biopsy

"That tissue doesn't look right to me. I want to go ahead with the biopsy,"  says the oral surgeon. I had been referred by my dentist and this wasn't supposed to be happening. I wanted the guy to look in my mouth, make a few muttering sounds and tell me to get out of here, quit wasting his time. But instead I am looking up at that overhead lamp shining through his thinning hair, not a split end in sight and my abdominal muscles curl into themselves. I feel light-headed and sluggish, useless and expendable.

Was twenty years of smoking finally catching up with me?  I had repented, sinner that I was, and have been smokeless since 1995, okay there was that one year of back sliding. Was my reformation too late?  And then there was the fact that I regularly bathe the insides of my mouth with diet Coke and jalapeno-laced food, of course! the tissue will look mutilated.  I wanted to offer him all this information, served up on a platter of logical recourse and he would say, why didn't you say so?  He and the technician would laugh and shake their heads and I would be free, back out in the world of the living and the breathing, all the lovely people unfettered by odd-looking tissue embedded in their inner cheeks.

It's all about attitude say the cancer support groups and my attitude has always sucked. Any intelligent citizen in this country is a hypochondriac, we're saturated with Reader's Digest and AARP articles spouting  "Ten Things Your Doctor Won't Tell You" and those damn YouDocs keep using their cutesy language to convince us that fish oil capsules and cumerin are the formula for eternal life.

I hear the phone ringing and I am staring out the window wondering if I should play Neil Young's Harvest at the beginning of my memorial service or at the end.  Everything is in slow motion as I pick up and after an extremely long minute place that phone back in its cradle. A line comes back from a movie. Woody Allen is stammering and looking pointedly into the camera and he says, "the most beautiful, the most beautiful word in the English language is benign."

let the children sing

I arrive moments before a grade school concert and I am in a packed gym. Even finding standing room vacancy ain't gonna be happening. Goddamn, these parents and grandparents are committed. And all those minivans taking up all that space means I practically had to park in the next county.  I see my daughter eight bleachers up and I need to squirm and thread my way through a lot of adult bodies encased in heavy winter coats.  I plunge in and suddenly arms and hands are reaching to assist me although I thought I was doing okay and some old geezer has his hand on my thigh. I get handed up to the spot next to Carrie without touching the floor murmuring, "next week the wheelchair."  In the eyes of the general public I look fragile and ancient.

The music teacher wants us to introduce ourselves to the people around us, "because those people are also here to nurture a child."   I'm here because if I wasn't my grandson will make me feel evil and guilty and annihilate me with those puppy dog eyes and he knows I attended his brother's basketball game earlier in the day. And the lady to my left identifies herself as Grandma Kitty "to an adorable first grader!" Seems like a lengthy title and she is perky and annoying and I think she wants to jump in my lap so I turn hastily to my daughter, "okay, that's enough introduction." I've already told my husband long ago I do not need to meet any more people, ever and Grandma Kitty keeps leaning into me and nudging me with her elbow every time her grandson blinks. I'm hot and sweaty and I want to take my coat off but I have a stained t-shirt underneath and I didn't have time to shower after my exercise routine. I am unacceptable on so many levels.

Each class of students stands in the center of the gym and sings their tunes and the theme of this concert is water, probably taken right out of some music teacher magazine that the director gets every month and it seems like a pretty weak excuse for entertainment.  The kindergartners are fun to watch because a couple of them always cry and that breaks the monotony. Thank God that's not my kid, we're all muttering under our collective breath.

At last we are relieved of our familial duties after an hour and fifteen minutes of enforced sitting on those hard wooden bleachers.  We would have been released earlier but the student teacher from Bogota had taught the fifth graders this boring, repetitive Hispanic dance that was trapped in some eternal mariachi loop. Dear God, when will this end?  I just want my couch and a drink.
Out into the blessed cold and I begin my walk to the next county.

an introvert's dilemma

My seventh month of indoor pool use and the other swimmers are making noises like they want to know me better.  It's inevitable, this human need to reach out and make other people uncomfortable but I just wanna swim in my own self-imposed state of oblivion. If I compromise those boundaries chaos and calamity will result, the sun will explode and my stomach lining will curdle.

Not me swimming, but it could be

Marty is 78 years old and she is swimming in the lane next to me.  She wears a black wig that stands up about eight inches off her scalp and she has thick kohl liner on both eye lids making her look like a raccoon with head fur on steroids. Today she tells me, "your eyes and complexion and hair all go well together."  God, did she have to say that.  Physical compliments make me uncomfortable and like a lot of American women I jump in quickly to downplay.  "That's because I have a bit of a Jamaican tan but when that fades I will be paleface butt-ugly again." Didn't exactly use those words.

Sandy has been swimming next to me for over two years.  From scraps of conversation I have divulged that she recycles, goes to the library, always tries to find the perfect gift, hasn't eaten a french fry since 2003 and never says, "have a nice day!" She comes highly qualified in the "possible friend" category. But what if  I say something really dumb and she recasts me as a commoner, a cliche user, an insufferable bore, all my teen-age angst issues coming back at me in rapid succession.  And then I realize I don't give a rat's ass but then there's that other discussion, do I really want to invest time and relinquish my precious hard-earned privacy to this new unresearched person?

Sandy is here today and she hasn't seen me in a while.  She says, "I called your house on two occasions wanting to know if you would like a ride to the pool."  Jesus Christ!  How did we jump from, "maybe I'll see you at the pool next week" to paging through the phone book for my address and number?  I pulled myself up to the side of the pool, my thoughts racing and my eyes wide and cautionary and my voice coming out slowly and carefully,  "Are --  you --  sure . . . it was my number?  There were no messages."   And Sandy says, "I didn't leave any," and she saunters away to the locker room.  I like that and perhaps I should say, next time leave a message because I never answer the phone but then the ball is back in my court, a newly formed responsibility, a required return phone call.  Quickly, I close my mouth.  It's all so complicated this business of making friends but I kinda like that girl.

ms. cat's opinion

"A cup of sugar, mostly brown," reads my mother's exasperating directions for pudding.  On any normal Thursday I would have called up the hill and said, "please Marie, be more specific," and she would have growled wondering why I didn't inherit her talent at literally reading between the lines of that recipe card.  Instead I possess my father's love of structure and the need to compulsively and painstakingly organize every facet in life. All science, no artistry here. At the end of the recipe she has written, "look at it."  No surprise, Marie has written her recipes for her eyes only. She always was a solitary girl. Geniuses in any field including the culinary arts don't have a clue how the rest of us common folk struggle and muddle through what looks to them to be a simple process.

If Sonny was not coming to dinner dessert would consist of Girl Scout cookies, you pick, I got'em all. But my father was accustomed to apple pie or strawberries in sauce on a homemade biscuit.  "Your mother cooked in the German fashion,"  says Dad's new paramour, a woman I have known since childhood, a safe bet for the old man.  "Big meals, lots of sides, and dessert. Your dad doesn't need all that."  In otherwards, quit  spoiling him. Easy for Cathy to say.  It's in her best interests to groom him for independence in case they take up housekeeping together. I'm still a lonely woman who achingly misses her mother and turning Dad into my child somewhat eases the dilemma. I know, probably a Freudian response, but then isn't everything.

So, I'm looking at this pudding as I have been instructed and it resembles watery cocoa, not what we want. Eureka! It has cornstarch in it and cornstarch gets thicker the more you cook it.  Back in the microwave again and again and now's it's a thick sludge but passable for human consumption.  Spent too much tme on the damn pudding, there will be baked potatoes instead of scalloped with swiss and parmesan cheeses.  Ahoy, Ms.Cat,  how'em I doing?

happy birthday to z-z-z . . .

The only people who should celebrate birthdays are the very young and the very old.  All of us in-betweeners should do the right and noble thing and invite a few friends out to a restaurant with lots of deep fried entrees and then proceed to get seriously drunk.

Somehow I have been invited to two birthday parties honoring persons in the geriatric crowd.  Both events will be celebrated on Sunday afternoons and the guests will be relieved of their partying duties by 4:00 p.m., poor tired old souls. Enough time to get home, fry a grilled cheese sandwich, watch 60 Minutes and fall asleep snoring loudly into the couch.  I am talking about myself, of course. The afternoon will be strenuous and taxing, all those new people to avoid, too much cream cheese eating and drinking what is someone else's idea of a good beer.

The first party will honor my father's girlfriend, would they please come up with a better word. Her kids decided to give her a party because she has never had a birthday party and this doesn't seem like a good reason but there you go. I do not want to attend because I don't like parties in any form but I need to show some level of support for this budding relationship, so important to my father.

The second soiree is for my father's sister, my aunt Patti.  She is a brilliant musician and has the degrees to prove it and I sat next to her at the piano on many Saturday mornings of my childhood while she puffed her cigarette and I stumbled through Beethoven. Like any artist worth her toast she is eccentric, quirky and the back of her car, the entire back of her car is covered with pro choice and love your earth bumper stickers.  She wears bright red lipstick and long sweeping purple skirts and her daughter Penny is giving the party.  Both women have traveled through three husbands apiece and Penny is a bonafide witch and pagan which always sparks up the conversation. The invitation insists that we bring musical instruments.  Oh no, this I will not miss.

I will not go without my father.  It will be necessary to stand anonymously in his shadow and then I can peruse the room and check out the contents of the medicine cabinet unnoticed, oh, I'm kidding.  Most people would rather speak with Sonny than with me and that is more than fine. 

I asked if he had received the invitation knowing that he automatically deletes without reading any email from his crazy sister. He grumbled for a few minutes and then agreed to go.

young lily

My nephew and his wife recently had their first child, a daughter and she really is a cute little snippet and cute right from the beginning, you don't see that too often. She has the perfectly round head, the clear inquisitive eyes, the little rosebud mouth that pouts on cue for the professional photographer. Her mother's family is a handsome tribe, and we have a few cuties on our side, a few.

Babies are a controversial issue.  They inspire us to heights of filial tenderness and threaten to plunge us into depths of embarrassment and despair if they don't walk or talk on schedule. Americans are competitive to the point of intrinsic pain and we insist our youngest and most innocent get in the race pronto.

I was a young mother of two-year-old Jason and he didn't chatter aimlessly like the son of a friend of my husband's and his awful wife and their kid was born just a couple of days after my boy.  Janet was an obnoxious, crude horror of a human being and unfortunately, she  reproduced. The two boys were playing and Janet did not notice that her prodigy was punching my son.  Jason was giving me a heavy-lidded glare because he was not allowed to hit and how should he handle this situation if not to knock the daylights out of this monster playmate.  I finally said, "Janet, tell your kid to stop hitting my kid."  She stood up, raised her arm and whacked little Davie across the back causing him to fly across the floor.  "Don't hit him," she thundered.  It doesn't take a team of crack engineers to understand why young Dave liked to hit and often.  Janet and her son were barred from the house and it was just a few weeks later that Jason started speaking and it was a complete sentence. "Mom, I don't want you to drive me around anymore."  I and I alone know the reason behind that comment and I'm taking it to my grave.

The horizon for young Lily looks promising.  She has the best of both worlds.  A father home schooled in the safe confines of the Midwest, surrounded by cousins and grandparents, fresh corn on the cob and sleeping under patchwork quilts and a mother, a Christian college graduate and professionally devoted to children with unfortunate deficits in home and parental involvement.  Lily will fill in the spaces, whatever they will be when her time comes.

at a distance

I ask for little in this life.  Healthy family members, a job that doesn't suck the life out of me, loose fitting neutral-colored clothing and on Saturday night I get to sit at an old downtown bar and eat some pretty decent pizza.  And the friendly barkeep keeps adding more whiskey to my cocktail to keep things interesting and when all this occurs the universe will spin and percolate as it should.  These requests are more than reasonable.  They are superlative and necessary to my existence.

But today I find myself tripping over invisible stones in the street and I swear people are looking at me like I have something voluminous hanging out of my nose. And it's all because Dave has invited Crazy Tom to join us for pizza and my natural rhythms are now threatened and interrupted.  The big guy should know better but he gets gregarious after his sauna at the health club and he does things like this.

Fast forward and I am wearing my neon orange pizza bar t-shirt that says "I just dropped in for a piece".  The staff cheers when I take off my jacket and I am home, sweet Jesus, I am home.  Then Crazy Tom slides into his chair and I order another drink really fast. Now I need to play the game of social interaction and it's not that I don't like people.  I just prefer them at a distance.

And Tom's okay, he really is, a single guy in his 50's who works at a group home for wayward boys, and that's putting it nicely.  He cares for his elderly parents, setting up his mom's Alzheimer's meds and arguing with his dad about, well, everything.  And he's holding onto the remnants of a disastrous relationship with a woman who harbors a piranha personality and she has relocated back to Florida, thank God, but he still bemoans her absence even after eight torture-filled months.  So we sit and listen to his rationalizations and maddening excuses for her insensitive behaviors and then I lick my pizza-stained fingers and bid good-by to Big Dave and the crazy boy.  They will be traveling across the river to a quaint little town where Lincoln once made a campaign speech and they have plans to hear a kickass blues group.

I know I would enjoy this band, middle-aged black men and women all from Chicago and Milwaukee so you know they will create good sound, you know they paid their dues.  But  I was divorced for seventeen years and spent way too many Saturday nights glued to bar stools staring up at band after band after band. I'm heading home to my down comforter and more Kessler's, good night sweet princes, good night and hopefully we'll all sleep well.