they say it's your birthday

And it is. Fifty-nine years old and sweating it, damn, sixty is too close.  My arthritic thumbs protest as I peel apples for Sonny's pie and I am thinking of a movie from the 50's, Marty, a black and white Oscar winner, starring Ernest Borgnine and he plays a lonely Italian butcher living with his widowed mother in the Bronx. Marty is a bumbling, homely sort of guy and Mom is a bitchy, unhappy critic who inserts herself into the lives of younger family members and then fans the winds of misery. There are no blue skies in this woman's aura. She is allowed to persist in this negative way because old people were revered in the day and matricide was illegal. In one scene she is sitting, in a rocking chair (duh) with her sister, another old lady and they are wearing the official old lady uniform: grey hair drawn back in a bun, black lumpy dress and thick stockings and huge crucifixes around their necks.  "Oh Bessie," she laments, "I am forty-eight years old and my time is past. I'm important to no one anymore."

My birthday. That means I get to order french fries and ask for a little packet of salt as well. I choose to celebrate with children because they understand the need for festivities and good things on this important day.  They will send me no birthday cards showing wrinkled women with sagging boobs and bonfire cakes and there will be no bottles of Geritol and X-lax in my gift pile. Instead we will sing loudly while the girl in the red and white checkered dress blows her oogah horn and announces to the room that it is indeed Dawn's birthday. "Do you want me to say another year older or  fifty-nine years old?" she asks.  Are you kidding?  Fifty-nine and gimme that free ice cream sundae.

holiday

I dust twice a year, Easter and Christmas, these are the days large amounts of people visit my house hoping to find chip dip and liquor.  I am not good at entertaining, nothing about it appeals to me and I am glad when the last citizen leaves my house.  I see people leaving my bathroom with dripping hands and my granddaughter Cameron is running up the stairs.  She is nude and there's my bathroom guest towel  wrapped around her little waist and she announces to the group she will be taking a shower. At least we got her out of her bathing suit which she has taken to wearing all the time.  You do not negotiate with a three-year-old child.

My brother David and I sit on our folding chairs holding our beer cans and waiting for the clock hands to move.  We are both self-acknowledged hermits and we come to these events because we know that family connections matter  although we're not sure why. We are waiting to return to our solitary comfortable lifestyles.

Another brother, Mark, is sitting on my purple couch and drinking my orange juice.  He is the middle sibling and owner of all the troubles and quirks that middle children are said to possess. "Poor Mark," my mother would sigh and roll her eyes," he is the middle child, you know," and with that statement he garnished a large portion of her attention.  And it didn't help that we teased him relentlessly about his "Dumbo" ears when we were small and he retaliated and called me "pizza face," an unchecked acne condition was my teen-aged angst.  Funny, the rest of him  caught up with those ears and they do not appear overly large to me at this late date. Mark did attain adulthood with only a few harmless neuroses, just like the rest us.
Another holiday passes and I hand my sister-in-law a pot of daffodils for volunteering to make the painstaking, time-consuming peanut cake recipe that is our family's mainstay traditional Easter dessert.  It involves freezing chunks of  cake and frosting all six sides of the chunks and rolling them in smashed peanuts.  It is not for the weak of heart but Sheri has met that challenge when she married my brother, a middle child with noticeable ears.

I had to buy a ham

I am standing at a huge freezer counter maybe ten feet long and it is filled with hams, bone-in, water added, spiral cut, shank, butt, shoulder, boiled, cured, smoked, raw and fully cooked.  Meat has never been my strong point and I face cooking  it with only scanty information and experience. My mother always bought the ham for Easter so I never bothered to learn ham language because she was always supposed to be there to cook the damn thing.  She and my father would travel to Cuba City, Wisconsin, home of Weber's Meat Market, a fine German establishment and purchase a fresh ham, the pale, pink color of a rose's heart.  She would  inspect that chunk of  meat and sometimes  request a new cut not liking how the fat veined or some other mysterious process.

There is a group of men in white butcher coats next to me and one man has that boss tone to his voice and he is lecturing the others and I am thinking they are student butchers and he is the ham master . He turns to me and says, "What are you looking for, m'am?"  A good ham, I reply, and I hear my mother's voice echo within my own. The gentleman wants to help me, and the novice butchers will learn something valuable about old ladies buying meat.  I bought the Fleur-de-Lis brand name as he advised.  His father  was some sort of meat know-it-all and he bought this ham every Easter and the family would talk about it for days.  And this is what I want, my family talking about ham for days. And the other winning factor was the name, Fleur de Lis. The Dubuque Packing plant in my hometown was a huge pig-smelly place that employed 3500 people in its heyday and used this French logo for their prize hams.  Everyone I know over the age of 50 worked at the Pack, except me, I stood at my cash register in my aqua blue plastic smock at the S.S. Kresge's after school each day.  Ah, the 60's . . .

woof

Making plans to visit my youngest son is like trying to see the Dali Lama.  He is enveloped in his job and can be unreachable for hours.  He is a cancer doctor for children and it is difficult to leave the ward when someone small is dying.  He stays.
It is a cold raw day in the Midwest, spring was here briefly for one day of seventy degrees and then we slammed those windows shut again. Ypsilanti Michigan is 425 miles away and I load the car up with books and yogurt and we head north.  There will be the challenge of driving around Chicago and no one's figured out how to do this efficiently.  Riding past the lake, the big one, Dave talks about renting a large cabin on the beach and inviting all the children, his and mine, for several days.  He babbles on about  bonfires and weenie roasts and I see myself hunched over a table peeling a mammoth pile of potatoes.

Arya is newly turned four and she could baffle a college debate team. She is complex and multi-leveled and fears nothing but public toilets as any intelligent person does. She sits in the backseat wearing Dave's sunglasses upside down and we get lost going from Walmart to her home. After two phone calls to her mother and a chat with a gas station guy in a town south of Ypsilanti we are back on the right road.  Arya is patient with us but it is clear she expects the adults in her life to be more organized.. 

Olive is almost one year old.  She's leery of me, who can blame her, I am this silly gushing grandma and Dave strikes her as the more interesting relative, big and gruff, like nobody in her life. She requires structure and sameness in her baby world and I am clearly an interruption of that.  She stares at me steely-eyed from the safety of her mother's lap and then gives me a little sniff and turns her attention to her rowdy grandfather.  Olive is aware she is in charge of the kingdom and she uses her power modestly.

Jim and Sara's condo is full to busting with baby furniture and it looks like the University will make Jim a deal he can't refuse and they will stay in Michigan. I tell him he can now buy a house with a guest bedroom and a ring for Sara's finger. I want a daughter-in-law.  I need a daughter-in-law. I deserve a daughter-in-law.  I have come close several times only to have my hopes dashed against the craggy shores  of bachelorhood, my sons shaking off  commitment like a couple of wet dogs.  Woof.

fat and crabby in Iowa

"If I were back in Iowa," Susan's neighbor tells me, "I would be fat and crabby. All those people do is sit in the house and eat."  Yowser.  I am talking to Jean, seventy something years of age, and she is lamenting the status of her family back in the fair city of Ames, home to a huge cow-loving university.  We are climbing into the car and Susan will drive us to her gym for fifty-five minutes of Silver Sneakers II aerobics.

There are some things I don't like about California such as the governor has an Austrian accent and a wife who shares genetic coding with the notorious Kennedys and that you can never, ever find a parking spot. But I do like the mental and physical conditions of their geriatric population.  Near perfect weather every day inspires the soul to blow fresh chi into aged limbs and locked joints.  I see a little grannies on the boardwalk, silver hair pinned in  top knots,  floral house dresses reminiscent of my Nana and the biggest, whitest Nikes you ever saw.

The class instructor looks forty-five from my position in the back of the class.  She has perfectly toned arms, damn her, and a surfer girl lilt to her voice and she giggles about nothing at all. She is actually sixty years old and just got back from a week swimming in Nicaragua. We go into a squat and she says, don't do this if it hurts and of course, it hurts. If I only did what didn't hurt I would just go home.


It's Sam I am I am.
Would you buy a used car from this Sam?

  Susan has purchased sky-blue denim upholstery for her most recent move back to San Diego. Her pillows have bird-of-paradise and palm tree motif.  "Too much ocean?" she asks,  Naaah, I say, and I luxuriate in the lush pale greens and sea blue turquoise living room. And they always have the biggest TV imaginable and they never watch a program when it is actually on because Jim records shows right inside that big TV and we watch  Sam, the Cooking Guy when we darn well feel like it.  The phone rings and on the corner of the TV screen Jean's name and phone number flashes.   God, I'm loving this.

I could live there, really

I could live in Hillcrest.  Susan says I would not like the frequent planes booming overhead but I would find a way to compromise on that issue.   On my first visit I felt some element had changed and the universe had shifted into a more sensible arrangement. The streets of Hillcrest are clean, litter is nonexistent and the houses and shops are painted in bold colors. Gardens are everywhere- all things have reached their artistic and most eye-pleasing potential here.  A creative funk hangs over the place and it is apparent intelligent people reside here. Poetry readings are posted everywhere, book shops touting Hemingway and Capote, eclectic art galleries, places of intelligent consumerism.  Hillcrest is a homosexual community and there is an acceptance and integrity in the lifestyle and I could cartwheel down he middle of the street in polka dot underwear and everyone will applaud and ask for more.

  We have breakfast at the Crest cafe, a favorite of mine and I love the pale pink walls, rainbow lighting and paintings of dogs and children on the walls.
We check out the farmers' market and sample blood oranges, oily pestos and Carlsbad strawberries, big as plums and they melt in your mouth like thick mushy pudding.  I buy silver earrings and Susan picks up pale pink Fuji apples for her neighbor. I did pass on the mango salad served in the sea urchin bowl, see below.  The band is playing xylophone/ washboard Louisiana beans and dirty rice kind of music and Hillcrest is just a versatile wholesome place to be. 
 






baby, you can drive my car

If you live in California you are either driving somewhere or coming back and if you actually slow down you are looking for someplace to park. An automobile is a requirement in this state and if you have none you are quietly escorted to the state line.


So, it was no surprise when we spent  my first day in San Diego test driving cars.  Susan was seduced by a  navy VW sedan convertible with tan leather seats and the hard-top creases and shuffles itself into the trunk like a blanket being folded.   Joe, the very gay salesman, thought we should take the car home and see how it looked in the driveway, sneaky devil. Todd, the other  salesman, looked all of twelve years old, but he had a Midwestern personality and his slacks were perfectly creased.   Currently, my friends own a Honda hybrid, God bless them, but they want to feel the California wind in their hair, thus the convertible.

 Susan knows a lot of rich people.  They seem drawn to her because she is classy and dresses well and she understands their predicament, being rich is not always easy. And she has an enfolding tenderness that appeals to those of us who are often misunderstood by the world. We are invited to dinner at the condo of Doug and Barbara, the rich people.  We arrive at the house on the boardwalk and it is the same house we stayed in sixteen years ago when Susan and Jim were married on the beach.  There had been a horrendous hail storm in Dubuque the August before and everybody was collecting from their insurance companies for hail damage.  I had a $400 check in my hand and decided a trip to California was more fun than buying shingles for my roof.  Susan loves a pajama party and there were fourteen of us in that house.  We roller bladed in the hallways, ate fresh fish and fruit and bought four new bottles of liquor each morning. 


Todd and Susan, BFF

 Doug picked up pepperoni pizza and salad, a regular blue collar lunch, from around the corner and we helped them finish off their margarita mix as they will be returning to Oregon this week. They own a flower seed company and their home and gardens were featured in, uh, Home and Gardens magazine.  Barbara is a soft-spoken woman in her mid-70's with shiny platinum hair that hangs loosely around her shoulders.  I love watching her hands when she speaks.  She wears slender gold rings and bracelets and they make tiny tinkling sounds whenever she gracefully gestured.