Halfpence None the Richer

Recently, I found myself standing at the sink, washing dishes, and humming to myself. This isn’t unusual; I’m prone to tunes.

What was unusual was the particular tune I was humming. For a while I was doing it sub-consciously, but eventually I became aware that although daffodils are popping up in my neighborhood, I was mumbling the words to a Christmas ditty that I think I learned from the Muppets.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat.

Please put a penny in the old man’s hat.

If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny then God bless you.

Why was I humming this song? With me, there’s often a reason. Once, for instance, when I was in college, I had an internship in New York City. Every time I went out for a period of about a week, I got an Indigo Girls song stuck in my head. I do love the Indigo Girls, but the predictability began to bug me eventually. It was always the same song (I don’t Wanna Know), and in fact, it was always the chorus. And not the whole chorus; just the first line of the chorus, over and over again.

I’m not scared and I’m not lonely….

When I finally gave it some conscious thought, I realized that this was nothing more than a classic case of lying to myself. I was 20 years old and had thought that Manhattan would be an exciting adventure. But that winter, the city overwhelmed me. Everywhere I went, men leered and groped, and panhandlers tugged at my sleeve. It seemed like no matter what direction I was headed, I was always walking directly into a bitter wind. I never got the hang of slaloming through the crush of humanity on every sidewalk, and I remember thinking that if a manhole opened up and swallowed me, nobody would notice or even know the difference.

Scared and lonely? I’d never felt both emotions so acutely in my life. Any musical statement on my part to the contrary was wishful thinking, a jangly self-comforting ritual in the key of G. (Luckily this flash of self-awareness was enough to short-circuit the repeat button, and freed me to go back to my usual ear-worm repertoire of bubble-gum pop and advertising jingles.)

O.K., that was a dark example. Usually, there’s a more benign explanation for why I’m compulsively playing something over and over again in my mind. As for the Christmas carol in February, it’s not out of the question that I was having a little bit of a hard time letting the holidays go. I think the key word in the song, though, is “ha’penny.”

A ha’penny is an extinct coin; a half of an English penny. I was thinking about them because I’ve been thinking about old foreign coins a lot lately. The reason for this is that at the end of last year, I took possession of a significant portion of my paternal grandfather’s coin collection. He is still with us, but at 94, his mind isn’t what it once was and he has literally lost the ability to make heads or tails of his collection. So my grandmother gave the coins to the grandchildren, and to my delight, I ended up with a lot of the foreign ones.

In the days before my brain latched onto the ha’penny song, I’d been cataloging some older coins from South Africa that used the British pre-decimal system of coinage. I’d decided that it was time that I learned what that was all about, as I’d never really understood what a shilling was, or how an English penny is different from a cent.

Having learned about pennies, and half-pennies, and how they relate to shillings and pounds (12 pence to the shilling; 20 shillings to the pound), I was, that evening, reviewing what I’d learned in my head. That’s what sent me down the path of singing about old English coinage. As with the Indigo Girls song in New York, realizing what was going on turned off the soundtrack, and I was able to stop hearing Miss Piggy’s voice in my head.

I found, however, that when the music stopped I was still hung up on the subject of half-pennies. They are a very small unit of currency. In the pre-decimal days, there were 240 pennies to the pound, meaning that a half-penny was one 480th of a pound. Even in the Victorian era, that can’t have been much money. (By 1983, the year before half-pennies were demonetized, an MP in favor of ditching the coin remarked that “Most people don’t even bother to pick them up when they drop them.”)

I started thinking what paltry offering a penny was, and thinking how truly wretched someone must be if they didn’t even have the “ha’penny” mentioned in the song. From that condescending place, I moved to a position of…I want to say gratitude, but it was really something closer to smugness, a feeling of grandiosity that came from knowing that when I give to charity, I’m able to do it in amounts greater than a penny.

But then, that toxic little bubble burst into an oily puddle around me when I realized that technically, I didn’t have a half-penny, either. Pennies, sure. Half-dollars, half-francs, and even an American half-dime from the days before nickels…those I had. But a ha’penny? Nope. By the song’s metric, I was poorer than the most pitiable Dickensian indigent.

Except that, as it turns out, I wasn’t.

The next evening I went through the last batch of coins, a small baggie filled with British currency. I had purposely saved it for last because a lot of the coins looked old and weird, and I thought this group might be the most interesting of all.

I was right, and the haul turned out to include a lot of great coins, like a sixpence with a portrait of crazy King George III, a lot of big old clunky copper pennies the size of poker chips, and, yes, a half-penny, dated 1885.

These coins delight me to no end really just because I’m a big nerd about these things. The coins aren’t valuable to collectors—old as they are, they were nevertheless minted in large quantities and aren’t very rare. They aren’t worth a thing in the real world, as the last pre-decimal coins were withdrawn in the early 1990s and are no longer legal tender. No contemporary beggar would be a bit jolly to see any of these coins in his hat—least of all that ha’penny.

But I choose to look at it this way: Having the half-penny lifts me above the Victorian-era poverty line, which has got to be some sort of accomplishment. (Take that, Great Recession.) The coin is also a token showing that I’ve been entrusted with a minor family treasure. As I’ve said, this collection is not valuable in a quantifiable way, but my grandfather loved it, and I love it, too, which makes me feel rich in a way that only coin geeks will understand. (The rest of you will just have to trust me.)

Also, I don’t live in New York anymore, so I’ve got that going for me, too.

Rummymoon

Girls That Roam has come through for me again, publishing a marathon article I wrote about a rum-themed cruise that Pipi and I took in November.

I’ve had a lot of fun writing articles for Girls That Roam, because they’ve all been based on really great trips. But this was the most fun of all to research. For this article, I spent a week in the tropics, drinking rum with my wife, which is pretty much the definition of living the dream, as far as I’m concerned.

This trip was significant for me for two reasons. First and foremost, it represented my honeymoon. Pipi and I have been together for many, many years, and legally married more than a year ago. But we’d never taken an official honeymoon, so we decided that this would be it.

The trip was also significant because it is the first cruise I took without trepidation. I’ve cruised before, and haven’t always enjoyed it. The Transatlantic cruise I took as a teenager was too adult for me, and the booze cruises I took in my early 30s were, by then, a little juvenile.

On the precipice of middle-age, I was talked into taking a Caribbean cruise with a group of rum aficionados, and it was a ton of fun. I realized that cruising can be enjoyable for independent travelers; it’s just really important to pick one that goes to places you’d actually like to explore. That sounds obvious, but it’s very easy to pick the wrong cruise, because so often they are marketed based on either price or the reputation of the cruise line, and often are picked based on which departure ports are the easiest to get to, and whether or not they happen during a particular convenient week.

Pipi and I got this cruise, our second Caribbean sailing, just right. The departure and return ports (leaving from San Juan, returning to Miami) were not all that convenient, and Carnival wouldn’t have been my first choice of cruise line. But none of that mattered much. We went with a group of friends and saw a bunch of islands that really interested us. It was a fun, relaxing vacation where we felt we saw a little bit of the world, not just beaches. And we got to visit several distilleries and drink a little rum, which makes any trip better.

Even a cruise.

What’s New Under the (Punishingly Hot) Sun

One more article of mine has been published on the Girls that Roam site. As usual, it’s about Orlando; this time, about theme parks specifically.

I set up a little bit of a challenge for myself on this one. I decided to make the article be, in large part, about how to best navigate the theme parks. Why did I decide this? Well, I needed some sort of angle, because the fact that these parks exist is not exactly breaking news, so a simple overview was out of the question.

Not much about Florida theme parks, when you come right down to it, is really a secret. They’re some of the best known, and best promoted attractions in the world, so it’s a little hard to find new things to say about them.

I personally find theme parks a little overwhelming. I like them, but the noise, the crowds, and in Orlando’s case, the baking sun all wear me down pretty quickly. I figured I must not be the only person this happens to, so I decided to write an article that would make life easier for us easily over-stimulated folk.

The problem was, the group I was traveling with didn’t really see the theme parks in a way that has much to do with the average person’s Orlando theme-park experience. I traveled there on a press trip, a whirlwind affair where, over the course of several 18-hour days, we were taken to just about every spot in Central Florida--for about five minutes. One day we covered three parks—Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Universal Studios—in one dawn-to-darkness burst of roller coasters, fried food, and sustained shrieking.

As a group, we did manage to experience quite a bit of each park, but only because we were afforded essentially a VIP experience. Park staff escorted us to the front of lines, put us on air-conditioned buses to get us from park gate to park gate, and made sure we were properly fed and hydrated so that our energy didn’t flag.

What I’m saying is that this is another one of those articles that required a lot of research once I got home. I had to remember what it’s like to visit parks as a normal person (which I have done) and then find out what programs and perks exist that normal people have access to.

So that’s what this article is—a guide to remaining sane in Orlando, based on my completely insane theme park experience.

That’s Ms. Soskin to You

I’ve had another article published by Girls That Roam, the online women’s travel magazine. This one is not about Orlando; it’s on Richmond, California’s Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park.

That’s a mouthful of a name, and perhaps in sympathy, my article ran a little long, too. It could have been tighter, I see now, but I do feel that the parts came together at the end, so I’m fairly happy with it.

I did want to make one note, though, just to show that I was raised right.

The Girls That Roam house style is to use a person’s whole name on first reference, and then their first name for subsequent references. I respect house style guides, having been responsible for compiling and enforcing several different ones in my time. This particular rule didn’t bother me at all until now, as all of the articles I have written so far for GTR have been about pretty laid-back (and relatively young) people who would think it was weird if I called them anything but their given names.

This Rosie the Riveter article was a little different, though. A person who gets mentioned a lot is park ranger Betty Reid Soskin, who, at 92, is just about old enough to be my grandmother. She is also African-American, which makes me even more inclined to err on the side of awkward earnestness. (I am thinking of a book I once read by two African-American women whose parents, born into slavery, called each other Mr. and Mrs. Delany until the end of their days—affording each other a respect that at the time they rarely got outside their home.)

What I am saying is that I would never dream of calling this woman “Betty” to her face, but the way the article appears, it looks like that’s what I’m doing behind her back. It’s just a house rule that I can’t change, and I hope I am forgiven--or at least unnoticed--by Ms. Soskin.

(She did mention, in a talk I saw her give recently, that she has mostly outlived her rage. So I’ve got that going for me.)

Child’s Play

I’ve had another article published on the Girls That Roam site, again on Orlando. It’s not my very favorite of the Orlando series, but I’m happy enough with it considering the challenges I faced writing it.

The first challenge was the subject matter: Kids in Orlando. You’d think that would practically write itself, and it’s true that there is a lot to say on that matter. But I’m about the least likely person in the world to say it. I don’t have kids, and while I did travel to Orlando and see lots of children having fun, the week I spent in Florida was actually one of the least kid-friendly experiences I’ve had since my early 20s. Of all the articles I’ve written this year, this is the one that required the most post-trip research.

None of us in the group I was traveling with have any children, which is good, because if we had, Child Protective Services would have taken them away in the first 24 hours. We spent our first evening seeing a John Waters one-man show, and then we drank with him, and then we went out for tacos in the middle of the night. And it only got less wholesome from there. We closed bars three times in one week, and at least two out of the eight of us hooked up with each other. (No, I wasn’t one of them; I just caught them making out in the back of the van.)

As for hookups outside of the group, I can’t begin to guess how many happened, facilitated by the modern marvel that is Grindr. Grindr is something that I almost thought was a myth, but whoa, Nellie, is it real in the world of young gay men. I got little enough sleep, but the guys…I don’t know how they’re still alive.

The second challenge I faced is the simple fact that I have written about 18,000 words so far on Orlando, and before I sat down to write this, I was starting to worry that I didn’t have many left in me. (For comparison, a respectable novel is 100,000 words.) But somehow another 1,800 found their way into a Word document, and arranged themselves in some kind of comprehensible order. I’ve been writing one article a week since mid-May, and now I get a little bit of a break, which is kind of nice. I’ve only got two more Orlando articles left, and they’re short, so I’ll make them happen somehow.

Cringe. C-R-I-N-G-E. Cringe

I am not an extroverted person by nature, and I don’t normally like to be the center of attention. I kind of freeze up when all eyes are on me and it’s not a situation I like to seek out.

My writing, though, is something I do like to put out in front of people. I’m oddly unselfconscious about my work and always quietly proud to see it out in the world. I don’t think I’m delusional about the quality of what I do, but I have not yet outgrown the kick I get out of seeing my name in print. I’m always pleased when an editor decides that something I produced is strong enough to survive out there. I suspect I feel about an article the way a parent feels about watching a child in a spelling bee. Maybe the kid isn’t going to be a winner, but I’m proud to see him up on the stage competing.

Occasionally, though, something happens that makes me feel more like my kid’s up on stage all right, but maybe with his hair sticking up oddly, or ketchup stains on his shirt.

Something like that occurred recently with one of my Orlando articles. This one was on the city’s lesbian scene. I’m happy with how it turned out, and was very pleased to see the publisher, Girls That Roam online magazine, promoting it.

I was a little taken aback, though, when I saw the lead photo used to promote the article. The shot was taken at a lesbian pool party that I’m sure really happened, but not in any universe I’ve ever occupied. In the foreground of the photo is a striking looking woman in a bikini. She is tall with chiseled features and an envious mane of hair—she looks something like the product of a union between Laura Dern and Barbarella.

Behind her is a baby butch in Ray Bans and a backwards baseball cap—this is the kind of lesbian who looks like Justin Beiber. She appears to be about to grope the amazon woman, and she has an expression on her face that looks a little like she’s thinking impure thoughts and a little like she can’t believe her luck. (It’s exactly the expression I would be wearing if I had even been invited to this party.) Behind them is a soft-focus sea of Sapphic debauchery, scores of wet, oiled, drunken 21- to 25-year-old women on the make.

It’s awesome.

And it would all be fine, except that the day the article hit the Girls That Roam social media pages is the very day my 93-year-old grandmother decided to find out what this Facebook thing is all about.

I accepted her request immediately—I was her first friend--and then went to my page, curious what impression it was conveying that day. Because I’d been tagged in a Girls That Roam post about my article, it appeared at the top of my page along with the photo.

This is not an awkward outing situation—my Grandma has known the score for years and treats Pipi like a fifth grandchild. So no real harm done. I am still quite proud of my kid, and we will all get past the fact that he chose to wear his raunchiest t-shirt on his big day before an audience.

Killing Me Softly

Girls That Roam online magazine has published another of my Orlando series. This one is about soft adventure in the Orlando area. Candidly, I like this one. It was fun to research and fun to write. Some articles are only pinned down on the page after a struggle. Sometimes it takes a while for me to decide what my point is. Sometimes structure is hard, and sometimes it’s just hard to find more than a few words to say about things I’m expected to go on about for paragraph after paragraph. But none of those problems came up here. There is so much fun stuff to do in and around the city, and learning this was such a pleasant surprise, that this article practically wrote itself. This week, though, I have to start an Orlando family travel article. This may be a different story. Anyway, the link to the outdoors article is here: http://girlsthatroam.com/killing-softly-orlandos-outdoorsy-adventurous-side/.

Blue is the Funniest Color

And here’s one more Orlando article I’ve just had published. This isn’t even the end of it, but it is all for now. I’ve written so many Orlando articles in the last 6 months that there’s a little bit of a backlog on the Girls That Roam site—they’d have to call it the Girls That Spend a Lot of Time in Central Florida site if they all went up as quickly as they’re written. So I expect that a few more will go up in the coming months, but I can’t be sure of the schedule. This article is on my first Blue Man Group experience.

More Orlando

I just noticed that another of my Orlando articles has gone up on the Girls That Roam site. It has actually been up for quite some time; I just happened to notice a link to it in an online newsletter that the site sends out every so often. Here’s the article--it’s a review of an excellent restaurant called Prato in the Orlando suburb of Winter Park.

Where Were We?

There was a time when I had a goal of writing one blog post per day. Lately, though, I haven’t quite been checking in that often. In fact, I haven’t even hit one per year in a while. Mostly that’s because I have been doing more editing than writing lately—although, I’m not going to lie; there was also a part of me that got tired of giving away my work. In the last few weeks, though, a couple of things have changed. One is that I did recently get commissioned to write some articles about Orlando, the first of which was recently published. And I wanted you to know about it. The second thing is that I realized I missed this. Writing a blog is really a great gig. It doesn’t pay much (did I mention that already?), but I’m my own boss and editor and publisher, so I always get my way. I assign the topics, write them any way I please, and get them done when I get them done—no deadline worries. You, in turn, read my work, or you don’t, as suits you. I’m free to follow my muse down whatever weird rabbit hole I choose, you’re free to ignore me…everybody wins, is what I’m saying. So I will try to do this more often, and keep a good attitude about it. It’s good to have you back.

Fearless Travel

Pipi and I like to think of ourselves as brave, independent travelers but sometimes we break the faith. For instance, when we went to Cuba, not only did we do it completely legally, we also went as part of a tour group. And recently, we booked a cruise. So I’ve been worrying lately that while I may feel like a youthful backpacker at heart, my vacations may be entering middle age.

So imagine my relief when I opened the travel section of the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday and found an article about traveling safely in Mexico. Part of the article was a graph suggesting Mexican destinations based on the reader’s preferred level of activity and required level of safety. “Totally Spooked” travelers who self-identify as “Sun & Sand Seekers,” for example, were directed toward the heavily guarded havens of Cancun and Puerto Vallarta. And “Objective But Cautious” vacationers who might be described as “Culture Vultures” were urged to visit places like Guadalajara and the nicer neighborhoods of Mexico City.

I myself have been to Mexico three times in my life. The first two visits were short stops in Ensenada while on weekend-long cruises out of Southern California. Ensenada is not even mentioned in the travel article, probably because there was no room for a category of traveler called “Chronically Inebriated” whose interests include “Eating Anything with Cheese on It.” Both times, the ship only docked for a few hours in port, and I can only assume that this stop in the itinerary was an archaic throw-back to the days when sailing ships could not make a three-day loop out of San Pedro without running dangerously low on viruses and tequila. I was onshore just long enough to ingest quite a bit of both, apparently, and both times spent the rest of the trip in a miserable gringo heap on my bunk, cursing agave and wondering if the seas were really heaving or just me.

So that barely counts as travel to Mexico, but the third time, I was with Pipi and we saw a lot more of the country. We did some whale-watching at San Ignacio, and then flew to the mainland where we boarded a train that took us through Copper Canyon, in the states of Sinaola and Chihuahua.

I’m perversely intrigued to report that the Chronicle not only used the word “deadly” to describe these two very states, but that they also prescribe a Copper Canyon visit to those who fall under the “Fearless” heading. And it’s not just for “Fearless” travelers; it’s for “Fearless” travelers whose tastes run toward the “Adventure Lover” end of the interest spectrum.

So I guess there’s no need for me to worry. Nearly 41 years wise and still traveling like an American idiot.

Sports Tourism

Pipi and I are doing our best to pioneer a form of travel we call sports tourism. This is exactly what it sounds like: Traveling around the world following our favorite sports teams and events.

It started in 2003 when we flew down to Los Angeles for a family visit, and then rented a car and drove from there to San Diego to watch that year’s WUSA professional women’s soccer championship. I’m glad we did because the league folded shortly thereafter, and so that match turned out to be the very last WUSA game ever. We’re learning that with sports, particularly women’s sports, you have to jump at opportunities to see games because in spite of what people say, there isn’t always a next year.

Our biggest trek so far has been to China for the 2007 Women’s World Cup soccer tournament. It would be hard to top that, in terms of both distance and adventure. The only idea we have that even comes close is that we’d both love to go to Melbourne for the Australian Open tennis tournament someday. (See, it’s not all soccer, although we are a little obsessed.)

The idea that we’re working on more seriously is going to Germany this summer for the 2011 Women’s World Cup. (Hard to believe it has been almost four years since China!) Actually, my hope is that by writing this, I will spur myself into action. Soccer is a big deal in Germany and I can’t count on tickets and hotel rooms being available at the last minute.

Part of what’s making me think of all this is the news, breaking this morning, that Canada has been awarded the Women’s World Cup in 2015. I’m a little relieved, although not surprised, that Canada won out over the other finalist, which was Zimbabwe. Women’s World Cups appear to be getting easier and easier to get to from my perspective. The United States has already hosted twice in the short history of the tournament, so I don’t expect to be able to drive to a game any time soon, but a trip with no time-zone crossings (hello, Vancouver!) will be nice.

Everybody Think I Goofed

The bad news: There’s a typo in paragraph three of my article. The good news: There is none in the seventh. It just looks like there is.

When I first read the phrase “everyone come here,” I thought that was a mistake. Turns out it’s not, at least not in Australia, which is where the new Curve editorial regime is from. Australians, like the English, treat collective nouns as plurals. So it’s correct to say, “Everyone come,” because Australians think of “everyone” as a group of individuals, and use the same verb form they would use in the sentence, “One hundred thousand people come every year.”

Americans, on the other hand, think of “everyone” as a monolithic group, so the word gets a singular verb, the same form used in the sentence, “One person comes every day.”

Yes, you can certainly make the argument that I am an American writer writing for a primarily American audience, and so Australian words should not be put in my mouth. But what’s done is (are?) done. And I have to admit, the Australian way of thinking does kind of make sense. Isn’t “everybody,” by definition, more than one person?

This is my story, and I’m sticking to it, because I would rather you know that I’m a grammar dork than suspect that I don’t know how to conjugate.

Published!

That Australia article I wrote last summer finally saw the light of day. I’m a Curve subscriber and just got the issue that it appears in in the mail, so it should be on newsstands soon.

The article is on page 64, if anyone’s wondering, and no, the two women pictured are not Pipi and me. I don’t know who they are. I think it’s a stock photo.

Why Bother?

I went to this trouble because I recently got a gig writing blog entries for Travelocity.com, and they require all freelancers to have a business license. I was very excited to get the job, because, for one thing, it pays pretty well. (Well, more than this blog, anyway.)

Travelocity is also the last company that employed me full-time before I started freelancing. I knew even at the time that this was one of the most fun jobs I would ever have, and it was hard to walk away from the people there, who were mostly my age and who for the most part shared my love of travel and writing.

I’ll be working at home, so I won’t see that crew every day (and of course a lot of my co-workers have moved on as well), but I’m still pleased to be associated again with a company I enjoyed working for in the past and of which I now have nothing but burnished happy memories.

Almost Done

The following Monday, I was able to turn in the zoning permission form, and they instantly gave me a permit number, which was the one missing piece I needed to fill in the last form, which was the actual business license application. With that done, I headed upstairs to the tax division at the recorder’s office and submitted the application, and one last check. (Actually, this office took credit cards. Nice. Who writes checks any more?)

I won’t have the certificate in my hand for another month, but my understanding is that at this point all my ducks are in a row and I am the proud sole proprietor of Clause and Effect writing and editing services. (And I have the sudden urge to see the movie Brazil again.)

The Paper Trail Lengthens

The naming paperwork was just the first step in setting up an official business, although it turned out to be the most expensive and complicated part. The second thing I had to do was to get zoning approval, essentially permission to run a business out of my home. This is really easy for a business that doesn’t involve food or people coming to the house to shop, but turning in the form still required one more check and one more trip downtown.

I almost got this task completed on the same day as the business name approval, but the zoning office is several blocks from the fictitious name bureau, and closes at 4pm. So at the end of my first administrative day, I had a name for my endeavor, but no legal place to do business.

The Jig is Up

I know you all would have eventually read the legal notice in the Oakland Tribune, because nobody can get enough of administrative arcana printed in six-point type in regional newspapers. So I might as well let the cat out of the bag and tell you now: The new business name I registered is Clause and Effect.

This is a name that I have been using informally for a long time, but I thought it was time to make a going concern of it. It’s a little silly, but it made the woman at the County Recorder’s office chuckle, and she must see a lot of new business names.

Not as Exciting as it Sounds

Applying for a Fictitious Business Name sounds like asking for permission to lie on your tax return, but it’s just an odd formality required if you establish a business and give it anything other than your own name.

Last Friday, I got my made-up name approved, although there is one more hoop to jump through: I have to take out a legal notice in an Alameda County newspaper and run it once a week for four weeks in a row. This is the part I really don’t understand. What’s the point of having a fictitious name if you’re going to take out an ad to reveal your deception to the world? I guess I have a lot to learn about subterfuge.

Guess Who Has a Fictitious Business Name?

Or will, once the paperwork goes through? Yes, me. I am so pleased at this development. I’m now one step closer to my ultimate goal of being a mysterious woman.