Filed under: humor, parenting | Tags: family, flu, humor, library, swine flu
The halls are alive with the sound of mucus.
The Big Bad Flu has come to town, and has parked itself in our living room, sprawling on the sofa, demanding another drink, brawling with its hosts, ignoring the lateness of the hour; the Germ Who Came to Dinner. There is no getting it to go; it is impervious to the most brutal snubs or the panoply of remedies we hurl at it.
And yes, I brought it home. Among the less-than-delightful things about working with the public is their appalling state of health, and how willing they are to share it, via sticky library books and germ-dripping DVD cases. Any patron tone-deaf enough to ask me for a tissue these days meets with a dead-eyed stare. Coughing, sneezing, or nose-trumpeting at the Library which used to elicit some expression of sympathy for the sufferer is more likely to provoke a stampede towards the staff room. Check out your own damn books, Typhoid Mary. I’m on break.
But of course, you can’t avoid your family. Or at least, I haven’t figured out how. I managed to stagger through the flu mostly solo, but men are not so hardy in this regard. If someone is coughing, and is alone in the room, does it make a sound? Apparently not enough of one. That whole sickness and health thing in the contract is getting a workout, folks. I’m starting to feel for Baby Jane. That Blanche – what a pain in the neck! Always complaining about the food.
Now the Son has it, and is upstairs maaa-ing like a sulky Wookie, demanding – what? Lemonade, not the canned kind. And pancakes. Not those pancakes, the thin ones! Bacon – wait, you didn’t cook that in the microwave, did you? Oh, forget it. Just go out and get me some Lo Mein. No mushrooms!
Standing guard over the swirling stockpot, or shoveling towels into the washer, or waiting on the phone for the on-call doctor to pick up, I have quiet time for reflection and questions. Is it possible that we’ll just go on swapping this bug around until next spring? What is it about this that reminds me of the Donner Party? Why did they name it “Ben Gay”? Would floating a battleship in Nyquil get us in the record books? How much chicken soup can a woman make before she goes out for a bag of cough drops, and never comes back?
We’ll see, my dears, we’ll see.
- I don’t know who Jon and Kate are — and please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know, because I’ve realized that every time I see their faces grinning or grimacing from this week’s supermarket tabloid, I actually lose a few IQ points. I can feel the great cranking celebrity manufacturing industry yanking my brains out through my nose, like an Egyptian embalmer. Are there really not enough people of accomplishment to fill the pages of our magazines? Must our whole culture collude in inventing the Parises, the Nicoles, the Jessicas, the Tories, not to mention the Nicks, the Ryans, and all the rest?
Forget precious metals. The real gold’s in Celebutoids. Celebutoids happen at the place where journalism and entertainment collide. They’re both — they’re neither. They’re a third thing, a bread and circuses kind of thing, whose only accomplishment is their ability to distract us from what’s real. Marathon dancers without the grit, Aimee Semple McPhearson without the spirituality, Mussolini without the trains.
I was getting a haircut and listening in on the conversation in the next chair. “I can’t believe he left her after all they’ve been through.” “I know! And when she says she still loves him, I totally believe her. I mean, you can see she means it. “Oh, but that mother of hers –” “Tell me about it!” I cringed as I realized that they weren’t talking about actual people with whom they had actual relationships, but some stuffed dummies on a reality show. Am I the only one who hears the blaring oxymoron in “reality show”?
Kids show up at the library looking for biographies. They used to reach for Helen Keller and Thomas Edison. Now they read about Miley Cyrus, a cyborg-like celebutoid who has been merchandized like a breakfast cereal to the training-bra set. What has she done of note, you ask. A shrug. “Umm. She has a show….”
If there’s a culture war, let’s declare ourselves on the side of mindfulness. Put down the PEOPLE, step away from the television. Tell your children about Abe Lincoln and Anne Frank, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa. They’ll only reach as high as we set the bar. Do you really want to let Kate and Jon hold it up for them?
Filed under: humor | Tags: Catholicism, church, family, humor, parenting, religion, teens
Peter has been drilled from early childhood on the necessity of knocking before you breeze into our bedroom, but whatever request he had to make at that moment was important enough to drive it from his mind the other night. So he barged in, sans knock, and caught his dad red-handed.
That stopped him, all right. “What – what are you doing?” he managed to stammer out, stalled in the doorway.
“I’m praying,” my husband said.
Pete frowned, flummoxed. “You’re praying with jewelry?”
We have raised two little heathens. It’s not Peter’s fault he doesn’t know a rosary from a pearl choker. How could he? He’s never stepped foot in a Catholic church that wasn’t a stop on a tour. During a brief fling with Presbyterianism I had him baptized, and got him to go to Sunday School by bribing him with donuts, but it didn’t really take, in either of our cases. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t remember much, outside of the donuts. He declared himself a Buddhist for a couple of months once, but abandoned it because meditation was too much work.
Religion has always been troublesome in my family. My father, the long-suffering product of a old-timey tent revival style of Christianity, knew scripture inside and out and declared himself an agnostic in high school, a position he stood by for life. He liked the music all right, but had no truck with God. My mother, from a milder clan of Methodists who didn’t go in for shouting and falling on the floor, tucked her faith away when she married my dad, like you would a hat your husband had laughed off your head. Church wasn’t part of my childhood, though religion was, snuck in via the holidays in the music and stuff they showed on television. I set up a secret shrine in the back of my closet, with a picture of Jesus I’d found somewhere, and a purloined string of my mother’s beads, which I’d gathered would get God’s attention. When my mom found it, she didn’t say much, but the narrow line of her mouth told me I’d embarrassed her. It was years before I figured out why.
My father scorned faith as a crutch, and the Bible as a storybook for credulous children. God? A comforting myth for those who could be wooed away from Reason, the closest thing to a god that my father would abide. My Presbyterian phase infuriated him.
“Don’t tell me you believe all that crap about Adam and Eve? And Noah’s Ark?” he demanded, red-faced.
I shared with him the Presbyterian view of these things, which was that the creation story and some of the other dodgy bits were generally viewed as myths, ways of explaining God’s presence and relationship with man in a fashion early Christians could understand. “We don’t take them for literal truth, Pop”.
Pop reared back like I’d swung at him. “You can’t do that!”
“Do what?”
“Just ignore the parts that you don’t like. Pick and choose, like you’re squeezing peaches at a farm stand. It doesn’t work like that!”
“You don’t even believe in God!” I snapped. “What do you care?”
“It’s the principle of the thing. Besides, I never said I didn’t believe in the existence of God. I said I doubt it.”
“What’s the difference?”
“An atheist’s as big a fool as a Christian. Two sides of the same coin.”
That was the end of that discussion. When we moved, I looked at a couple of churches – still squeezing the peaches, I guess – but didn’t find one with sufficient pull to overcome my desire to sleep in on Sunday. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know it’s missing. Sort of a spiritual phantom limb syndrome, though how do you miss what you’ve never seen, except in glimpses?
My husband was brought up Catholic, and is finding his way back to it, in a quiet and solitary quest that has begun with the rosary. It’s like using a muscle set that’s been sidelined for a long while, and he’s stretching and strengthening it gradually. But the old foundation’s still solid, and he’s comfortable with it, comforted by it. I envy him this. I don’t know how to sidestep my doubt, how to make the leap, how to silence my mind’s noisy chatter long enough to listen for the call.
I feel bad about that, and about my pagan babies.
Filed under: humor | Tags: admissions, children, college, humor, parenting, teens
When I was a high school senior, my parents gave me a clear choice. I could go to community college for two years, then transfer to UC Berkeley – or I could find richer parents. I went with Option One. I wrote an essay – no idea what on – filled out my forms, and, voila! Done and done. The whole deal probably took an hour, and the total cost of my education, including rent on my South Side apartment, was about five grand.
Those of you with teenagers contemplating college are probably rolling on the floor, either in hysterics or agony, possibly a piquant combination of the two. Getting into college today is a busier business. It combines the stress of big game hunting with the frenzied tedium of a long-haul car trip. There is no One School Option. There are thousands, from which must be sifted hundreds, from which he plucks a possible twenty, then winnows it down to eight or ten. And then you and The Dad look at the bottom line and realize you don’t have enough functional, salable organs between you to cover one semester.
Our kitchen counter is buried beneath shiny view books printed on heavy stock, slick, seductive college porn. Our computer is bookmarked with a panoply of websites, on which our kid can click through Paradise Promised, the cloud-land citadels of high culture where the Life of the Mind couples ecstatically with Boundless Social Interaction. Learn! Grow! Coed Dorms! It’s everything he ever dreamed of – and it’s 50K a year.
There are places in this country where you can get a perfectly good house for 50K. Maybe we should just buy him a house, and let him figure the rest out for himself.
Or we could start a puppy mill. About time that dog started carrying her weight around here. Meth’s pretty easy to make, isn’t it? Do you have to have a trailer? Is it too late to get an MBA? An MLS? Richer parents?
We’re a long way from home on this one, and the road trip has just begun. Already the car smells like gym socks and old banana peels. Somebody’s carsick, somebody has to pee. And there’s no place to pull off for the next six months.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My baby is 6′2″, which probably means I should quit telling him when to brush his teeth, reminding him to say “please” and “thank you” , and asking if he’s done his homework yet. These, taken all together, are called “caring parenting” when your child is under five feet tall, and “boundary issues” when they’re 6′2″. Peter has picked up that phrase (he must have been reading again) and now thumps me with it like a verbal truncheon whenever I make a helpful suggestion. I have to admit, it ticks me off.
And, I have to admit that he’s right.
Part of the problem is the swift way time passes when you’re in your middle years. Summers that used to take years to go by, now whiffle past like a deck of cards being shuffled. Wasn’t it last week that I was running along beside his first two-wheeler, trying to keep him upright long enough to peddle his wobbly way to free-flying independence? Whisking him off to the emergency room, weekly, to repair the damage a bad landing inflicted? Stitches and butterfly bandages, the occasional cast; those fixed most everything.
But now, of course, the stakes are higher, as the road to adulthood stretches out ahead of him. No driveway for his mom to run alongside him anymore, no way to steady him if he can’t steady himself. And no way to know, until something really dreadful happens, that he’s fallen.
How do we do it? How do we get the courage to let go the bike, let go the child, let go and send him away into all that we can’t imagine, and worse yet, all that we can? When so much of our lives – the biggest part, really, the most important job – has been spent in feverishly wrapping the corners of the dangerous world in cotton wool, guiding faltering steps, praying with a fervor that we never knew before to be spared the unspeakable, the unthinkable, the unbearable?
It’s like learning to walk again, just to make yourself take those steps back.
As I write this, a billow of dog hair the size of a small hay bale wafts gently across the floor by my feet. According to the breed description, our Brittany Roxy is supposed to blow her coat twice a year. By my reckoning, this process begins in January, runs like an express train through July, and starts all over again in August, pausing for the Christmas holidays before gearing up for the next avalanche. She has been responsible for the death-by-choking of three high-end vacuum cleaners, and is currently breaking the spirit of a fourth. Other than the hair thing, and her tendency to charge into dog-fights with Great Danes — oh, and eating cell phones when she can get them — she’s a great pal. She did bite the head off the neighbor’s prize rooster as the poor man watched in horror, but she didn’t mean anything by it.
As a family, we have endured a long line of odd and unlucky pets. Our previous dog, Lucy, was a Golden Retriever who couldn’t say “no” to a ball. She got a regulation sized football stuck in her mouth, unnoticed by the dipsomaniac neighbor who was caring for her while we were out of town. A lot of emergency treatment later, she could open her mouth just the eighth of an inch needed to lap water or soup. Of course, her personal hygiene suffered. No amount of bathing or toothbrushing made a dent in her potent signature scent, which entered the room ahead of her and never left. To put it bluntly, her stink could knock a buzzard off a shit-pile. If you petted her, your hand came away sticky and reeking. If you didn’t pet her, she’d rub against your legs until you gave in or fled, gagging. You could tell who your real friends were with a dog like that in the house. We got very close with a couple who we thought were being terribly sweet about it all. It wasn’t until years later we discovered that they both suffered with nasal polyps.
Lucy bore her tribulations with remarkable aplomb, but became addled in her later years. She took to running away up to Main Street, where she’d wait until some unfortunate tourist opened his car door, then leap into the back seat and refuse to be budged. “Anywhere but here” seemed to be her motto, but she never succeeded in beating town. More than one elegant garden party was ambushed and scattered by Lucy’s determined gate-crashing. Once she escaped to wallow in the swamps all night, then found her way through a stranger’s dog door and was discovered sprawled on their white sofa the next morning. She always acted happy to see us when we came to fetch her home. The people whose parties and sofas she’d ruined, not so much.
Currently we have a near-sighted Cockatiel who’s carrying on a one-sided love affair with a water dispenser. Trust me, it’s better to read about than it is to watch. When he’s not forcing his attentions on his plastic love-slave, he mutters and chuckles grimly under his breath, and plucks himself. He’s pretty old, it seems to me, but he’s not flagging any. Every couple of years, my husband plaintively asks our daughter how long these damn birds live. I notice that her estimate keeps changing upward. I suspect she’s lying to protect someone. Maybe all of us.
I’d look it up myself, but honestly, I’m not sure I want to know.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It started with my daughter’s butt-crack. Apparently it often does with first-timers, especially girls. And for a lot of girls, it stops there. But my daughter has never been a “stops there” kind of girl.
She was fifteen, still young enough to ride her bike to a friend’s house. She was heading off to a neighbor’s when I spotted an arresting new addition to the landscape just above her butt-crack. There’s probably a more elegant way to express this, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. It wasn’t that many years ago, relatively speaking, that I had been in charge of wiping said butt-crack, and I flattered myself that I’d have noticed this feature then. Nope, this was new.
“What is that thing on your butt-crack, young lady?” I called after her.
She pedaled harder, bending over the handlebars, giving me a full view over the top of her hip-huggers.
“Nothing – it’s just a design.”
“How did it get on your butt-crack?”
Lucky for me she was going uphill. “God, Mom! Kelly, with a magic marker. Stop talking about my butt-crack!
Of course, it wasn’t Kelly, and it wasn’t a magic marker. It was a tattoo – who put it there has never been fully explained, but some shadowy high school acquaintance was implicated – and it was there to stay.
“Why the hell did she want to decorate her butt-crack?” her long-suffering father demanded. “I mean, who for?”
I wasn’t touching that question, not with Daddy. Nope. I shrugged, trying to look clueless. Not hard.
“And what’s it supposed to be, exactly?”
“She says it’s Tribal.”
“Tribal? What freaking tribe is that? Italians don’t have “tribes”. And if we did, we wouldn’t advertise them on our butt-cracks, goddammit. You have to talk to her.”
“It’s just a design. It could be worse.”
“How?!”
“I don’t know. “Free Parking” maybe? Or “The Buck Stops Here”?”
He snorted. “How about “Kick Me”? I’d pay for that.”
What could we do? There was the usual operatic blow-up, a performance piece as scored by some third-rate post-modern composer; random screams and cries, punctuated with percussive door slamming, ultimately dying to muted moans from different sections of the ensemble.
But it seemed to take. At least, no new ink appeared anywhere on her body that I could spot. I became something of a shower-room stalker, popping in like Freddy Kreuger at alarming moments in my determination to protect her precious dermis from any further self-inflicted outrages. What would my mother have said? Done? More than my pathetic post-facto threats and jack-in-the-box intrusions. I was losing ground, as usual. Too old for this job. Not the first time I’d noticed that.
She was in college when the Virgin Mary appeared on her ankle. Not like that — not the sort of thing that show up on random pieces of toast in Iowa and gets sold on EBay. No, a Virgin Mary in ink, draped in blue robes, surrounded with red roses. About four inches high, although when I first spotted it it had the impact of a flashing billboard.
“What is that thing on your ankle?”
“It’s the Blessed Virgin.”
“Show me.”
She did. It was still appalling – only sailor’s molls and circus ladies were supposed to have tattoos in my cosmology – but it was, I had to admit, art. “That’s actually…kind of great. Except that it’s on your ankle.”
The guy who’d put it there is apparently famous in the world of tattoos, which is nowhere near where I live. I had to explain this to Dad, who had gotten progressively less volcanic over the intervening years. So had I. The slow dance from the family nest, the inevitable and ultimately desirable pulling away, has faded so many of the bounds we’d guarded with such jealous zeal all those years of raising her. It happens. Now, here was the Blessed Virgin on her ankle.
“No more, okay, honey?” I say occasionally. My words have no particular weight with her, I realize, but it’s part of the job to ask. “Just not where people can see it. You might want a real job some day.”
“You’re so old fashioned. Everyone has them.”
“Except me.”
“I’ll take you to get one for your birthday. I know a great guy…”
“Just be a good girl. That’s what I want for my birthday. Oh, and if you’re going to have the mother of God on your leg? Don’t forget good grooming, okay? Because right now, the Blessed Virgin needs a shave.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
How quiet is it here? You can hear stuff grow. Grass, trees, kids. Particularly kids. And at night? If a car goes by, you get up and look out the window to see what lunatic is driving around at this hour. You don’t lock your door, because you lost the key the week after you moved in eight years ago, and haven’t got around to doing anything about it. You don’t lock your car, because ….well, heck, you don’t lock your house, so why bother? Your daughter who was brought up in a city and ought to know better, leaves her keys and purse on the driver’s seat of her unlocked car every night. Until someone takes them, she’ll continue to do so, despite whatever nagging you inflict on her.
But nobody will. It’s that kind of town.
I know the mayor. I know the guy who runs the hardware store, and the woman who runs the diner, the volunteer firemen, and the wiry old lady across the street who knows everyone. More than that, I know about their business — and they know mine, for better or worse. Whose daughter’s smoking pot in the cemetery, whose husband can’t walk away while there’s a shot left in the bottle, whose son’s yearbook picture should be labeled Most Likely To Do Hard Time Upstate. The newspaper quit printing names in the little police blotter column a couple of years ago. Turns out everyone around here knows who they’re talking about, anyhow.
And the incidents themselves are pretty tame. Ticket for driving too close. Kids TPing the big maple outside the football star’s house. Skunk in a basement. Suspicious fire in a field (those damn kids again).
How do you get here from a big town? Nobody gets here by accident. You’re either born here, a full-blooded swamp yankee or a WASP with an entry in the Social Register — or you come here on purpose, drawn to the quiet, the spirit-calming beauty of the town, its white steeples and lush village green, the slow-moving river at the foot of Main. Boats bob in the marina, carrying elderly men in alarmingly pink trousers they call Nantucket Red. People come for the boats, some of them. Artists come too, to paint the seasonal march of color and life, and wind up staying. Families come, because it’s like the Fifties – the good part, the secure part, where your fourth-grader could go out at ten on a summer’s morning, and not show up again until suppertime, muddied and spent and ravenous — and you wouldn’t have worried. The Fifties when the suburban sprawl hadn’t reached far enough to wipe out the wild, green bits at the edge, little creeks and who-knows-whose woods where a kid could feel free of the bounds of grown-up civilization for a few precious hours. Those lost bits of the past that were sweet beyond measuring are not lost here.
So if you miss out on some things, you find others. A second act in a harried life, the gift of reflection, a safe port to ride out the storm, maybe. You take a deep breath. And start listening to life again.
Can you hear the grass growing?
