Category Archives: Observations

Various observations about family, nature, life and whatnot.

February 20, 2014 · 2:06 pm

The Charm in the Unsightly

There’s this back of a building I pass on my morning bike ride that makes me smile. Even though the dull white paint is chipped and molded and weeds flank the edges there is something poetic about it. But I’ll have to give its spray paint graffiti the credit. Right next to a red, boyishly printed “I love Julie” there’s “Life is Beautiful” in sweeping purple letters. On one of my rides I thought to stop and take a photo in case I need this affirmation when I’m not pumping the pedals on my favorite trail.

I’ve thought of this space very often. Who is the artist who thought to display this work? What was their motivation? I give them a nod and thank you to the atmosphere when I pass by.

Today the graffiti was gone.

The building was coated in a sandy beige that gleamed in the morning sun. Even the weeds were trimmed. I’m sure the owner of the building meant well while refreshing its facade. But I wasn’t too happy about it.

Blank Space

Don’t get me wrong. I love a manicured landscape, fresh paint, neatness, organization. But some things have more character when they aren’t, well, perfect.

Take people for instance. I’ve often said if you put all my ex-boyfriends in a row you might think you’re at the circus. And that’s not because I dated a bearded lady. I guess I’ve found attractiveness in all kinds. I never thought Tom Cruise was particularly hot. He’s just too damn normal. Give me a guy with a crooked (but clean) tooth, an unruly brow, or a laugh that makes the walls vibrate.

In college I had this dull and depressing drive from home to classes. Especially in the rainy winter. I saw no beauty in anything around me. My eyes only saw the dark, the dead, the sad. There have been other times in my life when this negative thinking took precedence over the glass-is-half-full mentality. Depression and anxiety were at their height. I think it all goes hand in hand. And even if I saw the most gorgeous of artwork on a wall in an alley I would not have recognized its charm.

My New Year’s resolution for 2014 was to continue to see the world in wonder instead of fear. So far, so good. Some of us have to train our brains to think this way. I’ve been in this training for many many months now. I sometimes get engulfed in the unsightliness of my surroundings when the dopamine is barely dripping. And I don’t live in an ugly place. But there is fear and unattractiveness all around if that is what you see. There may have even been times I thought a scarred Keanu Reeves wasn’t so hot. Okay, yeah, not really.

A field of weeds brings forth a bright yellow dandelion. A strip mall includes a shop of happy Vietnamese ladies eager to refresh tired tootsies. A junk yard is a photo-op. A scribble of tasteful graffiti is a mantra burned into a retrained brain.

And Julie, I’m sure you’re still loved. Just as life is still beautiful.

Beautiful Graffiti

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January 31, 2014 · 2:11 pm

Loose Change

Sometimes I wake up with a heaviness in my heart. It could be the previous night’s dream. It could be some energy in the world that is off-kilter. It could be an argument I had or dwelling on mistakes I made. It could be that my kid is growing up too fast. It could be all these things. Disturbances. Change. I don’t do change well.

Yesterday I found a penny at the bottom of the washing machine. Loose change from one of our pockets. Now washed and shiny. I threw it in the garbage. I don’t make a habit of tossing anything that can be used again. I think I was just in robot mode.

My mom-in-law is moving to another state today. End of an era. Bittersweet. I will most certainly write a post about it.

Our favorite crossing guard had to retire for health reasons. The morning bike ride is not the same.

My favorite kickboxing partner is joining the Navy. Who will I make goofy faces at while we do the warm-ups?

I can cry about this heaviness, these changes, and maybe I have. Maybe the other day I had a full-out bawl session on a fishing pier while listening to The Cure on my iPod and watching the pelicans glide in the sky. Maybe I cried so hard and so much my tears didn’t taste like salt anymore.

The heaviness subsided as it usually does with a good cry. But there is always space for it there to come back. My heart has so much room yet it’s bursting at the proverbial pericardium. And maybe that’s what I was crying about most. “This is not a curse,” I can hear some of you say. And perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it’s a gift. And with the loving comes the hurting. And with the change comes the progress.

My mom-in-law will get even more of the specialized attention she demands after she moves. The crossing guard can begin to repair her lungs now that she’s not breathing in automobile exhaust. My favorite kickboxing partner will move on to a new stage and adventure in her life and see and do things I can barely imagine.

And as for all these other occurrences and disturbances in life well, that is just what it is. Life.

Next time I find a penny I will put it with the other loose change. I’ll save it until it needs to be exchanged. And I’ll let it slip through my fingers leaving its seasoned metallic scent behind.

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January 22, 2014 · 11:03 am

The Berries at the Bottom

My first encounter with drink was a romantic one.  Picture this:  Bolzano, Italy.  1989.  The mid-summer night air is cool.  A virgin girl from southern America sits in a tent in the Dolomite mountains with a group of people she now considers friends.  In the years to come there will be letters sent to and from old Italia.  One of these friends will visit America several times.  But I digress.  This virgin girl (okay it’s me) has never touched her lips to a sip of alcohol, although she did sneak a biting puff off one of her grandfather’s Winston smokes in his basement back in Tennessee.  Hack hack.  The cigarette addiction won’t start for another four years.

Tent

In this tent after a long day’s hike these friends pass around a bottle of grappa.  Grappa, as defined by Wikipedia, is a fragrant grape-based pomace brandy of Italian origin that contains 35-60% alcohol by volume.  As defined by me it was a kind of heaven.

I was hesitant at first.  I wasn’t sure what it would do to me or how it would taste.  I can hear them all now.  “Janifehr!  You must try the grappa!  Is so very good.  Will make you feel quite warm!”  As each one took a sip and passed it I scanned the bottle carefully as it made its way closer.  A homemade label wrapped around the clear glass.  The purple liquid inside was the hue of happiness.  Bloated, wine-infused berries swam at the bottom of this drunken sea.

When it was my turn I took a quick, giggly sip.  Then another.  They all laughed.  “She loves the grappa!  Janifehr we will get you drunk tonight!”

The bottle was passed around until every last sip, every last berry was ingested and absorbed.  I don’t remember feeling particularly drunk.  Just happy.  That could have been partly because I was in one of the most serene and beautiful places ever, surrounded by some of the most engaging and beautiful people ever.  And it could have been partly because of the grappa.  My belly was warm.  My cheeks were red.  And I had a difficult time jumping over the fence surrounding the campsite when we decided to go out for ice-cream.

Mtn in Italy

They let me keep the bottle.  It now sits on the 1920’s buffet table I inherited from my great-grandmother.  I cannot believe it has survived all the moves and balls tossed around.  Whoever shall accidentally break it will surely pay.  I carried that thing all over Italy.  Back home to America.  High school bedroom.  College dorm.  First apartment.  Second apartment.  In a moving truck from Tennessee to Florida for a week with everything I owned including all my non-duplicated poems and stories.  Two more houses.  A villa.

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That bottle reminds me of my sense of adventure.  My love for wine.  My youth.  Friends I don’t hear from anymore but at one time were there to share a most magnificent summer.  The Dolomites and all its green, goat-pastured, dandelion-covered, dreamy landscapes.  It reminds me that some things don’t get broken.  Memories clear as the glass they were drunk from.  Experience rich and sweet and full like the berries at the bottom.

And thank God that first encounter with drink was not Mad Dog 20/20 on someone’s basement floor.

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January 14, 2014 · 9:58 pm

Up All Night

If some of the other parents saw us right now they’d be appalled.  Or perhaps just perplexed.  Or maybe even wishing they could do the same but their schedules or weird-ass beliefs won’t allow them to do so.  It’s 8:30 pm on a school night.  My kid is not in bed.  He’s outside in the dark riding his new bike in the rare Florida chill.  His dad is home from another week-long stint in another state for work.  They are outside together;  I’m cleaning the kitchen with the calmness and solidarity that a man experiences in his man-cave or garage tinkering with motors or wood.

I find great pleasure in washing dishes and wiping the counter.  I have my Pandora stations on shuffle.  It’s my kitchen dance party.  I know the dishwasher will be loaded per my exceedingly high expectations, meaning I can fit nearly every dish and utensil in there without having to hand wash much except the big salad bowl, special cutting knife, and roasting pan.  I’m working/dancing off the calories consumed by finishing not only my plate but also my kid’s.  I know this is not a good habit.  But I hate seeing healthy home-cooked food go to waste.  He’ll be hungry again in twenty minutes.

Sometimes when he rails against going to bed it reminds me of when he was just a year old.  We have video of him playing with an empty water bottle and laughing at his older cousin as she fake sneezes in this high-pitched “Eh Cheeeewww”.  I pan to the clock and it reads 1:00 am.  The baby is wide awake and laughing as his fat cheeks dimple and his eyes widen with maniacal late-night wonder.

That video will forever be etched in my memory.  When I hear other parents talk about how their kid goes down strictly at 8:30 I don’t offer much.  I figure if they knew I let my kid stay up til sometimes 10:00 on a school night they would roll their eyes or widen them and give me the “Oh we don’t do that at our house” judgement crap.

My brother and I had a strict bedtime of 9:00.  I can still hear my parents yelling from downstairs, “Ya’ll need to quiet down and go to sleep!”  We were always whisper-chatting or playing with stuffed animals way past the nine o’clock hour.  Even though we had our own rooms we slept in the same bed til I was thirteen.  I was afraid of the dark.  Utterly convinced there was something under the bed that would reach out and grab my feet if they were too close to the edge.  And lightning?  Utterly convinced it would crash through my window and strangle me with its electric arms.

My brother wasn’t scared.  He just humored me.  Until I kicked him out when it was too weird for us to be under the same quilt.

My kid doesn’t have a sibling to share in late-night laugh-fests.  So we let him stay up and watch SNL skits or old episodes of The Twilight Zone.  Interestingly he never has nightmares.

Sharks are night owls too.

Sharks are night owls too.

Maybe it’s bad parenting to let him stay up so late.  But then again everyone has their own child-rearing style.  I like that we’re flexible.  You gotta grab these moments and drink them in, inhale them.  One day soon that laughing baby, this night owl boy, will be up all night with his buds.  And I’ll be biting the skin off my fingers hoping to God he’s okay.  I think I’ll go ahead and order my Chardonnay drip right now.

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January 9, 2014 · 4:59 pm

Fire Good

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My grandfather liked to burn things.  Many an afternoon or early evening you’d find him in the backyard, standing over a black barrel watching the smoke rise.  He found things– various objects around the neatly cluttered yard to put in his kettle of contentment.  There were branches that had fallen from the tall oaks in the wintertime.  Brown leaves which had lost their vivid color and moisture in the fall.  Rubber from an old tire.  Perhaps a worn shoe void of its mate.  These were the items that made the smoke black.  But Papa stood there anyway, inhaling the plumes and diligently placing things in his cauldron and stirring and poking them with a metal rod.

He spent hours out there.  When he came back inside for biscuits and gravy or to play solitaire on his cushioned coffee table he’d be all white-faced.  He was a retired Nashville firefighter.  He smoked Winston Reds.

I never really understood his fascination with fire.  My brother and I burned the faces off our Star Wars figurines with some August sunshine and a magnifying glass.  But that was just kids being scientifically experimental and stupid.  My first bonfire at Girl Scout camp when we roasted apples wrapped in biscuit dough gave me a bit of an inkling into the fascination.  A fire can turn raw dough into one of the best breakfasts I ever had?

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Fast forward to high school when I joined my brother and his friends for camping trips at Cedars of Lebanon State Park.  There was a lot of smoking going on there, some of which was the bonfire.  We sat around it staring at the flames, telling stories and relishing in the quiet nature surrounding us.

A scattering of warm moments around bonfires happened since then.  And even though I adore living in Florida there are rarely occasions to enjoy a flaming fire.  But this past week or so it’s been unusually cold.  Now I have a new fire pit sitting on the lanai.  We’ve made great use of it– hotdog and marshmallow roasting with kids, a great New Year’s Eve house party, and delighting in it with a visiting friend from across the pond.  Each time mesmerized by the dancing blaze and comforted by its warmth.

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One time I tried to build the fire on my own, but to no avail.  My son came over, poked and turned it with a stick, and got it going again.  Both hubby and our male Brit friend had no trouble either.  Apparently you must have balls to get a proper fire started.  I joked about this on Facebook and several female friends commented it was no problem for them.  They were my lesbian friends.

I guess the Girl Scouts didn’t quite teach me to build a fire.  But I can damn sure make a kick-ass breakfast!

Isn’t it amazing how a fire can be so deadly, yet so hypnotizing at the same time?  A contained fire brings people together, away from the television, from crap small talk, and into a primitive state where words are spoken that might have otherwise just hung on the tongue.  It warms your toes.  It makes food charred and toasty and yummy.  And if you have a wood-burning stove you can heat your entire house.  My brother has one.  I can see him now, chopping wood and placing it in the black metal heater, stoking it with the poker.

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January 2, 2014 · 9:11 pm

Sunshine on a Rainy Day

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Wow, this is one of  two awards bestowed to me by another blogger.  Thank you, Samara.  It’s a rainy day over here in usual sunny Florida, so these golden rays of accolades are keeping me all warm and fuzzy (the good kind, not the kind where you need to shave).  Samara is the creator of A Buick in the Land of Lexus, one of my favorite blogs.  I get excited when I open my reader, whether it’s over coffee in the a.m. or snug under the covers in the p.m. and see that she has posted something.  There’s sure to be at least a half dozen laugh-out-loud moments as well as gritty insights into her world as a dedicated Mom with a wild ride of a past.  I am in awe of her way with words and her all-out ballsyness to put herself out there, virtually naked.

So in accepting this award, I must follow a few rules.  The first is to list 11 random factoids about myself.  Here goes…

1)  I like my cereal soggy and my oatmeal lumpy.

2)  One summer my brother and I watched The Goonies every single day.  One day we watched it twice.

3)  I’ve had a major crush on Keanu Reeves since 1988.

4)  It takes me an entire day to pack for a trip.

5)  I once sat next to the Italian prime minister’s family at a bonfire in the Australian outback.

6)  I saw Titanic twelve times when it came out at the theatre, each time accompanied by different people, and each time I bawled like a baby.

7)  I cannot curl my tongue but I can flare my nostrils to any tune.

8)  My favorite band of all time is Midnight Oil.  I got to meet the lead singer Peter Garrett and shake his hand.

9)  I hate math.

10)  I used to forge parent signatures in middle school.  And probably some in high school, too.

11)  I can’t win an arm-wrestling match but I gave birth to my 8 lb son in the water with no drugs.

Now another rule I must follow is to answer 11 questions Samara has asked me:

What is the first thing you do as soon as you wake up in the morning?  Turn off the white noise machine.

What is your greatest fear?  To be trapped in an insane mind for eternity.

Do you have a new years resolution for 2014?  Keep looking at the world in wonder instead of worry.  

What is your favorite song at the moment? It’s a toss-up between “Atmosphere” by Kaskade and “Reflektor” by Arcade Fire.

What is your favorite childhood memory? Oh wow, so many.  Probably snow sledding with my brother at night.  The street lights had this bluish hue while the fat snowflakes fell and we screamed in sheer joy as we skidded down the steep street across from our house.  We weren’t usually allowed to play outside after dark, so it was doubly intoxicating.  I don’t think I got cold as a kid.  Now I shiver if it gets below 70.

Facebook or Twitter?  I’ve never tweeted but I do FB.  I usually check it when I’m on the john.  TMI?

What did the last text message you received say?  “I decided to add some color to our lanai.  We were out in the rain all day running errands. Now comes actually doing the tasks.  Not so much fun.” (smiley face with tongue sticking out).  I love that my mom can text now. 

What bugs you the most?  Complaining.  And not the casual, light complaining that you wish it would stop raining.  The rude, I-have-seen/done-this-better complaining.  And especially the I-should-be-grateful-to-have-food-in-my-belly-but-I’m-gonna-bitch-about-how-this-ethnic-food-does-not-taste-like-its-country-of-origin complaining.  We are not in Mexico.  We are not in Italy.  Eat your freaking taco.

What do you consider to be the most important appliance in your house?  The air conditioner.  It’s Florida!  And I have night sweats.  

If you could have one song that would play whenever you entered a room, what would it be? “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds.

What’s your favorite movie quote?  Oh there are soooo many.  But this is the one I keep thinking about lately. Pretty in Pink “I just want them to know that they didn’t break me.”  Molly Ringwald as Andie talking to her dad in Pretty in Pink.  

Now I am to nominate 11 bloggers I would like to recognize for the Sunshine Award.  There are so many wonderful bloggers out there but these have definitely brought sunshine through their words and stories:  The Surfing Pizza, Phoenix Flights, Sophie’s Pug Pause, Crossroads, Vampire Maman, MONOCHROME JUNKIE, The Blogging Mama, Steve Says, who could know then, My Kaleidoscope, and No, You Go Outside.  They have to answer the same questions I did.

I have to say that WordPress has brought me more pleasure that I could have imagined.  I love this blogging world, what it has done for my sanity and creativity, and the fellow writers that are on this journey with me.  Cheers to a beautiful 2014.


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December 20, 2013 · 5:00 am

Rainbows: Sign or Science?

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I freaked when I saw this just beyond my patio fence a few weeks ago. A phenomenal beauty right in my own backyard.

I can’t remember the very first time I saw a rainbow, but I remember the first time a rainbow made me stop, mid-trek, and catch my breath.  It was my first of two trips to Europe.  I was fifteen and hiking with some new-found friends in Northern Italy.  There was a clearing, and up above the most vivid, striking rainbow my southern-American eyes had ever laid upon.  It curved in a miles-high arch, each end disappearing behind lush mountain evergreens.  Every band of color popped, emanating an unmitigated saturation that did not bleed into the other.  I must have stood there with my mouth wide open for minutes.

Told you so

Told you so

I grew up going to church on Sundays and Wednesdays at a Church of Christ—very strict, puritanical, and God-fearing.  It was because of that church I was introduced to the very people who would lead me on that unforgotten trip to Europe.  But it was also that church that made me question the very existence of rainbows.  In their doctrine, as they gathered from the King James version of the Bible, rainbows were a gift to man.  God had created a great storm that had flooded the lands and killed everyone except Noah and his boat-load of animals.  Because God was sorry for being such an asshole (my words, not the church’s), he would provide his disciples and worshipers  the gift of a rainbow after each rain so they would forgive him, and remember to build a damn ark the next time he said a flood was a comin’!  Actually, it was a symbol pledging he would not destroy the earth with water a second time.  Hmmm, sort of a morbid thought to have in the back of your brain while standing in awe of such a natural beauty.

If you listen to science instead, a rainbow is an arc of light separated into bands of parallel stripes that appear when the sun’s rays are refracted and reflected by drops of mist or rain.  Still more explanations, the Greeks believed it was a sign from the gods to foretell war or heavy rain.  Native Americans presumed that arc of light to be a bridge between life and death.  And the old saying that a pot of gold lies at the end of the rainbow came from the lucky mouths of the Irish.

Not literally

Not literally

After my beloved dog Napoleon died back in 2003 the vet sent a sympathy card along with his ashes.  In the card was a poem titled “Rainbow Bridge”.  It speaks of a place “just this side of heaven” where an animal goes that has been especially close to someone on Earth.  At Rainbow Bridge pets are “made whole and strong again, just as we remember them in our dreams of days and times gone by.”  Every time I read that poem I bawl like a baby.  Strangely I had witnessed a rainbow just a couple days after Napo died and before receiving that card.  The rainbow I witnessed looked just like a bridge, each short arc ending in a puffy, white cloud high in the late summer sky.   I’d never seen one like it before.  I continued seeing them almost every week for months after that.

One of the many rainbows I've seen on my way to kickboxing

One of the many rainbows I’ve seen on my way to kickboxing.

There have been other instances when a rainbow has presented itself to me at opportune times, like after spending an afternoon with a dear friend, thinking of someone long gone, or needing a lift during a trying day.

Even Kermit the frog waxes mystical about rainbows, in the song “Rainbow Connection” from 1979’s The Muppet Movie.  “Someday we’ll find it” he muses after he questions the meaning of rainbows, and whether they are just illusions, although in the next few lines he reveals he doesn’t quite believe that.  Kermit and The Muppets were a big part of my childhood.  I was in my bedroom getting ready for another grueling day of high school when I heard on the radio that Jim Henson had died.  The DJ immediately played that banjo-infused melody and I cranked my boom-box’s volume to ten.  My mom and brother came into my room and we clutched each other and cried and swayed.  That moment, for me, symbolized the death of what was a long, innocent girlhood.   thumbnail

No matter where on this rock you are from, what religion you do or don’t practice, your heritage, or what movies you adored as a child, that beaming spectrum of colors in the sky cannot be denied.  I don’t believe it to be a remorseful gift, but a sign and science.  And whether you believe the sign and the science came from God is yours to own.  To me rainbows connect them all, and every one of us.  As Kermit would sing, “the lovers, the dreamers, and me.”

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December 16, 2013 · 8:20 pm

Just a Shadow?

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This morning on my chilly bike ride I saw her.  Again.  She is usually near the park, but today she was a bit farther north, just before the tunnel.

On happy days I ignore her dark, dead eyes then roll my own bright blues after I pass her.  She never says hello, never a word.  I don’t know how it is humanly possible for someone to walk that slow and not fall.  Among the bikers and joggers and roller bladers and parents pushing strollers there she moves at a snail’s pace.  Except a snail has a purpose behind its travel.  I gave up smiling and saying good morning to her long ago.  And those hats!  A different one every day.  Neither too fancy nor too casual, yet totally impractical to moving about on the trail.

And her clothing.  It’s as if she’s dressed for a day at an open market someplace I’ve never been but only seen on TV.  Long, flowy skirts and tunics.  Even when it is sweltering outside (which it is here half the year) her entire average-sized body is fully covered.

But it’s not just her outward appearance that shakes me.  It’s what I feel when I see her.

I know when she is up ahead on the trail.  Not just because of the cadence of her mechanical walking, but because of the energy.  Whatever I am feeling I know she senses.  On my happy days I try to send her light or at least surround myself with irradiation so she may become momentarily blinded.  But when I pass her with this glow she does not falter.  glow

On my sad days (which thank god are not often anymore) I also avert my eyes to hers.  But I try not to direct this melancholy towards her.  Instead I feel she knows this.  She gives no solace yet she takes no energy.

But this morning she was not walking.  I saw up ahead a figure standing beside the tunnel, looking out onto the horizon.  I thought to myself what a beautiful photograph that would be.  The figure posed better than you could tell a model to pose while looking outward.  A shadow before it stretching out toward the early morning sun.  When I came closer I saw that it was her.  And like usual when I see her there is no one else around.

And like usual she did not look at me, did not speak a word, did not even seem to be breathing.

I biked past and just a tad more north where I always turn around and grab my water bottle from its nest underneath my ripped, cushioned seat.  When I got back to the tunnel she was gone.  I didn’t even see her anywhere else on the trail as I made my way back towards home, cold sweat on my forehead I had to wipe off on my little sissy Florida gloves.  tunnel

I have always wondered if she is a ghost.  I could ask one of my occasional biking companions about her but she is never there when I have company.  And to be honest I don’t really want to know.  She is my mirror.  Although unsettling, she reminds me to keep peddling and singing and sweating no matter what dark eyes try to pierce inside.

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December 3, 2013 · 8:43 pm

Sloppy Joes and Dim Bullies

I have the luxury of sometimes joining my son for lunch at his school.  The first time I did this I was quite nervous as the protocol for being a cool mom changes every year.  This year especially since we went from a private school (where we knew everyone) to public (where aside from two kids from the neighborhood every other face was a stranger).

I have learned since that first time it is not cool to wave wildly at a kid I do know and yell out “Hieeee!”  Nor is it cool to spill ice-tea while trying to balance a tray of food and grab a spork (or foon) at the same time.  I have also learned that cafeterias today smell exactly like they did in 1983.  Upon entering, mass-produced comfort food, industrial-strength cleaner, and a hint of Crayola marker wafts through the lunchroom and into the nostrils.

The food is actually way better than it was in the ’80’s and ’90’s, at least at this particular institution.  I’m not sure what I ingested in my youth, especially if it was encased in a bun.  Today I had a chicken/soy caesar salad with actual romaine lettuce and a rather crisp, slightly sweet green apple.  My son did not have the quintessential Sloppy Joe, but a rather sloppy slab of lasagna.  He proceeded to inform me he’d never had lasagna before and I felt a small pang of guilt for never including it in my small dinner repertoire.  He ate the entire thing and a couple tiny bites of his peas, per my nagging request.

One of our first school lunches together this year. There was a mad game of checkers going on in between bites.

One of our first school lunches together this year. There was a mad game of checkers going on in between bites.

We ate outside under a live oak as a rare chilly breeze staved off sweat and buzzing insects.  Parents aren’t allowed to eat inside the cafeteria as there are not enough seats at the tables.  We had a nice conversation (as they tend to be now in his ninth year of being a child) although it was heated at first as he begged for five dollars to buy a Rainbow Loom bracelet from another kid.

“That’s a rip off,” I told him.  “You could make one yourself.”

“No, I can’t,” he countered.  “This design is too hard.  Plus you have to have like four looms.”

“It’s still a rip off.  Tell the kid you won’t go higher than two bucks.”

“But he’ll say no.”

“Then ask him who else is gonna pay that price?  I bet no other kid has five bucks to spare for just one rubber band bracelet.”

“They go for ten bucks on Amazon, Mom.”

“This conversation is making me upset.  Can we please talk about something else?  I came here to have lunch with you, not haggle over obscenely priced jewelry.”

So he finally let it go and proceeded to tell me he fell asleep in class.  Then he asked how my day was.  Happy sigh.  I gave him a run-down of my usual– biked the trail, walked the dog, laundry, chatted with grandma, started some writing.  Then I asked him if he could tell me what the bully looks like.

The bully has put squished grapes from the cafeteria floor as well as ketchup in my kid’s soup and salad at various lunch times.  I want to strangle the bully.

“It’s easy,” my son says to me.  “He’s the one with no hair.”

Of course, I say to myself.  Buzz cut.  They are always the ones.

As lunch nears its 30 minute mark I notice my son’s class lining up outside to make their trek back to class.  I tell my kid I’ll take care of throwing the trash away (as I now know it is also not cool to walk with your fourth grader to the rubbish area).  He gives me a pathetic look and pleads, “Four dollars, Mom?”  I look through my cash and see that I have only one dollar bill and a five.

“Here’s a one,” I say.  “Make it work.”

He sighs in resigned desperation and I coolly nod to him as he joins the class.  I scour the line for a glimpse of the no-hair bully.  That one has medium length blonde hair.  Nope.  That one has short hair but it is still present.  Nope.  Ah, there he is.  Hair shaved like an incarcerated mass-murderer.  Skinny little goofy-ass kid.  Even though I have my sunglasses on I look directly at him and give him an eat-shit-and-die-look.  Hell yeah, that asshole saw it, too.  Bet he’s a little shaken.  The kid looks right at me and freakin waves!  All Eddie Haskell-like!  I look away and roll my eyes to the December clouds.

As the class line disappears and I gaze down at my new sturdy Croc flip flops I wonder if the bully will continue to haunt my son.  Or will he heed my undeniable shade-covered warning?  You mess with my son I mess with you.  You have no idea what a really crappy Sloppy Joe tastes like.

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November 21, 2013 · 1:04 am

Dreaming Among the Chaos

Dreaming

In the midst of chaos what do you dream of?

Life has been stressful over here the past couple weeks and I have been pretty damn good at keeping cool, keeping calm, keeping positive when others around me seem to be unraveling.  Well I guess it’s my turn to be the loosely-knitted sweater with the one thread that is dangling in the breeze.  It came on so fast.  And just as I was congratulating myself on being so even-keeled.

Don’t get me wrong.  Things are not horrible.  Just a few small sinkholes along the shell-covered pathway.  In times like these when I feel I’m being swallowed, my mind goes to the things I miss.

I miss floating in the salty gulf with the prospect of a nearby dolphin gracefully hurling itself out of the water.  I miss the flashing lights above a dance floor.  I miss dancing wildly.  I miss the Oprah Winfrey Show.

I miss the rousing touch of fingers and hands and lips on the body.  I miss writing down my dreams when I remember them instead of trying to recall them when the details have fizzled with the rising sun.  I miss Haagen-Dazs chocolate peanut butter ice cream.  Can’t find it at my local groceries.  Just as well.

I miss my old, cheap, grocery store-bought flip flops that I busted.  But they are the muse for this blog.  Busted, I mean.  Not when they were new.

So I guess I’m feeling pretty busted right now.  The gulf is cold.  Oprah has her own network.  My friends can’t come out and play.  No massages coming my way.

Maybe it’s time to buy a new pair of flippity flops.  Ones that can help me climb out of the sink hole before it becomes quick sand.  But I’ll still keep the old busted ones.

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