My late sister Lucy introduced me to Oliver Sacks back in the late 1980s. Not literally. She didn’t grab me by the sleeve, pull me over at a cocktail party and say: “Hey, Ame, this is Dr. Sacks,” introducing me to the broad, bald Brit who spent his career spelunking and explaining the deepest recesses of the brain. No, Lucy simply called me up one day and announced, “‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat’ — you need to read it.”

I read it. And almost everything else he ever published. After Lucy took her own life in 1992, Sacks became, for me, both an invisible thread connecting me to my sister and a way to understand her better — a way to process all that had happened to her, all the temporal-lobe dysfunction and unremitting suicidality that resulted from it. Reading his accounts of brains and brokenness, I felt closer to my sister, more grateful to her, more awed by her strength and stick-to-it-ive-ness in staying alive as long as she did. I learned about the plasticity of the brain, the strangeness of it. I learned about resilience and fortitude and love. All of that was in his books. All of that illuminated his writing and, as I read it, my own eccentric and rattled brain.

Lucy loved him. So did I. We loved him because he treated people like her — people with serious and mysterious neurological woes — with profound comprehension and compassion, never discounting their humanity for the sake of science, never forgetting that the colorblind artist or the autistic anthropologist or the locked-in Parkinson’s patient had joys, depths, yearnings that fell outside the order and disorders of neurology. Instead, the exactitude of his science informed every case study with an exquisite, clear-eyed pathos. His patients weren’t less human because of their problems. They were more human, more realized and whole.

I read a ton of Sacks after Lucy died, cranking through his best-sellers as well as his less-read works — “Hearing Voices,” “Uncle Tungsten.” I returned to him again in late 2011, when, exhausted by my husband’s six-month descent into insomnia, anxiety, depression and suicide, I gave up on easy explanations — there bloody hell weren’t any — and returned to the voice that had always described our oddball human brains with a reverence, a poetry, that saw beyond the broken bits and found creativity, personality and a fabulous, fertile quirk.

I learned from Oliver Sacks that no brain is a simple thing, that no life is easy. But what beauty lies in them both. What wisdom lies in opening ourselves to their mysteries. What gratitude I owe him for opening my mind and my heart, too.

Learning of his death, I felt as though I’d lost a friend. I’d written to him a few months back, after he published that column announcing his terminal cancer. My words felt grievously insufficient, but I thanked him for living his life and thus enriching mine. I included a copy of my latest book, but not because I wanted or expected him to read it; I only wanted to give him something, although that, too, felt grievously insufficient. He had given me so much.

This morning, I expressed these sentiments again. I hope he heard me, and I hope he hears me now, although I imagine the heavens are noisy with shouts of gratitude. Whether he hears me really doesn’t matter. I have to say it once more. Goodbye, Dr. Sacks. And thank you.

So I was walking back from Stewart’s, hauling a bag and a backpack full of milk and milk products and chocolate and chocolate products, when I came upon the crosswalk dividing That Side of New Scotland Avenue from This Side. Both sides are generally pretty busy with people busy errand-running, lunch-eating and stroller-pushing — even mid-day, even mid-week, even mid-August. The city painted a crosswalk at the intersection three or four years ago, adding a swell in-street pedestrian-alert sign that’s been replaced a few times after getting run over by resentful motorists or snatched by aliens mistaking them for stick-figure two-dimensional humans, or whatever.

The sign was up when I stuck my toe tentatively into That Side of the crosswalk. I don’t have a death wish. I know enough not to thump my chest, howl I AM A PEDESTRIAN! YIELD TO ME! RAAHHH! and stride boldly into a busy intersection. I’m not THAT stupid.

On the other hand, it peeves me when motorists just, you know, act like I’m not there. Or act like I’m there but I don’t count, or maybe I do count, but not in the way that cars do, and definitely not under THESE circumstances, i.e., any circumstances involving IMPORTANT THEM and THEIR IMPORTANT CARS. And what do I think I’m doing anyway, moving around a city of any sort without the aid of internal combustion?

Drivers are getting better at stopping, I must say. They stop most often when I try to make eye contact and wave at them friendly-like, as if to say, “Hi! I’m here, and I would like to cross the street without dying and/or spilling my milk and chocolate products!” This seems to either humanize me or guilt them into submission, maybe both. Then, to express my profoundest gratitude, I issue them an even friendlier-like wave that says, “Thank you SOOOO much for pausing in your busy day to let me pass without a life-crushing incident!” They smile. I smile. Happiness all around. Humanity and civility prevail! Hurrah!

Usually, the drivers who don’t let me cross just flat-out ignore me. When I try to make eye-contact, they resist, turning their square jaws and steely eyes straight toward the horizon (or where the horizon would be, if we had such things around here). In return, I smile broadly in gratitude and wave as they pass. I love love love doing this to people. They look soooooo confused. Their poor widdle wide-eyed faces! They ask so many wondewing questions! Such as: “Waaaaaah?” and “WTF? Did that Weird and Insignificant Walking Thing just wave at me?” and “Do I know her?” and “Did I do something nice to her that I don’t recall?” and “Holy holy SHIT! Is that my Aunt Brenda? Have I forgotten what she looks like? Does she live around here? Is she that weird? Does walk?”

It is so much fun. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

And so, on my most recent walk home from Stewart’s, I took a hesitant step into traffic and tried for eye contact. Cars whooshed past. I waggled my right leg. More cars whooshed past. I waggled my leg a little more, kick-line style, accompanying this chic move with a jazz hand and a fetching smile. Yet more cars whooshed past.

Finally, I caught the eye of a woman driving a BMW. She looked at me! Victory! I smiled! Another victory! I waved my hand as if to say, “Beemer Lady, hello there! You’re soooo nice! I can tell! Please stop for me! If you let me cross the street without killing or maiming me or my dark chocolate Milanos, I will love you forever! I will praise you to the heavens! I will tattoo your name across my forehead! Across my children’s foreheads! Right now! Watch me! Pass the ink!”

And do you know what she did? You don’t. There’s no way you could know. She DID NOT LET ME CROSS, although I’m happy to say she didn’t kill or maim me, either. Instead, as she whooshed through the crosswalk, she gave me a dismissive backhand wave — sort of a lazy, whole-handed flip-off, as though the entire appendage functioned as Just That One Critical Finger, which she honestly couldn’t be bothered to extend — and rolled her eyes with a little twitchy grimace of annoyance. I repeat, she ROLLED HER EYES. As in: “Puh-LEEZE. I can’t be bothered. We BOTH know you don’t count, O Weird and Insignificant Walking Person. As if! I’m so bored by you and your groceries, I want to vomit.”

In reply, I did not smile. I did not wave. Then again, I did not give her the finger, either, or even a whole-handed approximation of same. So I think I behaved pretty well, under the circumstances. I didn’t even stick out my tongue at her tailpipe! Seriously! Be impressed. I am.

Anyway, there was traffic behind her, and I still had to get to This Side of the street. I stuck out my foot again and looked out, hopeful. The very next car was a shiny black SUV driven by some young dude, and I caught his eye. He let me cross.

I smiled and waved. He smiled and waved. Humanity and civility prevailed.

The whole flap over Trump’s latest Trumpism has me thinking about middle-school lunchrooms. It’s like we’re all trapped at a table with our half-eaten mystery meat and the kid who won’t shut up. You know him (or her). We all do. He’s a show-off. He’s mean. He bad-mouths people behind their backs, dishing his snark at the fat kid with the butt crack, the skinny kid with the zits, the girl with the crooked bangs, the quiet boy who draws cartoons in a corner and, in a nasal whisper as she walks past, the lunchroom aide with the cheap dye job and the shuffling gait of a lifer.

We’re all too mesmerized by this kid to object. We can’t even look away. His air of relaxed authority and entitlement — and don’t all mean kids have that? — suggests that everyone everywhere ought to be listening, no matter the inanity or offensiveness of the content. I’ll never forget the sight of one such mean kid, a rawboned girl, holding forth on the playground with her fist on her sharply jutting hip. I don’t remember her name, or anything she said, or about whom, but I remember the crowd of girls huddled around her. I remember the expression on her face: snotty. I remember the angle of her elbow: 90 degrees. I even remember the color of her bell-bottoms: gray. And I remember that none of us moved.

So when Trump got in trouble, post-debate, with that remark about Megyn Kelly bleeding from her “wherever,” I was a little surprised. For one, I think I might — MIGHT — actually believe him when he says he didn’t intend it as a comment on her menstrual cycle; the “wherever” sounded more to me like the inexact blah-blah-blahing of someone who’s talking too fast for his brain. Also, after all the hateful, outrageous and objectifying remarks we’ve heard from him so far, THAT’S the one that finally incites widespread outrage? Talking about Penny Period? THAT gets him booted from the lunch table and disinvited from the RedState Gathering (and does anyone else appreciate the rosy irony of the name?).

And then I remembered those old tampon ads with clips of women in flowy white dresses intercut with shots of sanitary products being doused in crystalline blue liquid (not ferrous at all), and it hit me: EVERYONE IS GROSSED OUT! THAT EXPLAINS IT! It’s the lunchroom factor! If any woman learns anything from middle school, it’s that you do not talk in public about menstruating. You do not. Men don’t want to hear about the real-world phenomenon, much less talk about it (another reason I’m inclined to believe Trump), and women don’t generally raise the subject unless they’re in the ladies’ room and in sudden need of a Tampax. Outside that restroom, no one wants to associate bleeding with female plumbing. The most anyone ever does is make cracks about PMS, but (news flash) all the fun hormonal stuff occurs BEFORE the onset. That’s why they call it “pre.”

Maybe Trump intended the remark as outright misogyny, maybe not. He’s said plenty else that might and should have sent the embarrassed middle-schoolers shrugging away, cafeteria trays in hand, in search of another table — but nothing so far has sparked this type of revulsion. Whether he meant it or not, he introduced menses into the national conversation, and the lunchroom is officially squicked out.

People are always telling me I’m an extrovert, and I’m not. This happened again the other day, and my response, as usual, was: NOOOOO! I’m not! I swear! I only seem like an extrovert!

OKAY, all right, so I write and blab in public about all of my deepest thoughts and my most horrifically painful tragedies; I’ve written two, you know, books devoted to said tragedies;  I did a TEDx talk and a “Moth” story on them; and I am ready and willing to discuss them with any total stranger who approaches me in almost any context. Almost. I also happen to talk a lot. A shitload, really. Total windbag. I am more than capable of being stupidly loud, even when I shouldn’t. I like meeting new people, I enjoy parties, I’m forceful in an argument, and I don’t slink away quietly from crowds.

But none of this means I’m an extrovert, because I also savor long stretches alone to recharge my batteries, though the realities of my life mean this only rarely happens. But when I’m able, I am perfectly happy to spend time in my own head, whether I’m reading contentedly on the porch or spacing out, my unfocused eyeballs twirling like gaudy carnival rides while my body blobs bonelessly in a slump. I do that a shitload, too. Just ask my offspring, who’ve been known to jump out and down while waving their hands maniacally in front of my face, shouting MOM MOM MOM MOM MOM or saying outrageous untruths just to test me, most of them involving the construction HEY GUESS WHAT MOM I’M _____ (fill in the blank).

though i suppose only an extrovert would upload this

Maybe I’m an extrovert who feels like an introvert, or an introvert passing as extroverted. Or it could be I’m an introvert turned outward: someone who popped out of the birth canal with her head stuck up her moist little newborn tuckus only to have the hands of God and fate slowly, if not always gently, yank it free. As a kid I was profoundly, agonizingly shy — quiet, klutzy, pigeon-toed, unsure, never one to speak out in class, only ever at ease around my parents and older sister or my few close friends. I perceived the world and its confident occupants from within a chubby bubble of insecurity and confusion. I sometime spent hours — whole days — alone in the yard or the woods behind my Connecticut house, making little forts inside hedges and stands of bendy saplings, hoarding leaves and rocks and knick-knacks in holes dug in the ground, talking to myself, daydreaming constantly, lying on brittle grass or swinging on branches and snuggling the roots of my favorite tree. It was a Norway maple, and its name was Sweetheart.

But then I enrolled at the teensy all-girls school where my mother taught music, and I began to play sports — soccer especially. I found that my klutziness did not preclude athleticism, my pigeon-toed-ness did not prevent me from disco-dancing (with imported boys), and my shyness did not prohibit me from speaking up in classes so small that I was, on occasion, the only student. By the time I got to college I’d figured out how to talk in larger groups. I took a public-speaking class. I went to frat parties and acted drunk, even though I wasn’t.

Then, in 1992, my childhood family started dying, and I started talking and writing about it. I kept talking and writing after my husband died in 2011. None of this was my idea. I didn’t set out for a side-career in gut-spewing grief confessionals. It just happened. Life happened. But I didn’t change inside; I only learned how to live on the outside, how to face it rather than fear it, navigate it, find joy in it, fill myself with a new kind of energy from its stores.

So, no, I’m not an extrovert, but I suppose I’m not an introvert any longer, either. Better to call me an extroverted introvert, an introverted extrovert — an “ambivert,” as one personality test labeled me. “The Chameleon,” pronounced another, although that makes me feel like a slimy and shiftless master (matron?) of disguise. No test so far has called me a “bivert,” “panvert,” “omnivert,” “megavert,” “supravert,” “super-de-duper-vert,” “hermaphrovert,” “wowza-vert” or “who-gives-a-vert,” but believe you me, I’m waiting for it.

Or, hold on! I know! Here’s an idea: Maybe I’m just a human being who’s had one heck of an eventful life, and maybe it’s had some lingering effect on me and my approach to the world. It may also be that labels are USELESS AND SIMPLISTIC CRAP, and I should ignore them, slinking timidly away into my fort made of saplings. But only after I’ve blogged about it.

*that* doesn’t look like a butt.

Mama had her notions. Yes, she did. She was a smart lady, a world-class violinist, a Barnard-educated philosophy student, a voracious reader, an expansive thinker, a sharp-as-a-tack witness to human behavior. And she was always spouting opinions ON EVERYTHING. Many of these opinions made sense to me, if not at first, eventually. As in: “There’s such a thing as being so open-minded that your brains fall out.” And: “Every teenage boy has a hollow leg. He fills up his stomach and just keeps going,” which, now that I am responsible for the housing and feeding of one such person, I have learned to be true. She also said a few things that still strike me as somewhat harsh: “When your kids enter puberty, you just want to take them out back and shoot them,” and I’m profoundly grateful she never carried this out herself.

And then there were her mega-mondo-bizarro opinions, her beautifully wacky theses based on either A) questionable science, B) outright quack science; C) science she swore to be mainstream but could never actually cite when questioned; and D) her own rather stunningly insightful observations. Included the last category, which I’ve mentioned before in print and will never tire of repeating, was her First Theory of Faces governing the waning careers of certain regional TV newscasters: according to Mama, these people never hit the big time because their faces came, in the course of aging, to resemble buttocks. For all I know, she was right. I had no better theory.

Also included in category D) were a couple of hypotheses that (I am flabbergasted to now report) I found to be correct. Among other things, Mama SWORE that earlobes kept growing into old age, and yes, it turns out they do, although I must note that she was wrong when she claimed they grew after death, too. I was also a  little skeptical of her theories governing malice and human physiognomy — her Second Theory of Faces — which postulated evil in the upside-down portraits of famous people. According to this one, you could see the despotic malevolence in someone’s eyes if you just flipped the photo on its head. (Try it with Hitler. Or don’t. He’s pretty ugly either way.) So far, science has not backed her up on this one. You see anything that supports her, please send me the link.

But Mama also SWORE that early homo sapiens must have had sex with Neanderthals at some point, and this one always made me laugh. HA HA HA MAMA, THAT’S HILARIOUS, I’d say, at which point Mama would cock her head, jut her chin in her saucy little way, mention someone we both knew with prominent eyebrows and pronounce: “Come on. X has a brow ridge. X is proof. One of X‘s ancestors mated with a Neanderthal!”

Sure, Mama! Ha ha ha! Your Third Theory of Faces! Whatever you say!

And then, holy human evolution, it turned out she was right. Time for me to check the mirror. Could be my face looks like an ass.

I’ve never liked cars. They aren’t my friends. Often they’re my enemies. I can admire them from afar and even nurse crushes on them, especially all those hunky and muscular sports cars that never sat next to me in the middle-school lunchroom, and I often fantasize (chin on hand, eyes gazing at the clouds) about my vehicular ideal: a manual-transmission, four-wheel-drive Prius station wagon with a roof rack and a collapsible third row that gets 60 miles to the gallon, laughs mockingly at the snow and costs $20,000 brand frickin’ new. You find me that car, I will not only buy it, I will marry it.

My ideal car does not drive itself. I don’t care what Google says or does. You know how you want your spouse or lover to be independent and fine without you, but not THAT independent and fine without you? You want him or her to follow your express directions, at least in theory. You don’t want him to possess total autonomy and happiness in your absence, like, say, given a choice between you and a bloomin’ onion, the onion might just win out.

Well, I don’t want my car to be totally autonomous, either. I want it to NEED me. What’s more, I want to make some of the driving decisions on my own, such as: when to determine that a child on a sidewalk is about to chase into the street after a ball; when to downshift from third to second and second to first instead of braking, because it’s snowing, I’m driving toward a stop sign, and I can see a shiny slippery schmear of shit on the road some 30 feet ahead; when to wave another car ahead of me in a traffic jam, because someone just waved me in, and, you know, The Golden Rule; when to determine, if only from the tint in his window or the narcissistic gleam in his eye, that some fathead is about to cut me off.

Should I give him the finger? Probably not. That’s my decision, too.

One more thing. I DON’T TRUST COMPUTERS. Motherboards crash. On everything. Including cars. Someday, if you’re unlucky, I’ll tell you about the Mazda that broke my heart and my bank account. Also, even when they’re working well, computers are testy, moody, evil and capricious things that wish me ill and will not be persuaded. You want to know how well I get along with them at work? Just roll down your window next time you’re near Albany-Shaker Road around 4 pm on any given workday, and you’ll hear my faint but audible howls of pain and supplication — my PLEASE PLEASE PLEASEs and NO NO NOs and SHIT SHIT SHITs and then COMPUTER, I BEG YOU, I BEG YOU and finally OKAY, LISTEN, THIS IS WHAT WE’LL DO: IF YOU LET ME FILE THIS ONE STORY, I PROMISE YOU A LIFE OF SERVITUDE.

And then, thank goodness, I drive myself home.

i love it

Have you seen the most recent discharge from WalletHub? (I am NOT calling it “news.”) Apparently, according to their latest Ranking of Things That Don’t Need To Be Ranked, the #1 most patriotic state in the country is Virginia! Yay for Virginians! Clap clap clap clap. Maine is sixth, New Hampshire eighth. Well done, neighbors! New Jersey is wayyyyyy down there at 49. Oops. Coming in dead last? You guessed it: New York State! Yep, fellow Empire occupants, we are THE  least-patriotic Americans in the land.

In case you’re curious, and of course you are, the WalletHub methodology took into account military enlistments; veterans per capita (New York is 50th); Peace Corps volunteers; percentage of people who voted in the last election (46th); and volunteer rate (49th). I don’t aim to pick this apart nit by nit, but two thoughts. 1) Aren’t Peace Corps volunteers sort of, I don’t know, globally minded? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And 2) Isn’t it possible that New York boasts a lower rate of election participation because it’s home to so many recent immigrants who can’t yet vote? Who come here because they love the spirit and principles of this country and want to make themselves a part of it? Isn’t that patriotism, too?

Beyond that, the list cracks me up. When it doesn’t make me cry. I’m exaggerating; it does neither. Instead, it makes me slap my little wormy-squirmy un-American hand (which is free because it’s not waving a flag) against my pasty forehead at this simplistic definition of patriotism. Guess what, O Wise Ones at WalletHub: Just because I never enlisted in the military or fought in a war doesn’t mean I don’t love my country. And just because cranky-ass New Yorkers complain a heck of a lot more than people from other states doesn’t mean we’re not happy to be in this big, bubbling pot o’ diversity that we’re grateful to call home.

Yesterday, driving back from the Women’s World Cup in Montreal, I pulled up with my son at the border and readied our passports for inspection. Looking out at those gigantic capital letters proclaiming UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, I felt a shiver of thanksgiving.

You know, I said to my kid. You know, I love my country.

“Me, too,” he said.

As much as I complain about its screw-ups, I love it, I said. And you know why? Because here we’re ALLOWED to screw up. That’s the whole idea. We can be stupid and wrong-headed. We can make mistakes and stumble forward. That’s the beauty of it.

“Yeah. We get to vote. There are countries where people can’t. And we can say what we want about anyone, even the president.”

And not get arrested. And not get killed.

“And not get arrested. And not get killed,” he agreed.

I thought about this some more. About checks and balances, and Congress and SCOTUS, and the arguments over gay marriage and Obamacare that probably didn’t just end. Arguments never end in this country. We are, all of us, always free to get into a lather over anything we like. To speak out against injustice, however we define it. To be utter disagreeable ding-dongs. To bump the country in this direction, then that direction, then maybe the wrong direction without some patriarchal, dictatorial hand swooping in to save us. To have faith that we’ll right ourselves, sometime.

I remember my mother talking about this — the genius of America being just this openness to making a hash out of things. “Democracy is messy,” she used to say. This is what the Russians failed to realize after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This business of freedom isn’t easy.  It isn’t perfect. You can’t just shut people up. I love my country precisely because it’s as complicated, imperfect and loud-mouthed as everyone who’s lucky enough to be here.

And think about it: which state is more complicated, less perfect and louder than New York? I love my country, and I rest my case.

Not too long ago, I got into a shouting match with a guy over a racist bumper sticker. Where, I won’t say. But it happened, and it happened suddenly, and by the time it was over I felt shaken, frustrated and foam-at-the-mouth angry at the refusal of this or any person, anywhere at any time, who insists on displaying a racially loaded image that causes people pain.

I’ll confess I did most of the shouting. I started out talking, then got interrupted, then talked a little more loudly, then got interrupted again, and then I talked even more loudly, then got accused of yelling, at which point I agreed to pipe down if the guy only listened to what I was trying to say. When he replied by loudly revving the internal combustion engine he was controlling at the time, I, in turn, responded by shouting some more.

It was a futile conversation, if that’s what it was. It felt more like I was slamming my forehead against a steel wall outfitted with spikes. Nothing moved, and it hurt. My initial stab at communication began when, after seeing this bumper sticker that made my eyes bleed, I decided to pen a note of dismay and leave it on the windshield.

The sticker conveyed a message I’d seen before, on other bumpers. It was political. It was also stupid. Normally the sentiment just makes my eyes roll, not bleed. But this time, it was accompanied by a cartoon image that recalled age-old racist stereotypes going back to Stepin’ Fetchit.

I wanted to say all this in my note. What I wrote instead was this: “Your bumper sticker is an offensive racist caricature. Please remove it.”

I slipped the paper under a wiper blade and walked away. Less than a minute later, I turned back and saw the guy reading the note. He yanked his head up. Looked around. By that point, I’d already decided to walk over and talk to him.

ME (waving my hand): Excuse me, sir!

HIM (waving my note): Did you leave this note on my windshield?

ME: I did! You need to remove your bumper sticker, sir! It’s really offensive. And if I think it’s offensive, then imagine how it —

HIM: You have no right to leave a note on my windshield.

ME: — if I think it’s offensive, then what about all the black people who —

HIM: I can’t believe you left a note on my windshield.

ME: Listen to me! You’re hurting people with that! It’s the same old caricature from history that —

HIM: You’re yelling at me! And you left a note on my windshield!

ME: I’ll calm down and say this quietly, then. Please, sir. Listen to me.

HIM: Stop yelling at me!

ME (yelling at him for real): Sir! Sir! Listen! Please! It’s so offensive, and you can’t just —

HIM: A note on my windshield. You have no right. (Revving engine.) VROOOM VROOOM.

ME (still yelling at him): Please listen to me, sir!

HIM: VROOOM VROOOM VROOOM.

And that was that. He VROOOMED away.

I’m not saying anything about the guy’s beliefs. I’m just talking about his bumper sticker. I know nothing else about him, unless you count his disaffection for windshield notes and shouting women. Maybe, if I’d taken a different, friendlier tack at lower volume, he might have listened. He might have questioned the picture on his bumper and realized the hurt it caused. Then he might have said, “Oh my God, that’s awful,” and removed it then and there. Maybe this was my lost opportunity to sway a mind.

And just to be clear, I wasn’t outraged by the politics on the sticker; I don’t care. The marketplace of ideas. Freedom of expression. God bless America, etc., etc. But the drawing that accompanied it offended me deeply and, I was sure, directly injured any and all African-Americans who happened to cross paths with his bumper. If my eyes were bleeding, their hearts would be, too.

I recognize that this guy has a protected Constitutional right to display such a thing. But the right doesn’t make it right. It doesn’t mean it’s okay in basic human terms for him or anyone to display anything, a bumper sticker or a Confederate flag, that wounds a segment of the population. Symbols matter. They have weight and meaning beyond their shapes and colors. If they didn’t, would you be reading and understanding these words of mine right now?

And what about the guy that day? Would he understand me, if he listened? If he even tried?

Maybe he’d listen to someone besides me. I hope so. Whoever it is, I hope that Someone sees the sticker and asks him to remove it.

I love soccer. I played it for eight years. I LOVE SOCCER. I can’t play it any longer, because my knees are now decrepit, but I love love love it. I love it so much that one season, I think it was my sophomore year at Hamilton, both my big toenails fell off for reasons that shall remain unspoken (chiefly because I don’t remember) and I TAPED THEM BACK ON TO PLAY SOCCER. I’m not kidding. It’s really totally insane, isn’t it? Like, bonkers. I have visceral, vivid memories of sitting there in my dorm room every day with white athletic tape, binding my feet like some 12th-century Chinese lady from a Division III school in the Song Dynasty.

Now that the Women’s World Cup has started in Canada, I love soccer even more. As a Title IX-er who played the first year Hamilton fielded a women’s varsity team, I’m thilled that anyone anywhere is paying any attention at all. At the same time, I’m baffled by certain people who claim not to like the game (AND THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE) because apparently nothing exciting happens for looooooong stretches of time, just a lot of running around by squat, fast people doing pretty things with their feet, until BOOM BOOM BOOM, something actually does happen, and then the squat, fast people jump and strut fiercely in celebration or shock for about eight seconds before they all go back to running around and doing pretty things with their feet.

I hear these sorts of complaints, which are supposed to explain for me why soccer’s so boring, and in turn I attempt to explain why this is exactly why it’s NOT boring. Why stuff is happening ALL THE TIME, because all that running around with all that pretty footwork actually constitutes stuff happening! It’s not the OPPOSITE of happening. It’s NON-STOP HAPPENING! What’s more, it’s happening so intensely and continuously and suspensefully and beautifully that those of us who like and appreciate soccer (i.e., we who use our heads to view and think, not sit on) can barely tear our eyes away, knowing that the whole thing could suddenly and ecstatically break into one of those BOOM BOOM BOOM moments that change the score.

This is why I love soccer. It feels like living. It feels as though nothing is happening when in fact everything is. Friday night’s 0-0 draw between the U.S. and Sweden, for instance — I was riveted to the screen, knowing that any given pass or feint or cross or shot might put the Americans behind or ahead. Soccer is 99 percent anticipation: There’s always the promise, the tension, the fear, that something explosive could happen on top of everything else already unfolding. And when it happens, it might change everything. It might cause shock or celebration. And then all the squat, fast people, adjusting to this new and weirdly altered reality, will regroup on the field, take a deep breath and go back to running around. Just like life.

In casual conversation not long ago, the subject of tomboys came up. I confessed to being one as a kid, and I cringed. Because I hate that word. It’s simplistic and unfair to children of every stripe and sex, as though being rough-and-tumble and running around in divided legwear somehow defines boyness and outright negates girlness. (Not girliness, another word I hate.)

But I’m using it because that’s what everyone called me back then — to others and to my face, not cruelly but matter-of-factly, the way entomologists might identify a really hairy subspecies of caterpillar — and because there is no other term to describe what and who I was relative to the shellacked, starchy model of femininity that had held sway for decades.

In the 1960s, little girls wore dresses. They just did. From birth. And they had long hair. Perfectly combed, accessorized with pink barrettes. From birth. In addition, girls did not play baseball. Or run around barefoot through the woods, breaking their toes. Or collect Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars, racing them them down the looping plastic track straight across the living room floor while their parents carefully dodged them. Instead, girls collected dolls and sat on their bedroom floors in their plaid cotton skirts, playing with them. Not me. Instead I owned just one, a Barbie, who sat neglected on a shelf for most of her short, sad, plasticky life until I grabbed a pair of paper scissors and cut her hair to a jagged bob — same as I’d done to myself, not long before.

I never understood the term “tomboy” because I never wanted to be a boy, and I never saw my own, beautiful mother — with her short hair, sinewy arms and stick-to-it-ive disposition — as any less of a woman for being adventurous and tough. It made her MORE of a woman as I understood women to be: capable, adaptable and real, with dirt under their fingernails and salt on their brow and unstoppable spunk in the face of difficulty. “Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies glow,” she used to say, with perfect irony, because she and I both sweated buckets.

“Earthy” was Mama’s highest praise for anyone, and that’s what she was, always digging down and building things from the ground up, always articulating the truth and nothing but, always handling any and all crises with humor and fortitude. She often went barefoot. She usually wore pants. She wasn’t a tomboy; she was a hot-shit kick-ass Jeanne-Woman, female and proud, happy to have put her procreative plumbing to use in the most traditional and joyous ways. “Aren’t you glad you’re a girl?” she asked after my oldest was born — the only one of my children she ever met in the flesh, having died only eight months later. All I could say was yes. Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes.

I always did. I just didn’t like being a girl who wore dresses and couldn’t play ball. I liked the freedom of pants. I liked the way I they protected me from bearing my undies to the world, which never struck me as all that difficult or radical a concept, and I never understood why so many people had trouble with it.

Now that I’m older and fonder of skirts and dresses, I still don’t understand it. To me this is an issue apart from the recent, important and heightened sensitivity to transgender people, which is a long time coming — and God bless Bruce Jenner for his stunning and dauntless candor. But what Bruce wears matters a whole lot less than how Bruce feels. It isn’t the heels in his closet that make him a woman, and he was no less a woman inside when he was competing in the Olympics. He was simply a world-class athlete, muscular and spring-wound and fleet, and he would have been no matter where his gender compass pointed or what sort of clothing he wore.

I leave you with the words of Pope Nicholas I, who had this to say about women in breeches. “For whether you or your women wear or do not wear trousers,” he wrote, “neither impedes your salvation nor leads to any increase of your virtue.”

He said said this more than 1,100 years ago. And he didn’t call anyone a tomboy.

Jeanne-Woman, circa 1990