I allow myself a small smile as I stand behind the young man with multiple facial piercings and the white hoodie with lines of black barbed wire streaking across it and he's buying a pink and white teddy bear with a ribbon that says, "we weally weally wuv you."  Normally if I saw this guy on the wrong side of town I would make sure my backpack was securely lashed to my shoulders. Instead I want to know him, share a diet Coke, talk about junk mail or something.


I don't like Valentine's Day. There isn't a romantic bone in my body and I don't apologize. I'm right and the rest of you guys are wrong.  I've always been a  practiced realist shying away from anything remotely fairy-talish unless I'm with young children and then it's fun to see how long I can keep the fantasy story going until they finally roll their shrewd little eyes at me.  Romance bores me and I'd rather sit through a 60-minute car chase than endure five minutes of chick flick annoyance.  Those of my nature abhor public affection, stacks of Danielle Steele paperbacks and those whiny irritating Barry Manilow lyrics.


But I am married to a Don Juan in white Nikes who wants to hold my hand on a walk and dance to Presley's I Can't Help Falling in Love With You while exchanging soulful looks and trivial cutsie-pie banter. I only talk when necessary, a functional conversationalist so said the marriage counselor, and small talk God forbid romantic small talk would cause me to suffer a seizure or my eyeballs to bleed.


 I reluctantly admit I am lucky to have a man this enamored with me when I barely drop him a crumb of affectionate interest.  I am a woman who wants only the mechanics of a relationship, the nuts and bolts so to speak. On Tuesdays I iron his shirts and I send cards and birthday gifts to his out of town grandchildren and I am exceedingly nice to his social-climbing rude sister who owns 86 pairs of shoes, puh-leez.  I do what needs to be done to keep him clean and comfortable as well as his environment and I bake pies without being asked and clean his bathroom without too much grumbling.  Just don't talk baby talk to me at the dinner table or anywhere else.  And I will stay with you forever, my love. 

tan

I am turning the color of a coffee bean and it is not by choice.  Being overly tan in February is like having a lot of tattoos or an eye patch and people are drawn to you and want to ask questions.  I love to swim, I love to swim in the ocean and when I'm not swimming I am walking the beach, rhythmical waves like a mantra breathing in and out of my tired brain. The rest of the time I stay huddled under a sugar shack-looking kind of structure with 30 SPF slathered over my wrinkly hide, but it's not enough. My swimming fetish puts me directly under the tropical sun way too much.  And there's only so much Banana Boat can do and I inherited an olive Mediterranean skin tone prone to dark pigment, how that occurred with my middle-euro Germanic heritage I'll never figure out and I just keep getting darker.

When I was fifteen I was in Chicago attempting to cross a busy avenue and my father was waiting on the other side.  It was late August and I was deeply tanned and as I ran two black men whistled at me. "Hah!" Sonny emoted. "They think you're black!"  It never occurred to my father that black men would whistle at a white girl.

I would never schedule an appointment with a dermatologist the week after a Caribbean vacation but unfortunately I have a weepy, icky thing on my leg and I don't want to talk about it. There will be a lecture and I will roll my eyes and direct my mind somewhere else.  Dermatologists are the whitest people on this earth. My last derma doc was black lace Irish with riveting blue eyes, black blue hair and skin like the underbelly of a fish.  He was a Green Bay Packer fan but that is not the reason I left him.  Our insurance carrier got pissy at negotiation time and heaved all of the company customers over to a new medical provider.  My new gal is a strawberry blond, green-eyed porcelain beauty all white and peachy skin and I will be hearing her tsks-tsks way too soon.

It's time to go home.  Vacation means inhabiting a hotel room with one toilet and a man who farts and snorts like a brontosaurus and I am accustomed to a townhouse with three bathrooms.  I get nervous lying around doing nothing.  I need a project, a productive process to ignite my synapses, a museum or cathedral to explore and Jamaica is noticeably vacant on those. Hopefully I will remember to drive on the right side of the street when I return.

just another day in jamaica

Big Dave comes rushing up to my beach chair and yells, "you're missing all the excitement!"  That translates as drunken middle-aged men hoisting their wives into the air at the pool bar and pouring booze down the fronts of their swim suits. In one case, the woman weighed well over 200 pounds and I can only explain the husband's accomplishment as an adrenaline rush paired with way too much Appleton rum.  "Not my kind of party," I mutter into my book.  I abscond all organized pool activities but I do want to show for the aerobics class later that afternoon.  So at 4:30 I tiptoe across the bodies of passed-out sunburned red raw bodies only to find the exercise program consists of  two hefty matrons with belly-dancing baubles jingling around their ample waistlines dancing to some raunchy Mediterranean beat.

There are many positive things about a Jamaican resort. It is a place where grown men can wear obscenely loud purple orchid-patterned bermudas and get away with it. And I can indulge in two of my favorite activities: observing the eating habits of North American tourists and walking down a public street with an alcoholic beverage.  Referring to the former, you ain't lived until you've seen Minnesota citizens attack a buffet of deep fried vegetable fritters, meat pies and rum punch.

I meander over to the bar and order a Jack and diet and there are three bartenders pointing my way and demonstrating way too much interest in me.  I keep hearing "John Deere, John Deere" and that's the t-shirt Big Dave has been wearing all week and then young Charlene says, "you're Dawn, aren't you?"  Once again, my husband has passed this way and robbed me of precious anonymity. An extrovert spouse was not in my life plan but that's how the cards were dealt.  Worse things could have happened.

And now my husband is talking to a North Dakota green farmer who is saying, "soy beans don't like competition" and "all I got is John Deere equipment" and you never really leave home, you know, at least not any more.  Americans are everywhere, placing our stamp of macho cowboy bully rude boy on everything and soon the world will be one long strip mall with a McDonald's on one end and a J.C. Penney's at the other.

The only real problem with the tropics is you can't keep a drink cold very long.

odd duck at the party

Big Dave calls me and he is giggly and kinda nauseating at the same time.  "Are you excited!" he yells into the phone and I can tell he is spitting. Our vacation starts tomorrow and we are flying to Jamaica.  I think about his question and then say, you know, I'm really not the excitable type.  Honesty is always the best response and in most cases, not the desired one.  The last time I can remember being excited was 1971 when I woke up and found my bed on fire.  That's the level of intensity I require.

 I don't go into vacations easily.  I find it difficult to relax on cue and then there's the fact that I like my routines and schedules.  Without them I fear I may disappear, my obsessive-compulsive psyche will whirl feverishly for a few moments and then topple over like a spent top.

And then there's the problem of the all-inclusive resort.  Not my first choice for vacations but the big guy is footing the bill so I won't be complaining.  For one week we will be surrounded by alcoholic overweight misfits mostly from the continental Midwest who will begin drinking at 10 a.m. and many have brought their own 64-ounce mugs for the bartender to fill because those eight-ounce glasses are for amateurs, don't cha know.  To keep the alcohol from corroding their intestines they will make numerous trips to the all-day buffet gulping down deep-fried anything prepared by the island chefs specifically for the American tourists. And they talk and shriek from their stools at the pool bar and I never see anybody leave to use the restroom and I avoid swimming in those pee-infested waters and stay on the other end of the pool.

"All around us were people I had spent ten years avoiding - shapeless women in wool bathing suits, dull-eyed men with hairless legs and self-conscious laughs, all Americans, all fearsomely alike.  These people should be kept at home, I thought; lock them in the basement of some goddamn Elks Club and keep them pacified with erotic movies; if they want a vacation, show them a foreign art film; and if they still aren't satisfied, send them into the wilderness and run them with vicious dogs."  The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson

My man, Hunter.  I'll leave my watch by the pool side so I can time my laps and my inebriated co-vacationers will look at me with just a touch of contempt for I am reminding them of everything they came to this island to forget. I am the odd duck at the party but then I am this way most places. Shortly after my 30th birthday I stopped worrying what other people were thinking and it's been a much smoother ride because of that. 

it ain't fair, I tell you, it ain't fair

We eat breakfast at our usual Saturday morning greasy spoon and the place is filled with obnoxious types whose volume button is turned to a very high frequency.  Even extrovert Dave laments the lack of  a peaceful atmosphere in which to eat our eggs and there must be a sign outside I tell him that says "Annoying loud people eat free."  And the worse group of dysfunctional misfits is sitting directly behind me.  A mother, grandmother and three little out of control welfare brats and not a wedding ring in sight.  There is pounding on the table, ice cubes being thrown against the wall, endless threats from the adults and then one comment, "I swear to God I'm going to give you one of your brother's pills if you don't calm down."  So this is what it's come to.  None of these people sitting at the ice strewn table will ever do anything productive or constructive for society.  They are leeches and the taxpayers will pay for their Cheetos and Pampers and subsidized housing.

These puppies should have been strangled at birth and saved middle class America a lot of financial headaches and I have always been an advocate for enforced sterilization for the inept and stupid.  We allow capital punishment - how much more of a stretch is this concept - annihilate them before their little infant lungs fill with oxygen and they learn how to fill out food stamp applications.  Crazy family stands up to leave and I have the misfortune to turn and look when the grandmother is bending over and her ass is easily a yard wide and then some inches.

Christ, there are so many things wrong with this picture.

But tomorrow I will be winging to Jamaica, a third world country without a middle class and there's something wrong with that, too. I guess I need to stop thinking so much and just order another drink. There's just so much a midwestern grandmother can do.  I will chat with the young staff at the resort and encourage them to stay in school.

korean stinky meat

It's called Korean braised pot roast and normally I would run away from this one fast. But I am hungry and I am shopping and I am crisscrossing the aisles to double up on the free samples.  And besides my favorite store clerk is handing out the little chunks of brown meat.  She only comes to my shoulder and she walks with kind of a shuffling side-to-side penguin gait and when she smiles her face is a sea of creases.  She's so damn cute I just want to ask her, can I do something for you, anything, anything at all!  She wants me to buy a pot roast and I do and I take her recipe with me.

The ingredients always call for something you do not have in your cupboard. I'm onto their money-making strategies, but I was hungry I tell you and this was the only thing I wanted to eat. I open my newly purchased bottle of spicy hot chili sauce, the one with all the Chinese symbols on the side and take a taste - stupid unassuming American cook that I am.  Luckily there was a half bottle of Dansai on the counter or there would have been a hole in my cheek by the time I ran to the sink.  I mix everything together, an odd conglomerate of ingredients, even a pear, garsh what will these Koreans think of next and put everything in the food processor.  I love recipes that call for electrical gadgetry but I forget about the side opening and there is an explosion and then a sticky orange-brown paste is covering a large portion of the kitchen as well as myself and the stuff is starting to burn the hair off my skin.  Great balls of fire, what sort of devilish substance is this? I never quite trusted those Koreans.  I saw every single episode of Mash and that Hawkeye knew what he was talking about.

It sits in the crock pot for hours and it's just not reaching that fall apart tender stage of cooked meat that my smiling friend offered to me yesterday. I swear the thing is taunting me, its unnatural color and odor not familiar by American standards. The original recipe probably called for dog meat and that would explain why it doesn't smell right.



 Is this what I will offer my family for the evening repast?  Surely, anything would be safer, even those nitrate-filled, salt-riddled hot dogs sitting in the back of the fridge.  I go with the Korean stinky meat and make extra potatoes in case Big Dave snubs the entree.  Before I know it he is sopping up the juice from two sandwiches and his face has not turned green nor is he clutching his abdomen.  I go back to my meatless plate and ask him to pass the potatoes. 

drugs lots and lots of drugs

That's my motto as I slog through my latest sinus infection. I am weary of the endless passage of phlegm through my nasal canals and maybe if I hadn't smoked for twenty years or developed an addiction to those red hot candy antihistamine pills or worked in an office with leaky smelly moldy plumbing I might be healthier.  Oh balls, quit complaining and who's up for a climb on a high Mississippi bluff breathing in that sweet moist air and checking on the flight of a lone eagle soaring above me.

I trudge up a path that once was a trolley car route and I hear girls laughing. My grandmother and her best bud and cousin Violet nudging each other, full of girl secrets, wavy unruly hair held back by huge organza bows, riding the car up the hill for summertime play.  I have the picture of the two of them and it is 1916. What would Nana think of me, I am older than her husband when he died.  I am filled with empty spaces today. Walks always include memories of my mother pushing at me and consuming me. She appears on my horizon when it is quiet and I am alone.



On the top of the bluff there is no noise, animal, human or machine. I turn off my Ipod and listen to this rare sound of nothing.  And then I hear a faraway train whistle and  I have heard them since my childhood lying in bed on a summer night and the chugging of the trains was the sound of the world turning, or so thought my five-year-old mind.