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.

 

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

 

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.

 

 

 

Smokey the bear. The freaking huge, man-eating, slobbering bear. Day 5/366

We did a lot of camping when I was younger — and as wife who now does a lot of camping with her husband, I can tell you there is no surer sign of true love than a woman’s willingness for forego air-conditioning, microwave ovens, hot water and Top Chef reruns just to make her man happy.

(Of course, I haven’t had hot, hot water in so long, that isn’t much of a sacrifice, especially considering that the showers at our favorite campsites are hotter than the one at home.)

My dad loved it. We had every new camping gadget minutes after Coleman got the patent — stoves, lanterns, portable johns, cots, and one strange little flask he said had a secret potion that would keep mosquitoes away but was really how he smuggled Wild Turkey into the state parks.

Dad would wake up at the crack of dawn, practically thumping his chest and sprouting caveman muscles as he strutted around the campsite, rousting us, and doing his manly-man camping things — mainly telling us to chop wood, fetch water and chase the skunks out of the garbage pit.

Mom — not so much a fan of camping as she was a woman who truly loved her husband, in spite of his bizarre, atavistic urges to spend vacations some place other than a Howard Johnson motel room. While Dad was doing his Tarzan-Drill Sergeant routine she was having a long, meaningful discussion with the Coleman stove. Everything I learned about cussing, I learned from my dad and the skunks. Everything I learned about cussing without actually saying any bad words, I learned from my mom and the camp stove.

The one concession Dad made to Mom as far as camping went was the Nimrod. It was a pop-up camper with a canvas tent-top and foam mattresses inside. No air mattresses back then, and there was no way Mom was going to sleep on a cot or (shudder) the ground. We tried the tent thing once, but keep in mind, this was in the dark ages, before lightweight, strong nylon tents were invented (or we would have had one. Immediately.)

The tent was heavy canvas and came with at least 150 different poles, all different sizes, and an engineer to help you put it together. Of course, ours was actually a second-hand Army surplus, so we didn’t get the engineer. At least, I think it was Army surplus. It smelled as though there had been a surplus of Army in it.

Dad was, grant you, an enginer — but he was one of the first computer engineers in the country. Ask him to print out a dot matrix banner reading “Merry Christmas” from a  bunch of orange punch cards fed into a computer the size of your average McDonald’s, no problem.

Ask him to assemble a second-hand tent with 150 poles of different sizes? Problem.

So after one attempt tent construction, we found ourselves the proud possessors of the Nimrod.

Besides the foam mattresses, threr was another reason Mom preferred it. Safety. We did most of our camping in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park — way back in the dark ages when the rest of the world hadn’t discovered it yet — and ruined it. We could actually park the camper in a site so isolated we couldn’t see the people camping in the next lot over. These days, you can’t just see them, you can read the fine print on their tattoos.

All that vast park and those few people, made it peaceful, quiet, and really, really tempting for the park’s year-round residents.

To quote Ditka: Da Bears.

The black bears, to be precise. We learned quickly not to leave food out when we weren’t in camp. We also learned quickly that Bondo does not cover claw marks in old station wagon hoods. We learned that following an adorable bear cub into a gully to capture it on film with the nifty new movie camera should only be done when you are filming the filmer with another nifty new movie camera so you can catch him barrelling out of the same gully with Mama Bear hot on his heels.

One night, when I was about 6, Dad left to take my little brother to the bathroom and left the door to the camper open. I heard a strange rasping, grunting noise and woke up. There, filling the doorway of the camper, hulking in the darkness, was a giant, black, drooling, snarling giant of a bear, its eyes glowing redly evil in the sputtering light of the Coleman lantern. I screamed and leaped from my bed into my Mom’s. She quickly proved that not only was she the most tolerant wife on earth, she was the most protective mom. She threw a pillow at the bear.

A pillow.

Seriously, Mom?

Lightweight defense or not, it worked, and the monster shambled off into the darkness, no doubt to be teased and tormented by its fellow bears, being called Beauty Rest for the rest of its big, hairy life.

Dad and David came back from the bathroom, laughing wildly about some camper they heard screaming in the night. They weren’t laughing quite so wildly when they ended up sleeping in the station wagon.

It’s a funny story, and one I love telling when the subjects of camping or bears or pillow fights come up, but is it relevant to my year-long quest of Figuring Out Life Before I’m 50?

Oh, yeah. You see, a few years back, Terry and I were prowling through an RV lot, fanasizing about winning the lottery and being able to camp in something that has a fridge, a bed and something other than cheesecloth for a roof. I found a Nimrod pop-up camper tucked away, an ancient shetland pony of a camper hidden behind the stable of giant, sleek Winnebago thoroughbreds. As I opened the door to step inside, I realized — the door was only about a foot and a half wide.

Any bear who could get through that door and into the camper could only have been, well, about a foot and a half wide.

For those of you who arn’t Animal Planet junkies, that’s not a very big bear.

Hell, that’s not a very big dog.

That giant, slobbering hulking, monstrous, grunting growling bear that terrorized me on the fateful night could only have been a cub.

Perspective is everything. Now, when something scares me, I try to step back and ask myself — Is this a bear of a problem, or is it just a cub, pretending to be bigger than it really is?

And has anyone got a pillow handy?

Watching the storms roll in Day 4/366

Shhhh, don’t tell anybody, but my mother was a Yankee. Sort of. A St. Louis native, she came to Tullahoma the same way many of those lesser, Northern born folks did — she was married to an ambitious young engineer who got a job at the newly commissioned Air Force research facility just outside of town.

She arrived in February — not our great state’s prettiest month, at least not that year.

“Everything was brown and gray and I hated it and wanted to go home,” she told me once.

That’s saying something, since the last “home” had been an Air Force base in Texas,which was brown and gray all year round, not just in February.

It didn’t take her long to become a true adopted daughter of the South. She never liked grits or got the hang of using “Bless his heart”  as a way to get away with saying horrible things about people and getting away with it, but then, she didn’t say horrible things about people. (Except for one local law enforcement officer who bore a striking resemblance to Sgt. Schultz from “Hogan’s Heroes” — both in looks and [lack of] mentality.)

Even after she was betrayed and emotionally abused by people she cared for in her church family, she never said a bad thing about them, which proves my mom was a much better person than I will ever be. Back then, I thought she was just weak and I dove in and fought her battles for her, Now, I see her lack of action for what it was — grace and true Christian forgiveness.

Like I said, she was a much better person than I will ever be.

One year, when I was only 5 or 6, we spent the summer with her Missouri family, living on my granny’s farm (and avoiding my granny). There had been a housefire and my dad and his buddies were repairing and adding on to the little ranch house on McKellar — sorely overdue since the three bedroom home was now hosting five kids, two adults and usually two or three dogs and cats.

I don’t remember much of that sumer, except hiding from my granny, who had all the sweet, cookie-baking, loving grand-maternal instincts of Dick Cheney, but I do remember sitting on the porch one stormy afternoon and watching a trail of tornadoes dip and tease across the horzson. We were just miles from the base of the Ozarks, flatlanders for the season, and the mountains framed those twisters, making the whole scene feel like it was shot for a movie.

Mom was yelling and trying to get us into the basement, but I wanted to see the storm coming. How can you avoid it if you don’t know where it is?

(We had a similar incident about 10 years later involving a bank robbery in Fairfax, Virginia. I wanted to watch the SWAT team and mom kept trying to shove my head down in the back seat of the car. What a party pooper.)

Since then, I’ve been obsessed with — and horrified by — tornadoes. I grieve for those who lost their lives, loved ones or belongings, but at the same time, they fascinate me.

As long as I see them coming.

The worst storms, the ones smuggling tornadoes in their depths, tend to come to Tullahoma from the south and west, and our former house was about as south and west as it could be in Coffee County. There was a wall of trees across the street and you could barely see the western sky — no sense of what was hovering just behind them.

When bad things happen to good people, like my mom, or even to loud-mouthed, opinionated, stubborn and, I’ll admit it, arrogant people like me, they are worse when you don’t see them coming. Like twisters hiding behind a sea of trees, their results can be devastating and deadly.

Sometimes, even if you see those ambush events coming, they catch you out anyway. Our new home faces a western field that is huge, flat and empty. I will be able to see any twister rolling toward me as clearly as I could on that Missouri porch some 40 years ago.

But will I be able to get out of its way? Will I even try?

There is part of me that recognizes my own drive for self-destruction It’s that part that chain smokes , overeats and wears UT sweatshirts to an Alabama reunion. I have become all too aware that I am my own worst enemy, sabotaging my career, my finances and more. (Thank the heavens for a husband who refuses to let me torpedo our marriage, no matter how hard I try.)

What I’m trying to discover now is — why? Maybe when I figure that out, I can change my habits and do what most sane people do when there is a wicked storm on the horizon.

Take cover.

 

One small step for woman, one giant leap for support hose…

Happy birthday to me. Oh, rah. Huzzah.

Where’s the booze?

Isn’t it funny how our attitudes change towards birthdays as we age? When we’re kids, there are balloons and cakes and parties and sugar overdoses and the sense that there will always be more birthdays — and more parties — down the line.

Later, there are still balloons and cake, but the Koolaid has been hijacked by PGA or vodka, and we still have the sense of powerful youth and immortality.

About the time we realize that we’ve peaked — we have now celebrated more birthdays in the past than we will in the future, the last candle sort of fizzles out and the happy birthday song begins to sound like a dirge.

Most of the time, I don’t mind getting older. Sure, it’s a little creepy that my butt can now knuckle bump the backs of my knees while I’m still standing up, and I’m not happy that I’ve started falling asleep before 9 p.m. before I can take a pill, hot bath or alcoholic incentive to make me fall asleep by 10 p.m. But overall, despite bad fortune and unemployment, I like where I am.

I never had the perfect 10 body, and I’m now at the age where I can admit I don’t give a damn. I’m old enough to tell rude young snots what I think of them and not fear parental repercussions. Hell, I’m probably older than their parents.

Acne is a thing of the past, cramps soon will be (Please?!?!) and I now know that I can survive, thrive, and actually be happy even if I don’t have Coach bags or Prada shoes.

Okay, Ive always known that. I now know I can be happy even if I don’t have a $100,000 show horse and an Hermes saddle to put on it. That’s better.

But at the same time… it’s not this birthday that bothers me. It’s the next one … the big 5-0. The half century marks the beginning of the end, the grim reaper of girdles, the harvester of orthopedic soles, the doom of Depends ….

The late great George Harrison’s birthday is two days before mine and I realized he would have been 69 this year. Do you get that? The youngest Beatle would have been 69. My dear friend Susan, who turned 50 last week, and I talked about it and tried to figure out where the time wet.

It was sucked into the black hole of childrearing, making a living, and day-to-day existence. My years are not threads spun on Clothos’ spindle , to be woven by Lachesis and snipped dead by Atropos. My years are socks lost in the dryer, they are hours spent drowsing off in the pediatrician’s waiting rooms, and days spent shuttling offspring from one destination to another.

But another thing I noticed in my conversatrion with Susan is that the more we talked about those old days, the more memories came back. Just because the dryer ate the socks doesn’t mean it won’t regurgiatate them back up eventually.

(Hang on –  I’m about to realllly stretch the analogy here.)

True, there will be holes in the socks, but with a little creativity, they can be redarned and recreated and made almost as good as new.

In other words, I’m going to employ some revisionist history, creativity and outright lies to remember my life. All 49 years and counting….

Okay, I’ll skip the first three, since they’re pretty limited to eat, sleep, break things belonging to older siblings, and making doody in my diaper.

Come to think of it, I’ll probably skip the next 7 years too, for the same reasons (except for the doody in the diaper thing. I did actually outgrow that. Eventually.)

As far as I’m concerned, my life began on this same date in 1973, when my Dad woke me up to get my birthday present. It was a tiny toy black plastic horse, and taped around its barrel was a note.

“I.O.U.”

My life course was set then, in so many little and massive ways. That little black plastic horse would lead me to some of my greatest joys and sorrows, shames and triumphs, not to mention blisters, broken bones and romance….

So every day for the next year, come hell or high water, I’m going to blog. It won’t always be reminiscing. There will be tears and outright lies, not to mention a few recipes, rants and regrets.

Maybe, a year from today, when I do hit the big 50, I’ll have a better idea of just how I got there.

 

Say “Please,” butthead

Someone once wrote that the surest sign of a failing society is the loss of its manners.

I’m inclined to agree. Someone called me on my cell phone tonight and after I said,”Hello,” he snapped, “Who is this?”

“Who is this?” I fired right back. “You called me.”

“I just wanted to know if  I had the wrong number,” he sputtered. “There’s no need to get snippy about it.”

Yes, there was. When you call someone and they answer, the proper response is “May I speak with So-and-So.” If it is a wrong number, the person will say (or should say) “I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number.”

At that point, Mr. Snippy should say, “Oh, I’m sorry” and hang up.

I called Buzz into the room and asked him if they taught phone etiquette at school.

“What’s to teach?” he asked. “You pick up the phone and say ‘Hello,.'”

I cringed. We will, no doubt, be having lessons in how to answer the phone shortly.

So why don’t they teach it? In today’s communications-heavy business world, you’d think being able to sound like an intelligent, reasonable, educated adult on the telephone would be considered a life skill.

I wonder if they teach emoticons instead?

Of course, being Southern — and a mom — the rudeness thing hits me harder than most. I get irritated watching TV or movies when someone does something for another person and there is no “Thank you.” I remember how startled the waitresses were in Arizona when my boys, 3, 9, and 11 at the time, said “Please” and “Thank you” when they brought the meals.

What’s wrong with a little courtesy? As Bill Kelly once wrote, “Good manners are just a way of showing other people that we have respect for them. ”

Of course, you can go overboard when expecting good behavior from others. When I returned to work aftr my first hospital stay, I ran into my boss. He said, “Hello, Mary.”

(NOTE: Not “Welcome back” or “How are you feeling.” Just “Hello.”)

I nodded my head and said “Hi,” then ducked into the breakroom before my ramen noodles could nuke their styrofoam bowl to death in the microwave.

Later, my failure to stop, ruin my lunch, and carry on a  properly grateful and subservient conversation with the man whose actions sent me to the hospital in the first place was apparently one of the many sins he tried to crucify me with during the Great Ambush.

What was I supposed to do? Genuflect?

But even so, I wasn’t rude. I said “Hello” back.

The rudeness is everywhere, but nowhere more so than in politics. It literally hurts my stomach to listen to the awful things these people say and their indifferent shrugs of non-apology when those things are exposed as blatant lies. There is no graciousness left in that world, no kindness, no caring, and certainly no class.

Call me old-fashioned. I refuse to stoop to their level and I will continue to say “Thank you” to the waitress when she brings me my coffee.

“The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones,”  ~Gabirol (Solomon ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol),The Choice of Pearls.

And now, I’m going to go teach Buzz how to use the telephone.