oh daddy dear you know you're still number one

My father lingers at the table. He is finishing his dessert and he still has a full glass of wine. There will be conversation.

"I was not a good child," he begins, "I'm surprised my father didn't shoot me" and  I'm surprised he's telling me this.  After almost ninety years he chooses to drop this confession on my dinner table with Bing Crosby crooning Christmas tunes in the background.  I find this incredulous and as if he can hear my inner thoughts he says, "I know the masses will remember me as an honest and true man but that's not what I was. I was an imp and a scoundrel and a vagabond." This is how my father talks like he has a Webster dictionary and a Shakespeare manuscript in front of him.

 Sonny, nee Albert is the eldest in his family but his mother had delivered a stillborn child the year before at the Catholic hospital. The doctor was late and the nuns tied her legs together to keep the baby from birthing. The poor infant suffocated and my grandmother would not return to "that Catholic torture chamber" for another fifty years. I'm sure Nana had some spicier words to describe her situation because she could swear like a serious sailor. When I visited her in later years she would gaze at her arthritic withered hands and mutter, "sugar."  I knew when my younger sister showed up Nana used stronger language to describe her discomfort, those two were cohorts in borderline behaviors. I was such a good little Catholic back then and nobody cussed in front of me.  I went on to commit great and notorious sins but I am still remembered for my early piety and I swear when I enter a room the tone turns somber and church like.

As for my father he never did give me a lot of information about his deviant youth. Something about stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and it reminded me of the time he talked about his stint in the Marines.  He went on leave in New York City and his eyes got big and fuzzy at the memory and then he remembered  I was sitting there.  His face shifted as if a window shade was pulled down and he went silent.  If I had been my brother the story would have been told accompanied by much laughter and foot stomping, maybe not the stomping.  Girls just want to have fun but lots of time we really have to work for it.

no crazy news

The phone is ringing and I scream at it as I always do, "leave me alone!" Unfortunately, the four-year-old nymph that shares her days with me is quick with the pick-up, social dominatrix that she is. Luckily, she hangs up before any meaningful conversation can occur.

I don't make friends easily and that doesn't bother me.  I figure there are not many people worth knowing and as Thomas Edison said, "just how often does someone say something interesting?"  He spent a lot of evenings fishing off his dock after telling his wife he could not hear the conversation around the dinner table.  I have a couple of friends and they are gems, unfortunately they've moved out of town. I wasn't the reason, the town was, at least I think. We stay in touch in the way out of town friends stay in touch, precariously.



Sandy and I have been swimming together for over two years. We just happened to be in the same pool at the same time and after awhile, a long while we started talking. Swimming is a logical method of learning to know someone. If a pregnant pause is looming you can submerge and blow bubbles until an interesting thought appears and you can pick up the conversation again.

She tells me she and husband will celebrate their 40th anniversary next month. They met when they were seven years old (husband remembers, Sandy does not) and they were sixteen on their first date. Wow, I tell her my story. Married for 8 1/2 years and most people were surprised I lasted that long, divorced for twenty years and with Big Dave for twenty years. "Oh wait, I tend to round things up." Those numbers would have made me a bride at age twelve. "Divorced for seventeen, in this relationship seventeen."

I have had several lives all packed into one. And I don't find this upsetting, just exhausting. I long for the status quo, days without change or surprises, predictability and normalcy. I'm through with adventures. I just want to sit in the sun under the oak tree and know the ringing phone will bring no crazy news.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

state of iowa vs me - part two

I am sitting in a courtroom for my pre-trial conference because some bozo of a school bus driver decided his day needed excitement and told the police I drove past his bus, lights flashing. An uneasy feeling begins to creep along the side of my brain when I realize the last time I sat in a courtroom was my divorce and that didn't go too well either. That might have been due to the idiotic shady attorney I hired on the advice of a co-worker whose husband was eventually deterred by a state trooper who found a large chunk of cocaine and a loaded revolver on the front seat of his car. And that attorney? He is currently in federal prison and will be for a long time due to threatening a witness. And the beat goes on . . .

There are about thirty people here, all degenerates like myself and I notice the wardrobe choices of the woman ahead of me. She is wearing skin-tight black jeans and six-inch black fake leather boots and when she bends over to sign the attendance sheet a large sequinned heart on each of her buttocks winks at me.

The assistant county attorney walks in pulling a suitcase on wheels and it is full of red files and one of them will be mine. He has a large chest and an immense belly that hangs halfway to his knees. In an attempt to cover up this physical mishap he has tied his very orange tie so that the front piece is twice as long as the usual observed tie and the back piece is only a few inches. Like all fashion faux pas it only accentuates what was intended to be hidden.

And then the judge walks in and I couldn't make this up any better. He has one eye that is dead-on center square and the other one lolls off to the left.  Don't you just hate that because you never know which eye to look at and by the time you decide you're frustrated and the other guy is totally pissed at you for not figuring it out.

Again I wait almost two hours for a four-minute conference and I feel like an insignificant animal in an insignificant herd. I am never driving near a school bus again. And the worst is yet to come.

careful, Boots

It is 4:05 in the morning and sleep eludes me, obviously. Last night I drank a half gallon of salty oily syrupy crap attempting to cleanse my digestive tract for my date with the colon doc.  I accept the fact that in a very short time a two foot tube will be inserted in a place where nothing should ever be inserted but I'd just rather it not happen so early in the morning.  I am on a medically prescribed starvation diet to keep myself clean and pristine for the man in white and I am not accustomed to denying myself.

No food all day leaves me lightheaded and crabby.  But I'm feeling better than I look which is often the case these days and I'm still riding high on the Obama wave. I can now sit back and coast for another four years. Whenever a Republican is in office I feel the need to stay alert and owl-eyed in case of a nuclear retaliation or a sudden rise in social worker suicides which is often the case in that kind of administration.

Mornings are not my best time. I prefer to stay asleep as long as possible before meeting the confrontations and humiliations of the day. All I can think about is Gomer's Pickle Barrel sub shop just across the street from the hospital where my procedure is scheduled.  They whip together a mean marinara meatball sandwich and that is where I will be once they allow me to put my pants back on.

At my lowest point I think about checking you tube for some really blatant image shots of the upcoming procedure. I try not to peruse that website too often as it has a way of spiraling out of control.  I need to monitor my four year-old granddaughter's usage as some really warped individuals will slip in a Dora video with the little senorita spouting profanity and making lewd gestures towards Boots, her monkey companion. It's enough to make you want to gather your clan together and escape into the mountains to raise goats or something.

still in Paris with mr. cranky pants

Jason wouldn't ask for help if he were hanging from a tree root sprouting out the side of a cliff with masticating crocodiles circling below and an avalanche rescue team up above twiddling their thumbs just begging for something to do. That's how oblivious he is to the career needs of others.


I on the other hand ask for assistance from total strangers all the time in my hometown so you can imagine how that habit mushroomed when I was overseas. I'm old, I don't know how much time I have, I need to know now.

My son made it clear he was bothered every time I asked some person directions or when I needed help counting my change and especially when I questioned two gentlemen behind me in line to use a one-seat public toilet in Paris. Entrance was gained by pushing buttons and one of the fellows showed me how to do that. Once inside I realized my mistake. A French woman was purring over an intercom and she was telling me what I needed to do and I understood nothing. I panicked like the amateur tourist I am and began pushing all the buttons and the toilet started flushing and water sprayed out of openings in the floor to clean that surface and it seemed like a long time since I saw daylight. I started banging on the door and the sweet voice above me just caused my agitation to escalate and I was so relieved when the door finally opened and I never did pee.

One advantage with aging is you lose that self-consciousness your teen-aged psyche worked so hard to construct long ago. I could fall out of a moving vehicle totally nude in front of a busload of professional football players and and feel no remorse other than for my scraped knees. What other people think of me is none of my business.

But a 39-year-old bachelor traveling through Europe with his mother is weird toast indeed and he is like other non-married males, nit-pickity like a virginal old library lady, whiny and overly set in his routine. Walking down the hostel hallway in my slippers and housecoat with toothbrush and paste in hand the other somewhat dirty young residents smile and nod their heads and they usher me to the front of the toilet line. They look at me with gentle expressions, they miss their mothers I think.

state of iowa vs. me - part one

This day has been a rotting halibut on my calendar. It has alarmed and depressed me for weeks but here it is and I enter the traffic violation east courtroom where I will need to answer to a school bus driver who says I passed him while his lights were flashing. I am clutching a carbon copy form the officers gave me a month ago when they were kind enough to visit my home and inform me of this invitation and it says 8:30 will my be my appointment time. I have arrived ten minutes early and I could have been earlier but I didn't want to appear too eager. Imagine my surprise when I find fourteen people waiting before me  and why I assumed I would have my own private appointment time shows my extreme ignorance in the ways of Lady Justice and her schedules.

The court clerk informs us that we will be seen in the order we checked in so I attempt to get comfortable on the hard wooden lawbreaker chair. I cast sideways looks at the other party-goers and I appear to be the only person outside the court clerk who is not wearing jeans, sweats or Green Bay Packer pajama bottoms. One disheveled young man has been told to remove his baseball cap and that was a mistake as he is sporting one hell of a case of greasy bedhead locks thereby increasing his guilty index by several points.

The clerk asks me how I will plead and I say not guilty and then I realize every citizen in this courtroom is also claiming to be not guilty. All of us are pure as driven snow responsible drivers and the victims of overly zealous police officers and lying GI Joe school bus drivers.  It just makes me wanna cry as I nod sympathetically to the woman sitting next to me. Her kohl-rimmed eyes, triple-pierced lips and belly rolls extending over ripped jeans scream that she's just another innocent tread-upon victim of the fascist state of Iowa.

I

And I notice that all these other innocents have something that I do not. Paperwork. Realms and realms of computer sheets with diagrams of little cars and school buses in various positions on little streets. Piles of paper with arrows and circles drawn all over the place and highlighted sentences with exclamation marks. All I have is the before-mentioned pink carbon copy barely readable as all carbon copies are. I will definitely need to get myself some serious bad ass paperwork.

please god let it be over

Just in case you are hanging out on your couch wondering where your favorite presidential candidate is today think no more. I can tell you with absolute certainty they are both in my small Iowa town dragging their tired ass menageries behind them. Mitt Romney touched down in our city airport at noon today and no one in this household gives a hoot and Obama is currently in a small park about an hour's walk from my place.  Iowa is one of those politically infuriating battleground states and there are loads of undecided independent people who could be persuaded at the last minute and the candidates know this. We are stubborn procrastinating farmers holding our ballots tightly in dirt-encrusted hands hoping the last light will reveal the true prophet.

 I decide to take that hour walk and check out the scene. I know I am getting close when ten-foot chain-link fences keep butting up in front of me not allowing further passage.
There is John Deere equipment blocking alleys because no one in Iowa messes with a Deere and how comforting it is knowing those slick secret service guys borrowed the machines from our JD plant just north of town.

And here they are, the guys and it's a strange way to earn a salary, milling around casting fierce looks at the crowd and wearing curly pig tail wires left over from the Nixon administration and yes, that is a sniper squatting on top of the post office. I'll  be buying those stamps later.



I visit my aunt who lives in a senior citizen apartment building kitty corner from the park and the residents were instructed to keep their shades drawn. Who knows what fury a disgruntled octogenarian could release when faced with the blaring ineffectiveness of the current Medicare laws. Those quad canes can become weaponry in the wink of a cataract-clouded eye.

  

Big Dave shoves this sheet in front of me last night and I remind him it is no guarantee of admission to this president-starring event. Anyone who logs onto this website can get the precious page but the show will be a first come situation. My husband has the patience of a two-year-old waiting for a popsicle so I know he'll never get to see our current hero. We'll just go and drink beer and eat greasy fries someplace and that'll be fine enough for a Saturday night.