• There’s always a birthday party set up at 8 a.m. on Saturday,
• There’s always evidence of a recent paint ball game, and
• There are always huge people getting out of huge pickup trucks with tiny yappy dogs.

The height of her holiday ecstasy is Handel’s Messiah Sing-A-Long.  The public event is inviting, and accepting, of all.

Imagine her surprise when one year she was told to shut up because she wasn’t very good.

This season, give a gift, and let all sing along.

Friend 2: Don’t you think it’s kind of creepy to have them looking in your window?

This is my favorite picture from the windstorm.  This tree was full of leaves the day before, and was pretty bare the day after.  I did always think those leaves made it feel overdressed.  This, on the other hand, makes it look . . . um . . . like it’s flashing its fruit. More pictures here.

Several years ago, my extremely practical mother decided to visit me in Philadelphia.  Although she was scared that her inability to understand English might leave her stranded in Phoenix or Washington D.C. as she navigated connecting flights, she made the trek east.

Because she is practical, my mom decided to pack the 15-pound holiday turkey she’d been given as a morale boost earlier in the week by the hotel where she worked as a housekeeper.  She figured that since the turkey was too big for her to eat on her own, and I wouldn’t have one in Philadelphia (I don’t normally like turkey, but I’ll eat some of it if with others), an eight-hour long flight was justified for the bird.

But, baggage handling being what it is, my mother did not want the bird to get lost.  So, she packed the frozen bird into her bowling bag-style carry-on purse.  Because my mother doesn’t ever travel without packing and repacking often, she packed and repacked the turkey to determine how to best carry it onto the plane.  However, because she is a little clueless about the reaction of those around her to her oh-so-practical ideas, she gave remarkably little thought to the reaction an airport screener might have to the sight of a skeleton appearing on the baggage x-ray machine.

At the airport on the day of her travel, the screener waited until my mom had gone through the security line and put on her Keds, jacket, scarf, and mittens (she was, after all, going to the East Coast) before calling her over with his index finger.

“What is that?” he said as he pointed to the skeleton splayed out on the screen before him.

“Toor-kee,” my mother responded, in the one word she knew for sure she could say and which would suffice as a full explanation.

He looked at her standing there, an elderly Mexican woman with salt and pepper hair, with complete confidence in the propriety of carrying a frozen turkey onto a plane, and no clue that it was a bit odd.  And then, he shrugged while he laughed through an “ok” and waved her on through the line.

She recounted the story later that day when I picked her up in Philadelphia and was a little sheepish when she figured out that he was shocked because bones in a bag might not look so safe.  She worried about what this man, who’d never seen her before and who would never see her again, might think about what it said about her that she carried bones cross country.

Fortunately for my mother, the embarrassment only lasted a few hours.  Her sense of knowing right from wrong and not having to be born here to learn it was confirmed when, several hours into cooking the turkey at my house, we discovered that in my haste to clean for my mother, I’d returned the knob controlling the oven’s temperature onto the stove incorrectly.  Rather than cooking at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for hours, the turkey had only been cooking at 250 degrees.

And that’s when the head shaking “Ay, mija!” moment, that always seemed to follow a head shaking “Ay, mom!” moment, appeared.  My mom had forgotten her retrospective embarrassment and moved onto things that she knew were real and eternal—her American-born journalist daughter might be more educated and well-traveled than she was, but she would never be as wise.

More pictures from our Halloween party here.

Below is evidence of what a few women of all ages and some markers can do in lieu of pumpkin carving.

Some are scams, like the calls asking her to give up personal information over the phone.

Others just scare her, like those occurring just after she gets home. “Are they watching me?” she always thinks.

Yesterday, she hit on a new strategy for those calls where she just gets silence–she proclaims, in broken English, “I love you!” That cracks her up, so she then laughs hysterically into the phone.

“Dicen que es bueno reír. Pues en vez de asustarme, ahora me río.”

She cracks me up sometimes.

I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law thinks I’m dying of a horrible disease.

My 30-year-old friends and colleagues are now taking themselves to the gym.  Apparently, nothing inspires a lifestyle change like having someone you always thought was big, get smaller than you.

And, most disturbingly, I seem to have lost some ferocity.

I say this because I’m finding that people are messing with me in ways they haven’t before.  It’s not even people I know, it’s total strangers.  This was most evident on a recent trip to New York.

While my wife, a friend, and I waited for a subway train at midnight, a drunk came up and started talking to us.   In over a decade of running around in NYC, I’ve always dealt with this by putting up the “I’m ignoring you” face and this kind of “crazy” always just seemed to go away.

Not this time.  After a few minutes of asking (in English and Spanish) which of us would like to make love to him, he’d made himself the focal point of this particular subway station and point in time.  It made me uncomfortable so I finally said to the guy, “Dejanos en paz.”  Just leave us in peace.   I firmly said it over and over, figuring that at least if he knew that I could take him on in his own language he’d stop being gross.

He sneered in response, “Yo soy de El Salvador.  Yo soy judio, tu no eres judia!”

I’m not exactly sure what part of my Spanish made him guess I wasn’t Jewish or why he thought that letting me know he was Jewish was going to make this whole situation any less weird.  In any event, after reiterating for everyone on that train platform that I wasn’t Jewish, he stormed off.

I would have shaken the whole scene off if a day later I hadn’t been meowed at by an elderly guy in Brooklyn.

We were walking down a sidewalk in Park Slope when this unassuming little old man, who seemed to be minding his own business, stopped me mid-sidewalk, looked me up and down and meowed.  Now, I have been catcalled before, but never with an actual meow.

Perhaps more than they should have, these events have shaken my faith in my own “force field.”  You know the “force field,” it’s that thing you do that seems to get you through tough situations.

Mine has always been the ability to be loud and imposing–a little like an elephant flaring its ears.  With the loss of this weight, I’m not sure this works for me anymore. I’m struggling with this new world and wondering how to work my hair into my new force field.