I Need a Lifeguard Everywhere but the Pool

by Lisa Scottoline

  Which was probably more accurate.

  I’m not getting old, I’m getting mold.

  Or maybe I’m molting.

  Either way, I went to the dermatologist, who examined the suspicious mole and determined it was benign.

  Yay!

  I promised myself never to skip the sunscreen, ever again.

  But then the dermatologist frowned behind the contraption that magnified her eyes to two brown marbles. She pointed to my temples and said, “You have quite a lot of keratoses.”

  Again I didn’t understand because she was looking at my forehead, not my toesies. “What did you say?”

  “These brownish spots on your temples. You have so many.”

  Thanks, I thought, but didn’t say. “They’re from the sun, aren’t they?”

  “No, that’s a common misconception. They’re hereditary.”

  I remembered then that my father used to have them, which might have been the reason I never minded them. Because they reminded me of him.

  The dermatologist said, “They’re not related to age, but they age you, and I can remove them.”

  “Really?”

  “Hold on.” The dermatologist left the office, then returned with a styrofoam cup of what looked like coffee, because a curlicue of steam wafted from inside the cup. Before I could understand what was going on, she swiped a Q-tip inside the cup and pressed it to my temple.

  “Ow,” I blurted out. “What is that?”

  “Liquid nitrogen. It burns, right?”

  “Right.” I bit my lip as she swiped the Q-tip back in the styrofoam cup and pressed it on a few other places on my temples.

  I wanted my mommy, but didn’t say so.

  Because that would have been immature.

  The dermatologist finished up, saying, “That’s all for now. Call my office in a week or so and make an appointment to remove the others.”

  I thanked her and left the office, my forehead a field of red dots, like a constellation that spelled out:

  WE AGE YOU

  A week later, the red dots had turned brown and fallen off, and in their place was fresh pink skin.

  I could see that I looked better, maybe even younger.

  But I have to say, I missed looking like my father.

  And I think I’ll leave the other ones alone.

  Recipe Ambition

  Lisa

  Everybody knows that the holidays are crazy busy.

  But what we don’t know is why we make them busier.

  Or rather, why I do.

  I begin by saying that as of this writing, there are less than two weeks left before Christmas and I have not begun to shop. I’ve bought some gifts online but I still want to go into an actual store, not only because it’s fun, but because I want actual stores to remain open.

  This is one thing I’ve learned in my dotage.

  If you want something to exist, you have to support it with actual money. So as much as I love to shop online, I make sure I spend my money in the bricks and mortar.

  Vote with your boots.

  And your bucks.

  So you would naturally think that this is a story about me going shopping for gifts, but it isn’t. Because at about the same time, I decided to try a really unusual holiday meal for Christmas.

  The holidays are the time for Recipe Ambition.

  Please tell me that I’m not the only one who decides that the busiest time of the year is the perfect time to make the fanciest recipe ever, for the first time.

  It’s worth noting that I first had this idea for Thanksgiving, but I got too tired.

  But now that Christmas is coming up, I wanted to give my Recipe Ambition a trial run. The last thing you want to do is cook a new dish at Christmas and have it fall through, so that you end up serving cereal with a side of beer.

  And since Francesca and I are vegetarians, we’re always looking for something to substitute for turkey, and our days of Tofurkey are over. No disrespect, but Tofurkey reminds you that you want real turkey and we’re making a clean break.

  In other words, we’re going cold turkey on Tofurkey.

  I had been reading my recipe books and feeling my Italian heritage, which is the kind of thing that happens at the holidays, when I get nostalgic for hard-core ethnic food that no one in my family ever made, because we got too tired.

  Which brings me to fava beans.

  You may not have heard of them, except that if you watched Hannibal Lecter, you know he likes fava beans with liver.

  But like I say, we’re vegetarians.

  I had fava beans when Francesca and I went to Italy, and they were hearty and delicious, so when I was in the grocery store before Thanksgiving, I decided they would be my Recipe Ambition. The beans were large, hard, and an ugly green-brown, kept loose in a plastic container that had an opening on the bottom, which I had never used before. I got a plastic bag, put it under the opening, and released the lever, which was when a zillion beans poured into my bag, clattering like an organic jackpot.

  It was way too many but I couldn’t figure out how to pour them back.

  People were looking at me, and I felt stupid, so I got a twist tie, labeled the beans, and bought them. I had a recipe on how to make them, and they’re easy to make, but none of the recipes kick in until you get the bean out of the skin.

  One recipe actually said, “It’s mainly because shelling fava beans can be such tedious work that making this soup becomes an act of love.”

  Now you tell me?

  Tedious doesn’t even begin to explain the process of shelling fava beans.

  Tedious is foreplay.

  Especially when you bought a zillion of them.

  Only 52,095 more to go!

  And you can’t begin to shell them until after you soak them overnight, and I even found a recipe that you have to soak them for six days.

  This was more Italian than I can deal with.

  So I soaked them for five hours, which was all the hours I had left in the day, and that barely loosened up the skin, so I had to start scraping with my fingernails, a paring knife, and at one point, a corkscrew.

  I was trying to figure out the easiest way to do it.

  Turns out the easiest way is not to bother.

  But I was not about to be beaten by a bean.

  So I turned on the football game and started shelling. I had shelled enough to make whatever I was going to make after about two hours, forty-five beans, and two bloody cuts.

  I took the unshelled beans, put them in a Ziploc bag, and froze them, which means I will forget about them until next year.

  And I went to the mall.

  Our Ladies of Perpetual Motion

  Lisa

  I’m delighted to hear that Mother Teresa is going to be made a saint.

  But I’m also surprised.

  That she wasn’t already.

  I mean, what does it take?

  Before I begin, please understand that I’m not criticizing the Catholic Church. This is a humor column, and I’m Catholic myself. Of course it goes without saying that Mother Teresa is incredibly inspiring, but looked at another way, there’s nobody like Mother Teresa to make you feel inadequate, especially in the holiday season.

  At this time of year, if you’re like me, you’re trying to do your actual job while you juggle shopping, wrapping, planning a big meal, and hoping to remember where you put the tree stand.

  Nobody remembers where they put the tree stand.

  The tree stand is the cell phone of the holiday season.

  The only problem is, you can’t call it.

  Worse yet is trying to find the tree skirt.

  Yes, I own a tree skirt.

  I don’t wear skirts anymore, but my tree does. When it starts to wear panty hose, we’re all in trouble.

  But anyway, my point is that in the holiday season, I’m working at maximum capacity and still falling far short. For example, I’m writing this just a few days before Christmas, but I haven’t figured
out what I’m going to make for dinner, so I haven’t gone food shopping, and I haven’t gotten a tree yet, so I’m guaranteed to end up with one that’s crappy and expensive, which reminds me of my second marriage.

  But to get back to Mother Teresa, I can barely deal with the holiday season, and after all the gifts have been opened, the big meal eaten, and the dishes washed, I can tell you that I will feel like a saint.

  Saint Lisa, Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.

  I’m sure I’m not alone in this. If you are responsible for staging a holiday in your household, you probably feel like a saint, and in my view, you are one.

  No matter what your religion.

  Every woman can be a martyr.

  It’s a God-given right, no matter which God you believe in.

  So when I heard that Mother Teresa was finally about to attain sainthood, I started to look into what she had done to qualify. First, she was born in Macedonia, which is not near any mall that I know of.

  So right there, if you ask me, she’s on the fast track to sainthood.

  She became a nun at eighteen and traveled to India, where she was so moved by the poverty that she experienced what she termed “a call within the call.” She became “a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross,” so she gave up her nun’s habit and put on a white sari.

  Any woman who wears white deserves sainthood.

  In fact, Mother Teresa may be the only woman whoever looked thin in white.

  Me, I never wear white.

  In white, I look like a glacier.

  Mother Teresa lived among the poor, caring for them, even begging for them.

  You know me, and the only begging I’m doing is for Bradley Cooper.

  Mother Teresa started the Missionaries of Charity, dedicated to caring for “the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone.”

  Wow.

  The only people I’m caring for this holiday season are the hungry.

  And by that I mean Daughter Francesca and bestie Franca, who’ll be at my house for the holiday meal. And even at that, Francesca will help with the cooking and Franca will bring the dessert, because really, enough already.

  As for lepers, I admit I’m avoiding them.

  I need all my fingers.

  For my rings.

  Mother Teresa helped children trapped in war in Beirut, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia.

  Okay, but has she ever stood in line at Nordstrom’s, trying to get a box for a sale sweater?

  Or on line at Starbucks, waiting for overpriced caffeine?

  I have.

  Where’s my medal?

  Mother Teresa continued her good works despite two heart attacks, pneumonia, and malaria.

  Sadly, I think I’m getting a cold.

  For her decades of charitable work, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

  But that still wasn’t enough for sainthood.

  To qualify for sainthood, you have to perform not only one, but two miracles.

  And toughest yet, you have to do them after you’re dead.

  Look, I understand that we’re talking about sainthood here, but that’s not a standard that many women meet, especially not this woman.

  I have only one miracle up my sleeve, and I will perform it on Christmas Day, when I make actual cranberry sauce from scratch, and don’t serve the canned kind with those ridges on the sides.

  So while I am inspired by Mother Teresa, I’m not her.

  And I’m wishing happy holidays to everyone, all of the ordinary people who perform ordinary miracles, every day.

  You’re all saints to me.

  New Year’s Meh

  Francesca

  I have about a month before I turn thirty, so I’m on the lookout for unwelcome signs of wisdom and maturity. What I noticed this week:

  I’ve stopped caring about New Year’s Eve.

  Not in a bah-humbug way, but it just doesn’t have the hold on me that it used to.

  New Year’s Eve is like the rare ex-boyfriend with whom I’ve achieved genuine friendship—we have an okay time in each other’s company, but I don’t bother trying to look devastatingly beautiful around him anymore.

  It’s a big step for me. I used to put enormous effort into having a good time on New Year’s Eve. I had to have the Best Night Ever™, ideally with plenty of witnesses and photo documentation.

  And I was unwilling to admit defeat. My senior year of high school, my girlfriends and I went out to a nice prix fixe dinner. I wasn’t feeling too good after eating the lobster salad, but my then-boyfriend was throwing a party, and I was wearing my new, sequin shrug—remember when shrugs were a thing?—I was going to be seen. With increasing queasiness, I sweated it out until eleven, when my best friend had to take me home.

  We stopped twice for me to puke along the side of the road.

  By the time the ball dropped, I was Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

  It got so bad, my mom took me to the ER.

  Imagine you’re a seventeen-year-old girl sick to the point of passing out on New Year’s Eve, and then imagine trying to convince jaded ER docs that you aren’t drunk.

  After initial skepticism and several blood tests, I was diagnosed with toxicity poisoning from a bad lobster. I almost wished it had been champagne.

  But I achieved my wish of staying up all night—on IV fluids.

  My sophomore year of college, my best friend took me as her plus-one to a fancy cocktail party her friends were throwing in New York City. We took the train in, got a hotel room (that our moms probably paid for), primped like it was prom, and headed out on one of the coldest New Year’s Eves in memory.

  At twenty years old, we felt incredibly grown-up—we were in formal dresses with older boys in the big city, and I was utterly certain that this was the first night of our glamorous adult lives.

  Plus, I’d recently broken up with my high-school sweetheart and the only boy I’d ever kissed, so I was determined to find new love on the most romantic night of the year.

  Finding true love took longer than I expected.

  Fast-forward to 3:30 A.M. the first morning of the New Year, the two of us shivering on the sidewalk, our legs frozen numb, but our feet on fire after hours in high heels. We were waiting much too politely as cab after cab went to different people.

  So I improvised.

  Unable to withstand the pain of my shoes a minute longer, I dug plastic bags out of the trash and tied them to my feet.

  Hobbling in my bag slippers, we managed to hail an off-duty party bus and beg the driver to take us back to our hotel.

  He took pity on us—it was the shoes.

  But if that isn’t a dedication to having fun on NYE, I don’t know what is.

  Over time, my desperate need to do the coolest and hippest thing has subsided. The invisible audience judging my social life has dispersed. And the resulting quiet makes it easier to focus on what I cherish every year.

  Like last year, I spent the holiday with my best friend—the same girl who held my hair back and also helped me find clean takeout bags for my feet—only instead we celebrated by sitting on the couch in my mother’s house, giggling at our old high-school yearbooks.

  It was one of my favorite New Year’s Eves.

  This year, the most tantalizing invite I received was from a close friend throwing a “New Year’s Eve Stay-In” at his apartment.

  A small group of friends in a room quiet enough to hear them talk? Sounds perfect.

  I no longer need champagne and sequins to have a great night. The calmer celebrations may not yield the crazy stories or the false envy on Instagram, but my ego will survive. And my heart will be happy.

  Happy New Year!

  Lift and Separate

  Lisa

  Once again, you’ve come to the right
place.

  If you read this, you’re going to LOL.

  But this time, I can’t take the credit.

  Sometimes the world hands you an ace. All you have to do is set it down on the table and play.

  I’m talking, of course, about the SmartBra.

  Have you heard about this? If not, I’m here to tell you that at the recent consumer electronics show, a Canadian tech company introduced a smart bra, which is a bra that is smarter than you are.

  Or at least smarter than your breasts.

  Microsoft is reportedly developing a smart bra, too, and I’m sure the other tech companies will follow suit.

  Or maybe bra.

  If it creeps you out that the male-dominated tech industry is thinking about what’s under your shirt, raise your hand.

  Just don’t raise it very fast.

  They’re watching you jiggle.

  Bottom line, the smartbras contain sensors that are supposed to record your “biometric data” and send it to an app on your mobile device.

  It’s a fitbit for your breasts.

  Or a fittit.

  Sorry, I know that’s rude, but I couldn’t resist.

  Like I said, the world handed me an ace.

  Anyway, to stay on point, the biometric data it monitors is your heart rate and respiration rate, but Microsoft has taken that a step further. According to CNN, their smartbra is embedded with “psychological sensors that seek to monitor a woman’s heart activity to track her emotional moods and combat overeating.” In fact, their “sensors can signal the wearer’s smartphone, which then flash [sic] a warning message to help her step away from the fridge and make better diet decisions.”

  Isn’t that a great idea?

  It’s a bra that tells on you when you’re hitting the chocolate cake.

  Forgive me if I’m not rushing out to buy one.

  I already know when I’m being bad, and I don’t need to be nagged by my underwear.

  By the way, the smart bra sells for $150.

  If that price gives you a heart attack, the bra will know it.

  Maybe the bra can call 911.

  Maybe the bra can even drive you to the hospital.

  Don’t slack, bra.

  That’s for breasts.

  The Canadian company says that wearable tech is the latest thing, and that it developed its smart bra because it had “a plethora of requests from eager women who wanted in on the action, too.”