>Party Pooper

Until recently, I’d never thought of people in terms of political affiliation. Of course, ten years ago, “recently” meant last week. Now, “recently” refers to any occurrence still present in my short-term memory bank. That happened about the same time I came to think of the wraith-thin, long-haired, twenty-five-year-old in my office as a kid.

I changed jobs ten years ago. I spent the first day on my new job alone in the boardroom, in a leather chair, pushed up to a massive, gleaming, cherry table. Heat from my hands left a steamy outline on its surface, a way to pass time between tests. There were aptitude tests, and intelligence tests. My favorite was the personality test. Every question read like a trick question. By the time I had filled in one circle on every line of the answer sheet, I felt sure I would be declared certifiably insane.

Apparently, at least one of my answers gave away more than my IQ. From day one, I’ve been labeled “The Token Democrat”

I don’t like labels. I don’t like labels even more than I don’t like being told what to do. And, I really don’t like being told what to do. My tendency in both cases is to prove the opposite of the assumption, giving little or no thought to my own best interests. In other words, even if I had thought of myself as a Democrat, I certainly wouldn’t own up to it. But, the truth is, I didn’t.

The truth is, I rarely give a thought to politics at any time other than a few weeks before an election, at which time I dutifully research the candidates, read the amendments, and stand in line with the other five percent of the population who give a damn. Actually, five percent might be ambitious. Some voters appear just a little too pleased to see “Fred” or “Ethyl” behind the folding table passing out pencils they might have pilfered from Yahtzee. And, apparently, it’s not possible to hand out forms and pencils while reciting what amounts to two years worth of Christmas letters.

I work with CPAs, real estate investors, and mortgage brokers, self-proclaimed Republicans all…until recently. A couple of weeks ago a real “maaaverick” of a woman attended a Sarah Palin rally and henceforth refers to herself as a Libertarian. Her penchant for shoes rivals mine. She’s sure to have at least one pair that will compliment a tri-cornered hat.

On Wednesday, a memo circulated about the office, detailing changes prompted by our ever-weakening economy. This led to a discussion that, as it seems most do, turned political.

“It’s the same way Clinton was elected.” The speaker’s expensively sheathed legs stretched as he leaned against the corner of my cubicle. “The economy went south under Reagan, and Clinton was elected. The economy went south under Bush, and Obama was elected. No matter who the Democratic candidate had been, he’d have been elected.”

“Those darned Republicans…”, I murmured, aiming a coy smile in his direction.

“Hey, Stacye!”, the Sarah Palin supporter called over the unfortunately-colored, burlap-covered wall separating our PCs. “Why’d Barack change his name?”

I hesitated, looking to the leaner for enlightenment. He answered with a half smile and raised eyebrows. We both waited.

“Before he was elected he was Barry. Now all the sudden he’s Barack!” She’d obviously taken notes.

“It’s a nickname.” I failed in keeping derision from my voice. I don’t set out to defend Democratic positions. It’s just that I abhor inanity.

“Well you know…”, the leaner’s voice got louder as he straightened. Throwing both arms wide, he finished. “It’s like a lot of people who come to this country from somewhere else. They adopt an American name!”

A local radio station plays the sound of crickets when someone says something stupid. I heard them then. There was no other sound until I spoke…softly.

“You know he’s American, right? Barack Obama was born in America. You know that… right?”

Relief washed over me as fast as color filled his face.

“Yeah…”, he shuffled his Italian leather loafers. “Yeah, of course, I knew that…” He turned towards his office.

“It was a Freudian slip!”, he called over his shoulder, composure already regained.

The latest issue of New Yorker magazine contains an article by Jane Mayer in which she depicts Koch Industries, and specifically David and Charles Koch, as the Mad Hatter. Its tea time and Alice is drinking the Kool-Aid.

The Koch brothers might be described as fundamentalist Libertarians, a doctrine borne out of their father’s fervent anti-communist stance. Koch Senior made a fortune in Russian oil until Stalin kicked him out. Following in their father’s footsteps, David and Charles preached “No Government” while Koch Industry oil refineries raked in millions in subsidies mandated under George W. Bush.

I listen as my newly minted Libertarian office-mate encourages her friend to apply for a “handicap sticker”.

The disillusionment I feel in Barack Obama can not be overstated. I miss the prosperity we enjoyed under Bill Clinton. But, I know he wasn’t entirely responsible. I am one of the few Georgians I know, including my Republican friends, who continue to support our Republican governor. John Linder was my congressman. We emailed, back and forth, often. His idea for a Fair Tax was appealing if somewhat unrealistic, as presented.

I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I’ve a sudden aversion to tea.

I’m a woman. I’m a Mom. And. as any mother knows, not necessarily in that order.

Ask any Mom.

We just want what’s best for our babies.

>Hot As A Firecracker

I collect aphorisms. A really clever one will stick the first time I hear it. Others take more time but are used just as often. My sofa is “heavy as a dead minister”. My son’s friend is ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer”, and “time flies, whether you’re having fun or not”. I really love “…tight as Dick’s hatband”, but rarely have occasion to use it.

My Dad has a favorite I’ve only recently embraced.

“Old age isn’t for sissies.”

I just have gotten used to being fifty, which I suppose is a good thing since I’ll be fifty-one next week. Better late than never.

As an admitted late-bloomer, I find the gravitational pull of advancing years especially cruel. I only just arrived, and already I’m melting into my shoes…

If I could return, for a full refund, all the moisturizers, and eye creams, and facial serums, and Porecelana I have purchased since the age of thirty-five, I could easily afford the plastic surgery required to erase what time has wrought.

“Porcelana?”, you ask. If you’re my age, you remember the commercials featuring a frightening, liver-spotted hand. You remember thinking you would NEVER buy that stuff. If you’re younger, you have no idea what I’m talking about, and that’s just as well. I bought one jar, and for the record ladies, it doesn’t work. A Q-tip soaked in lemon juice is just as effective and probably much less carcinogenic.

It’s the baggy eyes, and the laugh lines, and the crow’s feet, and the lackluster teeth, and the nebulous chin. It’s in knowing that laying on your back takes years off your face, until anxiety sets in as you wonder where your breasts are. It’s that pair of Calvin Klein skinny jeans, the one in the back of your closet, the one with the permanent dust-line where your knee used to be. It’s all of it…

A couple of days ago, I was summoned by HR. This is never good. The man behind the desk is a scant four years younger than me.

“Did you change something with your insurance?” His chair turned side to side, and he with it.

Struck by the absurdity of his question, I hesitated before reminding him that he was the company insurance administrator.

Unembarrassed, he chuckled.

“I know!”, his voice, and his arms, became expansive. “That’s what I said! But my wife wondered if maybe you were having an important birthday.” The last two words squeezed out of the right side of his mouth while the left crept upward.

“No…”, I began. “You know my birth date. If anything, “big” would have been last year.”, the absurdity continued.

“Yeah, well…” He stopped spinning, and waving, and grinning, and gripped his desk instead. “But you are getting older…” The last word played like scales on a piano.

I’m thinking that’s what did it. That, and a comment made by a fellow blogger. Using wise words, she advised against comparing ourselves to young girls. She suggested, instead, that we embrace reality and try to be the best we can be…now.

The other day as I approached my car in the breezy way I do when feeling particularly light, I caught my reflection in the driver’s side window.

“Well! Look at you!” The words played, as though spoken, inside my head.

I slid into the driver’s seat with a smile.

I’ve “traveled the world and the seven seas”.

I’ve “been ridden hard and put up wet, more than once.”

Some days I feel “old as Methuselah”, but more often I’m “hot as a firecracker”!

Bring it on!

>Garaged

They were garage smokers. We could gauge when they woke and what time of night they went to bed by the rise and fall of the garage door.

Joe spent lots of time sitting in a kitchen chair just inside the door. It was an older chair, probably maple, judging by the color of the wood and the half-moon style so popular thirty years ago. Next to the chair sat a tall, gray file cabinet of the same era. I always wondered what was in that cabinet. I wondered if it was happenstance, or the result of a purpose-filled decision that the cabinet was in easy reach of the chair in which Joe spent so much of his time.

I never saw him open the cabinet, but he did other things in that chair. He smoked, of course. Sometimes I saw him raise a beer with his left arm. He’d sacrificed his right to Vietnam. It was there, but half the size of the “good” one. Contracted muscles had rendered his hand useless. Sometimes it twitched when he talked

He talked in that chair, mostly to my son, and mostly about cars; specifically, the 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They both drove one. Josh built his from the ground up, painted it silver, and referred to it as “Girl”. Joe’s was navy blue. Both were pristine.

Sometimes, he had his hair cut in that chair. He sat with a white towel draped over his bony shoulders and smoked with his good arm while Brenda, his wife, sheared him using electric hair clippers. She finished before he did. There wasn’t much to cut.

While spring air still carried winter’s bite, Joe sat several small, plastic greenhouses just outside the garage in the morning sun. He took them inside at night, repeating this ritual for weeks until the ground had warmed enough to plant. His gardens always flourished. Mine paled in comparison.

Their mowers woke me on Saturdays. Joe rode. Brenda pushed. Sometimes they wore pith helmets.

On Sundays, sometime after lunch, they emerged from the open garage carrying sudsy buckets. Hoses were unwound. Thus began a laborious process that entailed spraying water followed by endless circles made by soapy white towels. They used real chamois to dry their cars before opening all four doors to admit the vacuum. Slamming car doors punctuated our dinner conversation before they emptied their buckets on the lawn.

Brenda filled buckets with bleach water. Steam enveloped her hand as she carried a bucket across the lawn towards a park bench that sat between a large pot of silk sunflowers and a birdhouse on a tall, white pole. Once a month she dusted the garden hose with a feather duster, while Joe struggled, one-handed, to control the telescoping pole he used to dust the rafters. She mopped, first the front porch, and then the garage.

Their ritual went unbroken. No visitors interrupted their dusting. They never came home from a long vacation to find their lawn had gone to seed. They didn’t sully their freshly scrubbed front door with a Christmas wreath or mar the freshly mopped porch with a pumpkin. Nothing interfered with their quest for extreme cleanliness, not even Joe’s illness.

Sometimes, as he sat in his chair, a clear, plastic bag of urine peaked out beneath the hem of his khaki shorts.

The procession of cars in a driveway blown clear of autumn debris could mean only one thing. The emergence from the garage of a portly woman wearing a black picture hat over an unflattering black dress left no doubt. An older man joined her. They stood just to the left of the open garage, in front of a carefully maintained flower bed, and waited. Brenda emerged, also in black, and the three left in one car.

Two days later, Joe’s bedroom sat in a pile in front of the open garage. A large, red Salvation Army truck backed up the driveway, and as fast as the two young men loaded items onto the truck, Brenda brought more. Joe’s chair was the last piece loaded.

The Cutlass disappeared, as did Brenda’s Buick. Her shiny new Civic took up very little room inside the empty garage through which an assortment of craftsmen beat a path to Brenda’s door. Custom cabinet makers were followed by electricians who gave way to plumbers who were supplanted by painters who were replaced by roofers.

I watched as she purged him. Immediately, methodically, purposefully, Brenda removed every trace of Joe from her life.

And, the garage door rarely opens.

>Leftovers

I met Vera when she joined the staff of the midwifery clinic where I worked. Patient demographics had changed drastically over the preceding year, forcing a kicking and screaming administration to advertise for a translator. Vera was a fifty-something, bottle-born redhead with a personality to match. She was also Puerto Rican, which would seem to make her a perfect fit, unless you know something about the importance of dialect to the Spanish language. Most of our patients had immigrated from Mexico and Central America. Watching her with them reminded me of a comment my son made, after his first football practice, when he described a coach who had just moved to Atlanta from New York as, “…that French guy.”

Vera persevered, undaunted. She never lost patience with patients whose pronunciation differed from hers. But neither did she change. She taught, instead.

As I would soon learn, Vera was well schooled in adversity. One year before joining our staff she buried her husband of nearly thirty years. He had suffered from ALS for the preceding ten. During the two years we worked together, she constructed a story of undying love and amazing perseverance. She talked about the kind of man he was before the illness, the adventures he’d lived for, and their passion. He had been a successful businessman, making pots of money right up until the day his legs refused to support him. His time in a wheelchair was short, as the disease progressed quickly. Soon their world shrunk to fit inside their sumptuously decorated master bedroom. Vera slept by her man every night until his last night, and on his last day wrapped her body around his as he breathed his last breath.

Her description of his losses struck me. I pictured them as she spoke. One day he couldn’t write with his left hand. Six months later he couldn’t raise his arm to put on a t-shirt. The other arm quickly followed suit. He fell a lot before his legs stopped working. The wheelchair meant she couldn’t leave him for long. One side of his mouth went limp, so she had to remember to put the spoon in the other side or the food would fall out, making him angry.

I could easily picture myself the caretaker. I graduated from nursing school. I worked as a staff nurse for two years before quitting to care for my own babies. I volunteered at a hospice.

What I can not imagine is being the one with the misshapen mouth.

Years later, I discussed this with a friend who sympathized, saying she and her husband had had “the discussion”. She almost whispered the words, and I understood. Saying them aloud makes them real.

“I won’t have anyone taking care of me. When the time comes when I can’t take care of myself, that’s it, I want to go.”

“You mean…?”, I ventured.

“Yep.” The word felt incongruously nonchalant. “And, he’s going to help!” It was more an order than a suggestion. I found myself feeling sorry for her husband. Will he still be afraid of her? Even when she’s dying?

I watched my mother live four years as a cancer “survivor”. And, that’s what she was; she was surviving. You certainly couldn’t call it living, because it in no way resembled her life before cancer. Life after cancer was dependent on a steel oxygen tank and lots of plastic tubing. Oh, and yogurt. Radiation killed her natural flora, making digestion difficult. Yogurt helped to replenish it, allowing her to eat very small amounts of other foods. And, she developed a penchant for scarves…

She smiled a lot. To hear my father tell it, she and he enjoyed those years very much. But I have to wonder. I wish I’d asked.

“If you had it to do all over again, would you?”

I heard an interview today with Tony Judt. You may not recognize the name. He was a British-born historian who wrote what he called “boring old history books”. One of them was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He died last Friday from complications of ALS.

The interview was taped five months ago. His voice was digitally amplified and yet hard to hear over the wheezing oxygen pump next to his chair.

The interviewer focused her questions on death and dying, asking how things had changed for Mr. Judt, and how he felt about them. The topic turned to religion. Mr. Judt was a Jewish man who attended temple to please his wife.

He began by talking about life in a wheelchair, moving on to the time when his life shrunk to fit inside his bedroom. He painted a picture of life lived in an empty space that people used to visit. He felt sorry for himself until he realized it was his responsibility to be present, to be joyful, to create memories, because memories are after-life, and soon after-life was all the life he would have. In Mr. Judt’s opinion, we live on in the minds of our loved ones. How we live is up to us.

Boiled down, it’s selfish versus selfless. Selfish won’t allow for less than. Selfless accepts less than and builds upon it in order to leave something behind.

I never met Mr. Judt while he was alive. Now, six days after his death he’s left me with something to think about.

Perhaps he was right…

>Tomato Gorgonzola Soup

I was bit by the gardening bug early. Well, not bit exactly. No, it was more like someone wedged a pair of twenty pound post-hole diggers into my sweaty prepubescent hands while marking off the circumference of five circles where holes should be dug at least two feet down.

Yeah, it was exactly like that.

My dad marked the holes with the toe of his work boots which my mother referred to as “clodhoppers” when she threatened to make me wear them because I was “so rough on shoes”. They were suede on top with a heavy, rubber sole and always carried a thick crust of orange-colored, red clay on the toe. The clay didn’t come off, even as he drug the toe around and around, marking one hole after another, in a straight line, until he had five.

“Tomatoes have deep root systems. Don’t stop until you’ve dug at least two feet!”, he reminded me, while wiping sweat from his generous forehead with the handkerchief he always carried in his pants pocket.

Somewhere around the third hole, I started to picture my sisters and their perfect hair. And, they were smiling. But, of course they were. They were inside, in the air conditioning, where it was nice and cool. They were probably sitting in the den, watching television. It was time for American Bandstand. Posthole diggers slammed into the earth, harder and harder, until I couldn’t see how far down I had dug. I wondered if I’d left a trail of dirt like the clay on top of my father’s boots as I wiped tears from my eyes and saw I’d have to dig a little more.

Today, I am an avid gardener. Among other things, I grow tomatoes. I grow monster tomatoes that burst from their cages to tangle in a mass of hairy green branches that threatens to take over one whole side of my garden. And, I do it without the assistance of posthole diggers. Turns out tomatoes aren’t so finicky, after all.

Several times each summer I pick a tomato early, just as it begins to turn, while it’s still yellow nearest the stem. A guy at work saves boxes for me that are just big enough to hold one, carefully bubble-wrapped tomato. I apply a red and white “Fragile” sticker to the sides of the box not covered by the UPS label. Sometimes my father calls when he gets the package.

“I had a tomato sandwich for supper tonight, and I’ve got enough left over to have another one tomorrow!”

The excitement in his voice when he does call makes up for the times when he doesn’t.

I don’t eat raw tomatoes. And, I’ve tried. When we were kids, summer meant large slices on one side of our plates. Mimicking my mother I dusted mine, generously, with salt and pepper…and it became something disgusting covered with salt and pepper. My father relentlessly expressed his amazement that I didn’t like “his” tomatoes, especially when he’d grown them himself! I listened as my thumb worked the patch of hardened skin the posthole diggers left behind.

I do like cooked tomatoes. I can’t imagine french fries without ketchup, spaghetti without meat sauce, or life without brunswick stew. In fact, my favorite cooked tomatoes are in soup. Years of indoctrination leave me unable to eat a grilled cheese sandwich without a side of tomato soup.

Unless it’s Tomato Gorgonzola Soup. Tomato Gorgonzola Soup needs no accompaniment. Well, perhaps a salad of mixed greens topped with homemade blue-cheese vinaigrette. Mmmmmm….

Tomato Gorgonzola Soup

3 lbs. tomatoes, halved (Romas are good, heirlooms are better.)

3 tbl. olive oil

Salt & Pepper to taste

1 lg. onion chopped (Vidalias or Texas Sweet are best)

1 red bell pepper, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

3 tbl. good sherry

3 tbl. flour

½ c. gorgonzola cheese (Low-fat is okay)

½ c. cream cheese (You may use low-fat, but I think it loses something in the translation…)

½ c. half & half

5 c. organic chicken broth

1 tsp. salt

½ tsp. black pepper

1 can sliced new potatoes

3 tbl. fresh basil, minced

3 tbl. butter (Have you ever read a margarine label?)

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Toss tomato halves with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Place on baking sheet, skin side down. Bake 1 hour.

Meanwhile, sauté onion, garlic, and bell pepper in butter until tender. Add flour and cook for two minutes. Add sherry and stir, being careful to scrape pan. Add cheeses and half & half and stir until cheese melts. Add all remaining ingredients except basil and simmer ½ hour. Stir in basil..

Transfer mixture to blender and blend until creamy.

Pour into bowls to serve.

>Making It

I made a yardstick cover once. It was my first, and last, experience working with smelly, scratchy burlap. I might have gone with a nice, polished cotton except I was eight at the time, and I worked with what the Brownie leader gave us. The flowers we glued to the front were nice. They were large, made of felt, and sherbet hued.

My mother hung my gift next to the door in her sewing room. It sheathed her favorite yardstick; the one made of soft, balsa wood with the telephone number of a local hardware store printed on both sides. It stayed there until the flowers’ petals began to curl, just like real petals do. I never left the room without pressing on them.

I made a vest in home economics class. And, then I made a jumper. Remember jumpers? I loved jumpers, especially a simple A-line jumper.

The class was taught by a large African-American woman who favored chartreuse double knits. She also taught cooking classes. I can’t recall what I cooked, but I do remember her announcement, “There’s no such thing as blue food!”, and my bemusement when I realized she was right. I’d never really thought about it before…

I made an amazing score on the SAT. This has no real significance other than knowing that my sister, the one who made straight A’s for twelve straight years, didn’t.

I made children; four of them, one daughter and three sons. Of course I had help, of both a divine and not so divine nature, but their complete reliance upon the inner workings of MY body suggests “making” to me. And when you make children, you make something more. You make history, and legacy, and hope.

Putting my home economics classes to good use, I made all of my daughter’s clothing until she started elementary school. I made shirts, and shorts, and ruffled panties. I made dresses, and long, cuddly nightgowns. My favorite, of course, was a jumper. I made it of brown corduroy, and embroidered a yellow Care Bear named “Funshine” on one side, close to the hem. Upstairs in my attic, I’ve stored one outfit each of my children wore as babies. I hope to see a granddaughter wear that jumper. Maybe Care Bears will be popular again. It could happen…

I made a lovely counted-cross stitch sampler which I then stuffed and fashioned into a pillow. The design suggested a friend, and I gave it to her. That was over ten years ago, and it still serves as the centerpiece atop her creamy, white chenille bedspread. Some of the stitches have loosened, and synthetic stuffing often peeks through one burst corner. You see, she doesn’t just look at it, she uses it.

I made a different birthday cake for each of my children. My daughter, a “Christmas Baby”, favors red velvet. One year, my friend made her cake. I can’t recall why she did it. Perhaps I was just busy with the other children. My husband might have been in the hospital. Or, rehab. Rehab is more likely. Once in the hospital for surgery, and he came out a new man. Several trips to rehab never had the same affect.

My friend, in her creative wisdom, added crushed candy-cane to the cream cheese frosting covering the cake. We’ve made it that way ever since.

Bruises, especially large, purple, soon-to-be yellow bruises, are hard to ignore. When they are on your face its damn near impossible. Before they healed, I made a home for my children out of a 12’x60’ metal box. In the south, most people refer to them as trailers. If they’re trying to be polite, they might say “mobile home”. But it really was just a metal box. Oh, it had a hitch on one end, but the last time it was mobile was at least thirty years ago.

I felt fortunate to have scored the lot across from the pool. At night, red lights on the Coca-cola machine winked at me, taking me back to my childhood, when all motel rooms were on one level, and a peek through rubber-backed curtains revealed the pool’s glistening surface reflecting off brightly-lit, multi-colored vending machines. Despite what some deem squalor, living there was a perpetual vacation, and it wasn’t just the lights…

I made a field of flowers out of what used to be a lawn before the septic tank was replaced. When it rained, red clay ran in rivulets down the street towards the baseball field behind the pool. I say “baseball field” because my sons played baseball on it. But, whether you call it a trailer park or a mobile home park, diamonds were hard to come by.

I never heard my mother curse until she had cancer.

“I’ve got some heavy shit to tell you.”

She died over five years ago, and I still hear those words at least once a week.

Upon hearing them the first time, I made the decision to return home to Atlanta. We shared a duplex with a young couple expecting their first child. I went back to school, and on a diet. My fitness class instructor partnered me with a more traditional college student. He was cute. He was required to touch me. Matronly just wouldn’t do.

Many nights, I made a bed of the couches in the ICU waiting room. Visits were limited to fifteen minutes out of every hour. I made one when I arrived, and one before leaving. My father couldn’t bear the thought of my mother being alone. I couldn’t bear the thought of my father worrying.

Today, I made pickles. It’s been a banner year for cucumbers. I can’t pickle fast enough. Fortunately, my friends are pickle eaters. My son thinks we should sell them.

We visit our local Farmer’s Market weekly. As we walk the aisle, tasting and touching, he taunts me.

“You should sell your pickles, Mom! I could help you!”

I don’t need to sell them. I don’t even need to taste them. I just need to make them.

Tree Frogs at Night

I love tree frogs at night,

the back and forth,

the give and take,

the way the air vibrates,

on one side first, and then the other.

There’s comfort in their noise,

in the way they fill darkness with sounds of life..

I listen and remember,

I’m not alone.

Daddy’s Girl

My father fathered four females.

I am the eldest.

“My name is Stacye, and I’m a Daddy’s Girl.”

Of course I am. We all are. We have a Daddy…we are girls. And, like all good southern girls, we actually call him “Daddy”.

Addressing him that way comes naturally. Admitting to it conjures images of Orson Welles, syrup dripping from the corners of Joanne Woodward’s unlined mouth, and a discomfort that smells like warm gardenias.

By now, you have an image. My blonde hair is long, as are my legs. My eyes are large, and probably blue. There’s a natural curve to my lips, which are carefully painted pink; never red. And, you would be right.

Except, the image is that of my sister, my baby sister to be exact; the one who still throws her limbs on either side of his recliner as she sprawls across his lap, the one that bakes for him, calls him daily, and houses him when he leaves the crystal sands of his beloved beach for important family events, such as his birthday, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

But I was there in the early days…

On Saturdays, we logged hours in his two-toned El Camino, driving around town doing errands. His “Honey-Do” list became our “Trip for Two” list, as we traversed suburban side-roads between the post office, hardware store, garden nursery, and occasionally, the local mechanic.

Mostly, we talked.

“Never forget who you are!” I especially loved that one. “You’re a Howell!”

He said as though it meant something. He said it as though mere mention of our name was enough to garner the respect of anyone within hearing distance. He said it so often that I believed it.

He told me stories of him and Joe Wiggins. It was always “Joe Wiggins”, never just “Joe”. Perhaps there was another Joe. I don’t know, he never said. But, he never mentioned his childhood friend without inserting his surname.

I remember the sun being particularly bright one Saturday afternoon. We’d probably just dropped my car off…again. The dilapidated shop occupied most of a block-long side road. They specialized in foreign “jobs”, such as Hondas, Toyotas, Datsuns, and Cortinas. They didn’t actually specialize in Cortinas. No one did. Because, no one east of the Atlantic drove one…except me.

“Why don’t you divorce her?’ My right hand swept blonde wisps from my face. The air conditioner in the El Camino had stopped working weeks ago.

“Because Howells don’t divorce.” He said it as though it were true. He said it as though he was raised by two loving parents instead of a crotchety grandmother who insisted he sweep their dirt floor each morning before mounting the newspaper-laden bicycle he later rode to school.

And I believed, because I didn’t know.

He taught me about cars. He didn’t change his own oil. He had “Eddie, The Mechanic” to do that. But, he taught me to change mine.

He lay under the car, while I leaned across the engine. We changed the oil, added water to the battery, and checked all the other fluids. When we were done; large, continent-shaped swatches of my flannel shirt were missing.

“Battery acid.”, he said while ordering me inside to change my shirt with just a look.

But I kept it. I kept the shirt. I even wore it a few times. Now, I’m sure it lies alongside my holey Peter Frampton t-shirt; the one I kept for almost twenty years before deciding that I really never would wear it again.

But I will…

Angels will sing, harps will play, and there I’ll be…Daddy’s Girl…wearing a holey flannel shirt over a faded Peter Frampton t-shirt.

“Do you feel like I do?”

Hair Raising

It’s fitting, I suppose, that I have unruly hair. I’m a pretty unruly woman. But, sometimes, I think it’s my mother’s fault…

Some of my earliest memories are of my hips wedged between my mother’s ample thighs atop our ultra-chic, avocado green, vinyl couch. For reasons known only to her, she insisted on using a comb on my hair. And, not just any comb, but one of those barber’s combs with skinny, pointed teeth that were so close together a dime wouldn’t pass through them. As she raked those teeth across my scalp, I gritted my own and prepared for the blood that was sure to start running into my eyes just any minute. Occasionally, I howled, until I realized that only made her angry, causing her to plow even deeper.

The only respite from the raking came when she found what she referred to as a “knot”. I don’t know how it happened or why. I only know that every single time my mother raised a comb to my head she found the hair at the nape of my neck to be a tangled morass that inspired her to mutter mild epithets between groaning tugs.

There was lots of “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”, even though we both knew she’d seen it just last Saturday. And she whined a lot. Occasionally, the comb she extracted contained more than hair. The mass more resembled a bird’s nest than a knot, with wisps of lint and the occasional tiny scrap of paper woven into the mix.

And then there were the permanents…

For years, my mother lined us up on linoleum that was scored to resemble stone, if you were willing to allow that stone could possibly be tinged the same avocado green as the couch. By now, she’d invested in detangler which allowed her comb to slice through our tresses, unfettered. It was pretty smooth sailing, really, until it came time to roll. Because, rolling required wrapping, and wrapping involved small wisps of tissue paper, and, once again, she met her match at my nape.

At this point, she turned us over to my grandmother who owned a beauty shop on the ground floor of what would now be termed an assisted living high-rise. The real money, however, was made styling hair for regular customers who no longer required a return appointment. She spent Saturday mornings at the funeral home. Mother dropped us off after lunch and picked us up several hours later.

“Remember now!”, my grandmother called from the porch where she stood with one waving hand raised. “Don’t wash it for at least two days, so you don’t wash it out!”

I spent the ride home calculating how I could gain entry of the bathroom before my sister.

I drove myself the last time my grandmother curled my hair. By that time, I was compelled by more than style. By that time, the trek across town, and the smelly chemicals, the pulling, the tugging, and hot minutes spent under the hood of a hair dryer were a trade-off. Because, after she curled my hair, we could visit. She took me outside to her sun porch. She showed me her plants, some of which were decades old. She talked to me about them, told me how to grow them, and pulled up tiny samples for me to root when I returned home. It was worth the thirty minutes or so I would spend with my head in the sink later that evening.

The last time my mother tackled my hair involved one of those new-fangled curling irons; the kind encased in plastic bristles, the kind that not only curled your hair but brushed it, too. She was dolling me up for some kind of event. It may have been Easter. Easter was big deal at our house. It was one of two times, each year, that my parents would accompany us to church. We dressed in new dresses and wore pantyhose from freshly cracked eggs.

My mother separated a swath of hair from the crown of my head, twirling it around the plastic-bristled, metal shaft. Steam billowed from the contraption in her hand as she marked time. Time came, and she rolled her hand in an attempt to un-wrap. But, it wouldn’t. The curling iron, with its rows of plastic bristles, had a death-grip on my hair. Steam billowed from the crown of my head as my mother pulled and whined, pulled and whined.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”

Whines turned to whimpers as we both imagined what I would look like after she cut the hair at the scalp in order to remove it from the shaft. My mother cursed. My sisters watched in horror. Finally, the hair loosened. I never saw the curling iron again.

Two weeks later, my mother made an appointment for both of us at the hair salon she frequented. Despite odiferous armpits at the end of her pendulous arms, Sandra could feather with the best of them. Kristy McNichol had nothing on me…

I was in the eleventh grade. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. I drove quite a distance to the salon and was somewhat taken aback by the pumping, bass-driven beat of the music that greeted me as I entered. “Toto? We’re not in Kansas anymore…”

A tall man with sallow skin under his brush cut rushed, as fast as his leather pants allowed, to reach me. I left with what amounted to a crew cut. And, I loved it…but I never did it again.

Since then, I’ve been shorn by a tattooed biker chick, one Valley Girl, a middle-aged woman with an unfortunate spiral perm, and one really nice Vietnamese man. He didn’t try to talk to me. I like that in a stylist.

Several weeks ago, I got the urge. You know the one; that feeling that you have to have your hair styled…NOW! Several weeks ago, the Valley Girl had sent me home looking like something the cat had dragged in, and it wasn’t the first time. As I left work, I made the decision to stop at the first salon I passed.

It took longer than I anticipated. I was almost home. The sign on the marquee read “Famous Hair”. The fact that it occupied a space just two doors down from the market was a huge selling point.

She was introduced as “Nancy”, but I’m willing to bet her green card reads “Tran” or “Nguyen”.

“What you want?”, she asked, whipping a black, nylon robe round my neck, matador-like.

I produced a copy I’d made of a style I’d found on the internet. Nancy laced tiny fingers through my hair as she studied the picture, frowning.

“But it doesn’t matter…”, I laughed. “I gave up a long time ago. My hair does what it wants to do…and I let it.”

Pompless Circumstance

Shane’s long-time baby-sitter, Christin, invited us to her graduation ceremony. The invitation, and the opportunity it presented, seemed timely.

Shane will start eighth grade in the fall or, as he puts it, he’ll be the “Big Dog”. So many facets of Shane’s life serve to accentuate the fact that the upcoming school year will be a period of transition, a stepping stone if you will, from one phase of life into another. As high school graduation should be the pinnacle of this next phase, attending the event seemed an opportunity to plant a seed, to secure a goal, to expose him to all the pomp and circumstance afforded scholastic achievement.

He balked only slightly when I insisted he wear dress shoes and the imagined pain of buttoning his button-down was assuaged by the mirror over my shoulder, as a slight jerk of his head almost produced the coveted swish of Justin Bieber hair.

“Hey, Mom! I look kinda good!” He’s a slightly pudgy thirteen-year-old. “Kinda” IS good.

Christin had called earlier in the day. Her words were punctuated by a distinctive “click” as she released long golden curls from the clutches of a steaming curling iron. Her usually swift cadence was enhanced by excitement as she shared ticket information and encouraged early arrival.

“You’llbesittinginbleachersIt’sgoingtobehotbutthey’resellingChick-fil-asothereisthat.”

We parked at the church next to the high school and walked a down-hill block to the stadium. Shane’s baseball coach met us as we circled the football field.

“Luke’s up there somewhere.”, he shaded his eyes against the burning twilight, searching for his son. “There!”, he pointed.

Shane asked the question with a lift of his eyebrows. I answered with a blink and a nod, and he began a clumsy ascent towards his friend

We were early. There were plenty of seats to choose from. I headed for an empty metal bench in the center, and as I climbed towards my perch, overheard someone make reference to the fifty-yard-line. It felt out of place

Easing onto a very warm aluminum bench, I was disappointed to realize that the stage had been set up facing the opposite side of the field. They were, apparently, playing to the “home” crowd. A handful of people scurried to and fro around the stage as though assigned a very important task, but no one actually seemed to do anything. A golf cart sped past the bleachers several times. The sun had dipped below the treetops, but left her heat behind.

A group of people wearing black caps and gowns approached the stage area. It took me a minute or so to realize that they were teachers and not really old looking students. Mentally, I chastised myself for the mistake. It’s not as though I’d never attended a graduation before. I’d seen those same caps and gowns at my own graduation.

Of course, my graduation took place downtown, in the air-conditioned comfort of the Municipal Auditorium. And the event was actually a culmination of events that had taken place over the preceding two weeks. Parents feted their children with parties that felt a lot like bridal showers feel today. An assortment of gifts flowed in from my parents friends, many of whom I’d never met. Most sent money, but one relative sent a boxed set of Anais-Anais perfume. I was so impressed! It seemed so…continental! I wonder if it’s still available…

Crimson colored caps and gowns were delivered to the school two weeks before graduation and taken to the music room for fittings. We stood in line with our friends, waiting our turn while sharing our enthusiasm and an occasional joke at the expense of students whose heads measured extra-large. Afterwards, a group of us went out to lunch and, later, to the mall. It didn’t matter that we would be wearing calf-length gowns. The occasion called for a new dress. And shoes, of course.

Something about the prospect of walking down an aisle prompts profuse primping. Not until I married would I again spend so much time in front of a mirror. I emerged from the bedroom I shared with my sister to find my family waiting in the den. My father wore a suit and tie, my sisters, their Easter shoes, and my mother, heels under a skirt that probably hadn’t seen the light of day more than once or twice since she’d owned it. We all piled into Mom’s Vista Cruiser station wagon and headed downtown.

The auditorium was dark except for tiny lights imbedded in the aisle seats. My family went inside while I followed a beckoning, black-shrouded teacher whose job it was to herd graduates backstage.

The noise we made as we assembled ourselves upon the risers behind the curtain seemed deafening. I was sure our parents could hear. The relative darkness only served to accentuate the heavy blanket of expectancy that fueled our collective state of giddiness. Several robed teachers stood in front of the risers alternately moving students who had yet to master the alphabet and threatening rowdy boys by addressing them as “Mister”.

And the music began…daaaa, dadada, daaaa-da, daaaa, dadada, daaaaaah. A nervous silence fell over my class. Even the rowdy boys stood a little taller.

“Excuse me…”

I woke from my reverie to the face of a young father wearing cargo shorts with a baby dangling off one arm. He looked pointedly at the bleacher beneath my feet.

“Oh! I’m sorry!” I turned towards the aisle, allowing him passage. A young African-American man climbed the steps towards me. He wore blue jeans under a t-shirt which exposed carefully cultivated biceps. Very large basketball shoes bloomed beneath his pants. Loosened laces allowed for a protruding tongue. The toddler perched in the crook of his right arm made repeated attempts to dislodge his doo rag.

Behind him, a middle-aged woman in tank top and shorts, pushed a mop of unruly blonde curls from her face as she searched for a bench long enough to contain her similarly clad contingent.

I shifted on the bench that was becoming harder and more uncomfortable by the minute to see that two rows of black robes were filing in towards the stage.

The man sitting next to me leaned in, “Why are some of the kids wearing black robes, while the others are wearing white?” I felt so vindicated…

The presence of a tiny sea-foam-suited woman waving her arms, frantically, in front of a small group of students wielding instruments was the only indication that music was playing. The air around me was filled with the cacophony of mixing voices, frequent laughter, and the occasional baby crying. Suddenly the fifty-yard-line comment seemed less inappropriate.

This time I leaned in. “Are these people just going to talk through the entire ceremony? It’s bad enough we can’t see. We aren’t going to be able to hear either?”

My position granted me a line of sight though which I could see Shane. His eyes were focused as he sat immobile save for his thumbs, which danced rapidly over the controls of Luke’s Gameboy.

Four rows down, a slightly overweight, middle-aged man sat in a suit and tie. His hands folded and unfolded a program as he surveyed the crowd.