I do’t mind a crowded nest … much

There are, I tell myself  — as I step over mountains of plaid flannel shirts, wade through rivers of paint-dabbed paper towels and climb through tangles of new electronic mysteries that have recently sprouted like aliens from my computer —  there are reasons to be happy my oldest son is back at home.

Really, there are.

There have to be.

So to keep from  killing him the next time I knock over an empty beer bottle or accidentally step on a bowl of vegetarian something or other that is hidden under the computer desk, I made this list to remind myself that he is my oldest child and I love him.

Really, I do.

I have to.

Top 10 reasons why Scott is still breathing

10. He makes sure the critters have food and water when we go camping on weekends. He also got one of our barn kittens a wonderful new home – and then promptly lost interest in the two that remained.

9. He keeps Buzz company. Buzz may not have the same idol worship he did for his big brother when Scott lived away and only came home fo cool events that usually involved food, Apples to Apples and new electronics, but now that Buzz himself is older, they are connecting on a whole new level … and there’s usually a gaming console at the end of it.

I knew the honeymoon was over when I heard Buzz slam into his room and mutter “When do I get to get on the computer!?!”

8. He makes us laugh. Scott has a great and unusual perspective on life and always tries to see both sides of every issue – and find the funny dimension on each side. Don’t know where he got that …

7. My computer is becoming a gallery of beauty. Scott knocks out these amazing “paintings” he does with  digital palette and every day, I seem to find more of them. I always remember he’s a wonderful artist, but until I see the next work, I forgot just how damn good he is.

6. He does his own laundry. The good thing about this I, if my laundry is in the way, he actually finishes it up, so he’s doing my laundry, too, and that alone buys him a ticket to stay for eternity.

5. We eat better. On the rare occasions I cook these days, what with the new schedule, I try to cook meals with more vegetables and fruits because he is a vegetarian. Also, I’m eating much, much less cheese because he is also a cheesetarian and I can’t keep a giant block of cheddar in the deli tray long enough to taste it.

4. Free IT services. Need I say more?

3. Amazing beer. He I determined to discover every microbrewery in the United States and sample just one of each kind, so we get to try out the leftovers. Naked Beach, pretty good. Three Philosophers, eh,  not so much.

2. Transportation! Being a one car family hasn’t been too difficult, but now that I’m working, it helps knowing I’ve got a chauffeur if Terry needs the van.

1. Company. Flanner, beer bottles and discarded art supplies aside, my son is just good, restful, happy company and fun to talk to. Movies, music, art, stupid dog videos, cute cat videos, and cheese – we can talk and laugh and just about anything.

So yeah, I’m really glad he’s home for a while. And I’m going to make myself re-read this every morning as I dance the Gottago dance outside the bathroom door while he takes his time inside – just to remember why.

Summertime, and the living is easy ….

Summertime.

I don’t think the season has ever had more meaning for me than it has this year. My sunflowers are blooming across the back of the old barn like cheerful soldiers in a Disney cartoon, their heads bobbing in the vaguest of breezes, listening to music never heard in town.

The mockingbirds and redwinged blackbirds are staging their own Bonnaroo in the front yard and the does make their daily pilgrimage across the neighbor’s front yard, pausing and posing like visiting royalty.

Me?

I’m breathing.

I’m sitting on the front porch with my eyes closed and I’m letting the hot air wrap me up and hold me. Everything tastes better, feels better, looks better, and smells better, which is amazing when you live next to a cattle farm and a just-manured corn field.

Everything is better.

You see, I lost a summer last year. Most of it was spent in the chilly, sterile box of a hospital room, the clouded blur of medication adjustment, or the bitter darkness of anger and betrayal. I don’t remember much of last summer at all, and of what I do remember, most of it I wish I could forget.

Isn’t it amazing how nine short months can change your life? In nine months, a brief, pleasurable act creates a human being. In nine months, another year of education is crammed away into backpacks along with candy wrappers, mangled notebooks and that library book you forgot to turn in.

In nine months, a life can change.

For the first time in my post-college life, I’m not working for a newspaper or trying to work for a newspaper.  For the first time, I have a regular job with regular hours, a strict time clock, a cool, clean work environment and decent benefits.  I’m a call service rep for a company that provides fare cards for mass transit agencies in San Francisco and oddly enough, it’s the perfect job for me.

People call in to find out why their cards aren’t working and I have to figure it out, then write up an incident report. In other words, I’m getting paid to talk on the phone, be nosy, do logic puzzles, and make an incident out of everything. What could be better than that?

Best of all, my boss is fair and encouraging – what a concept.

I do miss my life at the Times-Gazette. I miss John and thank heaven for Facebook everyday so I can keep up with him. I miss talking to my guy, Ike Farrar, who did call me to check on me a few months ago. I miss being able to help people with their plays, projects, fundraisers and such.

What I don’t miss is the meanness.  It tainted last summer, a carrion scent at a picnic.

Coming out of that post-suicidal fugue has been gradual and even on bright sunny days like today, I can feel the  gray tendrils reaching for me, but these days, I’m much better at ignoring them. Nine months have taught me what is worth worrying over and what isn’t. Who my loved ones truly are – and aren’t.

Best off all, I get to write what I want to write now, and coming home to a blank computer screen after churning out glorified ad copy no longer seems like a busman’s holiday.

Everyday seems like a real holiday – summer vacation for the rest of my life, and it’s only just beginning.

Moccasins and powdered wigs

In Great Britain, the judges wear these powdered wigs. Here, they tend to wear black robes. What they all should wear — what everyone should wear — before being allowed to judge, is a pair of moccasins.

Someone else’s moccasins.

There have been two instances recently where I’ve seen people passing judgment who had no clue. They looked down from their lofty perches, vomited up the same old crap they’d heard vomited up by others who also had no clue, and felt as though they were the better people for doing it.

A friend of mine was getting out of her car to go into a store one day. Someone looked at her, looked at her car, and said — just loudly enough to be overheard — “Must be nice having a handicapped sticker when you don’t need one.”

Not an hour later, at the grocery store, a similar thing happened. This time, the woman who said something to my friend was also in a handicapped-stickered car. She was the handicapped one. Her  husband — her healthy and un-handicapped husband — parked in the handicapped lot and hopped out to go get groceries.

This time, My friend, still stinging from the earlier incident, didn’t even park in a blue lot, but the other woman took one look at her sticker, shook her finger in my friend’s face and said “Shame! Shame!”

Oh, there was something to be ashamed of, but it wasn’t anything my friend did. It was the other women, who assumed because my friend did not have a cane or walker, she wasn’t truly handicapped.

What she has is a rare condition that causes her skin to lister severey under the slightest pressure. Just the short walk from the car to the door can raise oozing welts on her feet, on her waist — anywhere anything can rub against her skin.

She also has fibromyalgia and a degenerative bone disease and has several small, broken bones in her feet that will never heal. She’s been recently diagnosed with a potentially fatal liver disease.

But because she wasn’t in a wheelchair, she’s supposed to be ashamed of that blue sticker? 

No, Those who judged without the facts should be ashamed.

A few days after she told me about this, I saw an apparently healthy couple park in a handicapped lot and get out to go into a store. I almost said something — I have a nephew in a wheelchair and I get ferocious about people who park there without reason — but I remembered her story. For all I knew, they had as many things wrong with them as my friend does. Either way, the only person who had the right to judge whether or not they got that blue sticker was the agency that assigned it. It wasn’t my place or my right to do so — especially since I didn’t have any of the facts, much less all of them.

Another incident hit closer to home. Someone posted a snotty comment about the woman in front of her buying food with food stamps, then getting into her nice car with her designer clothes and driving off. The poeple who came on and added their own pithy and prurient judgments had at least two things in common. One, they assumed that everyone who used food stamps abused food stamps. 2: They have never had to be on food stamps themselves.

I’m about to be, and I am mortified. Knowing that I have failed my family so badly, that I cannot provide for them, is just killing me, but pride has to be expendable when there is no food in the house. If it had not been for the kindness of friends, families and absolute strangers, we would have had little or no meat this winter.

It is humiliating enough, knowing that I’ve failed, but knowing that I’m being judged as I pick up that much-needed food for my family is terrifying. My emotional health is shaky at best — I dread what will happen the first time I have to use the card.

Here are some real facts for those who were so quick to judge. Food stamps cannot be used to purchase tobacco or alcohol. In fact, it can’t be used for anything but food that has to be prepared at home. In other words, I can’t take it to Red Lobster, but I can use it to buy hamburger for a meatloaf I make myself. I can’t use it to buy cleaning supplies or toilet paper. I don’t get cash back to buy alcohol and cigarettes.

True,I could use it to buy premium food items then sell them and use that money for booze and smokes, but I won’t. Most people won’t. We need the food too much.

Am I taking a handout? Yes. A handout I’ve paid for in part through the taxes I’ve pad in my 3+ decades as a wage earner. 

What I haven’t paid for in taxes, I will be paying for in pain and indignity as you pass judgment behind me. I won’t be leaving in designer clothes — I get mine at Goodwill. I won’t be driving off in a luxury car — our 10-year-old van has 210,000 miles and no handles on the back doors. But I will be leaving in shame.

Keep in mind, about that other woman — you don’t know when those clothes ere bought, or the car. All it takes is one layoff and one major illness, and you, too, could be suffering the humiliation of getting your food with food stamps. I know.

Try those moccasins on for size.

 

Appracadabra

Orginal fiction

by Mary Mannon Reeves

All rights reserved

Gideon Ambrose stared at the final calculation and sat heavily in his office chair. He would have kicked it back and scooted around the tiny space that was his office , but the reams of ancient manuscripts, mountains of computer printouts and empty boxes of Chicken McNuggets impeded  his way.

I should shout something, he thought. Eureka! or Mr. Watson!

Instead, he looked at the formula again and leaned forward on his desks, put his head in his hands, stared down at the good old Ticonderoga No. 2 wooden yellow pencil with teeth marks and no eraser  and whispered.

Abracadabra.

Color seemed to leach out of the pencil, then wash back in, richer and darker. The bright yellow paint faded, then turned gold. The soft, pale wood whitened, and then gleamed gold.  The dark graphite tip … you get the idea.

Gideon flicked the pencil with his finger tip and it began a slow roll to the end of the desk. It fell, bounced off an empty McNugget carton, then clinked against the tile floor.

Clinked.

Like gold.

Like magic.

Ambrose picked the pencil up and studied it in the soft gleam of his desk lamp. More than fifteen hundred years of study. Notes from everyone from DaVinci to Asimov. Ages of  alchemic studies and the result was one formula that could turned one object into gold.

One time.

To specify the formula for another object – even another pencil, would take another hundred years. You had to specify each atom in the change, recognize the properties of each element…

“It’s hopeless,” he moaned.

“It’s magic,” he whispered.

His phone chimed and vibrated beneath a pile of 12^th Century manuscripts from a monestary in East Bratislava, and they slipped to the floor, disgorging dust and dogma. Despite his  battle between despair and wonder,  or perhaps because if it, Ambrose grinned as his phone  buzzed its way free from ages of mathematical computations that it could complete in seconds. Nano seconds.

His eyes jumped from the golden pencil to the smart phone, then to the white board, where the last of the formula mocked fifteen centuries of frustration and forensics.

Could it be so easy? Could he break down the barriers between math and magic with modern technology?

Was there an app for that?

It took two years and, of course, the assistance of his teenaged son. It would have cost millions as far as processing, man hours, and paying for iPhones, iPads and Chicken McNuggets, but the initial formula, the golden pencil, was the easiest and first app to program  and gold Ticonderogas contributed covertly to the conversion of science to magic.

He son seemed mildly amused and happily incurious about just what the new app was supposed to do, other than convert formulas in time periods that turned nanoseconds into eons. Once he was confident his brilliant, but foggy, father had a good grasp on the concept behind building the apps, Matthew escaped. He wasn’t old enough to drive, care about girls, or be embarrassed by his brilliant but foggy father, and working for two solid years on one smart phone app had cured him of any desire to sit in front of a computer again.

He took up rock climbing and may have suffered a broken finger now and then, but not once a case of carpal tunnel.

At last, Gideon Ambrose had his app.

He spent days playing with it. He discovered that he could not only turn items into gold, he could turn gold into red cedar the perfect density for making number 2 pencils, but even Ambrose realized that was hardly cost efficient.

His office looked like Aladdin’s cave before he got bored enough  to act silly.

He pointed the phone’s lens at a at yet another pencil.

Not into gold this time,  he thought. I’m hungry.

“Ham sandwich,” he said. “Appracadabra.”

The next time, he would think to add mustard. It was a very thin sandwich to be sure – even magic has to obey certain laws of physics — but tasty. Mustard would have helped.

Next, he aimed at the cover of a book – one of his favorites, and one it made his heart hurt to read now because its creator, the great Dragonlady, was now flying in skies on a different plane of reality, having left mortality behind in her Irish home and immortality behind in the libraries, bookstores and dreams of would-be dragonriders.

“D…” he hesitated, then studied the small confines of his office. Not exactly the place for a giant, fire-breathing telepathic  dragon now was it?

“Fire lizard,” he said instead. “Appracadabra.”

Time and space and dimensions folded faster than a Starbucks franchise in a one-horse town, and the book now chirped at Ambrose.

Or rather the tiny, golden dragon perched on the book chirped at Ambrose, then  began stalking McNuggets  in the boxes on the floor.

Potential tornadoed in his mind, whipped up by excitement, pride, a touch of greed — and a sudden jet stream of terror.

What had he done?

He had not only learned how to transmute metal, he had learned how to transmute anything. He could create things that had previously only existed in the fertile imaginations of the McCaffreys and Heinleins of the world.

The fire lizard chirped and flapped and settled on his shoulder, where it dismembered a McNugget .

He had created life.

He had created a monster.

Imagine this app in the hands of just anybody>?  NeoNazis?  Halo addicts? Teenaged girls?

He had visions of hordes of Hitlers battling the monsters of Halo in the quiet streets of his town while the hipster vampires sparkled in the audience and pretended not to care.

No, no, no no, no. For every cancer cure the mathmagic app could produce, there were a thousand curses created by sullen neo Goths. For every Rembrandt masterpiece brought to light in subtlety and grace, there would be tens of thousands of cutesy thatched cottages with light shining from bizarre and physically impossible sources.

And what about the horrific creatures that only existed in fantasy form now? If he could bring a charming fire lizard to life, couldn’t – wouldn’t – the fans of Lovecraft, King and Jackie Collins do the same?

He shuddered , then shuddered again.

Anyone could  turn the app toward the Bible, the Koran , the Necronimicon …

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to his far distant son, thinking of the hard work the boy had put in on the app. “I could have given you Hogwarts – but someone else would have given you Mordor.”

Ambrose leaned back and pushed away from the computer screen, where swirling bits and bytes sparkled and vanished and returned magic to the world of fiction and fantasy. Around him, the massive lab gleamed in its usual dust-free, Kubrick-inspired whiteness, brightness and sterility. Through the observation window, Ambrose’s colleagues shook their heads.

“It took him what, five hours of computer time to disprove the works of 15 centuries?”

“Not disprove, un-prove, all virtually” corrected the dean. “He created the world, the circumstances and explored the potential outcomes. All of it in his head – the golden pencils, the teenaged son, the ham sandwich. He wasn’t able to find a viable outcome for any of the paths the alchemists began, so he shut them down.”

“It’s a good thing they keep him in theoretical physics,” said the colleague. “In applied, he’d be dangerous.”

Under Ambrose’s desk, the fire lizard looked up and cheeped softly,  a happy blue swirling in its multifaceted eyes while Ambrose texted his rock-climbing son and told him to pack.

Copyright 2012 Mary Mannon Reeves

But it made such a great planter ….

Dear Mrs. Reeves:

It has recently come to our attention that there are no appliances, working or otherwise, located outside of your new residence. There was, in fact, one chest freezer that was removed and replaced with an upright freezer, but we are given to believe you actually took that model inside the home.

To use. Because it actually works.

We are also aware that your lawn has been mowed recently and you discovered that a good weed wacker will function after 5 years of neglect and atmospheric exposure. And Mrs. Reeves, we also noted that you planted something in the matching flower pots on your front porch with something other than cigarette butts.

In light of these recent actions on your part, and also taking into consideration the lack of front yard bathroom fixtures, non-working vehicles in side yard, and presence of only one canine — and it’s not a hound — we regret to inform you that your membership in the White Trash Society has been rescinded.

Ours has been a long and rewarding association, from the bathtub that housed plants in your first back yard as a married woman, to the ancient and non-functioning VW Microbus you used at your last home as a way to tell your brick ranch apart from all the other brick ranches.We understand that there a large number of huge, old tires on the property behind your home. Should you consider moving them to your front yard, painting them white with beer can borders and filling them with petunias we will reconsider.

But only after the paint starts to peel.

Yours truly,

Git R. Dunn

President

WhiteTrash Society

 

What better legacy … Days 9-10 of 366

I confess – I was a spoiled child. I had a pony. We took great vacations. We never had a meal without meat, and with the exception of the $165,000 Lippizzaner stallion, I got everything I ever asked for for Christmas.

But my dad never let us forget how lucky we were. He’d been orphaned at the age of 8 and raised in a Methodist orphanage near Little Rok. If he went overboard for us at Christmas, it was because his Christmases made the orange-and-a-penny gifts Laura Ingalls got in her prairie stocking seem like a Wall Street windfall.

But he never forgot those bleak days and he never let us, either.

My mother was born to a family of some wealth, but it was all gone by the time World War II hit, so she knew both worlds, the one where you are the only family in the county with a motorcar and the one where you learn how to weed your own garden patch or go hungry that fall.

So even while we were being given ponies (me), motorcycles (David) and trips to Europe (John), we were also being shown, not just how to care, but how to give. From the heart, not the wallet.  We boxed up good, but outgrown clothes and took them to families with less. We packed and delivered food boxes on holidays. We volunteered at the day care for special needs children and made cookies for the low-income nursery school.

When we stopped by the home, the schools, the daycare centers, Mom or Dad would sit and visit and we would play with the children. Poor or black, or Down Syndrome – whatever.  Kids being kids, when not poisoned by parental prejudices, we had a great time and we learned through context that these kids were just like us – only we were luckier, and that was nothing to brag about. The luck of the genetic draw, being born in the right place at the right time, had nothing to do with our own abilities, any more than it had to do with their need for clothing, medicine, or just affection and attention had to do with theirs.

I worked three different jobs when I was in college. Of my two oldest sons, Scott paid his own way, working full time while taking a full course load. Ben is doing the same even now. All I’ve been able to give them are broken down cars that cost more than they’re worth, and advice (which also probably cost more than it’s worth.)

If any kids had the right to be, well, self-righteous and superior to those taking handouts, or those who have been lucky enough to have their way paid and paved for them, it would be my boys, but you won’t find more generous souls. They are ferocious in their determination to care for their fellow human beings, even as life tells them how greedy and underserving and downright mean some of those human beings can be.

For every 10 people out there who expect to be taken care of and given handouts, there are more who are simply in need.  I’m not a judge nor a jury – I don’t care if they ended up in dire straights because of their own actions. (A good thing, too, since I have had to be on the receiving end of that charity because of my own actions). There is a German proverb that says” Charity sees the need, not the cause.”

No, I didn’t have a huge legacy of money or property to hand on to my boys  — but I had the legacy of my own parents, who believed it is not just our duty to make the world a better place, it is our honor to do so. I have failed more than I have succeeded in my own pitiful attempts to better my corner of existence. But in my children, I have succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. I am proud of them and I know Mom and Dad would be, too.

I am not as good a Christian as my mother  wanted me to be. My issues with organized religion are too sticky to wade into here, but I do believe in caring for each other and I don’t care under which banner that takes place. I don’t want to live in a Darwinian Me-First world. I do believe, as human beings, we have a responsibility to make the world a better place for all of us. It is a sad place when commerce trumps compassion and selfishness survives and sympathy does not.

Less is more. More frustrating,that is. Day 8/9 of 366

I didn’t mean to skip a day yesterday. Sometimes stuff just happens. I usually  blog after 10 p.m. because  daylight hours are spent job hunting writing for the Shakespeare Festival and, yes, giving into to my online Bingo addiction (non-paying. I can’t afford a gambling addiction on top of the cigs and Diet Cokes.)

From 7 to 10, Bu has custody of the computer and as soon as he’s off, I start writing.

Unless, of course, I fall asleep sitting at the keyboard, which is what happened yesterday.

I don’t know why I am so tired all the time. I’m told it is an aspect of the depression, but all I know I it’s damned annoying. Sleep is overrated, except on weekends, when my only other entertainment option is washing the dog or listening to Buzz tell me all the endless details about his latest world-building adventures in Minecraft.

Wow, even typing it, my eyes start to glaze over. Once again, I find myself sending late apologies to my parents who listened to me talk about horses and comic books in much the same way.

Horses and comic books.

Life is so much easier when you’re a kid – and you can’t wait to grow up and get away for it. Not only are we programmed for self-destruction, we are programmed for discomfort.

When I was kid, if we talked about winning a truck load of money, my wish list was pretty short. Horses and comic books. A farm, of course, for the horses, but that was really about it. As I got older, the list got longer, and I found myself wishing for elaborate vacations, beach houses, rare books, indoor pools (with Brazilian pool boys named Raoul) and an in-home theater system, complete with popcorn maker and a heater because I get tired of freezing to death the few times I go to the movies these days.

And horses, of course. Walkers for trial riding, Friesians for showing, a couple of show jumpers and three-day eventers for my favorite young rider, Jessica Vihon, to show for me.

Now, living on this little farmhouse, having had to sacrifice a lot of “stuff” and juggling one income to pay for food AND utilities, my list is actually shorter. We are often told to simplify our lives to reduce stress and I can tell you, there is an element of truth there, even when the simplification is not voluntary. A smaller house means less to clean.

I just want a house, paid for, with no greedy bank hovering overhead like a vulture on steroids. I’d like a vehicle that wasn’t older than God, and new glasses and new teeth.

Okay, I wouldn’t say no to a horse, either.

Still, it’s not much, compared to Raoul and the indoor pool, huh?

Another computer would be nice … so I could get my blog in before my pending-50-obligatory-snoozefest begins at 9 p.m.

 

Recipe for adventure …. Day 7/366

How many little things go into the shaping of our character?

I was the fourth child, the second daughter, and as far as the “womanly arts” were concerned, I was definitely the spare, not the heir — and more than happy to keep it that way. Raised between two brothers in a neighborhood full of Y chromosomes, I was such a tomboy I made Peppermint Patty look like Paris Hilton.

My big sister was the one who loved to sew and my mother loved to cook and I was content with front yard baseball, backyard ponies, and chasing turtles into the creek behind the house.

In fact, I was such a tomboy and such a Daddy’s girl that the idea of being a {{shudder}}} housewife and mom was right down there with septic tank cleaner and tapioca tester in career choices for me. In high school, I swore I was going to go to New York and live in a garrett, write bad poetry and good books and live an artsy, Bohemian lifestyle that all of my siblings would ridicule but secretly envy.

Well, I got the Bohemian part right, but there’s a big difference between Bohemian by choice and Bohemian by bankruptcy…

So when poor Terry married me, I had conquered two culinary masterpieces — brownies and Hamburger Helper. After a solid of year of Hamburger Helper, he declared a moratorium and it was another 10 years before he let it back in the house. On probation.

I was Girl Scout for a few years and you’d think that would have helped, but I have to confess — my heart just wasn’t in scouting. I loved the camping and the crafts, but I would rather be eating those cookies than selling them.

I remember one day, my very nice scoulewader was atempting to teach me to cook French toast.(Somewhere in the distance, I could hea rmy mother giggling.) I mean, how hard can it be to cook French toast?

To this day, I can’t do it — mine come out soggy no matter what I do.

But these past six months, I’ve had housewifery forced upon me and I’ve come to a startling conclusion.

I kind of like it. I actually overheard my husband praising my cooking to a friend of his. I’ve invented recipes and so far my successes outnumber my failure by 10 to 1.

In fact, if it weren’t for that pesky needing money thingy, I wouldn’t mind staying at home. Does this make me a bad feminist? Am I ready to  throw in my Erica Jong library and start collecting cookbooks?

Nope. First of all, who needs cookbooks when they’ve got the internet? Secondly, part of growing up means learning that everything in the world is NOT a simple case of black and white, either or. Back in the dark ages when I was in school and nerddom was not cool, our biggest geek fights were between the Trekkies and the Star Wars fans (Star Warriors?) Now, well, duh, I realize I like them both. Why did I feel I had to choose?

These days, I get tickled at the Harry Potter camp squaring off against the Twilight camp. Why can’t you like both? It just gives you that much more to enjoy. (Of course, I can’t stand the Twilight stuff myself, but if you do, you have my permission to like Harry as well. And anything else you want to like — don;t let the camps divide you, or deprive you.)

Looking back now, I’d wish I’d paid more attention when Mrs. Cable was trying to teach me to make something other than s’mores. I wish I’d spent more time in the kitchen, basking beside my mother.

Now, I’m enjoying this work hiatus as it is letting me build some culinary muscle I never had before, but I really am going to have to get a job soon. I just found this great recipes, and the ingredients cost more than the gross national product of Belize. or at least as much as Mitt Romney spends on cars … which is about the same, I think.

 

 

 

blah Day 7/366

A blue and gray day, filled with downs — constant headache — and ups — husband’s cooking. A better blog tomorrow, I promise.

A fantastic beginning Day 6/366

I remember the first time I got in trouble in school.

At least, the first time I remember.

It was in first grade and I got caught stealing reading books from the sixth grade end of the school. You’d think someone would have head-smacked themselves and said “Hey, this 6-year-old is reading books meant for 12-year-olds –maybe we need to challenge her some more.”

But no. What they said was mor along the lines of “No recess,” which meant I was stuck inside, forced to read “See Jane run” when I had just been getting into “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids ” from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

But like many things I’ve bitched and moaned about in my life, this gross injustice worked out well for me in the long run. First of all, not being the running and jumping sort of girl (Unless I was on a horse that was doing the running and jumping for me,) recess was a gauntlet of terror and anger. A tomboy, even at the tender age of 6, I never fit in the girly-girl groups, who,  even at at the tender age of 6. were perfecting the art of character assassination and fashion policing. The boys didn’t want me hanging around because, well, I was a girl. Ew.

It could have been a lonely childhood until I got my horse (horses are great friends. They have to listen and they keep their mouths shut) but I had my books. I had worlds to visit and heroes to meet, and when The Man (meaning Mrs. Gilliam, whom I remember as being 106 but was probably closer to 40) denied me access to the wonderful stories at the sixth-grade end, of Bel-Aire, I wrote my own. So in a roundabout way, I guess I have to giver her credit for turning me into a writer.

It wasn’t until 4th grade, the same year I got my first horse, that I was able to revisit Narnia. Until then, our stories had been about real-life boys and girls, figures in history, or the like. Mythology was the closest thing to fantasy we read and I didn’t even realize there was such a thing as fantasy or science fiction out there.

The day I read the chapter where Lucy meets the faun Tumnus, the only part of the book in our reader, my oldest brother Mike came home to visit. Twelve years older, Mike was always more of an eccentric uncle than a brother. About the time I became aware of his existence, he was off to college, where he promptly dropped out and joined the hippie generation, which he never truly abandoned.

I told him about the story and was dumbfounded to find out it was part of its own book — and there were six more books in the series!

For Christmas that year, I got a boxed set of paperbacks — a Puffin set of the Narnia Chronicles that Mike had gotten by sneaking across the Canadian border because ti wasn’t available in the US at that time.

I devoured the books — and I still re-read them every year. They not only opened up whole new worlds for me in the realms of literature, they introduced me to my big brother and established the foundtion of our relationship which only grew stronger and stronger until the day he died.

Mike led me to Pern, where I came to ride dragons, and he guided me to Mordor so I could drop the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Other planets, other dimensions, other possibilities unfolded in front of me and the gateway was that wardrobe in the spare room.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if he did me any favors with that gift. The problem with fantasy is that, well, it isn’t real. It’s tempting to ignore the problems of real life by hiding on Dune or fighting evil in Prydain.

Remember all the uproar when the Harry Potter books came out, and the Religious (not) Right (in the head) called them textbooks to Satanism? I talked it over with Scott, my oldest. Getting him to read had been a painful chore until Harry Potter, which he dove into head first and came up smiling, Since then, he’s gone on to read  everything from calculus textbooks (for fun!) and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

He pointed out to me that anyone smart enough to actually read the books is smart enough to grasp the concept that they are fiction. Broomsticks don’t really fly.

“What the book is really about is friendship,” he said. “They help each other.”

He was right, of course. And looking back at all of those fantasy books, under the sparkle of unicorns , dragons and magic wands are simply stories of how people handle problems, and in the best stories, it’s not the magic that saves them so much as how they use it.

So here I am, 360 days away from being 50 and in a bad place. Out of work, living on the charity of family, broke and blue, the temptation to give myself over to fantasy is overwhelming.  But I’m going to take a page from that first-grade lesson.

If I don’t like the story I’m being forced to read — I’ll just write my own.

Figuratively and literally.