my legs are messed up from skin cancer and not so smooth. Of course the tan led to the skin cancer (multiple squamous cells), but who thought of that then?

We were in Palmas Del Mar, Puerto Rico. My parents had taken the whole gang. I remember my mother making up a song that she sang with Ben and Joe. "Palmas Del Mar is too far, we can't get there by a car." There was a scene at some point. Ben had fallen off of a jungle gym and hit his head. My mother's face went white. It was the first of a series of Ben mishaps. I don't remember having any real trouble traveling with a six-month-old baby and two little boys. We had a lot of fun. It was when the worst thing that had ever happened to me was having three Caesarean Sections.