charlotte harris

Five years ago I spent a holiday weekend curled up on my parents’ couch reading a book called How to Succeed With Men.  Equipped with a pencil and a notebook, I studied it as if I was a nervous freshman during exam week.   

I picked it up when I was working part-time at Borders to earn Christmas money, and my flirty young coworker Aziza dragged me to the self-help section and implored me to invoke my 20% employee discount and take the book home with me that night.  “You will not be single for long,” she promised. 

She was paying “it” forward as, only months earlier, her own brother had recommended this same book after consuming the male version How to Succeed with Women.  Apparently he had a revelation and wanted his ‘lil sister to also find love. Sure enough, after reading it Aziza found herself macking on a lucky young man standing by the New Fiction table and they’d been dating ever since. 

I can’t believe I just admitted to reading a dating book, but I had to in order to make my next point.  The point being… I have come a long way in my nonfiction selections in the past five years.

Tonight, reclining on a heap of pillows, I relaxed with a new reference book called Spunk and Bite.  I suppose the title could be that of another dating book, but really it’s a hip writer’s guide written by Arthur Plotnik.  Yes clever readers, the title is a play on the Elements of Style, the old writing handbook that is often referred to simply by it’s authors’ last names.  

I don’t often worry about dangling prepositions, misplaced commas, or when to use shall vs. will.  I prefer to write in a conversational tone because, as Plotnik puts it, “language derives its validity from actual use, and not from a bunch of prescribed forms.”  I agree with that… mostly.  I believe we should try our best to use good grammar and punctuation, consult the thesaurus, and to spell-check. 

But when a perfectly formed sentence sounds rigid when read aloud, I change it up.  See?  I ended that one in a preposition.  Might drop a ‘g’ next time I’m feelin’ sassy.  I am usually keenly aware when I commit these language infractions, but it just feels more natural sometimes to do so. 

I am reading Spunk and Bite as well as another book of writing exercises because I want to be a better writer.  I aspire to expand my vocabulary and create my own metaphors and inject surprise and delight.  Don’t look for a work of genius (see? just used a tired cliche) on this blog tomorrow… give me some time!

So 5 years later, while I still want to “give my man wins” and “assess him on the qualifying date” ( I do jest, yes, but I swear it is the only dating book worth any woman’s time.),  I’d also like to dazzle him with my careful employment of adverbs and stylish use of sentence fragments!  What?  I heard geeky was hot… or something like that. 

It was just like that old episode of Will and Grace.  The episode in which Grace works out “with” a personal trainer. 

You know the one… From across the gym, Grace stalks the trainer and his client and follows along with their exercise routine.  Will calls her out and she rationalizes it, “Look, why should I pay good money when I could just as well follow these guys around and do the same exercises for free?”

Finally, the trainer catches on to her ruse and calls her out on it as well, “Excuse me.  Are you working out with us?  You know, I don’t do this for free.”

The hilarious scene played over in my head this morning when I saw a random swimmer in the far lane of the pool following along with our team workout.  The lane reserved for water walkers and the like. 

Between sets, she was practically hanging on the lane marker, craning her neck to hear our coach explain the cryptic shorthand she had written up on the board.  Her eyes darted from our coach to the dry erase board where our workout was written out, and back to the coach. 

After Coach was finished speaking, we all remained at that end of the pool, facing down the lanes, our eyes focused on the wall ahead, waiting for the competition clock to return to zero again for an even start.  I glanced over at the hanger-on, seeing her obvious confusion.  She was poised and ready to push off, but kept looking over at us nervously, wondering when the heck we were all going to take off.  Like she was waiting for someone to say “GO!”

Coach reminded us all to pay our dues at the front desk on the first of the month.  We recently  ordered team suits, too.  Blue with green tiger print and a fierce (ok, not really, but cute!) alligator on the front and the team name on the rear end.  Most of us got our FedEx package tracking results this week, and it looks like we’ll have them in time for Thursday’s practice.  Maybe that will be a clue to the mooch-y swimmer that we “don’t do this for free.” 

After spending last weekend plus two sick days in bed with bronchitis, 2 whole weeks without running/biking/swimming, and a few dates not being able to canoodle with the new fella… I finally found my groove again this weekend. 

It stopped raining and the sun came out and burned in the most beautiful blue skies all day Saturday and Sunday.  I think that made everything about this weekend so much better.  Here are the top 10 highlights, but not necessarily in top 10 order…

Made a huge pot of yummy beef stew on Sunday.

Spent mid-day Sunday in the warm sun hitting golf balls at the range.  “Hitting” being the operative word.  Not aiming and not very successful.  But fun.  Better than sittin’ on our asses all day!

Started my Christmas shopping on Saturday.  Bought a stack of fun games for my niece and some other cute ‘lil girls I know. 

Got another fabulously cute haircut from my new favorite mall hairdresser. 

Found a perfect winter coat… on sale… and I had a coupon… and it’s a size 2! 

Got invited to a costume party.  I didn’t go, but it was nice to be invited.

Ran twice and went to one spinning class.  Caught up with some gym pals on Saturday.

Bought my cold-weather running/biking accessories: balaclava, gloves, base layer.

Went on two dates, Friday and Sunday, with the same guy I have been seeing all month. 

Went out for wings with my coworkers on Friday. Nothing too special except that it’s a nice reminder that I still have a job! 

As if I wasn’t cootie-phobic enough before these super-resistant staph infections started spreading around the metro area… I’ve definitely been pushed to the verge of cootie-crazy now!

Last night at the gym, I dropped in on a class in which we used mats and bosu balls.  One girl had brought in a PriceClub-sized tub of Lysol wipes and prior to class start, disinfected her mat and ball.  “Five kids in my school have it,” she announced.  “I’m not taking any chances.” 

She’s smart.  Our gym is in a Fairfax county rec center, adjacent to the high school, and tons of kids use these same fitness rooms and equipment for after-school programs and teen fitness classes.  There are probably buggies crawlin’ all over the place.

Other ladies in the room who happen to be teachers too started chiming in with the counts of students in their schools testing positive for the uber-Staph. 

The rest of us stood over our mats,  suddenly feeling less enthusiastic about getting down and doing ab work.  One by one, we grabbed wads of paper towels, passed around a spray bottle of disinfectant, and wiped down the mats. 

After class, the last stop on the way out of the gym last night was the Ladies, to wash our hands.  And I am sure the first thing we all did when we got home was take a hot soapy shower.  The germaphobic hygiene routine is already pretty standard for me, but I have a feeling this will be the standard M. O. for all of us for a while now.  Ick!!

“No news is good news.”  An adage that I pretty much assume to be true.  In most aspects of my life, at least.

My workplace:  If I’m doing my job and my boss is pretty much leaving me alone to do my thing and not correcting me or pestering me, I suppose he must think I’m doing the job right. 

My family:  If my phone doesn’t ring at odd hours, I figure that everyone I love is alive and well. 

My money: If I don’t get a notice from the bank, I assume they got my direct deposit and that all my billers got their payments on time.

My friends: If we go a short period of time without hearing from one another, I figure we just got busy. 

So WHY on earth do I think the complete opposite when it comes to the men I date?  No news is bad news.  This week, two whole days passed without hearing back from this fella I’m seeing,  and of course I started to overanalyze the “no news.”  Has he lost interest?  Why did he ask me out if he didn’t really mean it?  Does he not have time to call me because he’s busy seeing lots of other women?  I vented to a girlfriend and she was like, “you know very well how a week can get away from you.  Give him the benefit of the doubt.” 

Why couldn’t I just think like that to begin with?  If I didn’t hear from her for 48 hours I would not have thought twice about it!  Why should I hold him to a different standard? 

And she was right.  I did end up speaking with him that night.  He had been working long hard days at the office and planning a home improvement project and just became preoccupied.  No news was not bad news after all, and we even have a date tonight.  Ugh, I can be so sensitive sometimes.

Please do not park in this space.  It’s reserved and it’s mine.  Please use visitor parking.  Thank you.  - Spot # 85 Owner.

I scribbled the note on some paper I found in my bag and left it under the windshield wiper of the offending vehicle.  I looked around the lot at several vacant non-reserved spots, mere yards away from # 85.

Why didn’t I just call and have it ticketed or towed?  Well, the squatting vehicle was… ahem… a police car. 

I paid for that parking spot.  I own it… or at least the bank does!  Not sure, but I may even pay taxes on it’s square footage.  Point is… the spot is mine in the same way my kitchen is mine.  That cop may as well have pulled his car up into my living room. 

I do love our boys in blue but this move was just plain arrogant. 

“I heart it because it’s pink and girly!”  I said it with a bright-eyed grin, and I might have even hopped for joy like a big dork.  I teasingly posed and modeled my new duffel for my gym friends who had been hearing me gripe about the smelly old one for a while. 

But the joy and fun ended there.  It was weird.

“Oh stop!  Why do women think they need the fairy tale dream?”  M began her tirade against girliness.  I don’t even remember the rest… something about princes and being rescued.  Picture me standing there confused with question marks floating all around my head.  Whaaaat? 

I smiled at her, “ummm… all because I bought a pink gym bag?”

Sure, I love pink.  I wear high heels with my jeans and miniskirts with my flip flops.  I put lip gloss on every morning and I wink at cute guys.  I cook and clean and want to be a wife and mother.  I like romantic comedies and Oprah’s book club.  I let men hold doors for me and I flirt with happy little babies. 

I do NOT like ruffles, potpourri, beanie babies, cats, romance novels, diets, inspirational quotes, curling irons, Cathy comics, pedicures, bachelorette parties or The View.  My 91 year old neighbor lady calls me a “working girl” because I go to my job 5 days a week. 

I do consider M to be a friend.  She doesn’t know me in every context, but we talk about our lives a lot.  She knows all the strong independent stuff about me, so I don’t know why she has issues with my love affair with pink.  I am confident enough in my strength and independence that I don’t see being ‘girly’ as a weakness.  I don’t live in a fairy tale dream world!

The moment passed quickly… the conversation almost forgotten.  I’ll see her tomorrow where we’ll work out together as usual.  She will be able to lift 1.5 times more weight than I, but I will be working just as hard and, as a bonus, very happy with my pink shorts, bouncy ponytail, little tank top and my girly new gym bag!

I secretly just love to chat with my parents.  I’d rather talk to them than anyone else I can think of.  It would even be OK with me if we ran out of things to talk about and just breathed into each others ears.  Lately if I can think of a reason to call home and get advice, I do.  It’s easier than googling, but mostly just more comforting.  Tonight I realized that I must be driving them crazy.

Top 5 questions I called and asked my Mom this week in the past 48 hours:

1.  My washing machine was making a weird noise sorta like a missile landing.  And now it smells like it’s on fire… what should I do?

2.  I’m standing in Target and don’t know what type of plunger I need.  One has a flange and the other does not.  Which one should I buy?  Seriously Mom, I am standing here crying in Target because it’s shit-on-Charlotte week, and I can’t believe I have to buy a plunger and go unclog a toilet that someone else stopped up.  Why do these things keep happening to me?!

3.  How much should I tip the painters? 

4.  What does it mean when I cough up neon green phlegm?  Just in the mornings.  And I don’t have a fever.

5.  How long does paint take to dry?  Is it OK to breathe the paint fumes when I already have lungs full of phlegm?

The clock on the dash read 7:39 am and the sign said 40 miles to Fredericksburg.  Could I wait 40 miles for coffee?  Yeah, I supposed.  So I occupied my thoughts by recounting the previous day’s events in my mind.

To a small crowd in a big cathedral in Richmond, the priest introduced the couple by quoting some of the reasons they had given for loving one another.  His voice echoed off the bare rafters, not enough bodies in the church to absorb the noise.  I absorbed every word… he was describing my friend through the eyes of her almost-husband.  My heart swelled and eyes welled to hear him list off all the same reasons that I think I, too, should feel lucky to have her in my life.

Her passion for life and her big heart are what made Jeff fall in love with my friend Susie.  And because every time she sees him, she acts as excited as if it were their second date.  Later at the reception, her bridesmaid would point out that Susie is everyone’s biggest cheerleader.  We almost missed that toast, in fact. 

Her passion, her heart, her enthusiasm… the same reasons we, her friends, love Susie too.  But hostage to a broken and unmanned ticket machine in a parking garage in Shockoe Bottom, we could only pass the time by thinking up hilarious ways to phrase our regrets to the bride, “sorry Susie, we missed your reception because we were trapped in a parking garage.”  Only weeks earlier she had confided in us all that she was starting to learn who her true friends were after getting some less than polite responses from other invitees.  Would she know we were really truly stuck behind a mechanical gate or would we be lumped into the “untrue” friends category? 

We shouldn’t have even been across town there in that underground garage, but with four hours to kill between the ceremony and the reception, Andrea, Terry and I, dressed in our finest eveningwear at noon on a Saturday, went bar-hopping.

At Cafe Gutenberg we sipped mimosas in the library upstairs. At Cha Cha, we drank margaritas and deleted old boyfriends from our cell phones.  When we finally realized how familiar the place looked, memories came rushing back and we told the bartender our story of one night years ago when the Cha Cha was known as the Rivah Bistro.  We took turns blurting out fractured years-old memories as we pieced together those late inebriated Saturday nights.

The bartender was too young to remember Rivah Bistro, but Andrea and I recalled it like it was just last week.  Out bar hopping in the Bottom one night, we met a man named Kice (pronounced like ‘dice’).  It was closing time but none of us were ready to go home.  Kice escorted us down the street and through the door of a little place called Rivah Bistro.  After 2am, it was a sort of a speakeasy.  Kice knew the secret handshake or something, because within 3o seconds we were all inside with beers in our hands. 

Andrea and I remembered this place about a year later when we, again, found ourselves still ready to party after the bars closed.  No problem, we thought, we’ll just walk down to the Rivah Bistro.  We were stopped at the door but, “We know Kice,” we said confidently.  The man shook his head.  “We are closed, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  We had just been bounced. 

I called the number on the parking ticket machine and an operator in land far away opened the gate remotely.  Free at last and we wouldn’t even be late!  At the reception, Andrea and I jockeyed for position at the cocktail table, taking turns walking away so neither of us would be standing “next to” Terry.  Not because we don’t love him, but because we didn’t want it to look like either of us was “with” him.  As two single girls on a market with slim pickins’, neither of us could afford to be mistaken as part of a “couple.”  We exchanged knowing giggles when we sat at our assigned dinner table and waited for Terry to choose his seat on either side of us.  Who would be stuck with the “date?”

The band played loudly and Andrea taught me the trick to having a normal conversation despite the noise.  Place your fingertips in your ears and speak directly at each other in a normal tone of voice.  Once Terry left to return to NoVA for his night job, she and I were left knowing only one another, so we passed the time lamenting that the only single man at the party was also “that guy,” the total alcoholic making a spectacle of himself.  We might have looked funny sitting there with our fingers in our ears, laughing about how we were leaving the party at only 9:30pm. 

And we did leave, on a high note.  The day’s festivities had started a long ten hours earlier at the church, and still mostly sober and stuffed with cake, it was time for the two of us to leave while things were still classy.   To leave before “that guy” and his cohorts would make a mockery of the night.

Susie, my crazy pal and the beautiful bride.  Andrea, my old friend with whom I share some funny memories and inside jokes.  And Terry, a sometimes pal who’s just easy to be around.  I finally made it to the Fred and got my coffee… In 40 miles I had remembered the reasons why I gas up the car and make these weekend trips, why I put on the high heels and curl my hair, why I drink too much wine and waste the next day being tired, and why I’ll do it all over again next time… my friends.

“They’re like a band of pirates!”  Rumor has it, that’s what he exclaimed when he learned that a group of his former trainees had splintered off and gone underground with their own triathlon club.  After one meeting, two handshakes, an invitation, an approval, and (finally) several friendly welcomes, I joined this rebel faction for the first time Thursday night. 

As the sun set and autumn blew in with great force, I met this band of practical strangers for a run in the woods.  From the leader’s backyard, we shimmied between two trees at a break in the property line and ran through the adjacent neighborhood, across a two-lane road, up sharply off the shoulder, and into the park. 

Armed with only two dim safety lights and an obedient dog, we followed one another along dense wooded trails.  Stepping high to avoid roots and rocks, we otherwise followed the sound of footsteps, kicking gravel, shuffling dirt, padding over mulch and sometimes slapping asphalt with a reassuring rhythm.  The sound that tells the runners ahead and behind, “I’m still here and I’m OK” is the same repetitive thythm that sort of entrances me into my groove.  We ran across wooden bridges, up hills, around corners, along streams, behind houses and through fields.  In the dark.  It felt more like a great chase than exercise. 

We really were like bandito triathletes in training.  Running in secret, after dark, and under an alias I must not share here.  We’ll communicate using a private Google group, and that is how I will learn the time and place of the next clandestine workout.  I have a wedding to attend in Richmond this weekend, but I may return home early just to find out where a Sunday morning bike ride with this group might take me!