Succinctly Yours Week 206: Sure to Go

It’s time again for Succinctly Yours, a delightful meme courtesy of Grandma’s Goulash in which we are invited to spin a little yarn of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer to accompany the photo. The bonus word this week was “pace.”

Mary’s little lamb may have been sent from school at a hasty pace, but Mary’s family filed a suit declaring it a service animal to treat her ADHD and rewrote those rules. 139

It may at last have gone out like a lamb, but the whole March was a reluctant pace for those who were sick of winter.  93

Me: Why do you have a purple back-scratcher sitting on your desk?

Sixth Grade girl (smiling sheepishly): My grandma gave it to me for no particular reason, so I made it my pet.

Succinctly Yours Week 202: Groundhog Daze

Thank you to Grandma’s Goulash for hosting Succinctly Yours, a delightful little meme which encourages us to peak into the world of micro and come up with a story of 140 words or 140 characters or fewer. This week, a biography unexpectedly emerged. The bonus word was “zany.”

Punxsutawney Paul was more ambitious than his predecessor, Punxsutawney Phil. He longed to sing, quote the Bard, or do a zany dance during his moment in the sun. 132

Punxsutawney Paul loved his new job. He had terrific job security, a great benefits package, and he only worked one zany morning per year.  114

Punxsutawney Paul was horrified. It was his one moment in the sun, and he had overslept. He feared those zany crowds had ditched him for the ground squirrel next door.  135

Due to cutbacks, Paul was forced to work the rest of the year in a zany Whac-a-Mole game at the carny. When he did emerge, he couldn’t remember what he was looking for. 136

Thanks to PETA, Punxsutawney Paul retired and is now Palm Beach Paul. He does daily searches for something he knew he was supposed to look for and occasionally golfs. 137

That was a great game of golf, fellers. ~ Purported last words of Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby

Mama, Would You Be Mad?

"Galaxy" Nails

“Would you be mad if I became a nail artist?”

This is her stock question when she is feeling overwhelmed. She asks me this while poking delicately at her plate with a nail painted to resemble peacock feathers in turquoise and blue and gold.  Somehow it doesn’t look tacky on her long, tapered, hand-model fingers.

I suppress the urge to tell her to get her hands away from her food.  I’ve told her this too many times as it is in her life. I just want to enjoy the day.

We are sitting at an outdoor table at the Hard Rock Café in Union Station on an absolutely exquisite day.  Mother’s Day.  Below the terrace where we are sitting, koi and ducks drift lazily through the pond. 

“Do you want to become a nail artist?” I ask.  As her mother, this is my stock response.  We both know I’ve never pushed her. That I’ve never had to. She was born a fierce spirit who’s gone after her goals with awe-inspiring determination since she was a baby. When she learned to walk, it was by launching herself repeatedly forward until she was covered in bruises. She’d pick herself up, too focused to cry, and catapult herself forward all over again.

In those days, I used to read to her from a book we both loved called Mama, Do You Love Me? by Barbara M. Joosse (illustrated by Barbara Lavallee). As she got older, she would occasionally ask me: Would I love her if she joined the circus? Decided to become a palm reader? A sheep herder?

Yes, I tell her. Of course. I love you for who you are, I tell her, and not what you become. You’ve always made me proud by just being you, I tell her. I don’t love you for being what society calls successful. I just want you to be happy. Would you be happy painting nails all day? Toes too?

She sighs.

And then I hug her, this tall, lovely girl, and watch her go back to school with the same look on her face she had when she learned to walk.

I’ll love you until

the umiak flies

into the darkness,

till the stars turn

to fish in the sky,

till the puffin howls

at the moon.

~from Mama, Do You Love Me? By Barbara M. Joosse and illustrated by Barbara Lavallee

Improper Poll: The Mall Creature

I didn’t know from what hole the thing had crawled, but it was clearly not of this world. The hands were small and human, but the head was nothing short of disturbing. It was enormous and loomed above me with a perpetually grinning, funhouse mouth that stayed frozen when it talked with its too-happy girl voice like some great, furry pink mutation. The thought of this freakish hybrid sneaking around my house in the middle of the night hiding anything—even baskets of candy—was terrifying.

Bad enough they dragged you every December to sit on some strange, hairy man who smelled of sweat and old wool and moth balls. I told my mother that this creature didn’t look at all like the Easter Bunny, and no way was I going near it, least of all to sit on its lap. Then I dug in my new patent leather Mary Janes and braced for the fight.

But to my absolute shock, my mother agreed. Then she laughed. It was creepy, she giggled, and she was sure the real Easter Bunny didn’t look at all like that. So we turned [cotton] tail and left.

To this day, this is one of my best holiday memories ever, allowing Easter to remain a pure, no-frills holiday that brought lovely things, like candy you didn’t have to ring doorbells for and tiny daffodils and crocus that sprouted along the church sidewalk. And those hats, like sailboats for your head with kite tails that blew in the cool spring wind.

Happy Easter.  Do you have a favorite Easter or spring memory?

Improper Poll: No Foolin’

Don’t get me wrong—I can be plenty foolish. But I am sadly bereft of April Fooling talents. The best I ever did was pretend to be The State Messy-Desk Inspector for my sister’s fourth grade class. I was in costume, though one astute kid did notice there was no glass in my horn-rimmed glasses.

And it was probably very bad karma for me since I always had one of the messiest desks in grade school myself. Still do.

Friday at school, an eighth-grader asked me when April first was. Was it Monday? You could hear the hope in his voice. Those cogs were turning. The pranking ones. This is one holiday kids hope falls on a school day because of course it’s way more fun to fool teachers and other students than your little brother, for whom fooling is a daily occurrence. Plus chances are, little brothers know all of your tricks.

Do you have an April Fools prank?

Improper Poll: Halleluiah

The sun is out, and I don’t get to see sun much during the work week these days. So I’m taking a break from true impropriety today…and maybe for the next couple of weeks. There’s a scene in Eat Pray Love (the book; haven’t seen the movie) where Elizabeth Gilbert describes a few hours when the pleasure she’s been seeking just seems to settle on her during the sweetest, simplest times.

That very thing unexpectedly happens to me from time to time. I don’t mean ordinary, run of the mill happiness, but an overwhelming thrill that threatens to bring tears to my eyes. I used to try to capture life in art. Now I’m starting to see life as art. What’s more, I used to think the goal in art was to channel the divine. Now I think the goal in life is to channel the divine.

Every now and then, out of nowhere that almost overwhelming happiness just seems to appear and flutter down and nest into my soul, and while it’s there, my heart just soars. This time of year, it’s the way the sun angles through the tree limbs and sends blue stripes of shadow on the road. Or it’s the sculpture of bare trees against a cobalt sky.

Or maybe it’s the little vase of hyacinths on my kitchen table. Or the damp-earth smell of early spring.

What do you see as art? What makes your soul soar?

Can't Say I Wasn't Warned

It’s tornado season here in the Midwest. A few weeks ago, the sirens went off in the night. Tornadoes are supposed to come around dinnertime. It’s just common courtesy.

I have to get up at a time that qualifies as “night” in my book.  We also have a geriatric dog who occasionally decides that the bunnies under our deck require emergency, middle-of-the-night bed checks. So when I am awakened by yet another thing, I assume some sadist has devised more evil plots to keep me from sleeping. First I have to become coherent enough to figure out what the noise means, then I have to tackle the complex project of figuring out what to do about it.

What I did about it was what those legendary idiots do: I wandered out into the backyard to see if I could hear or see a tornado.  Then I turned on the TV to see if they really meant it. By that time my daughter had joined me in studying the map of the area that was painted in alarming swaths of color with a big red circle in the middle. “Why is it I feel like they keep drawing a big red circle over our house?” my daughter asked. It was because they were.

After consulting a while, the winds were picking up, so we decided to awaken the dog. This can be quite a project. When he’s not up conducting pre-dawn rabbit patrol, he is sometimes sleeping so deeply that I have thought he was comatose. This dog is no Toto; he’s a lab mix. After jiggling him for a while, we waved dog biscuits under his nose like smelling salts. This made him twitch and wag, so we had to stop and giggle a bit over those dog biscuit dreams.

After that entire process, which required more dog biscuits to lure him to the basement (because those old guys are experts at biscuit extortion), we remembered that we needed blankets and pillows….which were quickly usurped while we struggled with the ancient downstairs TV. Those old pups are also experts at finagling comfy places to sleep.

Thank heavens it wasn’t an actual emergency, because the whole thing took us about 20 minutes. They were giving the all-clear just around the time we were getting settled, so we hauled everything upstairs again…only to discover that it wasn’t the all-clear, after all, but a second round of tornadoes moving through.

The next day I discovered just before leaving for work that we had lost part of our fence. I found the dog standing on my neighbor’s patio with their newspaper in his mouth.

Sometimes that lab thing comes in real handy.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain. ~ Sign I saw in a gift shop (Wish I knew the original author!)

Out of the Bleakness

Usually one of my other favorite things in life is throwing open the curtains and blinds on a Saturday morning, especially when it’s sunny out. Not so today. Today I have the cold that’s been making its rounds, and it feels like my head’s been blown full of fiberglass insulation…with a few glass shards thrown in just for fun. My face itches and my eyeballs feel hot and bald. Thank heavens it’s a weekend and I can just lie around.

But when I managed to crawl from my lair of sickness long enough to let the dog out this morning, this is what greeted me. It’s Iris reticulata, always the first flower of the year in my yard.

Ah, hope.

If winter comes, can spring be far behind? ~Percy Bysshe Shelley