Letters in My Soup

B is for Beta Test

2010-06-18T11:30:00.004-05:00

this really isn't a post

it's a test of something i need on the other blog ...

A is for Archibet (and Archive)

2010-05-10T10:17:00.002-05:00

It's time to bring this one to a close, to put it in the archive. But I'm starting the alphabet over again here.

Z is for Zip-a-De-Do-Dah

2010-03-31T09:03:00.003-05:00

Finally the weather has turned nice here. Blue skies, sunshine ... I broke out the sandals and pedal pushers yesterday--perhaps a bit prematurely--and rode my bike to work for the first time this year.

Today is even more perfect. As I was riding down Euclid on the morning commute, I found myself humming. I pictured the Shrimp and me in our playroom, with its key-lime-painted walls and the ABC sheers bowing in with the spring breeze, our Best of Disney Musicals album playing on our white plastic record player, over and over again. We sang and whistled along, dancing across the toybox, the gold carpet, the big round teal ottoman until Mom threatened to make us jump off the roof at the end of the song because that's what they did in the movie.

Y is for Yes

2010-03-26T14:30:00.003-05:00

Yes, I do yet live. Yes, I am slightly crazy busy but I don't know exactly why. So, just hold on until I get back.

Also, check this out.

X is for (the Roman Numeral) X

2010-03-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

Ten things that piss me off today:

my 10-year old acting like a total asshat this morning.
10 boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I can't remember where to deliver.
sneezing 10 times in 10 minutes, despite taking antihistamines.
having to shower and blow dry my hair in 10 minutes. see #1.
we're out of milk.
it's grey, AGAIN. and cold. where is Spring?? where is it?? Come back already! I don't want snow on my daffodils!
my 10 little toes need painting, but I haven't found time to do that yet, so I can't wear sandals. booooooooooo.
having 10 things on each of my (2) to-do lists. I mean, seriously, I did work last week even if I was on vacation!
computers. There is no reason to behave this way, Athena.
the very fact that it is Monday, and there's a whole week yet to go.

W is for Work

2010-03-19T11:07:00.004-05:00

cancelled due to clement Weather.

(not really. I'm on my way to jobsite now ... )

V is for Vegan (til 6)

2010-03-04T18:02:00.004-06:00

I used to read Mark Bittman's food column in the New York Times, before I became addicted to Battlestar Galactica. Sad but true, time is limited and TV has temporarily derailed most online reading. Anyway, I was intrigued by his plan of eating a vegan diet until dinnertime, then enjoying meals with a bit of meat, cheese, even the occasional sweets. It seemed rational, and I tried it for a bit last summer, finally derailed by my love of cheese.

Right after the first of the year, the Husband came to me and said, I'm gonna try to lose some weight this year. Join me, support me. So I signed up for myfitnesspal.com, set a goal to lose enough weight to land me in the middle of the healthy BMI range, and started tracking calories.

Almost immediately I found the problem with planning to lose even just one pound per week. With an allocation of a little over 1200 calories per day, I basically couldn't eat anything I was accustomed to eating--not because I tend to eat unhealthily, but if I ate even half a normal lunch, I had only 500-600 calories left for dinner. The Husband plans meals and portion sizes around his calorie allotment, which is twice what mine is. This fact generates a lot of resentment on my side, but he is several inches taller, and male.

So I went back to the Vegan Before 6 notion. After a few days, I realized that what was really tripping me up was carbs. So now I'm basically doing a Vegan Atkins diet until supper--no animal products, no foods that have more than 5 carbohydrates per calorie--this time with all the force of a woman who was borderline anorexic for most of the teen years. And I suppose it's working, since I've lost 10 pounds in little over 6 weeks.

After listening to me for a couple of weeks, my officemate (who is six feet tall and dryad thin) decided to join me. That's definitely arcane enough for this middle-aged woman with food issues. she said.

The next day she came in with a box of Veggie Broth and a mug of green tea in her hands. Are you still drinking sodas? she asked.

I shrugged. Not so much.

Good. Because I'm giving up chemicals.

Huh?

Yeah, I'm giving up chemicals. Caffeine, carbonated water, nutrasweet.

They're trying to kill me.

Both of them.

U is for the Urge

2010-03-01T13:39:00.003-06:00

Friday afternoon, the Girl and I running errands between school and picking her brother up from Cub Scouts.

The radio blabbed endlessly about Iraq and Afghanistan. I glanced over at her, sitting in the passenger seat. How about finding us some tunes? and turned my attention back to traffic.

How about the Orgee (prounounced or-hard g-eeeee)? or is that Orgy?

Do we have that? I wasn't aware that we did.

Right here. she pulled a CD from her door pocket, waved it.

That's the Urge, dear.

Take Away - The Urge

T is for 10 Things, $20

2010-02-22T16:01:00.001-06:00

An unapologetically shallow post. Not complaining, not being extravagant, just saying what I'd do if a spare Andy or ten landed in my wallet ...

New shower curtains. Our old map one is absolutely ripped to shreds. It's almost become a game: how long can I continue to poke new holes to hang it? Only the Shadow knows. And the other one is just ugly.

Subways for dinner. BLT for the Girl, Meatball for the Boy, Turkey for the Husband, Veggie for me. With everything. Dunno, just feel like it.

A bottle of Frangelico. Great in hot cocoa, or coffee. Especially as dessert, by itself, golden liquid swirling in my last handled crystal glass. Sigh.

A new plain black fleece Hoodie. My old one finally gave up the ghost last spring after 10 years, and I miss it because it was perfect for just about everything in a pinch. No thinking, no fuss.

A school of Tetras for the aquarium. The final survivors of the last batch are swimming around in that daze that says they're probably not long for this world.

One of these cool mug French Press things. Because then I could have fresh hot coffee in the office. Even though the Husband says I don't need fresh hot coffee in the office.

More Smart Wool Socks. Who would have thought they could be so wonderful? Especially warm socks in loud patterns.

Pay off my library fines. Because it's nice to be able to check things out without having the Husband do it for me. Although I'm not sure quite why. So maybe not.

Some Chocolatour bars. Straub's stopped carrying them a while back, leaving me craving the Grenada.

I'd take a friend to the London Tea Room downtown. Someone I haven't seen in a while. Dunno who. Maybe you.

S is for Shrive, Shriven, Shrove

2010-02-18T09:11:00.004-06:00

What does Shrove mean, anyway? he asked. why do we call this Shrove Tuesday?

I didn't know. I googled it. A past tense of Shrive: To hear Confession. To gain absolution through confessing and penance.

So really you start to shrive tomorrow. he said. I'm giving up shriving. How about you? He looked around the office. Noone spoke up.

I thought about an earlier conversation, over coffee. I'm giving up envy. she said. Not envy like jealousy envy but professional envy. I look at other designers' websites and think, damn, they're good. You know? I nodded. She looked wistful. Or maybe, what I should give up is the self-loathing that comes from that.

And I thought about a discussion with another friend, who posted an online poll on her blog last week. Should I give up booze or chocolate, or both, for Lent? She finally decided on both, and more power to her. I learned better than that a few years ago, when I gave up booze, chocolate, and caffeine, all at the same time. Never again. Not even for everlasting life. Why not add something? I asked. I'm considering 15 minutes of meditation, or committing to Wednesday morning Eucharist.

I thought about the conversation Sunday before last with the Husband. Maybe we should do a spending fast, not buying anything unnecessary, even at the grocery store. He looked up from the coupons, the scissors paused mid-cut. You just told me to skip a shampoo coupon because it's frivolity. How would that be different than usual? I didn't have an answer.

What is penitence anyway? remorse for past actions, says the dictionary. I have that in spades, although not necessarily for things the Church would regard as sins. Maybe in thought, in things left undone, as we say in the Litany of Penance. But I'm not sure that giving up chocolate, going to Eucharist, cutting our already-sparse budget further absolves me. That has to come from someplace deeper, someplace those little actions don't go. And perhaps that's not possible anyway, that in reality we can never be shriven by virtue of what we do ourselves. If we could, why would we need Christ?

R is for Reality TV

2010-02-17T09:35:00.001-06:00

I watched half an hour of one episode of Survivor at the In-laws' place over Thanksgiving some years ago. I opted to join the five children under five in the muddy backyard rather than watch the rest.

Did I mention that hanging out with groups of small children make me as nervous as a heroin addict searching for the next hit?

But it's infinitely preferable to Reality TV. Infinitely.

Q is for Quiet, Please.

2010-02-11T13:01:00.004-06:00

The weather has been cold and wet.

The children haven't been outside at school for recess for ages.

And by the time the yellow bus drops them off and snacks are found and devoured and homework at least glanced at, it's dark.

So, they're rambunctious. They play chase in the house, their feet pounding on the floor like cannibal drumbeats to my saying, Stop. Stop. Okay, Time Out, both of you. Over and over again.

If they're not running and throwing balls and GoGos in my house--strictly verboten among the glass tables and sundry breakable objects--they're playing board games and arguing over the rules. The Girl is a tattletale. Mom, he took extra money from the bank. Mom, he moved twice. Mom, he took my cards.

I repeat, over and over again, If you don't like how he plays, don't play with him.

When they're not running and playing board games, they're doing homework and annoying each other in the process. The Girl prefers to work with music; the Boy prefers to work in silence. I don't care. We all prefer to work in the dining room and living room. If the Girl isn't humming with her brother shouting at her to stop, he's tapping a TechDeck or a pencil on the table with her shouting at him to stop. And I'm shouting at both of them to stop, over and over again.

Until bedtime. They snuggle beneath layers of blankets and quilts to stay warm in the still-unheated house. And I curl up between red-ticking-striped flannel sheets with my book while the Husband goes to the back to play Metroid for a few minutes. It's Quiet.

Finally, Quiet.

P is for Proofread, Please

2010-02-04T11:15:00.000-06:00

O is for Ornamentation

2010-02-01T19:33:00.002-06:00

Sitting in the kitchen, looking at this great (and hilarious) web site Rusty sent us.

What's Postmodern Ornamentation? asked the Boy.

Define Ornamentation. I said.

The process of putting ornaments on something?

N is for Nevermind

2010-01-28T20:42:00.004-06:00

I thought I had something to say.

Opened the computer, set the cursor in the box and waited for my fingers to begin their choreographed dance across the keyboard.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing

So, nevermind.

M is for Mitt of Wisdom

2010-01-22T10:14:00.000-06:00

also known as the Oracle of the Office.

L is for Lost

2010-01-14T18:04:00.003-06:00

Lost:

the $20 bill that I last saw on my desk on Monday.
my wallet. Last seen in my hands, walking out of Schlafly Library on Tuesday, with the Husband's library card in it. and there's another episode of Battlestar Galactica waiting, too.
an email I wrote the jobsite superintendent on the big job that took way too fraggin' long to write. He doesn't have it, I don't either. So I get to rewrite it.
a lot of time on a project that is gonna wind up paying about $3/hour before I'm through.
any inclination to force the Boy to do his Science Fair project. I don't care, he doesn't care, I don't care. I don't care, mainly.
the sense that we'll have the whole electrical panel/furnace issue solved anytime soon, or in anything resembling an affordable manner.
motivation to clean. Anything. The living room, the dishes, laundry, my office, anything.
5 baby mollies. Eaten by our angelfish in like 10 minutes Tuesday evening. Rescued the last two and put them in a mason jar, now on top of the aquarium.
half the usual assortment of crap that I carry around. You know what I mean: business cards, 5 dozen pens of various types and colors, post-it notes, thumb drives. Probably due to the fact I've switched from backpack to laptop bag to briefcase a couple of times this week. Maybe that's where my wallet and the$20 are, in another bag.
the ability to get up and face life in a timely manner.

If you see any of the items on this list, please hang a flyer on the telephone poles on West Pine Blvd. next to the one with the Found Blue Heeler.

K is for Kin

2010-01-10T15:13:00.005-06:00

A week after returning from the Southlands for the holidays, I feel wistful but relieved.

I love going to Little Rock to visit family, and wish I could go more often, probably as much out of guilt as missing my hometown. As the kids have gotten older our former habit of visiting 4-6 times a year has dwindled to going to Central Arkansas once or twice, always during the 12 days of Christmas and usually for a few days during the summer. So many things get in the way: extracurricular activities, work, the oddness of sleeping in Daddy Fred's bed, the fundamental distrust of Talon's boyfriend, the expense of gasoline and hotels and road food. And in so many ways it's odd to be there.

Ostensibly, I'm still Family, but I'm also an Outsider, someone to be cleaned up for like Uncle Bill used to be when he'd come home from D.C. I'm not told about all the little dramas or exactly what's going on behind the scenes anymore, although I usually know because Mom fills me in before I leave St. Louis. I shoo my children away from the white Divan, the breakables trinkets, the organ, and the tempting saloon-style kitchen doors as my mother and Granny always did me. And I sit on the old man-eating couch listening to the same old stories and the same old arguments, looking at the same Dali crucifixition scene over Granny's chair and the same Dali Last supper over the TV, wondering how I ever became who I am from here.

Then we go visit the Husband's family: the aunt and uncle with their tidy little house: more breakables, another antique organ, new furniture, and white wall-to wall carpet. I'm a complete klutz, so it made me anxious before children. Now I'm a complete nervous wreck from the moment we walk in the door, living in terror that someone will break something (thankfully not), spill something (this time, just water in the kitchen), or track something on the carpet (black mud and dried leaf bits, check.) The three redheaded cousins speak in a sisterly language half-derived from old jokes and memories. They share with their mother Grandmother Martha's prudish curl of lip, her black-and-white categorization of who We are and who the dangerous Others are. I hide in a chair by the windows beside the eldest's taciturn husband and try to disappear behind the black shield of my Nikon.

I look at the Husband across the room, engaged in a techie conversation with his father and Uncle Otto. Does he feel this detachment, this sense of Unbelonging too? Does he wonder how he could possibly be Kin?

J is for John's Gift

2010-01-09T13:38:00.004-06:00

John is my mother's current husband, #5. Like Mom, he's an artist with a Journalism degree. Otherwise, he combines traits of her exes: like my father, he's a bit of a putterer; artistic and intellectual like the Punk Stepfather; financially astute, like the Accountant. There's bits of the others there too, good and bad.

A native St. Louisian, he moved Mom here so that he could care for his parents in their last few years. Having them around has been nice--and not just having Mom around. John's the one I call when I need a truck. He's the one who picks up the Boy in his red Porsche to take him to a percussion concert at the Fox. He's the one who teaches us to make wine and beer.

And he shares the Girl's birthday.

The last few Christmases, my sister and I have found small boxes under the tree in their entry hall with our names written in his angular print. Custom jewelry. Glass pendants, earrings.

This year, Talismans. Mine is inscribed with Linea B symbols, intended to summon words to my mind, my fingers. Wear it in health and profit, he wrote in the accompanying card. Thank you for having me as part of your family.

Thank you, John. I'm glad you're one of us.

I is for Indecent Exposure

2009-12-27T19:04:00.003-06:00

One of my Facebook friends posted this yesterday:

Ok, I finally after 14 yrs of parenting, bought a Barbie. Is it ok if she doesn't have clothes on half of the time? Is this a temptation to my boys? What should I do?

Shelley was my next door neighbor through childhood, the older sister of my best friend Derek. Their mother whopped them both with a big stick of evangelical religion, and this is compounded by the fact that she's a Baptist preacher's wife.

So, she is seriously worried about this. Other friends weigh in with suggestions to throw it away if she ever finds it naked, glue on a swimsuit, hey, why not just marker a swimsuit on?

But in doing so, is she teaching her four sons that they are not responsible for resisting temptation through the force of their own will, their own morality?

H is for Holier than Thou

2009-12-20T16:11:00.005-06:00

This morning, we were running late all the way to the moment we reached the tall red doors of the church, and realized Eucharist was at 11:15, not 11:00.

The nave was mostly empty, and our usual seats in the second row had been replaced by two child-size plastic chairs and a red rug. After verifying with the usher that the area had been intended for families (we typically attend the earlier service), the Husband and I chose center aisle seats on the third row and the Girl sat on one of the little chairs, her red plaid skirt falling in a pleasing circle over the seat. Her brother, delighted, took up residence on the rug.

A few minutes later, two men entered through the side door, leading three boys about the same ages as our children. They looked at us, pointed to the first row. Are these taken?

No, we answered. And they set their belongings, including two Nintendo DSes, on the black cushions on the kneelers and went to the back.

Oh, it's that family. I hissed to the Husband. I pulled both children aside, told them to keep thier attentions on the service, the hymnals and prayer books, not the video games. For the most part, they did, except during the sermon, and who can blame them then?

We followed the fivesome to the chancel rail, set our cupped hands on the stone cap next to theirs. As we walked through the side aisle back to our seats, the Boy turned to me, speaking in a stage whisper. Why did they bring DSes to church? It's not fair. And--he jerked his head back towards the altar--they aren't even participating, yet take Communion?

I shook my head, silently, held my finger to my lip. And I thought back to seeing the DSes sitting on the kneelers, and hissing to the Husband, Oh, it's that family.

The Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee flashed through my head in the moment after I said it. God, I thank you that I am not like other men--robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even this tax collector ....

I prayed not only for patience, but humility, for the ability not to judge. That God might give these things to me, as gifts, rather than give me the circumstances to learn them.

G is for Garrulous

2009-12-19T11:17:00.000-06:00

Morning after the sleepover, Lucas gone home, time to clean up, to roll up the sleeping bags in the living room, put away games and toys, etc. My men are in the kitchen, father checking email, son putting away dishes.

The Husband was singing softly along with the radio, and the Boy said, Dad, I'm tired of voices.

Voices? asked the Husband.

I was awake all night because of voices.

Really? What voices did you hear up front?

Lucas's voice.

I thought you liked to stay up all night.

Yeah, but not that late.

F is for Football (American Football)

2009-11-21T11:34:00.004-06:00

Razorback football was the Saturday soundtrack of my youth. Sometimes afternoons, sometimes evenings, Dad always listened, shushing us so he could hear the call on the radio broadcast. Most of the time he resorted to sending us from the room, but if I was inside, I'd turn it on in my room as the background to playing with my Fisher-price peoples and Breyer horses.

One magical New Year's Day I remember sitting on the porch in the giant box from the desk I got for Christmas and listened to the Sugar Bowl, Lou Holtz's Hogs against the legendary Bear Bryant's Crimson Tide while the rain fell around me. We lost, of course.

When Paul Eels died, and I realized I'd never hear him yell Touchdown Arkansas!!! again, a bit of my childhood went with him. The new guy says it, but it's not the same.

The Redneck Stepfather almost ruined all that. I swore I'd never marry a guy who watched football on Saturdays and Sundays. The Husband was a pretty good fit for that, despite turning into a WereHog on Saturdays. That was okay, for the most part. It is, after all, the accepted common religion in a state where evangelical factions rule the roost. No matter what church you attend on Sunday morning, you're listening to the radio wishing you were there the night before, following the ritual.

These days, most weekends the kitchen TV is tuned to football at Chez S, with college games on Saturday and Pro on Sunday while the Husband prepares the bread and meals for the week and tracks his fantasy team. I come and go between working on my computer in the living room, cleaning & laundry, taking kids to activities. Sometimes I sit on the window seat, and chat with him as I scan the newspapers & cut coupons. And it's largely good. Not exciting, but good.

I can imagine it always being like this, with lanky teenage boys hanging out on the window seat in a few years, discussing strategy, friendly ribbing as they cheer for opposing teams. I can see the Girl & her friends oscillating through as their interests, sporting and otherwise, ebb and flow.

E is for Elevator

2009-11-19T09:47:00.002-06:00

The yellow bus moved away from the curb towards the stoplight, and I watched the water fall off the tire tread back onto the street in airborne rivers. I waved, as I always do. I didn't see anyone wave back. The Boy was fighting back tears as he mounted the steps, the Girl stone faced under the brow of her hood.

Another tough morning. Damn it, I knew this would happen last night, when the Boy kept ignoring my requests for him to stop reading and go to bed. Damn it, damn it, damn it. Finally, I bodily moved him off my bed and pushed him out the door towards his own room, a task that's grown difficult now that he's practically as big as my mother. I'm not putting up with any of your baloney tomorrow morning, Mister. Zero.

Yeah. Right. So explain it, Lisa. Explain why your son thinks it's okay to ignore you when you ask him to get dressed, to make his lunch. Why does he shout at you, flashing angry, hateful eyes over a Billy Idol sneer. Explain why you gave in and yelled back. Explain it, Lisa.

As I walked up the sidewalk , I could find no defense. I walked inside

The elevator was waiting. It hadn't come to the call earlier, and we had taken the stairs on our way out, my steps hitting every one, staccato; the children in their standard thump, thump, thump, THUMP rhythm of runs and jumps. But now the golden incandescent light poured through the rhomboid window, and I opened the door, got in, and pushed the 4 as the door slid back. The brass interior gate creaked to its side of the brass jamb, and the car started moving up.

And then stopped with a jerk halfway to the first floor. The brass gate accordioned back, as if I should get out`.

I pushed the stop button, then the 4 again. A clunk from above, but no motion. Stop again, 4 again. Clunk, the gate wiggles slightly, nothing. Push stop and 1, clunk, gate wiggles, nothing,r repeat.

I paused and looked hard at the Bell button at the top of the panel. Shook my head to myself. No, I'll call Lamar. He can get me out. No need to disturb everyone in the building.

Except that his phone doesn't even ring before going through to voice mail.

I'll call the property management company, then. Except I don't have their number and the first hit on Google is a fax machine. I call the second number, get the tri-tone and the "You have reached a number than has been disconnected. If you beleive you have reached this message in error, please try again" message. The rest of the hits on the page are for a company with the same name in New York.

Well then. Who can I call? I started scanning through the contacts list on my phone. I saw Joe walking for coffee, newspaper in hand. Trish is still asleep, and when her phone rings the Great Dane barks. My downstairs neighbor ... no. I try Lamar's number again, and this time I get hear his friendly voice saying Hello, Superintendent Lamar on the other end..

Hi. It's Lisa. I'm stuck in the elevator between floors.

Oh no, not that one too. I'm just getting off the bus, I'll be there in five minutes. Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm fine. No big deal.

I leaned against the metal back wall, slid down its face to sit on the floor.

I won't be stuck here forever, thank God.

Perhaps I needed these few minutes to think, to separate the day at hand from the morning.

Perhaps I needed to be stuck to become unstuck.

D is for Drinking Habits

2009-11-10T11:22:00.000-06:00

I'm three hours behind schedule already. my officemate announced.

A glance at the clock in the far right corner of the right-hand screen read 10:47.

Heels on hardwood. The muted puh of the minibar fridge opening. The hiss of air releasing from the 2 liter bottle. The chugging of the Diet Coke into her Starbucks cup.

How about you? she asks.

I do not know. I am still lost in this moment, waiting for time to catch up.

C is for Calendar

2009-10-28T09:23:00.000-05:00

On my Calendar today:

Children delivered to schoolyard gate, Carrying violin Cases.
Chris Came to Caulk Center seam of Condo windows.
Contracts to be Considered, Commented upon, Changed, and sent to the Client (whose name also starts with C).
CAD files to be emailed.
Call Code official.
Corporate Credit Card bills paid.
Checks in the mail maybe?
Continuing Education.
Coffee.
Color Concepts for Cool southtown store.
Chess Chaperone Conversations.
Children to be picked up and fed something Cheap.
Cub Scouts.
leftover Cake.

B is for Bicycle Ride

2009-10-25T16:36:00.000-05:00

A is for Appointment

2009-10-21T09:51:00.000-05:00

Homework hell has driven me to this: on Monday we're headed back to the psychologist to see if she can help us tame the monster that the Boy becomes when confronted with ... tasks. Deadlines. Stupid menial chores. Inevitable distractions, created both by himself and others.

We've been down this path before, when he was five. He was striking out at our nanny, and when he'd get angry with me he'd glare viciously and shout, You're FIRED! For a variety of reasons, I did not take this well.

Dr. S looked at the teacher and parent questionnaires on her desk and said Yeah, it looks borderline ADHD but what we seem to have here and now is an anger management problem. Let's work on that.

So we did. One of the prescribed solutions was a sticker chart: a grid of tasks that as the kid completes them the adult puts a sticker in the box. A sheet full of stickers warrants some larger reward.

This system is dependent on having an adult who can keep track of the chart, the stickers, and remember to take the time to do it amidst the whirl of getting out of the house in the morning, afternoon orchestration of homework and instrument practice and maybe a little bit of free time to play, and the evening rituals of dinner and bedtime.

There is no such person in our household.

Z is for Zoom Zoom

2009-10-13T14:19:00.000-05:00

Rewind to 2001, when we were a family of three. Mostly we commuted in my small SUV every day--the Husband and I to our West County jobs, the Boy to the day care center between the two, within just a few moments from either of us.

Mostly. Except when one or the other of us took the Miata. And sometimes that was with the Boy in his car seat, the top down, his thin baby hair blowing in the 60 mph wind as he smiled.

The first time he saw this commercial, the Boy sat upright in his spot on the floor, the blocks temporarily forgotten.

And the next time we went out to the street to get in the car, he smiled, pointed at the Miata, & said, Zoom zoom.

Y is for (Misspent) Youth

2009-07-01T13:05:00.000-05:00

So we washed the Mustang night before last, and yesterday morning was cool and partly cloudy ... perfect weather for taking pictures. Drove over to the Park, to the lower Muny lot, put on the hubcaps, got the camera out of its bag and started walking around and around the car, the viewfinder pressed to my eye, my fingers finding the optimum focal length on the zoom lens .

It felt maudlin, funereal. I found myself thinking of Victorian death portraits, of the death masks of Abraham Lincoln, of piled bodies in Civil War battlefield scenes. I felt like I was photographing the end of my youth, wrapped in skylight blue sheet metal.

X is for Xanadu

2009-06-21T16:10:00.000-05:00

First it was ELO and Olivia Newton-John and roller skating and romance. Zan-a-dooooo-oo-oo

I was enthralled. I was 10, and it was the perfect combination of all of my favorite things. I bought the soundtrack with my allowance one Saturday afternoon at Kroger. It might have been my first album purchase, I don't really remember.

A few years later, hanging out with my uncle and some of his friends on a summer weekend at the lake. A different version, an earlier version, caught my heavy metal mind ...

but I went home and found my old cassette, almost forgetting the chords except as a bit of trivia.

A few more years, into the mid-1980's and I finally learned

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measurelss to man
Down to a sunless sea.

in Pre-AP Junior English, and that same semester, found myself listening to Frankie:

and this was the version that captured me, that accompanied me through architecture school, where I was always dreaming ...

That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

W is for Words are Weird

2009-06-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

This morning, standing on the sidewalk watching the kids get onto the bus and the traffic back up behind them onto Kingshighway as the light changes. This stop location for summer school doesn't work for anyone, I thought. Gotta call her again and get them to reroute the route.

And then I thought about the words. Reroute, pronounced re-rout. Route, pronounced root.

English is just a plain weird language.

V is for Vacation

2009-06-15T22:36:00.000-05:00

Westbound Interstate 30 between Little Rock and Dallas seems to be maintained by the City of St. Louis Streets Department, which is to say maintained intermittantly at best. It's strange that the Eastbound lanes are so much better. Are that many more people going to Dallas than are coming back?

I love our friends in Dallas. I love holding their babies (my godchildren), talking late into the night, sitting with on the edge of the pool with our legs dangling in as we watch kids swim. I miss them terribly for weeks afterwards. I cannot imagine living in Dallas. I cannot imagine driving that much, every day of my life.

Four days in a minivan with two extroverts is a little more than I can handle, especially when the last day of the trip I'm suffering with a horrid drippy summer cold which makes me feel even more surly and snappish than usual.

It is possible for a family of four to take a 10-day road trip in an RX-8, if they pack sparingly for 4 days.

My husband's great-grandfather designed some really cool buildings. More on that later.

The Girl bears a remarkable resemblance to her namesake's sister, or at least the one photograph of E at a similar age.

I could be more creative about how I say it, but it's just really nice to be home.

Unknowns

2009-05-21T10:27:00.000-05:00

The location of the RX8 keys with the working key fob remote thingie. They're in Baltimore with the Husband, I suspect.
Bureaucratic St. Louis commissions Master Plans, Strategic Plans, etc all the time, for everything from neighborhood planning to downtown amenities to right-sizing the school system. They write the check and then shelve the plans. Are they simply trying to understand what the best practices are so they can do exactly the opposite?
How is that I can take photographs of everything I need for a project, but get back to the office to find every picture I took except the one I remember taking of the things I need??
Will the mechanic be able to rebuild the Mustang's half-melted carburetor? Or do I get to start a new wild goose chase of a parts chase?
How long will it take Sprint to respond to my emails regarding the technical issues with my stupid smartphone?

Edited to add Bonus! Is it really so hard to let parents know a performance time has been moved before they arrive???

T is for Train

2009-05-03T16:58:00.000-05:00

The Husband's parents were in town over the weekend, going to various railroadiana sites with their model train club.

Saturday night, after a long day of Girl Scouting, I looked up from my book when the Husband laid down in our bed. So, what's on the slate for tomorrow?

Well, Mom & Dad are going out to that steam railroad in Pacific, and I thought I'd take the kids along to spend a little time with them. And it's kind of fun, we haven't been in a while.

Steam railroad ... all I could think of was the one down near Cape. A long way for a day trip. This morning I figured out he was talking about the Wabash Frisco & Pacific Railroad in Wildwood, so I tagged along as well. As soon as we got off the freeway, I realized the folly of this decision as I looked into the acres and acres of oak-hickory forest on the hillsides between the oversized vinyl-sided homes.

A few miles down 109, turn right, turn right, and the road dead-ends at the railroad. And I realize how long it's been since we were out here last: was the Girl even born yet? Neither of us remembers. We remember the Boy, tiny and excited, trying to find Thomas. He's a little bigger now ...

(two generations of S men ... the Boy & his grandfather)

And the railroad has changed. There are teenagers helping run the operation, as well as the middle-aged and elderly men you'd expect.

The County built an extension of the Ozark Trail that wraps around the tracks along the river, and the bicyclists alternately pass the train and stop at the crossings and wave.

I sat on my bench, watching the Meramec flow muddily towards the Mississippi, wondering where the time has gone.

S is for Satanists

2009-04-25T17:44:00.000-05:00

I saw it in the Riverfront Times, and couldn't quite believe it.

Judas Priest, with Special Guest Whitesnake, playing at the Family Arena in St. Charles.

The irony of it took me back to seventh grade, to a lunch conversation with a new friend at the junior high in the small town I'd just moved. I mentioned the Eagles and Queen and Journey, and stopped because my companion had a look of abject horror on her face.

Why, you know the Eagles are Satanists, don't you?

No. I was puzzled. Why do you say that?

She smiled, spoke firmly, as if assured that she was saving a lost soul. Just listen to Hotel California. That line about not having the spirit here since 1969 is that Jesus hasn't been in California since the Satanist church opened in 1969. You'll go to Hell if you listen to that.

Really? I asked. I was amazed by the concept that my favorite band, my father's favorite band, were a bunch of Devil-worshipers. I rode the bus home that afternoon, popped the cassette into the deck, and listened very carefully.

A month or so later I walked into a church other than my own for the first time in my life, invited to what turned out to be night one of a Southern Baptist revival by my friend. The youth program focused on the evils of rock music. The speaker spent a great deal of time playing tracks forwards and backwards on a specially modified turntable. A couple of songs by AC/DC, Stairway to Heaven, two or three times. I could almost hear what he said it I should. He spent a lot of time talking about the bands that were so blatant that they didn't even bother to say it backwards. Queen was, of course, trying to lure us all to Hell through homosexuality. Black Sabbath, publicizing their worship of the Dark One. And Judas Priest, so very proud of of being Hell Bent .... we shouldn't listen to any of them, lest we be led down that path ourselves.

I went home, looked at my cassettes--the vast majority by bands I'd heard in the presentation, thought about the woman I'd spoken with after church who looked at me like I'd said "Satanist" instead of "Episcopalian" when she asked Honey what kind of church do you go to? as she was patting my hand .... and decided I didn't think that the God I knew, who spoke to me in the quiet spaces in the Eucharist and in the whispering wind among the trees in the woods, would sentence me to barbecue forever based on my choice of music.

Needless to say, I didn't hang out much with that girl anymore.

R is for Rabbit

2009-04-13T12:26:00.001-05:00

Saturday afternoon, sitting at the Egg Table with the kids. They're arguing about the Easter Bunny.

The Girl was emphatic. He's a rabbit. He bounces out of the park and over the street and straight through our windows. but he doesn't break them because he's Magic. Right, Mom? She looked at me as if desperate for some rhetorical firepower.

I shrugged. I really don't know. I've never seen him do it. But he obviously gets in somehow.

The Boy shook his head. He doesn't get in, he's already in, because it's mom and dad.

The Girl started protesting, but I interrupted.

Do I look like I have big ears and a cottontail?? And I can tell you that Dad doesn't, either. The Girl snickered.

It's you two. he said.

Can you prove that? do you have evidence?

He shook his head slowly.

Well, that's irrational, then, isn't it?

Then I realized what I had just said.

Q is for Qwerty

2009-04-10T15:48:00.000-05:00

P is for Pepper Sauce

2009-04-09T15:32:00.000-05:00

It was only a dream:

We were standing on the median, the group of us, half on the grass half on the pavement, talking bicycles and music and the weird stuff kids do and maybe we should go inside and grab some beers to drink on the porch as the evening fades to darkness.

The kids had wandered a little ways down the block, and stopped, their bicycles in the grass, lying among the tall oaks and forsythia. They were talking, throwing grass at each other, pushing people off the curb, playing. I noticed headlights beyond them in the twilight, and started walking towards them. Car! I yelled. Most of them got out of the street. All of them, actually,except the Girl, who was still standing still in the middle of the lane, her thumb in her mouth, staring off into space. I started running, yelling, Get out of the street! Get out of the street! The other adults behind me were yelling too, but she just stood there, unaware, as the blue LTD struck her, the chrome bumper buckling her knees as the shining tooth-like grille grazed her body. And she hit the pavement, her head double-bouncing as the car passed over, leaving her crumpled zig-zag in the headlights of the oncoming pickup.

I woke up, the faintest morning light visible around the drapes in the tall windows of our hotel room. I closed my eyes again to go back to sleep; finding myself still standing on the pavement, gaping, I opened them again. Why did my subconscious let me see that? I wondered, pushing the white linens away to get up, walked into the bathroom, brushed my teeth.

It's the thumbsucking. I decided. It's got to stop. It's past time, and it's dangerous.

So we've started a new regimen in addition to the chart on the calendar: band-aids on both thumbs, keeping her hands in constant motion with chores and projects. And yesterday I painted both thumbnails pink with pepper sauce.

O is for On the Other Hand ....

2009-04-01T09:38:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was talking to Artemis about the dream and what my subconscious, dressed in the body of a man, said to me.

She looked thoughtful for a moment. You know, Lisa, I think that's what you want to say to the Boy, not what you're saying to yourself. Because y'all have had quite a week with him.

And I thought about the report card full of Bs, the worst one ever; his teachers complaining that he's been playing around in class and not focusing on his work; the constant nagging fight of homework; his surly teenager attitude ....

... maybe.

N is for Nothing to See. Nevermind

2009-03-31T04:50:00.000-05:00

It's 4:24 AM and I've been awake for two hours now, yanked out of sleep by a subconscious that walked up to me and told me that I was not doing what I'm supposed to be doing and that it was tired of playing around with me.

I opened my eyes in the darkness to the glaring red eyes of the clock, the tall numbers blinking at me hungrily. I turned over, moved towards the center of the bed, and tried to go back to sleep. But the unleashed to-do list slinked down under the covers and began tweaking my toes, one by one, ending, of course, with the broken one, because it hurt. I opened my eyes, stared at the filmy fabric of the scarf over top rails of the bed. Yeah, you forgot to get toe tape yesterday, genius girl.

I didn't actually forget. I stopped by the little pharmacy in the neighborhood on my way to work yesterday. They had every conceivable size of self-adhering fabric bandage from finger to knee to whole body, but nothing small enough for a broken toe. You're making excuses, genius girl.

You need to get your butt up and email that file to the accountant, and find that lost bank statement, and articles of incorporation. You need to clean the kitchen. You need to write that proposal for that guy you met last week. You need to check and make sure the online banking thing paid the bills it was supposed to pay yesterday. You need to take out the recycling. You need to figure out what the hell is up with the Boy, why he brought home not one, but two notes from school yesterday.

I probably should take him to school this morning, talk to his teacher and the PE teacher both. You think, genius girl? You think you should have done that a month ago? Two months?

It's not like I haven't talked to her, at least. We've discussed what needs to happen. I've discussed it with the Boy. You're making excuses, genius girl.

So I got up, and did the dishes and straightened up the countertops a bit, and here I am at the computer, catching up on stuff for our Daisy troop, emailing the accountant, looking for all the papers misplaced in the scattered detritus of our lives.

You're procrastinating again, genius girl. And You--you out there, encouraging her, I'm talking to you--there's nothing to see here, so move on now.

M is for Mustang

2009-03-27T17:07:00.000-05:00

(Yes, this photo, again. I need to take more, or scan more, but not in the works today.)

Sitting at the stoplight at Devonshire and Kingshighway today, the engine idling roughly as we waiting. A couple walks by, the man's eyes glued on the car. As they step into the street, he says to the woman, Now that's a real Mustang. She nodded. They looked at us, inside the car, and offered thumbs-up that we returned.

Now that it's running again, I've been making a point of driving the Mustang around some. Not a lot, because a trip to South City to fetch kids from school burns a quarter tank of premium grade fuel, but enough to have a sense that this part of my life is over. I feel very conspicuous driving it, probably because everyone stares into the car as they drive by or I drive by them. I get a lot of thumbs ups and waves, a lot of comments as I get out or in or fill it up. I don't like the attention. Wallflower that I am, I wonder if I ever really did.

But the bigger thing is that I've suddenly realized how very far automotive techonology has come in the last 45 years. When we were in our 20s, we drove our classic Mustangs every day--to work, to go camping, on road trips--everywhere. Compared to the Horizons/Omnis we drove in college, the Mustangs were an improvement: bigger, more powerful, more comfortable, more fun, infinitely more prestigious. Even in those first post-college years, in the short trips to work between here and Maplewood, here and Clayton, the Mustang did just fine.

But between long commutes and the statutory requirement to use car seats that require 3-point seat belts, I've been driving modern cars almost every day since 1996, and at this point, the Mustang pales in comparison. It's noisy: I'm painfully aware of every sound from the cars around me and the ear-shattering volume of ambulances and police cars. It's cold: the vents that blow the heat are woefully underpowered for short trips in a cabin of its size. It's hot: i.e., not air-conditioned. And my God, the clutch feels like the forward version of one of the glute machine at the gym.

(Click on the link to see the web page for the company selling that fine piece of equipment, model not included.
No, that is not me. I am not blonde. Nothing wrong with blonde, just not me.)

The Boy is estatic that it's out again. He talks about it being his car in about seven years when he's old enough to drive. He hugs it, strokes it, reads the manual.

The Husband doesn't want anything to do with it. He wants to sell it, but doesn't even want anything to do with that process.

Me, I'm divided. When I drop it into third, I still hear the deep-throated rumble I always loved, albiet rough since the #8 valve is shot. Every rusting bubble is like a blister for me, raw and painful. I feel like a traitor for letting it get to this point. But we can't afford to sink all that cash into the car, not with so many architects out of work (although not either of us, knock on wood), not when noone with a license wants to drive it. And I'm a fogey wimp whining about the lack of creature comfort.

Am I really going to sell it? Will I regret it forever if I do?

Or just be thankful to be down to one pre-Vietnam era automotive headache?

I just don't know. Despite the fact that it's significantly under-insured, I almost wish the car would get smashed by a fallen tree or an out-control Freightliner so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore.

L is for Longer

2009-03-24T09:34:00.000-05:00

My officemate Artemis adores the Girl. She calls her Presh, short for Precious, which I have faint objections to because of our other not-friend, Gollum.

Anyway ... the Girl has wound up hanging out at the office a few times on sick days and such. On one of these, Artie comes in after a lunch meeting, swings her green purse across the back of her chair, and walks towards the Girl. You know, Presh, you're just like me, you know that?

The Girl is watching Toy Story on the other computer, Hera, the Mother of all Laptops. She has her left thumb inserted into her mouth up to webbing. She barely glances up to acknowledge Artie, much less makes any attempt to continue the conversation.

You see, Presh, continues Artie, her long, mocha-colored bangs curling into her dark eyes, I used to like my thumb too. But do you know what happened?

The Girl shrugs, eyes stuck to the screen. Artie holds her thumbs together, shows her. See? that one's a little longer than the other one.

The Girl is suddenly moderately interested. Enough to gaze thoughtfully before going back to the screen. I think, If anyone can make thumbsucking into your 20s attractive, it's Artie with her cool clothes, beautiful hair, and liquid grace.

I would imagine that hurts a bit, stretching your thumb like that, I said, trying to make it sound like a casual inquiry into the drawbacks of having distended thumbs.

No, no, it's kind of useful sometimes. I glare at Artie, point my index finger, cock the thumb as a pretend gun at her above the Girl's head, beyond her line of vision centered on the 17" widescreen.

The a-ha moment was visible on Artie's face. But every time I go get a manicure, they ask me why my thumbs don't match. It's kind of rough having to explain it.

The Girl has turned to stone in front of Hera. I go get the janitor's hand dolly, pry her from the chair, and wheel her to the car.

K is for Kaos

2009-03-22T18:30:00.000-05:00

Time for a string of vaguely related confessions:

1. I mostly think that astrology is absolutely nonsensical.
2. But I am a Libra, dead center of the sign, with the Moon and the everything all aligning to make me about as purely Libra as one can possibly be.
3. No one would describe me as being a cleanliness is next to godliness sort, except where it concerns drawing or darkrooms.
4. After a mere four days of spring break at home with the Husband and the children, the chaos was overwhelming my innate Libran need for order.
5. When we vacation in hotel rooms, we spend 10-15 minutes each day (at the Husband's insistence) straightening up the room so that it doesn't freak the maids out.
6. One might think it wouldn't be too difficult to do that here.
7. But even my lawful good son, who screams bloody murder when his sister fails to hang her towel up or rinse out the sink after brushing her teeth, looks at me like I'm speaking Retro-romanische when I ask them to spend 5 minutes picking up the living room.
8. The Husband, a fellow Libra, suggested I go to the office, since I can control the level of chaos there.
9. I considered it, but I'd have to come home eventually.
10. All in all I wish there was a retrogresser gun so I could be 8 again and not notice.

J is for Jury Duty

2009-03-11T20:02:00.000-05:00

Monday morning I drove downtown, parked the car in the Savvis Center garage, and hobbled the five blocks to the pyramid-topped Civil Courts building at the center of the Gateway Mall. Jury duty again: the biannual ritual.

I was surprised to be called in the second group. First in the second group, no less. In the seventh floor courtroom, I was seated in the top left corner of the Jury Box. Well, here I am. I thought. I'd have to be an ax murderer to get out of this now.

Voir dire. The attorneys question the 54 of us, prosecution first.

Have you or a close family member ever been the victim of a crime? Not a car break-in, or a home break-in when you're gone. A robbery, an assault? A woman with long blonde hair three rows in front of me raises her hand. The prosecuting attorney, a petite long-haired blonde herself, scans her juror list. Ms. ---? The woman clears her throat. About 20 years ago, I was kidnapped from South City, taken to St. Charles, and stabbed 15 times. The rest of us sit up, look at her a little more closely. Prosecutor asks a few clarifying questions, then Do you think this experience would make it difficult to be fair and impartial in this case? Ms. ---- nods. Yes, ma'am, I do. The Prosecutor nodded, said thank you, and went to the next person. A few more people assaulted, mugged, brothers murdered. They all think they can be impartial, and I wonder at that.

Has a close family member been arrested, charged, or convicted of a serious crime? asks the Prosecutor. The woman next to Ms. --- discusses her brother's conviction for pornography. They let it go on a while before they charged him, she said. I don't think it was very fair. Another woman, in the audience seating: my brother's in prison for murder. Do you correspond with him? asked the prosecutor. The sister nods. Another woman in that row: my son is in prison for assault, but I know he didn't do it. The lawyer writes something on her clipboard. They all say they can be impartial, but I wonder at that.

This goes on for most of Monday afternoon. My life has been fortunate; my family, while inclined towards chemical mood alteration, nonviolent and comparatively straight. Unlike the last time I came up for jury selection--for an auto accident case--I had nothing to say. No smart remarks about the speed limit being arbitrary. No questions. No offenses. No reason to do anything but listen and wonder at the blessings and simplicity of my life.

The blonde prosecutor looked at her watch, flipped to the top of her jury list. Ms. S------ she mangles the name, of course. I correct her gently, make eye contact. Do you know any reason you could not be fair and impartial in this case? she asked. I shake my head, looking at the young defendent sitting silent across the room. No, ma'am, I don't.

I is for Interview

2009-03-07T12:51:00.000-06:00

A Facebook meme turned blog post. Ask the kids questions ... watch out for the answers ...

1. What is something mom always says to you?
BOY: Stop.
GIRL: Be quiet.

2. What makes mom happy?
BOY: Being quiet and obeying
GIRL: When we be good.

3. What makes mom sad?
BOY: us doing the opposite of the last one
GIRL: when we be bad

4. How does your mom make you laugh?
BOY: when she cracks a bad joke
GIRL: when she tickles me.

5. What was your mom like as a child?
BOY: Fence-climbing suburban kid.
GIRL: I don’t know.

6. How old is your mom?
BOY: 39
GIRL: 39

7. How tall is your mom?
BOY: I’d have to measure you.
GIRL: I don’t know.

8. What is her favorite thing to do?
BOY: go on bike rides
GIRL: go out to eat

9. What does your mom do when you're not around?
BOY: blog, email, and stare at the computer screen
GIRL: go to meetings

10. If your mom becomes famous, what will it be for?
BOY: architecture
GIRL: for being a good worker

11. What is your mom really good at?
BOY: science
GIRL: riding her bike.

12. What is your mom not very good at?
BOY: video games
GIRL: hugging me when it’s time for bed

13. What does your mom do for her job?
BOY: architect jury duty person (I have jury duty on Monday.)
GIRL: works as an architect

14. What is your mom's favorite food?
BOY: risotto
GIRL: asparagus

15. What makes you proud of your mom?
BOY: how she thinks so fast.
GIRL: how she does her work all the times

16. If your mom were a cartoon character, who would she be?
BOY: I don’t know
GIRL: the little yellow bird--you remember the little yellow bird that has the little head. (me: on Peanuts?) no, remember the cat tries to eat the little yellow bird. (Tweety?) yeah, Tweety Bird

17. What do you and your mom do together?
BOY: ride bikes together
GIRL: play games.

18. How are you and your mom alike?
BOY: hair (patting me on head) eyes (jabs finger dangerously close to my face)
GIRL: we have blue eyes.

19. How are you and your mom different?
BOY: “I’m male, you’re female.”
GIRL: I have curly hair and she has straight.

20. How do you know your mom loves you?
BOY: Hugs me all the time.
GIRL: she hugs and gives me kisses.

22. Where is your mom's favorite place to go?
BOY: Fayetteville.
GIRL: come back home after trip.

23. How do you make your Mom laugh?
BOY: make bad jokes
GIRL: make jokes.

H is for H2O

2009-03-06T13:32:00.001-06:00

I never really thought much about water.

I really have always more or less taken it for granted.

As a child, it was all in terms of play: the smooth surface of the lake, reflecting the summer sky until a ski boat rushed by; the rush of water out of the hose, warming as it crossed the tea-colored concrete of our driveway as we laid face down, trying to escape the summer heat; the torrents of storm water to be tamed by dams and channels in the ditches down the street.

In adulthood, it's more functional: the perpetual running faucets of Rome, that become thirst-quenching fountains when you plug the open end with your finger; the green bottles of Mountain Valley that taste like summer camp; the orange five gallon buckets, carefully dechlorinated, that keep the fish swimming.

Reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, with its dark portrait of the United States broken down by environmental catastrophe and societal disintegration, I began to worry more. The Husband waved north. We've got a whole river bringing water to us--two whole river systems. That might be a problem in the West, but here ... it will never be.

Well, probably not in my lifetime.

But Mesopotamia was once the breadbasket of the world, not a place where operations called "Desert Storm" take place.
Georgia and Tennessee are having a border dispute, largely over water.
Westerners are becoming concerned about the future viability of the Colorado River, the stream that cut the Grand Canyon, as a water source.

I look at that and wonder why we would be any different than the rest of the world. Truth of the matter is that we aren't: after Camille, in the weeks before I was born, my mother was sent back home to Little Rock to avoid possible outbreaks of dysentery and other gastric illnesses. After Katrina hit New Orleans, drinkable water--and avoidance of contaminated sewage washed into the streets--was still a key issue. And here in St. Louis, with the New Madrid ever tightening under and around our century-old water systems, we are one earthquake away from similar disasters.

I don't want to think about it. I'd rather daydream of long days on the lake, drinking iced tea and splashing the children.

G is for Genocide

2009-03-04T07:09:00.000-06:00

I woke up slowly, the Husband's shower sounding a hundred miles away. Why am I awake? I wonder. The radio. The radio is on. His radio is on. NPR, Morning Edition, the familiar Midwestern voice of Steve Inskeep. I laid in the dark and listened, drowsing under the deep red flannel sheet and the Log Cabin quilt. Senator McCain on earmarks, cricket team attack, some guy talking about Iraq.

And then suddenly I was wide awake.

Americans remind me of someone who gets wildly drunk, careens down the highway, clips a bunch of cars, crosses the median, and smashes into the showcase window of a business, hops out of the car and says, you should clean this mess up but I'm bored and I'm leaving. By the way, I don't have enough money to pay for this mess. You better clean it up.

As if that weren't bad enough, the next part has haunted me all day:

I was speaking in California last week, near liberal Mill Valley, California. And I said, look, if you leave right now, this could lead to genocide.

And somebody in the audience said, So What?

And somebody else said, Genocide happens all the time.

I laid stricken still with shock. How old are these people? Are they my age, grown up in a supposedly desegregated America that isn't, really? Are they today's twenty-somethings, who came of political awareness in the 1990's, during Bosnia, so they think that what happened there and in Sudan is normal and not worthy of our notice or prevention?

And if this is what the liberals think--the liberals, mind you--

I weep for our miserable, over-weaponed world.

F is for Fast

2009-03-04T06:38:00.000-06:00

Sunday morning, 10 a.m. We all slept in, exhausted from the long day at State Chess Tournament the day before and the four hours of driving to and from Jefferson City. The Husband walks into the kitchen, studies the pantry. I'm making pancakes. he announced.

I nodded, started putting away dishes. That done, I walked to the playroom in the sunny closed-in porch at the east end of our unit. The kids were sitting the red chair together, fingers flying on the game controllers, playing Mario Party. Breakfast in a few minutes, I said. Dad's making pancakes.

The Girl looked suddenly stricken. But I gave up pancakes for Lent!

I shrugged. You gave them up, we didn't.

A few minutes later we're all together in the kitchen--kids sitting on the window seat, the Husband with spatula in hand at the stove, me leaning against the black-and-white cabinets. The Girl's plate is full of eggs and bacon and blackberries. The Boy has sawed his pancakes into a neat grid, with butter on each tiny piece, the whole drizzled with maple syrup. It's a happy, casual meal.

The Husband looked at the Boy. Did you give up anything for Lent?

Yeah, vegetables.

That's not much of a sacrifice.

Oh, I don't know about that. I interjected. That means that you can't eat corn, or asparagus--I paused to add emphasis--or cherry tomatoes.

The Boy chewed his pancake carefully, thinking. Maybe I should give up fruit instead.

E is for Eggs. and Easter

2009-02-28T20:27:00.000-06:00

We get our eggs from a local farm, through our CSA.

They are, of course, brown eggs, from hens who have never known a cage.

The Wednesday it snowed the Husband and the Girl picked up our share while the Boy and I took the bus back from the pediatrician's office. The bus, because the RX-8 doesn't do ice and snow, and the Miata has only two seats.

They got home first, put away most of the food.

And she said something really funny, he said. She asked me, Dad, will we get white eggs to color for Easter?

She seemed really concerned about it. I said yes, we'll get white eggs for Easter.

But you know, it could be fun to color some brown ones too. I'm just saying ...

(note: bonus entry! I wrote this in advance and forgot about it! oops!)

E is for Exit

2009-02-27T15:27:00.001-06:00

Exit Realty piqued my curiosity a couple of years ago: I had noticed the logo on signs here, in Arkansas, in other places. One afternoon I saw a sign in front of a house I've admired for a long time, so I googled it when I got back to the office. The information about the property was in the range of what was expected: too big, too much.

The rationale behind the name of the company, however, has stuck with me, as one of those examples of what not to do:

Why the name “EXIT” Realty?

EXIT IS ILLUMINATED ABOVE EVERY CORPORATE DOOR IN NORTH AMERICA!

MILLIONS and MILLIONS of EXIT signs across North America point to the way.
You see EXIT every place you go. Think about it…
EXIT is the most advertised name in the world.
EXIT signs must be illuminated by law.
The word EXIT suggests “Safe Passage”.
EXIT signs are always strategically located.
EXIT has a tremendous subliminal effect.
EXIT is memorable – the real purpose of advertising.
The Seller is making an “EXIT”.
EXIT has four letters/two syllables.
EXIT signs are paid for with other people’s money!
Everybody is looking for a way out!

Everybody is looking for a way out, I thought. Not a very good portent for the real estate market.

But apt, as fate has shown.

Maybe Omnipotent Realty knew what was coming?

note to real estate agents: I am critiquing, not looking for services. I plan to stay where I am forever. thanks for not adding me to your contact list.

D is for (Public) Display ( of Religion)

2009-02-26T14:18:00.000-06:00

Listening to the Gospel at Eucharist last night. Matthew 6: the one about praying, almsgiving, fasting in secret, not for demonstrating holiness to the world, but for God and God alone.

And then, not even 10 minutes later, the priests smudge our foreheads with grey crosses of oil and ash.

C is for Child Abduction

2009-01-30T18:05:00.000-06:00

Sitting in the bay with the camera on its tripod next to me, pointing across the park at the sunset. Waiting. Watching the stream of traffic below as the lights cycle over and over, staring pointedly at every yellow bus.

That one's in the wrong lane.

That one has a flat front.

That one has a black hood, not a yellow one.

It's 5:12 p.m., more than an hour after school dismissal, and the Boy has not yet arrived home.

When his sister's bus pulled up, we came upstairs, me hoping he had arrived early and come in on his own even though he's supposed to wait for her. The red door to our unit was locked and the entry hall dark.

So I sit there and watch, with the blue cell phone in my hand, dialing the Transportation Department on speakerphone. Busy signal. Hang up and repeat, in triplicate.

I feel the panic in my chest, pushing out from my ribcage against my navy turtleneck.

What if the bus arrived early and there was someone else waiting for him?

What if he read through his stop again and tried to walk home from too far away ... ?

What if, what if, what if?

An Amber Alert ticker scrolls in my head. I try to shake it off, then get a mental image of Shawn Hornbeck in my mind. You're being paranoid, I tell myself. Don't give in to this bullshit hysteria. You know the chances are miniscule.

But, but, but ....

Where is my son???

I pace across the living room, from the windows to the dining room.

Not his bus.

Not his bus ....

And then I remember, it's Friday. Cub Scouts? I pull his yellow folder from the shelf and check. Yes, he has Cub Scouts from 4:10 to 5:30. And it's 5:36 now and Stella has him in her dark blue SUV. He's in the back seat with Corbin, talking and laughing as Peyton teases them from the front seat. I pour a glass of red wine from the open bottle, sit down, begin writing. His cat lifts herself from the table, stretches, leaps to the floor and walks out of the room. The elevator clunks to a stop at our floor, the door clanging metallic as it rolls shut combining with her meow and our door opening thickly.

He's home. And I am releived beyond words.

B is for Babies

2009-01-24T17:41:00.000-06:00

I'm in one of those phases when it seems that everyone I know is having babies.

It happened before, back when I was in my 20's: a lot of my friends reproduced within about two years of each other. I disappeared: I had no plans of having kids myself, and babies always made me very nervous. Like shaking nervous, made worse by the fact that the child would invariably start screaming as soon as it was put in my hands.

The summer before I turned 28, the inevitable happened: babies started to become attractive. Interesting. Desirable.

I finally got up the courage to talk to the Husband about it at a Cardinals game that fall. He was amenable; I was surprised. He was surprised. We decided that we'd do this crazy thing as the fireworks went off at the end of the game. It was exhilarating and magical.

A week or so later I mentioned a few preparations to him, and he looked frightened. Oh no, no. I need to get licensed first. You need to get licensed first. and we need to ... and appended a long list.

I was heartbroken, but went on.

We took and passed the ARE. We went to Europe again. We learned to Scuba Dive. We flew First Class (frequent flyer miles), ate nice meals in nice restaurants, went to movies, bought books and CDs, English suits and Italian shoes.

And then his grandmother died, not really suddenly but still he didn't quite expect it, I don't think. The pink living room furniture was recovered in commercial fabric in tones of blue and green to fit its new household. The bedroom suite, with its tall dresser and oval mirrored dressing table, was set up in our room, with our Lone Star quilt covering the mated twin beds.

A few months later he was sitting on the bed one morning as we got dressed. Suddenly, he blurted out, sounding hurt and distraught, Why won't you have my baby?!?!?!?!?!?

I whirled around, angry in a flash. The baseball game hadn't been mentioned in months, maybe in a year. Because I'm waiting for you to decide you're ready!!!

He looked abashed, almost ashamed. Well, then, I guess we can start.

So now, over a decade later, I look around at all the friends who are having babies now .... Bridgett, Cherise and her twins, Andrea and her 41st birthday surprise ....

and I look at my kids, all independent grade schoolers now ....

and I think of those nights spent half-asleep in Grandma Lee's once-pink-now-purple rocker, with a warm baby nestled against my breast and the turquoise scrap quilt covering both of us ...

and my ovaries ache with yearning, while my heart and mind know that these two, these perfect two, are enough.

A is for AK

2009-01-22T18:12:00.000-06:00

Saturday morning I finally got around to reading the weekly email from the local AIA Chapter.

It's not unusual to learn of a colleague's death through the Missive, but this morning marked the first time the announcement had any effect on me beyond, oh, that's too bad.

AK and I, like most small architecture firms around here, competed for clients. In fact, he and I competed more directly than most, since we know the same interior designers and do the same sort of work. We very much fished from the same small pond.

A little more than a year ago, a local restaurateur came to me with one of AK's plans. I paid the guy but I want to change everything and I want a new architect.

I should have called AK, just as a professional courtesy.

But I didn't. I still don't quite know why.

And six or nine months later, he pretty much stopped talking to me. I kind of figured he had gotten wind of what I had done. I never spoke to him about it directly, though I kind of meant to. I avoided doing so in a conveniently cowardly way. There are people around now. It's almost time for the program to start. Etc, Etc. And time passed by, until it's Saturday morning and I'm reading my email and learning that he is dead.

My first thought was the obligatory, Oh, that's too bad.

My second thought was, hmmmmm, wonder if there's more work in it for me.

My third thought was not a thought at all, but a flash of deep reddening shame.

Z is for ZZ-Various

2009-01-17T20:07:00.000-06:00

I worked in one of those big box category killers in college and during that first summer of marriage. Books, Video, Music .... I probably spent more of my paycheck there than I kept. Almost certainly, between the Husband and I we did.

The first Tuesday I was put to work in the music department, moving new CDs from the Rubbermaid cart to the assigned spot in the CD racks, checking that the longboxes were tight and the security strips intact on the existing stock as I did. In that 8 hours, I filed music from AC/DC to ZZ-Various.

I spent more time in that last section after my shift. The catch-all location for samplers and soundtracks, dedications and decade collections, is where after reading the backs one by one you find the CD that saves you from buying an entire album by Dexy's Midnight Runners or Don McLean, where testing new trends in music is $15 for one CD instead of $100 for 6. So I still spend lots of time there when we're shopping, or browsing that section of emusic or iTunes or whatever.

Y is for Yam

2009-01-11T22:28:00.000-06:00

Why was this so hard? All these days fighting with the letter Y, when the topic was almost underfoot in the wire basket with the onions ....

Yams. The word conjures the mushy orange oblongs from two-pound cans, whipped with maple syrup at Thanksgiving and Christmas with marshmellows on top. I always wanted to like them, because of the marshmellows, but the sticky sweetness repelled me, even as a child. And they were on my plate because Honey she's got to have some yams. and plop! a dallop landed on my plate, touching the sliced white turkey breast and the brown-and-serve roll and my salad. And I didn't like anything to touch anything--I still don't like anything to touch anything--and I was stuck if I wanted the first slice of Grandma Cora's chocolate pie--deep chocolate with the barest skim coat of meringue.

So when I saw Sweet Potatoes on the list at Fair Shares, I visibly cringed, enough so that one of the volunteers asked if I was all right. And we've had a lot of them, more than I can pawn off on other people. So I've been trying to find a way to make them palatable ....

I sliced a couple thin and made chips.
Another couple, I nuked and the Girl and I ate them with butter.

When we went to the in-laws place the day after Christmas, his mom had made a sweet potato casserole, with maple syrup and toasted pecans in place of the marshmellows, with the yams I left there the weekend before. I tried to walk away from the stove without some--Lisa, you've got to try some of this, she said--and I held out my plate to accept a generous spoonful.

Took the first tentative nibble .... and then another ... not as crazy sweet as I remembered ... and then I was out. And I went and got another scoop out of the casserole on the stove.

I'm still not a fan, but don't tell Granny I ate someone else's casserole when I won't touch hers. I'll never live it down.

X is for eXpectations

2008-12-15T10:15:00.000-06:00

So we got a little freezing rain overnight in St. Louis, and you'd think it was a blizzard from the pre-precipitation hype. I'm sure the stores are devoid of milk and bread although I arrived back in town too late to take part in the bonding ritual.

This morning, some schools are closed, although standing outside waiting for the yellow buses it was hard to see why. The one slick spot right at the Kingshighway intersection provided some amusement as the speeding, not-planning-to-stop SUVs slipped and swayed to red light obedience, but there were no crashes.

So we tapped our toes on unbroken patches of ice to hear the crackling as the surface shattered, we pulled scarves and mittens to cover every bare bit of skin. We stamped our feet on the sidewalk and turned our backs against the cold wind. The children skated on the smooth black ice on the side street. After a while I pulled my phone out of my pocket to glance at the time. 8:45. All buses late. And suddenly it occurred to me that given the idiosyncrasies of the SLPS perhaps we wouldn't have buses today. The Husband drove the Cat to work; Rexy, with her slick summer tires, is undrivable on ice. Today is a convertible day for me, and our roadster has only two cozy seats.

As I pondered the possibilities, a flash of yellow appeared at the far end of the street. The Boy's bus. He jumped up the steps at 8:50. The Girl and I continued to wait, but with only 10 minutes left before the school bell was to ring, we walked back into the house.

Ten minutes to find keys.
Ten minutes to pry iced-stuck doors open.
Ten minutes to defrost and scrape the car.

The Girl arrived at school 40 minutes late. I sent her scurrying to the classroom as I walked into the office to check her in.

Room number, name? asked the secretary.

As I signed the slip, I said--casually, conversationally-- Bus didn't show up this morning.

The secretary nodded. When I called Transportation this morning, they said a lot of drivers didn't show up. They shoulda called off school.

I snapped. No, people should do what they're supposed to do.

Turned, walked out the door. Saw half a dozen more people walking up the sidewalk. I overheard one mother on her cell phone--I'll be there in about 20 minutes, I'm sorry, the bus didn't come.-- as she hurried two children carrying stuffed full backpacks.

I expect school to be in session unless road conditions are impassable, the plumbing is out of order, or some other serious catastrophe occurs. I expect my children to be there, attentive in their seats, unless they're sick in bed or we have some family calamity that prevents their attendance. I expect the same from the school personnel--secretaries and bus drivers, teachers and superintendent alike.

Maybe I expect too much.

W is for Waiting Room

2008-12-13T20:15:00.000-06:00

I've become a bit of a connoisseur of waiting rooms over the last few years, between July July July and the assorted minor calamities of parenthood.

It's a kind of a new thing, or maybe a revival of the days of the 1970's when Mom was sick for a while and in and out of the hospital and Grandpa Chick was sick and died and we kids were left in the waiting room on the first floor of St. Vincent's with books and Hot Wheels to amuse ourselves for what seemed forever because we weren't allowed on the higher floors At All.

But now I'm an adult, and have access to the patient rooms, albeit two by two in the ICU. I'm expected to want to be in The Room, and truth be told, I'd rather sit in the Waiting Room and wait and watch and listen to the stories of other families unfold. I'm embarrassed by the near nudity in the patient rooms, frightened by the whirrs and beeps of machinery and the high-pitched whistles noone else ever hears, and unnerved by the frailty of those I saw as strong.

At Baptist in Little Rock, where we were with Daddy Fred, the waiting room was a windowless room with comfortable furniture arranged in logical family conversation groupings. The area was dedicated to ICU, with phones for the families punctuating the walls. Glass partitions separating the staff areas from the family, so we could see the doctors coming and going, catch them on the way to discuss our questions and issues. You could feel helpful in the Waiting Room, because you were Watching for The Doctor, and could sneak into the ward and tell the pair in The Room that The Doctor had Arrived.

Baxter Regional is nothing like this. Intensive Care shares with two other wards here. There are two seating groups, too large for comfortable conversation. The elevators are around a corner, the users out of sight. The doctors can sneak by. Pick your day--here I sit, waiting, for at least a while before going back to the house to try to work and take care of the everyday, to be useful in some way.

Arnold comes in. Arnold went to architecture school the same place we did, twenty years previous, but never really practiced. Isn't this a nice space? he said, looking up and around. They've done some nice things in this hospital.

I look around. It's a nice section in concept: the two-story space lights the third floor hallway as well as the waiting area. In detail, in the things we touch and experience, not so much. Standard aluminum-frame windows, the glass translucent to keep the insolation to a minimum with the result of rendering all sunshine grey and northlike. A minimum weight commercial carpet next to wood-look vinyl planks. The seating cheap and uncomfortable. One phone on a desk obviously meant for a volunteer of some sort. Noone goes near it.

I look at him, quizzical. Form ever follows function???

You should see the space up in the doctor's wing. he says. It's really something.

It's not, but I don't say so.

V is for Visitation, Ventilator & Venison

2008-12-08T15:23:00.000-06:00

It's been hellaciously busy for weeks now, and as the end of the year approaches the velocity of my life accelerates. Yesterday ...

Visitation. Standing in line in the Jewish Funeral Home on Delmar, the line of people stretching all the way forward and all the way back, the taste of Communion Wine still strong in my mouth. By blind luck two of the three people I know in the room are right behind me; we catch up as we work our way forward, offering condolence to the black clad family: C., tearful but smiling at seeing us; her older sister almost crying under her long, curly bangs; the twin, her face a composed, wider version of C.'s, the brothers stoic. We sit in the back of the chapel, bowing our heads through the whisper of Hebrew prayers, phonetically typed on light blue programs.

Ventilation. Two hours into the Boy's birthday party at the City Museum, standing outside above the ball pit watching the eight 9-year-olds battle a like number of teenaged girls. Freezing since I forgot my coat in the mad rush between the funeral and the stadium blanket moved back into the other car. The Husband climbing up the spiral stairs from the ball pit, talking on the phone, walking towards the airplanes and the tower along the alley. He comes back, his face grave. Well? I ask. He shakes his head. The Doctor. Talking about putting him on a ventilator tonight. And I knew then that I would find myself along for the drive.

Venison. Dammit, for all the cost and hassle I should at least get the meat.

U is for Unforgotten Dream

2008-11-21T05:21:00.000-06:00

Here's one for all the amateur dreamologists out there ....

I was subbing at the Boy's school. The classroom was like a garage, concrete and grey and darkly fluorescent lit but lovely in a stark Tadao Ando kind of way, with the dozen or so wood all-in-one chairs (like we had when we were kids) for them to sit in on one side and tall plywood shelves, full of books and art supplies and teaching materials, on the other. Another line of plywood shelving units divided the room from a ramp down to a half light door. I sat at an old grey Steelcase desk at the head of the ramp, on the edge of two stairs leading down to another solid steel door. There was an orange-and-white Maine coon cat (one of the cats from this show I watched last night) rubbing against my ankle.

All the kids had gone outside to play except the Boy's best friend, Lucas. The tow-headed blond and I were waiting for the home health nurse to come give him a shot. She came in, a chubby older woman wearing dusty blue knits, and gave it to him as he sat in my antique, green vinyl seated Steelcase chair. She started telling me about all the side effects as he snuck away from us and out the solid door to go play. She gave me a a yellow half-piece of paper describing the side effects (all deadly) as well as a disease children could catch from Lucas if the shot had been administered incorrectly. It was different for boys than girls, even had a different name.

As we were talking we had apparently walked down the ramp and we were outside the half door, standing on a concrete patio with potted trees. One edge was bounded by a metal-roofed area of porch adjacent to a house; the driveway extended down towards the street; and the other edge overlooked a lush, summertime green park about the size and shape and description of Lindenwood Park, the view as if looking across the soccer fields towards Jamison. The home health lady said I think I gave it to him right and it won't hurt anyone else. I didn't feel very reassured.

I heard cats fighting in the classroom, and looked in the glazed door window to see a sleek long-haired black-and-white cat and a white cat fighting on the desk, papers flying everywhere, and the orange-and-white slinking around the corner of the shelves lining the ramp into the classroom area. (These were also clearly not my cats because they were immaculately silkily groomed.) I turned back to the lady and made some comment about tomcats fighting, about my mother-in-laws many cats when the Husband and I were in college and then she was gone.

I heard the Girl calling me from the play area, and I looked over the park. She was almost in the middle of the field but I could see clearly, as if I had binoculars for eyes. I caught a butterfly, she yelled, and waved the shoebox in the her left hand.

I was surprised because it actually was a butterfly, the biggest orange-and-black Monarch I have ever seen, the wingspan fitting nearly into the box with very little space left over. I jumped off the patio--it was about 30 inches off the ground--started running towards her, yelling Put the lid on the box.

Her brother came out of the nearby trees and he started yelling Put the lid on the box.

She had a roll of drafting tape in her hand and was tearing off a long piece. She taped the leading edge of the butterfly's right wing to the edge of the box. I was yelling, No, No, thinking this is the end of the butterfly.

As she tore the second piece I was still yelling No, No and then I suddenly realized that we were on the edge of a building about six stories off the ground, and as she dropped the roll of beige tape I tripped and fell headlong, knocking her down, off the edge of the building. I reached for her and caught her, but I was falling too.

And that's where I woke up: in midair, mentally screaming No, No, my heart racing. I focused on the red numbers on the alarm clock: 4:27.

Time to get up, eight minutes shy of the alarm. With that stupid song Dog and Butterfly stuck on repeat in my head.

T is for Thorncrown (& Trek)

2008-11-18T12:33:00.000-06:00

As in, Thorncrown Chapel, the sublime traveler's chapel near Eureka Springs, Arkansas. The Husband and I spent many hours as architecture students examining every stick of its structure before deciding to marry there.

And it just happens to appear in the trailer for the new Star Trek movie coming out in May.

I truthfully don't remember a time before Star Trek in my life. My parents both loved it; summer nights I was allowed to stay up to watch it after the news, curled up on the black Mediterrean-style sofa between them. I knew the Husband was a keeper when I found a brown plastic folder of Enterprise schematics on his bookshelf, which now sits next to my battered Concordance on the hall shelves.

Despite the inconsistent quality of previous movies, I'm cautiously psyched about this one; I'll be sitting in one of the Moolah's deep sofas one afternoon on Opening Weekend to be sure. This image--and the one preceding it in the trailer, of the sublimely cool Vulcan city--I take as a good sign.

Edit: May 18, 2009. IMDB lists the actual location as the SkyRose Chapel in Whittier, California.

S is for Substitutes

2008-11-14T11:05:00.000-06:00

The Girl's teacher has been out a lot lately. Don't know exactly what's up with that, but what I do know is that we haven't been getting substitute teachers. Instead, the Principal has been dividing her class between other classrooms. So when I went to pick up my daughter on Wednesday, her classroom door was dark. I spotted her through the glass door of the neighboring classroom, the room she was in last year.

I went to the office, looking for the Principal, who was nowhere to be seen. Understandable: it's a big school, the day before the Fall Performances. Went to the other grade level room, where the teacher was sitting in her chair, surrounded by ~35 kids crowded onto her rainbow rug. She looked up, smiled in recognition. She's in Mrs. Y's room. I nodded. Went back to Mrs. Y's door, where she stood, looking tired and harried. She called the Girl, even though there were officially five minutes left in the day.

I asked Mrs. Y what was up. She gave me an upset and noncommittal answer, said she was doing the best she could with a dozen extra kids in the room. I try to include them when appropriate, and I've been making packets but .... her voice trailed off.

This has been going on for a while. It happened from time to time last year. But it's been at least five days in the last couple of weeks. It's way past unacceptable.

Told the Husband about it. He talked to the Principal, who said she couldn't control how many subs showed up, that it was out of her hands. She couldn't say when the Girl's teacher will be back or why she's out. I can't control when people take PTO days, she said. From what I've heard from my six-year-old, this situation is not that simple, but, well, okay: If you're not going to take responsibility for anything, we'll find someone who will, if we have to go all the way to Rick Sullivan to do it.

I called the Human Resources Office, spoke to the very competent-sounding Interim Chief. This is the first I've heard of problems there, she said. We just went to an automated system last year, and we're still working out the kinks. She indicated that the district has an ample number of substitutes. I'll call the Principal and see what the problem is, and call you back with the proposed solution.

I hung up the phone feeling both satisfied and angry. Satisfied that maybe, maybe something would be done. Angry because of all the things that should occupy a Principal's mind, shouldn't asking Human Resources why substitutes aren't arriving be near the top of the list? It's a ten minute phone call, for God's sake. I know. I made it.

Sometimes the SLPS just makes me wonder. What I see at our schools and hear from other parents, and this, and this, and this ...

It's no way to run a school district. Unless, of course, the goal is to run it into the ground.

R is for Roomba

2008-11-09T14:53:00.000-06:00

We were at one of those Wednesday night Continuing Education things the AIA puts on back in September, the Husband and I, together for a change, an odd sort of date night.

The speaker was David Zach, Futurist, and he paced the floor like an impatient hungry cat as he went through his presentation. Anybody here got a Roomba? A few hands went up, but the Husband had chosen seats front and center so Zach centered on me. You--you have a Roomba?

I have three Roombas.

Three! he paced to the table next to the front wall, then back to me. How does it clean?

A long-time Roomba owner, I get asked this all the time so I have a stock answer. It's better than vacuuming myself, better than not vacuuming at all. Zach looked a little astonished, then began explaining the device to the uniniated in the room.

I misspoke: we actually have four Roombas, but right now only the newest one--the Mother's Day gift I chose myself--is running. The other three are on the laundry room counter until I donate their bodies to science or something. It doesn't feel right to just throw them away; Roombas are rather personable for vacuum cleaners. I don't talk to my old WindTunnel, unless you count the grumbling as I unwind and drag and wind the cord around.

But I talk to Roombas as if they were dogs. C'mon, boy. Let's go into the kitchen. I say as I slide it out of its home under the buffet. Our Discovery--named Hammie by the Boy--had a habit of sliding past the infrared Virtual Walls, and I'd find it 3 or 4 rooms away from its assignment. Here you are! What are you doing in here? The cats meow at them as if conversing with the beeps. Morgan has been known to pounce on one and take a ride as the vacuum whirrs across the floor until it bumps into a baseboard or a piece of furniture, then bounces off, Pong-like, and continues on its way.

Zach flashed a slide up on the screen of levels of animal intelligence, from bacteria and roaches and spiders up (?) to adult humans. Here! he pointed triumphantly. Here is your Roomba: spider intelligence, catching the dirt that falls into its weblike path across the floor.

He went on from there, considering the constant advancement of techonology, and the whining and questioning inevitable when Roombas have the same cognitive abilities as teenagers. I listened and wondered why they would need to evolve. Spiders haven't. And for me, with two kids and a husband who bakes, it's not hard to figure out where to place the net.

Q is for Quotations

2008-10-28T12:38:00.000-05:00

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

Susan Sontag, On Photography.

P is for Pines

2008-10-23T18:16:00.000-05:00

In '77 or '78, Granny and Daddy Fred finally finished the New House and moved out of Grandma and Grandpa's little white-paneled set of attached, recycled huts from Camp Robinson and into the house built of tan-and-red clinker bricks with the gold-and-brown shag carpeted Great Room and the door, twelve feet above the ground, that led to the Future Deck.

The Shrimp and Chris and I were set loose in the hilly yard, and in the woods beyond--the woods that stretched nearly half a mile behind the house to Heinke Rd. and nearly a mile-and-a-half behind the homes of all the Campbell cousins into Mabelvale proper.

At first, we were timid. We played in the wetlands in the yard next door, damming the forking streams and fencing with cattails until the brown pods burst. When the daffodils came out on the old homestead to the south, we beat a path through the brush to the old barns and chicken house, and sat in their shade in the summer heat when Granny chased us outside so she could watch her soaps in relative peace.

But as the years went on, as our legs and arms grew longer and our courage more copious, we ventured further. Past the Hobbit-hole tree and the creek at the bottom of the Racetrack Hill behind Kevin's house. All the way east to watch the cars whizz by on Heinke. Back to the electric fence around the pond, where goats were penned next to the barn. Further north, until we found ourselves looking through the square wire fence into a yard full of old cars.

One afternoon, hot and sweaty and trying to find our way back to Kevin's house for a drink (because General Hospital was not yet over, we were certain), we found ourselves among a grove of young pines, just big enough that my sister and cousin, three years younger than me and Kevin, could stand full height. The mat of red-orange pine needles was thick and softly woven, almost like a carpet, and we crawled to the center and laid with our heads together under a hole in the canopy, legs extended like spokes, staring into the blue sky framed by waving lines of long green needles, forgetting our thirst as a breeze crested the hill and cooled our wet bodies.

Eventually, we heard Granny calling for us, and we left at a run--you do not keep her waiting, even now. But we never found our way back to that place. Or perhaps we did, but we had grown enough that we no longer recognized it.

O is for Ole Main

2008-10-04T13:33:00.000-05:00

Before I left for Governor's School, I filled my tiny room in the house on Southern Oaks with boxes, each carefully labeled Lisa's Room. I packed my clothes into the big green suitcase, threw some books into the old blue backpack, filled out the application to remain at Mills despite moving out of the district.

The end of the era awaited me at the little house three doors down from the cemetery Fourth of July weekend: the application was denied. When I arrived back in my Galloway dorm room, I crossed out LR Mills on my nametag and wrote above it NLR Ole Main.

A couple of days later, talking with childhood friend Suzy under the trees, I met RebL. Hey, I go to Ole Main, she said.

Photo by the magnificent purple and mystical goat of love,
otherwise known as John Twosheds, aka RebL's husband.

Ole Main got its name from its building, a grand 1922 Art Deco ediface whose tower I had always noted from the freeway. Mom & I walked up the front steps to register me in the office, then walked down the wood-floored hall to the counselor. She looked at the transcripts, the test scores, and whistled. Then we got to the business of making my schedule for the year, using the plan from Mills as a guide. AP English, Band. That part was easy. Substitute Yearbook Staff for Newspaper Staff, Creative Writing for Talented & Gifted Seminar. Could I drive to Northeast for AP Chemisty and Calculus? No, that conflicted with Band. So I signed up for World History and Physics instead. Seventh period Study Hall. I'll mark you as a work-study so you can just leave.

Then summer band practice started. A quick tryout with the white-haired director put me in my place: 4th chair in a 12-man section. One of the baritone players was an old family friend whose split-level home on Scenic Hill I had often visited, where I discovered Pong and cable TV. The guy who sat beside me (and his twin) had been born in the same hospital as me, on the same day--my mother had written their names in my baby book. RebL and I, now dating best friends from Conway, chose lockers together on the second floor and in the west hall of the Band Building. It was comfortable and easy.

After a year and a half at windowless, blocky Mills, I loved the building itself: cool mornings sitting on the windowsills writing Poetry in Mrs. Perry's room, the sound of flats against on the polished floors, the eastern sunlight warming me in second-period English, the wood and iron banisters .... the windows everywhere, in every classroom, in the stairwells, the light shining into the halls through the transoms over every ancient wood-and-glass door.

The people were mostly kind, even the preppy cheerleader types. I fit nicely in with the assortment of personalities that gathered on the band room patio during lunch, the group RebL wrote Little Pyros to celebrate.

The teachers, especially Garvin and Perry, and the Herrens, the married band directors, were the best of all three schools.

For the first time, the transition felt like a homecoming.

N is for Nine

2008-10-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

Nine things about the letter 9:

Curvaceous ambiguity, defying gravity standing on too-narrow leg.
Upside-down, it's something else.
Mr. Sixby went on and on and on in high school Sunday School class: 3 for the Holy Trinity, 7 the perfect number, 6 for some other reason lost in time. Eric rolled his eyes at his father. Alicia, still half asleep in those days before teenagers drank coffee, yawned and propped her head on her hand. I asked Why not 9? and Mr. Sixby looked confused, and then the door to the parish hall flew open, Father John looking for my companions, the acolytes, so class was over. I looked at the cookies laid out on the table with longing for the benediction after Eucharist.
Never understood why anyone would give or want Nine Ladies Dancing.
The 9-Square, tic tac toe board, the signature of Hejduk and the standard Design I project for Architecture Students everywhere. Richard Meier did it too, in white house after white house after white house.
Phonetically, no auf Deutsch.
Dante's circles of Hell. And the number of design studios required for a B.Arch at the University of Arkansas. A dreadful symmetry?
Each time, the beginning of the end of an era: the doorway to double digits, to adulthood, to being over the hill. At some point, to becoming a graceful dowager, but not for a long, long while.
3-6-9. 3+6=9. 3 x 3, the square, = 9. Just always seemed a lovely link between my birth day and year.

M is for M.

2008-09-29T23:13:00.000-05:00

I played trombone, and sat in the back of the band with the boys. This was a deliberate factor in my instrument choice; it was incredible good fortune that I had a natural inclination to playing the long, unwieldy horn.

There were a multitude of Johns in the band, and they all sat in the back. John the drummer with his spiky hair, John the baritone player who would remove his glass eye and set it on the tray of the black stand to hold his music tight, John V. who sat third chair next to my second, and John M., last in our four man section. We called them by their surnames for simplicity's sake.

One morning after breaking up with Elvis I bumped into M. on the way to an assembly in the gym--Drug Free Teens or some such stupidity. We sat together, and started the usual double entendre banter. Finally, I noticed that his shirt was unbuttoned to the third button. I reached over and buttoned it all the the way up, saying This is the 80's. In the 80's we are conservative and don't wear our shirts unbuttoned to our navels.

Thus it started. We dated on and off for almost a year, with a constant flirtatious humour and sexual tension sated only partially in short interludes stolen from lunch and during third quarter at the weekly football games, under the bleachers. His father wouldn't let him drive the family car to see me. Instead of going on with him on Saturday nights after work, I cruised the Springs with girl friends and eyeballed the guys in hot cars. I resented his absence. I flirted, carefully sliding the class ring into my jacket pocket.

We stayed together over the summer despite seeing each other only twice. At Berly's birthday party we dove to the bottom of the pool in a kiss, breathing almost as one before breaking the surface in unison.

We weren't a good match. I was acing AP English, he struggled with Basic. I tutored him in Algebra while breezing Trig homework. I'm Episcopalian, he was Baptist. He lived in the country, I lived in town. And our fathers hated each other, had since we were little kids.

Predictably, we fought a lot. I handed him his class ring in a spate of anger three or four times. He put his fist through a locker door once. But then we'd say our apologies, the ring would go back on my index finger, wrapped with red yarn to take up the extra space, and we'd go on. I had the upper hand, always. It was probably the only time in my life I was loved more than I loved.

I turned sixteen, and could drive the Pinto that Ate Cleveland wherever I pleased. I'd drive him home from band practice, dropping him at the end of the gravel driveway after spending a few desperate minutes kissing on the side of a deserted dirt road on the way.

One afternoon he invited me up to the house. After introducing his mom and eating some cookies, he took my hand, saying Let me show you one of my favorite places. We walked into the woods, beyond the initial scrub into the silence under the tall pines. The dirt path curved and divided, and finally we ducked under a fallen tree, so big I couldn't stretch my arms all the way around it, and leaned against it, looking down into the woods below. Far from the house, the road noises so distant they sounded like running water, we turned towards each other, and lost ourselves in kisses and gropes. And then I looked down, realized he was massive, and that this was never, ever going to work.

We disentangled from each other, put our clothing back in order embarrassed and silent. Walked back hand in hand. He kissed me softly through the car window, brown eyes very sad.

A week or so later, I unwound the yarn and put his class ring back on his finger. And he never gave it back.

L is for Line-dried Laundry

2008-09-26T13:02:00.000-05:00

An extended reply to Bridgett's post.

Nobody where I grew up hung their clothes out to dry. Kind of strange since it was a very blue collar, very lower middle class suburb of quarter acre lots, full of electricians and police officers, secretaries and waitresses. There were rusted T poles in some backyards, and we kids would swing from the wire lines (where they still existed) and race from pole to pole. But nobody used them. My family always had a dryer--gas because it's cheaper to run.

The Husband's mom always had an aluminum clothes drying rack in the yard, moved the same one from place to place to place for thirty years. We refused to bring it to the current house, left its dented frame in the pile of stuff on the curb in Conway for the Freecyclers to take. She has no business taking baskets of laundry up and down the stairs at her age, with her knees.

So, when I moved into their home in 1988 that was the expectation. Using the dryer was just not done. I don't even know why she had one.

I hated it. Hated handling the wet clothes, hated carrying my key-lime-green basket through the kitchen and down the stairs through the train room being careful not to knock any of the art or plants or knick-knacks or (God forbid) freight cars to the brick floor, hated the dirt that crusted on them when they dropped onto the ground because of my abject clumsiness or the wind, hated having to think about the weather when I washed clothes, hated having no clean clothes to wear because it rained all weekend or it had been sunny when I left for school in the morning but rained all afternoon while I was in studio so everything was still wet, hated stiff socks and panties and jeans.

But most of all, I loathed the sun-stiffened towels, the coarseness scraping my face as I stepped half-blind from the shower.

She told me one time it was cheap exfoliation.

K is for Keep Walking

2008-09-25T22:12:00.000-05:00

1995. My first solo business trip, off to measure a store for the company we referred to in the office as Carnal Hell because it rhymes with the name and the client was so demanding that the designers worked day and night.

I had the first flight out of Lambert that morning--a 6:30 a.m. United to O'hare. I rolled out of bed at about 4 a.m., excited but dazed because I'd worked until 10 the night before. I drove to the airport, parked, went through the rituals of catching a plane in a rush, no time to grab a cup of coffee. All the airport vendors were closed still. Fell asleep waiting for the flight, and again as the plane took off, waking as the wheels touched down.

I gathered my briefcase and my overnight bag and trundled off the plane, following the suit in front of me as if he were holding a leash attached to my neck. Checked the board for my connection to Fort Wayne. Terminal One, and I was standing in the Terminal Two.

The tunnel between the two was dark. Colored lights flashed, electronic music barely audible in the background. A female voice intoned over all of it: Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking. In my uncaffienated fog, it was spooky and disconcerting, as if I were walking into the rotating knives in John Cleese's design for public housing.

But I kept walking.

J is for Junk

2008-09-24T03:27:00.000-05:00

Someday, I want to live in a house that looks like a designer lives in it.

Obviously, this won't happen until the kids are grown.

And it may not happen at all, given the propensity the Husband and I have for collecting junk.

I've been trying to slowly shed things. Over the weekend, I reached up onto the top shelf of the coat closet to get my first laptop out of its box, to try to extract the information from it so I can send it to a better place. I opened the cardboard flaps to find the Husband's thick red scrapbooks, loving pieced together by his mother in his early years. Treasures, to be left untouched. I labeled the box, and opened its neighbor. In that box, I found the lost photo album my great-grandmother gave me for Christmas when I was 8, in the same foil-wrapped package with my embroidered sheets, the blue ones with a band of tatted lace sewn along the hemmed edge of the sheet and the pillowcase. There too was one of the three photo albums from my childhood that my mother gave me for high school graduation, which I thought I lost when we moved to Fayetteville the last time. I sat on the sofa there in the entry hall and wept as I turned the pages, wept for what had been lost and what was found and the scenes in the photos of a time gone forever.

It's not as bad for me as for the Husband. My sister and I were made to clean out all the broken, outgrown, and underloved toys every August, before school started, with an eye to our October birthday and Christmas visible on the horizon. Every time we moved during my teenage years--five times between seventh grade and senior year of high school--we were responsible for packing and carrying our own stuff to and from the truck. Needless to say, a lot of things got purged that way. More things were discarded in the six times I moved during my six years hostage to the higher mind. Saying goodbye to things is as much part of leaving a place as bidding adieu to friends.

The Husband's family, in comparison, moved every four years before he went to college. And they kept everything--something I blame on the fact that the company paid for movers. Now that his parents are finally seriously downsizing their stuff, it's coming to our place. Rolls of drawings from undergrad that we forgot were at their place. Plastic bins of letters sent back and forth from Conway to Fayetteville, Fayetteville to Memphis. Flats full of drawings his mom and grandfather did in college. And large file boxes containing preschool drawings, elementary school assignments, toys, half decks of cards, and torn comic books left over from the Husband's childhood.

These pose a serious setback in decluttering my house. Some of the stuff is welcome: the series of biographies, engraved with the Husband's great-grandfather's name, have taken a front and center position on the bookshelves in the living room, displacing several stacks of architecture books. The Civil War diary lies wrapped in acid-free paper among the other treasures in my third dresser drawer--I tossed almost all of my tattered Tshirts from college to make room for them. The drawings have been carefully archived and put away for future framing. The linen closet is full of quilts and embroidered items, the kitchen shelves with glass and silver. (recognizing the realities of limited space have begun limiting myself to the truly antique and the 1950's vintage.) A whole closet is filled with photographs and beautiful drawings waiting for us to have time to organize them.

So, I wade through the boxes and discard what I can--which is to say, most of my stuff. I have no need of the miles of flimsy and study models from my undergrad studios. I can say with fair certainty at this point that I will never be a Star Architect, so nobody will every care. I don't care. I scan and photograph the things I want to document; I put citations for the many, many photocopied and clipped articles into a running bibliography on my computer. I figure I might as well do it myself and save the kids the agony.

The Husband claims there's no time for him to delve into his boxes, to render judgment, to make those three fateful piles: recycle, toss, keep. The reality: he has no desire to confront that final goodbye.

I is for Ironing

2008-09-23T11:11:00.000-05:00

I just folded 8 loads of laundry. No--actually, I folded 6, because two loads of Mike's work and Sophia's school clothes were simply transferred to the living room where I will iron them and wish I could drink amaretto sours this evening.

Bridgett's post reminded me of this. So I dug through the boxes and file drawers of old papers and found it.

Pressing

Pressing, from midnight on
seam to seam
held flat against the table
in a cloud of steam
A crisp edge and two creases are born,
buttered into existence by the hot trowel
of the iron. Put one in,
take two out.
He says I do this better than him.
I wonder if he looks at his clothes.
Wrinkles die in the puff
of anger boiling.

H is for Helene

2008-09-18T12:40:00.000-05:00

It's something about the beginning of the school year, the yearning to see her again, probably rooted in the annual summer separation when the Shrimp and I stayed with Dad. We began again, every year, in the baking southwest Arkansas heat, dripping lines of sweat on the crackling grass of the practice field as we marched, the distance in time and space unnoticed except in its absence.

These waning summer evenings with the Husband gone, I drink and google late into the night. Usually I see the same three references to her past jobs, but this time I found something else. A link to a web site describing a terrible struggle with a rare disease. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, and it's the daughter of my other soul mate, her only child.

And I know it's her. If I could dismiss the blog that brought me here, even though it calls her out by name and last known location, if I could dismiss the voice that I know is hers from a decade of passed notes and thick letters, I can't dismiss the photographs because the girl is a clone of her mother at that age. My mind rolls images of the toddler nursing in a tiny house in the shadow of the Benton water tower, the 3-year-old dancing around us at the Children's Museum at the Train Station, the 7-year-old who wanted to get me Michelin tires as a baby shower gift. I fight the rocking waves of weeping despair.

I stare at the email link, paralyzed. I click it and stare at the blank page of the email client, shut it down and stare at the link again. Repeat. Night after night.

G is for GI Acronyms

2008-09-17T22:08:00.000-05:00

Until I was in my 30s, I didn't even know SNAFU was an acronym; to me, it was just a useful word. My colleague at the small, used-to-be-a-Catholic-girl's-school wanna-be University let me in on the etymology, taught me its companions. This was when I thought we were friends.

As time went on, as department meetings and student critiques evolved into a constant state of BOHICA, he withdrew to escape the flak. I was living FUBAR right there in front of his always observant, battleship-blue eyes, and he didn't say or do a goddamn thing to help. Just accepted it as Situation Normal.

(thanks to Bridgett for the inspiration)

F is for Fair

2008-09-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

I have a hang-up about fairness. Maybe it's a Libra thing, I don't know, but I've always been the sort of person who seeks justice and balance in the world, sometimes to the point of obsession and often to the point of being dreadfully unfair to myself.

Playground games, dealing with my sister, workplace favorites ... constant sources of fury and anguish. In my academic life, grading student projects was torture: I developed detailed rubrics that left only a few points to "subjective" standards of aesthetic judgement ... those few points being the difference between a B and an A. I often worked until the indigo hours of early morning, trying to insure that the differences were clear. I never succeeded to my own satisfaction or that of the students.

But now, it's the kids and school that sound the alarms in my head. It's not so bad with the Girl because she's only in first grade and most of her classmates' parents aren't over-achievers.

The Boy's school is an entirely different matter. After all, gifted kids more than likely have gifted parents ... and unlike most bright people, the Husband and I mostly only did enough to get by in school. There are an astonishing number of former valedictorians and people with advanced degrees running our PTO.

So, over Labor Day weekend the Boy was assigned this task:
Write a poem or song comparing St. Louis and either Denver or Minneapolis.

He fussed and fretted. I don't wanna write a stupid poem! Finally the Husband persuaded him to start. But it's going to take so long ... the Boy whined.

Well, you could write a haiku. Those are short.

What's a haiku?

So we explained the form and origins of haiku to him, and showed him a few, although not this one. And he decided that maybe a 17-syllable poem was something he could do:

Winter, sledding's fun.
Denver and St. Louis, Friends
Join us on the hills.

He wrote it on his own, copied it fair Tuesday morning before school, put it in his blue folder, and jumped on the bus grinning.

When he got home, the smile was gone. How did it go? I asked.

Awful. I was embarrassed to have such a short poem.

Slowly I extracted the story: one classmate read an epic poem, minutes long. Another sang a song, accompanied by a friend on the piano. Etc, etc. His poem was by far the shortest of any in the class. He looked up at me, deflated. I tore it up. I'll tear up the draft as soon as I find it. (Nobody can find anything among the papers I keep on the dining table.)

Come on, now.

We're talking about 3rd graders here, and a beautiful sunny summer weekend, the last official days of white shoes and linen pants. What kid worth his salt is going to sit inside and write a long poem or song unless the parent is sitting right there, driving the whole process? I mean, really? Is it that important that the kid perform at the top of the class?

I think about the whole Science Fair debacle, about the moms who came right up to me that morning and said, Let's take a look at how the other projects compared to ours. Because they are ours as much as theirs, after all. A friend who had major surgery in two weeks before it was due: her second grader, J., did every bit of his project, even the cutting and gluing, by himself, and got a D on it, with a "distinct lack of effort" noted.

And my heart cries out that it's not fair. It's not fair that J. received a bad grade for a project he did himself while the top projects were largely done by adults. It's not fair that my son is ashamed of learning about a new form of poetry by writing one himself because "it wasn't long enough." It's not fair that I feel peer pressure to continually drive my third grader as if his every chance of success lay in the balance.

Mostly, it's not fair that those other kids will never really get the opportunity to see what they can do by and for themselves. And instead of being angry for the injustice, I am very, very sad.

This is cross-posted with my main blog, clearview.

E is for Elvis

2008-09-05T15:04:00.001-05:00

So we moved to Little Rock and became a family ...

That wasn't as simple as it sounded: it was Spring Break, and the Uhaul was full of everything we owned and there was nowhere to put it, so it sat on the west side of Granny's gravel driveway. Neither Mom nor DB had a job, and without a job there was no hope of a house. And of course, since Pulaski County has three different school districts, we couldn't register for school without an address.

On Wednesday, Mom asked if we'd like to go live with Dad for a while. You could go to school with the people you grew up with, she said. It would be as if things never changed.

The Shrimp shrugged, but I begged No no no. I didn't want to go back with those people who still saw me as the geeky girl from Watson.

She tightened her lips. We'll see. I knew that meant we had till Friday, maybe.

That afternoon the newspaper called with a job offer for Mom. We went house-hunting: she wanted to stay in Southwest Little Rock, near Granny and Carrie; the Shrimp and I wanted to be in West Little Rock, near the malls and things to do. Bottom line, I wanted to be out of McClellan territory.

Thursday Mom found a house on a loop road about a mile from Carrie. Two blocks to a grocery store, a 7-Eleven on the corner. I would go to Mills, the Shrimp to Fuller. We went to register for school. The following week was, of course, Spring Break again, another week of nothing. Time to unpack, to obsess.

Then came Monday, and the Shrimp and I were standing in the unseasonable cold, at the corner where our loop met the collector street, waiting for the yellow bus. We stood there so long we were afraid we'd missed it until others came straggling up in the last minute before the bus rattled up. I went up the three square steps and surveyed the seats.

There were no empty seats. Most were packed full, past full, with three and even four people, a sea of black faces, yelling, names called, cursing. Hey, baby. said a tall, thick boy, his brown face curled into a lascivious snarl. You can come with me. The kids around him snickered. About midway back, a fat middle schooler sat with a skinny boy with sandy brown hair combed into an almost pompadour. Given the other options, I chose that one.

His name was Rick, but everyone called him Elvis because of his love for the late rock-n-roller. Lunchtimes and waiting for the bus after school, he sang and swung his hips as if he were indeed the King. I don't know how it happened, but I thought I was in love. Within a few weeks, he was foregoing lunch performances to sneak into the woods with me. After school, we got off the bus and into my bed, emerging covered with sweet, sex-smelling sweat.

Somewhere in the second month of spending my afternoons listening to Blue Suede Shoes and Blue Hawaii I realized that while I wouldn't die a virgin, but I'd made a horrible mistake.

Among the many problems with that: where would I sit on the bus?

D is for DB

2008-08-26T03:05:00.000-05:00

DB .... initials, not decibels.

Tall, with wavy hair and sky blue eyes, and a deep scar framing the left side of his face from chin to earlobe. Always wore some form of chino with some form of button-up shirt, except on weekends when it was a black tshirt and jeans. Always sloppy, with a slouching, half loping gait. Always with his reporter's notebook hanging from his back pocket, as he was Mom's Assistant Editor at the paper.

One wall of his tiny apartment was lined with milk crates full of albums ... Joy Division and the Cure, as noted already, but also Crispy Ambulance and the Dead Kennedys and the Buzzcocks. A tall bookshelf stuffed with science fiction paperbacks stood across the room, next to the stereo.

He started helping out more after we left the Redneck Stepfather. He picked me up at the high school after band, handing me the keys to his 1972 Corolla, navy blue and held together with bumper stickers. He sat patiently while I failed to take off on the hill above the church, time after time after time, completely unruffled. It takes time to figure out how to get the clutch and brake and accelerator to work together, he said. It takes time.

Helene's mom studied the stickers one evening as they dropped me off.

What is Stiff Little Fingers? she asked. and the Cramps?

They're just rock bands, I said.

She pursed her thin lips in disapproval.

I was smitten by him, by his quick mind and cynical humor. I was 15, and he was only ten years my senior, younger even than Uncle Talon. Not an unreasonable age difference for people with so much in common, I thought. But he never made a move towards me ... never. It was just another thing that made me wonder if I was destined to die a virgin.

He was, of course, dating my mother.

I didn't see that for another month.

C is for Cats

2008-08-24T04:28:00.000-05:00

Growing up, we were a dog family. My dad hated cats, would chase the neighbor's black cat off our carport with extraordinary vehemence, sometimes even with the BB gun in hand. When I was about the Girl's age, I got Ringworm on my hand. Dad said it was from messing with cats, so I didn't wave weeds or sticks at them anymore in an attempt to entice them to play. I left cats alone.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my dog died. Mom's boyfriend had cats--a ginger female named SweeBee and Pinto the tabby Siamese--who sat and purred in my lap as I read. I discovered cats along with the Cure, Joy Division, and the Dead Kennedys. Liked it all.

So then we moved to Little Rock and became a family--the Punk Stepfather, Mom, the Shrimp, SweeBee and Pinto and I, plus Leo the red tabby kitten, who died in the Outbox on my mother's desk in the living room. SweeBee followed him after a couple of months--hit by a car on our cul-de-sac, I think.

We moved again. I started dating the Husband, who had always had cats but never a dog. His mom is a cat magnet--the person on the house every stray comes to find as home. Our senior year of high school, they had about 15 cats. The Husband's big black-and-white, Sylvester, ruled the roost. That spring, I chose a black kitten from the senior queen's litter, named him Zephyr. A month or two later, my sister found a bag of Siamese-mix kittens in the cemetery down the street. She kept the one with the most dramatic blue eyes, a French fashion model cat with a matching delicate step and thin meow. We called her simply Kitten until she walked across the keyboard while Mom was working one night and typed Miss See. That Christmas, the kitten and the English Springer Spaniel worked together to un-decorate the tree: Miss See batted the balls off, and Tag picked them up and put them behind the gold sofa.

So, then, college. Another year passed. I moved into the modern house on Mount Sequoyah with the Husband and his parents. Zephyr prowled the acreage for shrews, bit their heads off and left the bodies scattered around. More than twenty pounds, long and tall and slinky, we joked about having our own panther. The cat collection, with the spring's litter, numbered around 20, including a twin pair of black kittens--alike in every way except that one had a white spot on his belly (Spot) and the other a thin fringe of white whiskers above the eyes. That one fell 12 feet from one porch to another and survived. We christened him Halo.

The following year there were three litters of kittens. The last one was born on the stormy night that two huge walnut trees fell into the driveway from opposite sides and the white columns on the big house on top of the hill were tumbled onto its green lawn. They said it wasn't a tornado, but we never believed them. The next morning as we chainsawed the trees, we noticed Puff walking down the hill, obviously thinner. We followed her back up after breakfast, found the five kittens under the collapsing liner of the neighbor's swimming pool. Put them in a basket, moved them down to a box on the sheltered porch of our house. The biggest one, yellow-and-white like a Checker cab with a dramatic ring-striped tail, screamed all the way down the hill, so I took him out of the basket and held him in my hands as I called his mother. He quieted and went to sleep. Checker was smart and wanted to please. I took him to studio on a leash, fed him donut holes, curled around him to sleep. We taught him to fetch basswood when he was a kitten, and to say Milk as an older cat. I was his, and he knew it.

When we moved out for good after coming back from Rome, we took Checker and Sylvester with us to the stone shotgun on Reagan Street. The cats came and went freely through the holey screen door, including the neighbor's Siamese. They stalked birds in the woods and chased squirrels out of the railroad right-of-way, across the street, up the bent tree to the top of the house. Sylvester waned and died that spring--he was about 12 years old--so when we moved to St. Louis in August, it was with Checker yowling in the cat carrier in the Uhaul. We got Sasha at the Humane Society to keep him company after we bought our flat. Sasha was a long haired Russian blue--not very bright, but extremely athletic. He would leap to our shoulders in a single bound, and fly through the air chasing the dots from laser pointers. The Shrimp rented an apartment that didn't allow cats, so Miss See came to live with us. We were a three-cat family for a long, long time.

Then we had the Boy, and the cats took turns sleeping at the foot of his crib. We never had a baby monitor--didn't need one. At the first hint of crying Miss See would run to get us, meowing to get our attention. She'd bite if we didn't respond fast enough.

Checker was the first to go, in 2001--we hand fed him, gave him daily shots, force fed him and finally gave up. When I felt his body go slack in my arms I went numb ... until I got home and took to my bed for the weekend. I didn't want another cat.

Miss See was next, in 2004, and we didn't let it go so long. We suddenly realized Sasha was sick one Saturday night a few months after that, and I wrapped him in a blanket and rocked him. The children said their goodbyes, and the Husband took the children to the back to quiet the house. He died late that night.

For a year, we didn't have any cats. We donated the cat food and litter, put away the litter boxes, vacuumed the nests of fur we found everywhere. I learned that I'm allergic to cats, which makes the many years of annual sinus infections and walking pneumonia make sense.

But the kids wanted a pet, and we don't have time for a dog.

One day the mother-in-law emailed about her neighbor's litter of Arkansas Alleycats, maybe we wanted a couple for the kids. And we said yes. Standing in the garage a month later, we watched the kittens play. The Girl selected most vivacious of the litter, the little tabby with the clearest M, who had already been named Mary. The Girl added Dora as a middle name. The Boy chose the most beautiful one, the adventurous bicolor with long soft fur. Named her Morgan for Morgan LeFay, a character in the series of books he was reading.

They aren't my cats. My heart isn't ready for another cat. But they are lovely to curl up with on a cold night after I've taken my antihistamines ....

B is for Busy

2008-08-22T14:44:00.000-05:00

As one might guess from the U.S. economic reports and the AIA's Quarterly Billing Reports, it's been deadly slow around the office for months now. As in, I get paid at the discretion of management (i.e., me) and my manager (i.e., me) hasn't been discreet since, oh, May.

But now that the kids are back in school ... there are suddenly more inquiries. Big projects and small. Continuing clients and new ones. Not counting chickens before they hatch, you understand, but something is infinitely better than nothing.

It's all gonna hit at once, you know. said Artemis over lunch.

Yeah, I know. I said. But I'm not complaining. Seventy hour weeks and going crazy is better than boredom ... isn't it??

A is for Alphabet

2008-08-21T00:27:00.000-05:00

I collect alphabet books--photos, art, foreign languages. I have one that is an alphabet of building plans.

I live in a building known around town as the ABC's.

I visited the ABC Islands, officially known as the Lesser Netherlands Antilles, for vacation.

However, I do not alphabetize anything. Too many years of sitting in the first seat in the first row ....

Funny thing is, teachers don't seem to do that anymore. In the classrooms, there aren't rows of unitary desks, with an attached writing surface and storage for supplies under the seat, but shared tables or groupings of desks set facing each other, with chairs all around. A seeming invitation for chaos, but maybe I'm old-fashioned ....

Z is for Zinc Oxide

2008-08-17T22:28:00.000-05:00

Summer before 5th grade, the first summer after my folks split up. The Shrimp and I went to day camp at Lake Nixon, spent our days swimming and running and singing Baptist songs. Out in the sun all day, we burned a bit at first but then tanned so we didn't really think about it.

A couple of weeks in, some of the paler girls began sporting white stripes across their faces. What's that? I asked one of them. Zinc oxide. Keeps my sunburn from getting sunburned.

Years later, I have a kid who burns like that, whose face never tans between the freckles, just blisters. He swims mime-faced.

Y is for Yellow

2008-08-16T16:25:00.000-05:00

In honour of the 25th letter of the alphabet, 25 yellow, summery things:

trumpet-shaped blossoms among hand-sized leaves, future fruit. (cantalopes, I think)
1970's Corvette convertibles. the only colour they look good in.
bright stripes of summer sun under the allee in the park.
cheese. the soft, creamy yellow of Edam, the alarm yellow of sharp cheddar, and everything in between.
summer squash. fried, sauteed, raw.
mustard. Grey Poupon for sandwiches; French's yellow for corn dogs; seedy brown for sausages.
cheese dip. orangey yellow, like old-fashioned Ro-tel dip made with Velveeta, not the whitish sort from El Maguey. eaten with
yellow corn tortilla chips, of course.
golden cherry tomatoes from Biver Farms. like candy, I tell ya.
Hefeweizen. with a slice of
lemon. I like the scent, not the flavor so much, especially not in my iced tea. (pronounced properly as one word, without the d: icetea. yes, I prefer it sweet.)
my molded foam ski vest when I was 10, and learning to water ski behind
my grandparents' tri-hull ski boat, before the dock fell in on it with 10 inches of snow in 1979. then they painted it navy blue.
Caribbean fish--schools of them, white with black and yellow stripes or grey with yellow tails, gathering in the shallows for bites of bagel, their fins tickly against bare legs and arms. the tiny bright yellow fish hiding like jewels among the fan coral as I float, 30 feet below the surface in
my Zeagle BCD ... bright neon yellow so I'm easy to spot under or on top of the water.
a canary mesh tank top on a runner's back, dripping from the bottom hem.
a swarm of yellow jackets gathering on a black iron fence post.
a yellow rubber playground ball, bouncing in an even rhythm from hand to ground, ground to hand.
the fluorescent dome of lemon shaved ice peeking above the rim of a white paper cup.
the sweet dripping fuzziness of perfect peaches.
corn on the cob, eaten Remington typewriter style, with salt and pepper or just with
sweet unsalted butter, the perfect complement to almost all summer foods.
faded golden beach towels hanging over the porch rail to dry in the sun.
popcorn, stained yellow with greasy faux butter, at a matinee of the latest action flick. (the ultimate: Bond, James Bond. but alas, not this year.)
the first golden leaves of autumn, polka-dotting the grassy, shadowed ground.

X is for XTC

2008-08-13T21:38:00.000-05:00

I was sitting on the carpet of the (future) Punk Stepfather's apartment in Magnolia and riffling through the milk crates of albums while leaning against the tweedy sofa with Pinto the tabby Siamese in my lap. I pulled a brightly colored square from the stack, held it up for him to see.

Oh yeah, XTC, he said. You know, Making Plans for Nigel. Which I didn't know, so he pulled the black disc from its sleeve and set it on the Sony turntable.

W is for Waves

2008-08-10T10:26:00.000-05:00

A week of vacation in the Caribbean: impossibly blue skies, white beaches, water like swimming in a fish tank with aggressively friendly piscine companions. Parrotfish and trunkfish ate bits of bagel from our hands. The children ran and jumped into the waves, built and destroyed the same sand castles with the same Dutch children over the six days.

But three days on boats pitching and rolling in three-foot seas (which I learned means that you move a total of six feet vertically in each wavelength), three days of scuba diving and the associated Valsalva Maneuvers to relieve the pressure in my head as I descend, and three days of flying has my delicate sense of balance reeling.

I still feel the pitch and roll of the sea in my stomach and my head. Yes, sitting here at my dining table in my flat in the middle of America, sitting here perfectly still except for fingers on the keyboard.

V is for Vote

2008-08-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

V is also for vacation. I'll leave you with this.

U is for Used

2008-07-31T21:13:00.000-05:00

Used books
edges softened,
whitened.
Pages
preannotated
with penciled exclamations
in the margins.
Knowledge
used?
or tested
then forgotten.

T is for Tuesday

2008-07-30T00:14:00.000-05:00

Ladies Night at the roller rink. Granny, Carrie, me, the Shrimp, with skates slung over our shoulders using long laces as straps. Round and round, oh round and round.

Dollar Movie Night from Junior High through college. Paying for the PG and sneaking into to see Reds and Witness. Meeting S.B. in line and groping through the movie instead of watching it, then ignoring each other the next day. My first date with the Husband. Fatal Attraction Freshman year.

Mornings as a newlywed, not wanting to budge from our futon but knowing I couldn't miss any more of my construction systems class. Listening to the Pogues late in the studio, feeling the truth as I do now.

S is for Search

2008-07-28T16:01:00.000-05:00

I am almost always tagged for the supplementary search when we fly somewhere. I don't know why; perhaps it was my mother's anarchist ex-husband or the Homeland Security computer sees Daughter of the American Revolution on my records and thinks I'm dangerous, one way or the other it's the way it is. My friend Eleanor says I just look sneaky.

The first time was in November 2001. We were flying to Washington D.C. to visit my mom right after Reagan National reopened, meeting the Husband there at the end of one of his trips. I was visibly pregnant with the Girl--like 7 months--and the Boy was just shy of two. And they searched me at the gate, as they did in those first few months.

I protested--who is going to mind my two-year-old?--and they told me it didn't matter, I had to submit or I would be arrested. So I stood there, watching my son run up and down the terminal while they waved the wand up and down my body. They poked my stomach; the Girl kicked back. My bra strap was suspicious. And every time the wand got below my knees it beeped. I pulled my pant legs up to show hairy calves, black trouser socks, and loafers. They scanned again. Have you had surgery on this leg? Then my architect brain kicked in, realizing, it's the metal floor deck. They never figured this out; they finally decided, after disassembling my shoes, that I was safe. I chased the Boy down in my sock feet and boarded the plane, all of the other passengers glaring at me. The flight departed 10 minutes late.

The next time I was traveling by myself, flying out of Chicago Midway after a conference. The Girl was just months old, and I carried my electric breast pump with me to keep up my milk supply while I was gone. The screeners ran the black bag through the x-ray three, maybe four times, several of them staring and pointing.

Finally, a tall man with beautiful dark black skin took me to the side, scanned me, patted me down, searched my rolling carry on. Then he put a hand on the pump and said, I need to disassemble this to make sure there's nothing inside. I explained every piece of tubing and plastic in the bag, explained the empty space they had seen in the middle was part of the vacuum system that made it work. He said, I'm sorry ma'am, I've got to take it apart.

I was tired from the conference and running to catch the train to the airport. I was aching all over, from the feet stuffed in navy dress shoes to now disheveled hair. I was done. I wanted to pump, get myself a cold beer, and sit down. I'm sorry, but you're not destroying my $300 medical device. I picked up the attachments and waved them at him. How 'bout if I hook it up and show you what it does?

The man visibly blushed and looked at his clipboard before glancing back up at my perfectly serious face. He stuttered, Thank you ma'am, you're free to go.

R is for Reptile

2008-07-27T17:27:00.000-05:00

A summer day back in the 1980's, sometime in the teenage years. We were at Granny's for the monthly family gathering, this one ostensibly to celebrate the birthdays of my mother and my aunt. The men played pool in the living room, lying about fast cars and the adventures of younger days. The great-grandmas and great-aunts in the kitchen sat at the circle table comparing symptoms over glasses of iced tea as Mom and Aunt Carrie and Granny finished pulling dinner together. Chris and the Shrimp sat in front of the TV, but the air conditioning was too cold for me to stay; I walked out the front door onto the porch into the searing August heat.

The sun beat golden on the concrete patio; the wooden swing burned against my legs in the moment I rested on it. I wandered around the corner of the house, off the sidewalk and onto the gravel driveway towards the shady side yard. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the flash of a thin dark tail contrasted against the light grey oak logs. I'd spent my entire childhood hunting the lizards on that woodpile between the gardenias and the kitchen bay window.

I watched for a moment, then slid a long, thin stick between two logs to flush him out. The lizard ran up the stacked circles, tracing a path tangent to each one before leaping to the next--and sat on the top log, opening and closing its mouth at me like a tiny cayman considering me for dinner. I reached out with a cupped hand and it slipped away between the logs. Two smaller reptiles came scurrying out of the cracks, and I caught one of them instead--an inch-and-a-half long version of my original quarry.

The little lizard climbed out of my fist and over my thumb. He hesitated before climbing up my arm, tiny claws tickling the delicate inner arm and elbow. He ran across my labelless pique polo to rest in the same position as the Izod on my cousin's shirt, and stayed there.

Daddy Fred called me for dinner, and I went back into the house, forgetting momentarily about my new friend. Walked into the kitchen, where the old ladies still sat, now contemplating constipation.

Then the lizard moved, and Grandma Una screamed, pointing from her wheelchair.

And I was back on on the bright, hot porch.

Q is for Queer

2008-07-26T11:51:00.000-05:00

We were in seventh grade, maybe eighth, and I developed a sudden attachment to the word queer. Queer in the 19th century sense: odd, unusual, unexpected.

I had a terrible crush on Mike--a good Southern Baptist boy with wavy hair always carefully combed into tame lines and ice blue eyes that melted me. Random, ritualistic, irreverent ... I didn't have a chance of fitting into his world. You know the type: Student Council, newspaper editor, first chair forever, Future Engineers of America. The kind of guy where the loss of four points on a test is a sign of personal failure. Not my type, but I didn't know it.

On the way to the Band Room from Study Hall one morning, he and I were walking and talking and I mentioned something was a bit queer. He turned, those clear eyes meeting mine. You really shouldn't use that word, you know. It sounds a bit--queer. You know, gay.

I haven't used queer since, not even to describe someone who would accept the description.

Last time I spoke to Helene, a couple of years ago, she mentioned that he had called her out of the blue. He's a missionary. she said. Just got back from several years in Africa.

Married? I asked.

No. He's still running from the fact he's gay.

P is for Procrastination

2008-07-25T08:16:00.000-05:00

and I have nothing profound to say. It's Finance Friday and I should be doing the bills and such. Instead, I cleaned the dining room door (sort of), changed the poor betta's water, and set the Roomba to work on the kitchen before sitting down at the table and blogging. At least I'm closer: the bill are strewn on the table before me and the software is on this machine.

The poor betta is actually the second? or is it third? one we've had over the last two years. Bettas can't live in our big tank because the angelfish and the shark chase them into tatters. So Pikachu-Nemo III (PN3) lives in the covered, one gallon acrylic container we bought for the snake a couple of years back. The tank is on the back of the toilet so we remember to feed him and the Sistahs can sit and fantasize about fitting his finny body into their mouths in one gulp, a wet treat before dry cat food dinner.

About a year ago, PN3 developed a little case of fuzzy fin. I medicated his water, counting the drops that splashed into the little tank to provide a precise dose. It cleared up. Then his left eye swelled to 4 times its normal size. I bought several different remedies and nothing helped. I determined he was blind on that side and began carefully dropping the tiny pellets of food in front of the other eye. Then about 6 months ago I noticed a white growth on his shimmering blue body just in front of his tail. More drops, but it grew and grew until it was a pinky fuzzy pill--I kid you not--almost as big as his pointed, turned-up nose. He slept most of time and ate little. We thought he wasn't much longer for this world. But this he perked up. He started swimming more, and eating voraciously. His eye has receded most of the way back into his head, and I think the tumour has shrunk. The Husband jokes we should rename him Methuselah.

The Husband has been traveling all week. He left Sunday night, paused here mid-week just long enough to get his suits dry-cleaned and took off again yesterday morning on a 26-hour jaunt to New York and back. The Girl is at my mother's, going to Magic Camp and playing with her cousins. So, it's been me and the Boy, quiet days made more quiet by rain yesterday and probably today, busy evenings of meetings, and a baseball game last night.

A baseball game last night where he acted like a true-born, third-generation Cardinals fan. A baseball game where I pondered pants, wishing the players still wore knickers and long socks hugging tight to their thick, strong legs.

(photo by a very bored guy in the stadium's Family area)

O is for Open Hearts, Open Minds

2008-07-23T12:22:00.001-05:00

The Methodists use it as a slogan, but the words appear in the opening prayer of the Eucharist, and they're on my mind today.

I've taken to attending Wednesday morning services at Christ Church on a semi-regular basis. The light streaming through the pale, modern stained glass windows onto the bare white walls of the chapel blend with the plain-spoken words of the liturgy and the murmured prayers. The sharp crack of the Host reverberates through the silence of the space. It's a quiet center in a confusing world of emails and never completed tasks in a way that Sunday morning's full choral masses can never be.

Today's Gospel reading was the Parable of the Weeds, the one where weeds and wheat were growing in a field together. Canon Kilgore spoke of it in reference to Lambeth, in reference to the ongoing conversations about who is Anglican and who is not, but as he did my half-awake mind broadened the question: who is Christian and who is not? And where do I fit in all of this?

I've oft repeated the old maxim that Christianity is a great idea that has never been practiced. In my twenties, I was disillusioned with ministers who preached more about money than spirit, more about ministry for those in Africa than the poor in our own country--our own state--our own small town. I didn't want to be associated with the political Christians, who seem to understand the severity of the Old Testament more than the charity of the New. I turned away from religion. At the time I didn't realize this was in fact a denial of my own spiritual life for the sake of pride.

Perhaps I should let God sort the wheat from the weeds, and find my own path of Faith. Perhaps this is what is meant by having an open heart and an open mind.

N is for Ninja

2008-07-21T19:10:00.001-05:00

We spent the day Saturday at Six Flags. The Girl is tall enough now to ride all the roller coasters but two, one of which I wouldn't ride anyway because the inverted design means your feet dangle below--and above--you.

After playing in the water park all afternoon, we got two slices of Papa John's between the four of us and refilled our big red cup with water. We're not trying to fill you up, we told the children. Just keeping you from starving to death.

But Papa John's ... ugh. Upsets my stomach at the best of times. And then we gave the Boy the map and he went straight to the Ninja: two upside-downs and a sideways corkscrew. We rode it once and the children screamed as we arrived back at the platform: Again, again. So we ran down the stairs and up the stairs and there we were, ready for another round. We switched kids, so the Boy and I squished into the tiny car together. We shouted Ai-yi on cue as we left the platform, and we screamed our way through another ride. Walking down the stairs, they said, Let's do it again.

No. I said, and all three looked shocked. I blamed it on the pizza.

M is for Margaliter

2008-07-21T14:27:00.000-05:00

The perfect plan for a blazing hot Missouri Monday afternoon: a pitcher (or two) of icy green Margaritas, followed by a nap in our bear-cave bedroom until the sun drops below the green edge of the trees and the air begins to cool.

With you, of course. With you.

L is for Lisa

2008-07-21T11:00:00.000-05:00

I never really liked my name. I was supposed to Elizabeth Camille, nicknamed Lisa. It would have fit me better, but my father thought Elizabeth was pretentious. And then, right when my mother was large and ripe with me, Camille wiped out everything my parents owned.

So Lisa it was, and for my entire childhood I chafed against the plainness and ubiquity of the name. There were four Lisas in my gym class in 7th grade. I worked at an office where three of the seven employees were Lisa, Lisa, and Liz. To add to client confusion, my predecessor at that firm was also named Lisa.

I finally accepted the fact that Lisa would be my name forever when I was about 28. Odd as it is, what I've grown to like best about it is the anonymity it buys me.

K is for Knievel

2008-07-20T10:44:00.000-05:00

Evil Knievel, that is.

When we were kids all the boys I knew wanted to grow up to be just like him. Derek spent endless hours jumping the terraces in my backyard on my Big Wheel. My cousin Chris took BMX bicycles to Granny's, and we set up a series of jumps made of plywood and dirt on the trail leading to the steep bank of the creek near the Horse Trees.

I never really liked Evil Knievel because of their games. I preferred speed to aero-acrobatics, and Evil Knievel didn't have a sidekick.

J is for Jon Bon Jovi

2008-07-15T18:21:00.000-05:00

Turned on NPR this afternoon and the first thing I heard was Living on a Prayer. As I listened to the story of how Bon Jovi went from being my generation's teenage heroes to topping the country charts, I chopped bok choy and tomatoes and poured olive oil into the skillet to stir-fry as the quesadillas browned on the cast iron grill.

I never got into Bon Jovi. My friends did--Beth played Runaway over and over during freshman year, and RebL played the cassettes in her spotted red Mustang senior year and on the turntable in our freshman dorm room .... but I preferred Def Leppard and the Scorpions, Joy Division and REM.

Twenty years later I stood in my own kitchen listening to the snippet of Livin' on a Prayer playing on the tinny little clock-radio speakers with tears streaming down my face. Wish I could explain.

I is for Ice Cream

2008-07-13T11:32:00.000-05:00

Summer nights, long and hot and sticky. Sometimes the Shrimp and I didn't want to go to bed and we all four sat, sweaty, in the living room. After a while Dad looked around at us all, wandered to get his wallet and keys and the sandals with old tires for soles. Mom slipped delicate white leather strappy sandals on her feet and we ran to the car, scooting across the black vinyl of the back seat, still hot even after sundown.

He always started at the dairy bar on Mabelvale Cut-off. Stooping to talk to the teenager behind the screened window, he'd ask, Do you have soft chocolate ice cream? Sometimes he'd come back to the grey Chevelle with 4 cones in his hands, sometimes he'd just nod, say thanks anyway, and come back to start the car, to try again. Usually the next place was the one beside the railroad tracks on Chicot. If not there, the one on Mann Rd. And on to the various other likely places on the small roads and strips nearby, until our quarry was found.

Eventually, the Shrimp and I would sit on the running rails with napkin-wrapped yellow cake cones in our hands, our backs against the front seat, brown ice cream falling in fat drips onto our bare feet and into the gravel of the parking lot. We'd curl up in the back seat on the way home, waking up hours later in our beds with the curtains billowing taut above us, flapping in the cool morning air and the roaring draw of the attic fan.

H is for Humane Society

2008-07-07T19:25:00.001-05:00

Genius that I am, I told the Girl about the Humane Society camps.

I thought she'd enjoy it. She tells me she wants to be a cat veterinarian when she grows up--she's 6, but it's stayed constant for the last 2 years, ever since the first time we took Morgan and Mary to see Dr. Jerry.

So today I went to pick her up and she dragged me upstairs to the adoption area. Not to see Blacky, the Shepard mix that her table made posters for, but to visit the kittens.

There were about a dozen of them--rambunctious, sweet, and fuzzy. Ranging in color from golden tiger stripes, beige and brown tabbies to solid, luscious panther black. A beautiful little black-and-white played with the feather in the Girl's hand.

The Husband has a major soft spot for black-and-whites.

And our Humane Society is a kill shelter.