Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from All of Us to All of You!

The Gift Exchange

I made myself a simple lunch: two egg yolks (the whites had a higher purpose—royal icing for a gingerbread house), a few mushrooms, and half of a green onion all on a bed of arugula. I am trying to eat more normally—on a plate, sitting down with a napkin in my lap, and even a fork, sometimes a knife, too, if needed. A salad doesn’t usually require a knife, but crisscrossing the leaves with your knife and fork makes a difficult task more manageable, easier to pierce or scoop things off the plate, and tastier, too, as long as you don’t mind things being mixed together like some people do. All the while, I was fighting an unruly and compelling desire to say something significant in this season, something of social and spiritual importance, but my heart’s a little dry, wrung out of emotion, and plumped back up by a jumble of busy work, not good deeds. 

Still I have been thinking about Christmas stories. Like the year Isabel and I gathered our children, strung lights on our bikes, and rode through the neighborhood singing Christmas carols. (It’s a memory I am sure that the kids cherish, or struggle to forget.) Or the first time I went to the holiday party for an organization that helps homeless families and met a family who had been living under an apartment stairwell with their five children. One of the children hugged my knees and smiled up at me as if I were Santa. Or the year—just three days before Christmas—when we got word that my brother-in-law—he’d been taken hostage in Peru on my husband’s fortieth birthday—had been released. (We watched CNBC as the hostages were led in the dark to an awaiting bus and cheered when we saw him.) And it is fun to think back on those few Christmases when my children were so small that they would wear the outfits I bought for them—Alex in knickers and a red bowtie, Analise in velvet smocking with patent leather shoes and ribbons in her hair. One Christmas, we collected hundreds of toys for Alex’s Eagle project. He sorted them according to each child’s wish list. And I remember the year when Analise was three—the last time we spent Christmas here in Houston—she was so excited that she got us all up before dawn, rushed into the living room, ripped open all of her presents, took one look at them, and went back to bed. Too much of the good stuff, I suppose.

Then last year on Christmas Eve, as we slid into the pew of the Methodist church—the church my sister and I grew up in—my father whispered that he was afraid that a family who lived in the trailer park was too poor to buy gifts for their four children. How old are they? He wrote their ages, guessing some, on the back of the church bulletin, and I slipped out before the sermon (usually my favorite time to exit anyway). Dollar General was open late on Christmas Eve. The parking lot was crowded, but it didn’t compare to the crowd inside the store. Being the only game in town on Christmas Eve was a wise marketing decision. I found the last cart and maneuvered through the retail wreckage—opened boxes blocking the aisles, shelves spilling over with toys from China and fruitcakes and chocolates from God-knows-where. The store was bursting at the seams and still it was going to be slim pickin’s—it had nothing in common with Santa’s workshop. The best had been scooped up long before Christmas Eve and my fellow shoppers and I were left to scrounge. I pulled out the church bulletin and studied the children’s ages. They were something like this: boy, age 10, girl, 8, boy 5 maybe 6, girl 2 or 3. What did my children like to play when they were that young? I had forgotten, but did it matter anyway? Choice was the prerogative of early shoppers. I dug through the displays and, to my surprise, began finding things, little treasures—picture books, a pony, a couple of small trucks, a baby doll, a sword, a deck of cards, a box of candy canes, a stuffed bear and what looked like a baby squirrel. There was a plastic dollhouse and some transformers or transformer wannabees, silly socks that played jingle bells, dancing Santas. By the time I got in line to check out, my cart was overflowing. An older man smiled at me and told me to please go ahead of him, he was waiting on his boy to finish his shopping. Then he began to tell us that his son was home on leave, had just gotten here that day and was going back the day after Christmas. All of us in line—desperate shoppers—smiled back at him as he shared this precious gift with us. I paid and dragged my many bags out of the store with shoppers still streaming in as Dollar General was trying to close its doors.

In an hour or so, after putting bows on the shopping bags—there were too many gifts to wrap—Daddy, Alex, Analise, and I hopped on the golf cart and bumped along down the dirt road toward the trailer park. Golf carts are fun anytime, but riding a golf cart at night on the edge of the woods loaded down with Christmas presents was simply enchanting. We pulled up in front of the trailer shouting enthusiastically and probably a little too loudly, the children ran inside and hid, peeking out through a crack in the doorway that poured light onto the deck. Their parents sat there smoking in the cold night air as we explained our mission. They seemed confused by our charity as if we had stumbled onto a family secret by mistake. Undaunted, we delivered our goodies and in a matter of minutes were on our way back down the dirt road singing Jingle Bells.  Although they were too surprised to say much that night—we had caught them a little off guard—the children’s mother told my daddy months later how much they appreciated the gifts, how much it all meant to them.

It meant a lot to us, too.

Groucho's Little Sister

I dyed my hair. That’s right. It has latte or ginger colored stripes in it now—depending on the light—and they are sort of shiny which makes the dull gray so self-conscious that it hides. Sure a passel of nit-picking monkeys combing through my hair could still find the gray, but it’s pretty hard to see for the rest of us. And I had it cut—not too short because I have concluded that my head is too big for short hair—sort of a frizzy bowling ball (a bowling ball gathers no moss just a bunch of frizz).

There is more. I went to the dermatologist, too. It happened like this. Six weeks ago I had my semi-annual appointment with my endocrinologist—I have had some thyroid complaints for ten or twelve years, runs in my family—and I pointed out to him that not only was my hair thinning on top of my head, but my eyebrows were disappearing, too. I figured it had to have something to do with my medication. I went on to tell him that I have to color my eyebrows with a pencil and soon I’d be painting them on just like the checker at the grocery store. I had seen her eyebrows up close and although I admired her steady hand (she can draw a perfect arch) the color choice for eyebrow paint is a problem. It seems to be limited to plum or persimmon, or some other fall fruit color. My doctor listened quietly—he’s a quiet guy—and then breathed out deeply as if he were very tired and had heard this painful story one time too many. He sat down and rubbed his hand over his baldhead again and again, not saying a word. What was he doing, I thought. Was he trying to tell me something? I certainly hadn’t rubbed my eyebrows off. Is that what happened to his hair? I waited. Finally he said something profound like, “This happens sometimes to women your age.” What? They go hairless? Like some ancient lab rat? Add that to my shit list of What Will Change When You Go Through the Change? So far I have: crying over spilt wine; a desire to eat one’s young; a keen interest in an Eastern philosophy known as crouching tiger, hidden dragon, frightened husband; an uncontrollable urge for pita chips; a fetish for sharp knives and small handguns; and an evil laugh that sounds suspiciously like Cruella Deville (who was just misunderstood). My endocrinologist then said that I should ask my gynecologist about my symptoms. So I did. My gynecologist said, “Mmmmm, you should ask your dermatologist about your hair loss, especially your eyebrows.” As far as the rest of my symptoms go, she suggested that I tie myself to a tree in the backyard and have my family throw me ham bones and pita chips for the next year or so, or at least until I was through the worst of “It.” I kept this part to myself, but I told my husband that I was going to my dermatologist to see about my eyebrows. He said, “Fine, honey. Whatever you want, honey, just put the knife down.”

I said to my dermatologist, “What are we going to do about this face?” She looked at me, intently studying my face. I returned the favor: I studied hers. She is young—early 40’s—and there were no lines at all on her face, no small wrinkles under her eyes, no misplaced puffiness, not one laugh line, not even a dimple. There was not a crinkle to be found. Now my brain does something weird if I look too long at someone else’s face: I begin to think I look like them—not really like them, but as good as they do. It is like an imaginary fountain of youth—the longer I stare, the younger my face becomes, in my mind’s eye. And so I was thinking that I looked pretty good for my age when all of a sudden the doctor holds an enormous mirror right up in front of me and holy shit! I am sorry, but after looking at her young, young face there was something pretty damn jarring about mine. She started discussing the various droops, poofs, wrinkles, and chicken-scratching on my face and what she recommended to help smooth out the worst of it.  I could get a little filler right on top of my cheekbones and that would gently—and naturally—pull my saggy, puffy jowls back up to where they should be. I could consider an eyelift and botox to brighten my eyes and arch my eyebrows—what there was left of them. Oh and about that. My dermatologist recommended Latisse for my eyebrows. (She also recommended Rogaine for the hair on my head, but said to be careful that if it dripped I could grow fuzz on my face, which to me was nothing new—just look at what’s above my lip.) It just so happened that the Latisse representative was in the office that day and came in to discuss the product with me. Now let me prepare you. On the Latisse commercials, Brooke Shields’ eyelashes are pretty amazing and, I figured, photographically enhanced. I was wrong. This young women had to stand five feet away from me just so she could blink without swatting me in the face. I have never seen eyelashes that long. I wasn’t sure how her eyelids could hold them up. (Come to think of it, she did look a little drowsy). I had to ask how the hell the stuff worked. She said (blink) that Latisse (blink) was originally a medicine (blink, blink) for glaucoma. And they discovered (blink) that glaucoma patients had these incredibly (blink) long eyelashes and lo and behold (blink, blink) they figured that Latisse (blink) extends the life of each (blink, blink) lash so that it stays in longer (blink) and therefore can grow longer (blink) …and longer (blink, blink, blink). Wow, I thought. Imagine what it will do for my eyebrows. I will be able to braid them or have dreadlocks or just hide behind them on a bad day. I hurried out the door with my prescription, thinking about the possibilities…but frankly, I am still working up the courage to use it… 

Joy of Cooking

Whew. It’s over. Three dishwasher loads and it is all done and put away. But to tell the truth I got a late start on cleaning up. As soon as the others left this morning I went back to bed. I was exhausted. I did manage to get breakfast on the table for the two oblivious ones—I am not lying when I say I could cook breakfast wearing nothing but a bowtie and fluffy house slippers and nobody would blink an eye.  They sat in foggy silence eating their bacon and eggs, occasionally pointing at something they needed like salt or pepper or maybe the cream for their coffee while I was balancing a tray of champagne glasses on my head, recorking wine bottles, and scrubbing bean dip off the floor with my toes.

But as soon as I heard the door close, I got my book and Kitty Kyle and got under the covers. I had no plan other than to see if I could lie there and experience some kind of spontaneous energy infusion. It wasn’t just the party and all the party preparation that flattened me like roadkill, it was also that I got practically no sleep last night. First of all, our very enthusiastic party guests didn’t leave until nearly midnight—which is actually closer to my getting up time than to my usual bedtime. Then about two o’clock Analise woke me and said she couldn’t sleep because she was being harassed by American History.  Every time she closed her eyes a random fact would pop up and demand her attention.  I think she had over-studied—which has never been a problem before. She was miserable. I offered advice there in the dark in the middle of the night or morning, but those repetitive brain loops are hard to ignore. So she crawled in bed with us and finally fell asleep. About that time I took my pillow and went to the sofa.  Anyway after a little while in bed this morning I willed myself back up and started over.

As much as I like parties, I always dread one thing about them: the moment the guests arrive. I know that is terrible, but people are my least favorite thing about parties. Right up until the guests actually ring the doorbell, things are exciting and challenging. I am racing against the clock, juggling, screeching down my critical path to a perfectly prepared party: dishwasher empty and at attention, trashcans pristine ready for duty, kitchen clutter-free and perfectly clean, but with a fragrant bunch of herbs or perhaps some lemon and limes placed strategically on a cutting board, cheese room temperature, crackers crisp, the bar set up, the wine opened, candles lit, full rolls of toilet paper and fresh soap in the guest bathrooms, lights dimmed to just so, lamps on. It’s a thrill-seeker’s joy ride. But when the people get there something yanks up on my reins and it all grinds down into slow motion. You have to take their coats, make a little small talk, introduce them, get them a drink, on and on …What I really want to do is toss them the housekeys and say lock the doors when your finished, I’ll be back to clean up.  That’s just plain awful. But to make sure that I don’t have to slow down and chat—especially since I’d probably just doze off anyway—I have a trick. I leave my apron on. That’s right, I wear my apron like a uniform. It says I am on the job, I have things to do—just like a seeing-eye dog when he puts on his little red jacket, I am working so don’t even try to pet me. That usually does it and I can keep moving, flitting from task to task, making some up even, until it is time to say good night and I get to deal with the joy and wonder of inanimate objects again.

The Housewife's Christmas--A True Story

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And The Decorating Goes On...

Last night after waiting most of the afternoon for the drizzle to dry up, I took a deep breath and lugged the ladder outside to decorate the friends’ entrance. These doors are as big as the front doors and hence the garland is just as long as the one that nearly did me in. The good thing about a disaster is that it gets you to thinking—particularly about prevention—and since I was working alone again (my husband was at the office) I decided to be a little smarter this time. So I stretched out the mother of all garlands—or mother, for short—on the floor and pre-wired it with three small loops across the top leaving extra wire splayed out so like rabbit ears so I could find it with one hand in the dark. Then I put on my carpenter’s apron—who knows where that came from, but it has big pockets and a loop for the hammer. Very handy, except when I hang the hammer in the loop, the handle bops my knees as I climb the ladder, which may mean I am a little too short for a carpenter. Most people probably want one that is full grown—not that I am looking for work, but you never know and carpentry beats my other skilled labor daydream—being a lady plumber. That daydream is entirely too complicated because I spend most of my time explaining to irritable housewives exactly why I don’t unplug toilets, dig up sewers, or crawl under houses and get dirty. I am not that kind of plumber. I am the kind that installs high-end German bath fixtures and bidets. But once that stuff is used, they are on their own. Meanwhile, I put a couple of big-headed nails between my lips like a cigarette and stepped on the ladder. I hammered three of them across the top of the door frame making holes big enough for a friendly rat family to crawl through, but I figured that I could caulk later, hopefully before my husband sees them since he has an irrational fear of nail holes—hanging a picture on the wall requires months of negotiating, helping him work through the horror of the sheetrock being pierced. My plan was to hoist the garland over my shoulder and walk it up the ladder catching the three wire loops on the big-headed nails and twisting the extra long wire around the nails and alternating between praying and cursing. Believe it or not it worked and the garland was up and I secured it down the sides. Thank the dear Lord.

On Saturday my husband and I worked together to install the lights outside. Now this isn’t my job and I can say that because in our household we have a strict division of labor. For instance, cooking and cleaning are unquestionably my jobs—not that I don’t question. Taking out the trash, hauling wood for the fire, changing light bulbs, and putting gas in the car are, without a doubt, his jobs. You can probably see the flaw in this system. Cooking and cleaning are done every day, sometimes several times a day, and seven days a week. The other jobs are done on occasion and on most of those occasions my husband is out of town.  But back to the Christmas lights. Normally it is my son who helps with this job, but we know where he is. (Actually most of the time I don’t know exactly where he is. On Friday after I sent a message to tell him about the snow, and we chatted back and forth several times and then he noticed that he wasn’t at Emory after all, but was on his way to Clemson.) Now even without caffeine I get up on most Saturday mornings ready to conquer or kill something. My husband conquers the sofa and throws back a couple of newspapers with his sixteen cups of coffee. Finally sometime after lunch he is ready to start hanging the lights. I toss some dirt over the pansies I am planting and run over to help. But he has a couple of distractions: the football games have started and apparently he is waiting to join a conference call for work. Not only that while he is hanging the lights he wants to clean out the gutters. I stand below untangling the lights and dodging the debris he tossing out of the gutters. I tell him that cleaning the damn gutters is slowing his already-slow-self down and he needed to just get on with it, not to mention the fact that I am practically dying of boredom and getting pine needles in my teeth. But his desire to irritate me was just overwhelming, so he continued at a snail’s pace. I started doing calculations in my head based on the number of lights and the distance across the front of the house and figured out that he’d still be up there hanging, clipping and tossing come Easter. I tried to get my mind off of that by taking my bulb replacement task seriously. After I twisted about a half dozen new lights in, I noticed that something was wrong. The new lights had a quirk. They were flickering, going off and on. So I pointed this out to my husband and he said, oh yeah that is what they are supposed to do, they are twinkling lights. But the others aren’t twinkling lights I said. To which he, in his infinite gutter-cleaning wisdom said, well that’s ok because the neighbors will think that the Riddles are setting a new lighting trend where you have some twinkling lights mixed in with the regular lights; it will look good. Being twelve feet up on a ladder put him in a vulnerable position—a temptingly vulnerable position. Fortunately about that time his conference call came through and he had to go inside and take it, leaving me there with boxes of easter-egg colored lights winking at each other and giggling behind my back.

I looked at the ladder. It was one of those escalating or expandable or retractable kinds, something you see hung of the side of a fire truck. I studied it and tried to figure out how to make it go up and down—no such luck, but that didn’t stop me from climbing up and starting where he left off. I climbed up high enough to look into the gutters. There on top of the leaves and pine needles was a weird sight: it was ice shimmering like crystallized sugar. The ice crunched in my glove as I grabbed it and slung it and the debris onto the ground below. I worked as quickly as I could snapping little plastic curley-ques onto the gutters and forcing each little light to stand up straight. I didn’t want them flopping around, hanging willy-nilly. We’d already lost face in the neighborhood mixing twinkling lights in with our normal ones. As I came near a downspout there was the sound of water flowing, like musical notes, nature’s own Christmas carol, a little respite from the hum-drum tasks.

Before long—but not too soon—my husband returned and we had the front of our house ringed in colored lights. Our last two light strands died before we could get them up which meant that we couldn’t wrap the garage in color. But that was ok, because by then my standards were on friendly terms with reality and I pronounced it all good enough. A few of the lights twinkled back at me, or maybe that was applause.

It's a Hard Luck Life

It's Snowing in Houston!

Next up: "Hell Freezes Over."

A Little Christmas Cheer

Christmas is my favorite time of year, but it is a bagful, maybe a whole sleighful, of work especially since we moved in to this house. (Our old house is across the street and is now occupied by two adorable little children, sort of like it was when we lived there, although these two are a tad sweeter than mine or maybe they just have better manners.) The first few years after we moved here, we hosted several parties so I hired a designer to help me with the Christmas decorations. She made garlands for the mantles with sparkling balls and gold ribbons and tiny twinkling lights. She spruced up our Christmas tree with tendrils of grosgrain ribbon tucked up underneath the star on top, cascading gracefully, then fastened with bows and poofed and bustled like the train of a wedding gown. She wove bunches of fake pine branches with small plastic—but very realistic—pine cones in and out of the iron chandeliers in the kitchen and hung interesting, exotic-looking ornaments and teardrops of glass beads. Then outside at each door, she made enormous garlands with giant iridescent balls of green, blue, and purple clustered like strange, oversized grapes. Each garland was swathed by jewel colored ribbons—paint strokes—whipping and flowing in between the branches. And then came the lights. Dozens—a hundred, maybe—of itty-bitty multi-colored lights hung like refugees from the Crayola box.

Now I have to pause a moment and explain. My husband likes colored lights. Colored lights, he says, are festive. Early in our marriage I tried to explain that you have to be careful because “festive” can be a tricky concept–a downright slippery booger. Head down the road to “festive” and before you know it you are on the hood of your pickup wearing antlers and a Rudolph sweater with a red blinking nose, sloshing shots of MD 20-20 all the way back to the trailer park. Believe me, I know. I went on to tell him about the folks that owned the dime store in my hometown. (The dime store was a dark, dusty treasure chest of a place filled with wood bins and racks of desirable goodies, but walk down an aisle to possibly fondle some little trinket and a wraith-like gray-haired old lady would follow and stare at you hard enough to shrink you into something too small to reach the counter. Maybe they were right to give us the evil eye. Most of us children roamed all over town like stray cats, penniless and barefoot. But as far as I remember money didn’t matter anyway. I am pretty sure that my first full sentence was “just charge that to my daddy.”) Anyway, I told my husband that the couple that owned the dime store grew weary of the dank dinginess of their daily life and longed to be “festive” during the holidays, so they strung colored lights all over their house and I think—or maybe I imagined—even put a Santa in his sleigh on their roof. We rode by their house every Christmas Eve to marvel (and snicker) at just how tacky some people are. I thought that this story perfectly illustrated my point about the danger of  “festive,” how far off the good taste meter it can throw you. But my warnings fell on deaf ears. My husband is a big city boy from Dallas. Tacky lived on the other side of town and never came to visit. Colored lights seemed just fine to him, festive, really, so we have used colored lights for the last nineteen years.

This year I am doing all the decorating myself, something that I enjoy, mostly. On Sunday, I bought fresh greenery for the mantles and I finished the tree with its bridal veil of ribbons and bows. I used the same fake pine branches on my kitchen chandeliers. On Monday, the weather was very bad, so I waited until Tuesday to haul the boxes from upstairs that have the door garlands in them. Each box weighed as much as Shiner and Bud put together, so when I say hauled I actually mean I bounced them down the stairs hoping they didn’t gain momentum and mow me down when they hit the bottom. Fortunately, the boxes had wheels on one end so I rolled them along through the kitchen and dining room and bumped over the threshold out the front door. I started to think about the process, about how to go about hanging the garlands, what tools I would need; but I was a little impatient and anxious to get started so I figured I would just make it up as I went along. First I pulled the garland out of the box and spread it along the front porch. Right about then I had a little inkling that this might not be a one-woman job, but I ignored the troublesome little thought. Then I checked to make sure the lights still worked and identified the middle since I had to work from the top down. The ladder was nearby, at the Christmas tree, so I brought it out with a hammer and long skinny nails, along with some wire and one of my favorite tools—needle-nose pliers—I even like the name—needle-nose. When I stepped up on the ladder with the garland over one arm, my little inkling began to shriek. Now let me see if I can explain what the fuss was about: the front doors are eight feet tall and six feet wide, that means that the garland was twenty-two feet long and full of lights and balls and ribbons and apparently several missing children. It was like wrestling an anaconda. I wrapped it around my neck to use my shoulders to help push to up the ladder, and after hours of snake-wrangling managed to get it hung on three nails at the top of the door. I got down to rest and to consider hammering my thumbs when I heard a scraping noise and the whole damn thing fell right on top of my head, and I expressed my frustration in an unprintable fashion, a loud unprintable fashion, which prompted me to warn the young mothers gathered on the corner to meet the school bus to cover the ears of their innocent darlings because my Christmas decorating was rated R.

After another more serious try—this time I wore an apron and was armed with enormous nails and was wielding a glue gun—the feisty garland was subdued and hung. And all was right with the world.

So if you come to visit for the holidays—and I hope you will—we are easy to find. We are the only house on our street with multi-colored lights, some strung across the front hooked to gutters, some hugging the arches of our front doors, some happily waving from the branches of our Christmas tree. All in all it looks, I don’t know… pretty darn festive…

Leftover Turkey Part II

It was Thanksgiving evening, or maybe the next day, that my husband made a tiny mistake, or maybe it wasn’t so tiny, at least not to me. As I was cleaning the kitchen and mumbling quietly to myself about how badly I felt, he walked away from the football game and the newspaper, came around the corner and said something that sounded like, “You know, I may be getting sick, too.” In my addled state I could have misunderstood, so I asked “What?” And he said, “My throat is a little scratchy, I think I am coming down with something.” Oh really? He apparently didn’t realize that I would be the last person on earth to sympathize; that there was no way that he was going to steal my sick show. I deserved an opportunity to wallow in my misery without having to consider his, so he may as well get over it. And furthermore even if he did get sick, I did not give a rat’s ass, period. And that is basically what I said. Later on Friday evening before we went out to dinner I was feeling certifiably terrible, but he tried again to convince me that he was getting sick. I was so irritated that, out of spite, I immediately pronounced myself well, threw on my go-go boots and marched out the door. He said, “Are you really better?’ I said, “I am completely cured—that’s how mad I am. In fact I am too mad to be sick. I am not sick at all, I am just mad. Is that better?” I fumed while he drove wondering what just hit him.

My cure didn’t last long. On Saturday I was still sick and mad or was it mad and sick or maybe it was vindictive and manipulative, so I made breakfast for every-damn-body. Afterwards, I grabbed a box of Kleenex, sat on the sofa and waited for the kitchen to be cleaned. It was a long wait. So long, in fact, that technically I am still waiting. That afternoon we went as a damn family to get a Christmas tree and after arguing over height, shape and girth finally found one that would do. I felt a little better when my children said they couldn’t wait to get home and decorate the tree and could they please have hot chocolate and hot apple cider. Of course, my sweet sugar plums. I rushed out to the grocery store and grabbed gourmet chocolate and cider and mulling spices and whiskey-soaked cherries (just because). Since I was feeling better, I decided to pick up a couple of steaks, too. When I got back Analise was on her way out the door to have dinner with her friends and Alex wasn’t far behind, so I was left to unload the groceries, cook dinner, and put the damn lights on the damn Christmas tree myself.

It was becoming clear to me that my jaw-clenching spite was too subtle for my family. They couldn’t read between the lines or interpret the hissing between my teeth. As long as I was alert and standing they assumed I was well enough to cook, clean, do a couple of loads of laundry, and haul boxes of Christmas decorations down the stairs. But as the night wore on, my patience wore thin. Actually there were several tantrums welling up inside of me to create the perfect storm—the mother of all storms, which I unleashed like some runny-nosed Medusa on my husband and daughter. (I excluded poor Alex because I was afraid he would never come home again.) As I packed my suitcase, I screeched, or rather croaked, how worn out I was waiting on them hand and foot and that I expected better treatment, that my indentured servitude was bound to be up soon and I was out of there. My smart-ass daughter pointed out that I had no place to go, but I proved her wrong and went straight to bed.

Sunday night, Analise and I were flipping through cookbooks and planning our Christmas baking when I said well I suppose I will still be here. She said she couldn’t believe how loud I screamed and that my fit was completely ridiculous and unnecessary. Well that is a just matter of opinion since…

The next morning my husband got up, made me a cup of coffee and loaded the dishwasher…Now for that laundry and litter box.

Leftover Turkey Part I

I spent most of this morning sleeping. It was a luxury I could afford, but barely. I had to borrow a little time from Tuesday to deposit myself in bed, but it is a perfect day for a nap—cold and rainy—and I needed it, or else I would have stumbled my way from one Thanksgiving leftover to another: dirty sheets and towels here, a turkey leg there, a pair of frowning pilgrim candlesticks, and a stack of linen napkins screaming to be ironed. They all looked tired and neglected in their dried-up fall colors, especially next to the cheery, sparkly gold Christmas ornaments and brilliantly attired nutcrackers already lined up and eager to take their place. (Exactly whose idea was it to cram Christmas right on top of Thanksgiving, elbowing its way in like a forgotten cousin late for dinner acting like it’s no trouble at all, that everyone is just glad they came?)

Well, anyway, it was a complicated nap—part sick, part dog-ass tired, and part protest. After putting together a flawless—if I do say so myself—plan for Thanksgiving dinner, complete with note cards written in my award-winning third grade cursive with my favorite pen—a Uniball Vision needle (It is the pen I would like to be buried with, something I can use to scratch out explanations for my behavior during the years leading up to my untimely death, distract St. Peter with my very nice handwriting, slip through the Pearly Gates while he amuses himself with the flourish of my capital letters. This pen is so precise that I can write notes in the margin or on the left shoulder of a task, a tiny note hovering over a note like Tinkerbell. My daughter looked at my color-coordinated lists and menus, mumbled, “holy crap,” and handed them back to me with a look that was hard to describe, but vaguely familiar. It’s like the one I reserve for carnival people—sort of a mixture between pity and disgust. What does she know? It takes an event like Thanksgiving dinner at my house to remind me just how happily neurotic I am. I like my compulsions and my nutty attention to detail and crave opportunities to drive myself and those around me crazy, especially those around me. I even had a note card entitled “Things Others May Do,” which included unskilled tasks like walking the dog and stacking wood in the fireplace.)

Wait. I lost my place. Oh, Thanksgiving dinner. I went to bed Wednesday night with the entire menu loaded, cocked, and ready to fire. At approximately 3:30 in the morning I sat straight up in bed bounced awake by two big questions: Where was Alex and what was that burning tingle in my nose and throat? Alex came in around four (those crazy, nocturnal college kids!) and I lay in bed trying to remember the incubation period for a cold virus, so I could sling a little blame around. I woke up again three hours later with my face en croute from whatever viral juices the body cooks up and boils over crusting your eyes, mouth and nose. I pried my eyes apart and initiated a program of vapor rub and constant hand scrubbing to get through the day without infecting my guests. Caffeine was an absolute necessity along with whatever drugs I could take and still handle a large kitchen knife.

Fortified, I sprinted toward the finish line, juggling, chopping, washing, and stirring. I cooked the turkey my same old way—450 degrees with salt, pepper, with celery, thyme, and an orange stuffed up where the sun don’t shine. After an hour or so I decided to flip the eighteen-pound baby and brown his backside, which nearly killed me, but worked well for the turkey. He came out the color of caramel (unfortunately his legs were splayed apart like some old lady in the nursing home. I made myself a note to be sure and tie them together in the future and avoid embarrassing situations like that). My proudest moment was pouring the turkey drippings and broth into the roux in a steady stream—just like I was supposed to—and producing perfectly smooth gravy, a first. Remarkably, dinner came together and was served less than eight minutes past the appointed time of 2:00 or about an hour after Alex woke up. Looking back, I think the champagne cocktails were the real key to my brief recovery…Stay tuned…

Happy Thanksgiving

Several years ago Gourmet magazine conducted a turkey taste test. The editors sampled brined turkeys, fried turkeys, smoked turkeys. They tried turkeys that had been slow roasted. They tasted grilled turkeys. After all that work Gourmet concluded that the best way to cook a turkey for the most flavorful taste (which meant, of course, turkey that could actually be chewed and swallowed without requiring a pint of gravy, a scoop of sweet potatoes, and a quart of iced tea) was to salt and pepper the bird and throw it in a 425 degree oven until it hollers ready. Fast cooking at a high temperature, what could be simpler? I have been cooking my turkeys that way ever since. Granted, the turkeys have probably missed their sensual precooking rubdown with olive oil and melted butter —just like I have—but oil and butter will brown the turkey too fast, well before it is done, so a little less pleasure is good for them. I have been in charge of Thanksgiving dinner for several years, and this method of cooking is just so easy, especially since I am usually cooking in Dallas in my mother-in-law’s kitchen for twenty-something people.

As you can imagine it takes a lot of turkey to feed that many, so up until last year we have always gotten a twenty-two pound turkey. A twenty-two pound turkey is…pardon my French…one big-ass bird. It was like wrangling a first-grader into the oven. But I like a little challenge as long as I don’t have to shoot it, pluck it, or chase it down and ring its neck. (I saw a neighbor ring a chicken’s neck once. The mother—if you could call her that, I wasn’t sure—sat perched on a three-legged stool in the harsh sunlight of the treeless backyard, her knobby knees jackknifed nearly to her chin. She looked like an evil Olive Oil or a prehistoric bird lying in wait for its own species, except I didn’t see that coming. I stood close by as she opened her hand with a palm full of chicken feed and when one dumb cluck came too close she snatched it by the neck and whipped it around like a whirlygig until, shit!, the head came off in her hand. The surprised headless chicken flapped around in aimless protest wondering what the hell just happened. I ran home as fast as I could.)

But I am getting off the holiday subject—it is Thanksgiving, birds die unfortunate deaths. My brother-in-law, who lives in Dallas, usually buys the turkey. He likes to get an upscale, prep school turkey from Whole Foods, which is fine and certainly makes you feel a bit smug about your turkey compared to those margarine-colored Butterballs with the red plastic implant that pops up when they are done. But I read about another turkey taste test just this year, although I have forgotten where. This test pitted deistel turkeys against heritage turkeys against kosher turkeys against free-range turkeys against certified organic turkeys against fresh turkeys against frozen turkeys. And guess who won? That’s right—the frozen Butterball with the embedded lego. 

Last year I decided that we (meaning me) should cook two smaller turkeys instead of the giant steroid bird. Two twelve pound turkeys would be a lot easier to handle, more like a couple of large chickens. I had planned to have Thanksgiving dinner here at our house, and got started a head of time. I had baked a couple of pies—chess and apple—fixed the cornbread for the dressing, made a turkey stock and a cranberry compote, when suddenly and sadly the call came: my husband’s uncle had died. So we loaded it all up and headed to Dallas. On Thanksgiving morning I got up very early—we were staying at my brother-in-law’s house. He is the bachelor, if you remember, and has never had the benefit of a kitchen shower. So when you cook at his house you have to allow extra time to fashion mixing bowls out of mud from the backyard, carve your own wooden spoons, and use the coffee pot to heat broth. But I found that you can use a screwdriver just as well as a fork, a martini glass measures about half a cup, and you can throw bourbon in anything and it tastes better. The plan that day was to prepare most of the meal at my brother-in-law’s and then transport it to my mother-in-law’s house.  It was pretty exciting—I could pretend I was a caterer—I was whipping and cooking and wrapping and packaging. And it all worked beautifully even though the tiny turkeys got done way too early. So I tripled wrapped them in heavyduty tin foil and they were still warm three hours later. We did have a smidge of a glitch with the two kinds of gravy—but gravy is just like that—and my cornbread dressing did not taste nearly as good my mother’s, but I think I was the only one who knew. When is was all over, I could sit and bask in the glow of a still warm oven, sip a glass of wine and think about my Christmas list.

So this year Thanksgiving dinner really is at my house, and my mind is spinning with ideas. Even though I am pretty experienced, and my Gourmet turkey recipe has been foolproof, I kind of want to experiment. I think I will take Cook’s Illustrated advice and start the turkey with its backside up covered in strips of salt pork, then flip it over and finish it breast side up. Sounds like fun. And I am determined to get my mother’s cornbread dressing just right. (It will be hard because there is no recipe, she makes it by taste alone.) Since my precious little kumquats, they are the cutest things, are almost ripe I am going to mix a few of them into the cranberry compote.  And like always, I will make several desserts: my traditional apple pie, which is sometimes good and sometimes not (this year I’m using vodka in the dough), and then a praline pumpkin bread pudding which based on an Emeril recipe. For my mother-in-law I am going to make a favorite of hers: my grandmama’s teacakes.

And then there will be the icing on the cake—Alex will be home from college.

The Season of My Discontent

This morning is our first real cold snap, although it didn’t come on that suddenly. The front slipped in quietly yesterday after lunch, waving the clouds aside to unveil a watercolor blue sky. As I walked with Shiner—himself feeling a bit snappy in the cool weather—the treetops undulated and swayed like tall, skinny dancers rubbing their big leafy heads together. My abbreviated yoga pants drew the attention of the cool air, and I thought about socks, maybe even sweatpants, for the first time since March. It is perfect holiday weather, if only Thanksgiving were today or even tomorrow. But it is a week away and by then the weather will have changed again, two or three times probably. And in Houston the weather never plays by the rules; I may be cooking a turkey in my flip-flops.

As beautiful as this morning is, I am just not in the mood. I think I may be suffering from Holiday Hurdle Affliction. Maybe you know what I am talking about. It’s that neo-puritan conspiracy that extracts fun out of the holidays like a wet vac. It creeps into your head scrooge-like and reminds you that there is work to be done; things to worry about before you can relax; hoops and hurdles to jump over, taxes to pay, crowds to curse, and airports to screech through; that you have to take the bad before the good because life isn’t a fairy tale even during the holidays.  But I don’t want to do all the yucky, irritating things that come with the holidays, those things that make you want to say, “Excuse me, but don’t you know what time of year it is? Don’t go spoiling it for me, I’ve waited twelve months for this magic.” What I want to do is to shop at pretty holiday decorated stores that offer wassail and gingerbread cookies, bake gorgeous pies and cakes, make truffles and rum balls, sip eggnog, carve an enormous turkey, and listen to Barbra Streisand’s Christmas album, all while dressed in a red velvet skirt that twirls as I spin around kitchen in my Christmas apron licking the chocolate icing off of a wooden spoon…

(Yes, well, lest you think I am shallow as a mud puddle on a summer day, let me explain that that isn’t the case. I think I am merely tired and would like to be selective in how I utilize the little energy I have. Just this morning I was complaining to my husband that since I decaffeinated I can’t get a damn thing done. He pointed out that less is the new more, and that I should be happy to have sacrificed progress for a pleasant demeanor.)

But really, if I look into my deflated mood more deeply, if I lift the curd off the stale milk and stir it up a little, something else bubbles to the top, something insidious that has been at the bottom for too long. And that is my hair dilemma—the color I mean. My daughter has been telling me for months (years?) that I need to have the gray in my hair “taken care of,” as in eliminated, buried under a pile of rubble somewhere. I have denied that my hair and its distinctive gray streak running down one side of my head were a problem until I experienced what can only be described as a complete paradigm shift—I saw myself as other people—well, other pretty critical people—see me. Here’s how it happened. Last Friday night my husband left Analise and me unsupervised while he drove to Dallas to play golf with his high school buddies. We decided that we would go some place hip and cool for a mother-daughter dinner. So we drove into Midtown—actually she drove, on the freeway at night through eight lanes of stop and go traffic with me far too sober to appreciate the novelty of the situation. We arrived shaken and stirred at the restaurant which was a dimly lit place, like a cave, buzzing with waiters who were taking turns springing onto a library ladder scooting down the rail along the wall of wine to stretch tippy-toed for that special bottle. After ordering, I excused myself and was walking around the corner when I caught myself headed right for the doorless entrance to the men’s room. That should have been a sign to me to turn back, return to the comfort of the dark dining room, but instead I ventured on to the well-lit glitzy sanctuary of the ladies’ room. As I was washing my hands I looked up into the mirror and there was a wrinkled-face rag doll with dense brown shag carpeting on its head staring back at me. Who the hell is that, I wondered? I studied it more closely. The hair looked like something a kid had scribbled in with a dirt colored crayon. It lay on my head like a fur pelt, like the backside of a black hairy hole emitting no light just absorbing the energy around it, weighing down, shmushing in wrinkles on my face like a waffle iron. I couldn’t even see the gray streak. Then it hit me then why women my age lighten their hair. I always thought it was to cover up the gray, but no, it is to cover up the dark, to shove aside the rain cloud and bring a little sunshine to the top of their head. It was a defining moment for me—ugly, but defining.

And now I have another thing to add to my holiday to do list—along with a couple of cosmetic procedures—and that is find a trustworthy hair colorist to perk up my hair and my mood, get a little spring back in my step, so I can leap a few of those holiday hurdles, maybe even a tall building or two. As my daughter would say, “You’re only as young as you look.”

What Your Children are Really Doing at College

Friday night at Emory was the cultural arts festival (?) "Cultural Beats." Alex and his freshman Step group, BAM,  performed the finale.

BAM '09 Cultural Beats from Jeff Chen on Vimeo.

Alex is the one on the far right of the first four who come to center stage—you know, the one who looks like choir boy until he performs a move he didn't learn at home.

My sister emailed to say that although she enjoyed the Cultural Beats video, she couldn’t get all the way through it because of the long, apparently intentional, pauses between dances. The BAM performers were trying to whip the crowd into a frenzy of anticipation for more of their gyrations, hip-thrusts, and body slapping. I think it would have been helpful had she watched Stomp the Yard, which coincidentally was on TV Saturday afternoon while I was sitting on the sofa recovering from Christmas shopping at the Nutcracker Market. It was really very good movie and a very good primer to Stomp or Step (I am still having trouble sorting out when it is Step and when it is Stomp, but Analise says I am just confusing both with break dancing). Anyway when I talked to Alex on Sunday he told me that he had seen Stomp the Yard recently, too, and that as a movie it was good, but the dancers made a few mistakes. For example, the correct position of your hands, according to Alex, is called a “blade” fingers straight, thumb tucked. The Stomp the Yard guys had their thumbs stuck out like hitchhikers—a major no-no, certainly not a boo-boo he would have made.

He was very happy with their performance on Friday night. It was the culmination of weeks of preparation including a five-hour practice (until 1:00 in the morning) on Thursday. Alex said that many people told them that this was the best BAM show ever and the best performance of the entire Cultural Beats night. Wow.

(Ok, folks...I am having a terrible time managing the font personalities lately. You may have notice how sometimes my blog looks different or is harder to read or even see. The fonts have been misbehaving ever since blogspot made some changes to its something or other a couple of months ago...too bad there are no real people to talk to about it, so please bear with me until I can create a killer robot to go and attack the automatons responsible.)

At One Time the Bump Was Cool

There are so many ways to appall and disgust your own children that I can’t keep up. I have a lot of them committed to memory, but sometimes I am caught completely by surprise. A total misread on what is cool and how parents should act and what they should look like. It isn’t that I go out of my way to not irritate my kids, but I like to think that of the two parents in this household I am the cool one. The other one is, as my daughter puts it, “a 1950s dad reading the newspaper in his slippers and yelling at his children to take out the trash.” Ridiculously uncool, plus he wears his jeans pulled up above his waist with his shirt tucked in and an English driving cap—all of which gives me an unfair advantage.

Anyway when I was in my hometown recently, I had some time—there’s usually a lot of that just lying around—so I went to the new CVS to explore and read the headlines on the tabloids. I worked my way through the aisles from the office supplies like small notebooks, pens, and post-its, to color crayons, next over to hand wipes and chocolates (Giradelli!) and then, saving the best for last, to my favorite area—make up, skin and hair care products. (I like to shop for these at the drug store. In my highly developed and sophisticated system—so sophisticated that I can hardly explain it. It’s a hierarchy, really, of needs you might say—where was I? Oh yeah, talking about my system of shopping rationalizations. In my system of shopping rationalizations purchases made at the drug store count as necessities, no matter what they are. Make up, avocado face masques, foot scrubs, hair glisteners, you name it, as long as it comes from The Drug Store, instead of the makeup counter at Neiman’s, I can call it a necessity, a serious purchase.) So I cruised through the make up and then down two aisles full of serums, gels, scrubs, mousses, oils, and creams beckoning me, making all sorts of promises to depuff my eyes, smooth my skin, unfrizz my hair and fuse my split ends. It is hard not to fill pampered and almost serene when that many things pledge to take care of you that well. Then as I was peacefully perusing the hair care products, I came across something I’d never seen before—BumpIt! It was a package of half-moon combs that you wear on the top of your head like a tiara, except you give your hair a little tease (which your hair enjoys immensely) and brush it back over the comb and voila! you have a well-placed mound at the crown of your head just like Nancy Sinatra. I loved the brilliant simplicity of it, not to mention that I have been struggling to get a little more poof in my hair. I bought the BumpIt! in the color that matched my hair, minus the gray streak, and went home to give it a try. It worked beautifully; my mother said it even gave my face a little lift—magic words to a fifty-one year old. I wore my BumpIt! like a toupee to dinner that night, just hoping I would see someone from high school. The next day I styled my hair, BumpIt! in place, put on a new bra for a little more lift, and took off to Atlanta feeling very high-spirited, well uplifted, really.

Later that day, I was in the bathroom in our hotel freshening up for dinner and adjusting my BumpIt! which had slid a little catty wompus on my head and looked like I was harboring a small hedgehog under there, when Analise came in and said, “Mom,” speaking very slowly like she was trying to warn me about a danger nearby—a spider in the shower or maybe a split in the rear of my pants (which could have happened, I am not sure how I squeezed my plumpIt rumpIt into them). I was relieved when she asked, “Is that a BumpIt! on your head?” and stupidly I fell right into the trap (there was danger after all), “Yes, honey, doesn’t it work great?” “Mom,” that slow voice again this time tinged with derision and sounding like she was speaking to an imbecile or an addled old lady, “you didn’t really buy a BumpIt! did you?” Well it was too late to deny it, although maybe I could have said I borrowed it or that I was testing it for a friend or it was a free sample provided by the hotel. I looked at her through the mirror just in time to catch the completely grossed-out look on her face. “It isn’t a hedgehog!” I wanted to yell. Then I opened my mouth to ask what was wrong with wearing a BumpIt! but, you know, if you have to ask why something isn’t cool… 

A Well-Hatched Plan

Evidently when you are a junior in high school, dances follow one behind the other like ducks on a pond. Different, but all gaily attired ducks—some formal, some semi formal, some dressed for the after parties, or the before dinners, all with chandelier earrings, and funky high heels to show of their shimmery, pedicured little duck toes. That’s right, no sooner are the Homecoming pictures posted on Facebook than the next event is paddling right up behind. Next is Junior Girls’ Cotillion, one of those dances where the girls ask the guys not because they really want to go with guys, but because everything looks better with a little black accent—just ask your decorator. The tux, boy optional, is the perfect accessory to highlight the glitz and glamour of The Dress or rather The Girl in The Dress.

And speaking of The Dress—this dance is formal, short hand for more expensive and more difficult to find and must be hemmed and will require new shoes. At first there was a rumor that this year’s Cotillion would allow short dresses, so my daughter actually said that she might wear her dress from last year’s prom. I was stunned. Wouldn’t someone notice that she had worn that dress once before? Was she really willing to risk it? She laughed, maybe even scoffed, and tossed her head, flinging her long chestnut hair dangerously close to the paws of a nearby kitty. Adjectives of admiration for her shot through my mind like meteors—plucky, bold, daring, feisty, heroic! Take that Facebook!

Yet I had only a day of giddy celebration before the next email apologized for the misinformation and assured us that Cotillion would be as traditional as ever and allow only long, formal dresses that would be worn once and thereafter face a lonely existence scrunched in the back of the closet living on lost promises and old pictures.

So my daughter and I went shopping. We went shopping in Houston. We went shopping in Atlanta. We went shopping in Houston again. We encountered one obstacle after another and not all of them had to do with price. There were obstacles of size as in “I am sorry, this doesn’t come in a size zero.” And obstacles of style, “Yes, honey that does make you look like a leprechaun or a smurf or a pint-size bale of hay or a pint of beer, maybe just a pint. How about something without ruffles.” Then there were the many just plain ugly dresses, ugly being its own obstacle. (However, I think we should have been a little kinder to the ugly dresses since they probably would be happily married to the ugly shoes that haunt the stores this year.) There was one possible dress, but it was marked down, way down, to a ridiculously low price which meant, of course, there was no way we could even consider it. We were starting to get nervous, or at least Analise was. I kept hoping the dance would somehow be cancelled, maybe that the venue would have a rat infestation, or they’d find bats in the belfry, or slime in the ice machine. 

Having exhausted all the stores in Houston, Analise proposed that we carve out time for shopping when we went to Dallas for SMU’s Homecoming. That would be tough. My husband had a full day of Homecoming activities planned on Saturday and we had to participate even if it killed us. So she and I hatched a plan. We were not new to this. Analise and I have been covertly shopping in Dallas for years. My husband and his mother are late sleepers; Analise and I are early risers. We can get up and out the door, dressing and putting on mascara in the car, chewing gum instead of brushing our teeth, fortifying ourselves with caffeine, screeching into the empty parking lot at Northpark and tapping our feet until they unlock the door at Nordstrom. Then it is a blitzkrieg. We storm through Nordstrom and Neiman’s in under an hour and a half, stuff everything in the trunk, and slip in the kitchen door like we have just returned from a morning stroll, to find my husband and his mother still yawning and sitting around in robes and underwear—well, actually that’s just my husband in his underwear.   But our shopping excursion would be a tad more difficult to manage this time. For one, my husband and I were at a hotel and Analise and her friend, Emily, were at my mother-in-law’s, and the homecoming parade started early—before lunch. Doing the time-space calculations in my head, I would have to arrive at my mother-in-law’s house at exactly 9:45. I would pick up the girls, dressed for the Homecoming activities and the football game, and be at The Galleria at o-ten-hundred hours or something like that. Our experience in covert shopping paid off and we marched into Saks barely one minute past our target time.  Analise and I went to work—dresses were flying of the racks into the waiting arms of the highly skilled and apparently lonely sales clerk—beads, sequins, feathers—it was all up for grabs. I went into the dressing room with her and we worked as a team—I zipped and hooked, she preened, twirled and appraised. In less than forty minutes Analise had found two dresses—one of which was the one we liked in Atlanta that was too cheap. Fortunately here it was more expensive. Thank goodness. After a thirty-second discussion we decided to get them both. Bought, bagged, and back home in less than an hour. I think we set a record and here is the best news of all: she already has shoes to match. It was a perfect plan.

When the Going Gets Tough

We are always late to church. Sometimes it is my fault, but not often. Usually it is everybody else’s fault. People here who don’t get up on time, or sit down to eat breakfast just as the church bells ring—not that I can actually hear them, but you know what I mean. At least they are going to church. There was a long period of time when Sunday caught them completely by surprise. They would be lollygagging aimlessly happy through their weekend when “whop!” Sunday morning right up side their unsuspecting little heads. It inspired me to sing the days of the week song out loud and point out that the days always come in the same order—week after week, verse after verse. I am happy to say that they have learned that Sunday comes right after Saturday, most often after a late Saturday night, and that church will always be too early on Sunday morning, even if it starts an hour and a half later than anything these people do during the week—like go to work or school.

Recently we arrived five minutes early to the nine o’clock service. It wasn’t an accident. My husband was scheduled to usher and was supposed to get there no later than eight-thirty. Close enough—for him anyway. However most parishioners had already been ushered in by the time we arrived, so he just stood around like a pallbearer while the priests, acolytes, and choir lined up for the parade, I mean procession. You’d think my husband would get there on time since he actually enjoys his usher duties—greeting people, passing the offering plate, hanging out with the guys. (We don’t have women ushers at our church. I don’t know why, but I’ve heard something about the loud clippity-clop of their high heels breaking the sacred silence or adding a little too much percussion during the offertory.) Not only does my husband enjoy being an usher, he takes it seriously, too. Sometimes a little too seriously. Like during the Christmas service a few years ago when he didn’t recognize Neal Bush (it’s not like he was president or governor) and stopped him from joining his parents, George and Barbara, on the row reserved for their family. My husband blocked the end of the pew, his hand on the green silk cord until Neal, with an attitude not commensurate with the season, spelled out his pedigree. It was a misunderstanding that could have been avoided if this Bush brother had just worn a nametag like the rest of us.

Speaking of avoiding things, I avoid my husband when he is on duty. His zeal for his usher job is a little over the top (but then again, zeal doesn’t usually take the middle road), and he is personally offended that most people in our church plop right down on the end of the pew and won’t scooch to the middle even after being urged to do so by fine men like himself.  Latecomers have to step over high-heeled feet, small children coloring on the kneelers, walking sticks, and umbrellas. But stepping over people is certainly preferable to being grabbed by the elbow by a fanatical usher, marched down the center aisle, and shoehorned into the six-inch spot between two crotchety widows on the second row, which, if you’re not careful, can happen.

Anyway back to the story. It is a twelve minute ride to the church from our house which meant, of course, rather than finding my seat and spending a couple of minutes in prayer preparing my mind and restless personality for worship, I had to dash straight to the ladies’ room.  As I made my way in, two choir members were rushing out with concerned—well really panicked—looks on their faces. Oh my—a choir member had accidentally locked herself in one of the stalls, or rather the lock mechanism misunderstood its purpose and had locked her in and the rest of us out. She was trapped. Now here is a downside nobody thought of when they designed a nice bathroom. These stalls are not your usual metal compartments that you could crawl out from under—although I would have to be pretty doggone desperate to crawl on a bathroom floor even in the church—these stalls are really just itsy-bitsy rooms and they have lovely stained mahogany louvered doors—very nice, like being at the Ritz-Carlton—but one way in and one way out, a feat easy to manage on most days. In my weekly visits to that bathroom, I had noticed that over time the locks have become a little cockeyed or have been moved, or removed and replaced with a lock that doesn’t match, or you have to jimmy it a little to get the latch part to cooperate. As I have sat there on Sundays past, I have contemplated theories to explain how a little lock on a bathroom door could have so much trouble. Are Episcopalians, especially women, unusually aggressive about their privacy yanking on the lock so hard it breaks off? Are they desperately shoving past each other and bursting through a locked stall? Instead of knocking and asking if anyone is in there are, just kicking the door in? Once in, are they whacking the lock with their prayer book to get out or pounding it with their shoe? I have never personally witnessed any of these events, but then again I don’t go to the eleven o’clock service very often.

By now the trapped choir member was getting claustrophobic, which would have been my first symptom. I moved in quickly and put my fingers through the louvers and started telling her to just breathe, something that never works with my claustrophobia, but I kept that to myself. I repeated what my therapist had said to me—that deep breathing stimulates the body’s relaxation response—possibly complete bullshit, but it sounded plausible, medical, even dalai lama-ish, or maybe that was just me feeling dalai lama-ish. She seemed to calm down, but said she was so upset that she was missing the procession. I pointed out that she had, if not a good reason, at least an unusual reason, and perhaps it would be mentioned in the sermon. I continued to hold her hand or really it was only her fingertips since that’s all that could fit through the louvers. We probably should have prayed, but instead I started cracking jokes, because you had to admit it was pretty funny. About that time someone arrived with a walkie-talkie and soon after the church sextant came in. Certain he had dynamite, or at least a blow torch, we urged the cloistered choir member to move away from the door, duck behind the potty, get back, get back! But the sextant approached the door with no tools other than his faith, touched the handle and it opened. The flabbergasted choir member stood there, in her flowing white robe clutching her songbook and her freedom. She gratefully hugged and kissed all of us and then scurried off to join the others. Relieved, I entered a stall cautiously—I still had to go—and sat there studying the locks and thinking that for once we weren’t late to church.

Weathering the Storm

Last Thursday it was raining—not a gullywasher, or a frog-strangler, no cats and dogs. The rain was not that brutally intense, even with the thunder you couldn’t really call it a storm. It was more of a steady throttling like the head-hammering staccato of a woodpecker. Funny, as much as it rains in Houston nobody is ever prepared. Most folks don’t wear rain boots even if they own them. You can’t run in rain boots and trying to out dash the raindrops is the most common defense. The few people who do wear rain boots look pretty silly in their plaid Burburries. It’s like they are showing off—who’d think rain boots could be a status symbol? Anyway rain boots, like ornery umbrellas, have a design flaw.  The sloshy, bucket-sized fit is better suited for puddle jumping—I haven’t seen grownups do that lately—and not for wearing in a downpour unless you are harvesting rainwater or trying to soak the calluses off your feet.

Although I don’t own rain boots, I have three raincoats. The most practical one is the classic poncho with a hood, made of something cooked up in a lab from Malaysian rubber trees and dyed to match the mustard on a hot dog. When I wear it I swell with imagined authority like a school crossing guard, able to stop cars with the palm of my hand. My other two raincoats qualify as raincoats because they shed water like roof shingles, but since neither has a hood they are actually just an accessory—and accessories are big this year—something you’d wear on a cloudy day if you wanted to look the part, like those starlets in LA with Starbucks in their hands and scarves wound round their necks pretending it is chilly.

I didn’t put on a raincoat as I left the house that morning. I was going to the bank, but planned to use the drive-in so a little—or even a lot—of rain didn’t matter. As I was driving back home, the rain let up and I saw a man ahead walking alone. Even with his back to me I recognized him by longish, distinguished gray hair. I wrote about him and his wife a few months ago—how I had watched them for several years walking hand-in-hand, how we said hello sometimes as we passed, how over time her jet black hair had turned white and her eyes gradually became the eyes of a fish on ice at the market—clouded and lifeless. Although she continued to walk with her husband, she was no longer headed in the same direction, but instead toward a lost world filled with broken shards of memories pieced together randomly, but not beautifully like a mosaic, instead scrambled into mental gibberish. I saw her a couple of weeks ago walking, shuffling, held erect by a caregiver. She looked terrible, much worse, slipping-away-worse. And now here he was walking in the rain wearing slacks and a golf shirt blinking as the drops pelted his eyes, looking completely unprepared for the onslaught of merciless rain that targeted him. It made no sense. He is British. They know how to dress for rain, don’t they? The world could probably blame the British for the umbrella, and maybe even galoshes. So I couldn’t help but think it was intentional—it had been raining since last night—he wasn’t caught out and about, surprised, by a sudden storm. Maybe something had happened to his wife. Maybe he was trying to wash away the tragedy, rinse it down the sewer, dilute it in Galveston Bay. Maybe the fierce raindrops were like a wire brush scrubbing off the pain he’s worn the last few years.

I had a decision to make. As I drove past him and saw his face, I thought about stopping and offering him a ride. But something held me back. I felt too shy to offer that simple kindness. I was afraid I would get embarrassed—kindness can sometimes do that, backfire on you, especially if it is rejected. And in this weird world where the Internet plasters intimate details of people’s lives across digital billboards, to stop and offer him a lift seemed, oddly enough, like an invasion of his privacy. I drove a little further and looked back at him in my rearview mirror. The rain fell harder.  I thought what the hell and turned around. I pulled along side of him and rolled down the window and said, “Sir, I know y’all live just down the road,” trying to establish myself as something other than a complete stranger, “would you like a ride home?” He approached my car with an unexpected, rain-soaked smile and said, “Oh no, thank you. Wouldn’t do much good now, would it? I am a bit wet already.” I halfway expected his next word to be “Cheerio.” I had the tiniest, but most perfect, moment to ask about his wife, but I didn’t have the courage. I drove on home. The rain roared and fell thick like panes of etched glass.   He still had a long way to walk.

Skip to My Loo

Early this morning I was on my way to do something important and possibly life-changing—mail lemon squares and brownies to Alex—when I caught a traffic light near the mall. This intersection has been under construction for the last year or so. Traffic cones dot the streets like oversized candy corn carelessly dropped by giant trick or treaters. In spite of that, cars and buses zip and zing through the zone on their way to the freeway, the hospital complex, or Target. As I sat waiting for the light to change, I absentmindedly watched a man—a construction worker—cross the street in front of me. He was a testimony to workplace safety in his bright orange vest and yellow hardhat as he walked briskly across four lanes of traffic to the small outhouse on the median. Wait a minute. Was there really a port-o-potty plopped down in the middle of one of the busiest intersections in the fourth largest city in America? A lone loo deposited on the median with nothing but giant candy corn between it and the thousands of cars, trucks, buses, and tractor-trailers that rushed by within inches of it’s flimsy foundation? Wouldn’t OSHA have something to say about a company who, when new employees asked, “Excuse me, boss, but where is the restroom?” hands them a hardhat and points across four lanes of traffic to the giant, green plastic bath toy disguised as a potty and centrally located so that it could be mowed down by a city bus from either direction? That’s pretty discouraging, but as bad as it is that a worker risks being run over to going to the bathroom, I think death by embarrassment is worse. This guy had to march across the street with all of us watching him go to the bathroom, and all of us—maybe not every one of us, but certainly those like me—were sitting at the intersection thinking the same thing. This worker, however, seemed very nonchalant as he closed the door of the port-o-potty, or rather the port-o-let (port-o-lét? Olé!) a sign on it proudly announced. But think about it. Think how disturbing that would be. Imagine opening the potty door in the middle of rush hour! Cars and trucks honking and drivers screaming at each other when suddenly their gaze falls on you as you try to make a graceful exit, hopefully, into a manhole. It would be surreal, like the nightmare where you show up at school in your underwear and everyone is staring at you. I couldn’t take it. I would do exactly what my children used to do—just hold it until I got home. 

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

If you are what you eat, then I am a pack of peanut M & Ms, or maybe a big scoop of orange cupcake icing. It is hard to say. I could be the grilled cheese sandwich or maybe the two bowls of chili with Tabasco. I think, honestly, if I had my choice I’d be the grilled cheese—toasty, gooey, and universally loved…but maybe that’s too ambitious.

Aside from my plunging off of the diet wagon to the bottom of candy cliff, our combination Halloween-Homecoming weekend was nice, really nice. The rain stopped mid-morning on Friday and a cool front took its place, practically guaranteeing manageable hair for the big game that night. But just to be sure, my daughter had an appointment after school to have her hair “blown out.” I didn’t get to see the results because by the time Analise came home, I had already dashed off to help a friend with the last minute details of her Halloween party. Analise tracked me down to deliver her  list of minor disasters: her dad and grandmother had yelled at her, she was forty minutes late for the before game dinner with her date at a friend’s house, and oh, no, she couldn’t find her camera. I tackled the camera issue first, running through the possibilities: By the phone in the kitchen? In the laundry by my computer? Upstairs on the worktable? No, no, no. Well then, I told her, you will just have to go on without it and I will call your dad to find it. We didn’t say what we were both thinking—that Shiner would be a better choice for the hunt. Or really Bud was best, but that’s only if the camera had an slight odeur de salmon, which, as far as we knew, it didn’t. After hanging up with Analise, I immediately called my husband and asked, first of all, why he and his mother had yelled at my precious baby. Well, he said as he poked his fatherly authority right through the phone, Analise was walking out the door with—you won’t believe this—only a light jacket. A light jacket? Yes, he said, she was going to freeze to death. I reminded him that she is sixteen years old and if she wants to freeze to death I was fine with that, but she needed her camera to document her demise for Facebook and it was up to him to find it. So I started giving him his instructions, not rattling them off, but slowly unfolding each one so he could remember them without having to write anything down. We didn’t have time for that. He checked everywhere, upstairs, downstairs—even venturing into her room with its bra and panty littered carpet and make-up strewn bathroom. I was running out of ideas when he said I found it, three words he had never used together in a sentence. Good for you, I said, where was it? Right here on the counter under Mom’s used tissue. It was hard to believe that with all the whirlwind of activity a Kleenex had stayed earthbound and covered up her camera, but what do I know?

On Saturday, Analise had her nails done and then returned to the salon to have her hair “blown out” again.  Meanwhile I was busy with the final preparations for the neighborhood Halloween party later that day in our front yard. My job was easy: provide the yard and a big batch of chili, along with plenty of wine in case the chili didn’t go over so well. When Analise came back—her hair really did look pretty—I started my other job—makeup artist. I always do her makeup for these big events, and sometimes, her friend’s makeup, too, or her friends come over and just use my makeup. (It used to be a surprise to walk into the bathroom and see someone else’s daughter plucking their eyebrows in my mirror, now it’s just another happy day living with teens.) Analise and I rummaged through each other's makeup looking for just the right combination of color to go with her black dress and burgandy (or are they blood-red?) heels. I spread it all out in front of us on the counter: palettes of eyeshadow, eye pencils, highlighters, cover-ups,  brow pencils, barely there bronzers. In a few minutes, Analise’s makeup was done—a teensy bit of eyeliner here, you could barely see it, a pale smudge of gold eye shadow there, and then a delicate dusting of a translucent burgundy right above the lashes. It was just right.

At five o’clock our yard began to fill up with creatures—good and evil—of all kinds: Transformers, power rangers, a couple of princesses, some creature in red with a saber (not the devil), Snow White, a miniature punk rocker, a cute kitty with a pink tale whose ears kept falling off, and then a whole slew of costumed children that were just plain indecipherable, and you hate to ask. When Analise was dressed, and after her grandmother was appalled at her outfit (I figure a little shock is good for her eighty-nine year old heart), she came outside so that the young mothers could see what scary outfits their little darlings would be wearing at sixteen—five inch heels with a three inch dress. Analise was immediately surrounded by Snow White, the Little Mermaid, and the punk rocker…Dressing up—a little girls’ dream, no matter how old.

The Amazing Transformative Power of Chocolate Chip Cookies

Our high school is not a particularly friendly place. As you enter the main office, the employees give you the once over like you are sneaking in to take a test for your child. I mean that’s a ridiculous thought, isn’t it? The receptionist, apparently encouraged to be mute to parents (there are school secrets that could be spilled and not mopped up until the janitor arrives), motions for your driver’s license while chatting happily with the school policemen who looks at you, raises an eye brow with a half smile (that would be a smirk) and pats his gun. She hands you back a nametag tattooed with your driver’s license picture, and leans back in her chair satisfied that you will be in and out in five minutes or less.

Not that I would want to spend more time there than I had to. The school, designed before there was rain in Houston, is a jumble of buildings connected by breezeways that fill up with mud puddles, colored flyers (Ping Pong Club meets Thurs. in the Chem. Lab!) and a lost tennis shoe or two. Staircases are dropped in like afterthoughts—outside, inside, covered, uncovered. One staircase angles across a hallway so low that it could take out a whole basketball team. I am pretty sure the school was originally built by a five year old with a box of Legos, and then added onto in random directions by his entire kindergarten class (“My school part is gonna be really tall, and mine is gonna have two windows and no door so you have to crawl across these little blocks to get to the stairs that are hanging outside, and my part will be a tiny school, so small you can barely get in, and that will make you have to jump over the pit where the alligators live to go over there, and this used to be a cave, but I am gonna stick a block and a one of these things in it so you can run over it with the tractor I made. See?  And then I built a wall outside, by the swimming pool, I mean the potty, where they can play basketball.”). The only things the kindergarteners forgot to include were the scruffy kids and frowning adults pacing the halls.

Up until this year I have, for the most part, successfully avoided volunteering at the high school. I tell folks that I have just burned out on the whole volunteer thing, that I am working at home (and I am, sort of), and that I  am making chili or… well…whatever inventive little lie comes into my head. But now my daughter has joined the choir.  The choir, it turns out, has more volunteer opportunities than keys on a piano, and your child earns points (toward a letter jacket, maybe) when the parent participates.  Gee whiz, fine. What else do I have to do? So last Friday—my day off, my day to do whatever I want—I went to school. Analise had requested that I look nice because all the other mothers did, and that I should not wear my black yoga pants and shredded Gap sweater. That was fine with me. I always dress up on Fridays. I even obeyed the rules and went right up to the receptionist to get my nametag, which I placed inside my cute little jacket.

The choir moms have a fundraiser every Friday. They bake cookies and sell them two for a dollar to the students, teachers, and anybody else who comes by waving a bill. I arrived just before the lunches started. I found the choir room and a red apron—how nice—and I was ready to bake. It is an amazing operation. Parent volunteers start early in the morning with boxes of Otis Spunkmeyer frozen cookies and four toaster ovens. Each oven cooks thirty-six cookies at a time and it takes twenty minutes for a batch. The ovens are set up on the breezeway near the cafeteria, with timers.  This is serious business here, ‘cause the choir makes serious money. My first job was slipping the barely cooled cookies two at a time into the little wax wrapper. Through trial and error, I learned that your wrapper should be face up so you could see Otis’s smiling face and so you could get your left thumb just inside to open it wide to slide the cookies in. Next, I tried various techniques to get the two cookies into the wrapper at the same time. (This is my trademark—I always take a mundane, routine job and try to speed it up, eliminate unnecessary motion or steps, be a model of efficiency, the Henry Ford of the Volunteer World.) I looked around. Another mom had a technique I admired—stack one cookie on top of another and then slide them in together. She even stacked all dozen first into six little cookie towers and wham, bam, thank you mam, those little guys were ready to go. I tried her technique, but somehow couldn’t master it.  Another mom simply scooped both cookies on to her spatula at once and gently scooted them into the wrapper. Hah. Got it down flat. After that round was finished, I jumped over to the prep table and dropped frozen cookies like rocks, twelve at a time, onto warm trays that we lined up around the ovens waiting their turn.

We were whipping out cookies right and left as fast as we could when suddenly, it seemed, the whole breezeway filled up with the glorious smell of cookies baking, and teens of all shapes, sizes and hairstyles, with shorts hanging anywhere from the waist to the knees emerged out of the walls, down the stairs and from under the floor. And they all wanted one thing: Chocolate chip cookies! Oh and how we were ready for them in our little red aprons with baskets full of warm cookies, our hands shoving dollar bills into our pockets like peasants in the marketplace, surrounded by these eager, charming, delightful children and their smiling teachers. The wonderful aroma floated to the heavens and old Mr. Sun shone down on us, the sky blossomed into a luminous blue sea, off in the distance I heard the faint sweet chirp of a bluebird “Ceviche, Ceviche,” as someone broke into song.

Two thousand cookies later our ovens, and ourselves, were spent, finished for the day having satisfied the sweet tooth of a thousand young good citizens and their kind, wise, and no doubt loving teachers. I took off my apron, folded it and as I lay it in the box,  I gave it a gentle, affectionate pat. It had served me well. I could almost see it smile back at me before it drifted off to a much-deserved sleep. I walked to the main office with a strut in my step and a song in my heart—“Hello dear receptionist, hello! I return my nametag to you, not scornfully, no, but proud, proud to bear its humble face, proud to serve”…and with that I gave her dimpled cheek a kiss and danced out the door…

With Halloween, Homecoming, and company on the way I may be a little out of touch the rest of the week. I will be back on Monday. Have a great weekend and a Happy Halloween--which seems like a weird thing to say.

Sorting Laundry

My goals for myself and my family’s goals for me differ. They skid off the page away from each other like magnets. At first glance they look compatible, even like twins, but get them close together and they repel each other violently. The magnets, I mean. My goals and my family’s goals for me are a little more polite, but not much. They are willing to be in the same room, at least, if not on the same page. With all that skittering and clamoring, though, it is hard to trap the source of the conflict, examine it for signs of a compromise, but let’s just take a look at a typical day. My goal today is to attempt to research something, just what I can’t be sure, that is a subgoal of my vaguely described idea to write and record a podcast for my blog. Also I intend to spend a lot of time trying to figure out the meaning of life, my life in particular, do a little yoga, and then walk the dog. On the other hand, my husband’s goals for me today aren’t really goals at all, more like a list of things he doesn’t want to do: Don’t forget it’s trash day, you may want throw away the bags in the garage (or I may not want to), call the pool guy again and tell him that the polaris still doesn’t work, and get more Listerine at Walgreen’s along with dental floss and a new toothbrush, and don’t forget to turn off the porch lights (he called from his car for that one), and can you fix my computer? My daughter’s goals for me today are a bit more glamorous; they make me feel like a personal assistant to a reality TV star: Make me a hair appointment at that new salon, wash my silver top with the ruffledy front—I think it has to be handwashed (sorry!), I guess just return the red dress—it doesn’t have enough wow for homecoming—and while you’re out (I was going out?) please buy me another battery thingy for my vibrating mascara, it isn’t vibrating anymore just sort of giving my eyelashes a friendly wave, oh and can you see if they have gold eyeshadow, and what’s for supper?

You wouldn’t believe the trouble I go through to actually do these things; how utterly brainwashed I am. It’s the Stockholm Housewife Syndrome—I identify with my captors, their needs are my needs; I think about their teeth, eyebrows, and underwear, their hair or where their hair went; what they drink, what they eat, are they regular, and what should I do about it. I fluff their pillows and stir their coffee, and clear their plates. When I went to Georgia for a few days, they turned on each other—vicious like abandoned zoo animals locked up with nothing to eat—arguing about the nasty everyday tasks I left behind: feeding the pets, scooping the litter box, unloading the dishwasher, making the beds, closing the refrigerator door! It was hell. Things settled down once I came back home, and took up where I left off—catering to their every need. They feel much better now.

So for the moment, my goals, along with the meaning of life, are curled up on top of my socks on a shelf in the closet. They know, just like I do, that a long to do list sucks the air out of the soul and leaves you with nothing but shriveled latex and a really high squeaky voice… 

Every Mental Picture Tells a Story

The late sunrise pushes the shadows aside and catches wide-eyed scarecrows stunned and impaled on bales of hay. Witches of various dispositions—threatening, comical, friendly—wield brooms like spatulas, as they position themselves strategically near front doors. Furry, giant spiders cling to thick, clumsy webs stretched between trees like high summer clouds. Leaves gather their nerve to change color, some twirling like a loose tooth before letting go, taking their sweet time to land on the dewy grass below. The pine trees shed their needles like dog hair. It is much too soon, the cool weather is just a tease, but optimistic gardeners have planted beautiful, finicky cyclamen or prisms of pansies. The shopping mall is already sprouting gold tinsel and giant Christmas ornaments. Magic buzzes in the air like mosquitoes and everywhere children are giddy and giggly with excitement—the grownups, too. At least they are at our church because it’s that time of year, again. Time for sex in Sunday school.

My husband and I, as usual, were not prepared. We have missed the last two Sundays, which is not a good thing since our Sunday school likes to keep you on your toes by asking questions such as “What turns you on?” And they don’t mean Jesus. Actually it wasn’t quite that bad—well yes it was. The real question was, “What makes you feel sensual?” That light-hearted query dropped into the middle of the room like a meteor and just sat there throbbing in the silence. No one jumped in to share their favorite foreplay story, so the sex therapist told us what gets her in the mood—Rod Stewart’s music, which is nice, but yesterday afternoon when I came across the full-page ad in the New York Times for an upcoming Rod Stewart concert, the first thing that came to my mind was somebody’s mother-in-law in a slinky pink negligee dancing around the bedroom on her tiptoes with a long silk scarf crooning “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” (I can’t really explain the tippy toes or the silk scarf, except to say the mind is a mysterious thing.)

After class, my husband said that at least this therapist spoke more in generalities and, unlike the last one we listened to, didn’t go into explicit details of comparative body parts —as if we’d never seen one—or descriptions what those particular parts were capable of given the proper stimulation, or in some cases experimental stimulation which was just peachy keen, too. This therapist talked about emotional intimacy as well as physical intimacy, although she emphasized the importance of frequency, and backed that up biblically. She offered up this chilling fact from the Old Testament: if a married couple doesn’t have sex at least twice a month, so sayeth the Lord they will end up hunched over lukewarm liver and onions at Luby’s cafeteria on a Friday night, sharing nothing but a piece of stale carrot cake.

As good as sex is supposed to be for your marriage, I think there is more to married life than chasing each other around the bedroom while listening to Rod Stewart sing “Tonight’s the Night.” I told my husband that he and I should have a hobby together—something fun that we can continue to do after the thrill is gone. Once he got over the “thrill is gone” part, he suggested golf. I said that golf is something he can play with his buddies, while they smoke cigars and drink beer. How about tennis? Maybe. Then I realized that every time I made a quick move on the court I’d have to run to the ladies’ room, besides most of the women I know who play tennis scare me. How about hunting he said. Hunting what? Bargains? No, bird hunting.  Well that won’t do for me, since I would never kill an animal—roaches, snakes, a few people maybe, but not an animal. How about bridge, I said. Lots of couples play bridge. I played a few years ago and really liked it. I know it has a million rules, but I managed to play without knowing one thing, so I am sure he could learn. No, bridge is a game for sissies. Camping, he said. Too many bugs, the bathrooms are nasty, my hair would frizz, and you have to cook your own food, tote your own water, and sleep in a tent, and unless the tent was the size (and décor) of The Ritz Carlton, I am pretty sure I would be so debilitated by claustrophobia that I would have ride home on top of the car like a hood ornament.

And that’s when it hit me. Motor scooters. Not big, loud, ez-rider Harley hogs, but quiet, sophisticated, European-ish motor scooters. On Saturday while I was walking with my husband on one of his weekend death marches (which I typically try to avoid), a couple passed us. They were riding beautiful, gleaming white motor scooters and she had a darling black poodle on her lap. It was like a post card from Monte Carlo. Wouldn’t it be so much fun to tool around quaint neighborhoods on matching motor scooters? I could have some cute little lap dog attached to me—not a poodle, they are irritating—but some other kind of French dog. Think about how charming that would be. No, he said, we can’t ride motor scooters in Houston; we’d be killed. And that would ruin the moment, I agreed, but that didn’t stop me from fantasizing about pulling into a lovely little wine bar on my shiny white motor scooter—my long, silk scarf blowing gently in the breeze, Rod Stewart on the headphones…

Consider the Umbrella

My in-laws have huddled and come up with a career mantra for my son. “Go into engineering,” they say in unison. He is good in math—a skill his father takes credit for, although I can honestly say I don’t see it. Since we have been married my husband hasn’t counted higher than the number of newspapers he can read on a given Saturday morning. Of course, I am not with him at work—not that I haven’t offered—and I suppose he understands what’s going there. But that isn’t a given. As we have seen, lots of people in the business world don’t have a clue what the numbers mean, even the analysts and the home economists. Let’s look at a tried (maybe a little tired) and true, hypothetical example. Bank A begins sniffing around Bank B, and in doing their diligence, they find that Bank B is broke: their balance sheet is as thin and messy as used toilet paper and their assets are shit—unfortunately not literal shit, which would have been good news since waste management continues to be a growth industry—super-sized, in fact—especially now that more folks are out of work and eating fast food again. To continue.  Having found out that Bank B is bubbling in a rancid, stinky stew of bad loans and body parts, you would think that Bank A would run and hide under its own kettle of fish, so to speak. But you would be wrong. Bank A’s sense of smell has been permanently altered due to its bulging greed compressing the olfactory nerve. It can happen. Take people who work at paper mills—which I can say from personal experience produce one nasty odor. Those scent-addled employees call that stench “the smell of money.” (They are the same folks who keep a litter box in the kitchen.) So you see, it is possible that Bank A may actually like what they smell at Bank B. They can deglaze the stew pot with a little cheap wine, scrape up the charred bits of bad ideas on the bottom, turn up the heat, whisk in a dab of magical thinking and with accidental alchemy voila— It’s gold!

Wait a minute. I am way off the subject. We were talking about my in-laws’ obsession with Alex becoming an engineer. Let me just say that doesn’t seem like a good fit for a kid who likes to sing, dance, discuss John Steinbeck, and can’t drive a stick shift, but maybe they are right. It beats Vaudeville. But here is my problem with engineers—if they are so smart why haven’t they come up with a better idea for the umbrella? Umbrellas have not improved since people rode in chariots. You would think that once cars came along someone—an engineer, perhaps—would have noticed that it is impossible to get into a car and close an umbrella at the same time. A good umbrella will fight you tooth and nail, their entire body goes stiff and they arch their little umbrella backs, and grab at the top of the car door. It’s like trying shove a two year old in a stroller, which is hard enough, but how about getting a two year old out of the stroller in a rainstorm holding an umbrella in one hand? A mother would have to use her teeth. Grab him by the back of the neck and toss him in his car seat, while the stroller got drenched. Maybe someone could design an umbrella with a flexible handle like you see on desk lamps or grill lights. She could twist it around her neck like a noose freeing up her hands to help baby into the car. But imagine how hazardous that could be in a wind gust—mother strangled by flying umbrella.

And what do you do with a wet umbrella? I left one on its pointy head on the porch this morning after getting the paper so it could drip dry, and instead it proceeded to twirl itself over to the edge and fill up with raindrops. They cannot be trusted. Have umbrellas ever considered why their owners are constantly leaving them behind?

It seems to me that a conscientious engineer could improve the umbrella if he put his mind to it and had a billion dollar grant. On the other hand, there are those that would say I am being silly, picking at life’s minutiae, that, so what, getting wet isn’t that bad, a little rain never hurt anyone, and that we shouldn’t waste precious resources trying to improve a five thousand year old folly. Well to all you would-be smarty pants engineers and storm chasers, I say, “You try blow drying this hair after wrestling with an umbrella in a monsoon. Hah. You don’t have the stomach for a job that big.” 

So much for engineering…

Times Like These

I couldn’t see Alex until later in the day. He was in class and I had a meeting to attend. I am now on the Emory Parent Council, which meets a couple of times a year to discuss issues that affect students and their families. (My daughter told a complete stranger at the hotel that I was on the Council for Overly Concerned Parents of Freshman Students. Smartass. See what I have to put with.) My meeting ran until around two o’clock, about the same time that those other two people arrived from Houston. They had to take a cab from the airport to the hotel since I was busy having coffee with my friend Phyllis. And that was a great idea because not only had I not seen Phyllis in twenty or thirty years, it kept me from lurking around campus waiting for Alex to get out of class.

By three o’clock I was saying so long to Phyllis and scurrying back to campus to corner him in his dorm room or wherever I found him. And there he was—bigger than I remembered and smiling like he was genuinely happy I’d come. And I got my ginormous hug. I then took Alex to meet Analise and my husband at the hotel and spent the next couple of hours listening to my children giggle, discuss music, agree on what a bitch eleventh grade is, and trash each other’s intellectual abilities and personal fashion. It was delightful. Alex shared a smidgeon of what his college life is like, and I mean a smidgeon, but he seemed so content that I guess I have to be satisfied, too.

That night we celebrated with dinner at a great Greek restaurant called Kyma. Food seems to be the only area where Alex is lacking—he is really hungry. I thought dorm food had improved, but I guess I am wrong because we ordered one of everything and he ate it all.

On Saturday I spent the morning shopping with Analise for a homecoming dress (that’s another story). My husband acted as if his feelings were hurt that we were leaving him in the hotel room. I felt a little guilty until we came back and there he was in his underwear looking completely satisfied watching the Texas game, coffee in one hand, phone in the other talking politics with his brother. Meanwhile Alex had BAM practice, and we met him afterwards for lunch. (His BAM Freshman step dance team is performing at a cultural festival in a couple of weeks. Too bad I can’t just scoot back to see that.) Since the Emory Family Picnic had to move indoors because of Atlanta’s chronic drizzle, we decided to skip it and head instead to a sports bar to watch the Texas game and get Alex some more food. He told us at lunch that his jeans were starting to fit funny, but it’s not what you think. His middle is just the same—no beer belly there, thank goodness—but because of the intense track practice his thighs look like they belong to Arnold or maybe Jack Lalane. We all took turns punching his quads to see how rock hard they were, which was fun until somebody punched mine for comparison. Anyway, of course, I had to take him shopping and as luck would have it only a very nice, very expensive pair of jeans would fit his new physique. (I managed to keep the price tag away from my husband until he got abnormally curious, and I would say unhealthily curious since the sight of that much money nearly killed him; I do my best to protect from that sort of thing.) Next I found a very handsome black leather jacket (a cold front was on its way) that was well-priced—although I had lost a little credibility with my husband on whether I truly knew what well-priced meant—but we got it anyway. After we left Nordstrom, we took Alex back to his dorm to study (really) while I (and the two tag-alongs who are lousy at shopping for other people) replenished his necessities at Target. A quick change of clothes and we were off to dinner, followed by a concert right across the street from the dorm.

Sunday morning was the Emory Legacy Pinning Ceremony and Brunch. I was so afraid that the brunch would only have sweet rolls and fruit to eat that I made Analise and my husband get up early and go to a real breakfast with eggs and bacon and, hopefully, sausage. When we arrived at the brunch, imagine my surprise to find a full breakfast buffet! (Afterward enduring my husband’s silent, but daggerlike, I-told-you-sos, we decided to eat like hobbits, that is have a second breakfast.) The ceremony that followed was just right, no long speeches or testimonies to get through. There was a performance by one of the men’s a cappella groups and they were terrific. Then it was time for me, Emory Class of 1979, to fasten the legacy pin on my son, Emory Class of 2013. Could I have anticipated this moment thirty years ago? In my dreams…

Road Thoughts

I like two lane highways, if you can really call them that. They are really more like lowways, or byways, or even plain old roads. Sometimes they can be speedways—like last Friday morning when I left my parents’ house before sunup headed to Emory for Family Weekend. I drove too fast in my little rented Toyota with the road undulating and curving ahead of me like a cow path or a wagon trail. The roads are much better now than when I grew up, it takes the guesswork out –fluorescent white lines mark the shoulder, dayglo yellow stripes with tabs of reflective lights mark the center. Staying within the lines gave me a strange, new confidence, and I remembered something that an old boyfriend said he heard from a trucker, “Keep that big thing between the ditches and that little thing in your britches and you’ll do alright.” It sounded like good advice, even if it didn't quite work for me.

It was a very dark morning, so dark that you could barely make out the swollen clouds, the color of a fresh bruise, threatening overhead. A determined mist polished the road black, glossy like a new shoeshine and demanded my constant attention to adjust the windshield wipers. I had almost forgotten how to use the car’s high beams after driving in the garish artificial light of the city for so many years. What a little thrill to click and be surprised by what was illuminated: a farmhouse here, an abandoned pick-up there. I whizzed past silhouettes of kudzu-covered trees, with their spines curving under the weight of that nasty alien vine, but it was too dark to see if any barns still beckoned me to “See Rock City.” Who painted that on barns across the South? What an odd ad campaign, but it worked, at least for my family. We went to see Rock City, but I am not sure I enjoyed the trip. All I remember was hanging on the edge of Lookout Mountain on a narrow stone path, and getting frantic that my daddy might not make it through the next pass called, “Fatman’s Squeeze.”

By the time my little car and I reached Sutton’s Crossing—which I remembered as Sutton’s Gin, but I guess the gin closed a long time ago—my mind started to wander, and I thought of a gruesome front page story I came across in the old newspapers while I was doing my research at the library. In 1959 apparently there was still a working grist mill in the county and some poor soul was working with the augur—whatever that is—and was suddenly thrust forward by something (the devil’s hand?) and into a razor sharp metal hook that had the unfortunate aim to pierce his jugular vein. Needless to say, his grits were cooked. And my parents told me about a recent awful and tragic event. A farmer was plowing, I think, and felt something get tangled up underneath his equipment. He stopped his plow and leaned in to check and a shithead of a rattlesnake sprung and struck him right in the face. His son found him hours later. And then Mama read a newspaper article just yesterday about a hunter who climbed down from his blind and stepped right on a rattler. He didn’t make it either, even though his grandson performed CPR. I hate snakes.

But aside from those thoughts, my drive to Atlanta was very pleasant. There was something peaceful about the speed, the dark, and the empty road. Or maybe it was the knowing that before the end of the day I would see my sweet son—the college kid, the one on his own, the one I hadn’t seen for six weeks. I couldn’t wait to give him a ginormous hug. Surely he’d let me.

The Superman Chronicles Part III

And that is when it all began. I remember the desolate, lunar landscape of the playground, the sparse, dry grass gritty beneath my saddle oxfords. The teachers were ignoring us, off far away gossiping in the shade under the live oaks.  Somebody was picking teams for kickball. I was picked first or almost first—it turns out that my pigeon-toed feet could really kick up some dust, and shoot the ball in completely unpredictable directions due to the cockeyed position of my right foot. (Here’s an example of the kooky, practical jokes your DNA can play: My right foot was the one angling perpendicular to my left foot, in my daughter it is just the opposite. We are a pair of bookends, she and I, mirror images like synchronized swimmers or gymnasts, cartwheeling beautifully in opposite directions.) No doubt kickball was a big deal and I knew it, but something more important was going on. I was planning my escape.  What I needed was superhero powers.

Superheros have advantages over the rest of us. Take Batman, for instance. He is handsome, rich, and has a butler with impeccable manners and outstanding technical skills—a servant like that makes the rest of us green with envy, just ask the Green Hornet, he’ll tell you. Sure Batman has suffered tragedy, but it seems like a fair trade for the good fortune he got later on—that great, spooky mansion and the Batcave. But if you look closely, his superhero skills are really a matter of how good his equipment is—like his Batmobile. And what about that fancy tool belt he wears with its versatile batarang? Although you begin to realize that there are only so many ways to use “bat” in a compound word. McDonald’s faced the same challenge in later years. Because of that, the technical nature of Batman’s heroism, and the fact that he worked with that whiny-ass Robin, I knew he couldn’t make my shortlist as a rescuer.

My mind wandered briefly and I started thinking about Native Americans—I called them Indians, at the time. I was a very big fan of their fashions; in fact, when the dentist finally pulled the gray stub of a front tooth to make room for my enormous, horse-sized, permanent teeth (who knew you had to grow into your teeth?), my reward was an Indian costume (full regalia!) and a bow and arrow. I could imagine myself riding bareback across the plains on my palomino pony firing arrows at wagon trains and Union soldiers. It wasn’t lost on me that the Indians were the underdogs. They were doomed from the start of every cowboy movie I ever saw—which was a lot. They always got slaughtered, bloodlessly sure, but that was beside the point, they lay in piles of fringed leather and moccasins. (Just to let you know whose side I was really on, “papoose” is my favorite all time word.) And to make matters worse, the poor Indians were almost always betrayed by one of their own or they thought he was one of their own. It turns out the ratfink was a half-blood kidnapped at birth and educated at Oxford or Harvard or Fort Wayne Community College, and was in it solely for the money.

I had enough sense to know that I couldn’t possibly conjure up a whole tribe of warriors to whisk me off to some safe teepee at Kolomoki. That would just be too obvious. No, I had to work alone.

And no one worked alone better than Superman. I stared up into the cloudless, burning sky wide open with possibility and knew I was onto something. Superman had superhuman strength, a positive attitude, and he could fly, a skill critical to my escape. Not only that, but he had a normal, actually dull and easily overlooked, alter ego—a perfect cover for me. I was pretty sure I was dull, and I prayed my teacher overlooked me. My seven-year-old brain wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the impossibility of flying. I spent most of my time rummaging around in my imagination anyway, so flight was no big deal. As I fantasized my escape, I began to think how cool it would be to take a friend with me. I could picture the entire class looking stunned, dropping the ball in the dirt, as I swooped down out of the sky to scoop up my best, and only, friend tucking her under my arm like a small melon. I would be magnanimous, too. I would rescue anyone who needed me, even the kids who teased me in first grade. But I would come to find out that that was dangerous thinking.

My sister’s birthday was in early May. (I had made it that far in the school year—the end was in sight.) Her birthday plan was to have several of her friends ride the bus home with her to her grand party in the backyard. I was thrilled to have the older girls on the bus ride home. They were a great distraction from the utter misery the ride usually bestowed on us. The school bus was hot, grimy, all metal and sticky vinyl. It was a fine place to cull dirty words from the graffiti scratched on the backs of the seats (almost as good as the urine-puddled tunnel under the street to the high school). But that was little consolation for the nasty company you had to keep on board. Think about riding home everyday with the same people you might meet when you renew your driver’s license.

Maybe it was the excitement of the day, maybe it was having new people around, maybe it was just another wild Friday afternoon, but something stirred up the regulars. I was sitting with my sister, and in front of us was one of the skankiest, “greasy-headedest”, snaggled-toothed boys you’d ever seen, and for some reason he turned around and got his sorry self transfixed on us. I don’t remember, but because it was her birthday I am sure that my sister was well-groomed and cute as a button, so that nasty soul had absolutely no reason whatsoever to call her a sea hag. Not once, not twice, but over and over. I started to smolder. It was her birthday for goodness sake! But I held back knowing that to act would give away my real identity. I tried negotiating, then mild threats, and then out of nowhere like the Incredible Hulk, I burst over the seat and tackle him to the grungy floor (I cringe just thinking about that much dirt) and started beating the living shit out of him. Not exactly Superman’s style, but very effective. I had the upper hand and was bringing home the bacon when I felt a yank on my back and I was suspended in the air just like I had dreamed of. Only this was no dream, it was my worst nightmare. Mr. Joe Cannon, the school principal had heard the screams (and probably cheers) emanating from the bus and jumped in, assumed I was the perpetrator, and without asking one question, blistered my bottom right in front of that skanky boy and all my sister’s party-goers. I was humiliated and completely bamboozled by Mr. Cannon’s dumb assumption that I was at fault. Didn’t he know who I was? Needless to say, I was no longer in a celebratory mood, but that was the least of my worries. My biggest disappointment was the realization that I was no superhero after all. Otherwise I’d have been sure to fly away from the scene of the crime.

Epilogue

But old habits are hard to break. Even today whenever a loved one is any trouble—near or far—my first instinct is to run out my back door, take a good, hard bounce and shout up, up and away. Who knows, maybe one day I really will fly.

The Superman Chronicles Part II

I am writing from the outpost of South Georgia with its good bourbon, fried catfish, butter beans, very spotty Internet service, and no cell service.

Back to our story…

Here is the real surprise about first grade: I became the class celebrity. It’s true, although some of the kids didn’t much appreciate my superiority, especially my best friend who called me Miss Big Stuff, and said I thought I was hot stuff on a stick, and that my something didn’t stink, and that I just acting like little Miss Kiss-my-fanny. I wasn’t sure but most of that sounded bad, worse than being a chalk-stomper. But who cares, here is how I happened to rise to celebrity status: My father managed the radio station and the year I was in first grade was the same year that my mother began announcing the local news at noon, or I think it was, more accurately, at twelve twenty. So every day just after lunch, right before rest time, Miss Smith would put a chair in front of the whole class, call me to come up while she plugged in the am radio and put it on her desk right behind me. I may have been shy, but I knew a good thing when I saw it. I would gather my little plaid skirt, spread it over the seat and sit, swinging my legs, smiling while I surveyed my subjects in their drowsy glory. My mother’s beautiful drawl told us everything that was going on in town: who was having a birthday, the Rotary Club would meet this Tuesday and hold officer elections, The Lion’s Club was having a car wash to benefit blind children, the city council held its monthly meeting, accomplished very little, but was glad to see everybody, and finally the news that everyone waited for: who was in the hospital, who had been discharged, and who had died. The newscast was sponsored by, not surprisingly, the local funeral home. (Which reminds me, not to digress, but first grade was also the first time I ever heard an emergency siren. The ambulance screeched by rushing Mrs. Bush—who was beautiful and wore a fur stole with little fox heads on it—to the hospital. Someone had poisoned her; put arsenic in her coca-cola right there in the flower shop she managed. It was truly terrible and is still unsolved, although everybody in town was—and is—sure they knew who did it.) Anyway, Miss Smith was thrilled about my mother being on the radio and never failed to remind the other children whose daughter I was. Between that, my effervescent personality, and my stunning good looks, I had to beat off friends with a stick, once I got the hot stuff off of it.

By the next year my fame had faded and I was just another highly pinchable, pain-in-the-teacher’s-ass second grader. School became a terrible place to go. I was so scared of being pinched by my teacher that I resorted to psychosomatic illnesses. (It must run in the family—psychosomotosis and pigeon toes.  My pigeon-toed daughter, Analise, went to the nurse every day in first grade with a new symptom, and I didn’t find out until much later in the year that it was because her teacher was mean to her, at least that was what Analise thought. As far as I could tell her teacher was excellent, devoted; she did seem a little high-strung now that I think about it. Anyway although Analise wrote her first book at age four—Dusty’s First Christmas, surely you’ve read it. It was inspired by Spot’s First Christmas, but has a complicated twist involving a cat and a manipulative bear. It is good; I highly recommend it and the sequel, Dusty’s Second Christmas… Well, never mind because evidently her reading skills were not up to snuff. So her teacher plopped her down in the middle of the yellow group, which was the color group for kids who lacked true career goals and instead spent a lot of time in the bathtub with farm animals and squirt guns. (It was probably a brilliant move of a mean, but experienced, teacher because in a couple of weeks Analise, out of spite, was flying through chapter books.) It was around this same time that I found a kitty-cat change purse full of quarters in her backpack, and when I asked her where she got that kind of money and what did she do with it, she confessed that she was buying junk food at lunch everyday. Wow. That seemed ingenious to me; my son just ate the lunch I made for him. It would never have occurred to him to work the system like that. I felt warm all over—my child may not read well, but already she is a hell of a shopper.)

Meanwhile in second grade, my psychosomatic illness was real, to me anyway—that’s how they usually work. Every morning right after I’d eaten my cinnamon toast and bacon and it was just about time to drive to the Gitmo for small children known as elementary school, I would get a really bad tummy ache. No amount of motherly love, threats, or laxatives worked to cure it, especially since I didn’t want to get better, hoping instead that it was a chronic something that I couldn’t recover from until at least third grade. My mother took me to the doctor over and over and, although he found nothing wrong with me, did me a favor and occasionally recommended I stay home, possibly sensing a mental health issue. But, of course, your loved ones eventually lose patience with you no matter how sick you are and prefer that you die or go back to school. So I, unfortunately, had to take my chances with Miss Hay’s class.

The Superman Chronicles Part I

I think it started when I was in second grade. My teacher that year was Miss Hay, another member of the club of spinsters who passed their days teaching small children. Miss Hay, true to her name, was large and square-edged, her dress belted tight across her bale-like middle, leaving her hands free to pinch the sweet, chubby arms of those of us who irritated her.  Surely, there was something in her life that made her so mean besides being born that way—maybe being left at the altar, for example. But even at seven, I found it hard to believe any man would have been that desperate, or rather that smart. She was so different from Miss Smith, my first grade teacher. Miss Smith had been my older sister’s teacher, which can sometimes backfire on you, but my sister was good at coloring and singing, had pleasant manners, and was a runner up in the Little Miss Peanut contest, so she made a good impression.

I was glad to have someone pave the way, since I was working through a few disadvantages. I was shy to the point of being mute, although that didn’t stop me from dreaming up anti-social behaviors—like stealing vanillas wafers out of other kid’s lunches; it’s the quiet ones you have to watch. Not only did I have nothing cute to say, I was sporting a jagged front tooth in a nice shade of gray (The other half of my tooth was lost on the floorboard after I chomped down on the metal dash when my mother slid into a ditch), and I wore enormous black and white saddle oxfords that had been beefed up and angled to correct my sadly turned in toes. In those days, the foot doctor and the evil cobbler, or rather orthopedic shoemaker, had some weird ornithology equation that thought if they could angle your pigeon toes as wide as a duck’s waddle, your human feet would somehow choose the middle road and you’d walk like a princess. I remember Dr. Sanders, who up until then I thought was nice, talking about putting braces on my uncooperative legs. I had seen a child like that once hobbling and clinking down the sidewalk toward the wrong side of town. Leg braces first, exile to the trailer park next, I thought. He was probably a victim of polio, not pigeon toes, but who could be sure? And the good Dr. Sanders always made me walk down the hall in my slip, or heaven forbid, my Marquis de Sade petticoat. It was a long, cold hall and I had to waddle half-naked past the other patients like a mini-streetwalker in training. He said he needed to watch me walk to assess my progress, but I didn’t trust him. I felt pretty sure I would walk a little more normally with clothes on. I would certainly look more normal. By the second grade, I was sleeping in corrective shoes with a rigid metal bar between my legs that kept my feet pliéd east and west like some bowlegged Baryshnikov. It is a miracle I could ever get them—my feet, that is—pointed in the same direction again. My mother would comment how remarkably durable I was, “That young’un can just fling herself over in her sleep with that big ole brace sticking straight up under the covers.” Imagine that weird sight, not to mention the danger. You lean down to give your sleeping child a goodnight kiss, when she suddenly turns over and you are nailed by a saddle oxford wielding a nightstick and a couple of nunchuks. And the unfortunate truth is that none of this did any good. I still walk funny.

Where was I? Oh yes, talking about the origin of my superman fantasies… I think that the unpleasantness of second grade was such a shock partly because first grade had been fine (outside of the playground teasing I endured for wearing “baby shoes”). My teacher was nice to me and didn’t seem to notice my penchant for thievery, maybe because she had her hands full with my best friend who hated first grade so much that she screamed and howled like a wild billy goat, flipped her desk over and stomp on chalk with her penny loafers. I think she got to go home early every day. Most of the rest of us had uneventful personalities and led ordinary small-town lives. My biggest worry was when would it get too cold to go barefoot. I do remember a little ragamuffin child (I think the nasty term would be “white trash”) who smelled awful, really awful, landfill-awful. She had watery blue eyes with a hollow, Appalachian look, and desperately wanted to be friends with me, who with my snaggled tooth and bad shoes must have made her feel right at home.

Dress for Success

Death by humidity. Day 4. Lingering…

This morning I woke up thinking how peculiar it is that men eat breakfast in their underwear. Maybe not all men, but I know at least two who do, although they shall remain nameless. I don’t do anything in my underwear except get dressed and I do that as quickly as I can.  In fact I get up every morning and waste no time getting my clothes on. I stretch, get out of bed, step over Bud, who sleeps on the floor in the middle of the closet, (Speaking of cats—the yellow one, Kyle, is truly making me crazy or rather crazier. Last night, I mean this morning—the clock said 3:12—he kept rubbing his little cold, moist, English pea-sized nose on my arms and face. A nose that tiny should be easy to ignore, but his combination purr and meow—like he was gargling; a little Listerine would have been nice—was as loud as a leaf blower right outside your window. And there was no getting rid of him; cats are just not that sensitive to criticism or being thrown off the bed.) Where was I? Oh yes, getting dressed. I put on the same thing every day: black yoga pants, black shirt, black little ballet slippers, and a black sweater. I don’t care if I look like a ninja—I am dressed which makes me one up on the eat-in-your-underwear crowd. But I will admit the sweater is a problem. It, frankly, has seen better days. Although it still has sleeves, the rest of it looks like the lawnmower got a hold of it, or maybe the blender.  It wouldn’t even make the cut with my friends under the overpass. At least I stopped wearing it to the grocery store, although the free groceries were nice—just kidding.

Anyway more importantly, I stay dressed until I undress which is right before I go to bed. I don’t walk around in my slip, and I don’t sit in the kitchen in my bra and panties. And I don’t hang out in my nightclothes, either. I don’t even eat breakfast in my pajamas. My mother can cook a four-course breakfast in her gown and robe. Some people lie around Saturday mornings until noon in their pajamas. And I think that is fine, admirable, but I am psychologically prohibited from joining their ranks. But why, you might ask. Well first of all, pajamas, and particularly underwear, just aren’t that versatile, unless you are a middle-school girl; apparently they can wear pajamas everywhere but church and Neiman’s. On the other hand, workout clothes, the wild cards in the wardrobe world, can be worn anywhere to do anything as long as you add makeup and a little jewelry. And most mornings I have to hit the floor running or at least chugging along pretty fast making lunches and lists and cooking breakfast. And I can’t be in my kitchen without an apron, and wearing an apron while in your pajamas is just wrong. I can’t imagine a place in the universe where it is permissible for one to tie one’s apron over and around one’s pajamas. (I am sure there are some kinky web sites that have housewives wearing nothing but an apron, but that is another story.) Cooking wearing a beret and galoshes would look less goofy than combining an apron and pajamas. Or a nightgown.

 In fact, I am so apron-addicted that it makes me nervous to watch Paula Deen, or Giada, or the Barefoot Contessa. How do they sauté, slosh stuff out of the food processor, whisk chocolate sauce and never get a drop on their clothes? I stare at Paula’s shirt the entire show watching for stains, especially when she is manning the deep fryer, or dipping shrimp in cocktail sauce. Once Paula did a breakfast show and cooked in her pajamas, so naturally she couldn’t wear an apron then, but that was only one show.

Sarah Moulton used to wear a white, starched apron on her cooking show. And she was one of my favorites, although each show had a missing ingredient—her personality. She was so dull that she had to be reminded to smile. Every few minutes no matter what she was talking about—kitchen bacteria, how sausage is made—some one would press a button off camera and the corners of her mouth would suddenly turn up, and her lips would part and show her teeth. It seemed like a smile, especially if she remembered to crinkle the corners of her eyes. (It is just terrible that Gourmet magazine shut down. Sarah was the executive chef at the magazine. I will miss it and Ruth Reichl, too.)

These are just a few of the clothing standards—spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten—that make us a civilized society, bring order to the chaos of daily life, lessen our laundry loads, and allow us to answer the doorbell, unembarrassed. Proper clothing makes the man and the woman and determines if they will seize the day or go back to bed every morning right after the last goodbye, which I would certainly do if I was still in my pj’s or, heaven forbid, my underwear.