Leftover Easter jelly beans and whiskey not a good combination.

for Carolyn with love

I have taken a long and unexplained absence from this worthy site. The only reason I can offer is that true to my family history I occasionally suffer from delusional psychotic breaks. For example while attending the second funeral of one of my father's siblings (the funerals were only a month apart) and after drinking several glasses of a most excellent Merlot I said, "hey, everybody! The next time we get together let's have it be for a happy reason! Tee hee hee!"  And the next thing I knew I had volunteered to single-handed put together a family reunion. If ever there were ever a motto that sums up my life it would be: it seemed like a good idea at the time. I had a pin once with those words on it. I wish I could find it so I could point to it when the occasion demanded.

And then we acquired a hairy small animal and I don't mean my husband's dwarf aunt with hormonal issues (my apologies to little people everywhere. I love you guys. I have several decorative gnomes around my property. That's how much I love ya.)  So anyway in this other episode when the logic lobe in my brain shut down I decided to get a puppy. I have not owned a dog since my kids were in elementary school and when I divorced I filled my various apartments with cats to rid them of the vermin that were fond of rental property. I'm calling it a mid-to-late-life crisis. Ovaries dry up, get a puppy. You have more chin hair than arm hair, get a puppy. She's a teddy bear girl and she melted my heart with one single cold nose and lick to my cheek. Too late, pe-e-e-e-e. CHLOE! PEE, GODDAMNIT!"  I should probably have been screened by some animal protection organization before making the purchase, what's done is done.

I didn't know I signed on for new baby duty. You haven't seen a more desperate woman than the one shivering in a dog hair smelling housecoat pleading at 3 a.m. in the pouring rain, "please pee, Chloe,

My summer is full and it's barely started. I must go. Chloe is chasing killer rabbits in her dreams. Poor thing, that's the best she'll ever do. Even the squirrels aren't afraid of her.

easter

At Easter I miss her. The year she died, it was July, I packed away her Easter decorations in April and wondered, will this be it?
And it was.

It was a little porcelain bunny plaque in lilac and powder blue shades and she hung it above the door bell on a crooked nail. Today I had this thought. Her townhouse association voted to have cement siding applied to the walls, the stuff doesn't tolerate nails. My mother would have bemoaned the fact that she could not hang that little bunny on the wall any more. The carpenter took down that crooked nail. Well, that's all and good.

How long do I need to mourn her? The setting sun leaves me aloof and alone, too alone. I never thought being alone would be a problem.

I never decorate for Easter.









 

i am not a vacation person

We are in Mexico. I spend my days reading, swimming, walking alone on the beach and trying to avoid eye contact with the other human beings milling about.  And for those of you who are familiar with resort life you know this is damn well impossible.

this is the guy

Why must the most obnoxious people always sit next to me? Is there a sign attached to my back that says, if you are a true pain in the ass please feel free to plunk yourself down. And tell your wife to keep inhaling those stinky European cigarettes that smell like burnt  chocolate. Oh, and thank you for smoking that huge honking cigar in the pool while I was swimming this morning.  I can only hope you bought it from one of those skanky beach vendors which means it probably contains traces of fertilizer or glue.

I am not a vacation person. Granted, it sounds good in theory but I come from a family where having a good time is prohibited. My father and his siblings were not allowed toys. They were put on this earth to work and be serious about it and everything else. German heritage you ask me? You had better be able to account for some level of productivity every waking hour of the day.

Currently, I am sitting in my room and my skin is reddened and bumpy due to an allergic reaction to my new sunscreen. People look at my spotty skin, shudder and turn the other way. This may just work out. I'm ready to go home. I can't log onto Netflix and worse, this place doesn't stock Coke products.

At the airport I buy duty free Estee Lauder cologne. The clerk looks closely at me and hands me a free sample of neck firming cream and some sparkly pink lipstick which I will pass onto my granddaughter. It's too princessy for an old broad and the cream? The wrinkly rivers etched into my neck are beyond repair. I may use it to caulk some nail holes in the bathroom.

At the airport I order shrimp and a margarita. I decide to visit a restroom while waiting and when I come back I see six laughing young Mexican waiters surrounding my table talking to the husband. Gawd, what has the attention-craving man gotten himself into?  I gingerly sit down amongst cheers and flashing white teeth and suddenly the boys all start singing, one kid shaking that margarita tumbler, shakee, shakee and swinging his butt way too close to my face. After about a minute of this nonsense I clap my hands twice loudly and point both fingers at my glass. The singing stops, the drink is poured and they all shuffle away looking somewhat mortified.

Oh c'mon, I just endured a week at an all inclusive, I'm allowed. 

die Brandy die

I'm calling our energy company customer service. Someone named Brandy has answered the phone and I don't know if she's pissed about her stupid name or the Motrin hasn't kicked in for her menstrual cramps but she's a bitch. Or possibly her boyfriend finally admitted he cannot live with someone who has such a caustic personality.

There's no such thing as office etiquette anymore. Or the company purposely hires the most obnoxious person they can find to man the phones and make it so difficult that good citizens just simply give up.

Brandy's messed with the wrong citizen. I live for shit like this. I was born arguing and I'll probably die the same way.

Energy company people came to my townhouse association and installed new utility boxes behind our buildings. In the process they pulled several hundred dollars worth of newly planted perennials. As the grounds consultant I am responsible for anything on the ground - including torn up things with dirt clinging to their roots. I am not angry. I am calm. I just want to report my situation, be taken seriously and respectfully, and get my goddamn money back.

None of this was going to happen on Brandy's shift. She talked in circles, contradicted herself, didn't listen or retain well and her passive-aggressive approach was giving me the spins. She wanted something called meter numbers and I didn't see the point nor did I want to go sloshing through several feet of snow drifts and a -20 wind chill factor when it would make so much more sense to just give her the building numbers.

Only six of our fifteen buildings were affected but damn Brandy, I'm gonna tell you all the buildings need restoration, just because I want to take up as much of your time as I possibly can. Minutes and more minutes tick by and I can hear her typing, typing, what is she doing, is she enrolled in some college class so she can quit her pathetic job that she obviously hates and she's doing her mid-term paper? I finally grab my book off the end table. I can play this game, too, you sad, sad excuse for a human resources person.

What ever happened to professional attitude? Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?" Okay, I come from a long line of self-employed grandfathers and I know that is not true. But people should be able to talk constructively and work towards a solution. Brandy, if I don't get what I want, I'm coming for you, girl. I'm retired. I can sit on the phone all afternoon.

EDD-IEEE!

While in Jamaica my husband signed us up for a dinner party called Meet the Chefs. I didn't want to meet the chefs or anybody else for that matter. I would rather read about them in a newsletter or something in the privacy of my room. My husband should know better.

"I'm bringing my kindle," I announce at breakfast. "If I have to sit and make meaningless conversation with people I don't know, I need a back-up plan."

Luckily, I have downloaded some pretty interesting authors on my apparatus - writers like Nora Ephron, Caitlin Moran and the new kid on the horizon, Lena Dunham, all of 27 years old and directing and writing her own HBO series. Funny smart strong women. I started reading Lena's collection of essays and thought uh-oh, too young. I'll check back when she's 50 or more, when she's lived some, got her hands good and dirty. Then one afternoon I was dreadfully bored of watching Midwestern tourists downing fruity rum drinks and turning red by the pool and I gave Lena another try. This time she clicked for me.

It was like the first time I watched Raw with Eddie Murphy and he's wearing that silly lavender leather suit. What a bunch of pornographic sexist drivel, I sniffed.  And since I never watch anything once I tried again only to say, my god, that Eddie really understands women.
"Buck naked zebra bitch?"  EDD-IEEEE!

Lena writes things like, "her vagina looked like a three-day-old sandwich." I know. Only it's funnier when she says it.

In between books I take mental surveys of Jamaican resort life. Four women with fake boob jobs. No woman with 28" hips has breasts the size of these overly fertilized gourds. Women know this and we judge accordingly. Of course, men don't care. These incredibly out of proportion women must need to buy two bikinis. One bottom to fit those Brownie scout hips and another for the 42"DDD bra..

Only one guy in a Speedo, thank god and I actually see three separate people put their fingers in their mouths as if to gag. It almost makes me want to follow him around to see how many more people do this - but then again not.

dazzled i'm not

Dear Dazzle:

I am returning this shirt to you because I ordered a size large and the thing you sent me would fit a medium-sized poodle and snugly, I might add. Where is your factory located - India? I ask you this because I once purchased a jacket in an Indian shop and I am a small person and the only one that fit was an extra large.

I know I was supposed to go to your website and acquire an authorized approval code, whatever that is but I found that website impossible to navigate - very confusing and illogical. A drunken monkey must have created it.

Do you do this purposely to discourage people from returning your elf-sized shirts? Well, here it is anyway with the receipt and I had to pay for the special  envelope twice at the post office because I couldn't remember if I had paid the fee when I first got the thing. I am painfully honest especially when confronted by federal employees. I blame this on early childhood influences such as Catholic nuns, an OCD girl scout leader, a sadistic babysitter and my ex-Marine father.

I thought about giving it to my six-year-old granddaughter but since the text says THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE I thought it might encourage inappropriate comments from mentally ill strangers. I could handle that, possibly relish it but she has not learned that skill. Yet.

I want my money back. Sincerely . . .

.

d d

I volunteered to be the designated driver for my 90-year-old aunt and my husband as they celebrate their December birthdays. I have never been a designated driver because I like to drink but I am well-equipped for the job. I perform well in emergency situations. One time I emptied my whole college dorm when I woke up and discovered my bed was on fire. I pulled the alarm and refused to leave the building until every last coed was safely outside. Nobody was going to die in my fire. The firemen had to escort me out of the building and my picture was on the front page of my town newspaper.

Harleys are a big deal in the Midwest, nobody knows why.  My little aunt identifies herself with this segment of the population and tonight she is wearing the orange Harley sweatshirt with 2004 LEAF RUN emblazoned on the back, short leather skirt and knee high black boots. She has sewn black sequins on her black leather cap. And check out that black and white zebra nail polish.

I pick up her up and she and my husband are giggling. They are looking forward to their tryst in the night, all the naughties they intend to commit and then I will be there to safely transport them home.  My aunt has always had a huge crush on my husband, reminding me how sexy he is and "what kind eyes he has," can both exist in the same body? I remember ten years ago or so she and I were listening to a rock band down near the river marina and the lead singer was a young black man, comely and muscular and she whispered to me, "that man could park his shoes under my bed anytime." She told me about her lifelong crush on Harry Belafonte, all this from a little country girl living in a small farming village.

I slap my hand on the old time wooden bar and tell the bartender, "I do not care how much I beg or whine do not DO NOT serve me any alcohol." My aunt is all of 4'8" and with her knee high boots she looks like one of those strange John Lennon-drawn cartoons from Yellow Submarine. Her dentures are too large for her tiny mouth and she is all teeth and boots. I do water, diet Coke and finally n/a beer and then a pizza with meatball sized-chunks of sausage that will visit and revist me in the night to come.

 "I'm the designated driver," I tell the red-faced loud-mouthed person next to me. "You're D D!" she shrieks in my ear. Yes, I'm Dee Dee, this woman does not need to know my real name. I glance at the clock for the 100th time this hour.

 

how many dancing santas will this stage hold?

I'm sitting on a bus at 7:15 on this cold Sunday morning and listening to a woman older than me. She has a shiny blond pageboy haircut sprayed into frozen waves and lots of plastered on foundation two shades darker than her real face color. She laughs too much.

I zone out her prattle and wonder what she looks like first thing in the morning. That blond hair would be matted to her scalp and there would be smeared mascara on her pasty cheeks.  She looks like she requires a lotta time to get ready.

 I am traveling through frozen Wisconsin cornfields to a dinner theatre. I am with my 85-year-old aunt and she has small wads of toilet paper in her ears. This is her first winter in the Midwest after thirty years of living in a small trailer in Arizona.

I am not like these women. I don't wear garish holiday sweaters. Lipstick is my only cosmetic, very European and I do this because my natural lip color is fading and soon my mouth will be a small black hole at the bottom of my face. I don't need to wear four rings on each hand or designer jeans imbedded with shiny enormous rhinestones glued to my butt.

The chatter is constant and loud, these women do not need to come up for air. They have mastered the art of conversation without the use of oxygen. I am not one for endless loops of words. I may resort to the toilet paper in the ear thing.

She gives us Christmas quizzes on red and green paper. I refuse to circle any answers. The only thing more humiliating than taking this test is exhibiting enough interest to answer the questions. I stare straight ahead at Blondie's doughy face as she spits into the microphone. Her cheeks wiggle and wobble when she talks.

At the all you can eat buffet I watch the girls downing Bloody Marys and drinks with large umbrellas, I'm guessing six inches in diameter. I decide to treat myself and order a diet Coke. It comes in a 32 ounce glass and I need both hands to lift it up to my disappearing mouth. "And the best part,"chirps the red-cheeked waitress, "is it comes with free refills!" That will not be happening as I do not like peeing on a moving bus.

I am sitting in the dark theatre and audience members surround all four sides. We are all old and there are dozens of walking assisted devices taking up space in the aisles threatening to trip us and create more walking disasters. I can hear several people snoring and the farm wives behind me talk and laugh no matter how many dirty looks I give them. They think they are in their living room watching TV.

The actors are singing and whirling around the small stage. They are fresh-faced, sparkly lads and lasses with unbelievable skin and teeth.  Was I ever that young? Did I sparkle?  My friend Sandy's son is a famous symphony orchestra trumpet player and he says they're all on coke. He has played for many dinner theatres: two shows a day, they skip meals and snort coke to stay thin and alert. They do have a lot of energy and these shiny creatures seem to vibrate and twinkle and glow from within. There are four children in the program and I am hoping they were not given coke and I'm especially concerned about one lively little girl.

Back on the bus the chatter is louder fueled by those large colorful drinks. I just want to curl into a ball and have soft tropical breezes kiss my fevered brow. I will not talk for the next four days, I swear, tired little introvert that I am.
 

sorrry i'm late

"I'm sorry I'm late," I say to my husband, "but I didn't want to come anyway." He sighs and waves me in the door. I sign the ledger, this is the veterans' center and why am I signing in anyway? I am not a security risk but I could be and I have been. I marched in a lot of anti-war protests in college and I know my picture is in more than a few FBI files. I hope my hair looked good.

I have agreed to attend a buffet luncheon with all the guys. Symbols of male aggression adorn the walls, weapons, military uniforms, a grenade on someone's desk. Nothing is color coordinated but I know these men have carefully and intentionally designed this getaway place to comfort and calm the ongoing battles in their heads.

There are several roasters of meat, atop a pool table,  piles and piles of meat, mountains of meat, too much meat, a gluttony of meat.  Randy, an Afghanistan vet is being applauded for providing all this animal protein. I hear him tell the guys his grandmother died in April 2013. He gathered up all the meat from her funeral dinner, bagged it and threw it in the freezer. Until now. Here it is for consumption, I will avoid those crock pots, they smell oily and unnatural.

The only vegetables are canned corn and Van Camp pork and beans. This is all I will put on my plate. One of the guys puts his hand in a roaster and pulls out a greasy grey pork rib and plops it on my plate. "You're gonna want to eat one of these," he says. When no one is looking I transfer it to Dave's plate. I'm fairly certain the big guy's stomach acid is much more intensely concentrated than mine. I've seen him eat sloppy joes slathered in peanut butter and mayonnaise with sliced pickles.

 The man sitting next to me is a Korean veteran and he is 84 years old. Why do old guys always have that dusty-looking skin? You just want to take a rag soaked in furniture polish to them.  He is dressed in a plaid blazer and sweater vest, corduroy trousers. I remember old black and white photos of great grandfathers playing cards around the kitchen table, factory laborers dressed in Sunday suit coats and ties, this generation liked to dress up. Thank god that's changed.

He has funny stories, he used to be a county supervisor so you know he has funny stories. His red nose looks like mutilated pink play dough, he must like the drink.  He says, why must I always be the oldest guy in the room? Come back on Wednesday, I tell him. My father, all of 90 years, stops by to play euchre. I notice his dinner-sized plate is heaped with cherry cream something and cookies plus potato chips. How he lived to be a great age on this diet is a mystery for the ages. I like it here.

I munch my corn and beans and look around the room. Some of the men are disheveled, clothing stained with holes and they never look up from their plates. They are here because they are hungry, they have no interest in socializing. Their fingers are drumming on the table, feet tapping tapping tapping, always always movement.  I remember the first date with my spouse. His knee never stopped bouncing for the entire two-hour movie.

 

i will want a fork

I am going to eat at the Japanese restaurant. My oldest son resides in Japan and he teaches English. This is pretty much what all Americans do who live in Japan. I'm thinking it might make me feel closer to him, having a meal here. He can only afford one trip home a year.

 Most ethnic restaurants in my hometown americanize their menus. There's always those cheeseburger and chicken nugget entrees at the bottom of the menu but I have heard this place is the real thing. I order the shrimp tempura. The little Asian waitress asks, "You will want a fohk?" Excuse me? "A fohk?" I'm sorry, I, what oh a fork! Yes, I will want a fork.

I have never learned to use chopsticks and I never will. I don't care how culturally cool it appears to be I will not do it. Here we have Asia, an ancient, introspectively wise culture and this is how they manuever food into their mouths? Any three-year-old knows you can pick up more sand with a shovel than a stick.

And then it arrives. Asians have cornered the market on food presentation. A work of art has been placed in front of me and I don't know whether to eat it or take it home and display it on my coffee table. There are five very long shrimps forming a little upright tent, their tails sticking straight up in the air. There is rice and dumplings and an orange with its top cut off and the fruit removed and quartered and put back into its peel. Pretty. There is sushi but that will be ignored. I know seaweed is very healthy for me, but for chrissake, it's seaweed.

Other things have been tempured. A large piece of broccoli, something square and white, something square and orange, a large golf-ball sized thing with black skin peeking through the golden panko. Eggplant? Mushroom? Bull testicle? It squishes and leaks juice into my mouth when I bite leading me to believe it is the latter of those possibilities.

The little waitress comes back smiling and bowing and I ask her what the mystery items are and she cannot say so that's disconcerting. She may not understand my English. I think the whole world should adopt bowing. It is a polite gesture and possesses a sort of dignified beauty about it. It may reduce the amount of terrorism all around us. I say it's worth a try. I leave her a large tip and I have always been a big tipper and I want that mentioned in my obituary.

As I leave the place a truck is parked outside and staff are removing food boxes and taking them into the restaurant. There is a picture of a large orange koi, an Asian goldfish  painted on the side of the truck. My Japanese-English-teaching son has these same fishes tattooed on his back.  I am wondering just what the heck I got served in there.

cancer scare #147

It is 8:30 in the morning and I am eating from a large container of french onion dip. With a spoon. I finished the chips a half hour ago. The latest virus has dug its claws into my system and a raggedy cough rips through my chest. My body has betrayed me and I will not feed it good things.

I drive to the urologist's office and seat myself in a room full of older gentlemen looking really worried. In this particular corner of the world female anatomy is superior. I silently applaud my short little urethra. We are all here to have tubes with lights and cameras inserted into our bladders. I am not kidding.

Some guy with a microscope said I have red blood cells in my pee and now I must go through the required medical scrutiny.  I walk back to the exam room. On the walls are detailed posters of the male prostate and reproductive systems, pink tubes and ruby red bulging sacks exploding everywhere, things no respectable woman should be forced to view. I am happy I do not own a prostate. Like breasts and uteruses, they exist in middle age only to harbor disease.  As we grow older we need to shed our sexual machinery, it only works against us.

The doctor's name is Horchak and wasn't Horchak one of the goons on Welcome Back, Kotter? He is deeply tanned, too tanned for a man who works in rooms without windows. His shirt is bright orange and open at the neck and a large gold cross lays on his dark chest hairs. His black thinning hair is slicked back and with his beady blue eyes he reminds me of Alex Baldwin, not one of my favorite human beings. His gold framed glasses are sitting crookedly on his nose.

"Do you smoke?"
"No."
"Did you ever smoke?"
"Yes."
"When did you quit?"
"'95."
"One pack a day?"
"Two."  I never do anything half way.

 

 

His eyes lock with mine. "Smoking produces toxins that travel in the urine to the bladder. The bladder walls are bathed, BATHED with these poisons and that's how the cancers start!" Those blue liquidy eyes are blazing with some inner not quite defined emotion. I want to apologize for some reason. I started smoking as a freshman in college, 1970.  My throat would be raw on Monday morning from all the pot I inhaled over the weekend. My roommate, an art major from a small town where her mother taught that same subject at the local high school advised me to start smoking cigarettes, a way to "condition" my throat. Thanks, Moria. We think her mother meant Mariah, you know they call the wind Mariah.  I started with menthol Marlboros, green and white boxes and it tasted like smoking toothpaste, but it had to be done. I was on a mission. I needed to be high.

 I decide not to tell Horchak about the long term love affair I had with marijuana after my divorce. I am already in enough trouble. Cannabis was my opiate of choice and before you start we all know people who chose a lot worse.

That's all I know for now. This was an informational meeting only and they will take that "peek" inside my bladder next time. It's hard to schedule an appointment when I keep leaving town.

And I think about getting one of those prostate pink tube posters. I could mount the thing in my living room. As one brother has commented, "you seem to like weird things hanging on your walls."

whitey's legacy

 

My husband's best friend Whitey is dying. He gained the name in childhood for the alarming white shock of hair atop his head. Now it's gone thinly sickly grey. At age eighteen he was an enlisted Marine who volunteered for three tours in Viet Nam.  He came from a gruesome upbringing, an older brother wailing the crap out of him and Whitey never fought back. There just wasn't enough pain and punishment to satisfy this kid.





At Whitey's 50th birthday party I saw the brother. Paul picked up a piece of cake and rammed it in Whitey's mouth so violently the guy crashed into the wall behind him sending a framed picture of water lilies to the floor, glass everywhere. Whitey spent his youth beating up carnies and taking outrageous dares in bars.  He was perfect Marine material.

After the war he returned to the states with a liver full of Agent Orange and addictions to cigars and hard liquor that eventually earned him malignancies in all his major organs.

Of all Dave's friends Whitey has always been my favorite. Underneath the tough guy image is a soft-hearted intellectual. When I first cut my hair my Dave was displeased. We were with Whitey and wife for a ravioli dinner and Mister started his lament about HER HAIR. "I think she looks sexy," said Whitey and he lifted the beer bottle to his lips and held Dave's gaze. Topic never came up again.

PTSD clamped its ugly jaws into Whitey big time and Dave won't tell me about the guy's experiences, just as well. He has served time in several mental institutions and once he posted  negative remarks regarding the Bush administration on a facility bulletin board when the asshole was still in office. Whitey got whisked away by FBI agents, all sunglasses and crew cuts. They grilled him for three days and they had photos of Whitey's front lawn where he routinely displayed anti-Bush placards. Whitey said he got the feeling the guys were on his side.

Whitey wants to have a celebration of life party. These have come into vogue lately and I'm uncomfortable with the concept. One of our town's greatest benefactors for the arts, an old woman with a fabulously decorated apartment did the same thing when she learned of her Alzheimer's diagnosis. A week later she marched herself into the Mississippi river.

Whitey has invited 287 people. There will be six kegs of beer and a fried chicken dinner from a local caterer. A funeral service in reverse.

 Godspeed, Whitey, my good man.

ollie the oiler

I am in Minnesota not by choice but here I am nonetheless. My father wants to see some military museums so he sits in the back of our Impala as we head north. I want to make him happy. He's 90 years old and his fragile spirit could take flight at any time. I hear him humming to himself as I have heard all my life and I've adopted the same habit myself. He reads his newspaper, every single article and does the crossword puzzle as he has for the last seven decades.

Twice a week he dresses up as Ollie the Oiler in bib overalls and a train engineer's cap. He plays the part of a maintenance man on an ancient dredging boat at our local museum. Ollie will answer tourist questions for anyone showing an interest in river dredging and you would be amazed how many people want to know this stuff.

We will be gone four nights. My father refuses to buy the commonly used suitcase with wheels and extended handle, easy on the back and easy to move. He would never trade "perfectly good usable" anything in for a better, more accomodating model. He has four, FOUR hard plastic suitcases and a large cooler full of beer and fruit. I heard him say one suitcase was just for shoes. He packs like a wealthy elderly matron from the Victorian era, er, your ladyship.

I could successfully live the rest of my life without visiting 1) another military museum or 2) another  blacksmith demonstration. I grew up being dragged all over the Midwest visiting these exhibits and I should be excused from any further suffering. Military museum: after an hour or two of viewing Civil War amputation tools and related items I feel heavy and sad and I need to go hold a baby or something. And blacksmithing: another barn, another blue-tinged fire with a hairy half-naked guy in a leather apron wielding huge iron tools and the thick sticky smell of manure. Oh look! He made a horseshoe! Oooh, aahh . . .

 Everything in Minnesota is painted forest green or made of knotty pine.

 

 You could get knotty-pined to death in this place. This is the land of seriously Norwegian Lutherans and loons, often one and the same entity. Actually, the loon is the state bird and there are loon calling contests in every berg and church parish, kind of like pig calling contests in Iowa. Come to the Midwest, an alluring corn-filled paradise hosting abundant animal calling rituals. The little town we are visiting puts a twist on their contest. What does a loon with a sprained foot sound like?  A drunk loon hitting on a female loon? A loon with popcorn stuck in his throat? There's just so much you can do with loon material.

I ask the woman at the museum, is there a good place to eat around here? She is chewing her gum ferociously and finally says, "oh yah, just down the street, two bars that have good food, one on each side of the road, you betcha," in that singsong Norwegian Fargo lingo.  Instead I find a cute little French bistro in the travel guide. "But the woman at the museum said they have good food," spouse whines, he doesn't like those healthy eateries with complicated menus.  I will not eat bar food where nutritious innocent veggies get breaded and deep fried and then there's that other American creation, the family restaurant. They feel obligated to offer mac and cheese and other nightmare entrees on their laminated just wipe it clean menus.

At the French place my father smiles and slides into his seat and says, "always sit with your back to the wall. That way no one can shoot you from behind."

He's always been one to pull interesting philosophical ditties out of his head but lately they've been getting kind of strange.

a tale of two universities

In my sixty odd years on this planet I have never gone to a college football game. Call it luck, call it divine intervention, call it clever ingenuity on my part. Keep in mind I possess the soul of a true and pure introvert and that makes the discussion a little more believable. I am accustomed to rude people calling me a party pooper when I attempt an early leave, They smirk and wait for my embarrassed response. I should call them on it. I should say,"at least I'm not a needy, attention-grabbing narcissistic blowhard. If I were, there'd be two of us."

But I digress. I have been lured into attending this event at my kids' alma mater university town one hundred miles away because the young grandchildren will also be attending and this means more face time with them. We adorn ourselves in the University of Iowa Hawkeye attire of black and gold. Except for my spouse. He is an angry Iowa State University alumnus. His red and gold shirt sports six-inch letters that scream BEAT IOWA. He has written letters to our editor demanding more coverage of his team and accosted local store managers because they do not carry ISU wearables. But alas he is in Hawkeye Land and this will never happen.

Our car has crawled to a near-stop as we enter the town and I look up from my book to see hundreds, no thousands of people milling and churning, bees in a hive, all heading in the same direction towards the Holy Grail, the sitting Buddha, Elvis's Graceland, their Mecca.  Waiting to worship in the big round half-bubble arena in the distance. Thousands. I have made a colossal mistake.

I am afraid to get out of the car. I am afraid what will await me out there. There are no parking spaces. We end up in a city ramp and are unloading our food baskets when two friendly policeman approach us and explain there is no tailgating here, public property and all. We quickly wolf down cold hot dogs and spoonfuls of hummus and pineapple slices. It's just getting worse.

We climb and climb up to our seats and masculine-themed rutting AC/DC tunes are blasting me senseless. On the field huge men are chest bashing each other and pumping their fists in the air and the fans are pig-grunting their approval. Everything is blown up and threatening to me. I feel like a small soft piece of fluff on a foreign ocean. The student sections are roiling, churning masses of humanity, they move as one large ferocious animal, waiting, NO, begging, NO demanding spilled blood. And they have it.  By game's end four students limp and stumble their way off the field. Young healthy bodies should not act that way. I picture an eighty-year-old man decades from now rubbing his hip in front of the fireplace and remembering that golden September afternoon long ago.

I am sitting next to cowboys and boy scouts, Harley riders and cavemen, astronauts and every kind of manly man. Here in this stadium everybody is a manly man, even a small bespectacled older woman with an incredibly attractive family .  No matter how lewd and uncontrolled and barbaric football can be it's legal and allowable and encouraged. It is the ALL AMERICAN SPORT, thus we give it our highest and mightiest stamp of authenticity.

 And I can't believe I'm enjoying it.

back in san diego, thank god

I step into the restroom stall at Chicago O'Hare and push the button for a new toilet seat cover. For some reason I sit down before it has stopped moving and I slide quickly to the left and almost crash on the floor. If this is any indication how the rest of the day may go I will head directly to the bar and stay there for a really long time.

I am back in San Diego, thank god. After a hot summer baking in the Iowa corn fields I need to be somewhere with a little culture, some place that sells really good beauty products and decent Indian food. I am sitting on Susan's beautiful new grey Italian leather couch made in China and playing with the recliner buttons.

We go next door to the neighbors' wine party. There are sardines and garlicky hummus and a delicious bowl of fresh tuna seasoned with yellow curry, quiche dotted with mint, a small bowl of walnuts and creamy dip bursting with colored peppers and tiny bits of salty olives. And meatballs. The house is a museum with framed art stretching all the way up to its high ceilings. The furniture reminds me of Rosemary's baby's neighbor: big and clunky and darkly satanic. I sit on the couch, all green velvet and carved wood and my legs stick straight out in front of me, such is the lot of the short girl. 

 By the third glass of cabernet I am feeling warm and really swell in this strange little house. The hostess is flamboyant and likes to hug. Her necklace is lovely, large flat stones laced together and striped with blue and purple rainbows. Helena* wears heavy black eye liner and her grey hair is sleek and pulled back with hairpins, she's pretty in a coquettish AARP way. Hel is in her 70's and her boyfriend of three years rearranged her furniture on their first date. He tells me later in hushed tones that he has three sons, two of them dead, one shot nine times in the back by the police when he was eighteen years old. "And they bragged about it," he says.  Mario, the young man from Guadeloupe, talks about his planned trip to Spain. He will ride his bike cross country. I do not know people like these back in I-O-way.

Raymond sits next to me, neat and prim in khakis and white sweater and has given only one word replies to anything directed at him. Suddenly he touches my bare foot and exclaims, "I love your long skinny toes! They're so pretty! I love your toes!" His drunk wife is sitting next to him and he pulls off her sandal and says, "Look at Norma's short stubby toes! I love your toes!"  I don't know what to do.

And then that same wife blurts out, "so what are we going to do about these immigrant children coming into our country and bringing all those diseases?" Mario makes a small choking sound. He's eating meatballs. Susan's husband Jim is a staunch defender of the oppressed and racially insulted and he quickly takes the stage. "These are the same people who cut your lawn, prepare your food and watch your children." Damn, this is getting good.  Susan doesn't want to do this political haggling with a roomful of wine-soaked friends and she's right. Cheap entertainment is well, cheap.

*the names have been changed to protect the utterly clueless
 

the sneaky guy

"Don't you think this guy is kind of sneaky?" I ask the husband. My radiator in my eleven-year-old Impala barfed out its' contents on the driveway of my former son-in-law. I stopped there to pick up my grandsons and take them to IHOP for breakfast because the jerk has only wieners and ketchup in his fridge.

Big Dave calls. His mechanic wants $500 to replace my radiator. "Too much. I'll make some calls," he says.

One of the guys at the Vets' center told him about some hillbilly who works cheap. We turn off the old highway onto a gravel road and there are NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere, some of them pockmarked from bullets. This short wiry guy comes out of a garage that has a partially caved-in wall. He is opening a Coors Lite and there are three crushed cans on the windowsill near my car and I just know they weren't there yesterday.  His skin is  brown as shoe leather and he's wearing one of those sleeveless shirts with no sides. The logo above his heart is the name of the local Harley-Davidson bar and his name is embroidered below that, Sliver.  None of this is making me feel comfortable. "You wanna beer?" he sneers, directed to my husband. There are several major teeth missing in this mouth. All transactions will be in cash. I'm not comfortable with that either. My daddy raised himself an honest girl.

"Yeah, that other guy's estimate was just plain rape." He winks at me and I feel heat flaming my cheeks. His late acknowledgement of my presence feels way too intimate, almost dirty. I'm fingering the cell in my pocket and wondering if I can dial 911 without Sliver noticing.  My husband is telling him about the loud and obnoxious groan coming from the underside of my car. "Yeah, I can do you for that," he says, lighting up a Marlboro and my husband is cracking open a beer can and I am walking toward the highway for so many reasons.

 The next day  he repairs the muffler. I turn the ignition and Christ, the noise is worse. I live in a really seedy part of town so nobody should notice. I go home and slam the door. I get down on my knees to check out this new muffler and the thing is dented and grime-encrusted and I reach out my finger to see how thick that dirt is. Bad idea, back comes the finger with a blister starting to blossom. Stupid, stupid, I should know better. About so many things.

Seems like Mr. Sliver and I are not finished. I have a quick and angry reaction to anyone who treats me like a stupid person.  As a small, older woman I sometimes get this treatment from members of  the Old Boys' Club and some of their young counterparts, a bunch of Confederate Republican homophobes and I quickly let them know I can and will eat them for breakfast.
 Sliver, you messed with the wrong small, older woman.







 

regressing

She is six years old and she's usually in your face, a tough little broad.  Her mother approves and I agree. Women need to be aggressive and loud to get their mission across, Gloria and Bella would approve. The little one and I were leaving the liquor store with well, a few bottles and she yelled at the clerks. "Okay, good-by everybody. We're going to go home and have some fun with all this booze."  No wonder I feel like I'm being watched.

But then she got different. Remote, tight-lipped, beyond my reach. "Did you have a bad day at school?" No. "Are you mad at me?" No.
That's all I got.

She's regressing. She wants warm milk in a sippie cup. She wants to sit in a stroller and not walk with me. She's begging her mom to buy her a car seat although she's 17 pounds over the weight limit. She's surrounds herself with old stuffed and stained toys, a fortress against an unrecognizable world.  "Will my dad be at your house for Thanksgiving?"  I'm not going to explain this to her, she does not understand the dynamics. Her mom can do it. This child's vulnerability is like a slap in my face. I can't protect her.

My job shouldn't be this hard. I'm a grandma. Through the generations we have done the grunt work. My great-great grandma and her spinster daughter traveled from one family to the next, stitching quilts, baking cinnamon rolls, holding babies while everybody else went about their work.

This is what I want to do but my job is redefined. Now I chauffer children to golf practice, boy scout meetings, gymnastics class. There is little if no conversation during these car rides. Screens are up, I hear a little snicker, a reaction to some online jolly. I am lonely.

My daughter is reclusive, wrapped tightly in the cocoon of a second divorce, not sure how to deal with the overwhelming angst of it all.  I don't know what to say.

I lie on my back in the pool and stare at the changing cloud patterns.  I know women are not accomplished at spacial perception but I study those clouds and see many things, skawking ducks and elephants wearing clown hats and an entire train chugging across the blueness.

I am lonely, exceedingly lonely, so much pain in my family.

We give each other facials. It is comforting.

 

an introvert attends a wedding reception

Drat, another social event. Didn't I just attend one last month? I hate summer. People celebrate way too many things.  Our friends are all married as are most of their kids. But now the kids' kids are getting married and it's not right we are still getting invited. I could run that kid over in my Chevy Impala and not know who I flattened. I say if I haven't talked to this person in the last three days I should not have to attend his event.

We pull up to the Community Center and I see the HyVee catering vans. HyVee, the King of Midwestern Groceries but could somebody please do something different? How about that fancy new Thai restaurant on the west end or something cajun packing lots of heat?  Instead, yet another fried chicken dinner and those little beef slabs that look like Spam and taste weird. I toss our wedding card into the giant gold fish bowl festooned with purple ribbons. I had penned "to the happy couple" on the envelope with a little heart and arrow, a dead-give away to the fact that I do not know their names.

I crackle as I walk across the floor. I am wearing my daughter's platform sandals, one size too large and packaging tape is stuck inside to keep them on my feet. Up ahead is a table with platters and platters of cake pops. Ooooooh, cake pops. Maybe this might have some worthwhile results afterall. They are all wrapped in cellophane which will make their removal from the building less mess.



"Don't you think Ron's wife looks like a hooker?" My husband's head snaps in my direction. He is eyeing me very carefully knowing that after three drinks I tend to say things out loud that should remain in my head. I give him a little smile and try to look level-headed and steady-eyed. See? I'm still miles away from a drunken demeanor. He slowly turns back to the conversation, something about somebody's golf ball collection and knows he is now on babysitting duty.

But I behave myself and eat the shitty chicken and miniature meat-like slabs. I am content as the evening drags itself to its beer-soaked end. The groom is having trouble removing the garter off the bride's thigh. Behind him are the groomsmen woot-woot-wooting like barbarian clansmen. Content, knowing  there are six cake pops in my purse and four more in each of my husband's pockets.
 

it is 1970

It is 1970 and I am eighteen years old. I have just graduated from an inferior Catholic convent school. My parents wanted me to go the bigger newer Catholic high school but I balked and kicked my feet. My friends were going to the obscure school hosted by the dwindling Sisters of the Visitation and it was all that was important to me, being with my friends.  Our gym teacher smoked and coughed in a corner of our windowless basement gym and the nuns had us in the convent kitchen shelling corn when we should have been studying logarithms or something.

So I wore the idiotic freshman beanie and the itchy plaid skirts and hoped I would never grow up. My parents wouldn't let me cross the street until I was five years old and then they had to because I needed to go to kindergarten.  I'm not sure why but they always thought I was making the best and correct decisions for myself. And I wasn't, that's how good an actor I was.

I worked at S.S.Kresge's as a cashier in an aqua blue plastic apron cinched at the waist, not an attractive look for a short girl with no waistline. I folded underwear and bagged orange slices for $1.35 an hour. College was on the peripheral and it scared me. I really didn't want to learn anything else. But I bought green pillowcases for the move to a state university along with my Simon and Garfunkel albums and my beat-up Schwinn.

During my first six months of college life I had many new beginnings. Got drunk, got stoned, got laid. Fathers, give your daughters some stretching room. Sit on them too long and they will explode in a fury of passion and curiosity. My first night drunk I got up to leave the bar and three men stood up. Apparently, I had promised all of them they could accompany me home.  Next morning I showed up for my Intro to Psych class, all 1500 of us in a theatre setting and I begged the guy on the aisle to change seats with me. I did not trust my stomach still roiling with its boozy contents. What did Steve Martin say about Intro to Psych? "They teach you just enough to think you're crazy." I already knew I was crazy.

 My roommate, an art major wore a gloriously hand-embroidered navy blue cloak and stored our joints in her paint box and I worried about the toxic stains we were inhaling. My throat was furiously raw on Monday mornings from all the pot and she suggested I take up smoking to "tenderize" my throat. Thus began a lifelong love relationship with menthol Marlboros, like smoking toothpaste. I would watch that roommate draw. She would sketch an apple, pick up that apple and take a bite, sketch it again and so on, bite after bite. I envied that.



I liked the 70's. We were smug and safe in our generation knowing that our sheer numbers would conquer all. My brothers smoked pot in their bedroom and my mother would shout, "what are you burning up there?" Incense, ma, incense. One brother dropped acid and thought about flying out a third floor window. He went to the emergency room and my dad thought he had a bad case of flu. You can't bring that kind of magic back.