Deborah Paul

One of my most vivid teen memories involves a Monday-morning pep rally in the Broad Ripple High School gym, after Coach Gene Ring’s Rockets won the sectionals, then regionals, and secured a trip to the 1963 semi-state. As the rock-star players filed onto the floor wearing varsity sweaters, the students in the bleachers went wild. Dressed in our own uniforms of stitched-down pleated skirts and cardigans, my girlfriends and I jumped up and down ’til our eyeballs rattled, screeching like banshees. The rumble was deafening, the kind you can feel way down in your gut.

Over the last couple of years, I have seen, in person, the following performers: Willie Nelson, Tony Bennett, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason, Garrison Keillor, Candice Bergen, Bill Cosby, Angela Lansbury, and James Earl Jones. Common among these celebrities is “maturity,” and, pardon the insensitivity, plenty of it. In fact, rough math indicates that their combined age approximates the 700-year-old mummy recently discovered in China.

My father came home from work every day with grease under his fingernails. His place of business was a southside auto-parts yard the family referred to as “the store.” The first thing he did upon coming home in the evening was scrub his hands with Lava soap, and even then, you could see the faint but indelible trace of black.

My 5-year-old granddaughter and I like to play the Tea Party Game, in which you spin an arrow to determine which cardboard food item—finger sandwiches, petits fours, fruit—to put on your cardboard plate, and at what point you get your napkins, utensils, and other necessities. The first one whose plate is filled and pretty place setting completed wins. She cheats, though, thinking I don’t see her re-spin, lightning-fast, when the arrow points to “Lose a piece.” If she already has a dessert and the arrow points to that category again, she claims it’s “on the line!” The competitive streak runs fast and furious in our family, and I do not judge.

You can buy chairs at the drugstore. Granted, the selection consists of remote-controlled lift chairs for the old or infirm, but still. They are chairs, they cost $799, and you can buy them at the drugstore. On my last visit, I was tempted to try one just to see how far it would launch me, but I was afraid someone I knew might see. So I moved on to the “walking sticks”—canes, for crying out loud—and blood-pressure cuffs. Those devices I expect to see at the drugstore, but chairs? That blows me away.

I fell for it, every last bit. There we were, cherished granddaughter in tow, standing in line at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, Disney World’s excessive tribute to all things princess. If you wanted to be transformed into, say, Cinderella or Snow White, you could buy hairstyling, “shimmering makeup,” nail polish, sash, face gem, and cinch bag for $59.95. But who could settle for such a paltry princess makeover when for $189.95 you got the works—glittery costume, tiara, wand, and all—and a personal photo portfolio? 

Every year about this time, I get the back-to-school itch. The smell of plastic pencil cases fills the air, and I dream about the days when I broke in a pair of stiff new oxfords, donned an itchy Black Watch plaid jumper, and trudged off to School 84. 

An alley connects the downtown office building where I work to Illinois Street. Even though the pathway is a nifty shortcut to Panera Bread, where I like to pick up a nice BBQ Chopped Chicken salad, I never walk it alone. Colleagues find my reluctance silly, as no one to our recollection has been assaulted, murdered, or dismembered there. But my thought process works differently: If something bad is going to happen, it probably will happen to me.

Dear Mayor Ballard:

Reading other people’s bucket lists is fun, but I’ve never had the desire to compile one myself. Risk-takers yearn to climb Mount Everest and sail the blue Pacific, but boring people such as I are satisfied spending their days bundled up in an afghan while watching reruns of The Big Bang Theory and eating Double Stuf Oreos.

Some children aren’t satisfied with their names, but I always liked mine: Deborah Lynn Dorman. Or Debra Lynn Dorman—I was never sure, as my birth certificate says “Debra,” and somewhere along the way I decided to use the biblical version because it sounded more romantic. My mother waved away the inconsistency, saying I mattered to her far more than what I was called. Either way, the name had a melodic cadence, and I was proud to say it out loud. And unlike my given name, my surname was certain. Dorman.

On an overcast day this past autumn, I sat across a table at a downtown sandwich shop with my niece Wendy, sobbing. She was there to provide a shoulder and cajole me into eating the chicken-noodle soup that had become my staple since being diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer a few weeks before.

Our own Deborah Paul was in L.A. for the 2012 Oscars, red carpet and all.

One of my first writing gigs was a magazine column called “Perspicacity.” Nobody, including me, knew what this meant, although the dictionary defines “perspicacious” as having acute mental vision or discernment. My job was to apply such selectivity as it related to new stores, i.e., discover them and tantalize readers with a sparkling yet reliable description. I don’t know if I came to love shopping because of the column or loved the column because of shopping, but since 1979 I’ve enjoyed the quest.

I miss the phone book. A lot. I realize this makes me sound like Andy Rooney, who proclaimed everything was better the way it used to be, but I am who I am. Old—not Andy Rooney old, at the time of his death, but up there. Set in my ways. Resistant to change. For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept two phone books—the white and yellow pages—in my bottom desk drawer, the one deep enough to accommodate the weight without rolling off its hinges.