My Life with Mister Shmoo

This house of ours is in mourning. The vacuum cleaner, which for years quietly played along with my mom, cleaning what was already clean, is in mourning. The furniture, paintings, plants and carpets are in mourning. Her toothbrush, which is still there where she left it, is in mourning, along with the sweater on the armchair in her room. The dust, on the other hand, seems less perturbed, able now to at least enjoy a few days on the surfaces of our home, while - I might be mistaken - but I thought I heard a bit of sobbing from the well-ironed and neatly arranged dust rags. They know their destiny; tragically for them, there will be no one to iron them anymore. The elevator and the washing machine are in mourning; the purple scarf she wore when she sat on the couch, full of holes from her cigarettes, is also desperate.     The four of us, her daughters, are in mourning. We lost much more than our mother. We lost the rock on which our family was built. We lost her comforting...

  I am certainly not the first person, nor will I be the last, to view the story of David and Goliath as a metaphor for the incredible impact of surprise; when someone behaves differently from what you expected. For those who don’t feel like trying to remember the story: Goliath was a giant, armed to the teeth, and full of bad intentions. He was chosen by the Philistines to fight the Jews. After all, he was their strongest warrior, and he was willing to fight to the end to establish who was boss. The Jews didn’t have anyone even close to Goliath’s size and power, and nobody wanted to volunteer to fight him. Then along came a skinny little shepherd, with no hidden weapons except for his intelligence. He was sent to fight with a few rocks in his backpack, and with all the area’s bookmakers predicting a quick victory for Goliath. David, however, surprised Goliath, and their audience, and, using only five stones and a ton of shrewdness, hit the giant’s forehead and cut off his head (gr...

Hard to believe, but even this year we survived Thanksgiving.   We spent it in our little cabin in Becket, in the Berkshires, with Dan’s family. It was great to finally hang out all of us together. I hadn’t seen my two nieces in a long time; Matt’s mother, my American stepmom, passed away in mid-November, and I couldn’t wait to give my brother-in-law a big hug.   The bird was huge, made slightly heavier by the small pouch of turkey innards that Dan had left in its cavities before sticking it in the oven. Shit happens. As always, Shmoo spent the day in his room with an enormous bowl of pasta, no pants and with some stolen, stale goldfish he found, who knows where. But, despite the nice day on Thursday, a few things happened during the vacation that made my heart a bit heavier than usual.   Two days before Thanksgiving, for example, I hit a magnificent male deer in my car, when he decided to cross the empty, dark, and isolated road I happened to be driving on. Of course, I’...

This year it’s been twenty-five years. A quarter of a century of Shmoo. As we all know, Luca is not a typical 25-year-old: he never smoked weed, never had a sip of wine, or coffee. He never made love with a person, only himself, he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and he never graduated from middle school or college. He has no ambitions, he never broke up with anyone, he never ordered a pizza to go. He was never sent to the principal’s office, never went to Greece on vacation, never travelled around Europe by train. He never wrote a love letter and he doesn’t have a resumé. He never cooked, never asked for expensive sneakers, he never went for a walk by himself. He made his own bed a few times, at gunpoint; the same with laundry, emptying the dishwasher or putting away groceries. Luce doesn’t care about any of that. It’s one of the many reasons I consider him to be the most amazing person in the world. Because he doesn’t miss anything. Whatever he doesn’t have, he has never wa...

Luca was born on a Tuesday in November. The year was 1996, and the weather was cold with occasional snow showers. The hospital room was very cozy, the midwife comforting, despite her pronounced lisp; especially when she was encouraging me to push. Her S was unusually long - a bit distracting, but hey, we can’t all be perfect.   As I started to really push, Dan, my husband, started throwing up the rotten chicken sandwich he had found in the nurses’ fridge. Out went the whole birth plan we had so carefully put together - down the drain, literally. Claudia, Dan’s sister, showed up to replace him. It was she and I who met Luca for the first time - and the midwife with the lisp was there too, slapping Luca on the back so that he would take his very first breath, which came a bit later than expected. But arrive it did, along with his first huge scream.   Luca was ugly: he had a conehead, a red eye and red marks on his face. It took a long time for him to leave my uterus. Three hours...