Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

  LUCKY

  In an online column I was writing, I devised a sort of cyber scavenger hunt. One of the instructions was for readers to go to google.com, plug in Lucky Charms, and tell me the first listing that pops up. When I created this game, I had no idea what the Google search would reveal—I had come up with this scavenger hunt idea away from my computer—but I just thought, Okay, I’ll do a Google thing, have them plug in something fun, pop culturey, something smiley and smirky. Let’s see … Lucky Charms cereal. Perfect. I figured this would surely lead to some magically delicious Web page featuring the little leprechaun character.

  It was only when I started hearing back from readers who had proudly found all the scavenger hunt items that I learned what the search coughed up. The first listing was a link to CNN.com, reporting on the gentleman who invented Lucky Charms. He had recently been killed in a car accident, along with his wife, on their way to visit their daughter, who, horrifically enough, was in a coma and dying in the hospital.

  At this point, I could have altered the Google question for the game, but I felt that this devastating, absurd, unfathomable, true story was meant to be read. That such an ending would come to the creator of a cereal named Lucky Charms seemed to be yet another glaring example of how curiously beautiful-tragic-ridiculous-poignant-dreadful-happy-sad it all is.

  See also: Wabi-Sabi

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  CEREAL SLOGANS

  Lucky Charms They’re magically delicious.

  Frosted Flakes They’re grrrrrrreat.

  Rice Krispies Snap. Crackle. Pop.

  Trix Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.

  Kix Mother-tested. Kid-approved.

  Cocoa Puffs I’m coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs.

  LUCKY (VERSUS SMART)

  A gentleman at dinner the other night said, in response to a comment about his success and abundant wealth, you know, I’d rather be lucky than smart. I used to like that expression till I heard him say it, at which point it became clear to me how smug and full-of-it that line is. He really meant the exact opposite when he said it. It’s an attempt to be modest, but really, what’s being conveyed is: I am smart enough to know this expression, smart enough to use it in this conversation so you think I’m being humble, but deep down you and I both know that my astounding success can be traced and attributed to my brilliant mind. This success is my destiny, luck or no luck.

  M

  MAGAZINES

  I cannot keep up with all the magazines. I want to. I want to read them all. I want to ingest them, preferably in one gulp, so then I can move on to my wobbly tower of nightstand books, my real reading. But they just keep coming at you, the magazines do, every damn month, or worse, every week. They refuse to let us catch up, catch our breath, be done, have closure. You’ve got People with its irresistible celebrity gossip (Uma snagged a hot new beau! Sandra Bullock and Matthew McConaughey spottings!), and Newsweek with its Perspective quote page up front and book and movie reviews in back, and all those brilliant New Yorker cartoons, and Reader’s Digest’s latest survival tale (an avalanche! a shark attack! trapped under a fallen tree, in a cave, on a mountain, for eight, sixteen, eleven days), and my husband’s subscriptions to Rolling Stone and Esquire don’t help things any (both of which keep lobbing these great multi-page profile pieces at me: Liz Phair, Bill Murray, that superstar chef outside of Barcelona), and who can resist the “Readings” section of Harper’s or the consistent right-on-ness of The Onion and the zeitgeist pearl I always extract from the bundle: The Sunday Magazine (Google these big stories: meta, Sofia Coppola, anything by Lisa Belkin, for an accurate distillation of the current sociocultural vibe), and I can always be seduced by a good Utne Reader, Bon Appétit, or Entertainment Weekly.

  The only magazines that never tempt me are the time line-y, rehashing, year-in-review issues.

  The only magazines I can read without a shade of guilt are those I find at the dentist’s office or hair salon, because I never have—and would never think to bring—a book with me. It was at the latter locale that I happened upon A. A. Gill’s restaurant review (rant) in Vanity Fair (August 2003), which in my book ties with Brian Frazier’s back-page pieces in Esquire for freshest—in both senses—magazine voice.

  The only magazines I don’t chuck are the ones I am in.

  See also: Completion

  MAGIC WAND

  When they were little, Justin and Miles would frequently ask me—and they were completely sincere—Mom, when you get your magic wand, will you change us into tigers? And I would say, Yes, when I get a real magic wand, I will be happy to change you into tigers. This thrilled them to no end. They would talk about what life would be like when they were tigers. They would be able to jump higher. They would be able to run faster. They wouldn’t have to nap. I played along in a very serious way, because I so badly wanted to be able to make this happen for them, if only for a minute. How they wished and marveled and believed. One day we went to a costume store on a quest to find not a pretend magic wand but a real magic wand. We found one that looked pretty authentic. The boys could hardly contain themselves in the car ride home. I remember standing in their room, holding the wand out, saying that if it worked, I would want them to come back home for dinner, that I would feed their tiger selves but then I’d change them back into little boys for bedtime. When my “One, two, three” failed to produce sparks, and they saw that they were still standing there the same as ever, I felt that I had let them down in the hugest, most irreparable way.

  MAN FROM EGYPT

  From journal, August 17, 1987:

  Cab home. Nice older man from Egypt. He said I was the first one to guess his native country (“Italy? Greece? Israel? Egypt?” “Yes!”). “Twenty-two is the best age—you remember that. You remember that in years to come that your cabdriver said this.” I felt bittersweet by his kindness. “Good night, Amy. Good luck with everything. Have a good life,” he said.

  MARSHMALLOWS

  Charise and I declared a particular week the Week of the Marshmallow. There was no logic to this; it simply emerged. As the week unfolded, these things happened:

  1. At the grocery store I told Justin he could pick out one dessert for dinner that night. He really agonized over his decision, walking up and down the cookie aisle, the candy aisle, looking at pastries. And then, totally out of the blue, he presented me with a bag of marshmallows.

  2. While on vacation my three-year-old niece was yearning for home. She told her mom, I just want to go to our house and eat marshmallows.

  3. For the first time ever in our eleven years of marriage, and with absolutely no knowledge of my word of the week, Jason came home from the store with a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

  Did I somehow will these marshmallow events to occur? Or did I just notice (and otherwise would not have) what would have occurred regardless? Like that game you can play at a stadium—call red and all the red shirts pop out; call yellow and … —my vision was skewed. Back when Jason and I were crafting bracelets out of antique buttons, I was always finding cool buttons on the sidewalk. Such a beautiful button, just lying there, I can’t wait to show J … But aha, once we stopped making the bracelets, the sidewalk in turn stopped presenting me with these stray gems; I don’t think I’ve found a roadside button since. Evidently, if you put yourself on high marshmallow alert, high button alert, high injustice alert, high whatever alert, the world will gladly accommodate you.

  MEANING

  I am working on letting go of trying to find meaning where there probably is none. For example, I stepped outside and at once saw a license plate that read AMY1429; my birthday is April 29—4/29—so except for the 1, the license plate was perfect, and surely a sign of something, I thought. And this: I was at the video store picking out a movie for the kids, and as I walked down the aisle, my backpack accidentally knocked a video off the rack. I picked it up. Adventures in Babysitting. Hmmm. Interesting. The children are meant to watch this tonight, I thought—as if this movie had some important message
to impart, one that would alter the course of my children’s lives and make them better people. That same week, at the drugstore, I was trying to choose a hair color from the rows and rows of nearly identical shades. The boxes were uniformly stacked, except for one sole box that happened to be jetting out a tad. This is the one, I thought, eyeing the model’s hair more closely. A bit blonder than I would have chosen, but I trust the gesture just the same. And I immediately took #211 Ginger Zing to the counter.

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  FINDING MEANING IN LICENSE PLATES

  FINDING MEANING IN LICENSE PLATES

  Jason took an unusual, alternate route. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I used to do this shortcut all the time with my dad when I was a kid. I remember the way perfectly.” At that moment a car pulled in front of us …

  I was thinking about staying true to my own thing, just doing what I do, what I like to do, what I do best, not worrying about what others are doing. Making comparisons is useless. They are them. I am me. Then I saw …

  Jason and I went to a sushi restaurant on the night they happened to be serving a delicacy—shots of electric baby eel. Feeling brave, Jason ordered one. They looked like shiny, green, thrashing angel-hair noodles. There were about twenty of them. Occasionally one would jump to the top of the shot glass. I watched him down it. Jason said he could feel a couple of the eels trying to shimmy back up his throat. Our mutual and immediate reaction to all this was: The kids would have loved to see this, particularly the boys, who were still talking about the chocolate-covered grasshoppers we brought home (and which they ate) from a Mexican restaurant two years before. So Sunday morning we shared the eel news with them. This was just about the coolest thing ever to them. Justin was particularly captivated and proceeded to tell anyone who would listen to the story of Daddy and the electric green eel. He would tell it with such detail and drama: “Okay, so there was a little glass, about this big …” A couple days later, while I was driving home, I was thinking about it again, about how exciting this story was to the boys, how in awe they were, how impressed and proud of their dad they were, and how fun it was for me to watch Justin retell the story. I looked up …

  On the way to Charise’s, I was thinking about a private-eye experiment I wanted to conduct for this book. The gist was to have a detective get photographs of Jason and me from a distance, walking out of a restaurant—documenting our monogamy. I was debating whether to stage the whole thing—tell the detective over the phone that I suspected my husband was having an affair, send photos of him and his supposed mistress (me)—or just go speak with the guy in person, tell him the truth, that it was more the standard procedure and black-and-white catch-them-from-a-distance snapshot-photo style I was after. I kept going back and forth. Stage it. Be up front. Stage it. Be up front. At the stoplight right before turning to her house, I looked up …

  I e-mailed my old high-school boyfriend to ask him if I might interview him for this book. Our anniversary way back when was March 16, or 316 as we referred to it; it became a number that we saw everywhere for years—even friends and family members would comment on it. While we had kept in touch sporadically over the years, there had never been a reason to communicate for work-related reasons, that is, until this day when I e-mailed him. Later that afternoon I was driving the kids somewhere and looked over to see the license plate …

  MESSAGES

  Each time I go to play my messages, I think, I need to put a little pad of paper right here by the answering machine. I never do it. Instead, I keep cramming phone numbers and notes into the tiny, insufficient margins of the operating manual that we keep on the shelf by the phone.

  Messages written on page of operating manual.

  MIND, RANDOM THINGS THAT FOR SOME REASON OFTEN COME BACK INTO MY

  MORE MILES

  I saw this sign on the back of a truck:

  I read it with an implicit or between the two lines. The sign was saying to me, Here are the two, diametrically opposed spectrums of your life: more time with Miles (and Justin and Paris) or more time to write.

  MOVIES

  I always want to see what happens after the movie is technically over. I want an update on the couple that fell in love in Dolby Surround Sound, to see how they’re doing post-euphoria. Have they begun fighting over small increments of time? (You said you’d be home at seven-fifteen. It’s seven-twenty.) Or in Ransom, for example, after they get their son back in the end, I want to see what their family life is like. When they’re sitting around the breakfast table, do they reminisce, can you believe you were chained up to a bed for a week?

  MR. KOCH

  Not too long ago, I sent some material off to an editor in Ohio. In the package, I included a copy of a poem that I love, one I had first read in The New Yorker a couple of years prior. I am not a poetry aficionado; I don’t even understand that many poems. But Mr. Koch’s poem I love, and I refer to it often. I wanted to share it with my Ohio colleague because I thought he, too, might love it, and in turn like me a bit more for introducing it to him, in the same way one feels fondly toward the friend who clued him in on, say, Elliott Smith, or the movie Strangers in Good Company.

  A few days later the Ohio gentleman told me that when my package arrived, he promptly leafed through it, read the poem, and then dashed out to meet a friend for lunch. When he arrived at the restaurant, he saw that his friend had brought along an out-of-town guest to join them. Now, of course I am going to tell you that the guest turned out to be the poet, Mr. Koch.

  YOU WANT A SOCIAL LIFE, WITH FRIENDS

  You want a social life, with friends,

  A passionate love life as well

  To work hard every day. What’s true

  Is of these three you may have two

  And two can pay you dividends

  But never may have three

  There isn’t time enough, my friends—

  Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends—

  To find the time to have love, work, and friends.

  Michelangelo had feeling

  For Vittoria and Ceiling

  But did he go to parties at day’s end?

  Homer nightly went to banquets

  Wrote all day but had no lockets

  Bright with pictures of his Girl.

  I know one who loves and parties

  And has done so since his thirties

  But writes hardly anything at all.

  Poem by Kenneth Koch

  N

  NAILS

  Having a glass of wine inevitably results in me biting and picking at my nails.

  NAMES AS THEY SEEMINGLY INFLUENCE ONE’S CHOSEN PROFESSION

  Art Spiegelman Artist/cartoonist

  Amby Burfoot Runner/writer who wrote book about running

  Sarah Vowell Writer

  DD Smalley Creator of the Hyde Park Miniature Museum

  Francine Prose Writer

  Meg Musick Artist who makes bags / purses out of album covers

  Michael Green Environmental activist

  Henry Calvin Goodrich Wealthy entrepreneur who ended up donating his fortune to charity

  Dr. Cherry Gynecologist

  Mrs. Gotchalk Teacher

  NAPKINS

  I found a 1950s handbook titled Folding Table Napkins in the car. I could not for the life of me figure out where this had come from. In a matter of seconds, I ran through all conceivable options: Was it mine and I’d just forgotten I had it? Had it been in the crevice between the seats for years, left by a friend or a valet driver? Was my husband having an affair with a party planner? Turned out that Jason had picked it up for me as a gift at a thrift shop.

  NEEDLEPOINT

  I had stated the following in a column I wrote:

  The greatest piece of needlepoint art ever would be one that admitted in meticulously stitched lettering

  If I ever saw that at a craft fair, or featured in a mail-order catalog as a cute little throw pillow, I would buy it in a second, and p
ay good money for it.

  A reader promptly offered to needlepoint one for me.

  Actual needlepoint.

  NICE WORDS

  Soup and pond are both such nice words, pond especially. You think: small, quiet, calm, clear. And the ducks.

  NIMIETY

  I can think of nothing less necessary than the cereal Froot Loops with marshmallows.

  NIPPLE

  Nipple is a funny word. Maybe it’s because you can’t help but picture one, and because it’s at once erotic and clinical sounding and so anatomically dot dot specific. Even saying the word—your lips push out a puh and then your tongue goes lllll—is funny. Nipple. The idea of nipples on boys always seemed goofy—those flat things aren’t nipple nipples. And now I’m remembering, as kids we used to giggle in the presence of a box of Cheese Nips crackers. Hee, hee, snicker, snicker. It’s sexual but we don’t know why! Once you introduce breast-feeding into the repertoire, nipples take on a double persona: sometimes provocative headlights, other times just handy, elastic, marvelously functional gadgets.