He hugged me and patted my back with those hands when we left to drive back home. He’s gone to summer camps before. But this was the first time that he didn’t push me toward the exit with impatience, counting the seconds before I would stop embarrassing him, or smothering him, or fretting too much, or whatever it is that I do that usually drives him absolutely crazy. “Thanks, Mom,” he said instead.

We were standing in his dorm room, the place that will be his home for the next six weeks. I don’t think he was talking about the twin-sized bed I had just made up for him, with the freshly purchased extra-long sheets and the fleece blanket from his bed at home. He seemed to be talking about something else entirely, and it was that other thing that caused a sudden lump to rise in my throat.

I had noticed it earlier: He walked with ease with the three of us around the campus, getting the lay of the land, taking it all in like he always does — like he always has since his newborn eyes focused so intently that as a new and nervous mother I was convinced it was the sign of a vision problem.

As we walked around the campus, and checked him in, and picked up his ID card, and visited the health office, and the housing office, and all that, he didn’t say much, really. But it was more what wasn’t there that I noticed: The way he didn’t walk two steps ahead of us or loiter behind us. The way he didn’t look away — seemingly mortified at being caught red-handed with the ridiculous people who spawned him — when we passed another student on the brick sidewalks near the school. The way that he didn’t roll his eyes when I clarified with the kitchen attendant some specifics of his meal plan, or got the exact coordinates of the laundry facility. And when I relayed it back, he actually listened, and he didn’t cut me off with an impatient, “O-kay! I know!”

In other words, he didn’t act one bit like he’d rather be anywhere else except where he was at that very moment, interacting with anyone else except me. If you have a teenager, or you’ve ever been one, you can recognize that behavior.

His “thank you” in the dorm room was for help with all of that, I think. But also for putting him there at all. By that I mean writing the check, of course. But more than that: for racing in the pouring rain to the post office to make the application deadline. For slogging through the confusing reams of paperwork the college sent. For the marathon seven loads of laundry just the day before. The desperate run for deodorant. The last-ditch stop on the way because I was worried he wouldn’t have enough cash for supplies. For the opportunity he seemed suddenly awed to realize he had been given.

I could fool myself into thinking that his thank you meant more than that: that he was grateful for all the stuff that fell into place in the 17 years leading up to today, too: All of the mostly thankless and unacknowledged stuff that I do, and any parent does, just to keep our kids healthy and happy and safely out of the path of a moving bus, those that are actual as well as metaphorical. But he probably wasn’t thinking of that, of course. Love rolls down hill. It’ll be years and years (I hope) before he has his own family and he’ll come close to understanding any of it.

All afternoon, in the back of my mind, while we zipped around the campus on foot on a hot, muggy day, I tried to think of a word that might describe how completely happy he was to be there, how excited, how amazed at the possibilities, how completely turned on he felt.

And then I tried to think of how it felt, as a parent, to see him so happy and alive. Most parents might describe it as pride, I guess. But pride doesn’t come close, because it’s not about me. It’s about him. What’s a word that describes how you feel when one of the people you love most in the world, one of the very few people you would gladly suffer deeply for, would do just about anything for just because they asked — no questions asked, no strings attached, no payment required — without resentment, or anything even close to anger or complaint, and in fact would see it as a kind of duty and honor? What’s the word for a kind of love that fills you up to the point that it overflows the brim?

Whatever you call it, that’s what rose in my throat today, and rendered me unable to tell him, right then, that I was happy for him. That I loved him. I hoped he’d have the time of his life, and goodbye.

About a week ago, two childhood friends launched a site to document as much. The results — in the vein of LOLCats and Stuff White People Like — are hilarious:

The Choker: “This is what happens when your male role model is both a priest and a gym teacher.”

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My Two Dads: “You may use your calculator for this equation.”
(Favorite comment: “I am very confused by this. Is the guy in the front right like a neighborhood computer guy who helps them out sometimes?”)

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Family Tree: “Even the tree felt this one was awkward.”

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Check out the full, awkward archive here.

But a word of caution: Some of these will give you nightmares. Or at least the.. uh… willies.

Thanks to Megan Cordero for flagging this site.

A few weeks ago, I had to film a video greeting that would be shown to 14,000 people who had registered for an online conference my company was holding. It was a short video – no more than a minute or so. All I had to do was smile warmly and welcome folks for dropping by – sort of like a digital version of a Wal-Mart greeter. It sounds easy enough – fun, even – but for some reason the prospect of the filming completely unnerved me.

Maybe I was worried about the number of potential eyeballs gawking at my every move. Or maybe I worried about stumbling over my script, like saying shit instead of sit. (And the more I worried about that one, the more convinced I became that it was going to happen.) Whatever the case, certainly that Tuesday when I entered my friend Steve’s house in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, and Steve pointed his camera at me and told me to start talking, I worried about all of that at once. I felt excruciatingly self-conscious, awkward, and scared.

I was what grownups in the 1970s called a “nervous” child. I worried constantly. I was afraid of lots of things – snakes, the dark, monsters, our house catching on fire, deep water, loud noises, being kidnapped, the school bus, Russia, talking to adults, answering the telephone. I was thin-skinned; it was easy to bruise my feelings. Everything embarrassed me.

Typically, this came out at night. During the day, I played outside with the other neighborhood kids and – other than taking pains to avoid a few key triggers – generally got along okay. But at night I’d lie in my twin bed watching the shadows on the wall, and imagine all sorts of horrors that would twist my insides into a coat hanger.

“Mom!” I’d yell, as suddenly another thought occurred to me. “When was the last earthquake?”

From her recliner in the den she’d yell, “Go to sleep!”

As I grew, I learned to tolerate my fears. I learned that the school bus wasn’t so bad when, mid-way through the kindergarten year, a cute blond-haired boy named Eric decided to sit next to me. I tried answering the phone once or twice. But still it took until I was in my early 30s before I started to understand that the very things that still scared me as a grown up – meeting new people, speaking up, finding myself in a new situation – are the very experiences that I should embrace rather than refuse, no matter how terrifying the prospect. Harkening back to Nancy Reagan in the ’80s, I developed a mantra, “Just Say Yes.”

So even now, every once in a while, I’m faced with a situation that truly scares me witless. You’d think it would happen all the time, given this life I sometimes am shocked to find myself living: A career that brings me often enough into the limelight – a limelight I took great pains to avoid not that long ago. Of course, the surprise is that it’s entirely of my creation, which is how I found myself in Steve’s house that day. I did fine: We shot the video in one take, and I forgot only a few words in my script. “You’re a natural!” Steve said to me.

But in truth, that kind of fear is triggered only rarely by public interaction these days. I might still be chronically embarrassed, but I can talk myself out of it. Because really, what’s there to worry about? What’s there to be scared of? So what if people gawk? Or stare? Or make fun of me? So what if I humiliate myself? When I thought later about the video shoot at Steve’s house, I couldn’t fathom what made me so scared.

Because I’ve realized that the very thing that makes me want to hide – the painful self-awareness, the excruciating self-consciousness, the constant sense of exposure and vulnerability that reveals far more than a slip of shit for sit – more or less goes with the territory for any writer. Sometimes, recognition of who you are grows into acceptance. And if you’re lucky, you figure out how to leverage that weakness. I can’t really do anything about my tendency to be overly sensitive. But the truth is these days, I’m okay with that.

Photo credit: Steve Garfield

Since I make my living attempting to make my words paint a picture—or at least a good doodle—I don’t usually subscribe to the hooey about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Not everybody feels this way, of course. Napoleon said, “A good sketch is better than a long speech.” And, truth be told, I find myself sometimes agreeing with Napoleon, even though I do think it depends largely on who is doing the sketch and on who is speaking. For example, I have no idea whether Martin Luther King Jr. could draw. But, still, I imagine that a sketched version of “I Have a Dream” delivered to the crowd in Washington via overhead projector would have been something of a train wreck. You see my point.

On the other hand, this photo of me, above, actually illustrates Napoleon’s philosophy nicely. I could give you the background here: Setting the stage by telling you that I’m in Santa Barbara, California, at an alley called Zodos, competing in a company tournament with 30 or so of my coworkers.

I could describe the slickness of the lanes, and the tiny fear I had in my gut each time I went up to roll the ball down the lane that I would slip on the wax and land hard on my tailbone—as hard as my throws landed on the lane itself. I could explain that this was my first time with the big balls—since I’m a New England girl, I’m used to little balls. (I’m talking about bowling, people, bowling!) I could tell you that no one wanted me on their team.

And I could also tell you that, if you are looking for some durable hardwood flooring, ask the folks at your local bowling alley what kind of wood they use on the lanes. Because every single one of my throws landed like an H bomb on a New Mexico test site, and you’d expect a pretty big crater and perhaps a mushroom cloud from the rubble. But not once did the flooring crack or give way, which I thought was pretty impressive.

Anyway, I could tell you all that… or I could just let the photo speak for itself. If it could, it might say something like, “Holy shit! What is she doing? Is she having a seizure? Is she releasing a homing pigeon? This is bowling, lady, not slow-pitch softball! Geez, she really wasn’t kidding about that bit about being stunningly unathletic, more Eeyore than Seabiscuit. She really deserves to be the one standing on the sidelines, last-picked for the team. She really should be afraid of the ball—any ball—because I’m pretty sure that the lane management are terrified of it, at this point.”

Of course, that’s less than a hundred words, let alone a thousand. But still.

Photo credit: Sharon Edwards

You might not even know the name of the guy sitting at your elbow, but still: You know his choice of reading material; what he drinks with his meal; the way his face, erased of its wakeful composure, slackens when he nods off after lunch. Every once in a while, your thighs touch, or you get a whiff of his cologne, and it’s all at once completely normal and yet weird: Here we are, two people randomly seated together. We begin the journey as strangers and then, hours later, we part knowing more details about each other than many of our casual acquaintances—even if we haven’t exchanged a single word. We’re not friends, exactly, but we’re something.

Six hours is a long time to maintain a conversation with a stranger. That is, if you are the type who attempts that sort of thing. I’ve been thinking about this lately, because in the flights I’ve taken this winter and spring, I’ve noticed that the world doesn’t come down to, as some psychologists will tell you, Introverts and Extroverts—or Montagues and Capulets, or Sharks and Jets, or Shirts and Skins, or tomayto and tomahto, or whatever.

Instead, the world comes down to exactly two types of people: Those who chit-chat on airplanes, and those who don’t.

In the latter group are those who settle into an airplane seat, buckle up, and immediately pop in earphones and crack open a book. In the former group are those who—as you make your way toward them down the aisle—lock eye contact, smile and nod a silent hello, eagerly stand (“Oh absolutely—here, let me move right out of your way!”) while you contort into your own seat, and then retake their own spot, turn back toward you, beaming, and inquire, “So! Business or pleasure?”

Initially, conversation is easy enough: “In fact I’m headed to Santa Barbara for business… I’m an editor and a writer…. No, you haven’t heard of anything I’ve written… I work online, on the Internet.”

Invariably, someone hears the word “internet” and assumes that means I am a technologist, a techie, a geek: the kind of person who knows how to develop software, write code, and so forth, when really all I can write are the same words they can, just (I like to think) in a different order. “Well actually I don’t really know that much about backing up hard drives,” I explain. “See, I use computers in my work, but my work isn’t in computers.”

Here I’ll reveal that I fall into the No Chat category. It’s not that I’m not friendly—because I am—but it’s just that after the initial hellos, and introductions, and explanations of what you are doing on this flight and where you are going, I run out of things to say. Or, possibly, I lack the ambition to find other things to talk about—to sift through the murkier parts of my brain in hopes of stumbling into something there worthy of conversation, or to struggle to recall the headlines at the airport news kiosk that morning.

Whatever the case, the ensuing silence feels acute, and it carries with it, for me, a heavy mantle of social failure, of being somehow neutered of any conversational skills. And at the same time, I worry about my seatmate: How do they interpret my silence? Do they think I find them boring? Inadequate? Do they think that I am withholding an overture to be friends? And if they interpret it that way, are they insulted by it?

At times, I’ve tried a different path: I’ve tried broadcasting a personality that’s overly friendly and outgoing. But soon enough I realize that that strategy ultimately presents a different problem that’s even more awkward to resolve: Then, the issue becomes identifying where, exactly, lie the limits of the relationship.

I’m not talking about knowing when it’s time to physically separate—of deplaning, of retrieving your luggage, of hailing a cab and letting it shuttle you to wherever you need to be. All that happens more or less on its own. I’m talking about the moment when you make the choice not to share your business card, or your email address, or whatever. The point you reach when you wordlessly recognize that you’ll never likely see each other again, and you both realize that you’re okay with that. You might be chatting along about all kind of things, sharing anecdotes, trading stories, connecting, relating, fully immersed and interested in the discussion. But as much as you might enjoy each other, nonetheless that moment comes when one or both of you seems to decide that you’re not enjoying it that much.

Does this sound weird? Maybe it is, because when I look around an airplane cabin at the end of a flight, I see people going through the motions of saying goodbye. “Well, good luck—it was nice talking to you!” I might hear someone say to their seatmate, and it makes me wonder, How can they do that? How can they not add, “Make sure to drop me a line and let me know how it goes with your biopsy, and how your aunt’s lesions heal, and then we’ll schedule that lunch!”

At times—once or twice, tops—I’ve met someone on an airplane I actually wouldn’t mind having lunch with, some point down the line. But since that’s the exception rather than the rule, you can see why, in the end, I find it easier to avoid the whole business of chatting with seatmates, and why I have adopted a No Chat policy in most other places, too: anywhere, in fact, that I’m likely to encounter strangers or, sometimes, acquaintances. It’s easier not to connect at all, I think, than to struggle with the fundamental questions of friendship every time you open your mouth.

I suppose that struggle is what gives me somewhat of an unforgiving approach on airplanes—what makes me easily riled and annoyed at those seated near me. Put me with a snoring traveler, an antsy baby, even a screeching toddler—a regular pint-sized Maria Callas, as my friend Peter would say—and I don’t mind a whit. But chit-chatters? No, thank you.

Here are 10 more things I hate about my neighbors (the airplane edition):

1. Eating smelly food. I have two words for this one: Fast food. Wait, one more: Cinnabon.

2. Perfume. Because the longer the flight, the worse it gets.

3. Excessive cell phone use just prior to takeoff. Especially when someone finds it necessary to announce the play-by-play of a runway delay. “OK, so the pilot just came on and it seems like there’s a problem with the wing jibbet, so we’ll be here a while, he says maybe 20 minutes or so. So what’s going on…? What are you guys doing now?”

4. Talking too loudly on a cell phone while we are still (or again) on the ground. If people three rows up turn to look at you, that’s a signal that we can hear you crystal-clear, but shouldn’t.

5. Playing an iPod loud enough for others to hear through the headphones. Especially playing an iPod *just* loud enough, so it gives off a persistent, tinny whine, like a mosquito loitering near your ear.

6. Not keeping cell phones on vibrate, particularly when it’s “The Mexican Hat Dance” rendered in ring tone.

7. Hovering over your seat, volleying conversation over the seat-back.

8. Asking the flight attendant to repeat meals options, when they’ve already been relayed once, and when they are also listed inside the in-flight magazine. Are you seriously weighing the options? They all suck.

9. Yes, I do mind if we keep the arm rest up.

10. Chatting. Oh wait… have we covered that yet…?

1. Three weeks ago, William tagged me in a “25 Random Things About Me” chain letter. I’ve hung around with William a few times, but reading his list feels a lot like a peek at his diary: Here are his hopes, fears, and his profession of love for Twizzlers.
2. I’m tagged again by Tim (”I’m a writer… but poetry is what I love to write the most”), then Kris (”I love Bailey, my Jack Russell cocker who puts her paws over her face when I scold her”), and red-headed Stephanie (”I am addicted to television.” And, comically, “This is not my natural hair color.”)
3. I’m sensing that this thing is bigger than I might have thought. I do some research and discover the concept: Generate a list of 25 “things, facts, habits or goals” about yourself in the notes section of your Facebook profile and publish it there. Then, tap 25 of your friends by asking them to do the same. “If I tagged you,” the instructions explain, “it’s because I want to know more about you.”
4. I debate whether to play along. I like reading the truths, dreams and candy habits of my friends. But I’m a little unsettled about participating. It’s the term “chain letter” than unnerves me.
5. In the sixth grade, I got a rare letter addressed to me. It was hand-written on blue-lined paper in a sloppy pencil scrawl, and there were 10 names printed in block letters at the bottom of the page. The letter implored me to mail a dollar to the top name on the list, then to remove that name, copy the letter over again and mail it to 10 other friends. In a week, the letter said, I’d get a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars! Math has never been my strong suit, so how $1 mushroomed to $100 was beyond me. But still, I thought it was a brilliant way to support oneself, copying letters at home in front of the TV. Later, my mother described the letter as “illegal,” and she made me throw it in the trash. She wasn’t swayed by the last line, either: “Do not break this chain or you will be sorry!” I was left with a feeling of unease that persisted for weeks: If I complied, I was a crook. But if I didn’t, I was doomed in a different way.
6. Is a chain letter also illegal if it’s on the internet? I’m not sure. Anyway, I decide that, for me, generating such a list is both superfluous and overly indulgent. On this blog, I reveal far more about myself than any line-by-line inventory on Facebook. I’ve already appeared here naked, embarrassed, prostrate, injured… so what’s the point?
7. Facebook turns five years old — and comes of age, it seems, joining society-at-large.
8. Suddenly, I have a bunch of new “friends” there: My cousin Beth connects with me on Facebook. She suggests we start a Handley family group there.
9. My childhood friend Bev friends me; several people who I know through dog rescue — Carolyn, Karen, Denise — do, too. I encourage Pat, my 56-year-old sister in Florida, to join Facebook, because for the first time it occurs to me that she might enjoy it.
10. For months, Facebook has felt like an outpost to me, the online equivalent of an unkempt settlement on the dusty outskirts of town, rife with biting vampires, and arbitrary pokes, and tossed sheep. Now, suddenly, it’s buzzing like a bar with dollar drafts.
11. Facebook is now mainstream, and what makes for a “friend,” in a larger sense, is redefined — as something entirely more global, and democratic, and random. A friend isn’t necessarily someone you know well, and it may be someone you haven’t seen in years, or someone you don’t see regularly. At the same time, all of us early adopters are freaking out about our worlds blending.
12. Suze tags me: “My biggest regret is saying to a woman whose baby died, ‘you’re young enough to have another one.’ I meant well but it was only when I’d had a child of my own I realised how cruel that was.”
13. Tom tags me, and I read, “Something I’m ashamed of… when I was younger I was ashamed of bringing my Dad to school. He’s quite a bit older so the other kids thought he was my grandfather, I let them. I regret/am ashamed of this now as he’s a great man.”
14. Brian tags me and contributes a hilarious “2,056 Things” about himself, chronicling his descent into social media madness: “1623. I think I’m delirious! 1624. Hyenas and lollypops! 1625. Rainbows are smelly.”
15. Facebook protest groups crop up: 25 things you can do OTHER THAN FACEBOOK; Screw you, I’m not gonna tell you 25 Random things about myself; and Stop Tagging Me in 25 Random Things Posts You Tards. Someone makes a “25 Things I Hate About Facebook” video.
16. The NY Times runs a story on 25 Things, terming it the latest “digital fad.”
17. On the social networking site Twitter, many see the Times article as a kind of woozy canary in a coal mine: the 25 Things fad is dying, some predict.
18. The Washington Post, USA Today, and Time magazine, among others, jump on the 25 Random Things bandwagon. Writing on the LA Times, Joel Stein writes, “I don’t want to know 25 things about you. In fact, I don’t want to know two things about you. But somehow you’ve found me on Facebook and sent me your ‘25 Random Things About Me,’ which I deleted….”
19. I don’t like confrontation. But if I did, something in me might have snapped at Stein’s column when he adds — snobbishly, I think: “Not long ago, very few people got their writing published, and those people were often paid for it. Now everybody can type about themselves online….”
20. My philosophy — on Facebook (and in life, for that matter) is: “Treat everyone like a who.” I try, anyway. Everyone has a voice and can be heard. Everyone has a way of looking at things that can inform the thinking of anyone else. Everyone is a “who’s who.” That’s the juiciest part of social media platforms like Facebook, and Twitter, and this blog, in fact: You don’t to wait for the LA Times to tell you it’s your turn to speak.
21. The Chicago Tribune’s Patrick Reardon sums it up nicely: “Studs Terkel made a career of interviewing ‘voiceless’ people — non-celebrities from the workaday world — and then serving as the medium to get their stories to the broader public. It used to be that the only people who got to write autobiographies were those who were famous, infamous or otherwise had a life story that publishers thought would sell.” With this Facebook thing, though, such calculations disappear.
22. My boyfriend V. tells me warmly about reading the 25 Things list written by his son’s girlfriend, and about the tenderness of their relationship.
23. Barb tags me, and writes something that stops me cold: “I’ve been married twice — there will never be a third!” It’s a throwaway line, tucked in among all the other random facts (she’s quit smoking… she has three lovely children). Her tone, if I’m reading it right, isn’t gloomy or morose, but matter-of-fact, like she’s saying she’ll never change her brand of shampoo. I can’t help but gain a renewed understanding about all that my friend Barb, who lost the love of her life to cancer a few years ago, is gently reaffirming.
24. Some might mock, deride, or poke fun. But what I love about the 25 Things list is precisely what so many of them dislike. The non-geeks are flocking to Facebook, they are setting up profiles there, they are publishing about themselves, and they are tagging you. Like LOLcats, 25 Things sheds some light on the glorious underbelly: the stuff of our dreams, fears, hopes.
25. Say what you want, but 25 Things is at once brave, rich, and, ultimately, so very human.

Today, I smiled broadly at a pint-sized preschooler watching me from his mother’s grocery cart, but my friendliness wasn’t reciprocated. The child was perhaps three or four, dressed in a miniature plaid hunting jacket, and dark, tightly curled hair crowned his head like a button mushroom cap. He was swinging his winter boots dangerously close to the shelved bottled ketchup. But as his wide eyes fully took me in, his dangling legs quit their motion and he stared, stone-faced. He pointed at his own nose and frowned. Our conversation was silent and wordless: “What happened to your nose?” the boy seemed to ask suspiciously, his shiny dark eyes fixed on the center of my face. “I have a boo-boo,” I communicated back silently. “You look weird,” he summates, narrowing his gaze as if to say, “I don’t know who you are or where you came from, lady, but don’t take a step closer.”

Later, at the checkout, a teenage girl runs my things through the scanner and then, as she looks up to relay the price to me, startles and interrupts herself. “Whoa!” she asks. “What happened to you?” I’ve never met this girl before, but she asks as if she is surprised by the change in me, as if she’s slightly offended that I didn’t mention something before now. I’m instantly embarrassed and laugh a little nervously, “Oh, it’s nothing really,” I say, forcing a casual tone. “It’s just a… a cut.” A cut? From what? I imagine her wondering. From a fall? From shaving? Just what would necessitate a flesh-colored bandage that large, splayed across the bridge of a nose and spilling onto the cheeks?

The check-out girl studies me for a few seconds, and I can almost see her brain working. She’s taller than I am, with blue eyes, dirty-blond hair that falls to her shoulder, and a deep tan — even though it’s mid-winter in Boston and the sky is gray. Her lips are full and shellacked with a translucent pink lip gloss — so shiny that it looks as though a tiny Zamboni had driven over them and slicked up the surface.

I was about to dismiss her as the kind of pretty, popular girl I would have instinctively disliked in high school when suddenly a thought seemed to occur to her, and she knotted her eyebrows in some concern. She said in a bright, helpful tone, “Well, at least you have sort of a pretty face, so it doesn’t look that bad. It could be worse, you know, like if you were really ugly AND your nose looked like that. I mean, THAT would be awful,” she said. She paused, then added kindly, “Well, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded and handed her my credit card, admitting that it probably would: “Well, thanks,” I said, expressing gratitude as much for her kind intentions as for the receipt. The girl was right, though, she had a point. My nose will heal. In fact, it is healing. The skin cancer is gone, the skin graft to repair the gouge it left behind is taking. Unlike a few weeks ago, I’m back to eating solid food, and walking unsupported, and showering without fear of blacking out and hitting my head on the tile. I’m back to driving carpool, and working at my job, and walking the dogs, and, when Saturday night comes around, pulling the cork on a really nice bottle of red, and doing all of the other things that grown-ups enjoy doing.

My life has slowly returned, for the most part, to normal, except for the fact that this bandage crisscrosses the bridge of my nose like the police tape at a recent crime scene. “Do Not Cross,” it cries. “There’s some bad shit went down here.”

The bandage is banner that signals unrest, as if my nose has unfurled a defiant political sign from its perch. Something is different about me; something is broken and wrong.

I guess everyone has a story. Your friends know it, and so does your family. But the softest, most vulnerable bits of your story are usually private, hidden from strangers. You might spill it out in a bar over a bottle of tequila, or you might, in one of those moments of sudden intimacy, choose to share parts of it with someone who seems to get it. But for the most part, your story belongs to you.

I like it that way, in fact. I’ve lived decades with a tiny sentry posted at the doorway to my inner world whose job it is to protect me from emotional intruders — therapists, pastors, New Age counselors, the kinds of exhaustingly helpful people who believe in probing the confines and hauling whatever they find there out into the harsh light of day. There is healing in airing things out, in talking everything through, they believe. I’ve sometimes sat in their offices, attempting to convert myself to their way of thinking. But I always held a part of myself back; it’s just not me.

A few years ago, when my daughter was a Brownie Girl Scout, she wore a vest emblazoned with all the patches she has earned that spelled out the skills she had attained: A cloth patch of a tiny gray-haired grandmother rendered in thread said she was a regular visitor to a nursing home, while a miniature blaze circled by stones signaled her proficiency at building a campfire. I liked the idea of those patches sewn onto that vest, and the way that, when worn, they acted as a kind of shorthand for your abilities and accomplishments. The inclusion of certain patches acts as a kind of introduction to those around you about what makes you tick and, by the omission of other patches, what’s lacking.

I wonder whether we could learn a thing or two from the Girl Scouts, and institute a kind of national uniform that, when worn, might signal our own strengths and weaknesses to others. I imagined myself wearing a vest with a miniature pen rendered in thread (”Oh, so you’re a writer?” a stranger might ask on approach), and perhaps a tiny batch of muffins (”So you like to bake?”), or a tiny potato on a miniature couch (”Ah! A homebody!”). And other things, too: A miniature broken heart patch for the rougher parts of my relationships, a small green monster for my tendency to form petty jealousies, or a tiny inflexible ruler to signal my controlling tendencies. Taken together, our vests could tell a wordless story of each of us.

But the idea of a kind of emotional Brownie vest runs counter to my core, and so I considered it with a kind of titillation, in the way that a drunk might momentarily ponder a life of sobriety. (“Think of the money I’ll save that I’d otherwise spend on booze! And the time when I could be productive instead of passed out, sleeping it off! Imagine!”) But just as quickly, I reject it as ragtime crazy talk. In my family, we aren’t the kind of people who go around sharing our story with strangers. Traditionally, we offer only the best and most appealing parts of ourselves to our friends and neighbors.

Sometimes, we took vast care to cultivate our tale, and protect the most vulnerable parts of ourselves: My father wore a carefully pressed suit and tie when he left for his office every day. And when he was fired from his job — again — he dressed with the same careful precision when he went to stand in line at the unemployment office, because, my mother said, it was a kind of uniform that separated him from the losers there.

“Your father isn’t like those other bums,” my mother told me, when I asked why he bothered to don a fresh shirt and tie just to fill out more forms and to collect a meager check, then circle through the hot dog place for lunch and count the hours before returning home again. He arrived as close to the usual dinner hour as he could, so as not to raise the suspicion of neighbors. I didn’t argue with her, but I still I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was more of a costume than a uniform. Was my own hilarious and brilliant father, who lost three jobs in a decade because, at some point in each case, he stopped showing up to work sober, really all that different? And if so, well… how?

My bandaged nose is my latest story, writ large, and the first I’ve been forced to share against my will, to wear — literally, now — as a patch for all the world to see. In a practical sense, it makes me reluctant to interact with folks: to go out to dinner, or even to shop among strangers with my kid. But standing before the teenage cashier in the store, whose hopeful smile conveys only compassion and concern, makes me reconsider whether I’ve wrongly cast some roles in my story. I’m suddenly grateful to the girl for acknowledging the bandage on my nose. Yes, it’s embarrassing when people mention it. But it’s more embarrassing still when they don’t. It’s worse when they see it, look away, and change the subject. Maybe I’m older and a little bit wiser, or maybe I’m just feeling sheepish that I had read this girl all wrong. But whatever the case, it’s excruciating to pretend that nothing is wrong.

This insight calms me rather than upsets me, and reminds me that people, for the most part, are less mean-spirited and malicious than they are empathetic and kind. That’s something that the cashier, and kids, and others seem to know instinctively.

Me, it’s taking longer. Understanding that all of this is only temporary. A single moment in time.

As my mother would say, waiting dinner on the stove for my Dad, as she sighed into her gimlet, “This, too, shall pass.” Then she’d take a long drag on her Tarryton, blow the smoke over her shoulder, and address me, saying, “Right, Pussycat?” I looked up from my plate of boiled macaroni. “Uh-huh,” I’d agree, never knowing quite what it was, exactly, that would be passing.

But looking back, I think I understand what my mother meant: There are few wounds that don’t heal. Eventually. The world spins. The planets realign. And somewhere, silently, another patch is added to another vest.

That aside, it felt relaxing to be lying down in the middle of the day, under a warm blanket, a pillow tucked beneath my knees. I dozed off. When I awoke, I had a bandage on my face the size of a hamburger bun. I touched at it curiously, like a blind man learning the face of a friend.

The bigger deal actually came the next day, when a different doctor—this time, a plastic surgeon—followed up to putty the now-concave part of my nose. In the world of cosmetic surgery, it’s called a “repair,” and it’s performed to fix parts of the body deformed by congenital defects, or developmental abnormalities, or trauma: a knife fight, dog bite, or, in my case, an angry little bald-faced tumor that took up residence and required rough eviction by the authorities.

The plan was to clip off a small piece of skin by my ear and “graft it,” the surgeon said, onto my nose. The word “graft” always makes me think of efforts to reproduce heirloom apple varietals, and immediately I conjured up twigs and tape. But in this case, it would be more like a patch sewn onto frayed denim. It sounded simple enough, but as it turned out, this surgery was more involved than I anticipated: If yesterday’s was a child’s simple wooden puzzle, today’s was a 5,000-piece monster jigsaw designed to challenge shut-ins for weeks.

It took longer, required more anesthetic, and when I awoke and stood swaying in front of the hospital lavatory mirror, it had dropped a gauze pad the size of a nickel onto my nose. It looked like a dollhouse pincushion sewn onto my face with crazy Frankenstein stitches. If I had buttons for eyes, I’d look like a not-very-talented child’s attempt at a crude, stuffed doll. I had a blinding headache, burning eye from a bit of iodine swabbed too closely to it, and a swollen face that left me unable to smile or sip water without dribbling it down the front of my cement-colored hospital gown. And though I didn’t know it then, I felt better than I would over the next two days.

It was not so much the affects of the surgery but the prescribed pain drug, a narcotic, that seemed my biggest bully. It was hot pink and oblong, like a jelly bean in an Easter basket. It looked like candy, but once past my lips it made quick work of bringing me to my knees. Evil and powerful, it pinned me down for days on the couch, curled into a motionless ball, as my cracked and swollen lips whispered, “Take me now, sweet Jesus.” The pill incited a cascade of agonies: a series of mutinies from my head, my gut, my bowels. My organs all seemed to be plotting a conspiracy against me, to make my existence as painful as possible.

I lived not so much day-by-day or minute-by-minute, but second-by-second, willing my head to stop pounding and the roiling, heaving sea in my stomach to calm. When it didn’t—when instead it erupted into the purple plastic bowl like a kind of foamy, foul birch beer—I made all sorts of promises to reform my ways. I’d be kinder, nicer, more giving. I’d volunteer in a soup kitchen. I’d offer our spare room to a homeless person. Sweating onto the sheets, I vowed to take better care of myself: I’d wear SPF 45, even in winter. I’d take a multivitamin. I’d work on my quads.

With a little distance, and a rational explanation from the surgeon over the telephone, I can now see that my system was reacting to a kind of affront from the double wallop of anesthesia and the pain drugs. But when you are in the throes of it, it’s hard not to wonder whether you might have seriously pissed someone off. It’s hard not to offer to make amends, to strike a deal. With anyone.

Gradually, I grew to tolerate the pink pill, but I still depended on whoever was home with me for the simplest of tasks. Family members came in from work or school, and I marveled that their worlds were still continuing: They still left in the morning and came home at night, same as always, like nothing had happened. I sensed the winter chill from their jackets like Anne Frank feeling the snow that clung to the coats of attic visitors.

They helped me from the bed to the couch, and then held a glass to my lips so I could sip the tiniest of sips. They fetched more dry crackers. This was the kind of pampering that I might, were I feeling better, actually enjoy, and possibly milk a little. But in these circumstances, I felt sad, pathetic, and robbed of something.

I was able, after another day or two, to bear the sound of the TV or stereo, stimuli that had previously provoked my stomach to pitch. I’d convalesce in front of the television and stare at an endless flow of sitcoms. I was heavy into sitcoms when I was younger—at one point, my whole world revolved around the scheduled airing of my favorite shows—but it wasn’t until now, perhaps with the insight proffered by my narcotic pink pill, that I realized with a dawn of recognition that each sitcom was all about me. About my life: my relationships, my kids, the way I am.

Incredibly, each 30-minute segment featured a female lead exactly like me, with my characteristics: The way I embarrass my family with my played-up, over-the-top enthusiasm; my controlling tendencies; my inclination to nit-pick. All was revealed to me in Technicolor, and I read its code like a truth I’d been too dim-witted to realize before. It probably helped that my vision was blurred, because my nickel-sized nose cushion prevents me from wearing my glasses. The fuzzy characters on the screen could be good-hearted anyones. Like my sometimes hapless but generous and loving man. Like my wise-cracking teen. Like my cute-as-a button youngest. My competitive sister. My intrusive neighbor. Like you. Like me.

I was reconciling my life with “Everybody Loves Raymond” when the pink pill made me doze off. When I awoke, it was late afternoon: the TV was off, and the clock radio next to my head had switched on, playing a hit parade of current songs with some older classics mingled in.

“Listen, it don’t really matter to me/Baby, you believe what you wanna believe,” sang the radio. “You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee.”

Then: “Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have/Kicked you around some/Tell me why you wanna lay there/Revel in your abandon….”

Now this was something I recognized, maybe more so than George Lopez and the King of Queens. It spoke to me of the way I was living now, in my inner world, as a refugee within my own body, that erstwhile place of comfort and ease. A bucolic place, even, where I felt capable and safe. It allowed me to accomplish things with proficiency and ease, to navigate my world while easily surmounting impediments and roadblocks.

But lying here now, I realized, I was in exile: Things I took for granted were unexpectedly off-limits. I didn’t have access to the same resources I’d come to enjoy and, I admitted it now, took for granted. Whereas once I wandered the streets without a care in the world, confident that I’d wake up the next day and carry on as I always had, now I wasn’t so sure. I was a stranger in this land, this place, this body that turned out to be unpredictable and deceiving. I couldn’t depend on it to get me through my day as I was accustomed.

Tom Petty was right. Maybe I wasn’t living in an actual shanty or camp, but I was living as something that resembled refugee status. I’d lost my independence, and now existed in that murky place where I resented asking for help I desperately needed.

Lying there in the dusky light, my head propped up at an uncomfortable angle to keep the swelling down, I sang along silently in my head:

“Honey, it don’t make no difference to me
Baby, everybody’s had to fight to be free
You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee
No baby, you don’t have to live like a refugee.”

But I do, Tom, I do… at least for now. But not for long. By next week—two at the most—I’ll be better. For another few decades, knock wood, I’ll again walk the streets of my inner hometown, unfettered, in total confidence.

Outside my window, the cold winter sky was rolling from a smoky gray to black. I wasn’t really cold, but the sight of it made me shiver. I pulled the blanket closer to my oddly angled chin just as another thought occurred to me. I wondered, But for how long, exactly?

How long before we all, in a way, become exiled from ourselves—from the able-bodiedness of our youth? Because of age, or illness, or whatever else that can rob us of fitness and vigor? How long do any of us—you, me, George Lopez, the hapless, the wisecracking, the competitive, the cute-as-a-button—really have? How long before all of us become, in a sense, permanent refugees, with no hope of ever going home?

At her Long Island home, her family walked around in track suits and tennis shoes, without the irony that, for example, a track suit would have conveyed on my plump mother. Someone was always going out to play on the courts or coming in from just having played, toting bags and several racquets and fresh cans of balls that smelled excitingly of gassy rubber. They had kitchen conversations about faults and flats and tournament seeds, and other things that I desperately didn’t understand. They taped the US Open, replaying the best parts for each other. Even their golden retriever always seemed to have a tennis ball nestled between her paws.

I envied Jane deeply. I coveted her family’s casual athleticism, their secret language, their common bond that elevated tennis from a simple game to a distinct family culture–a way of life that lent meaning and purpose to each as a person as well as to their lives together as a unit.

For a while I took tennis lessons. I started running to improve my wind and stamina. I walked around in gym shorts and short white socks with pom-poms at the heel, with a racquet tucked in my armpit. My then-boyfriend and I hit the ball back and forth on the weedy courts at a local middle school. It was fun enough, I guess, but it lacked the magic I had seen in Long Island.

Eventually, I had to face the truth: I am not a tennis player, nor do I come from a long line of athletes, like Jane did. My family isn’t willowy and tall–more Eeyore than thoroughbred–and in fact most of us, with a few exceptions, are stunningly unathletic. We are the ones last-picked for the team, the ones who are afraid of the ball.

When I was 12, I spent an entire softball season in the right outfield–the place where no one ever hits–praying that nothing would roll toward me. Renee Bettelle played shortstop, just ahead of me on the field, and I was always extra nice to her–offering her my can of bug spray when dusk hit and the mosquitoes swarmed, and bringing her small gifts of a stick of gum, an extra water bottle. I was buttering her up in the hopes that she’d come to my rescue should a pop fly ever come my way. (And the one time it happened that season, she did. Thank God.)

My own kids have played sports over the years, at times with real enthusiasm. But it’s hard to shake genetics: If athletics were a Harry Potter story, they’d still both be Muggles.

Of course, this was before something remarkable happened–before Christmas came and under our tree appeared a Nintendo Wii gaming system. The Wii might look like any other video game console, but it’s anything but.

The Wii is marketed as the gaming system for the rest of us: regular people, the non-basement-dwellers, the non-geeks, the non-gamers, the people who don’t know Astromash from our elbow. But it also suits those of us who are mere mortals on athletic fields and courts–and not, like Jane and her family, the genetically gifted, the talented elite, the Greek deities of physical prowess.

In practice, Wii tennis simulates the actions and achievements of a real tennis game, but for the colossally unskilled and unschooled. You hold the remote like you’re shaking hands with it, just like a real racquet, and you play one side of the net–volleying against someone else or against one or more players–swooping and diving with a grace and power that’s hard to replicate in the real world.

I’ve thought a lot about Jane and her family over the past week of near constant play, like when my 11-year-old turned “semi-pro.” And then again, last night, around 2 AM, when I was rousted from sleep with the sweet victory cheer of my teenage son, downstairs in the family room: He had just turned “pro.”

The Wii, more than a video game console, is an agent of change: It has taken us from Eeyore to Barbaro, reframing us as a family of virtual athletes. From the family room, in front of the screen that has their tiny avatars facing off in a match, my two kids talk tennis. Evan, in the role of game veteran, critiques Caroline’s game, her stance, her swing. And she, amazingly, accepts his advice, and sometimes solicits it.

Occasionally–usually late at night, after they’ve been on the courts for hours, they break out into a bicker. They call each other names. But even that I tolerate, because here we are with something approaching a common language and culture that–25 years after I once coveted Jane’s family–I thought was permanently out of reach.

I’m exaggerating, of course. None of us thinks we are really athletes. But what’s the harm in fantasy? What’s the harm in play?

A year or so ago, National Public Radio aired a commentary from Kelly McBride, a parent and Poynter faculty member, regarding her children’s frequent use of the Wii. From ArsTechnica: “Rather than relishing the fact that the new toy has them off the couch and swinging their arms, Kelly worried that her children are equating the game version of the sports with the real-life counterpart; that is to say, the children are gaining ‘a false sense of what it’s like to compete in the world.’”

Well, duh. Tennis is a ridiculously hard game, and there are a relative few who can, in the real world, reach pro status. Few of us can do much of anything well enough to attract real acclaim. But it’s a blast to try. And it’s even more fun to feel some pleasure of success from your efforts. To forget–even for a few foolish minutes–that you aren’t an uncoordinated undesirable left standing on the sidelines. That, instead, you are gifted. Talented. A winner on the court. The kind of person the captain picks first for the team.

This morning, my son corralled me into the family room to show off his newly minted pro status. “Check it out,” he said, as he proceeded to volley flawlessly.

I sat on the couch and watched him. He might have been standing, in his stocking feet, on the floor of our family room, hitting with a tiny virtual figure. And he might have been wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and jeans slung so low that he played with one hand at his waist, to keep his pants from drooping below his hips.

But seeing the look of concentration on his face, the small grunt he emitted at each powerful swing, and the tiny smile that appeared around his lips when he won the volley and his avatar danced in the end zone, he might as well have been dressed in tennis whites, rallying the crowd, and right there–for all the world–playing for keeps.

It’s four days before Christmas, and my father finally retrieves from beneath the cellar stairs the huge Sears box that houses our Christmas tree. The tree is heavy, its metal trunk solid and plumed with thick branches trimmed with rough-cut green cellophane that simulates pine needles.

It’s the only Christmas tree I’ve ever known, and when my father wrestles it upright and folds its heavy wire branches down, one by one, it’s as magical to me as a butterfly unfurling new wings. He gets pinched once or twice by the boughs as he tugs them into place. “Goddamit,” he says under his breath, to no one in particular.

Then comes the endless detangling of lights (“Goddamit!!”), and my favorite part: the box of ornaments. Most of our Christmas tree ornaments are flimsy or plastic—cheap molded candy canes painted with red, uneven stripes; cardboard stars dipped in white glue and glitter; small plastic elves trimmed sloppily with felt, their faces painted by someone who slap-dashed their eyes on, completely askew from the divot meant to replicate a tiny plastic eye socket. But I love them all.

What I love best, though, are the few fragile glass balls that predate me and are carefully hung in a place of honor on the tree, high up in front. They aren’t particularly fancy, but they are beautiful in the eyes of a 6-year-old. My favorite is a fat little ball with a pointed tip, painted with a picture of a small white snowman holding what looks like a palm tree, but which I later realize is supposed to be a broom.

I don’t really fully know the story of the handful of painted glass ornaments on our tree—and I still don’t. They might have been purchased by my parents as newlyweds, or possibly they once hung on a tree at my grandparents’ house. But those years, they add import and sophistication to our metal tree, erected in the basement rec room. We aren’t a family prone to cultural or ethnic traditions: Like many of their generation, my parents have fully embraced the conveniences of the suburban New World and cast off the Old. But, still, our Christmas has the ornaments, and I associate them in a murky, unfocused way with all that is rich and good about family history, and ritual, and tradition.

1973

I am invited to my friend Heidi’s house for a Christmas party. Heidi’s mother is German. She swings open the door just as we hit the top step, at the threshold, and as we pass through… her meaty arms swing heavily, like hams in a butcher shop, over our heads. “Velcome! Velcome, children!” she says.

Heidi’s mother serves a kind of sweet bread I now know was stollen. It’s doughy and lemony and studded with fat raisins, and I can’t get enough of it. The bread was home-made, Heidi tells me, a point which I think confusing, because to me “home-made” is a package of brown-and-serve dinner rolls served heated in the oven, and I had never seen anything close to this braided bread in the pre-baked bakery aisle at the supermarket.

Heidi’s Christmas tree isn’t a tight cone like our perfect metal tree, I notice. Instead, it’s a real tree, messy and shapeless, with drooping boughs that shed needles on the carpet. Real candles are clipped to it, here and there, and though I’m old enough to wonder whether that’s safe… I still like the way they look. Heidi’s house—the stollen, the tree, her mother—seems full, and ample, and generous, a lot like Christmas itself should be, I think.

When I get home, I tell my mother about the party: the candles on the tree, the stollen, the tradition Heidi has of leaving her shoes by the fireplace on a certain night so Saint Nicholas will fill them with candy if she’s been good.

I ask my mother whether we might be a little German. She hugs me and laughs and says we are not. But that night she lets me put my shoes outside the door to my bedroom, because we don’t have a fireplace, and in the morning my sneakers are full of candy canes.

She was adamant about the tree, though, when I pushed my luck for a real one: “Why?” she said, in a tone I know is useless to argue against. “A real tree makes a mess and is a pain in the neck.”

1979

My father spends this Christmas hospitalized with a lung cancer that will—by next fall—kill him, and my older brother opts to buy a live tree rather than set up the one that’s under the stairs. My mother, weary and distracted, doesn’t argue.

My brother drives a Plymouth Valiant, a boxy little car he inherited from our grandfather, so the best he can manage to tote home is a plump, stocky pine that, when he sets it in its stand, is shorter than I am.

With our parents at the hospital, my brother and I decorate it without them, one eye on the TV. My brother eventually stretches out on the couch with a beer, and though he occasionally glances over at me, he doesn’t get up again. I finish the job myself, placing the old glass balls near the very top of the tree, which is this year more or less even with my sternum. I’m happy about a real tree, at last, but it doesn’t deliver anything close to the wallop of tradition I had imagined it might.

1988

After both my parents had died, there was a surprising volume of things, collected over a lifetime, to sift through in a house that had once housed the whole six of us. On a hot day in August, my two sisters, brother, and I parceled out their stuff in as civil and equitable a way as we could manage. The heat in my parent’s small ranch was oppressive; the job was depressing. Both things made us cranky, which made communication strained, which made us skip some corners in the house just to be done with the whole business. Some things—the Christmas stuff, the family photos—were left with me with a vague understanding to divide it eventually.

That Christmas, I tried to separate the box of ornaments into four piles, one for me and one for each of my siblings. I sat on the floor with the ornaments scattered around me—the plastic Santa boot; the paper mache gingerbread house; the ridiculously heavy flour and salt dough ornaments my sister Karen and I had years earlier copied from an issue of Woman’s Day; tarnished silver bells; the chipped plaster pear; and a few old glass balls that had managed to survive over the years.

The more I sifted through them, the more unbearable became the idea of breaking up what I had come to see as a unit. Separately, they seemed imperfect and ordinary, and in truth they were, seeing as they were purchased from discount stores or crafted by clumsy hands. But, together, the collection of ornaments created a context, and took on a meaning that individually they couldn’t possibly have. Together, they had, I realized then, the kind of gravitas I had longed to find years ago, and which, for a while, I thought was reserved only for old glass ornaments. Or families who baked their own stollen and put candles on trees.

Ours was a different kind of family, maybe. But, together, the oddball collection nonetheless told a story of lives lived out over decades, of successive generations, of the ritual of a family celebrating around a tree, fake or real.

2008

This year, as we have for the past decade, we cut down our Christmas tree at the same small tree farm and lug it home on top of the car. That night, when we hang the ornaments on the tree, I mention to my kids which among the trinkets came from my parents’ house. That’s all I say about them. Neither of children has ever known my parents, and there’s not much else to add.

They get a bigger kick out of their collected history: the oddball stuff we are inspired to string alongside the traditional ornaments—a set of keys from my first house, a cork from a particularly memorable evening, my toddler son’s favorite teether.

If you were to walk into my living room, you’d see a Christmas tree festooned with a collection that, with a few exceptions, appears as any on any other tree in any other living room in the world this time of year. But it’s not. It’s a festive mingling of the dead and the living, the past and the present, and the traditions we are still writing.

So what’s on your tree?