It was a Sign

I owe it all to Sioux. Or should I say, “blame?” Well, Sioux and Mrs. Buffa. Because I did think of Sioux’s endearing story, “Trained by the Best,” that appeared in Sasee magazine a few months ago, when I stopped at the corner stop sign while leaving my subdivision and accidentally made eye contact with the two little boys who were selling something.

 The eye contact, of course, was my first mistake. But it was a hot day, and I was looking around for the lemonade, and there was none. Instead, there was a box. That, and an elaborately decorated cardboard sign I couldn’t read. I positively couldn’t resist wanting to know what two boys—maybe nine years old—were selling out of that box. Animal? Vegetable? Mineral?

I strained so much that they had to bring the sign over to me so I could read it. Then I had to roll down my window so they could tell me what the sign said, because it was really bad handwriting. Then they had to show me, because I still couldn’t understand them.

Sometimes innocence is genius itself. Because by that point, of course, I pretty much had to buy whatever it was. Even if it was hissing cockroaches in that box.

Which thankfully it wasn’t. It was Shrunken Head Dude here, with his unibrow and devil-may-care whiskers, a bargain at $1. Do you know what he is? Because I had no idea. I had to ask them several times. Stress balls. He is delightfully squishy. Is he dead? My daughter surmised that he is sleeping. Whew. I’d hate to think the stress killed him.

Anyway, thanks to Sioux and Mrs. Buffa, I had coincidentally been feeling very stressed indeed. By the way, his face was much clearer when I bought him a few weeks ago. I left him on the center island where my kids and their friends play with him every time they gather. Thanks, Sioux. And thanks, Mrs. Buffa. Some purchases are worth a lot more than their price tag.

Children are our most valuable resource. ~Herbert Hoover

Improper Poll: Gellin’ Like a One-Legged Felon

The other day I got home and discovered one of my gel insoles, made specifically for sandals, was gone. Just…gone. It was an outsole.

My sole had fled to The Great Yonder. Where did it go? Thanks to the 100°+ weather we’ve been having, I can only assume my sole went to someplace hot as…well, you know.

To solve this mystery, I suppose one must follow the footprint. But right now, the only thing I can say for certain is that it could not have escaped on foot.

So naturally I am not only wondering where it ended up, but how. I had been all over the place. Did it flap considerably beforehand as if to wave bon voyage? Why did I not feel this? And perhaps most important, is my foot displayed on a website somewhere erupting what is sort of the foot equivalent of an incontinence pad? And would a better title for this post have been “Gellin’ Like Mount St. Helen?”

Has someone found my gel insole lying in the street like a gelatinous road kill foot?

And which is worse, the fact that I am going around losing my foot underwear, or the fact that I am taking pictures of the remaining one?

Have you ever lost items of clothing right off your body, or am I the only one who does these things?

A Window Opens

I’ve mentioned my smelly car. One reason this is so extra-tragic is that I have a freakishly strong sense of smell. So for the first time in years, I’ve been driving around with my windows down. When did I start keeping them up all the time, anyway, and why? I’m sure it was to keep my hair from being a mess, but lately I’m thinking that messy hair might just be a small price to pay sometimes. I’m almost a little bit grateful to the RBO for reminding me what I’ve been missing.

Years ago, someone gave my family tickets to box seats at the circus. No question it was cool. We had our own little suite with private bathroom and everything. But it made me realize it’s not always so bad to live among the common folk. There were some things I genuinely missed while being hermetically sealed in our little Plexiglas room in the sky. I sort of missed the down-and-dirty earthiness of the experience that is the circus I remembered from my childhood: the smells of elephant musk and popcorn and excitement. The guy with change in his apron hocking “Ice Cold Coke!” from the dark auditorium stairs and people waving sparkling souvenirs-on-a-stick all around us. Breathing and bodies and clapping and peanut shells. That disco ball light thing that showered the audience in stars so that we could look down and see the actual circus lights touching us, just like the magic all around, making us a part of it in one sparkling moment.

Driving with my windows down is a little like that. I find myself wanting to drive faster just for the exhilaration of it. There are whole new layers of experience coming in those windows. The sounds rush in my ears, and as the visual scenery flashes by in a blur of houses-stores-signs-fields-trees, so flashes the olfactory scenery in a blur of backyard grill-fast food-cut grass-mimosa. And the humid wind is cool-slick on my arms and swirles my hair in a mad summer frenzy.

For a while I am back in my big sister’s orange-and-black 1969 Camaro convertible with the top down. Or even my own first car with the broken air conditioner.

The smell is much, much better, by the way, thanks to your suggestions. The thing that really seemed to do it? The coffee grounds. Was going to try the apple, but it turned out someone had eaten it. Which was okay, because I got a new one at the grocery store and used it to get rid of the coffee ground smell, which it turns out is oddly out of place in a car. It actually smells good in there now. Thank you so much!

Still, I’m going to try to remember to roll down the windows. Just sometimes. I’d forgotten there’s magic out there in the summer air just waiting to swirl in.

All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world, manifesting itself in such a degree and darting forth in such variety so much of its own nature.

– William Law

Improper Poll: The Beast

I recently discovered a new recipe by accident. It goes like this.  Heat one trunk to 150°.  Add one pound ground beef and cook in a sealed garage all weekend.  This is a recipe for The Beast. This recipe is the pot-potpourri equivalent of manna...from hell.  Because it will serve everyone within about a 12 foot radius.  Indefinitely.

The ground beef was double wrapped, too, so it's not like anything leaked out.  Still, Holy Cow Guts, does my car stink.  So I sprayed everything thoroughly, first with one product and then the other. Both are anti-bacterial air purifiers that promise to kill the source of the odor. But I guess since my ground beef was already dead, it refused to die all over again. Almost two weeks later, it reminds me of my favorite Seinfeld episode about the B.B.O. But this is G.B.O. Or maybe R.B.O., because it’s rotted. Either way, it really is The Beast.

The R.B.O. has sent out airborne molecules to infuse, like microscopic zombies, into everything in my car. Another car parked next to it in the same garage had its windows rolled down, and now IT smells of R.B.O., as does my garbage can (long since emptied) and the garage itself. Should I be washing my hair in tomato sauce? I keep asking random people to do smell-checks.

I went to a car parts store and asked them what they recommend, and now my car smells like chemically-infused-cardboard-jasmine with strong R.B.O. top notes. Gak.  Left my car outside with the windows down in the hot sun. Threw out the cardboard box that the R.B. had fallen into when it first began this invasion of O. molecules. A neighbor (who obligingly performed The Smell Check, and I don't even know her very well)  suggested baking soda.  It sort of amazes me who will smell you if you ask them.

I admit it—I haven’t had my car steam-cleaned yet because I keep thinking surely The Beast will give up the ghost, as it were. Move on to greener pastures. Something. Should I sage my trunk to clear out evil spirits? Call in an exorcist?

Have you ever done battle with a horrifying odor? If so, do you have any suggestions?  Other than driving my car into the city and walking away?

Adventure at Psycho Bell

If the universe is a big drive-through speaker, I lean in and order good stuff on the menu because…well, you know…who doesn’t? I am careful to enunciate, too, just so the universe doesn’t get my order wrong. Again. And then the universe promptly gathers up a bunch of psychos and plops them into my bag. Because that universe sure has a sense of humor, doesn’t it?

It was broad summer daylight just after the dinner rush last Thursday evening, and I was the only car sitting in the Taco Bell drive-thru. It’s one way, just big enough to let an extra large vehicle through. There are curbs and landscaped berms on either side, so you are lower than the surrounding area and very much hemmed in. This is in a pleasant, family-oriented, suburban area just off a main highway.

I was talking into the speaker, which is a little way back from the building. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “One cheesy supreme TRUCK SPEEDING TOWARD ME GOING THE WRONG WAY NO NO STOP GO BACK!!!”

There was absolutely nowhere for Taco Bell's Ding-Dong-Driver to go but straight into me. Fortunately he did slow a bit, but then it became clear that his plan was to pass me. With his truck. In the space that was only about 3 feet wide. It was if he thought one or both of us would magically accordion into something skinny like that cool Harry Potter bus for stranded witches and wizards. He was literally inches from the magic when I desperately amped up the shouting and gesturing and yelling. “NOOOO!!! Back up! Go back!”

The guy inside—who did look extremely wasted or at least not at all right, pondered the situation like a Taco Bell Buddha for what seemed like an eternity. Then he gave a sage nod; he had given the matter a great deal of thought and concurred. This was the undoubtedly the smartest decision of the day for him.

He threw his truck into reverse and tried to back up at the same speed at which he’d approached, which had to have been about 25 mph, which is surprisingly fast in a drive-thru, not to mention going backward, especially considering the job he was doing going forward.

Here is what my conversation with the Taco Bell Girl over the microphone was like.

Me: “Oh-my-gosh-oh-my-gosh! The crazy man is headed back toward you now! Can you see that??! He’s crashing into the curb! Now he’s in the flower bed!”

Taco Bell Employee: “Yes, ma’am. We apologize for the crazy man, ma’am.”

Me: “He’s turning the corner and I can’t see him. Is he coming back? Will you tell me if he comes back? That was so scary! What’s he doing now?” (This was when I could hear people in the restaurant laughing in nervous horror, because the guy was now threatening to crash into the Taco Bell building while trying to negotiate the turn. Still backwards.) “Where is he?!”

Taco Bell Employee: “He appears to be trying to drive backwards on the highway, ma’am. He’s going to—no, he made it. Now he’s back on the median. Now he’s on the sidewalk—okay, he’s back on the median again. He’s really tearing up his car. I don’t think he’s coming back, ma’am. He’s definitely not coming back. (The giggles behind her were hysterical now.)

Me: “Are you sure?” There was a brief pause.

Taco Bell Employee: “Yes, ma’am. Right now he’s...(at this point her calm voice almost—but not quite—broke, but she immediately recovered her composure).  He’s stuck in a tree.” The outburst of snorting guffaws behind her was positively explosive.

At some point he disengaged his car from the pine tree and drove off. I was so shaken, it was difficult to complete my order. When I got to the window, it was interesting to see the people with whom I had just survived the ordeal. The calmly polite Taco Bell Employee, a cute blond girl who was probably only in high school, continued to complete the order with utter aplomb. One of the employees in the crowd behind her, though, appeared as shaken as I felt. He said it was the most excitement he’d seen since he’d started working there six months earlier. Then he handed me my ”nachos with trees…I mean, cheese.”

It was completely unconscious—a Freudian slip. We all laughed so hard, I was a little afraid I’d be the one who had trouble driving away that time.

We apologize for the crazy man, ma’am. ~Taco Bell Employee

Ten Things I Learned from My Father

 1.  A real man is big on the inside. He has a booming laugh and tough, warm hands that almost make a muffled sound when they clap, like slapping oven mitts together. If he is tall and strong, it’s so he can lift you onto his shoulders to help you see better. His size and strength only emphasize his tenderness.
2.  Everyone should have a sense of humor and use it often.
3.  Encourage your child to ask questions about life, and then have the patience to answer honestly. If the question is about sex, give an honest, straightforward answer. Then shrug your shoulders and add (with wonder in your voice), “That’s the way God made it, and it works!”
4.  My father was a man’s man, a one-time boxer, a former Nebraska Cornhusker football player, an ex WWII marine. But he was also a talented artist and in many ways so much more intuitive than most of the women I knew that for most of my childhood, I thought the stereotype of creative woman/pragmatic man was a joke. I learned that the best people go against stereotypes.
5.  Lying is okay if it’s done out of genuine love. When I asked my father if he was sorry he didn’t have a son, he grimaced with mock horror and asked, “What would I want with icky boys when I have the three best daughters in the world?!” Of course I knew he was lying. But how I loved him for it.
6.  Sometimes it’s the things you don’t say that speak the loudest. When I asked him about WWII, he got that look and got way too quiet. And then he’d perk up and say, “Here’s a funny story….” He’d tell things like the time he was supposed to swab the deck and got the “bright idea” to clean the mops by tying them to a rope behind the ship, without thinking about the fact that they had metal on the handles that would set off the torpedo warnings. When I got done laughing, I was left contemplating that prologue of silence. It was the things he didn’t say about the war that made me ache.
7.  Small people put others down in order to feel bigger. Big people lift others up because they have the strength to spare. They know how to be humble. They admit they have faults and know how to laugh at themselves.
8.  Absolutely the best gift a man can give his daughter? His respect. Not for the way she looks, but for her mind and her soul. Because of course men who are confident enough to be able to love and respect strong women are the best men there are. And I don’t mean in that slightly cheesy, “I am excessively chivalrous” way that’s really an excuse to posture. I could have an intellectual conversation with my father or just be silly. He worked in local politics toward the end of his life. At his funeral, a female politician approached me and told me all the things she admired about my dad.  But the thing that struck her on the deepest level was what set him apart from all the rest. “Your father was the only man of his era I’ve ever known who genuinely knew how to treat women as his equal.” She was right. I’ve always cherished both that truth and her gift of putting it into words.
9.  The most important thing really is being there.
10.  There is a great deal to be said for having nothing left to say when it’s time to die. Sometimes you have to greet each other by your nicknames, do the “secret handshake,” and know that’s the best goodbye there is.

Miss him? Yep. Happy Father’s Day.

When all is said and done, 90% of being a dad is just showing up. ~Jay from Modern Family

More Hot Dead Guys

The other day, Val Thevictorian mentioned that Nathaniel Hawthorne was “a bit wordy.” I have a theory that writing schools of yesteryear taught that word quantity was a big determiner of greatness. Big word count=big writer. They never just grabbed the Velveeta. They pondered before the tremulous hands hesitantly reached out in desperate longing for the processed cheese food. And if the author was Russian, the hand would belong to a guy whose name you could never pronounce and there would be peasants and starvation and the Velveeta symbolized something dark and mysterious.

But Hawthorne has one big advantage over other writers of his day that has propelled some readers through his books in rapid and frenzied anticipation: the picture that’s usually printed along with the author’s byline. I am combining expletives here from Lynn and Sioux in order to create one, slightly more socially acceptable expletive when I say: oh-my-greasy-gracious-holy-flying-lardfish.

Hawthorne was hot.

This, of course, was before the hair on his head migrated to his face in great, walrus-like excess as it seemed to have been wont to do in that era. I’m not knocking bald, either—I’m knocking those great, sweeping Fuller Brush push-brooms that sprouted out of their upper lips with disappointing regularity. The ones where I imagine they had to slide food up under the Great Wall of Chia like inserting mail into a letter slot, because how else would you get food past all that briar-rose-shrubbery without sucking some of it in? Bleah.

Here he is in his non-massively-mustachio-ed days. This portrait is akin to female English major porn, which is ironic when you consider how he wrote about all that shameful sinfulness. But he does remind us of one of the cardinal rules of writing: show, don’t tell.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Michael (on dating his coworker’s mother) in The Office: “The only time you should care about a woman’s age is if she is too young for you. And I am not robbing the cradle. If anything, I am robbing the grave.”

Improper Poll: Apostropeeved…and Feeling Weally Larry

So…this week’s poll is about grammatical peeves. I’ve mentioned before that I get annoyed when I keep reading plural’s that have been made into possessive’s by the (fairly recent) tendency to add an apostrophe to everything with an s on the end. I’m sure it’s because spellcheck isn’t really able to catch these mistakes since so many words can be either plural or possessive. Still…it’s not that hard to figure out if the noun is more than one thing or owning something. Or a contraction with “is,” as in the sentence, “Dad’s a golfer.”

But because I’ve been feeling particularly peevish, here’s one I just looked up because I recently heard it again. I keep hearing “wary,” “leery,” and “weary” interchangeably and wanted to make sure I’m using the first two correctly because I wasn’t sure I knew the difference. Turns out that’s because there really isn’t one. The two are considered synonyms for being cautious or careful. So you can be wary OR leery of the salesman when he’s a little shady and you don’t trust him. As a side note, though, I’ve always used “leery” when the meaning expresses a little more suspicion and “wary” when it expresses more caution. So I’m leery when I think he might be dishonest, but I’m wary of salespeople in general. Maybe it’s just me. Feel free to tell me if you think so.

“Weary” probably became a victim in all of this simply by virtue of sounding like a combination of “wary” and “leery.” “Weary,” of course, means tired—so you’d only be weary of the salesman when he’s stayed at your kitchen table for hours and hours, though he could still be perfectly trustworthy.

But the other day when I had been standing at a nursery in almost 100° heat listening to a man who worked for a landscaping company talk endlessly about the need to be weary of certain landscapers, he might have been using the word correctly, after all.

What are your grammatical peeves?

From The Office: Michael’s having a hard time with the gender part of Spanish. So I told him to mark everything with the international symbol for gender and, um, I should have been more specific. [to Michael] Your office is full of genitalia. ~Oscar

Hello Computer, Goodbye Ray Bradbury

 It’s good to be back after a long absence with a broken computer. Now I’m back at last…only to find out that one of my all-time favorite writers ever, Ray Bradbury, died this week.

I’m not sure exactly when I fell in love with his unique style—that unlikely combination of horror and lilting poetry that sings to my soul. I think I read Fahrenheit 451 in high school. Excerpts from The Martian Chronicles inevitably end up in high school anthologies, so I think that’s where my feelings began to deepen. But I believe it was after Something Wicked This Way Comes that it became pure love.

The one that reads to me like sips of a precious elixir to the spirit is Dandelion Wine. I rocked in the nursery rocking chair and read it to my abdomen after I found out that the fetus therein was male. To this day it remains one of my all-time favorite books and proof to me of what I once read about Ray Bradbury to those of us who worshiped him: he was not really a science fiction writer, but a poet.

I relished each word of Zen in the Art of Writing. Then last Christmas, I got the most thoughtful gift of my life when a dear friend sent me an autographed copy of The Halloween Tree. It’s one of the few I don’t have. I was almost speechless.

“How did you know that’s something I’ve always wanted?” I asked. I’d never said.

I could hear his infamous shrug over the phone. “I don’t know. It just fit you.” Which is, of course, what I could say about all of Ray Bradbury’s work. I’m not sure why, but it fits me.

I read that Ray Bradbury died during the rare transit of Venus. I hope that’s true. I imagine he would have liked that.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. ~Ray Bradbury

What’s in a Name

Recently I got a comment on an old Book Blurb Friday blog post. Most of you know that Book Blurb Friday is the brainchild of Lisa Ricard Caro of Writing in the Buff. The challenge of this fun meme for writers is to use her weekly picture as the cover of a pretend book, and then post an accompanying blurb. I had written about a fictional little boy.

Be sure and check out the comment I got from a man of the same name as my main character (though a slightly different spelling). The only reason I’m not using his name again is because I don’t want to further misdirect his online presence. I was telling this story to a friend, and her comment was that he sounds like an amazing man. Yes indeed.

Isn’t life cool?

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

~Alfred North Whitehead

Sub Notes: Heroes Come In Small Packages Too

It occurs to me that it’s so much more fun to write about bad teenagers than good ones. It’s not fun, for example, to tell you that there are kids out there—lots of them, as a matter of fact—who are much better human beings than I am.

I have witnessed girls intervening on behalf of children who were being bullied, and I am always awed. Once when I was in high school, I overheard a girl tell a boy he was ugly. I assumed they were friends and that she was teasing him, but it quickly became clear that they weren’t, and she wasn’t. It was nothing more than meanness. I clearly remember all of the horrified retorts that crossed my mind, but in the end, I’m ashamed to say that I stayed out of it. So I am more than a little respectful of these little girls—and there are quite a few of them—who don’t put up with any nonsense, even from friends and acquaintances.

One of them even came to my defense recently when I encountered an unruly student. When he got lippy with me, the girl next to him fixed him with a withering look and ordered him to “stop being ignorant.”

Once when I was calling roll, I ran into a particularly difficult name to pronounce. But when I asked the boy to pronounce it for me, he refused, so I kept going. When I’d finished, the boy’s friend spoke up. “My friend’s name is really cool. Want to hear how he pronounces it?” After urging his friend several times, he said it for me, and then he grinned proudly. “Isn’t that cool?” When I agreed, it had double meaning. I still haven’t mastered tact, and these children were sixth graders.

In fact, every now and then, there’s a student I suspect is older than I am on the inside. It’s almost an eerie feeling because I think I am pretty old. I once had to go to a strange building on a large campus. One high school boy apparently knew his teacher’s schedule, and he knew the building was confusing and hard to find. “Do you know where you go next, Ma’am?” He asked. “Here, I’ll show you.” And he walked me there. Every one of those things is a weird response for a high school kid—the concern, the willingness to be seen with a strange middle-aged teacher. And this was no loser kid.

Sometimes I wonder what happens to these children. I imagine they grow up to run governments and armies and rescue people and save the world.

I hope so. Because the world needs them.

The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Improper Poll: Publicly Peeved

I hate those lotion cults at malls. Or any mall worker not in a third world country who stands in the sidelines shouting at you to try their product or asking if you will answer just one question. They always seem to target me in spite of the fact that I am a very fast walker and intentionally use the most negative body language ever—eyes averted, skittering quickly along the wall like a cockroach.

I don't mean the grocery store sample ladies, either.  Those people never seem to be pushy and they never hard-sell.  And I've never had one behave rudely.  The ones I'm talking about stand in the mall and ask me to try their product as I race by.  Usually it's lotion.  After I’ve politely told them “no, thank you,” I’ve found that they nearly always argue. Argue! But it’s good lotion, they will say. As if it’s their job to tell me what it is I need and want to buy and not the other way around. I find it so disrespectful. Even worse, if I ignore them, they shout something snotty at my back. Yet if I repeat myself, they get snotty. In fact, come to think of it, I have never had a pleasant experience with these people and would rather put expired Crisco on my chapped hands than use their Attack Lotion, so there!

At one point the Survey People were so bad at the mall that I boycotted the stores near them. I wasn’t trying to be mean; I just don’t like to do business in establishments that allow their customers to be accosted. It comes across as cheap, and it’s easy enough just to shop in peace elsewhere.

And don’t even get me started on that local business with the word “Construction” in it who stands at malls and fairs and tells you that you will be entered to win a prize if you give them your name. No one I know has had a good experience with them, including myself. They managed to sell us a door once in the years before they resorted to shouting at passers-by like carnie barkers. When the patio door finally arrived, not only did it not fit, the manager to whom I spoke was so rude and unapologetic that she lost all future business right there. As if that weren’t bad enough, when we finally did get the door properly installed, it was of shockingly poor quality despite the exorbitant price tag. So what I shout back when they shout at me about their business is, “I had a bad experience with your company and would never buy there again!” I figure this is what they earned, and I truly wish I’d been warned the first time around.

What are your pet peeves that happen in public?

Sub Notes: So, Like, Not Hot

One of the bad things about subbing is that you have no idea how warmly to dress during any time of year. Today I spent the day in the coldest room I can remember, and I was pretty covered up to begin with. At the end of the day I ran to my car (dropping my keys because of the shivering), and just baked in the sun for a while. Then I drove home with no air conditioning and all the windows rolled up. I bet it was well over 100° in there, but I was so bone-chilled that it still felt good. Throughout the day, I thought of

Ten Ways to Get Warm in an Eighth Grade Science Room:

1. Steal all the lab coats and pile them on
2. Shut myself in my car over lunch (if I had time to get there and still eat)
3. Warm myself over Bunsen burners
4. Break glass and wrap up in the asbestos fire blanket
5. Teach class while jogging in place
6. Haphazardly combine chemicals in hopes that something generates heat
7. Threaten custodians with jars of pickled tape worms if they don’t turn down air conditioning
8. Try to evoke hot flashes (which refuse to occur when you actually need them)
9. Failing that, invite menopausal teachers to stand around like space heaters
10. Go to Lost and Found and dig up a hoodie that (ironically) pronounces me to be hot in some way

Question I got from a seventh grader, who was pointing to a portrait of Cher in a white wig: “Is this Lady Gaga?”

Not So Improper: Day for Moms

I was going to write about pet peeves before I realized it’s Mother’s Day.  Writing about peeves on Mother’s Day would just be wrong.

Although thinking about it did get me thinking about something my mother used to do that upset me.  She used to tell me I was too thin.  Can you imagine?  What I wouldn’t give to hear that now. Alas, who but a mother ever tells you that you’re too thin?

Anyway, this is a little story about my mother.

For years, I thought of her as huge.  Then one day in college I realized with a shock that I was physically bigger than she was.  She was 5’ 2” and weighed 105. 

My mother was what everyone called a strong woman.  She was tiny and fierce and political, with an elegance all her own.  She had a powerful sense of justice, and her character and honesty were to me on par with a superhero.  When she believed in something—and she always believed in something—you were either on her side or you stayed out of the way.

As an adult, I once told a friend about how my mother had been left partially crippled by a childhood bout with polio.  The friend seemed shocked I’d never mentioned such a significant thing before.

I laughed.  For most of my life, it wasn’t something I even noticed.  It was just how she was.

My mother had one leg that had suffered some muscle atrophy.  She walked with a limp. Once when we were buying shoes, a little boy loudly wondered what was wrong with the lady’s leg.  I was shocked when I realized he was talking about my mother.  That was how her leg was supposed to be, like the way some mothers have freckles or curly hair or long fingernails.

As a child, I could lie in bed and listen to my family members’ footsteps on our old house’s creaky stairs, and each person had a walk that was as individual as his or her fingerprint. 

My father went, “STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP!”

My sister went, "Skip-skip! Skip-skip! Skip-skip!"

And my mother went, “Step-pause…step-pause…step-pause….”

That was how I thought of it.  It was her walk.

It wasn’t until I was grown that I realized how hard it had been for my mother in a world that wasn’t terribly friendly to those who were different.  Or how hard it had taught her to fight for the underdog. 

And when she died, it was the underdogs who turned up at her funeral.  In droves.  Turns out they were grateful my mother walked to her own beat, too. Funny that I still think of her as huge.  She was.

Happy Mother’s Day to you and yours.  If you need a pick-me-up, imagine a small, fierce woman saying the below quote to you.  You’re welcome.

Are you on a diet?  Because you are much too thin.  It isn’t healthy to be so thin!  Eat something! ~My mother  

Sub Notes: May 7-11

Normal people have no clue about teaching. None. Once a writer friend of mine went around to schools to speak to the children about writing.

The first time she did most of a day, she couldn’t believe it. Good lord! she said. She was wiped out. Drained. Sapped. Zapped. She went home and slept for hours.

Well, yes.

I’m just a sub, but I get to watch teachers work their magic.I see how some of them  feed children because no one else does. I see them fight—hard—for children no one else seems to care about.They do it because they know someone must.

The best teachers are “on” all day long. From seven AM to three PM, and then later for the planning and grading and coaching and conferences, they are on. No hour lunches. No noon-time errands. Sometimes no bathroom breaks, even. Every minute of the day, timed like a bomb that explodes bells and stampeding feet and slamming lockers.

The best teachers teach with their minds and bodies and hearts and souls—all at once. They are simultaneously divining rods of knowledge and wellsprings of empathy. They channel God and Einstein and Shakespeare and Leno and Oprah. They are demigods in these microcosms of society.

This is Teacher Appreciation Week. Have you hugged a teacher today?

Those who can, teach. Those you can’t go into some less significant line of work. ~Words inscribed on a teacher’s coffee cup

Improper Poll: Road Rage

Last week I enjoyed your comments so much, I’ve decided to do another traffic one. I knew you would mention my other traffic peeves, and you sure did not disappoint!

Last week I also mentioned my Sad Head Shaking gesture that I use in traffic and how it once almost got me attacked. I realized the effectiveness of the Sad Head Shake when I was a teenaged driver and did something stupid in traffic. I don’t remember what it was, but I do remember the way a man sadly shook his head at it.

It was a shaming gesture, and I was much more horrified than if he’d behaved angrily.

From then on I promised myself I would A.) drive more carefully, and B.) use the Sad Head Shake myself whenever the opportunity arose.

That opportunity has arisen many times since then. One of those times was when I was taking my son to pick out college bedding and supplies. We had to make a left into the bedding store, so I was in the left lane and driving exactly the speed limit. My son later corroborated this. But it was clear by the way the guy behind me was riding my bumper that he wanted me to go faster.

Normally I’d just let him pass, but I don’t usually drive in the left lane without a reason, and my turn was coming up. So the kid—who was somewhere around my son’s age or early twenties—screeched into the slow lane, passed me on the right, then angrily swung back in front of me.

I did the Sad Head Shake. I might have laughed a little, too, because my son made a funny comment about people who drive like idjuts.

It was right at that point that I pulled into the left turn lane, and so did Screeching Guy just ahead of me. And then this boy who was so anxious to get somewhere slammed on his brakes, parked his car right there in the turn lane, and got out and started heading toward my car.

Have I ever mentioned that I seem to attract crazies? I do. Always have. And this was not the first time a crazy guy has come after me in a car, so I’ve had some practice. I put my hand on the horn and left it there. It was the middle of the day and traffic was fairly heavy, so we were attracting a lot of attention. But it was when my son was obviously calling police on his cell that the kid thought the better of it and went back to his car and left. At least he didn’t appear to have any weapons that we could see.

So we opted not to call police. In the big picture, it was almost worth the bonding experience with my son; we talked about it for ages. “Remember that crazy guy…?”


Powerful stuff, the Sad Head Shake. Do you have a favorite traffic gesture? And have you ever experience road rage?

Improper Poll: Driven to Distraction

I’ve been feeling somewhat peevish, so I’ve decided to cover peeves in the next few weeks. Is that exciting, or what? So allow me to begin with Traffic Peeves. Sad to say I have only too many of those, but this one is inspired by something that happened Friday on my way home from work. Then in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be moving on to General Public Peeves and possibly Grammatical Peeves. So prepare your peeves!

This Traffic Peeve actually has three parts. No, wait—four. Part I is that the sirens on police cars in my area really are not audible until the cruiser is right next to you. Ambulance and fire trucks are audible, but police cars seem not to be. However, those redblueredblue lights are visible, and that’s how I first detected this one, flashing in my rear-view mirror in the other lane several cars behind me.

So I pulled over to allow him to pass. By the way, this was at the start of rush hour, since rush hour seems to start so early these days. But here’s Part II of the peeve: no one else pulled over even when he was right there and they could obviously hear the siren. In fact, it looked like no one was even willing to pull into the slow lane to let him pass. And there were a lot of cars.

I’m not being holier-than-anyone, either. Honestly, I almost didn’t pull over myself just because no one else did. I hate to admit that, but for a second it actually crossed my mind that maybe someone had changed the rule and I’d missed it.

But here is Part III of the peeve. When I did pull to the side of the road, the woman behind me honked. At me. And she kept it up until after the cop car had passed, so it couldn’t have been that she didn’t see him. This was no little honk, either. This was a what-the-heck-are-you-doing-you-idiot honk, accompanied by flailing arms. To which I flailed back even more angrily. I pointed to the police car. I pointed to the side of the road. I shook my head sadly (which has been my favorite traffic gesture ever since someone used it on me when I was a teenager, but which once almost got me attacked in a genuine instance of road rage; but that’s for another time).

I have to wonder if her own mistake finally hit her, because I noticed she abruptly stopped gesturing and honking. Then she actually stopped riding my bumper after that.

Or maybe she was afraid I’d come after her. Part IV of my peeve is me. I should have ignored her or maybe just done the Sad Head Shake. I don’t like it when I allow other people’s stupidity to have any effect on me.

What’s your worst traffic peeve?

Sub Notes: The Boy Who Died Outside My Window

I did not see the boy die, and I will forever be glad of that. What I saw—what was almost surreal—was the rescue chopper. Today’s schools are often built almost without windows (literally prison-style) in order to avoid distractions. But this was years ago, and beyond the wall of classroom windows, about 40 feet away, was the Flight for Life helicopter landing in the parking lot.

When I hear the phrase, “snuffed out,” I think of this boy. Sometimes I wonder how long he pondered the decision to huff Freon. Minutes? Seconds? Regardless, I imagine that his last deciding breath was his last one altogether. And then that presumably strong, healthy boy was snuffed with a sniff, blown out with a breath.

I’ve heard that it happens that way with inhalants—that you are stopped. Ended. Frozen, almost, which I suppose has a horrifying appropriateness in the case of Freon.

I think sometimes about how abruptly and unexpectedly life can end. I heard rumors about how hard they tried to restart his heart. I know they were there in the parking lot for most of the class period. Until at last the helicopter rose to the sky in no particular hurry.

I wish I could stop messing up but I don’t know how. What is it that mends broken people? Jesus? Chocolate? New shoes? I wish someone could tell me. I wish I had an answer. Once I asked Nathan what the answer was. I thought he might know, considering all he’s been through [the holocaust], but he told me I would have to find it for myself. That everybody has to. ~Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution

Improper Poll: The Nekid Truth

Don’t blame me for this. Blame Linda of Write from the Heart for writing from the funny bone a couple of months ago about the first time she saw a naked man. Her description of Bazooka Joe is hysterical.

So I confessed that, since I came from a family of sisters and was not even remotely privy to male privates, I once studied a picture in a figure drawing book with increasing confusion until I realized much later that what I’d been sneaking peeks of had in reality been…a fig leaf. (This was a black and white drawing, by the way. If the leaf had been green, I would have had a clue. Or maybe not.)

Never fear—I did not give up on my pursuit of the personal parts! Much later I discovered a big sister’s copy of The Godfather (I think) in our attic and read a description so terrifying that I would say that prose alone did more to protect my virtue than pretty much anything else. So yet one more reason to be a reader! What I pictured was very angry and not of this world and could have starred in its own horror flick.

Eventually my best friend and I got to talking, and she ended up stealing her big sister’s ID in order to buy me a copy of a “Playgirl” magazine.

I mean no insult to the male gender when I say that being underwhelmed can be good.  Whew.

Did you have any interesting thoughts on the other side’s nether sides?

Book Blurb Friday #59

Could it be? It is! It's Book Blurb Friday! Every week, Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff posts a meme with a picture for a pretend book jacket. Our challenge is to write a blurb of 150 words or fewer to go with it. My blurb has 150 words.

~Riley was Here~

Sweet little Riley Kiley was not like other nine-year-old children. From the time he stopped breathing when he was five, he began talking to an invisible friend named Bosco. And when Riley talked to Bosco, he always seemed to slip out somehow and disappear. For three minutes and fourteen seconds at a time. Always left in his place was his penguin, Gwen. Riley said Gwen was Bosco’s promise that he was coming back.

How did he do it? No one—even the child psychologist assigned to work with him—could figure it out. Cameras in his vicinity at the time always seemed to go dead.

Then one day Riley told his parents that Bosco had something important to say…and he wasn’t back in three minutes. Or three days. Where was he? The press caught wind of his story, and the people began to gather, hoping for more than one miracle.

The unkown is something not yet found. ~James Van Praagh, Talking to Heaven

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?

Book Blurb Friday #58

How quickly the week goes! Every Friday, Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff posts a meme with a picture for a pretend book jacket. Our challenge is to write a blurb of 150 words or fewer to go with it. My blurb has 150 words.

~So, Like, Over the Moon~

By Stuffeny Mayer

You loved reading the first book in Stuffeny Mayer’s new series about Jacob and Renesme, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon:

“Dude, your prom date smells like vampire.”
“That’s not vampire; I think her diaper needs changing.”

And you clamored for more in Shoot the Moon, when Jacob and Renesme have their baby, Isadorbell (named after Bella and Jacob’s mother, Dora), and Jacob contracts distemper and fails to phase completely, leaving his bare human buttocks exposed when he becomes a wolf.

Now you will enjoy Stuffeny’s last in the Full Moon Series, So, Like, Over the Moon, where Renesme finds out that her accelerated aging continues until she is seven, which is the equivalent of 49 human years…leaving her in eternal menopause.

Now her hot flashes are even too much for Jacob, he is perpetually in the doghouse, and he’s afraid that his wife will bite his head off. Literally.

Take this letter that I give you/ Take it sonny, hold it high/ You won’t understand a word that’s in it/ But you’ll write it all again before you die ~Queen, “Father to Son” (from Queen II, one of the best albums ever made)

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?

Book Blurb Friday #57

TGIBBF! Every week, Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff posts a meme with a picture for a pretend book jacket. Our challenge is to write a blurb of 150 words or fewer to go with it. I am in love with Sandra's work of art, below.  My blurb this week has 128 words.

~The Naked Ape Exposed~

By Dr. Darence Clarrow

The year is 2053, and the research is complete. The conclusion? Not only is society becoming more detached, we may actually be returning to our roots: evidence now suggests that our ancestors “planted” us here when they crossed their own hairless, big-headed, bug eyed genes with those of the warm and social apes of our own planet.

But a flaw in the alien gene means that the more we evolve, the more we become like our alien ancestors—and thus lose what it is that makes us most human. Could this paradox of enormous proportions really be true? And how delicious is the irony: what makes us essentially “human” is really due to our ape genes.

“A ‘Monkey Trial’ to end all Monkey Trials.” ~Sci Fi Journal Monthly

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God. ~Mary Daly

Improper Poll: Not Quite Pinned Down

It’s clear that many of you were impressed by last week’s Slut Pin. Some of you even asked how one obtains such a thing…because you were obviously hoping to run out and get one for yourself.

As much as I hate to thwart a fashion trend in the making, I don’t think slut pins are still available. They were given out free before a movie I saw years ago with a friend and my daughter. I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it was about high school. The attendant held a basket of pins as we entered the theater. The idea was to choose one that represented the group we most identified with. My daughter and I both reached for the one that said, “Theater Geek,” so I let her have it.

I didn’t want the same pin, so at that point my hand hovered over the basket. There was a group of creative writers at my high school, but we were so diverse that we never could have formed our own cohesive group even when we worked together on publications. And what do you call that, anyway? There was never a group that seemed to encompass all of the arts, and besides, I never felt edgy enough to be considered one of the cool artsy people. It was one of the great plagues of my high school years that I identified with a bunch of groups, but none, really, in particular. I even made friends with that kid in the back whose name no one else knew, and I learned those people can be undiscovered gems.

I sit at a lot of tables at reunions, and at last I'm happy about that.

So this was what I was thinking as my hand hovered over the basket of pins and the movie line waited patiently behind me. “Here, take this one,” my friend teased, and scooped up The Slut Pin. There were a whole bunch of them. Apparently the coolness hadn’t yet caught on.

What pin would you wear?

Book Blurb Friday #56

Time for Book Blurb Friday! Every week, Lisa Ricard Claro of Writing in the Buff posts a meme with a picture of a pretend book cover. Our challenge is to write a blurb of 150 words or fewer to go with it.  My blurb has 150 words.

Photo courtesy of Scott Liddell

~Changes~

Ty was in for a shock when he awoke for school…and it was a paw the size of a baseball mitt—with claws—that hit his IPod radio.

Ty Munson had enough problems. He was thirteen and not exactly one of the popular kids. Now he had to come to terms with the fact that he was a weretiger—like a werewolf, but a tiger. And werewolves, Ty learned, have it easy in comparison. They have the predictability of a full moon and the night as a cover.

Ty went into weretiger during increased sunspot activity…which meant it was during the day, and with very little warning.Now he seemed destined to spend his time hiding out, often in the school’s science storage room, trying to avoid trouble.

Then a classroom was taken hostage and no one knew what to do.

Except, that is, the tiger in the storage room.

***

Have to say I was jazzed about this one. In my mind, none of the kids have cell phones because of a recent crackdown, which middle schools do in my area.  And the teacher’s phone is in her purse locked away. And Ty, of course, can’t dial or text with those gigantor paws of his, so it’s up to him to save the day. Oh, by the way, can you see his initials to the left of his eye? The “M” is easier to spot, and the “T” is above it.  Have a grrreat weekend!

***

If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in the eye, and say, “I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.” ~Ann Landers