For the 22 years of my marriage and a few years thereafter, I carefully traced the history of our little family by designing a special addition to our Christmas tree skirt each year. Each new shape represented something of importance that had happened that year—marriage, the first cars, the first home, kids, divorce, pets—always something that in some way changed our lives.
For the past few years, I haven't actually gotten around to finishing the new ornaments, although I've cut them out and made a few notes about why I chose them.
This year, I haven't even done that, but I'm sure the ornament I'll make (when I get back around to it, and I promise I will) will be a moving van. Not me moving, but each of the kids, and each of the moves has touched me in a special way.
The first move, early in the summer, wasn't even one of my kids but instead Dramatic Daughter's Prince Charming. These two have known each other for a decade or so, and I suspect PC has kept DD in mind for most of that time. Romance actually first flared a little over a year ago, but DD had had a long-distance romance once or twice before and drew a line in the sand: if he was really interested, he had to move to California to be near her job and her lifestyle. As illogical as it was, he cut the ties to a job with possibly a good deal more potential than anything California might offer and made the move. Things have gone swimmingly, and I wonder whether the blue topaz he gave her for Christmas has more meaning than the birthstone it purports to be; I suspect the chances are good. That move could change my daughter's life.
The second move came in August, when Number One son left a job in Austin and wedged his mattress between the sewing machines and computer desk in my office to be near the local community college, where he is hoping to retrain from auto mechanics to radiation technology. His current plan is an associate's degree that will give him a start in the medical field, which is foreign to anything he's tried before. I'm crossing my fingers for him, but I know that whether this works out or not, his life is going to change for the happier.
The third move came today, and I find myself a bit melancholy because of it: I took Soldier Son to his Army recruiting station to be inducted into full-time military service. He and I have talked this over a great deal over the past year, so I knew it was coming, and I'm mostly very happy for him. As we have discussed, much the Army has to offer is very good for him, and his experiences as an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran and a 6-year reservist assure us that much of the Army lifestyle fits well with his personality and his needs. I don't know what has future as a soldier will be, but I think he has made the right choice for himself.
And yet, the lump in my throat just hangs there, gently pressing on my heart. This son is the most of all of them like me in his personality, his thinking, and his sense of humor.
This is the son of silver-sky-blue eyes that I described once as a burst of balloons, bobbing in a dozen different directions. He has always been the one who has reached out for love when he needed it for himself but who has been hesitant and uncomfortable in reaching out to share it with others. He is a gentle spirit with a fierce Christian faith but he sees the irony of Christians who cannot forgive and accept others for who and what they are. He is a pigpen and a loner, but he can swoop in and take charge and make sense of chaos when a situation needs a clear mind and a strong heart. He wants to be successful on his own terms: he doesn't want to be in debt, but he doesn't need to amass wealth.
This son has never lived away from home except for his tour in Iraq, his senior year in college, and a few weeks after his graduation; otherwise, he has been here with me and for me for nearly 28 years, and I already miss him.
But time has come, and we're all moving on.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Changing the names to protect the (in)nocent?
Christmas at our house was pretty much an orgy of excess from the time the better-heeled grandmother discovered Toys R Us until the divorce, at which time it pretty much crashed for the kids and me into our best hope to be able to come up with any gifts for each other at all.
That first year, we stubbornly put up the tree and draped it in Christmas memories, nestling the few small gifts we could afford easily within the rim of its smallish round skirt. The kids spent Christmas Eve exchanging gifts with their dad's side of the family, pretty much coming home with washtubs of gifts that were more useful than special, but much appreciated in our tight times nonetheless.
The kids were eager to have time with their dad's family, but they insisted Christmas morning was time for their Santa at home and for exchanging gifts with me. I have always loved that.
At first, I tried to keep traditions as much in place as possible, pulling out what I could by way of gift wrap and bows, but I couldn't just let the tree skirt sit bare until Christmas morning, so I developed a code to identify the gifts. That way, the kids could look and shake and try to guess what was in the packages, but they didn't know whose was whose, which I assumed sort of added to the challenge.
Sometimes the code was as simple as a string of random numbers so that their birth order appeared as one of the digits (only gifts for Number One son had a 1in them, only those for Second Son had a 2, and Darling Daughter had a 3); sometimes it included their birth year, sometimes it had an initial.
Since this year I have a blog they don't know about and I use names that aren't theirs, I just used the "blog" initials: NO, SS, and DD. I wound up wrapping gifts they were giving each other, so I tacked the giver's real initial on the end, so SSM meant a gift to Second Son from me.
Maybe as early as that first Christmas I managed to scramble the code so that even I didn't remember it, so something of NO's wound up going to Darling Daughter, and something of hers wound up going to SS. This year, even with what I thought was the easiest code ever, I inverted a couple of them so the givers wound up getting back the gifts they were giving because I put the wrong initials first, but they just slipped them back into the wrappings and sent them on their way.
Although I think all three of the kids have enjoyed trying to figure out the code, DD has typically been the one whose interest in the code has sometimes superseded her interest in the gifts. This year, thee last gifts under the tree were pet toys for the dogs, so they were the first ones out. Since I had used the dogs' real initials, DD thought she had it figured out: first initial the receiver, last initial the giver.
The next gift up was for NO from me, so when he read the code, I interpreted. The next one up was for SS from me, so DD piped up right away with her interpretation: Soldier Son! Since he's shipping out for basic training on a 6-year Army hitch, that's appropriate, but since I haven't told her about the blog yet, I didn't indicate that her assumption was wrong.
After a couple more for SS, NO found one for DD.
"Dramatic Daughter," she interpreted.
"Ah," NO reasoned, "then mine must be 'Not a Mechanic.'" The fact that NOM wouldn't likely stand for that and that a couple of later gifts would come up with his siblings' initials instead of the M didn't seem to faze him.
But his thinking in terms of jobs—SS is off to be a soldier here in a couple of days, and DD holds a degree in theater arts—makes sense. SS is bunking here for a while to work on a degree and career change so he'll really be "not a mechanic."
None of the kids questioned why the NO didn't work (they wound up happier than I had expected with my off-the-wall assortment of gifts), and I didn't volunteer it. But Soldier Son alleviates my concern about having a kid in second place, and DD really can be something of a drama queen. I'm not sure where I'll go with the third one, but I think I've backtracked from existing initials to a whole new set of names!
That first year, we stubbornly put up the tree and draped it in Christmas memories, nestling the few small gifts we could afford easily within the rim of its smallish round skirt. The kids spent Christmas Eve exchanging gifts with their dad's side of the family, pretty much coming home with washtubs of gifts that were more useful than special, but much appreciated in our tight times nonetheless.
The kids were eager to have time with their dad's family, but they insisted Christmas morning was time for their Santa at home and for exchanging gifts with me. I have always loved that.
At first, I tried to keep traditions as much in place as possible, pulling out what I could by way of gift wrap and bows, but I couldn't just let the tree skirt sit bare until Christmas morning, so I developed a code to identify the gifts. That way, the kids could look and shake and try to guess what was in the packages, but they didn't know whose was whose, which I assumed sort of added to the challenge.
Sometimes the code was as simple as a string of random numbers so that their birth order appeared as one of the digits (only gifts for Number One son had a 1in them, only those for Second Son had a 2, and Darling Daughter had a 3); sometimes it included their birth year, sometimes it had an initial.
Since this year I have a blog they don't know about and I use names that aren't theirs, I just used the "blog" initials: NO, SS, and DD. I wound up wrapping gifts they were giving each other, so I tacked the giver's real initial on the end, so SSM meant a gift to Second Son from me.
Maybe as early as that first Christmas I managed to scramble the code so that even I didn't remember it, so something of NO's wound up going to Darling Daughter, and something of hers wound up going to SS. This year, even with what I thought was the easiest code ever, I inverted a couple of them so the givers wound up getting back the gifts they were giving because I put the wrong initials first, but they just slipped them back into the wrappings and sent them on their way.
Although I think all three of the kids have enjoyed trying to figure out the code, DD has typically been the one whose interest in the code has sometimes superseded her interest in the gifts. This year, thee last gifts under the tree were pet toys for the dogs, so they were the first ones out. Since I had used the dogs' real initials, DD thought she had it figured out: first initial the receiver, last initial the giver.
The next gift up was for NO from me, so when he read the code, I interpreted. The next one up was for SS from me, so DD piped up right away with her interpretation: Soldier Son! Since he's shipping out for basic training on a 6-year Army hitch, that's appropriate, but since I haven't told her about the blog yet, I didn't indicate that her assumption was wrong.
After a couple more for SS, NO found one for DD.
"Dramatic Daughter," she interpreted.
"Ah," NO reasoned, "then mine must be 'Not a Mechanic.'" The fact that NOM wouldn't likely stand for that and that a couple of later gifts would come up with his siblings' initials instead of the M didn't seem to faze him.
But his thinking in terms of jobs—SS is off to be a soldier here in a couple of days, and DD holds a degree in theater arts—makes sense. SS is bunking here for a while to work on a degree and career change so he'll really be "not a mechanic."
None of the kids questioned why the NO didn't work (they wound up happier than I had expected with my off-the-wall assortment of gifts), and I didn't volunteer it. But Soldier Son alleviates my concern about having a kid in second place, and DD really can be something of a drama queen. I'm not sure where I'll go with the third one, but I think I've backtracked from existing initials to a whole new set of names!
Monday, December 21, 2009
Junk Yard Dog comes to visit
Darling Daughter came home for the holidays with both Prince Charming and her junkyard dog—all 15 feisty pounds of her—in tow. Junk Yard gets that moniker from her origins at the Pasadena animal shelter, where she showed up one day slathered in mud from the construction site where she had been found and may have lived a good part of her four-month lifespan. She’s pretty much wire-haired terrier through and through, with an overlay of beagle giving her a black saddle with white boots, vest, and taillight, all trimmed up with soft tan. She’s stocky, so in isolation she looks much larger than she is, and she typically makes up for size in volume.
Which is not terribly effective around the dogs that live with me the rest of the year. My own dog can be wonderfully sweet and affectionate, but those aren’t exactly the traits that earned her the position of Alpha Bitch next to the boxer/bird dog Tank that moved in with us just over a year ago. Alpha Bitch also seems to be part hobbit; she delights in snatching toys that Tank has dropped, dashing off to my bedroom, and “hiding” them on my bed. She doesn't take well to annoyances, and anything that irritates her is likely to get a tongue-lashing, quite likely accompanied by ugly snarls and growls and probably at least baring of teeth, if not some gratuitous snapping to seal the point. When she is asleep, even small movements can yank her to rowdy reprobation.
Tank is usually quite the opposite. He was starved for both food and affection when Second Son, who yo-yoed back home last year, found him at the local shelter. Affection is as important as food to Tank, who works hard to get both of them now. He would never dream of stealing a toy; in fact, he’d be more likely to offer one than to snatch it. In spite of his size (when he rises up on his hind legs, his face is inches from mine) and his energy, his current objective in life seems to be controlling his whiplash tail and eager paws enough to win the affection of our cat, who suffers through with Alpha Bitch but just isn’t too much into the enthusiastic Tank. Otherwise than intimidating the cat, he’s quite gentle and quiet and usually more than eager to please.
To get an idea of how these three stack up, imagine Junk Yard standing on my patio. Alpha Bitch can (and sometimes does) stand over her, her belly clearing Junk Yard’s back. Tank can stand over Alpha Bitch.
In the past, Junk Yard has enjoyed coming to our house. When Alpha Bitch was a puppy, Junk Yard buddied up to the cat and had a fine time playing with her, and Junk Yard had plenty of experience to keep her ahead of the pack. The next year she stood up on her hind legs to explain reality to Tank, and he obediently accepted her word as law. Now that the other two have had some time together and she’s the new kid on the block, they’re a lot less frightened by her purely terrier noisemaking, and she’s feeling a bit nonplussed about losing her status as queen of the castle.
That became painfully apparent when I had the three of them in the back yard yesterday afternoon to play fetch. Now, I had seen videos of Junk Yard playing fetch with an assortment of toys when she was fresh home from the shelter, and she had cheerfully brought back anything that was thrown for her. Not so much now; from what I hear now, she is happy to chase whatever is thrown for her, but in her digs, humans may throw all of her toys for her to hide in various places not where they originated.
In the sandpit the bigger dogs have made of my backyard, she can give the others a good run for the ones that are farther away, although she typically doesn’t come up with the ball. That initially translated into her scrambling to snag any ball that landed close enough for her to get it and digging furiously in an effort to keep it away. Her industry is admirable but extraneous; the other two seem to have established long ago that He Who Gets the Ball Keeps the Ball, so the one who snags it has the privilege of taking it back.
I sort of thought that praise for the return of the ball would encourage Junk Yard to stop being so possessive, but that hasn’t worked; neither has grabbing her by the scruff and telling her no before prying it from her jaws. The best solution so far—when the other two are willing to break their code of honor to keep the ball in play—has been for Tank to distract Junk Yard long enough for Alpha Bitch to snag the ball when Junk Yard isn’t looking.
This morning the big dogs decided to honor the code, but Junk Yard caught onto the fact that if she tried to bury the ball, her Grammar was going to be upset. A couple of times she even got it onto the patio so I cold pry it out of her jaws and praise her for bringing it back. The next time she got that close, she took off into the house with it, so I closed the door and continued to play with the other two. I meant for shutting her out (or in) to be punishment, but she seemed thoroughly self-satisfied as she stomped off upstairs to report to her mother about how mean I was!
DD and PC have taken off for a couple of days, leaving Junk Yard to work out her differences with the other dogs and Grammar. We’ll see if she gets the hang of it over the next couple of weeks.
Which is not terribly effective around the dogs that live with me the rest of the year. My own dog can be wonderfully sweet and affectionate, but those aren’t exactly the traits that earned her the position of Alpha Bitch next to the boxer/bird dog Tank that moved in with us just over a year ago. Alpha Bitch also seems to be part hobbit; she delights in snatching toys that Tank has dropped, dashing off to my bedroom, and “hiding” them on my bed. She doesn't take well to annoyances, and anything that irritates her is likely to get a tongue-lashing, quite likely accompanied by ugly snarls and growls and probably at least baring of teeth, if not some gratuitous snapping to seal the point. When she is asleep, even small movements can yank her to rowdy reprobation.
Tank is usually quite the opposite. He was starved for both food and affection when Second Son, who yo-yoed back home last year, found him at the local shelter. Affection is as important as food to Tank, who works hard to get both of them now. He would never dream of stealing a toy; in fact, he’d be more likely to offer one than to snatch it. In spite of his size (when he rises up on his hind legs, his face is inches from mine) and his energy, his current objective in life seems to be controlling his whiplash tail and eager paws enough to win the affection of our cat, who suffers through with Alpha Bitch but just isn’t too much into the enthusiastic Tank. Otherwise than intimidating the cat, he’s quite gentle and quiet and usually more than eager to please.
To get an idea of how these three stack up, imagine Junk Yard standing on my patio. Alpha Bitch can (and sometimes does) stand over her, her belly clearing Junk Yard’s back. Tank can stand over Alpha Bitch.
In the past, Junk Yard has enjoyed coming to our house. When Alpha Bitch was a puppy, Junk Yard buddied up to the cat and had a fine time playing with her, and Junk Yard had plenty of experience to keep her ahead of the pack. The next year she stood up on her hind legs to explain reality to Tank, and he obediently accepted her word as law. Now that the other two have had some time together and she’s the new kid on the block, they’re a lot less frightened by her purely terrier noisemaking, and she’s feeling a bit nonplussed about losing her status as queen of the castle.
That became painfully apparent when I had the three of them in the back yard yesterday afternoon to play fetch. Now, I had seen videos of Junk Yard playing fetch with an assortment of toys when she was fresh home from the shelter, and she had cheerfully brought back anything that was thrown for her. Not so much now; from what I hear now, she is happy to chase whatever is thrown for her, but in her digs, humans may throw all of her toys for her to hide in various places not where they originated.
In the sandpit the bigger dogs have made of my backyard, she can give the others a good run for the ones that are farther away, although she typically doesn’t come up with the ball. That initially translated into her scrambling to snag any ball that landed close enough for her to get it and digging furiously in an effort to keep it away. Her industry is admirable but extraneous; the other two seem to have established long ago that He Who Gets the Ball Keeps the Ball, so the one who snags it has the privilege of taking it back.
I sort of thought that praise for the return of the ball would encourage Junk Yard to stop being so possessive, but that hasn’t worked; neither has grabbing her by the scruff and telling her no before prying it from her jaws. The best solution so far—when the other two are willing to break their code of honor to keep the ball in play—has been for Tank to distract Junk Yard long enough for Alpha Bitch to snag the ball when Junk Yard isn’t looking.
This morning the big dogs decided to honor the code, but Junk Yard caught onto the fact that if she tried to bury the ball, her Grammar was going to be upset. A couple of times she even got it onto the patio so I cold pry it out of her jaws and praise her for bringing it back. The next time she got that close, she took off into the house with it, so I closed the door and continued to play with the other two. I meant for shutting her out (or in) to be punishment, but she seemed thoroughly self-satisfied as she stomped off upstairs to report to her mother about how mean I was!
DD and PC have taken off for a couple of days, leaving Junk Yard to work out her differences with the other dogs and Grammar. We’ll see if she gets the hang of it over the next couple of weeks.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Happy birthday, Angel
Today is Darling Daughter's birthday.
I might have made a bigger deal of it if my life hadn't careened around a strange bend several months ago such that I've spent this whole day in mid-December grading papers. (Okay, I've taken a couple of short breaks, but you get the drift.)
The south turn started at the beginning of the semester when a senior professor informed me that I would be coteaching a couple of courses with him. I taught both courses myself for about 8 years before they were yanked away from me last year; the argument was that an engineer would be able to solicit higher-quality projects from our students. That professor isn't the one teaching with me; turns out that wasn't such a good idea, either.
I've never been really happy with having the course yanked as it was, so I was less than enthusiastic when I was called back in on it; I was also not particularly cheered when I discovered that "coteaching" would me that I would do virtually all of the design of one course and coordinate four teaching assistants to grade them, with little assistance from the senior professor. Worse, I was given little control over the teaching of the second course but all of the responsibility for grading the formal, senior-level reports. And apparently I'm doing this without any formal credit from the university.
The glitch in all this is that the grading rubric for the course I'm grading for is clearly derived from the one I used when I taught the course, but the instruction didn't really prepare the students to measure up to its demands. Consequently, when the papers came in in mid-November, few of them earned passing grades, and most of them shocked and disappointed their authors, most of whom have been top students in their classes since kindergarten.
Sometimes the classes have been rewarding; a couple of my lectures in the class I have controlled went off very well, and one of the TAs has remarked a couple of times that she has seen significant improvement in the writing she has been grading over the course of the semester. When I asked last week for examples of good, average, and poor final reports, they TAs said they had plenty of good ones and several "average" ones, but "poor" ones were hard to come by. I'm okay with that.
And except for the long, long hours of grading in the other class, sometimes it has had its rewards. I was surprised several times by students whose first-round grades were poor but who stopped to thank me for the detailed comments I gave them. I was pleased by a couple of students who told me they had been in a laboratory I had graded a couple of years ago and had used techniques from that class as they wrote excellent formal reports as seniors. And I have been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who first grades had been horrifying to them but whose revisions have merited As or low Bs.
I've never still been grading papers this close to the end of the semester (I have only hours, really, before I have to submit final grades), and I resent the hours I've had to steal from other opportunities that I consider more important to my life, but I have to admit I appreciate the students who clearly responded to my advice and did well.
A small group of them had permission from the professor to do one of the course assignments today, provided they got permission from me. I assured them that I would accept the late assignments (because he was willing to), provided they all sang happy birthday to my daughter. Their responses have been amusing: what's her name? where will she be? why do we have to do that? None of them matters except the last: because I said so!
I'm not sure if they did it (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure the daughter half a continent away didn't hear it. But I do hope she had a lovely day!
I might have made a bigger deal of it if my life hadn't careened around a strange bend several months ago such that I've spent this whole day in mid-December grading papers. (Okay, I've taken a couple of short breaks, but you get the drift.)
The south turn started at the beginning of the semester when a senior professor informed me that I would be coteaching a couple of courses with him. I taught both courses myself for about 8 years before they were yanked away from me last year; the argument was that an engineer would be able to solicit higher-quality projects from our students. That professor isn't the one teaching with me; turns out that wasn't such a good idea, either.
I've never been really happy with having the course yanked as it was, so I was less than enthusiastic when I was called back in on it; I was also not particularly cheered when I discovered that "coteaching" would me that I would do virtually all of the design of one course and coordinate four teaching assistants to grade them, with little assistance from the senior professor. Worse, I was given little control over the teaching of the second course but all of the responsibility for grading the formal, senior-level reports. And apparently I'm doing this without any formal credit from the university.
The glitch in all this is that the grading rubric for the course I'm grading for is clearly derived from the one I used when I taught the course, but the instruction didn't really prepare the students to measure up to its demands. Consequently, when the papers came in in mid-November, few of them earned passing grades, and most of them shocked and disappointed their authors, most of whom have been top students in their classes since kindergarten.
Sometimes the classes have been rewarding; a couple of my lectures in the class I have controlled went off very well, and one of the TAs has remarked a couple of times that she has seen significant improvement in the writing she has been grading over the course of the semester. When I asked last week for examples of good, average, and poor final reports, they TAs said they had plenty of good ones and several "average" ones, but "poor" ones were hard to come by. I'm okay with that.
And except for the long, long hours of grading in the other class, sometimes it has had its rewards. I was surprised several times by students whose first-round grades were poor but who stopped to thank me for the detailed comments I gave them. I was pleased by a couple of students who told me they had been in a laboratory I had graded a couple of years ago and had used techniques from that class as they wrote excellent formal reports as seniors. And I have been gobsmacked by a surprising number of students who first grades had been horrifying to them but whose revisions have merited As or low Bs.
I've never still been grading papers this close to the end of the semester (I have only hours, really, before I have to submit final grades), and I resent the hours I've had to steal from other opportunities that I consider more important to my life, but I have to admit I appreciate the students who clearly responded to my advice and did well.
A small group of them had permission from the professor to do one of the course assignments today, provided they got permission from me. I assured them that I would accept the late assignments (because he was willing to), provided they all sang happy birthday to my daughter. Their responses have been amusing: what's her name? where will she be? why do we have to do that? None of them matters except the last: because I said so!
I'm not sure if they did it (I doubt it), but I'm quite sure the daughter half a continent away didn't hear it. But I do hope she had a lovely day!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
And about don marquis and e.e. cummings
If you don't know about e.e. cummings and his propensity for writing in lower case, you have no one but yourself to blame. I recommend Wikipedia to start.
If you don't know Don Marquis, you may just have missed The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis' hysterical account of the life of a cockroach who shared Marquis' office space at The Evening Sun in New York during the early part of the last century.
I discovered Archy and Mehitabel when I was in junior high or high school, when a friend of mine loaned me her copy to read. I was fascinated by the fact that Marquis had managed to turn out an entire book in lower-case type (I'm not sure I had even heard of cummings yet, but I'm sure I hadn't been terribly smitten by him), and even more by the explanation: Marquis attributed the entire book to Archy.
The idea was that Archy was actually a reincarnated poet who still loved to write (even in his incarnation as a cockroach), but he felt obliged, apparently, to share the office news from his view on the underside of the world in exchange for the use of Marquis' typewriter.
As a cockroach, his only means of typing was diving from the top of the machine onto the keys; since he was only one cockroach, he couldn't strike two keys at once, so he couldn't hold the shift key. As I recall, at least one segment (I sort of hate to call them chapters; I suspect they were actually collected from Marquis' daily column in the Evening Sun) appeared in all caps as a concession to those who wanted capital letters, but Archy made the caps by locking the caps lock key for the entire segment. After all, using the caps lock would have required three leaps from the top of the machine to capitalize normally: one to lock the caps, one to strike the letter, and one to unlock the caps. I agree with Archy; sounds like way too much work to me.
You can read snippets of Archy's work from the Don Marquis website at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/, and copies of the whole book are still available on the web. As the website shows, archy was Marquis' voice for a lot of observations of his world, but his bug's-eye view makes them even funnier.
If you don't know Don Marquis, you may just have missed The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, Marquis' hysterical account of the life of a cockroach who shared Marquis' office space at The Evening Sun in New York during the early part of the last century.
I discovered Archy and Mehitabel when I was in junior high or high school, when a friend of mine loaned me her copy to read. I was fascinated by the fact that Marquis had managed to turn out an entire book in lower-case type (I'm not sure I had even heard of cummings yet, but I'm sure I hadn't been terribly smitten by him), and even more by the explanation: Marquis attributed the entire book to Archy.
The idea was that Archy was actually a reincarnated poet who still loved to write (even in his incarnation as a cockroach), but he felt obliged, apparently, to share the office news from his view on the underside of the world in exchange for the use of Marquis' typewriter.
As a cockroach, his only means of typing was diving from the top of the machine onto the keys; since he was only one cockroach, he couldn't strike two keys at once, so he couldn't hold the shift key. As I recall, at least one segment (I sort of hate to call them chapters; I suspect they were actually collected from Marquis' daily column in the Evening Sun) appeared in all caps as a concession to those who wanted capital letters, but Archy made the caps by locking the caps lock key for the entire segment. After all, using the caps lock would have required three leaps from the top of the machine to capitalize normally: one to lock the caps, one to strike the letter, and one to unlock the caps. I agree with Archy; sounds like way too much work to me.
You can read snippets of Archy's work from the Don Marquis website at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/, and copies of the whole book are still available on the web. As the website shows, archy was Marquis' voice for a lot of observations of his world, but his bug's-eye view makes them even funnier.
Monday, November 30, 2009
So about that naked ice skating...
Here's the scoop on the naked ice skating:
I made my annual fall trek to Los Angeles to see Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming a couple of weeks early to celebrate my birthday and to see DD's school's production of A Chorus Line.
After the Sunday matinee, several of the school staff treated the Guest Director and his Best Friend to dinner at a restaurant that I happen to like to visit when I'm in LA, and PC and I were invited along.
PC and I somehow wound up at the table with DD, the GD and his BF, and the two folks who work closest with DD on these things, the school's Set Designer and the Theater Arts Coordinator. I don't know how PC and I wound up separating SD and TAC from DD, GD and BF, but we did, and that left DD having a lively theater chat with those two and PC and me sort of on our own to figure out whether to listen to that or to drop in on SD and TAC, whose conversation would potentially be must less interesting because they've been friends for so long.
Not long enough, it turns out, for SD to feel as if he knew all he could about TAC's background, so SD asked the question of how TAC got from his European beginnings to a private school in Pasadena, California.
One worthwhile stop along the way was a set designer job at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Among other things, TAC had designed sets for an ice show there. PC and I chuckled at the idea of ice at a place called "the Tropicana," but that was only the beginning.
One of the stars of the show was a young man TAC and I remembered from our younger years as the voice of NASA who had counted down to blast-off in the early days of manned space exploration. I had always assumed the voice we heard was that of a NASA engineer or astronaut or someone with "official" ties to the space program; the notion that an actor—in fact, an ice skater—counting us down to man's first steps on the moon just somehow seemed illogical.
But then it got worse: TAC told us that one of the shows was supposed to feature a rain shower, so he had had to design a way to get rain on the rink without melting the ice. So now we have the voice of NASA. Ice skating. At the Tropicana. In the rain.
Naked.
DD seemed to be having a lively and interesting conversation with the GD and his BF. PC and I were trying to keep from rolling under the table.
A day or two later the three of us were rolling around the kids' apartment in preparation for taking off on our next adventure. When PC finished his shower, he hollered out the bathroom door at DD about something, and I reminded him that if he was about to come out of the bathroom, he might want to grab a towel first. A couple of minutes later, he slipped from the bathroom into the bedroom with the towel wrapped around his midsection.
"No nudie show for me this afternoon?" I called through the bedroom door.
"Let me grab my skates!" he hollered back.
Priceless.
I made my annual fall trek to Los Angeles to see Darling Daughter and her Prince Charming a couple of weeks early to celebrate my birthday and to see DD's school's production of A Chorus Line.
After the Sunday matinee, several of the school staff treated the Guest Director and his Best Friend to dinner at a restaurant that I happen to like to visit when I'm in LA, and PC and I were invited along.
PC and I somehow wound up at the table with DD, the GD and his BF, and the two folks who work closest with DD on these things, the school's Set Designer and the Theater Arts Coordinator. I don't know how PC and I wound up separating SD and TAC from DD, GD and BF, but we did, and that left DD having a lively theater chat with those two and PC and me sort of on our own to figure out whether to listen to that or to drop in on SD and TAC, whose conversation would potentially be must less interesting because they've been friends for so long.
Not long enough, it turns out, for SD to feel as if he knew all he could about TAC's background, so SD asked the question of how TAC got from his European beginnings to a private school in Pasadena, California.
One worthwhile stop along the way was a set designer job at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. Among other things, TAC had designed sets for an ice show there. PC and I chuckled at the idea of ice at a place called "the Tropicana," but that was only the beginning.
One of the stars of the show was a young man TAC and I remembered from our younger years as the voice of NASA who had counted down to blast-off in the early days of manned space exploration. I had always assumed the voice we heard was that of a NASA engineer or astronaut or someone with "official" ties to the space program; the notion that an actor—in fact, an ice skater—counting us down to man's first steps on the moon just somehow seemed illogical.
But then it got worse: TAC told us that one of the shows was supposed to feature a rain shower, so he had had to design a way to get rain on the rink without melting the ice. So now we have the voice of NASA. Ice skating. At the Tropicana. In the rain.
Naked.
DD seemed to be having a lively and interesting conversation with the GD and his BF. PC and I were trying to keep from rolling under the table.
A day or two later the three of us were rolling around the kids' apartment in preparation for taking off on our next adventure. When PC finished his shower, he hollered out the bathroom door at DD about something, and I reminded him that if he was about to come out of the bathroom, he might want to grab a towel first. A couple of minutes later, he slipped from the bathroom into the bedroom with the towel wrapped around his midsection.
"No nudie show for me this afternoon?" I called through the bedroom door.
"Let me grab my skates!" he hollered back.
Priceless.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Hmph. Okay. My sister thought it was funny, anyway...
Late-last-night volley in an email exchange with my sister (edited for spelling and to protect the names of the innocent):
oh, yeah, i've enjoyed the world of living alone for a long time—part of why i was sure when nobody else seemed to be that i'd be fine when my marriage crashed. i don't think of myself as being that terribly selfish (although i know i am); i just pretty much think of myself as a mole, which turns out to be a pretty accurate description.
i pretty much let the boys live upstairs and i live downstairs, but the dogs do their shedding and dirt-tracking-in downstairs (and the dust bunnies seem to party down here), so with jobs keeping me nuts, i don't have time to dust and clean as i'd like. I could probably pay a housekeeper, but i'm too stubborn to do that with live-ins who could do the job if they'd get off their duffs. I know Second Son will come through on his debts to me shortly after he starts getting army pay, and Number One Son has come to the plate for meal preparation (and is wonderful with the dogs—one of those things that really makes me see daddy in him). But neither one of them seems to be any better than the dogs at herding dust bunnies. or yard work, for that matter. i must have trained them wrong.
fortunately, neither of them comes even close to [our older brother] Bo; NOS and i were surprised by upstairs-crashing-around last week one day when SS had decided he couldn't go to houston to visit a buddy unless he cleaned (and vacuumed) his room first. never ceases to amaze me. NOS is living literally in the middle of my office—virtually all his goods stacked between the desk on one side and the sewing machine on the other—and frankly doesn't own enough stuff to make much of a mess of anything. hangs out up there more than i thought he would, but i'm more surprised by the amount of time he spends down here with me and the dogs. don't like the amount of drinking he's doing; grandmother is praying for him to get off booze and butts, but i figure out next best friend on butts will be x-ray school, if he gets in.
california is probably in my future if for no reason than that i'm prepaying my alzheimer's care by helping darling daughter w/student loans. i've got other business to tend to here for a while yet; for one thing, i sort of need to hold this fort down while NOS needs a place to bunk, and for another, i think i'll be able to snag a much better price if i wait for the market stabilize somewhat and for the university to get the new medical center on this side of town up and running—probably still four or five years down the road. unless someone comes up with a really sweet deal on the left coast or makes me an offer on the casa, i'm snug if not always comfortable here. and my next move will be to a place half this size—lord knows i don't need this much space to rattle around in alone.
DD's flame is a sweetheart, but i don't want the two of them even to think marriage until they have cohabited a while. from what i can tell, he's probably up to the challenge, and i know she's really working to remember that the advantages of having a man around the house also mean letting him be the man around the house. i don't know how hard he is to live with, but i suspect my daughter can be a megabitch, so he needs to be sure he's willing to put up with her. she is definitely smitten by him, and from what i can tell, it's mutual. and he's funny—did i tell you about the naked ice skating? She's been trying to get him to family gigs for a while, but life so far has gotten in the way.
i suspect kids will follow wedding vows; i'm not sure whether DD needs kidlets in her life much more than arge does, but i'm pretty sure she wants them, and if she has them, she'll be as super a mom as she has been at just about everything else.
haven't heard anything about dubai weather except to know that they built a mall with a ski slope in it several years ago because, well, they could, and we drive gas guzzlers to pay for it. i know qatar keeps the air conditioning low enough to hang icicles everywhere indoors, which drives the ecoperson in me nuts, but again, we drive gas guzzlers to pay for it. (our university's building in qatar has lights on motion sensors so you can get stuck in the dark in the restrooms, but your butt could freeze off if you don't flail around enough to get the lights back on because the thermostats must be on the outsides of the buildings there—only possible explanation for that much indoor cold.)
oh, yeah, i've enjoyed the world of living alone for a long time—part of why i was sure when nobody else seemed to be that i'd be fine when my marriage crashed. i don't think of myself as being that terribly selfish (although i know i am); i just pretty much think of myself as a mole, which turns out to be a pretty accurate description.
i pretty much let the boys live upstairs and i live downstairs, but the dogs do their shedding and dirt-tracking-in downstairs (and the dust bunnies seem to party down here), so with jobs keeping me nuts, i don't have time to dust and clean as i'd like. I could probably pay a housekeeper, but i'm too stubborn to do that with live-ins who could do the job if they'd get off their duffs. I know Second Son will come through on his debts to me shortly after he starts getting army pay, and Number One Son has come to the plate for meal preparation (and is wonderful with the dogs—one of those things that really makes me see daddy in him). But neither one of them seems to be any better than the dogs at herding dust bunnies. or yard work, for that matter. i must have trained them wrong.
fortunately, neither of them comes even close to [our older brother] Bo; NOS and i were surprised by upstairs-crashing-around last week one day when SS had decided he couldn't go to houston to visit a buddy unless he cleaned (and vacuumed) his room first. never ceases to amaze me. NOS is living literally in the middle of my office—virtually all his goods stacked between the desk on one side and the sewing machine on the other—and frankly doesn't own enough stuff to make much of a mess of anything. hangs out up there more than i thought he would, but i'm more surprised by the amount of time he spends down here with me and the dogs. don't like the amount of drinking he's doing; grandmother is praying for him to get off booze and butts, but i figure out next best friend on butts will be x-ray school, if he gets in.
california is probably in my future if for no reason than that i'm prepaying my alzheimer's care by helping darling daughter w/student loans. i've got other business to tend to here for a while yet; for one thing, i sort of need to hold this fort down while NOS needs a place to bunk, and for another, i think i'll be able to snag a much better price if i wait for the market stabilize somewhat and for the university to get the new medical center on this side of town up and running—probably still four or five years down the road. unless someone comes up with a really sweet deal on the left coast or makes me an offer on the casa, i'm snug if not always comfortable here. and my next move will be to a place half this size—lord knows i don't need this much space to rattle around in alone.
DD's flame is a sweetheart, but i don't want the two of them even to think marriage until they have cohabited a while. from what i can tell, he's probably up to the challenge, and i know she's really working to remember that the advantages of having a man around the house also mean letting him be the man around the house. i don't know how hard he is to live with, but i suspect my daughter can be a megabitch, so he needs to be sure he's willing to put up with her. she is definitely smitten by him, and from what i can tell, it's mutual. and he's funny—did i tell you about the naked ice skating? She's been trying to get him to family gigs for a while, but life so far has gotten in the way.
i suspect kids will follow wedding vows; i'm not sure whether DD needs kidlets in her life much more than arge does, but i'm pretty sure she wants them, and if she has them, she'll be as super a mom as she has been at just about everything else.
haven't heard anything about dubai weather except to know that they built a mall with a ski slope in it several years ago because, well, they could, and we drive gas guzzlers to pay for it. i know qatar keeps the air conditioning low enough to hang icicles everywhere indoors, which drives the ecoperson in me nuts, but again, we drive gas guzzlers to pay for it. (our university's building in qatar has lights on motion sensors so you can get stuck in the dark in the restrooms, but your butt could freeze off if you don't flail around enough to get the lights back on because the thermostats must be on the outsides of the buildings there—only possible explanation for that much indoor cold.)
this message brought to you by don marquis and e.e. cummings.
First line of Sis's response: "You are so funny!"
Don't think I've ever gotten that from her before.
Don't think I've ever gotten that from her before.
Moving on down the road.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
A short entry
Since I started this blog, I have linked myself to RSS feeds from other bloggers who have lots more experience than I do.
What I've observed is that most of the entries these folks write are short and focused.
Mine tend to ramble on for paragraphs, muddling through random thoughts and details and then ending on something that may or may not be a point.
This one doesn't.
Or does.
Depending.
What I've observed is that most of the entries these folks write are short and focused.
Mine tend to ramble on for paragraphs, muddling through random thoughts and details and then ending on something that may or may not be a point.
This one doesn't.
Or does.
Depending.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Pimping for the software
I have been absolutely swamped for the past couple of weeks by far more work than I've had time to do, both on my "day" job and in my consulting, so I've fallen badly behind in a number of things. Not surprisingly, then, I really didn't have time to do much in the way of preparation for this afternoon's scheduled presentation on how to use a bibliographic software I've been using religiously for the past couple of years to manage my reading notes.
I actually used the software for another purpose a decade or more ago, but when the university made it available to staff and students free, I realized that it might have good potential for storing reading notes in a handy, electronic format that I could access more easily than the clumsy hard copies I've tried to use for years. Turns out, it does a fine job.
More important, I teach technical writing, and one of my big challenges is getting students to read and cite papers as part of their research efforts. For many of the undergraduate projects, citing a half-dozen papers is often plenty; others need to cite many more than that, but they need a way to keep track of what they're doing so they can synthesize information and write responsibly. The graduate students need to build libraries of articles they can cite as they continue in their careers, and they need to be able to manage notes on those articles in a place where they can find them easily.
Enter dj. I happened to have written a paper recently that included a large number of cited references, but I had written the whole paper and formatted all of the citations at a rate of about 10 minutes for each paper cited, without even allowing any time to format the references. I was pretty impressed with how quickly that had gone, and I was eager to help my students be able to write (and cite) quickly.
Meantime, I have become really disenchanted with the references format of my students' professional organization. Giving the organization credit, they have made a more-than-valiant effort to develop a style guide that offers a great deal of useful information for the members about how to write clearly, but their references format is nothing short of a confused jumble. That doesn't work with either a bibliographic manager or with the alternative that seems more logical to me for engineers: a spreadsheet.
In the past few months, the organization has negotiated an agreement to make its literature available through an online library that, like many libraries today, downloads automatically into the bibliographic manager or to a spreadsheet, but neither of those works with the references style because of its inconsistencies. So I have waded through the style, figured out a way to make it substantially more consistent, and developed a knock-off format for our students to use. In an effort to help manage their notes, I also formatted a way for them to take notes in the software and print out formatted copies of the entries and their notes, all on a single file.
So I walked into my presentation today armed with an electronic library I borrowed from a student from last semester, the files to make my professional format work, a blank word processing document, and an internet connection to reach our university library. I sort of had some idea of what I wanted to say, but I didn't have a lot of fancy presentation slides.
The official moderator for the afternoon seminar was out sick today and I didn't have a microphone in a room designed for about 150 students, so I spent a moment getting their attention and introduced myself. I explained the topic, showed them how the electric library works, and then showed them how to use the software to format citations and references effortlessly. I had their attention; faces lit up and air sucked in as they realized that I really had spent all my time on my own paper writing rather than formatting references, and they saw that the tools could really work for them.
I had had some basic ideas in mind when I went into the meeting, but I ran out of those after about half the allotted hour, so I called for questions. Even though current and former students of mine were scattered throughout the room, only one of them said anything, and that was to help a faculty member with a problem the student had the experience to know how to solve. The rest of the questions were thoughtful and valuable, and I was really pleased to have what seemed to me like a meaningful, well-received seminar, in spite of my lack of planning and preparation.
And it didn't end when I went back to my office. A couple of students were waiting for me there with questions about their senior projects. I really haven't had much to do with the senior class (my coteacher has handled most of it), but early in the semester I had put them, kicking and screaming, through an exercise to set up the bibliographic software and some tools our library makes available that I have found handy.
By the time I had finished handling their projects, a third student had walked in, and I said something about having just talked to the graduate students about the software, noting that I had been able to tell that, to my surprise, I had been able to tell by the format of the senior papers that some of them had used the software, even without my asking.
The one of the three who had made the best grade on his paper draft lighted up at the mention. Turned out he had set up the system as I had instructed, added some papers to his library, and used the notes format to develop the introduction to his paper—according to him, relatively painlessly.
I left the office smiling that the seminar had gone well and that my students were using the tools I had given them without even being told to. But I also wonder if the university is going to wonder if I'm pimping for the software company. I'm not, really, but I love being able to help make my students' lives easier—and I love it even more when I find out they appreciate it.
I actually used the software for another purpose a decade or more ago, but when the university made it available to staff and students free, I realized that it might have good potential for storing reading notes in a handy, electronic format that I could access more easily than the clumsy hard copies I've tried to use for years. Turns out, it does a fine job.
More important, I teach technical writing, and one of my big challenges is getting students to read and cite papers as part of their research efforts. For many of the undergraduate projects, citing a half-dozen papers is often plenty; others need to cite many more than that, but they need a way to keep track of what they're doing so they can synthesize information and write responsibly. The graduate students need to build libraries of articles they can cite as they continue in their careers, and they need to be able to manage notes on those articles in a place where they can find them easily.
Enter dj. I happened to have written a paper recently that included a large number of cited references, but I had written the whole paper and formatted all of the citations at a rate of about 10 minutes for each paper cited, without even allowing any time to format the references. I was pretty impressed with how quickly that had gone, and I was eager to help my students be able to write (and cite) quickly.
Meantime, I have become really disenchanted with the references format of my students' professional organization. Giving the organization credit, they have made a more-than-valiant effort to develop a style guide that offers a great deal of useful information for the members about how to write clearly, but their references format is nothing short of a confused jumble. That doesn't work with either a bibliographic manager or with the alternative that seems more logical to me for engineers: a spreadsheet.
In the past few months, the organization has negotiated an agreement to make its literature available through an online library that, like many libraries today, downloads automatically into the bibliographic manager or to a spreadsheet, but neither of those works with the references style because of its inconsistencies. So I have waded through the style, figured out a way to make it substantially more consistent, and developed a knock-off format for our students to use. In an effort to help manage their notes, I also formatted a way for them to take notes in the software and print out formatted copies of the entries and their notes, all on a single file.
So I walked into my presentation today armed with an electronic library I borrowed from a student from last semester, the files to make my professional format work, a blank word processing document, and an internet connection to reach our university library. I sort of had some idea of what I wanted to say, but I didn't have a lot of fancy presentation slides.
The official moderator for the afternoon seminar was out sick today and I didn't have a microphone in a room designed for about 150 students, so I spent a moment getting their attention and introduced myself. I explained the topic, showed them how the electric library works, and then showed them how to use the software to format citations and references effortlessly. I had their attention; faces lit up and air sucked in as they realized that I really had spent all my time on my own paper writing rather than formatting references, and they saw that the tools could really work for them.
I had had some basic ideas in mind when I went into the meeting, but I ran out of those after about half the allotted hour, so I called for questions. Even though current and former students of mine were scattered throughout the room, only one of them said anything, and that was to help a faculty member with a problem the student had the experience to know how to solve. The rest of the questions were thoughtful and valuable, and I was really pleased to have what seemed to me like a meaningful, well-received seminar, in spite of my lack of planning and preparation.
And it didn't end when I went back to my office. A couple of students were waiting for me there with questions about their senior projects. I really haven't had much to do with the senior class (my coteacher has handled most of it), but early in the semester I had put them, kicking and screaming, through an exercise to set up the bibliographic software and some tools our library makes available that I have found handy.
By the time I had finished handling their projects, a third student had walked in, and I said something about having just talked to the graduate students about the software, noting that I had been able to tell that, to my surprise, I had been able to tell by the format of the senior papers that some of them had used the software, even without my asking.
The one of the three who had made the best grade on his paper draft lighted up at the mention. Turned out he had set up the system as I had instructed, added some papers to his library, and used the notes format to develop the introduction to his paper—according to him, relatively painlessly.
I left the office smiling that the seminar had gone well and that my students were using the tools I had given them without even being told to. But I also wonder if the university is going to wonder if I'm pimping for the software company. I'm not, really, but I love being able to help make my students' lives easier—and I love it even more when I find out they appreciate it.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
So you say it's your birthday?
My first conscious thought when I woke up this morning was, Today is my birthday.
Half a lifetime ago, I woke up with the same thought, knowing that I was pregnant with my first baby and eager to know what the life ahead of me would bring.
A quarter of a lifetime ago, I woke up with the same thought, knowing that I had survived almost half a year as a single mom and scared that I wouldn't be up to the challenge.
Ten years ago, I was determined to let that first baby make his own mistakes and face his own consequences; his little brother walked the halls as a senior in high school and his sister took off every morning driving her own car.
Five years ago, the little brother was an Army reservist driving a truck in the war zone in Iraq, the little sister was a senior theater arts major at USC, that first baby was trying to become an auto mechanic in Austin, and I was hopeful that all three of them were finally stepping into adulthood.
And now we're here. The little sister is having a ball as a theater lighting designer in Los Angeles and trying out an exciting relationship with her current flame; the little brother is delivering pizzas, biding his time until the call comes through telling him when and where to report for full-time duty with the US Army; and that first baby is back at home, working in an automotive repair shop to earn the money to pay for school at the local community college, where he hopes to be admitted to the radiation therapy program and start a career in the medical field.
And me? Well, I keep thinking that I'm the age my Nana was in that quintessential grandmotherly picture I have somewhere in this confusion I call a home, and I'm pretty sure that's not me. I still think of myself as a mom first, teacher second, but teaching seems to be consuming the huge majority of my time lately. I have become something of an addict of stupid computer card games, and I've managed to find time here and there to blog, but mornings every day find me grading stacks and stacks of papers, and afternoons find me teaching or consulting with students most of the time. Grandchildren don't even appear to be on my horizon.
When I'm not teaching, I'm often "grading for pin money"—working as a contract or consulting editor; in fact, I have a bid out to develop some short courses that could provide nice pin money I'd love to have. And if I can squeeze out the time Saturday, I'll be back at the local Girl Scout camp as a volunteer there.
My next-older sister came over today to deliver a delightful letter she had written for me to tell me how proud of me she is, and I have to admit that that was one of the nicest presents I've ever gotten. I also have to admit that she nailed some things right on the head, but she mostly gave me credit in cases where I'm pretty sure I've just been incredibly lucky—or blessed, if that's the way you want to look at it.
So today is my birthday. And I'm okay with that.
Half a lifetime ago, I woke up with the same thought, knowing that I was pregnant with my first baby and eager to know what the life ahead of me would bring.
A quarter of a lifetime ago, I woke up with the same thought, knowing that I had survived almost half a year as a single mom and scared that I wouldn't be up to the challenge.
Ten years ago, I was determined to let that first baby make his own mistakes and face his own consequences; his little brother walked the halls as a senior in high school and his sister took off every morning driving her own car.
Five years ago, the little brother was an Army reservist driving a truck in the war zone in Iraq, the little sister was a senior theater arts major at USC, that first baby was trying to become an auto mechanic in Austin, and I was hopeful that all three of them were finally stepping into adulthood.
And now we're here. The little sister is having a ball as a theater lighting designer in Los Angeles and trying out an exciting relationship with her current flame; the little brother is delivering pizzas, biding his time until the call comes through telling him when and where to report for full-time duty with the US Army; and that first baby is back at home, working in an automotive repair shop to earn the money to pay for school at the local community college, where he hopes to be admitted to the radiation therapy program and start a career in the medical field.
And me? Well, I keep thinking that I'm the age my Nana was in that quintessential grandmotherly picture I have somewhere in this confusion I call a home, and I'm pretty sure that's not me. I still think of myself as a mom first, teacher second, but teaching seems to be consuming the huge majority of my time lately. I have become something of an addict of stupid computer card games, and I've managed to find time here and there to blog, but mornings every day find me grading stacks and stacks of papers, and afternoons find me teaching or consulting with students most of the time. Grandchildren don't even appear to be on my horizon.
When I'm not teaching, I'm often "grading for pin money"—working as a contract or consulting editor; in fact, I have a bid out to develop some short courses that could provide nice pin money I'd love to have. And if I can squeeze out the time Saturday, I'll be back at the local Girl Scout camp as a volunteer there.
My next-older sister came over today to deliver a delightful letter she had written for me to tell me how proud of me she is, and I have to admit that that was one of the nicest presents I've ever gotten. I also have to admit that she nailed some things right on the head, but she mostly gave me credit in cases where I'm pretty sure I've just been incredibly lucky—or blessed, if that's the way you want to look at it.
So today is my birthday. And I'm okay with that.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Is Emily Post in the house?
A few years ago, Daughter and Second Son put their heads together and figured out that I had something they didn't have but wanted badly enough to remedy the situation: leashes. Actually, what I had was landline phones at my home and office that connected to cell phones in their pockets.
I had set D up with hers by signing the paperwork for it when she was 16 and too young to sign it herself. She had already had a couple of pagers by then, but she insisted that she'd be more careful with cell phones if only I would let her have one. I agreed with one condition: Since the phone would be in my name, I'd clobber her if she missed a payment and affected my credit rating. I don't really know what's gone on with it since then, but my credit rating has been good enough to borrow money when I've wanted to, so I suppose she's doing okay.
SS had acquired his phone on his own; he was old enough to sign his own contract by the time I got D hers. He had set up his phone with a number that he could break down into numbers that were important for him and easy to remember, so he was glad to have it.
I was glad for both of them to have cell phones because I could find them regardless how far from home they strayed; one of the first times I got really excited about this was when I called JaNelle on hers on the Fourth of July. She was in New York that summer, and for some reason the celebration was being telecast so I could watch the same fireworks at home—even better when I could call her in New York and see how cool it all looked from her perch on one of the bridges over the river.
But things didn't work the other way around: I could call them and find out what they were up to anytime I wanted to, but for some reason both of them had bumped into reasons to want to contact me but couldn't: if I was away from home or office, I was unreachable.
To resolve that, they conspired to get my own cell phone for me. D had all the information on "my" account (I still haven't done anything to manage it), and Sprint offered a "family plan" that would allow her to add me. Even though she was living in Los Angeles by then, she still had the same area code as me on the phone, so Sprint was fine with adding me to her family or circle or whatever for just a few dollars a month, and if there was a way to get my phone free, she did that, too.
The phone was my Mothers Day gift that year, and i have to give them credit for being clever about the gifting. SS invited me to a movie, and as we left the theater, the cell phone in his pocket rang. After he answered it, he handed it to me, saying, "It's for you, Mom."
I assumed it was Daughter checking on on Mothers Day, but I was a little perplexed at firts when she said, "It really is for you," but then she explained, "This is your phone." By that time, SS had quietly fished his own phone out of his pocket and was dialing a number, probably more to show me that we really did have two phones that day.
In my usual mom-too-long way of thinking, I mocked, "Oh, yeah, and it's the gift that keeps on giving! I get a phone now, and next month I start getting the bills!"
"We resemble that remark," D popped back. "We've taken care of that. We'll pay your bills for the first year, and next Mothers Day, we'll talk."
Long story short, I hadn't paid a dime for cell phone service until my recent trip to Los Angeles. In the interim, she had upgraded me from my first, very basic phone to one with a camera (and presumed capabilities to download data to my computer, but I never figured out how to make that function work), but not a QWERTY keyboard. I never needed the keyboard until she got a super deal on text messaging and I discovered that I could get much better responses from SS if I sent texts than if I called. Clearly, I was going to need a keyboard if I was going to stay in the loop. The replacement phone is still a little limited because I haven't decided if I want to pay the difference to get all the bells and whistles activated, but even at that, my cell service is a steal.
But what I'm still having trouble with is protocol. I've been around the block more than once with SS, who has a goofy habit of cutting off a call while I'm in the middle of a sentence. He assures me that he only does it when I'm starting to repeat myself, and I assure him that I only repeat myself because I'm not sure he's got the message or when I want to modify it somehow. Then he shrugs and tells me I'm getting all upset over nothing, and I get upset over being brushed off, and there we go again.
Sunday was a little different, though. I had decided that early November was a fine time to buy the gas grill Number One Son has been bemoaning not having, especially since the local Wally World had them on sale for about 1/3 off. The only problem was that the grill in a box was too big to fit into my little Camry, so I needed SS's Matrix to get it home. I had the good sense to text him on it.
He allowed as how he could make the run to pick it up, so I worked out an arrangement with the stocker to let him have it. I described the car and told the stocker he could match the credit card number on my ticket (which the stocker kept so the ticket and the grill could leave the store together; makes sense at some levels more than at others) to the one in my son's wallet to be sure he had the right guy. That way, I could make a quick trip to the grandparents' apartment nearby and visit with them before the evening wore on too late.
A few minutes later, I got a call from SS telling me WallyWorld wouldn't let him have the grill. I told him to check with the stocker, but he insisted the stocker was gone; the only people there were "two little old ladies" (neither of whom, it turned out, was probably within 10 years of my age). I was close enough to dash back over to straighten the problem out, so I asked, "Can you wait 10 minutes?" But by that time, he had cut me off.
I dialed his number and got his voice mail twice before I gave up and jumped in my car. Back at WallyWorld, he was long gone, but the clerk who had sold me the grill recognized me immediately and asked what the problem was. I told her what I knew: the stocker had put the grill on a cart and, last I saw, had stuck the ticket with it, but only the grill in the cart were still on the patio. My son had been by but had apparently disappeared again, and I couldn't "just go ahead and take the grill" because it still wouldn't fit in my Camry. As far as I knew, SS was halfway home by then.
I tried dialing again and this time, I got through. I had enough time to ask if he could get back to the store (while I was still there) and pick up the grill. I got only a word or two in response before he cut off again, but I was pretty sure the response was positive.
A few minutes later, I called again and discovered he was at the high school next door to the store, so I continued to have the sales clerk track down stockers to find the one who had taken my ticket. He showed up several minutes later, just about the time SS managed to creep across the parking lot to get to the patio area. (Does he not know about the alley around the back that gets there much faster?) The stocker had stuffed my ticket in his pocket and gone off to the back of the store to work on a shipment there, never thinking that we'd need the ticket to get the grill home.
I wasn't as happy as I could have been to see SS's smiling face when he finally showed up because I thought he'd been cutting off on the phone again, but I was pretty pleased when I got his side of the story: He hadn't intentionally been cutting me off or ignoring me; he had just forgotten to recharge the cell phone. And he hadn't turned and gone all the way back to the house; in fact, he was sure enough that I had gone to visit the grandparents that he had gone there, intending to trade cars with me and let me go get the grill at my leisure—a plan that would have suited me just fine and even gotten the milk home to the fridge faster.
But what I need now is the lesson on cell phone protocol: When Person A's phone keeps cutting out because of the dead battery but Person B needs to catch whatever she can of the status of a situation, who's supposed to make the effort to reconnect? And aren't car chargers sort of required for cell phones? And why am I letting him talk to me while he's driving, anyway?
Is Emily Post in the house?
I had set D up with hers by signing the paperwork for it when she was 16 and too young to sign it herself. She had already had a couple of pagers by then, but she insisted that she'd be more careful with cell phones if only I would let her have one. I agreed with one condition: Since the phone would be in my name, I'd clobber her if she missed a payment and affected my credit rating. I don't really know what's gone on with it since then, but my credit rating has been good enough to borrow money when I've wanted to, so I suppose she's doing okay.
SS had acquired his phone on his own; he was old enough to sign his own contract by the time I got D hers. He had set up his phone with a number that he could break down into numbers that were important for him and easy to remember, so he was glad to have it.
I was glad for both of them to have cell phones because I could find them regardless how far from home they strayed; one of the first times I got really excited about this was when I called JaNelle on hers on the Fourth of July. She was in New York that summer, and for some reason the celebration was being telecast so I could watch the same fireworks at home—even better when I could call her in New York and see how cool it all looked from her perch on one of the bridges over the river.
But things didn't work the other way around: I could call them and find out what they were up to anytime I wanted to, but for some reason both of them had bumped into reasons to want to contact me but couldn't: if I was away from home or office, I was unreachable.
To resolve that, they conspired to get my own cell phone for me. D had all the information on "my" account (I still haven't done anything to manage it), and Sprint offered a "family plan" that would allow her to add me. Even though she was living in Los Angeles by then, she still had the same area code as me on the phone, so Sprint was fine with adding me to her family or circle or whatever for just a few dollars a month, and if there was a way to get my phone free, she did that, too.
The phone was my Mothers Day gift that year, and i have to give them credit for being clever about the gifting. SS invited me to a movie, and as we left the theater, the cell phone in his pocket rang. After he answered it, he handed it to me, saying, "It's for you, Mom."
I assumed it was Daughter checking on on Mothers Day, but I was a little perplexed at firts when she said, "It really is for you," but then she explained, "This is your phone." By that time, SS had quietly fished his own phone out of his pocket and was dialing a number, probably more to show me that we really did have two phones that day.
In my usual mom-too-long way of thinking, I mocked, "Oh, yeah, and it's the gift that keeps on giving! I get a phone now, and next month I start getting the bills!"
"We resemble that remark," D popped back. "We've taken care of that. We'll pay your bills for the first year, and next Mothers Day, we'll talk."
Long story short, I hadn't paid a dime for cell phone service until my recent trip to Los Angeles. In the interim, she had upgraded me from my first, very basic phone to one with a camera (and presumed capabilities to download data to my computer, but I never figured out how to make that function work), but not a QWERTY keyboard. I never needed the keyboard until she got a super deal on text messaging and I discovered that I could get much better responses from SS if I sent texts than if I called. Clearly, I was going to need a keyboard if I was going to stay in the loop. The replacement phone is still a little limited because I haven't decided if I want to pay the difference to get all the bells and whistles activated, but even at that, my cell service is a steal.
But what I'm still having trouble with is protocol. I've been around the block more than once with SS, who has a goofy habit of cutting off a call while I'm in the middle of a sentence. He assures me that he only does it when I'm starting to repeat myself, and I assure him that I only repeat myself because I'm not sure he's got the message or when I want to modify it somehow. Then he shrugs and tells me I'm getting all upset over nothing, and I get upset over being brushed off, and there we go again.
Sunday was a little different, though. I had decided that early November was a fine time to buy the gas grill Number One Son has been bemoaning not having, especially since the local Wally World had them on sale for about 1/3 off. The only problem was that the grill in a box was too big to fit into my little Camry, so I needed SS's Matrix to get it home. I had the good sense to text him on it.
He allowed as how he could make the run to pick it up, so I worked out an arrangement with the stocker to let him have it. I described the car and told the stocker he could match the credit card number on my ticket (which the stocker kept so the ticket and the grill could leave the store together; makes sense at some levels more than at others) to the one in my son's wallet to be sure he had the right guy. That way, I could make a quick trip to the grandparents' apartment nearby and visit with them before the evening wore on too late.
A few minutes later, I got a call from SS telling me WallyWorld wouldn't let him have the grill. I told him to check with the stocker, but he insisted the stocker was gone; the only people there were "two little old ladies" (neither of whom, it turned out, was probably within 10 years of my age). I was close enough to dash back over to straighten the problem out, so I asked, "Can you wait 10 minutes?" But by that time, he had cut me off.
I dialed his number and got his voice mail twice before I gave up and jumped in my car. Back at WallyWorld, he was long gone, but the clerk who had sold me the grill recognized me immediately and asked what the problem was. I told her what I knew: the stocker had put the grill on a cart and, last I saw, had stuck the ticket with it, but only the grill in the cart were still on the patio. My son had been by but had apparently disappeared again, and I couldn't "just go ahead and take the grill" because it still wouldn't fit in my Camry. As far as I knew, SS was halfway home by then.
I tried dialing again and this time, I got through. I had enough time to ask if he could get back to the store (while I was still there) and pick up the grill. I got only a word or two in response before he cut off again, but I was pretty sure the response was positive.
A few minutes later, I called again and discovered he was at the high school next door to the store, so I continued to have the sales clerk track down stockers to find the one who had taken my ticket. He showed up several minutes later, just about the time SS managed to creep across the parking lot to get to the patio area. (Does he not know about the alley around the back that gets there much faster?) The stocker had stuffed my ticket in his pocket and gone off to the back of the store to work on a shipment there, never thinking that we'd need the ticket to get the grill home.
I wasn't as happy as I could have been to see SS's smiling face when he finally showed up because I thought he'd been cutting off on the phone again, but I was pretty pleased when I got his side of the story: He hadn't intentionally been cutting me off or ignoring me; he had just forgotten to recharge the cell phone. And he hadn't turned and gone all the way back to the house; in fact, he was sure enough that I had gone to visit the grandparents that he had gone there, intending to trade cars with me and let me go get the grill at my leisure—a plan that would have suited me just fine and even gotten the milk home to the fridge faster.
But what I need now is the lesson on cell phone protocol: When Person A's phone keeps cutting out because of the dead battery but Person B needs to catch whatever she can of the status of a situation, who's supposed to make the effort to reconnect? And aren't car chargers sort of required for cell phones? And why am I letting him talk to me while he's driving, anyway?
Is Emily Post in the house?
Saturday, October 31, 2009
So the potty training thing never really ends, does it?
You'd think by my age—and my children's ages—I'd have left potty training in the dirt ages ago and I wouldn't be close enough to senility to be concerned about my supply of Depends yet, but somehow I've found myself having the potty conversation a lot lately. Maybe the early senility part is that I'm usually having it with myself, but I've done so much of that in my lifetime that I don't think much about it.
I think the reason this came up a few weeks ago was that the university finally replaced the toilet paper holders in the ladies room outside my office. I remember when I was a little kid and Mother lectured me on the amount of toilet paper I used; somewhere down the road I decided that must have been a Baptist mantra at some time because my college roommate's mother had used it on her, too. My mom probably did it because we were as dirt poor as the indigents the Baptist missionaries were trying to reach; my roomie's family never seemed to be in those dire straits. But the rule both of us heard was three squares per visit, and I was amazed by the neighbor down the street who would reel off yards of the stuff every time she went.
I was pretty sure the university had the same rule because the paper holders worked so horribly as to make me give up after battling for a few inches of tissue lest I not finish my day's work in a day's time. Ultimately, the top roll seemed to be permanently wedged over the bottom one so that neither one would turn. (And for a while there, the custodians were prohibited from replacing a roll until it was completely gone, which got to be a real challenge late in the day when the custodians had been long gone.)
Then one day I reached for the end of the roll and it whirled out almost completely across the stall as if it had been loosed by a teenager on Halloween. I recovered, gathered it up enough to finish my business, and laughed on my way to the sink.
Where I had another surprise: the new tissue holders had come in tandem with new soap dispensers, too. They weren't what any self-respecting designer would refer to as a matched set, so I have no idea why they both seemed to come together, but I'd long since grown tired of having to close the top section that held the soap pouch every time I bumped the bottom to release a stream of liquid.
I reached over to bump the release, but nothing happened. I had to examine it for a second before I realized that it was automatic, which meant all I had to do was to hold my hand under it briefly to get a lovely little mound of foam on my palm. I continued to paper the stall and jab at the soap dispenser for the rest of the week before I got the hang of using either one of them.
So then I went to New Orleans for a conference in a lovely convention center that had automagic faucets. I think the idea of automagic faucets is wonderful except that (a) they all seem to have different mechanisms to trip them and (b) I can't ever figure out what the right action is to get the one I'm facing started. I'm sure they save water for the places that have them, but I can work up a good level of frustration standing in front of a sink and striking a series of inane poses in search of the right way to hold my hands to get the water to come on.
And in the sinks at our favorite movie theater, the water is often so hot as to worry me that it's going to burn some little kid's hands, although I guess that's dependent on whether the kid can get it started. (I suppose that if kids have the same knack for automagic water faucets that they have for operating other electronic devices, they probably never miss a beat and the water starts for them first time, every time.) But if they can't get the water started or can't hold their hands in it, how healthy is that for the rest of us?
And then we have towel dispensers. I've survived the old cloth roll dispensers and dozens of iterations of the folded brown towels, so I've had some towel dispenser experience. But when I first visited the school where my daughter works a few years ago, I had recently been on an overseas flight and had spent an inordinate amount of time in various facilities that had automagic towel dispensers. You guessed it: every one different, and every one a guessing game about which pantomime to perform to get the towels to appear.
At the convention I attended in New Orleans, the custodial staff on the first day had carefully dispensed from each dispenser in the restrooms a length of toweling that just suited my needs, so all I had to do was tear them off and not worry about how to make the things work. But these were the good old, familiar dispensers like we had back home at school, so I followed what I understand is protocol in Asia and left the dispensers the way I found them.
The idea really makes good sense to me: wash your hands, tear off the length of towel on the dispenser, then use the towel in your hand to dispense enough for the next customer. No wet hands on the dispenser lever, and a towel in hand to dispense for the next user. In fact, I've been known to campaign for a wastebasket near the restroom door so I can open the door with the towel still in my hand and toss the towel on the other side.
So when I got through washing my hands at my daughter's school, I walked over to the sleek, streamlined towel dispenser and started my usual gyrations in front of it: hands held still beneath it, hands still in front of it, hands waving across the front, down the front, up the sides.... Oh. There on the side. The left and the right might look different because the trim on the right is a release lever. A couple of quick pushes (okay, three or four to find the right spot) and I had plenty of toweling for what I needed.
I had been in an another series of airports before my trip back last weekend, and this time I found yet another kind of towel dispenser. No handy pull tab, no indication of a trip light; instead, just pull gently and voilá—there they are! If it's that easy to get a towel, why did I spend all that time practicing charades?
By now I was beginning to think I must surely be approaching Alzheimer's faster than I thought when I read my niece's blog, wherein she related the story of an associate who habitually lets sneezes fly across the office but then carefully lines the toilet seat with tissue lest she contract someone else's germs. So it isn't just me that has this weird bathroom issue....
But then that brings up the case of the airport toilet with the automatic seat liner dispenser. That's a lovely idea and I appreciate the concern for my personal well-being, but could they please tell me how to make the liner stop circling the seat and just flush the thing? This one was not an automatic flusher or it would surely not have had residual tissue still in the bowl, but I must have dispensed four yards of seat liner before I figured out how to flush it myself.
My daughter isn't any help, either. She's in the process of breaking in a new roommate, which includes not only teaching him to put the leftovers in the Tupperware for storage but also washing his hands after using the potty. I don't know where she gets the idea this can happen—I raised her with two brothers who seem not to understand why the bathroom has a sink, in spite of my efforts to educate them—but she seems determined. She really likes this guy, so she's trying to be gracious about it, but she really does believe washing hands prevents the spread of germs."I've heard all the arguments about how they don't touch anything in there," she acknowledges. "I just don't buy it."
I might; it could explain a lot of why the ladies room downstairs at our house is substantially cleaner between scrubbings than the men's room upstairs. But either he's willing the seat up and down mysteriously or he's touching it with his hands or—ew—his feet, and either way, I'm pretty sure something in there calls for a hand washing.
I'm going to wish her a lot of luck with that, but it's an argument I don't want to join. I figure if I ever share a house with a person who doesn't want to wash, I'm going to assign bathrooms and stay out of the one that isn't mine. I don't want to hear about it.
Meanwhile, I'm off to another adventure, and I know I'll have to use an unfamiliar potty somewhere. Just give me strength to make the system work!
I think the reason this came up a few weeks ago was that the university finally replaced the toilet paper holders in the ladies room outside my office. I remember when I was a little kid and Mother lectured me on the amount of toilet paper I used; somewhere down the road I decided that must have been a Baptist mantra at some time because my college roommate's mother had used it on her, too. My mom probably did it because we were as dirt poor as the indigents the Baptist missionaries were trying to reach; my roomie's family never seemed to be in those dire straits. But the rule both of us heard was three squares per visit, and I was amazed by the neighbor down the street who would reel off yards of the stuff every time she went.
I was pretty sure the university had the same rule because the paper holders worked so horribly as to make me give up after battling for a few inches of tissue lest I not finish my day's work in a day's time. Ultimately, the top roll seemed to be permanently wedged over the bottom one so that neither one would turn. (And for a while there, the custodians were prohibited from replacing a roll until it was completely gone, which got to be a real challenge late in the day when the custodians had been long gone.)
Then one day I reached for the end of the roll and it whirled out almost completely across the stall as if it had been loosed by a teenager on Halloween. I recovered, gathered it up enough to finish my business, and laughed on my way to the sink.
Where I had another surprise: the new tissue holders had come in tandem with new soap dispensers, too. They weren't what any self-respecting designer would refer to as a matched set, so I have no idea why they both seemed to come together, but I'd long since grown tired of having to close the top section that held the soap pouch every time I bumped the bottom to release a stream of liquid.
I reached over to bump the release, but nothing happened. I had to examine it for a second before I realized that it was automatic, which meant all I had to do was to hold my hand under it briefly to get a lovely little mound of foam on my palm. I continued to paper the stall and jab at the soap dispenser for the rest of the week before I got the hang of using either one of them.
So then I went to New Orleans for a conference in a lovely convention center that had automagic faucets. I think the idea of automagic faucets is wonderful except that (a) they all seem to have different mechanisms to trip them and (b) I can't ever figure out what the right action is to get the one I'm facing started. I'm sure they save water for the places that have them, but I can work up a good level of frustration standing in front of a sink and striking a series of inane poses in search of the right way to hold my hands to get the water to come on.
And in the sinks at our favorite movie theater, the water is often so hot as to worry me that it's going to burn some little kid's hands, although I guess that's dependent on whether the kid can get it started. (I suppose that if kids have the same knack for automagic water faucets that they have for operating other electronic devices, they probably never miss a beat and the water starts for them first time, every time.) But if they can't get the water started or can't hold their hands in it, how healthy is that for the rest of us?
And then we have towel dispensers. I've survived the old cloth roll dispensers and dozens of iterations of the folded brown towels, so I've had some towel dispenser experience. But when I first visited the school where my daughter works a few years ago, I had recently been on an overseas flight and had spent an inordinate amount of time in various facilities that had automagic towel dispensers. You guessed it: every one different, and every one a guessing game about which pantomime to perform to get the towels to appear.
At the convention I attended in New Orleans, the custodial staff on the first day had carefully dispensed from each dispenser in the restrooms a length of toweling that just suited my needs, so all I had to do was tear them off and not worry about how to make the things work. But these were the good old, familiar dispensers like we had back home at school, so I followed what I understand is protocol in Asia and left the dispensers the way I found them.
The idea really makes good sense to me: wash your hands, tear off the length of towel on the dispenser, then use the towel in your hand to dispense enough for the next customer. No wet hands on the dispenser lever, and a towel in hand to dispense for the next user. In fact, I've been known to campaign for a wastebasket near the restroom door so I can open the door with the towel still in my hand and toss the towel on the other side.
So when I got through washing my hands at my daughter's school, I walked over to the sleek, streamlined towel dispenser and started my usual gyrations in front of it: hands held still beneath it, hands still in front of it, hands waving across the front, down the front, up the sides.... Oh. There on the side. The left and the right might look different because the trim on the right is a release lever. A couple of quick pushes (okay, three or four to find the right spot) and I had plenty of toweling for what I needed.
I had been in an another series of airports before my trip back last weekend, and this time I found yet another kind of towel dispenser. No handy pull tab, no indication of a trip light; instead, just pull gently and voilá—there they are! If it's that easy to get a towel, why did I spend all that time practicing charades?
By now I was beginning to think I must surely be approaching Alzheimer's faster than I thought when I read my niece's blog, wherein she related the story of an associate who habitually lets sneezes fly across the office but then carefully lines the toilet seat with tissue lest she contract someone else's germs. So it isn't just me that has this weird bathroom issue....
But then that brings up the case of the airport toilet with the automatic seat liner dispenser. That's a lovely idea and I appreciate the concern for my personal well-being, but could they please tell me how to make the liner stop circling the seat and just flush the thing? This one was not an automatic flusher or it would surely not have had residual tissue still in the bowl, but I must have dispensed four yards of seat liner before I figured out how to flush it myself.
My daughter isn't any help, either. She's in the process of breaking in a new roommate, which includes not only teaching him to put the leftovers in the Tupperware for storage but also washing his hands after using the potty. I don't know where she gets the idea this can happen—I raised her with two brothers who seem not to understand why the bathroom has a sink, in spite of my efforts to educate them—but she seems determined. She really likes this guy, so she's trying to be gracious about it, but she really does believe washing hands prevents the spread of germs."I've heard all the arguments about how they don't touch anything in there," she acknowledges. "I just don't buy it."
I might; it could explain a lot of why the ladies room downstairs at our house is substantially cleaner between scrubbings than the men's room upstairs. But either he's willing the seat up and down mysteriously or he's touching it with his hands or—ew—his feet, and either way, I'm pretty sure something in there calls for a hand washing.
I'm going to wish her a lot of luck with that, but it's an argument I don't want to join. I figure if I ever share a house with a person who doesn't want to wash, I'm going to assign bathrooms and stay out of the one that isn't mine. I don't want to hear about it.
Meanwhile, I'm off to another adventure, and I know I'll have to use an unfamiliar potty somewhere. Just give me strength to make the system work!
Monday, October 19, 2009
Making the most of a Monday
Second Son took a job at a local pizza joint a few weeks ago, so we haven't seen him around the house much except when he sails through and drops off leftovers from the pizza kitchen on his way upstairs to play online video games with his buddies. Since he's got cash in his pockets, he gets to go out and play on the weekends, and he's out late enough that I'm usually sacked out by the time he gets in.
I've mostly been pleasantly surprised that the regular addition of pizza to my diet (if "regular" means most weeknights) hasn't caused me to balloon to the weight I was carrying around when that one was born—suffice it to say, substantially more than I should have weighed even if he had been twins. In fact, between making a point of playing fetch with the dogs a couple of times a day and Number One Son cooking generally nutritious food for me when the pizza runs out, I've actually managed to keep my weight close to where I think it ought to be, which is around 22 on the body mass index.
Since NOS has been out of work for a month and depression was beginning to set in (the good news for today is that he reports to a new job tomorrow), I've found myself missing my visits with SS, who is probably the most like me of my three kids. Besides sharing a lot of my political views, he also enjoys a level of gentle teasing that I enjoy but NOS considers rude; I guess a lot of it depends on perspective, although I have to admit the crowd I tease that way is pretty small.
Saturday night was an exception. My sister from Irving was in town, and the sister who lives here had invited us to join her and her husband to an evening of a home-cooked meal and "Guys and Dolls" at the local little theater. I enjoyed the show and would surely have enjoyed visiting my sisters more afterward, but the to-do list has been out of control for some time, and I wanted to knock off a couple of items before bed so I could start farther down the list Sunday morning.
One of those to-do items was connecting SS's laptop to our wireless printer, a project that we had never accomplished with our previous wireless router and that had been perplexing to me with my own laptop earlier in the week; but since I had conquered mine, I felt confident that I could conquer his, too.
Not so much; the task took a good deal longer than I had expected, so that a little time on the next item down the list put me awake well past midnight. NOS had some issue I needed to resolve before tucking in for the night, so I was still awake when SS came in from his evening out with friends. He drifted into my room and chatted randomly about everything from the new boots that weren't breaking in to suit him to the friends who are on their way to additional schooling in distant places to his struggles with learning to be a man while growing up in a house with estrogen to spare between his sister and me.
Somewhere in that last batch of information, he looked squarely at me and said, "You know, you've made it pretty hard on me to find women."
I could see how that fit the notion of too much estrogen around here; I don't know how to be a man, and I sure never figured out how to teach my sons to be. We had discussed the fact that he had made lots of good attempts to find good male role models, and I think he had done pretty well. He had tried out for football and made the middle school "starter" team; he had taken band to try to develop a relationship of sorts with his dad, who had been in band through his tour with the Marines; he had immersed himself in our church and developed a warm relationship with his male teachers; he had ultimately gotten into high school wrestling, where he found a sport where he could log some wins and had a coach he adored. So while I had certainly not been the influence he needed, I thought he had done a respectable job of finding role models who had much to teach him.
While he acknowledged that the lack of a father had made his life difficult, that wasn't the problem that remains. Instead, it was the fact that I've kept an eye on my weight, and except for my pregnancy with his sister, I have never reached a BMI over about 23 or 24, depending on how tall I claim to be. Either way, keeping my weight under 140 hasn't been a huge challenge, but it's been my stop-and-reconsider mark for years.
Turns out, SS is having a hard time finding women who weigh less than I do, and that irritates him. "They'll tell me they're 5-ft-3 and weight 140 pounds, and I have to tell them my mom is 5-ft-5 or -6 and weighs less than that. They don't have any excuses." It wasn't much of a compliment, but this was SS; I thought that was pretty major.
I crashed a little later than that, and Sunday I had a long list still before me, so while I let his words roll around in the back of my head, I pretty much kept said head down and went to work checking items off the list, not thinking much about the conversation of the night before.
This morning when I got ready to dress for work, though, I pulled out a pair of skinny-leg jeans I like and a long-sleeve t-shirt to keep back the light chill of an early fall day. Since the jeans are longer than I usually wear, I slipped on a pair of sandals that elevate my height almost another 3 inches but are still amazingly comfortable for standing and walking—a requirement on Monday when I have to teach two classes.
Something about the cool weather, the skinny jeans and shirt, the nice but comfortable shoes, and SS's comment that women his age have to look as good as his mom to make him happy put me in an unusually good mood for a Monday.
It's nice to get unsolicited compliments from your son!
I've mostly been pleasantly surprised that the regular addition of pizza to my diet (if "regular" means most weeknights) hasn't caused me to balloon to the weight I was carrying around when that one was born—suffice it to say, substantially more than I should have weighed even if he had been twins. In fact, between making a point of playing fetch with the dogs a couple of times a day and Number One Son cooking generally nutritious food for me when the pizza runs out, I've actually managed to keep my weight close to where I think it ought to be, which is around 22 on the body mass index.
Since NOS has been out of work for a month and depression was beginning to set in (the good news for today is that he reports to a new job tomorrow), I've found myself missing my visits with SS, who is probably the most like me of my three kids. Besides sharing a lot of my political views, he also enjoys a level of gentle teasing that I enjoy but NOS considers rude; I guess a lot of it depends on perspective, although I have to admit the crowd I tease that way is pretty small.
Saturday night was an exception. My sister from Irving was in town, and the sister who lives here had invited us to join her and her husband to an evening of a home-cooked meal and "Guys and Dolls" at the local little theater. I enjoyed the show and would surely have enjoyed visiting my sisters more afterward, but the to-do list has been out of control for some time, and I wanted to knock off a couple of items before bed so I could start farther down the list Sunday morning.
One of those to-do items was connecting SS's laptop to our wireless printer, a project that we had never accomplished with our previous wireless router and that had been perplexing to me with my own laptop earlier in the week; but since I had conquered mine, I felt confident that I could conquer his, too.
Not so much; the task took a good deal longer than I had expected, so that a little time on the next item down the list put me awake well past midnight. NOS had some issue I needed to resolve before tucking in for the night, so I was still awake when SS came in from his evening out with friends. He drifted into my room and chatted randomly about everything from the new boots that weren't breaking in to suit him to the friends who are on their way to additional schooling in distant places to his struggles with learning to be a man while growing up in a house with estrogen to spare between his sister and me.
Somewhere in that last batch of information, he looked squarely at me and said, "You know, you've made it pretty hard on me to find women."
I could see how that fit the notion of too much estrogen around here; I don't know how to be a man, and I sure never figured out how to teach my sons to be. We had discussed the fact that he had made lots of good attempts to find good male role models, and I think he had done pretty well. He had tried out for football and made the middle school "starter" team; he had taken band to try to develop a relationship of sorts with his dad, who had been in band through his tour with the Marines; he had immersed himself in our church and developed a warm relationship with his male teachers; he had ultimately gotten into high school wrestling, where he found a sport where he could log some wins and had a coach he adored. So while I had certainly not been the influence he needed, I thought he had done a respectable job of finding role models who had much to teach him.
While he acknowledged that the lack of a father had made his life difficult, that wasn't the problem that remains. Instead, it was the fact that I've kept an eye on my weight, and except for my pregnancy with his sister, I have never reached a BMI over about 23 or 24, depending on how tall I claim to be. Either way, keeping my weight under 140 hasn't been a huge challenge, but it's been my stop-and-reconsider mark for years.
Turns out, SS is having a hard time finding women who weigh less than I do, and that irritates him. "They'll tell me they're 5-ft-3 and weight 140 pounds, and I have to tell them my mom is 5-ft-5 or -6 and weighs less than that. They don't have any excuses." It wasn't much of a compliment, but this was SS; I thought that was pretty major.
I crashed a little later than that, and Sunday I had a long list still before me, so while I let his words roll around in the back of my head, I pretty much kept said head down and went to work checking items off the list, not thinking much about the conversation of the night before.
This morning when I got ready to dress for work, though, I pulled out a pair of skinny-leg jeans I like and a long-sleeve t-shirt to keep back the light chill of an early fall day. Since the jeans are longer than I usually wear, I slipped on a pair of sandals that elevate my height almost another 3 inches but are still amazingly comfortable for standing and walking—a requirement on Monday when I have to teach two classes.
Something about the cool weather, the skinny jeans and shirt, the nice but comfortable shoes, and SS's comment that women his age have to look as good as his mom to make him happy put me in an unusually good mood for a Monday.
It's nice to get unsolicited compliments from your son!
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad
Today would have been Mother and Daddy's 70th wedding anniversary. Daddy died more than 38 years ago, and Mother has been gone for 17, but I always stop to remember them on this day. Whatever else ever happens on 14 October in my life, its significance will always be Mother and Daddy's anniversary.
This one started out a bit ironically. The dogs set up a fuss when someone rang our doorbell (Parker sets up a fuss if a doorbell rings on tv), so I rounded them up, pushed Sherman out back, and answered it. The man outside said his name was Gary and he was selling meat out of the back of a pickup truck.
I have no idea why I suckered in to a door-to-door meat salesman (I may be advertising my complication in a stolen-meat scam, or we could die of tainted-meat disease), but I did, provided he let me wake up the chief cook around here, Number One Son—who shares the dude's first name.
I had to rattle NOS out of bed to get him to talk to the guy, and he decided that the meat looked tasty, so I decided to buy. Hey, times are hard, I've been lucky, and the meat really did look tasty. Besides, it was sort of ironic that this guy had the same name as NOS.
Which got weirder. After we decided on the sale, I pulled out my checkbook to pay the dude and needed to remember the date. I never know what day it is in the morning; I sort of keep up with days of the week at the office, but my life is so automated I almost don't recognize the day of the month even there. But 14 October is Mother and Daddy's anniversary, and I was writing a check to a man who had the same name as my son.
Only not quite. The dude asked me to make out the check to Gary Frank. I said, "You're kidding." I don't think he heard that because he didn't respond to it, but the irony was even bigger: NOS was named for his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but none of them uses the middle name from which we derive Garry. No, that name came marginally from the name of the variety-show host who introduced Carol Burnett to the world, a man name Garry Moore.
But mostly it came from the name of the best man and our wedding—my ex's best friend at the time, Gary Franks.
Way too weird for a Wednesday.
This one started out a bit ironically. The dogs set up a fuss when someone rang our doorbell (Parker sets up a fuss if a doorbell rings on tv), so I rounded them up, pushed Sherman out back, and answered it. The man outside said his name was Gary and he was selling meat out of the back of a pickup truck.
I have no idea why I suckered in to a door-to-door meat salesman (I may be advertising my complication in a stolen-meat scam, or we could die of tainted-meat disease), but I did, provided he let me wake up the chief cook around here, Number One Son—who shares the dude's first name.
I had to rattle NOS out of bed to get him to talk to the guy, and he decided that the meat looked tasty, so I decided to buy. Hey, times are hard, I've been lucky, and the meat really did look tasty. Besides, it was sort of ironic that this guy had the same name as NOS.
Which got weirder. After we decided on the sale, I pulled out my checkbook to pay the dude and needed to remember the date. I never know what day it is in the morning; I sort of keep up with days of the week at the office, but my life is so automated I almost don't recognize the day of the month even there. But 14 October is Mother and Daddy's anniversary, and I was writing a check to a man who had the same name as my son.
Only not quite. The dude asked me to make out the check to Gary Frank. I said, "You're kidding." I don't think he heard that because he didn't respond to it, but the irony was even bigger: NOS was named for his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but none of them uses the middle name from which we derive Garry. No, that name came marginally from the name of the variety-show host who introduced Carol Burnett to the world, a man name Garry Moore.
But mostly it came from the name of the best man and our wedding—my ex's best friend at the time, Gary Franks.
Way too weird for a Wednesday.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Monica, Marcia, Mallory, Kelsey somehow got me here
The little Asian lady who strolled up behind me on the Wally World parking lot seemed to have a smile in her voice when she commented, "You look like you're having fun!" She was right, of course; I don't often pull out my cell phone to use its camera function, but the two cars parked in the next lane were just too much fun for me: one was a faded brown Chrysler New Yorker from the early ’80s, the other a blue Mazda 323 from probably the early ’90s. To any other shopper this evening, they were just a couple of slightly damaged old cars; to me, they were a swirl of memories of the "pretty car" I drove when the kids were small and Mokey Mazda, the first car each of them drove as they reached driving age.
Cars have always seemed like members of the family to me, from my earliest vague memories of the green woodie station wagon Daddy drove to the red and white, nine-passenger Chevy with its funny little jump seat so we smaller kids could crawl into the back, through a series of sedans up to the day Daddy proudly drove home in a sad little Corvair Monza that he announced was mine. From that day on, it's never mattered what anybody else was driving; the only car that had a personality was the one that belonged to me.
It wasn't always easy. Daddy had never been able to spring for a car for the three older siblings, and even though this one had been a steal at $150, it was probably still about $150 more than he had available to spend on a car for me. I didn't know that the dual-carburetor engine was supposed to be a cool thing, and I really didn't know that its cousin, the Monza Spyder, was a source of pride among sports car enthusiasts. I just knew Daddy had given away my dog and come home in this junker of a car.
For all I know, my little Monica Monza was a Spyder, but when I first drove her to school, she was mostly a huge embarrasment. For one thing, she was a 1961 vehicle on a 1967 parking lot, and for another, her rear-engine design made her the target of a campaign as "unsafe at any speed." (Later research showed that those claims were irrational, but still—I was only 17.) Worst of all, the previous owner had done his best to drive her wheels off, and I carried a gallon of gasoline in an old plastic bleach jug so I could prime those fine twin carburetors when the car wouldn't start on its own, which turned out to be most afternoons after school. In those days, we didn't think of carrying gasoline in a Clorox jug as being dangerous, but having to wait until the newer cars cleared the parking lot so I could drag out my gasoline and prime my carburetors was appalling. I could hardly wait for the school year to be over, which thankfully was a matter of only a couple of weeks.
As soon as I was safely home for the summer, Daddy pulled Monica into the carport and went to work on her. Stem to stern, bolt by bolt, he took apart every moving part and put it back together again. (A neighbor lady threatened to acquire additional car parts to add to his collection to see if he'd try to put them back in the Monza, too.) He had it ticking along beautifully a few weeks before time for my senior year to start, and since I no longer needed to prime the carburetors and the car was a new, shiny red with a fashionable white vinyl roof, I was tickled to have wheels I could take just about anywhere I wanted to go. Who cares that Anne Andres had a brand-new, baby blue Dodge Challenger? or Ann Anderson had the latest in new Mustangs? I had wheels!
And drive I did. I became the driver to get Little Brother to school; he cracked me up the afternoon he came bouncing out of the junior high school, thumped his palm on the trunk (which was in the front where otherwise the hood would have been), and announced that he was Joe Marvin Alligator Duck, a nickname that followed him around for at least the rest of the school year, usually shortened to Joe Duck.
I was the editor of the high school paper that year, and one morning a friend of mine and I made a 10-minute trip to the printer to approve the latest edition before it went to press. Only I made the mistake of letting my friend shift gears on my fancy three-on-the-floor drive, and he—like every other passenger except me and Joe Duck—managed to pull the stick completely out of the floorboards.That required me to coast into the Goodyear parking lot and call Daddy, who appeared a few minutes latter with a sheet of cardboard and a pair of pliers. He had us back on the road in 10 or 15 minutes, but it took longer than that to explain to Mrs. MacDonald why we were out of her class for so long.
Joe Duck and I were allowed to ride in Monica on family vacations, and we'd urge her up the hills of central Texas and then coast back down the other side. We didn't have air conditioning, but we rode with the wind in our hair and the radio on its highest volume, and we were in the car without Mother and Daddy—shear heaven to a couple of Texas teens.
When I went off to college the next fall, Joe Duck was 14 and had a driver's license, so Monica fell to him. After all, I was moving to Houston, and Daddy was the magic that made Monica run; she had to stay near him.
Three years later, Daddy suffered a massive coronary and died, and Mother declared the end of Monica Monza. She sent Joe Duck and me out in search of wheels on a promise to buy us each a car with Daddy's life insurance money. Our siblings were horrified: first, Daddy had given us Monica, and now Mother was buying us brand new cars. How spoiled we were!
The car I found was Marcia Malibu. Marcia had been a driver's ed car and was available for the same price as the smaller but sportier Chevy Nova that Joe Duck and I had first planned to buy. By that time, though, I was a college junior, and I was sure I needed a more sophisticated set of wheels. Besides, at that time, the Malibu was pretty much the darling of the road. Marcia was just on the inside of a tolerable shade of pea green, but I was thrilled to call her my own. Besides, it was one of her regular service checkups that led me to my future spouse. I eagerly watched the miles turn over until she got to 99,993, when my spouse announced that she was at the end of the road, so he drove her off to sell. I didn't forgive him for a year for driving her off a handful of miles before I would have gotten to watch the odometer roll over to a whole new string of zeroes.
His replacement was the only car I've ever owned that didn't get a name. Remembering that Joe Duck and I had at one time planned to buy matching Novas, he had exchanged my used Malibu for a used Nova that never quite seemed "right" to me. A friend of mine had recently traded in her Oldmobile for a Pontiac Sunbird—a sort of a feminine version of the powerhouse Firebird that seemed like just the ticket for me—and another had gotten a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And I had a beat-up old Nova. When I drove it to Bryan to apply for a job and lost the watch Mother and Daddy had given me for high school graduation, I decided the Nova had eaten my watch, and that didn't endear it to me. I never knew what the husband was thinking.
Shortly thereafter, though, I got pregnant with Number One Son, and I found that the Sunbird would have had the same limitation the Nova had: getting a baby in and out of a sports coupe with only two doors wasn't really a lot of fun. When Second Son came along a couple of years later, getting two babies in and out of the back seat was an even bigger pain. This time, when Spouse drove my car off to purchase a different one, I didn't even watch him leave; I figured this one was good riddance.
When he came back a few hours later in a shiny new Chrysler New Yorker, I had to agree with toddler NOS, whose first enthusiastic comment when he saw the car was, "Look, Mom, that's a pretty car!" This one really was a pretty car, a deep chocolate brown with a "brougham" vinyl top and "wire" wheels that looked pretty slick, even if I do say so myself. I guess if I had thought about it much, I could have come up with a "people" name for a New Yorker, but NOS was so happy with Pretty Car that that's what we called it for the next eight years, through all sorts of adventures until the Pretty Car on the outside starting showing signs of being the Tired Out car on the inside.
It had certainly met my needs for being able to get to the kids in the back seat; in fact, when the school where I taught had a rasher of teachers losing car radios to on-campus theft, I commented one afternoon that I hoped my car wouldn't be "hit" because my spouse would blow a fuse. One of the students reassured me: "Oh, don't you worry, Mrs. W," he said, "nobody's going to hit your car. It's the one with the three baby seats in the back!"
In fact, it was the only car the kids remembered ever having (and the only one Darling Daughter had ever known) when we decided to trade it in on a Mazda minivan, so you'd have thought I was selling their souls along with it. The salesman, who had a daughter DD's age, had seen that scene enough that he let it play out patiently, and I promised the kids we'd get cherry slushes on the way home that they could drink in the back of the new van. I stopped by an upholstery shop on the way home to find out what to do about the red dye on the new carpet.
Monica and Marcia had had clearly feminine names, and Pretty Car could hardly be considered a "name" at all, so I decided the minivan needed something sort of "neutral." I came up with Mallory; I usually thought of the van itself as being feminine, but I liked the gender-indefinite sound of the name. Mallory took us through Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and learning to drive and a divorce, and Mallory faithfully kept on rolling. Thank goodness I wasn't saddled with car payments during those first few years on my own; whatever else ex-spouse had done, he had taken care of me financially by paying off our bills as we got them, and I'm still grateful to him for that.
When NOS reached 16 and was eligible to learn to drive, I went shopping for wheels for kids to drive, and that's when the 323 came into the picture. I probably paid too much for her, and I probably could have gotten a better car for what I spent, but I got wheels that kids could drive, and all of them were thrilled. The kids had been great fans of Fraggle Rock when they were younger, and teenage NOS took about a minute to determine the new little car's name had to be Mokey.
Mokey survived a number of dents, bangs, and rattles during her years with us, but she was sturdy and reliable, and I was glad to have her. I have no idea where she went that she shouldn't have, but those are secrets the kids can keep to themselves; I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
When Darling Daughter got old enough to drive, Second Son was still driving Mokey (NOS had moved out of the house and was on his own for wheels), so I shopped till I got a steal on a little Geo Metro that looked like a great little car that was just her size. The Metro was standard shift, so the day I drove it home I took DD out to a quiet road near the house and had her drive and shift and stop and drive until I thought I could trust her to navigate the traffic mixture of young drivers and pedestrians around her school.
One thing I was sure of with a young driver new at standard shift: no left turns. I chanted that over and over on the way back to the house and as she charged out the door in the morning. Thirty minutes later, she was back on the stoop, shaking, and saying, "Mom, I wanted you to see that I'm safe, but I've killed Macy." I think that was the car's name, anyway; I'd owned it for less than 24 hours, and she had, indeed, already killed it, trying to make a left turn out of our neighborhood onto the four-lane road that connects the west side of town to the local university. She had walked the three blocks back to the house to tell me.
"What on earth were you doing here?" I demanded when I got to the scene. (Okay, I was probably screaming at her, but I like to pretend I was calmer than that.)
"Going to school," she insisted. Duh. But why was she at this intersection, where she had no choice but to turn left? "There's no other way to get there!" she cried. One more time, I reminded her: right at the end of our street, right onto the main drag through our neighborhood, right onto the road that goes all the way to the high school, including through a stoplight that would get her safely across the four-lane. Right into the high school parking lot. Right, right, right, right—never left.
No matter how many times I play it over in my mind, it still winds up with four kids in a little car that was creamed by a much larger Ford Bronco. But then I snap back to reality and remember the firemen dancing around the little pile of rubble that had been my little car and saying, "Look! It did exactly what it was supposed to do! None of the kids got hurt!" And they were exactly right: my daughter and three of her best friends (that I had had no idea would be in the car with her) had all walked away completely unhurt because the little car's front end had completely crumpled, leaving it totalled but all of them unscathed.
Her dad was gracious enough to choke up his contribution to the cost of the car (which was insured, but not for damage to itself), and shortly thereafter he passed his own old pickup truck to SS, leaving Mokey for DD to drive.
A year or so later I acquired another used car for her, this time a Nissan Pulsar that was cute as a bug (she adored the t-tops!) but that turned out to be a money pit: I bought it cheap, but then I started a long line of repairs that soon showed me the error of my ways. The salesman had been a friend of the family, but the money-pit-on-wheels didn't do much for our relationship. Trixie got DD through her freshman year of college, and DD was truly irate when I refused to let her take Trixie off to school in Los Angeles; the one good result of that was that DD managed to get more money than I expected when she sold the car to a friend who had grown to love it and who managed to wreck it before discovering that the purchase might not have been such a great deal.
The summer before DD made the move to Los Angeles, I had decided the time had come for me to move out of the minivan, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was 12 years old and I was growing tired of it, even though it still wasn't pressing too hard on that once-important 100,000 miles; after all, it was new enough that even 100,000 miles wouldn't roll the odometer over to a full row of zeroes. For another, except for an occasional trip to the hardware store to by goods for a new project, I really didn't have much use for a vehicle that big. In fact, by then SS was driving a Ford F150 pickup truck, and the hardware store didn't have anything I needed that wouldn't fit in a pickup truck. It was time to move on.
I was determined to do my homework, so I read the consumer guides, read the car columns, and test drove the likely candidates—a couple of Toyotas and a couple of Hondas. I had friends and family who were Honda devotees, but of the cars I drove, the Toyotas seemed to "fit" me better, and at the last minute I jumped ship from a loaded-out sporty version of Toyota's small Corolla to its slightly larger and more widely admired Camry. Even the very bottom of the line (the biggest one I thought I could swing financially) was so much more than I had dreamed of that I felt pretty classy; I had driven poor old Mallory for so long that I had no idea how many cool new amenities were available in even the barest of cars.
In fact, I was nervous enough about making such a big purchase that I had decided to let SS, who had bought his own pickup after graduation from high school, help me make the decision. I was down to the last few items when I realized that the Camry didn't seem to have automatic door locks, which were more important to me as a safety feature in parking lots at night than for any other reason. I swung by the McDonald's where he was working so I could quiz him on that when I finally realized that on the car I was driving, the doors locked as soon as I shifted into gear and didn't unlock until I told them to. This car had possibilities!
I bought Kelsey Camry in May, than DD came home from her first year of college and got a job delivering pizzas. There was no way I trusted Trixie to get her through pizza delivery, much less moving to Los Angeles. On a June business trip to Houston, I dropped into a Hyundai dealership to see if the cheap little Accents they offered would make me feel any better. The saleslady who helped me seemed to know where I was coming from, but she discouraged me from considering the Accent, pointing out advantages for a mom to putting her kid in the slightly larger—but only slightly more expensive—Elantra. The purchase itself was a crazy experience, but long story short was that DD drove home in Emma about 36 hours after I had first started to shop. Emma had 6,000 miles worth of pizza delivery before she hauled me and DD to Los Angeles a couple of months later and more than 75,000 miles when DD traded her in a few months ago on her own first car purchase, a brand-new Mini Cooper.
And I've made one more recent car purchase, too. Kevin Cavalier sits in front the house these days for NOS, who has moved back home to start junior college and try to buy himself a new lease on life. Kevin is a 2003 Chevy who's seen some long, hard miles, but NOS is trained as a mechanic and can at least keep the wheels going around for a while longer; at least, that's what I'm hoping. So maybe Kevin has some meaning for me that I hadn't expected, too. And maybe he's going to make himself a part of our little family of cars.
It was nice this evening to be reminded of the Pretty Car and Mokey. They, too, somehow got me here.
Cars have always seemed like members of the family to me, from my earliest vague memories of the green woodie station wagon Daddy drove to the red and white, nine-passenger Chevy with its funny little jump seat so we smaller kids could crawl into the back, through a series of sedans up to the day Daddy proudly drove home in a sad little Corvair Monza that he announced was mine. From that day on, it's never mattered what anybody else was driving; the only car that had a personality was the one that belonged to me.
It wasn't always easy. Daddy had never been able to spring for a car for the three older siblings, and even though this one had been a steal at $150, it was probably still about $150 more than he had available to spend on a car for me. I didn't know that the dual-carburetor engine was supposed to be a cool thing, and I really didn't know that its cousin, the Monza Spyder, was a source of pride among sports car enthusiasts. I just knew Daddy had given away my dog and come home in this junker of a car.
For all I know, my little Monica Monza was a Spyder, but when I first drove her to school, she was mostly a huge embarrasment. For one thing, she was a 1961 vehicle on a 1967 parking lot, and for another, her rear-engine design made her the target of a campaign as "unsafe at any speed." (Later research showed that those claims were irrational, but still—I was only 17.) Worst of all, the previous owner had done his best to drive her wheels off, and I carried a gallon of gasoline in an old plastic bleach jug so I could prime those fine twin carburetors when the car wouldn't start on its own, which turned out to be most afternoons after school. In those days, we didn't think of carrying gasoline in a Clorox jug as being dangerous, but having to wait until the newer cars cleared the parking lot so I could drag out my gasoline and prime my carburetors was appalling. I could hardly wait for the school year to be over, which thankfully was a matter of only a couple of weeks.
As soon as I was safely home for the summer, Daddy pulled Monica into the carport and went to work on her. Stem to stern, bolt by bolt, he took apart every moving part and put it back together again. (A neighbor lady threatened to acquire additional car parts to add to his collection to see if he'd try to put them back in the Monza, too.) He had it ticking along beautifully a few weeks before time for my senior year to start, and since I no longer needed to prime the carburetors and the car was a new, shiny red with a fashionable white vinyl roof, I was tickled to have wheels I could take just about anywhere I wanted to go. Who cares that Anne Andres had a brand-new, baby blue Dodge Challenger? or Ann Anderson had the latest in new Mustangs? I had wheels!
And drive I did. I became the driver to get Little Brother to school; he cracked me up the afternoon he came bouncing out of the junior high school, thumped his palm on the trunk (which was in the front where otherwise the hood would have been), and announced that he was Joe Marvin Alligator Duck, a nickname that followed him around for at least the rest of the school year, usually shortened to Joe Duck.
I was the editor of the high school paper that year, and one morning a friend of mine and I made a 10-minute trip to the printer to approve the latest edition before it went to press. Only I made the mistake of letting my friend shift gears on my fancy three-on-the-floor drive, and he—like every other passenger except me and Joe Duck—managed to pull the stick completely out of the floorboards.That required me to coast into the Goodyear parking lot and call Daddy, who appeared a few minutes latter with a sheet of cardboard and a pair of pliers. He had us back on the road in 10 or 15 minutes, but it took longer than that to explain to Mrs. MacDonald why we were out of her class for so long.
Joe Duck and I were allowed to ride in Monica on family vacations, and we'd urge her up the hills of central Texas and then coast back down the other side. We didn't have air conditioning, but we rode with the wind in our hair and the radio on its highest volume, and we were in the car without Mother and Daddy—shear heaven to a couple of Texas teens.
When I went off to college the next fall, Joe Duck was 14 and had a driver's license, so Monica fell to him. After all, I was moving to Houston, and Daddy was the magic that made Monica run; she had to stay near him.
Three years later, Daddy suffered a massive coronary and died, and Mother declared the end of Monica Monza. She sent Joe Duck and me out in search of wheels on a promise to buy us each a car with Daddy's life insurance money. Our siblings were horrified: first, Daddy had given us Monica, and now Mother was buying us brand new cars. How spoiled we were!
The car I found was Marcia Malibu. Marcia had been a driver's ed car and was available for the same price as the smaller but sportier Chevy Nova that Joe Duck and I had first planned to buy. By that time, though, I was a college junior, and I was sure I needed a more sophisticated set of wheels. Besides, at that time, the Malibu was pretty much the darling of the road. Marcia was just on the inside of a tolerable shade of pea green, but I was thrilled to call her my own. Besides, it was one of her regular service checkups that led me to my future spouse. I eagerly watched the miles turn over until she got to 99,993, when my spouse announced that she was at the end of the road, so he drove her off to sell. I didn't forgive him for a year for driving her off a handful of miles before I would have gotten to watch the odometer roll over to a whole new string of zeroes.
His replacement was the only car I've ever owned that didn't get a name. Remembering that Joe Duck and I had at one time planned to buy matching Novas, he had exchanged my used Malibu for a used Nova that never quite seemed "right" to me. A friend of mine had recently traded in her Oldmobile for a Pontiac Sunbird—a sort of a feminine version of the powerhouse Firebird that seemed like just the ticket for me—and another had gotten a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And I had a beat-up old Nova. When I drove it to Bryan to apply for a job and lost the watch Mother and Daddy had given me for high school graduation, I decided the Nova had eaten my watch, and that didn't endear it to me. I never knew what the husband was thinking.
Shortly thereafter, though, I got pregnant with Number One Son, and I found that the Sunbird would have had the same limitation the Nova had: getting a baby in and out of a sports coupe with only two doors wasn't really a lot of fun. When Second Son came along a couple of years later, getting two babies in and out of the back seat was an even bigger pain. This time, when Spouse drove my car off to purchase a different one, I didn't even watch him leave; I figured this one was good riddance.
When he came back a few hours later in a shiny new Chrysler New Yorker, I had to agree with toddler NOS, whose first enthusiastic comment when he saw the car was, "Look, Mom, that's a pretty car!" This one really was a pretty car, a deep chocolate brown with a "brougham" vinyl top and "wire" wheels that looked pretty slick, even if I do say so myself. I guess if I had thought about it much, I could have come up with a "people" name for a New Yorker, but NOS was so happy with Pretty Car that that's what we called it for the next eight years, through all sorts of adventures until the Pretty Car on the outside starting showing signs of being the Tired Out car on the inside.
It had certainly met my needs for being able to get to the kids in the back seat; in fact, when the school where I taught had a rasher of teachers losing car radios to on-campus theft, I commented one afternoon that I hoped my car wouldn't be "hit" because my spouse would blow a fuse. One of the students reassured me: "Oh, don't you worry, Mrs. W," he said, "nobody's going to hit your car. It's the one with the three baby seats in the back!"
In fact, it was the only car the kids remembered ever having (and the only one Darling Daughter had ever known) when we decided to trade it in on a Mazda minivan, so you'd have thought I was selling their souls along with it. The salesman, who had a daughter DD's age, had seen that scene enough that he let it play out patiently, and I promised the kids we'd get cherry slushes on the way home that they could drink in the back of the new van. I stopped by an upholstery shop on the way home to find out what to do about the red dye on the new carpet.
Monica and Marcia had had clearly feminine names, and Pretty Car could hardly be considered a "name" at all, so I decided the minivan needed something sort of "neutral." I came up with Mallory; I usually thought of the van itself as being feminine, but I liked the gender-indefinite sound of the name. Mallory took us through Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and learning to drive and a divorce, and Mallory faithfully kept on rolling. Thank goodness I wasn't saddled with car payments during those first few years on my own; whatever else ex-spouse had done, he had taken care of me financially by paying off our bills as we got them, and I'm still grateful to him for that.
When NOS reached 16 and was eligible to learn to drive, I went shopping for wheels for kids to drive, and that's when the 323 came into the picture. I probably paid too much for her, and I probably could have gotten a better car for what I spent, but I got wheels that kids could drive, and all of them were thrilled. The kids had been great fans of Fraggle Rock when they were younger, and teenage NOS took about a minute to determine the new little car's name had to be Mokey.
Mokey survived a number of dents, bangs, and rattles during her years with us, but she was sturdy and reliable, and I was glad to have her. I have no idea where she went that she shouldn't have, but those are secrets the kids can keep to themselves; I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
When Darling Daughter got old enough to drive, Second Son was still driving Mokey (NOS had moved out of the house and was on his own for wheels), so I shopped till I got a steal on a little Geo Metro that looked like a great little car that was just her size. The Metro was standard shift, so the day I drove it home I took DD out to a quiet road near the house and had her drive and shift and stop and drive until I thought I could trust her to navigate the traffic mixture of young drivers and pedestrians around her school.
One thing I was sure of with a young driver new at standard shift: no left turns. I chanted that over and over on the way back to the house and as she charged out the door in the morning. Thirty minutes later, she was back on the stoop, shaking, and saying, "Mom, I wanted you to see that I'm safe, but I've killed Macy." I think that was the car's name, anyway; I'd owned it for less than 24 hours, and she had, indeed, already killed it, trying to make a left turn out of our neighborhood onto the four-lane road that connects the west side of town to the local university. She had walked the three blocks back to the house to tell me.
"What on earth were you doing here?" I demanded when I got to the scene. (Okay, I was probably screaming at her, but I like to pretend I was calmer than that.)
"Going to school," she insisted. Duh. But why was she at this intersection, where she had no choice but to turn left? "There's no other way to get there!" she cried. One more time, I reminded her: right at the end of our street, right onto the main drag through our neighborhood, right onto the road that goes all the way to the high school, including through a stoplight that would get her safely across the four-lane. Right into the high school parking lot. Right, right, right, right—never left.
No matter how many times I play it over in my mind, it still winds up with four kids in a little car that was creamed by a much larger Ford Bronco. But then I snap back to reality and remember the firemen dancing around the little pile of rubble that had been my little car and saying, "Look! It did exactly what it was supposed to do! None of the kids got hurt!" And they were exactly right: my daughter and three of her best friends (that I had had no idea would be in the car with her) had all walked away completely unhurt because the little car's front end had completely crumpled, leaving it totalled but all of them unscathed.
Her dad was gracious enough to choke up his contribution to the cost of the car (which was insured, but not for damage to itself), and shortly thereafter he passed his own old pickup truck to SS, leaving Mokey for DD to drive.
A year or so later I acquired another used car for her, this time a Nissan Pulsar that was cute as a bug (she adored the t-tops!) but that turned out to be a money pit: I bought it cheap, but then I started a long line of repairs that soon showed me the error of my ways. The salesman had been a friend of the family, but the money-pit-on-wheels didn't do much for our relationship. Trixie got DD through her freshman year of college, and DD was truly irate when I refused to let her take Trixie off to school in Los Angeles; the one good result of that was that DD managed to get more money than I expected when she sold the car to a friend who had grown to love it and who managed to wreck it before discovering that the purchase might not have been such a great deal.
The summer before DD made the move to Los Angeles, I had decided the time had come for me to move out of the minivan, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was 12 years old and I was growing tired of it, even though it still wasn't pressing too hard on that once-important 100,000 miles; after all, it was new enough that even 100,000 miles wouldn't roll the odometer over to a full row of zeroes. For another, except for an occasional trip to the hardware store to by goods for a new project, I really didn't have much use for a vehicle that big. In fact, by then SS was driving a Ford F150 pickup truck, and the hardware store didn't have anything I needed that wouldn't fit in a pickup truck. It was time to move on.
I was determined to do my homework, so I read the consumer guides, read the car columns, and test drove the likely candidates—a couple of Toyotas and a couple of Hondas. I had friends and family who were Honda devotees, but of the cars I drove, the Toyotas seemed to "fit" me better, and at the last minute I jumped ship from a loaded-out sporty version of Toyota's small Corolla to its slightly larger and more widely admired Camry. Even the very bottom of the line (the biggest one I thought I could swing financially) was so much more than I had dreamed of that I felt pretty classy; I had driven poor old Mallory for so long that I had no idea how many cool new amenities were available in even the barest of cars.
In fact, I was nervous enough about making such a big purchase that I had decided to let SS, who had bought his own pickup after graduation from high school, help me make the decision. I was down to the last few items when I realized that the Camry didn't seem to have automatic door locks, which were more important to me as a safety feature in parking lots at night than for any other reason. I swung by the McDonald's where he was working so I could quiz him on that when I finally realized that on the car I was driving, the doors locked as soon as I shifted into gear and didn't unlock until I told them to. This car had possibilities!
I bought Kelsey Camry in May, than DD came home from her first year of college and got a job delivering pizzas. There was no way I trusted Trixie to get her through pizza delivery, much less moving to Los Angeles. On a June business trip to Houston, I dropped into a Hyundai dealership to see if the cheap little Accents they offered would make me feel any better. The saleslady who helped me seemed to know where I was coming from, but she discouraged me from considering the Accent, pointing out advantages for a mom to putting her kid in the slightly larger—but only slightly more expensive—Elantra. The purchase itself was a crazy experience, but long story short was that DD drove home in Emma about 36 hours after I had first started to shop. Emma had 6,000 miles worth of pizza delivery before she hauled me and DD to Los Angeles a couple of months later and more than 75,000 miles when DD traded her in a few months ago on her own first car purchase, a brand-new Mini Cooper.
And I've made one more recent car purchase, too. Kevin Cavalier sits in front the house these days for NOS, who has moved back home to start junior college and try to buy himself a new lease on life. Kevin is a 2003 Chevy who's seen some long, hard miles, but NOS is trained as a mechanic and can at least keep the wheels going around for a while longer; at least, that's what I'm hoping. So maybe Kevin has some meaning for me that I hadn't expected, too. And maybe he's going to make himself a part of our little family of cars.
It was nice this evening to be reminded of the Pretty Car and Mokey. They, too, somehow got me here.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sometimes teaching just fits
I gave up long ago on ever being one of those teachers that students nominate for awards or remember in their memoirs or acknowledge in any other public way, but I'm pretty much okay with that. I'd love to be the kind of teaching genius I saw in Randy Pausch before he died this summer, or Taylor Mali, whose humorous videos on YouTube flatten me. But I'm not, and I'm not going to be.
Still, once in a while I hear from one who is grateful to me. A few years after I lost my last position teaching high school journalism (which had turned out in some ways to be a blessing), I got a call from one of the few students I had had there who told me I needed to know that "we" had won a pretty significant award. He had gone on from my class (which he had taken as a sort of a fill-in-the-blank elective) to major in journalism at the local university, but his call was to tell me that he had learned the things he really needed to know in my high school journalism class. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
A couple of years ago, another student cornered me at a departmental function to tell me she had pretty much hated me when I graded her lab reports while she was an engineering sophomore, and her feelings had softened only gradually as she had moved through our program.
When she was in our master's degree program, she had sometimes come to my office to discuss her thesis project, and she began to see that the lessons from the undergraduate courses had taught her more than she had recognized. Now, as a PhD student in our online program and a drilling engineer for a major oil company, she was using the same lessons she had learned as a sophomore to write routine reports that sailed through management—and she attributed her success with them to those dreaded lab reports.
Just last week, a student emailed me with a question and noted that another former student had advised him to pay close attention in my writing class because those lab reports had turned out to be invaluable to that former student, too.
Nothing major, no student-driven awards, but still nice for a teacher to hear.
Monday night's class was one of those that reminded me why I like to do this. The class meets at 6 p.m. in the largest room in our building, which is filled to its gills with nearly 140 students. I'm pretty sure the students were on their good behavior more because they were hoping to get out a little early for another event than because my lecture was fascinating, but they were more attentive than they often are.
The lesson was fairly complex. I was trying to help juniors understand my philosophy about writing introductions to engineering reports, and as an example I was using a paper written by my coteacher, who has also often served as my mentor as I have learned to function in an engineering environment. I've used this paper (and the story that follows) in my course many times before, but this was the first time I had used them with him sitting in the classroom.
The students mostly recognize my collaborator's prestige; they know he has published textbooks, and they know that he is well-respected within the industry. So when I scanned to the end of his paper and showed them a references list of 37 papers, they were impressed with the importance of reading and citing literature—a lesson I really, really want them to learn.
We spent a couple of minutes on the conclusions to the paper and talked about their meaning and their merit before I zoomed back to the introduction. There, my point was that my collaborator—who holds the highest awards his professional organization can confer on him—includes the concepts from the conclusions right there, near the front of the paper, in the introduction.
The story I have told for years (and repeated Monday) is about another paper, though. The first time the two of us taught this course together—probably 14 or 15 years ago—he had told a class not to do that: putting the conclusions in the introductions spoils the surprise, he said. And I rudely interrupted his thought with a stage-whispered "or not." After class, he came to my office to debate the point, which I was comfortable enough conceding since I had only a couple of degrees in education, no professional publications, and nearly no comprehension of engineering at all.
A couple of days later, he showed up in the office with copies of three reports from a consulting company where he worked part-time as something like vice-president for technology. He dropped the reports on my desk, informing me that the client, the Gas Research Institute, had assured the consulting firm that their reports were consistently the best GRI received, although G RIfunded projects for a large number of organizations. The challenge: read these papers and see whether they contained conclusions in the introductions.
Recognizing the words from the conclusions in the introduction might have been simple enough, but recognizing their meaning would mean reading the papers more thoroughly. Besides, I needed to learn more about petroleum engineering, and what better place to start than some of the best papers in the industry?
The first paper was painful, some sort of gibberish about hydraulic fracturing in the Devonian shales, whatever any of that meant. As I told the students, reading it was a lot like reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky":
Still, once in a while I hear from one who is grateful to me. A few years after I lost my last position teaching high school journalism (which had turned out in some ways to be a blessing), I got a call from one of the few students I had had there who told me I needed to know that "we" had won a pretty significant award. He had gone on from my class (which he had taken as a sort of a fill-in-the-blank elective) to major in journalism at the local university, but his call was to tell me that he had learned the things he really needed to know in my high school journalism class. Needless to say, I was thrilled.
A couple of years ago, another student cornered me at a departmental function to tell me she had pretty much hated me when I graded her lab reports while she was an engineering sophomore, and her feelings had softened only gradually as she had moved through our program.
When she was in our master's degree program, she had sometimes come to my office to discuss her thesis project, and she began to see that the lessons from the undergraduate courses had taught her more than she had recognized. Now, as a PhD student in our online program and a drilling engineer for a major oil company, she was using the same lessons she had learned as a sophomore to write routine reports that sailed through management—and she attributed her success with them to those dreaded lab reports.
Just last week, a student emailed me with a question and noted that another former student had advised him to pay close attention in my writing class because those lab reports had turned out to be invaluable to that former student, too.
Nothing major, no student-driven awards, but still nice for a teacher to hear.
Monday night's class was one of those that reminded me why I like to do this. The class meets at 6 p.m. in the largest room in our building, which is filled to its gills with nearly 140 students. I'm pretty sure the students were on their good behavior more because they were hoping to get out a little early for another event than because my lecture was fascinating, but they were more attentive than they often are.
The lesson was fairly complex. I was trying to help juniors understand my philosophy about writing introductions to engineering reports, and as an example I was using a paper written by my coteacher, who has also often served as my mentor as I have learned to function in an engineering environment. I've used this paper (and the story that follows) in my course many times before, but this was the first time I had used them with him sitting in the classroom.
The students mostly recognize my collaborator's prestige; they know he has published textbooks, and they know that he is well-respected within the industry. So when I scanned to the end of his paper and showed them a references list of 37 papers, they were impressed with the importance of reading and citing literature—a lesson I really, really want them to learn.
We spent a couple of minutes on the conclusions to the paper and talked about their meaning and their merit before I zoomed back to the introduction. There, my point was that my collaborator—who holds the highest awards his professional organization can confer on him—includes the concepts from the conclusions right there, near the front of the paper, in the introduction.
The story I have told for years (and repeated Monday) is about another paper, though. The first time the two of us taught this course together—probably 14 or 15 years ago—he had told a class not to do that: putting the conclusions in the introductions spoils the surprise, he said. And I rudely interrupted his thought with a stage-whispered "or not." After class, he came to my office to debate the point, which I was comfortable enough conceding since I had only a couple of degrees in education, no professional publications, and nearly no comprehension of engineering at all.
A couple of days later, he showed up in the office with copies of three reports from a consulting company where he worked part-time as something like vice-president for technology. He dropped the reports on my desk, informing me that the client, the Gas Research Institute, had assured the consulting firm that their reports were consistently the best GRI received, although G RIfunded projects for a large number of organizations. The challenge: read these papers and see whether they contained conclusions in the introductions.
Recognizing the words from the conclusions in the introduction might have been simple enough, but recognizing their meaning would mean reading the papers more thoroughly. Besides, I needed to learn more about petroleum engineering, and what better place to start than some of the best papers in the industry?
The first paper was painful, some sort of gibberish about hydraulic fracturing in the Devonian shales, whatever any of that meant. As I told the students, reading it was a lot like reading Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky":
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogroves
And the mome wraths outgrabe."
I knew better than to be surprised by the students' quizzical looks; Carroll was way ahead of Dr. Seuss in making up words, and most of the words in "Jabberwocky" apparently were outgrowths of a drug-induced stupor. But the analogy is still pretty good.
The second paper was easier to read, but logic suggested that I had somehow developed some rudimentary vocabulary while reading the first one, and surely my growing expertise with the language made it clearer to me. I had high hopes for the third one.
Imagine my disappointment, then, when the third paper was about as perplexing as the first; the lessons of the first two apparently had made no discernible difference at all.
But the challenge had been to find the conclusions echoing in the introduction, and I set out with all three papers to search. The first and third ones—the more difficult ones to read—sort of danced around the concluding ideas, but they never quite got to them. The third one was markedly different: I pulled out my brand new little yellow sticky notes and carefully marked the places where each conclusion was spelled out almost exactly in the introduction.
When my collaborator rolled back through my office in a couple of days, he said somewhat smugly that he bet I hadn't found the conclusions in the introductions.
"Well, not in this one," I said, picking up the first one. "Or in this one. But let's talk about this one." And I started thumbing to the pages with the sticky notes.
"You didn't," he answered, but I showed him unequivocally that, indeed, I did.
With him in the classroom Monday, I had to stop a moment to warn him to get ready for the students to laugh.
"Oh," he had said quietly that day in my office. "That's the one that I wrote."
They're young students, and they weren't particularly comfortable, but a ripple of chuckles crossed the room.
"But I don't know why I did that," he had continued. But I did, and it's the object lesson that makes the story so good: even though he has worked very hard to learn to write well, talking with writing teachers and taking additional courses well into his career, he ignored the advice of professionals who were not engineers and listened instead to his own brilliant intuition instead. His training told him to save the conclusions for the ending to keep from "giving away the surprise"; his heart told him his readers probably already knew the ending but instead needed closure, gentle reminders all through the paper that what the writers claimed would really turn out to be true.
"You weren't writing for those technical writing teachers," I said Monday. "You were writing for these young students who want to learn from your paper and need you to guide them through. You were writing for people who don't know the subject as well as you do. You were writing for me."
Sometimes a class of 140 students can be almost eerily quiet, and Monday night, it was.
But it reminded me why I love standing in front of it, and why sometimes teaching just fits.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Beware the midnight pocket call!
When my throat started hurting Sunday night, I didn't think too much of it. I cough a lot anyway (my pulmonologist says I have bronchioectasis, which apparently translates loosely to "stuff in my lungs that makes me cough a lot"), and I live in a place my general practitioner used to call the allergy capital of the world (changing GPs apparently didn't change that, but the new one doesn't talk about it that way).
So between the general cough and the junk in the back of my throat (which the ear/nose/throat guy insists on calling "post-nasal drip," although in Backwards World, where I live, it seems as if it should be "pre-nasal drip"; that junk is going directly from my sinuses to my throat without ever making it to my nose), a sore throat didn't seem like a big deal. In retrospect, of course, I realize that sore throat is one of the symptoms of the dreaded H1N1 flu going around, so maybe I had a mild case of the flu instead of just a sore throat. Too late now.
At any rate, by the time I woke up Monday morning I was too hoarse to tell the dog to go outside, so I took the day off, took care of the business of logging out of a day's work (including coming up with a solution for missing class that night), and curled up on the couch with a tall glass of tea and a small bottle of antihistamines.
I thought I'd done a pretty good job of taking care of myself, and Number One Son made sure I had a good supper and plenty of liquids once he got home and could pitch in to help out. I watched the usual Monday night lineup on t.v., then dragged myself off to bed to read the paper and try to face Tuesday.
A little before 2 in the morning, my cell phone rang. My initial inclination was to ignore it, but a good friend had been calling regularly about her husband's deteriorating conditions of cancer, and I wanted to be there if she were calling about him.
I dragged myself across the bed, flipped open my phone, and saw my daughter's number. She's quite a mature, independent young lady who had been a bit out of touch lately because the current flame had just moved halfway across the country to be with her, so I was not at all surprised that I hadn't heard from her recently. The vibes I had gotten had been few but positive, so my only thought was that if she were calling in the middle of the night, something must be terribly, horribly wrong.
I hit the dial back button and heard her voicemail message. Well, I sort of heard it; what I really heard was a great deal of background noise broken by what seemed to be a teary, strangled "Mom!" and then more noises muffling what seemed to be a teary "want to come home!" accompanied by more background racket. Then the call shut off.
This was beyond strange; this chick has been out of the nest and on her own for nearly 10 years already, and I couldn't believe she'd be calling me unless something were really, horribly wrong. And if she were calling me instead of one of many friends in Los Angeles who had a chance of getting to her quickly, things must be beyond "out of hand."
Even in my antihistamine-induced stupor, I knew I needed to find out what I could do to help her, so I hit the speed dial and tried to reach her phone. The first three times I called, I got the "not available" message; either her phone was not in her hands or something else was going on that was keeping her from answering, and I was becoming frantic. Had someone grabbed her, taken away her phone (which is sort of like taking out one of her arteries), and continued to do harm to her?
From what I know of the boyfriend, he's a jewel, and even if he were somehow implicated in this, if I could at least get through to him, maybe I could get to the bottom of it. Lord only knows why she would have called me instead of him unless he had gone Jekyll and Hyde on her, but if calling the perp would distract him, well, maybe that was worth a try. I dialed his number.
Antihistamines really do stupid stuff to me, you know?
He didn't answer, but a few seconds later, my phone rang again, and my daughter's number popped up. I answered immediately.
"Hello?" The voice was the BF's, but it was calm and rational, and there was no background noise. This didn't even seem like the same phone that had called me minutes before.
"BF?" I asked. "Is Daughter there?"
"Yes," he said calmly.
"Can I talk to her?"
I couldn't figure out what he was doing calling me on her phone, but it cut out before he could answer. A heartbeat later, he called me back.
"She's here. Just a minute."
"Mom?" The voice was a little shaky, but not teary or scary, and the background noise was still completely gone.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"Yes! Are you? It's-2-o'clock-in-the-morning-there! Why-are-you-calling-me?"
"I didn't start this—you called first!"
"Oh my god. I didn't call you. My phone was in my pocket—my pocket called you!"
Two a.m. is no time of day/night for me to try to figure out how in the world her pocket called me, but I had heard her voice, it was fine, and I felt better.
"Okay. I've been sick, and you called me. I thought you were hurt and crying and telling me you wanted to come home."
"Could be that I called you," she said more calmly. "My phone sometimes does that. We're having a party here, and since I haven't talked to you in so long, I was talking about you, and I probably said 'home' and no telling what else you might have heard. But I'm okay."
Several days passed before I had a chance to chat with her, and we both laughed when we found out the other side of the story:
I was too groggy to recognize that probably what I had heard on the voice mail was mostly just gibberish coming from a room full of people in the middle of a weekend football party; she was too horrified to answer my calls when she calculated the time of night it had to be back home in Texas and lord=only-knows what sort of terrible things might have happened to one of her brothers. The party had stopped to be sure everything was fine at home, and I'm still not sure whether it had a chance to fire back up again.
But I learned not to pay too much attention when her cell phone calls me late at night from her bluejeans pocket.
So between the general cough and the junk in the back of my throat (which the ear/nose/throat guy insists on calling "post-nasal drip," although in Backwards World, where I live, it seems as if it should be "pre-nasal drip"; that junk is going directly from my sinuses to my throat without ever making it to my nose), a sore throat didn't seem like a big deal. In retrospect, of course, I realize that sore throat is one of the symptoms of the dreaded H1N1 flu going around, so maybe I had a mild case of the flu instead of just a sore throat. Too late now.
At any rate, by the time I woke up Monday morning I was too hoarse to tell the dog to go outside, so I took the day off, took care of the business of logging out of a day's work (including coming up with a solution for missing class that night), and curled up on the couch with a tall glass of tea and a small bottle of antihistamines.
I thought I'd done a pretty good job of taking care of myself, and Number One Son made sure I had a good supper and plenty of liquids once he got home and could pitch in to help out. I watched the usual Monday night lineup on t.v., then dragged myself off to bed to read the paper and try to face Tuesday.
A little before 2 in the morning, my cell phone rang. My initial inclination was to ignore it, but a good friend had been calling regularly about her husband's deteriorating conditions of cancer, and I wanted to be there if she were calling about him.
I dragged myself across the bed, flipped open my phone, and saw my daughter's number. She's quite a mature, independent young lady who had been a bit out of touch lately because the current flame had just moved halfway across the country to be with her, so I was not at all surprised that I hadn't heard from her recently. The vibes I had gotten had been few but positive, so my only thought was that if she were calling in the middle of the night, something must be terribly, horribly wrong.
I hit the dial back button and heard her voicemail message. Well, I sort of heard it; what I really heard was a great deal of background noise broken by what seemed to be a teary, strangled "Mom!" and then more noises muffling what seemed to be a teary "want to come home!" accompanied by more background racket. Then the call shut off.
This was beyond strange; this chick has been out of the nest and on her own for nearly 10 years already, and I couldn't believe she'd be calling me unless something were really, horribly wrong. And if she were calling me instead of one of many friends in Los Angeles who had a chance of getting to her quickly, things must be beyond "out of hand."
Even in my antihistamine-induced stupor, I knew I needed to find out what I could do to help her, so I hit the speed dial and tried to reach her phone. The first three times I called, I got the "not available" message; either her phone was not in her hands or something else was going on that was keeping her from answering, and I was becoming frantic. Had someone grabbed her, taken away her phone (which is sort of like taking out one of her arteries), and continued to do harm to her?
From what I know of the boyfriend, he's a jewel, and even if he were somehow implicated in this, if I could at least get through to him, maybe I could get to the bottom of it. Lord only knows why she would have called me instead of him unless he had gone Jekyll and Hyde on her, but if calling the perp would distract him, well, maybe that was worth a try. I dialed his number.
Antihistamines really do stupid stuff to me, you know?
He didn't answer, but a few seconds later, my phone rang again, and my daughter's number popped up. I answered immediately.
"Hello?" The voice was the BF's, but it was calm and rational, and there was no background noise. This didn't even seem like the same phone that had called me minutes before.
"BF?" I asked. "Is Daughter there?"
"Yes," he said calmly.
"Can I talk to her?"
I couldn't figure out what he was doing calling me on her phone, but it cut out before he could answer. A heartbeat later, he called me back.
"She's here. Just a minute."
"Mom?" The voice was a little shaky, but not teary or scary, and the background noise was still completely gone.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"Yes! Are you? It's-2-o'clock-in-the-morning-there! Why-are-you-calling-me?"
"I didn't start this—you called first!"
"Oh my god. I didn't call you. My phone was in my pocket—my pocket called you!"
Two a.m. is no time of day/night for me to try to figure out how in the world her pocket called me, but I had heard her voice, it was fine, and I felt better.
"Okay. I've been sick, and you called me. I thought you were hurt and crying and telling me you wanted to come home."
"Could be that I called you," she said more calmly. "My phone sometimes does that. We're having a party here, and since I haven't talked to you in so long, I was talking about you, and I probably said 'home' and no telling what else you might have heard. But I'm okay."
Several days passed before I had a chance to chat with her, and we both laughed when we found out the other side of the story:
I was too groggy to recognize that probably what I had heard on the voice mail was mostly just gibberish coming from a room full of people in the middle of a weekend football party; she was too horrified to answer my calls when she calculated the time of night it had to be back home in Texas and lord=only-knows what sort of terrible things might have happened to one of her brothers. The party had stopped to be sure everything was fine at home, and I'm still not sure whether it had a chance to fire back up again.
But I learned not to pay too much attention when her cell phone calls me late at night from her bluejeans pocket.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Remembering my brother
I heard from a friend last summer about how hard it was for her to lose her grandmother; I could empathize even more when lost my older brother. This is an entry I wrote in another venue about him; I post it here on his birthday because I want to save it somehow.
In some ways, I'm grateful (but not at all glad!) that he was something of a loner and a hermit; I'm not tempted to pick up the phone every day or two to ask how he is or to tell him the news in my world, as I did my mom several years ago when she died. On the one hand, that's nice; I don't have that hole in my heart. On the other, it kind of sucks; why didn't I talk to him more?
I've thought some over the past few days about what I could say to give you a bit of insight into just how crazy and wonderful this brother really was, but a couple of others have done it for me, and probably better. (See our nephew Chef Bruce's blog at http://thebranchrestaurant.blogspot.com/2008/08/ogg.html and our niece Stephanie G's nice notes at http://sdfgarcia.blogspot.com/2008/07/don-ogg.html, then follow the link to the notes his Buckskinner friends made at http://www.buckskinning.org/2008_ogg.htm.)
But Don and I shared a lot: of five kids in our family, we were the two whose names began with D; his dyslexia (and even his left-handedness) gave him legitimate reason to feel as if he didn't "measure up" to our parents' standards for years, so he understood that I never felt as if I "measured up" in comparison to our two sisters; we both loved being outdoors and both had life memberships in scouting (and both had camped out in the year before he died—although his skills were immeasurably greater than mine!); we both loved handcrafts—the only two left in our family who actually made things on treadle sewing machines; we both knew that we had a special bond neither of us would ever share with the others.
He was different from me in many ways, too: I loved to read from the time I first figured out words on a page, and I made a career of writing and teaching writing, while he found both of those arts painful and only learned to love them as an adult, when he finally realized the treasures of knowledge in books (especially old ones) and that all of us loved every word he wrote to us, even when he broke every grammar and spelling rule we knew. He never had children (he shipped his mail-order bride back to the sender six months after he met her), and he scraped by for most of his life on a meager income that would never have accommodated them. He was an inveterate tinkerer; if he wanted something, he often managed to build it (or to modify something close enough to make it work), although some of his efforts were remarkably more or less successful than others.
I miss him, but I love the blogs his niece and nephew and friends have built to preserve his memory. My former mother-in-law volunteered to pull together some of our memorabilia of him (pictures, copies of email he sent us, the web pages linked above) into a scrapbook that I hope will one day enter our family archives.
One thing is sure: He'll never leave our family memory.
In some ways, I'm grateful (but not at all glad!) that he was something of a loner and a hermit; I'm not tempted to pick up the phone every day or two to ask how he is or to tell him the news in my world, as I did my mom several years ago when she died. On the one hand, that's nice; I don't have that hole in my heart. On the other, it kind of sucks; why didn't I talk to him more?
I've thought some over the past few days about what I could say to give you a bit of insight into just how crazy and wonderful this brother really was, but a couple of others have done it for me, and probably better. (See our nephew Chef Bruce's blog at http://thebranchrestaurant.blogspot.com/2008/08/ogg.html and our niece Stephanie G's nice notes at http://sdfgarcia.blogspot.com/2008/07/don-ogg.html, then follow the link to the notes his Buckskinner friends made at http://www.buckskinning.org/2008_ogg.htm.)
But Don and I shared a lot: of five kids in our family, we were the two whose names began with D; his dyslexia (and even his left-handedness) gave him legitimate reason to feel as if he didn't "measure up" to our parents' standards for years, so he understood that I never felt as if I "measured up" in comparison to our two sisters; we both loved being outdoors and both had life memberships in scouting (and both had camped out in the year before he died—although his skills were immeasurably greater than mine!); we both loved handcrafts—the only two left in our family who actually made things on treadle sewing machines; we both knew that we had a special bond neither of us would ever share with the others.
He was different from me in many ways, too: I loved to read from the time I first figured out words on a page, and I made a career of writing and teaching writing, while he found both of those arts painful and only learned to love them as an adult, when he finally realized the treasures of knowledge in books (especially old ones) and that all of us loved every word he wrote to us, even when he broke every grammar and spelling rule we knew. He never had children (he shipped his mail-order bride back to the sender six months after he met her), and he scraped by for most of his life on a meager income that would never have accommodated them. He was an inveterate tinkerer; if he wanted something, he often managed to build it (or to modify something close enough to make it work), although some of his efforts were remarkably more or less successful than others.
I miss him, but I love the blogs his niece and nephew and friends have built to preserve his memory. My former mother-in-law volunteered to pull together some of our memorabilia of him (pictures, copies of email he sent us, the web pages linked above) into a scrapbook that I hope will one day enter our family archives.
One thing is sure: He'll never leave our family memory.
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