Month: March 2007

Life in a Stinky Shoe

This week during school-at-home, we have encountered semester assessments.  Also known as “GET ME OUT OF HERE!”  We spent the whole day today reviewing history from 1865 through about 1920 . . . and then they had to take the assessment.  One student passed easily with a 96%.  The other, my Reluctant Student, received a 76%, which frankly, is a huge success considering everything.  If he doesn’t get 80%, he is supposed to bring his score up to 100%, so we discussed all his wrong answers and that’s that.  Enough.  Enough. 

I had lunch at 2:00 p.m. and since my case of Diet Coke was in the back of the van (I never brought it in from the store the other night), I was unintentionally caffeine-free.  Not a good thing.  At all.

This afternoon, twelve boys played baseball in my front yard, which is not equipped for baseball games.  Home-plate was right in front of my overgrown boxwood hedge which is right in front of my plate-glass window.  I envisioned the baseball flying through my window and into my head, but it did not.  First base was a hedge.  Then, the player had to jump a three foot rock wall to get to second base, the mailbox.  To reach third base (a spindly tree), the player would jump down the three foot rock wall, cross the ivy and grab the twigs of the tree.

TWELVE BOYS.  I had my fingers ready to dial 9-1-1 knowing that one of them would smack another of them in the head with a metal bat at any moment.  But no one did.

You should see what happened to my daisies though.  The new green growth was pulverized by boy sneakers.  I am the kind mother who pops open the front door and shrieks, “HEY, GET OUT OF MY GARDEN!” to no avail.  All the boys just stare at me as if I have a lilac bush growing out of my forehead.

My daughter insists on being a part of the boy bedlam.  I do not enjoy this at all because that means I have to sit where I can see the front yard and exactly who is cooking dinner while I’m supervising?  No one, that’s who.  (The same person who is doing the laundry:  No One.) 

Anyway, the boys are arguing right now about some imaginary game and I just might lose my mind if I have to listen to this discussion one more second.  So, farewell.  I cannot stay in this room because my precarious mental health is at stake.

(Oh, by the way, my 9-year old son and his 9-year old friend say, “Hey, should we play wall-ball old-school?”  As if they are cynical and weary from their long tenure on this earth.  It never fails to crack me up.  “Old-school” indeed!)

On Time

This afternoon, I fell into the past.  My grandmother’s birthday sparked questions in my mind.  Where, exactly, did her parents come from?  I know my grandfather’s came from Sweden, but I didn’t know about her relatives.  I asked my grandmother herself, but she was a little mixed up and so then I asked my mother.  A few years back, she typed up some family history and gave us all copies, but I couldn’t locate mine.

Until today.  My mom emailed me back which prompted me to go get the box labeled “Family Tree.”  When my dad died in 1989, I gathered all his research into a single box.  I’ve hardly looked at it since.  But today, I sorted through and found immigration documents and baptism certificates and deeds to land and military discharge papers in addition to his handwritten notes about our ancestry.  I found the information my mother gave me in the same box.  (Occasionally, there is a method to my organizational madness.)

I found Ancestry.com and loaded the information I already have into a family tree.  I’m still trying to pinpoint when certain ancestors came to this country–one ancestor was a native American, but the rest came from various parts of Europe, but in the early 1800s or maybe even earlier.  I don’t know yet, but I hope to find out.

My husband came home with frozen pizzas tonight and suggested I go out for a walk in the early-evening sunshine and so I did.  The happy daffodils are blooming everywhere.  The trees are suddenly covered with fuzzy, pastel pink blossoms.  I spotted some lilac embryos when I got close to the Puget Sound.  I thought how temporary all this is–from the weather to the buds on the trees to the houses perched with their views of the Puget Sound.  My relatives lived full lives, experienced heartache and triumph, lived through wars and death, weddings and holidays.  My grandfather missed World War I because of a cataract on one eye.  My other grandfather fought in World War II, though he never told us a thing about it.  Their wives had babies, raised toddlers, fussed over schoolchildren, worried over teenagers, cried over their young adults, rejoiced over grandchildren. 

I wonder about those women in those decades so long ago.  Did they fret over their kitchen floors and yell at the children to wipe their muddy feet?  Did they recognize their individual lives were like drops of water?  Or did they see their lives as rolling waves of ocean, stretching as far as the eye can see?  All their worries are gone with them, evaporated.  My worries seem momentary when I realize that spring will transform into summer and summer will fade into fall and then winter will creep into our bones again . . . and time rolls downhill faster and faster like a snowball gaining speed on the mountain.

And yet.  The days have grown longer since Daylight Savings time started.  Now, the children are still outside at 7:00 p.m. playing makeshift games of baseball in the front yard (today with a tennis ball and a stick).  And while I’m thrilled to see my children playing childhood games with neighborhood children, I want the days to end sooner rather than later.  The children have no concept of “dinner-time” and “night-time” and “time-to-go-home-time” while the sun still shines until 7:00 p.m.  (And it will only get worse as summer approaches.)

Time flows, trickles, sometimes seems to go back uphill until suddenly, it rushes so fast it knocks you off your feet.  All you can do is swim with the current and enjoy the view as you float past.

WWJBD?

What would Jack Bauer do?

If an intruder entered under cover of darkness, what would Jack Bauer do?

I am nothing, if not attentive to details.  And so, I grew suspicious.  Yesterday, I took steps to confront the intruder.

This morning?  I heard rustling.

I caught the intruder.

Now, the question is:  what would Jack Bauer do? 

He would most likely kill the intruder with a swift blow to the head.

I am considering the merits of suffocation versus drowning. 

My husband refuses to be a party to this murder.

I wondered if it would be cruel and unusual to discard the intruder in a Trader Joe’s grocery bag.  Let it die slowly in the trash can.

What would Jack Bauer do?

He would have thought through the logistical problem of trapping the intruder in a glue trap.  Then again, a prisoner struggling against a gluey base might be just the way to extort information out of an intruder.  If this sort of intruder could talk, which of course, he cannot.  He can only scurry and flick his whiskers and . . . leave a trail of tiny poop on my kitchen counter.  That poop is the reason he’s imprisoned in glue under my sink.

But, what would Jack Bauer do?

How does one kill a furry little gray mouse? 

I cannot even smash a bug. 

What would you do?  (He’s not dead here, this mouse.  No.  He’s merely resting.) 

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Update:  I wish I had never posted this sad tale of the mouse.  I wish the dumb mouse had never crawled into my house.  I wish I weren’t a grown-up so someone else would have disposed of the mouse.  When I read the comments, I realized that I could no longer ignore the stuck mouse under the sink.  So, with racing heart and shaking hands, I used a dustpan to sweep it into a paper Trader Joe’s bag.  The mouse looked mostly dead . . . he’d not only gotten stuck, but he’d eaten some poison first.  I couldn’t bear to look closely at the poor little creature.  So, he’s in the trash.  I cannot stop shuddering.

We shall never speak of the matter again.

A Hundred and One

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Her grandmother served as midwife when she was born in 1906.  Yesterday, she turned a hundred and one years old, so I baked up forty-eight cupcakes, loaded my daughter into the van and headed over for a celebratory Open House.  I left my boys at home with my husband because this has been a week full of mysterious illnesses and I didn’t want to take a chance of contaminating my grandmother with germs that might ultimately kill her. 

(Last year, I had to leave behind my two youngest children when I went to her 100th birthday party because they had the flu.  March 10th is apparently not a healthy day for my children.)

I intended to stop in with my daughter and leave after, oh, say fifteen minutes because I figured that would be all she could manage before the urge to redecorate Grandma’s house or pound on Grandma’s piano would hit.  As it turned out, a 5-year old boy was already there and the two of them headed off to the back yard to play (in the mud).  Hey, it was only raining a tiny bit and we’re not made of brown sugar!  We won’t melt!

A neighbor boy on the other side of the fence chatted to the two of them and they came in to ask if he could climb the fence and play.

My grandmother is a woman of obsessive order and inflexibility.  These traits have served her well and so the thought of a neighbor boy climbing her chain-link fence would mortify her.  I said, “No, just talk to him through the fence.”

A bit later, a knock at the door.  I rose to answer it and there stood a woman lingering on the sidewalk and a boy on the front step.  One of them said, “The children wanted him to come over and play.”  And I, being taken by surprise and yet being unable to be rude, said, “Oh.  Okay.”  I said to the mother, “What is his name?” and that’s about the time I realized she didn’t actually speak English.  I don’t speak Spanish, so we nodded and smiled at each other.  And I let him walk through my grandmother’s pristine house and onto her back deck.  He carried a little Rubbermaid-type container full of sticks, rocks and “potato bugs.”  (That’s what we call them.  To you, they might be roly-polies?)  “Oh,” I said, “Potato bugs!” and then I told them to have fun.

You should know that my grandmother is essentially blind, otherwise I would never have dared to sneak a stranger through her house.  She is private and guarded.  But what she couldn’t see couldn’t hurt her.  And Armando seemed like a very nice eight-year old.  

Awhile later (after digging in the muddy side yard, I think), they decided to come inside . . . they all took off their shoes, including Armando, and I said brightly, “Well, let’s wash our hands!” and that’s about the time my cousin said, “Um, I think Grandmother might be okay with him in the backyard, but, um, since we have no toys and we don’t really know him, probably not in the house.”  And I agreed and so I sent him off with a cupcake and a cheery “good-bye!”

A bit later, I found my daughter and her cousins (ages 5 and 3) jumping on my grandmother’s bed.  My grandmother never even sat on the edge of her bed because she believed that doing so would ruin the mattress.  My grandmother folded her underwear into tidy squares her whole life.  She keeps her folding table in its original box.  She has curtains in her garage, separating her storage items from the rest of the garage . . . which features a large square of carpet.  I’ve never in my lifetime seen my grandmother wearing anything but a dress with nylons and shoes.  (Oh wait, once when I spent the night, I saw her bare feet because she was wearing a nightgown.)

My grandmother is a little obsessive about her belongings, which is what you’d expect from someone her age who lived through the tumultuous century from 1906 until now.

We didn’t tell her that the children were jumping on her bed, but I somehow think she might know, even though she is blind and moves in ultra-slow motion as she inches across her house, clutching her walker.

My daughter and I ended up staying until all the other relatives left . . . after her first playmate disappeared, two other cousins (the bed-jumpers) arrived, so she stayed busy running through the house, hiding under Grandma’s desk, and licking cupcakes.  We had arrived at 12:30 p.m. and left at nearly 5 p.m.  I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a variety of my cousins and uncles and an aunt (some of who are now aware of this blog:  “hello! Natalie and Dan!”) . . . but that was one long afternoon in my grandmother’s well-heated house.  (She is frail and has thin skin and no longer retains heat whatsoever, so she is always about twenty degrees colder than the rest of us, so we all sweat while we visit her.)

I had hoped to create a sweet, meaningful post that would make me cry, but instead, this is all I’ve got. 

So, happy birthday, Grandma!  Sorry I let a stranger track mud through your house and that I only laughed when I saw the little kids jumping on your blue-flowered bedspread.  But thanks for answering my questions–how did I only now realize that your mother arrived here directly from Ireland?  (I say all this as if my grandmother will read this, but if she were to read this, I would never have admitted the whole bed-jumping fiasco.)

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Balance

What’s fun is waking up in the darkest of dark nights and realizing two things:

1)  You are still cold, even though you’ve been huddled under the covers since 11:00 p.m.

2)  That sound you heard was the sound of someone coughing and vomiting.

But, good news!  Although she’s only 4, I found her standing over toilet, retching and vomiting into the toilet bowl.  Hooray.

But, bad news.  “Did you throw up anywhere else?” I asked. 

“On the floor,” she said.

And then I stepped in it.

But, good news!  She settled back into bed and went right to sleep.

But, bad news!  She woke up a few hours later, thus waking me up.

But, good news!  She did not throw up again!

And more good news:  I went back to bed after my 8-year old left for school.  

But, bad news!  One of my 13-year old twins woke up in the dark hours of the night and threw up.

More bad news:  he threw up on the bathroom floor.

But, good news!  He cleaned it up!

But, bad news!  He did not flush.

More bad news:  The toilet was clogged.

But, good news!  I plunged it and the water receded.

But, bad news!  The bathroom stunk.  (Stank?  Stunk?  Stank?  Huh.  I can’t decide.)

But, good news!  Now it smells better because I bought a new mop the other day and a quick mopping and toilet cleaning worked a miracle.

And more good news!  I declared this a sick day.  And worked on taxes.

But, bad news:  My 13-year old felt ill all day.

But, good news!  My daughter felt much better and begged me for Cheetos.  (Uh, no.)

But, bad news!  My 8-year old complains that his stomach hurts.

But, good news!  Soon, I get to drop into bed and sleep, hopefully all night long.  And I feel great!

My life is so balanced, is it not?

Now, pass the hand sanitizer and spray every surface in your house with Lysol, just in case.

March

I’m living with a daily sense of being slightly overwhelmed by my schedule, my life and my laundry pile.  Oh, and the moldy edges in the shower stall.  I wonder sometimes just exactly when I’m supposed to fit in doing the meaningful things like, oh, painting my toenails flaming red and writing a book.  Or an article.  I’d settle for an article!  And I need to caulk the tub. 

I did put up a feeble wire fence around my little square garden.  I hope that fence will say to the boys roaming through my backyard, “HEY, DO NOT STOMP ON ME!”  I transplanted some perennials from a neglected flowerbed in the front yard.  The other day, our temperatures reached almost 70 degrees, which was a delight and reminded me that one day, my nose will not be a cold knob on my face and I will stop wearing slippers day and night.  Dirt gathered under my fingernails as I dreamed of flowers and buzzing bumblebees.  It was a fine afternoon, indeed.

Followed by a rainy morning and another sunny afternoon, though admittedly cooler.  The crocuses bloom, the kids stay outdoors all afternoon and spring rushes toward us.  Funny how time doesn’t care that I already have my hands full.  Onward, onward, march, march, march.

 

 

Movie Review: Zodiac

Dear Guy in the faded FX Toughman shirt,

What in the name of all good sense are you doing taking a young girl (was she eight?!) to a rated R movie like “Zodiac”?  Are you insane?  Or just selfish?  Or stupid?

The previews alone for half a dozen gory horror films would have given me lifelong nightmares had I seen them when I was an eight year old girl.  What were you thinking?  Do you think?

And furthermore, Tuesday night is a SCHOOL NIGHT, dude!  The movie ended at 10 p.m. . . . isn’t that way past an 8-year old child’s bedtime?  Plan ahead, pal!  Get a babysitter!

What an idiot you are.  When I saw that child ALONE in the bathroom, I wanted to casually ask her if she liked the movie, but I was afraid she might talk to a stranger (ME!), thus giving her the idea that it’s completely fine to talk to strangers in the bathroom at the movie theater.

Honestly.  What is wrong with you? 

Signed,

Mel

p.s.  I liked the movie.  But I would NEVER in a MILLION years take a child to see it. 

Hair Today

Saturday night I noticed that my 9-year old’s bangs looked odd, as if he’d sawed at them with scissors.  I said, “Did you cut your hair?”  He said, “Oh, uh, no.”  I said, “You did, too!  Why did you cut your hair?”  He said, “Oh, that.  Well, uh, I was feeling uncomfortable and I had something in my hair and so I cut it.”   (He was outside.  Came inside, found scissors, took them outside and cut his hair.)

What?  So I got my sheers and trimmed up his bangs, leaving him with a hairstyle which can only be described as Little Dutch Boy.  nod_dutchboy.jpg 

I heard vague rumors about one of my 13-year old sons getting gum in his hair (“It was not my fault!  I cut it out!  It was here in the back!”) as we drove to church on Sunday morning.  Why am I not even consulted in these matters?

Today, there I was minding my own business and the same 13-year old said, “Hey, why does Gracie have gum in her hair?” And I scoffed.  “She doesn’t have gum in her hair!”

Only, she did have gum in her hair.  She had four evenly spaced wads of reddish gum along the left side of her head.  This was not good because she is hair-deficient.  While her hair is curly, it is sparse and in almost four and a half years of living, she’s managed only to grow a short curly mop.  100_0134.jpg 

Without alarming her, I asked, “Why did you put gum in your hair?”

She denied it.  I said, “You have gum in your hair!  How did it get there?”

And she said, “It just fell into my hair!”

I used cooking oil to ease it out of her hair, thus avoiding scissors entirely.  We were lucky this time.  I just hope she doesn’t decide to use her expert scissors skills to cut her curls off because if I’ve learned anything in 13 years of mothering, it’s that a bad idea masquerades as a good idea when it presents itself to a 4-year old.  (Also, I’ve learned never to walk around the house in socks.  You never know what puddle or piddle you might step in.)

About my funeral

My teenagers have a teenage boy over spending the night. No matter what I threaten, they are unable to maintain any sense of quiet. And their room smells like a can of onion-flavored Pringles, though I am certain we do not have any Pringles in the house.

I want to write a lovely little tribute to my kids (something like this), but instead, I’m obsessed with mentally planning my funeral. I know! What is wrong with me? Well, I attended a funeral a few weeks ago which made me realize that I have some definite ideas about my own funeral and how it ought to be planned. And then this week, a local man died at home quite suddenly . . . as in, his daughter found him dead when she returned home from school. He was fifty.

So, instead of thinking up cute ideas to write here, I think about what songs I want played at my funeral.

Okay, how about this, instead?

My boxwood hedge has a boy-shaped hole in it. All the boys were playing some kind of shoving-tackling game (I believe called “Kill Me”) and someone landed in the hedge right by my front door. I’m not sure my hedge can recover from this sort of abuse.

Tomorrow I’m going to spend the morning scrap-booking. And I hope to eat lunch in a restaurant. Maybe I’ll return my overdue library books. These are my dreams.

(Also, tell me that I’m not the only not-quite-middle-aged woman planning pondering her own funeral.)

What I’m Reading

The problem with library books is that you have to read them within three weeks or pay fines. I’m paying fines on two books because I just couldn’t finish them in time.

I read P.D. James’ A Time to Be In Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography recently. I really enjoyed it. I sought out this autobiography after wondering what P.D. James thought about having her book, Children of Men, made into a movie which hardly resembled the novel at all. Unfortunately, P.D. James has no real Internet presence (no blog for her!) and so I turned to her other writings. (I’m guessing now that she hates hates hate when they did to her novel.)

I’ve never read a P.D. James murder mystery, but after reading her autobiography, I look forward to reading her body of work, starting from the beginning.

Meanwhile, here are some quotes from the autobiography which struck me:

I began writing Cover Her Face when I was in my mid-thirties. It was a late beginning for someone who knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a novelist and, looking back, I can’t help regretting what I now see as some wasted years. In the war there was always the uncertainty of survival and one needed more determination and dedication than I possessed to embark on an 80,000-word work when the bombs were falling and lack of paper made it difficult for anyone new to get published. There is also in my nature that streak of indolence which made it more agreeable to contemplate the first book than actually to begin writing it. It was easier, too, to see the war years as a preparation for future endeavor rather than an appropriate time to begin. I can remember the moment, but not the date, when I finally realized that there would never be a convenient time to write my first book and that, unless I did make a start, I would eventually be saying to my grandchildren that what I had wanted to be was a novelist. Even to think of speaking these words was a realization of potential failure.

And this:

There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can’t now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

I also read a biography called Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air. I knew nothing about Anne Morrow Lindbergh other than the fact that she wrote the classic, Gift from the Sea (which I read immediately after finishing the biography.) What an interesting life she led–she and her husband, Charles, flew many exploratory routes in the early days of aviation–back in the day when they flew by sight, not by instruments. And then, of course, there is the tragedy of the kidnapping of their firstborn son when he was less than two years old. (The baby was murdered.) Back in their day, Anne and Charles were hounded by the press, much like celebrities of today. So much has changed in the world, yet so much has stayed the same.

Now, I’m finished with the library books, ready to start reading something new. Fiction, I think. I have literally hundreds of books on my shelves waiting to be read . . . a glut of reading material, an overabundance, too many choices.

What are you reading?