The Inside Press

Magazines serving the communities of Northern Westchester

Inside Thoughts

Here’s to “Love Beyond Measure” and a PRESSURE-FREE Valentine’s Day!

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anna-at-u-massI’m not here to argue that Valentine’s Day is a made-up commercial holiday that exists only to remind singles how sorry they are to be alone. In fact, it’s been around for perhaps some 1500 years–WAY before Hallmark ever existed. It’s not the romantic pressure of needing a “Valentine” that bugs me, but it’s the inevitable and underestimated and underreported social pressure in our schools while growing up that left me with a heavy heart on several Valentine’s Days.

In my otherwise happy-go-lucky life as an elementary school youngster at Roaring Brook, there were three occasions that gave me anxiety: 1) sporadic lice epidemics, 2) school play auditions, and 3) Valentine’s Day. Each year, with a stern expression, my teacher decreed that if we hand out any Valentines, we must hand them to everyone in the class. We also took home letters to our parents outlining this directive.

I basically agree with the premise: Every child should have the same number of Valentines so there is no one feeling left out. However, little did I realize, an arms race would ensue as to who could come up with the biggest and best Valentine. When I realized my Hershey Kiss taped onto printer paper heart cutouts could never measure up to my classmate’s six-dollar goody bags packed with Godiva chocolates galore and custom decorated cookies, I felt embarrassed by my own creations.

While I understand and appreciate the attempt at fostering equality here, it really just permanently etches materialism into kids’ vulnerable minds and puts pressure on parents to not let their child be outdone. To avoid this issue, I suggest that teachers have children write cards in the classroom using the same art materials to work with. It’s not like they don’t get enough candy on Halloween.

In middle school, the Valentine dilemma became only slightly less daunting. Some homerooms allowed students to exchange cards, but I don’t recall it as a concern. Even so, there was a new, perhaps greater problem looming: kids started dressing up super wacky for Valentine’s Day. Instead of your average red shirt, the halls of Seven Bridges were a swarm of colorful knee socks, pink boas, tiaras, heart-shaped sunglasses and layers upon layers of beads.

While this was festive and fun, it also seriously promoted cliques. It was up to you to establish a group to match with and shop for gear together, and dressing up alone signified being a loner. At an age where cattiness is at an all-time high, you can imagine how being left out would feel. Buy $30 worth of pointless tchotchkes solely to suggest your membership in a group? Now I’d say, no way! Then I’d say it was a requirement.

Fast forward to high school. The rule established in elementary school had disappeared and turned into the opposite: Valograms. They’re a great idea, as they fundraise for the American Heart Association, but they’re also a downright popularity contest. Each year, one purchases a number of  “Valogram” cards for their friends, and senior-class volunteer “Cupids” hand them out in classrooms, accompanied with a flower per Valogram. This is literally a public announcement of exactly how many friends you have.

There is no being discreet here, as there are flowers to show for it. It’s just like the scene in Mean Girls where Damien hands out candy cane grams, “FOUR for you, Glen Coco! You go Glen Coco! Cady Heron, one for you … and none for Gretchen Wieners. Bye!”

If someone you thought was your friend sends a Valogram to all of your friends but you, what’s that supposed to mean? What if you send one and don’t receive one in return? How disheartening! Can’t we just have a simple bake sale or dance or something instead? Oh, and students continue 
to go all-out with Valentine’s Day attire, so there’s still that hanging over your head.

Despite evidence here to the contrary, I happen to like Valentine’s Day. However, I like Valentine’s Day because it celebrates love for those you care most about, whether that is a significant other, family, or close friends. I enjoy yummy treats and teddy bears as much as the next person, but I believe the love you give and receive should not be laid bare for all of your classmates to observe.

Throughout childhood and into high school, kids are quite impressionable and vulnerable. I know I was. So, rather than make some children feel less than equal among their peers, I suggest we teach our children that love is beyond measure.

Anna Bennett graduated Greeley in 2010 and is a senior at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

A Closing, Antiques & Sauerkraut

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By Dan Levitz

Dan-Levitz-tableMy family and I moved to Chappaqua 10 years ago last month. Leaving Manhattan was a difficult decision and it was a somewhat chaotic time for all of us. We weren’t able to close on our house until early October which meant driving our son from lower Manhattan to Roaring Brook Elementary every morning and back to the city every afternoon. As disruptive as the move would be, we wanted him to start first grade at the same time as his classmates. This strange and long commute wasn’t unpleasant at all and, ultimately, got our son, and us, off to 
a nice start in New Castle as we got into a kind of rhythm with our new community.

When we finally reached the closing, the room was filled with a strange tension that seemed to come from the elderly couple that had lived in our, soon to be, house for at least 25 years. My wife and I were excited to finally be concluding this transaction and beginning the next chapter of our family’s story. I understood that leaving the home one has raised their children in could be bittersweet, however, I felt the extremely large check they would be receiving that day would certainly dull the sting to some degree. Apparently not.

When the time came for us to take the keys from the sellers, the older gentleman, tossed them across the table to me in a small, looping arc. They clanged before me and just missed sliding into my lap. This little abrupt gesture was so clearly fraught with sadness and, perhaps, disdain that whatever excited anticipation I felt about our new house was now eclipsed by surprise and a bit of anger. I wanted to say, “Are you kidding me? Look at the check we just gave you for your nice old house. If you can’t be even a little gracious how about some common courtesy?” I looked to his wife but her expression remained calm if a little bit somber.

The strained closing scene soon faded away as we moved into our house and began adjusting to suburban life in beautiful Chappaqua. The kids assimilated amazingly well and we were all busy getting into our new routines. Not long after we settled in, there was a block party on the cul-de-sac where we live. The beautiful fall colors created a stunning backdrop as we met many of our new neighbors. With kids jumping in piles of leaves, dogs barking and warm cider being served I thought of a Woody Allen line where he asked someone if they grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting.

What I remember the most from that afternoon was meeting some of the other Dad/Husbands. There was a group of them and after the handshakes and “how are you doings,” the small talk began with occupation inquiries. Turns out four out of five of my new acquaintances were lawyers with the fifth working on Wall Street. When I told them that I am an art & antique dealer with a specialty in Japanese pieces, there was more than a pregnant pause.

While they didn’t do the “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil posturing,” I think I may have literally heard crickets in the silence. I quickly recovered and noted that my wife is a tax attorney at a big firm in Manhattan so, not to worry. We’re alright.

Cut to this previous weekend. I’m displaying (and hopefully selling) my wares at the Chappaqua Antiques Show at West Orchard Elementary. It’s another beautiful Westchester autumn weekend and I’m stuck inside drinking too much coffee and making chit-chat with browsers I’m trying to turn into customers. I take a well-needed break and buy a hot dog from the snack bar which is staffed by very friendly volunteers from the New Castle Historical Society. As the kind older woman slaps some sauerkraut on a frankfurter I realize that I know her. She is the previous owner of our home and the last time I had seen her was at the closing 10 years ago. I reminded her who I was and we had a nice conversation about the house and neighborhood and what a wonderful place it was to raise a family.

As I started to say goodbye and head towards the condiments she told me that selling their home was a painful decision and that she was happy that a nice family had moved into and thrived at the house that had once been their’s. She said they still drove by from time to time to look at an oak tree they had planted and see how it had grown.

The antique show is a nice community event. Not everyone is interested in old things but for those who are, it’s a great opportunity to hunt and gather, amongst neighbors, and search for whatever it is that may be enticing to an individual. There’s a feeling of like-minded good will between the vendors and shoppers because antique collecting is as much of a cult endeavor as is Grateful Dead music, bird-watching or NHL Hockey. I never really expected to have any contact with the previous owners of my house. It was such a pleasant two minute little exchange that it made me reevaluate the slightly unpleasant closing and realize that, of course, it’s a tiny footnote in our story and that perhaps their attitude was absolutely understandable.

Dan is an antique dealer and writer who has lived in Chappaqua for 10 years with his family. He has an ongoing blog on The Huffington Post.

 

Two Worlds

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suzanne-chazinBy Suzanne Chazin

 Writers are always told to ‘write what you know.’ I’ve lived in Chappaqua for 15 years and I’m chagrined to admit that aside from one romantic scene set in a restaurant on King Street where Waka Asian Bistro now stands, my first three published novels contained nothing about Chappaqua.

When I returned to writing mystery novels after almost a decade away, I knew I wanted to set my new book in Chappaqua and the surrounding vicinity. But a book is such a tremendous investment of energy; I knew I could never sustain it unless I was writing about something I cared about deeply.

As it happened, I had started volunteering at Neighbor’s Link in Mount Kisco, helping immigrants use computers to study English. My Spanish is very limited, but thanks to another bilingual volunteer, I began to learn a little about the people who came to the center. I met a man who often went hungry the first winter he spent in Westchester. I met a woman who slept surrounded by stuffed animals to keep the memories of a brutal childhood at bay. I met smart, ambitious people who’d had to surrender their educations and their childhoods to put food on their families’ tables. I heard about harrowing journeys, tearful partings. In my more than two decades as a journalist, I’d never encountered so many dramatic and poignant stories in one place.

Suddenly, I found myself driving down familiar streets and seeing them as they might look through an immigrant’s eyes. At the Chappaqua train station, I thought about the man who’d spent two hours there trying to get back to Mount Kisco after his employer dropped him off. He didn’t speak enough English to figure out how to buy a ticket or which side of the track he needed to wait on. He was afraid to ask for help.

Driving through a stretch of wooded back roads, I thought about a homesick live-in nanny who found herself trapped in a big house in the middle of the woods each day, miles from town and unable to drive. At a local food store, I recalled the young woman whose immigrant mother worked there but had neither the health insurance nor the income to afford the arthritis medications she needed.

I saw boys leaving Greeley and thought about the young gardener who couldn’t go back to Guatemala to visit his dying mother. I picked up my daughter at Westorchard and thought about the housekeeper who only knew about her young children’s daily activities when they called long distance from Ecuador.

Some days it seemed, I was straddling between two entirely different worlds—spending my mornings talking to people who’d had to leave their families, sometimes for years, to provide for them. Then spending my afternoons fretting over some small inconvenience that ultimately didn’t merit the worry I’d invested. I gained such a deep appreciation for the little things I had previously taken for granted: family vacations, the flurry of college applications scattered across my son’s bedroom floor, the nightly rituals that accompanied tucking my daughter into bed. My own parents were both immigrants. And although they had never known the deprivations of the people I spoke to, they too had felt the dislocation that comes from being a stranger in a strange land. My father can still recall the moment his teacher made him get up in class to speak Russian when all he wanted was to be able to speak English like every other kid.

Here was a subject I felt passionate enough about to devote the 18 months or so it takes to draft a novel. I blended Chappaqua and Mount Kisco into a fictional ‘Lake Holly’ where wealth and want coexist in full view of one another like two sides of a pane of glass and Land of Careful Shadows was born.

For me, Chappaqua will always have the cozy blanket feel of a small town where children scatter like marbles across the soccer fields on weekends and neighbors meet up with one another at the library or the train station or over coffee at Susan Lawrence. But I know too, that there is an alternate world that exists right outside my door. And I try to open myself up to it as much as I can.

Suzanne Chazin has lived in Chappaqua for 15 years and in Mount Kisco for five before that. She is the author of three novels published by Putnam: The Fourth Angel, Flashover and Fireplay. She has volunteered with several immigrant organizations in Westchester County and has spent the past several years compiling the true stories of immigrants in conjunction with the Westchester Hispanic Coalition. She is currently shopping a novel based on her research called Land of Careful Shadows. Her website is: www.suzannechazin.com

Ode to Grace

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A poem written by Nancy Huehnergarth and shared with about 175 attendees celebrating with Grace on March 14 at Crabtree’s Kittle House.

 

New Castle is small
Just a spit of a place
But larger than life
Is one resident named Grace

She had a great vision
For a town magazine
So she launched Inside Chappaqua
And became our news queen

Soon the residents noticed
That amidst their junk mail
Was an upstart new journal
That told quite a tale

Who’d have thought that so many
From Green Lane to Whipporwill
Had such interesting stories
And they weren’t Bill or Hill

Grace canvassed New Castle
And the town’s cul-de-sacs
She broke trailblazing stories
Like the best place to wax

Her in-depth interviews
With notable residents
Reminded town citizens
We boast more than Presidents

As a loyal town booster
She embodied “Shop Local”
To support her advertisers
She became very vocal

Soon her friends were afraid
To go shop at the malls
Cause if Grace learned you went
She would roll her eyeballs

Before IC was started
If you wanted town news
You could hear it from friends
But it was colored by their views
To have a real magazine
Covering the good and the solemn
Is a blessing for Chappaqua
As is Grace’s monthly column

After 10 years in Chappaqua
Covering every good story
Grace is famous in town
And enjoys all the glory

But fame has its price
Lack of privacy’s loony
Grace would have to move to Rye
If she dated George Clooney

Speaking of celebrities
We all were agape
When Grace traveled to Africa
With the Secretary of State

But she almost didn’t make it
This chronic overachiever
When she passed out stone cold
From her shot for Yellow Fever

The journalists she traveled with
Had superior gloats
But a few days into Africa
They asked Grace for her notes!

Inside Chappaqua’s journey
Into the hyper-local scene
Is a lesson in tenacity
And how to start a magazine

Since IC was launched
And began to ascend
Local journals have proliferated
But Grace started the trend!

Grace, we all want to thank you
For thinking outside the box
You’re the best thing in New Castle
Inside Chappaqua rocks!

How Social Media will Kill you…(if you let it!)

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eve_marx By Eve Marx

There’s been a lot of buzz about the destructive powers of social media and it being a threat to civilization. Social media can wreak havoc. If you don’t believe me, just follow the tweets of any Fox News anchor or Bret Easton Ellis. Facebook, which for years seemed so benign, has been targeted as a scourge and the ultimate time waster. But with social media so ingrained into my daily life (I need those Real Housewife updates and checking to see who’s retweeted me), I do wonder how badly social media is hurting me. Is it as deleterious to my health as, say, heroin, or is it just nasty, like a cupcake addiction?

A friend allowed her own social media habits have made her lazy. Hours frittered away on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter have resulted in a laundry pile up. She no longer finishes books and excercises less than she used to. 
I get it. Entire mornings have vaporized for me, spent trolling entertainment sites to see who wore what on the red carpet.

Social media is so huge it has its own hashtag. Bashing social media is now a popular pastime. One powerful social media site rhetorically asked if our on-line habits are turning adults into tweens. Duh! My own I.Q. has circled the drain as my communication skills devolve to the point where my go-to words are “omg,” “tmi,” “brb,” and “lol,” for everything. Thanks to Twitter, I’ve mastered reducing all my thoughts into 140 characters. But has it ruined me, or, more importantly, civilization? Let’s investigate.

Getting news via social media means I watch less TV. On the surface, this sounds good, right? Less time watching the antics of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” but also less time with intelligent programming, like CNN. Does following Perez Hilton on Twitter count as news information?

Thanks to social media, instead of phoning, I’d rather text or FB inbox. OK, but does it matter? Besides your old Aunt Betty, who talks on the phone?

Is there any point discussing an important topic when you can send a link? It’s so much easier to let someone else sell your position on say, gun control, for you, isn’t it? Plus you’re spared the drudgery of research.

If I find three articles to support my political leanings, that means I’m right, right? And the Huffington Post is the ultimate authority on almost anything. Right?

Social media promotes hypochondria. Addicted to webmd.com and mayoclinic.com? Shhh, me, too. Those gruesome close ups of eczema, rosacea, and the heartbreak of psoriasis? I’m riveted. When you’ve got the web, who needs a dermatologist?

Thanks to social media, I’m a recluse. Once upon a time I took the train into the city. I went to museums. I went to galleries. Now I go nowhere and just tool around the web. Oh, btw, my rear end is also fatter. The upside is thanks to social media I know having a big behind is good because every woman wants to look like the Kardashians who sport their  “donkey booty.”

I used to look things up; now I Google. Name one person who uses the library or even a dictionary anymore. Is Wikipedia a reliable source? Hmm.

Social media can lead to becoming extremely judgmental. Social media all have a feature telling you what your friends are reading/sharing/viewing.. Now you know all your friends’ louche secrets. How can that be good?

I used to have friends. Now my friends are all virtual. It’s comforting when you post you have the flu and a dozen friendly folk post right back, “Aw, feel better!” But will they knock on your door and deliver chicken soup? Not really.

Beddington coverSocial media undercuts, even trumps, my most intimate moments. The true definition of intercourse includes conversation, a back and forth, a sharing. Experts say having TV in the bedroom spoils intimacy. Now bring your tablet or iPhone into bed and watch what happens. My guess is that unless you’re watching Andy Cohen Live and tweeting him, nothing.

Eve Marx is a sex and relationship expert, journalist, and author. Her most recent novel is BEDDINGTON PLACE: Watch Your Back, Cover Your Tracks, is available on Amazon.com in print and Kindle versions.