The Average Blogger

It Runs in the Family

Meet Anson:

He was my great-great grandfather. Apparently he had a soft spot for kittens.

There are many anecdotes about this man, who was born in 1864 and died in 1941. (Maybe he was a war buff. I don't know.) For one thing, he adopted my Aunt Mettie, whom I remember as being the most amazing woman alive (with the exception of my grandmother.) This is a woman who lived to be 105 or so and still went "jogging" in her back yard when she was over 100. I remember one time she tripped and fell, and was far more irritated that she'd ripped her stocking than  concerned she might have broken a hip.  There are lots of stories about her, too, but that's another post.

Anson, among other things, was apparently an incredibly strong man. Even into his 80s, he could take an ax and cut down a 4” diameter tree in one hack. One story tells of him taking the train to San Antonio one winter and leaving his watch on the bed in his sleeping car while he went to breakfast. When he came back, the watch was gone. Anson went to the conductor and reported his watch stolen, and the conductor, while sympathetic, was not particularly helpful. Anson told him, "Well, actually, the porter was the only guy in there and he probably stole it. Can I talk to him?" The conductor told him that was impossible, but called for the porter anyway. The porter was brought in and of course denied any such thing. According to the story, Anson picked the man up by his ankles and shook him -- and the watch fell out of the porter's pocket on to the floor.

Another story about Anson also involves him heading to San Antonio. (Hey, the man liked to winter where it was warm -- clearly proving he is related to me.) This time he was driving. He saw some poor bedraggled motorist and took pity on him. This was in the 1930s: It was a lot harder to get to and fro then, and there were no cell phones or convenience stores or rest stops -- or interstates, for that matter. Anyway, Anson pulled over and asked the guy what the trouble was. The guy didn’t say anything, he just pulled a gun out and held it to Anson's head and took his watch and billfold. Well, we already know how Anson felt about getting his watch swiped.  When the opportunity arose, he looked up the road and exclaimed, ‘Hey! Look!’ and when the idiot with the gun actually looked, Anson coldcocked him. And took back his stuff along with the guy's gun, and left the guy lying there by the side of the road. But that wasn't the end of it; Anson was a good citizen. He stopped in the next town and found the sheriff’s office, turned in the gun and said, “You know, there's a stickup artist out there about 5 miles back. If you hurry, he'll probably still be there."

Anson was very fond of his son and daughter-in-law (my great-grandpa Glenn and grandma Eileen.) When G&E were newlyweds, they went to live in Chicago. (Glenn wasn't big on farming; and instead got into cars. He started out working with a cab company, went on to own a Packard dealership in southern Illinois, always had big fast power machines.) So every Friday night, to help out the crazy kids, Anson would wrap a chicken and put it on the train to be delivered. But while his heart was in the right place, his wrapping skills were apparently not the greatest, and my poor great-grandmother reportedly spent every Saturday morning mortified because when she would go to pick the thing up, the string had routinely come undone and the bird's head or feet would hanging out of the package, garnering all kinds of odd looks from the Big-City folks she'd pass by while carrying the thing.

I'm not sure when it happened, but eventually Anson went deaf. (I think he went deaf. I don't think he was born deaf, but I'm not sure.) And at some point he moved in with my great-grandfather and his family after they left Chicago. My grandfather used to recount how it was a matter of course that he and Glenn would converse with Anson by writing stuff down on a notepad, and then Anson would answer aloud.  But eventually it always devolved into them writing questions and Anson responding in kind by writing his responses, until my great-grandfather would rip the pencil from his hand sputtering, "Stop that writing! WE aren't deaf!!!"

When Anson was 76, he got up one weekend morning before everybody else, and as was his routine, went out to water the livestock. He got up on the well platform to pump the water, when the platform collapsed and he fell several feet into the well. Of course, everyone else was still asleep, so nobody heard him splashing around and yelling for a rope. Eventually he got fed up with waiting and climbed up the pump pipe. When the rest of the family got up, he was exasperatedly wringing out his clothes and hanging them on clothesline. Sorta like Aunt Mettie and her stockings.

Sweet Nostalgia

I bought a candy bar the other day while we were at a gas station. Just a regular candy bar. And it cost 85 cents.

It is proof I am getting old that my first reaction was, “Really? Cripes. My kid is going to have to steal paper money from my purse in order to be able to buy junk food?! Dude. I will totally notice if paper money is missing!”

When I was in grade school, there was a very popular after-school pit stop called Jerry’s Market. (According to this, it was still there in 1999. I can only assume it's there today.) I only went there once or twice, as my mom was not big on the “hanging out after school” thing.

(I don’t really understand this, actually. I had to book it home, getting out of class at 2:55 and flying through the door by 3:15 or I was in Big Trouble, Boy-Howdy.  But then? Then I was free to literally wander the streets until dinner time; streets that led right back to school, and even past it, as I got bigger and a little faster. I am not sure why this was the case. I mean, I could have -- and probably did -- get into just as much trouble between 4 and 4:15 as I would have between 3 and 3:15. Maybe she was afraid I would lose my schoolbooks if I didn’t bring my homework straight home? Mom, what the hell was up with that?)

Anyway, so Jerry’s Market. I remember hearing classmates talking about going there, and how they were going to get Charms and Pixy Stix and Pop Rocks and Bubblicious.  I had this vision of the world’s best candy store in my head.  Floor to ceiling sugar in a dazzling array of colors and shiny glass jars with shiny metal lids. 

And of course, there would be an entire area devoted exclusively to chocolate, since I really didn’t care about any of that other crap. Oh, sure, occasionally I would somehow come into possession of grape-flavored Bubble Yum, but the real fun in that was it clearly made my mom want to hurl whenever she smelled it. She finally outlawed my chewing it in her car, and the appeal instantly declined.

Mostly, though, my thing was chocolate. It would have been ice cream, but that was too hard to come by, too messy to deal with, and since I had champagne tastes, the stuff I liked was far pricier than chocolate bars. So I was a Nestle Crunch girl. My mom used to buy Milky Ways and Three Musketeers and stick them in the freezer. I never liked that; eating frozen candy bars required a patience I lack to this day when it comes to ingesting chocolate. (This might explain why I spent two years lusting after the idea of deep fried candy bars, a lust that proved to be completely well-founded and not at all sated by one sampling last month.)

I can’t remember how long it was before I finally made it to Jerry’s Market myself. It was pathetic that all my friends had been there and I hadn’t. It was even more pathetic when I realized that the place was actually sort of on my way home from school if I only went out the back door instead of the front door. Most pathetic of all, however, was my disappointment upon discovering what Jerry’s Market really was – not a Candy Xanadu at all, but an ordinary, run of the mill mom-and-pop grocery store. The kind you almost never see anywhere anymore except maybe in Brooklyn. The kind that smelled funny and was run by a cranky looking old guy with gray and greasy hair. (I have no idea if this was THE Jerry. All I know is he scared the everloving bejeezus out of me.)

Even more depressing? The Nestle Crunch bars were … well, they were … kinda stale.  Which is odd, when you consider that a significant chunk of Jerry's (or whoever's) daily business had to be a result of a mad stampede for his candy aisle every weekday at 3 p.m. I mean, really, I couldn’t have been the only kid in a school of 600 or so who liked Nestle Crunch.

I don’t think I went to Jerry’s Market after that. Maybe once or twice. I seem to recall going there with my uncle on an extremely cold autumn day when he was visiting and getting ice cream bars (because they wouldn’t melt too fast.) And I switched from Nestle Crunch to Whatchamacallits when those were invented. (1978, thank you very much. And even though they changed the formula I still eat them to this day, though I like the king-size ones better. More crunchy, less gooey.)  When I was in college, I wound up with a summer job in a drugstore near my parents’ house.  For a few weeks at the beginning and end of the summer, there was a similar 3 p.m. rush the candy aisle.  I am pretty sure I thanked my mom for not letting me be One of Those Kids, in much the same way I had thanked her three years earlier while working in a shopping mall where hordes of 13-year-old girls congregated and smeared lip gloss on all the clothes but never bought anything. 

The question all this nostalgia brings to mind is – where is my kid going to be forbidden to go that all the other kids hit after school? Will it be the Giant grocery store across the four-lane highway and probably a mile from his school? Will it be the 7-11 where his dad and I go to buy milk on nights we’re too lazy to do a full grocery shopping? Will it be some as-yet unbuilt sugar-pusher who manages to snag some property in between the elementary school and the nearest housing development? I’m stumped. All I know is, I’m very glad he’s going to be riding the bus, because that precludes any of that trouble my mom was so afraid of between the hours of 3 and 4.  I learned from a neighbor this weekend that the bus leaves school at 3:15 (I think,) and stops in our area at 3:46 sharp. 

So I’ve got that going for me. Now I have to figure out a way to explain why he can’t wander the streets until dinnertime…

I No Longer Love Your Sweaters

In the throes of the recent bedbug incident, an effort at self-preservation led me to bag up absolutely every stitch of clothing we owned that we weren’t likely to wear over the course of the three-visit pesticide treatment. (The idea of tearing down the curtains and emptying all the dressers and washing absolutely everything THREE TIMES was enough to make me want to stick my head in the dryer.)

What stayed out: some work clothes, some shorts, a lot of underwear and socks.

What got packed: a lot of sweaters, some too-big and too-small clothes, and a bunch of winter items.

Last weekend, I went through all the seldom-to-never worn items and sorted into the standard three piles destined to go in the trash, off to goodwill or back in the dressers. Most of it was easy.  Lounge pants with holes in the crotch? Trash.  My skinny jeans? Yeaaaah, back in the dresser.  I know it’s dumb. I don’t care.  The YP’s 600 long-sleeve rugby shirts he inherited and rips off in a fit every time I try to put one on him? Goodwill.

And then I got to the scarf.

I have a weird history with winter scarves.  I love them, I love that they keep my neck warm, I love that they can blend in or offer up a splash of color depending on what else I’m wearing. I love that I can wear a scarf with a sweater and not need a coat. I love that they can be worn alone or as part of a set with matching hat and gloves.  And I have a weird inability to get rid of them.

The first winter scarf I remember ever seeing was one my mom wore when we would go skiing. The story goes that it started out as a wrap to go with a  floor-length skirt my grandmother wore. By the time I came along, my mom had chopped out the middle foot of fabric and turned the skirt into a mini skirt, but the wrap remained. I don’t remember ever seeing  my mother wear the skirt, but she wore the scarf a lot, especially after we moved to Illinois when I was six and winter was a regular thing.

The skirt eventually came into my possession and I loved it, even though it was wool and itchy.  It met a terrible fate one night involving alcohol and bleach, after which I had to get rid of it. The scarf? Remained.  Until last weekend, when I finally gave it to Goodwill after realizing I hadn’t worn it in six years. Too itchy for my new low-maintenance lifestyle.

But the scarf pictured above holds a spot in my heart. You see, someone made it for me.

When we moved to Illinois, we bought the house of an older couple who were retiring out to a “farm” in the “country.”  (To the best of my recollection, it wasn’t really much of a farm and in retrospect it couldn’t possibly have been very far out in rural-land, but I could be wrong about that.) I ended up being best friends with this couple’s granddaughter, Kristin, and as a result I was also rather close to Mrs. Stille, who sold my mom the house. Kristin’s mom was a teacher and her dad was dead, so Mrs. Stille was the afterschool caregiver. And she was one of those grandmas who did a lot of grandma things, including bake cookies, pick us up from school so we didn’t have to walk, and knit. Always, she knit. Slippers, blankets, scarves, you name it.

She made that scarf for me when I was 7.  And it meant a lot.

It has always meant a lot when people make stuff for me – my mom used to embark on projects like that every so often and I knew the work that went into completing them.  My mom sewed the quilts for my twin beds when I was little, and I still have one of them – I don’t know where the other one went. My mom might have it or it might have disintegrated. My mom sewed my first bookbag out of two old pairs of jeans – one set white and one set blue.  I remember being very upset that my teacher wrote my name on it in red magic marker because she had defaced it. My mom crocheted a lot of blankets, but it wasn’t until a relative died that I got one of those.  But to me, hey, she was my mom. She was SUPPOSED to do those things! And the only other hand-sewn thing I remember getting were some cunning little felt Christmas ornaments from a cousin one year – ornaments I still have and hang on our tree now.

But getting something handmade from a non-relative was like, wow.  People do that for people without a blood obligation?  Really? Who knew?  The only other thing like this I ever got from a non-relative (before I got pregnant and several amazing people made me baby blankets,) was another scarf from another woman who ended up bringing nothing but misery and heartache to my family. That scarf? That one got torched.

But this scarf – it was everything. It was made by someone who clearly cared about me and loved that I was in her old house and friends with her family.  It was soft. It was pretty, with tassles and an inoffensive color that went with EVERYTHING. It went with my tan coat one year and it went with my pink coat the next. When we left Illinois and moved to Florida when I was 12, all the coats came with us because, hey, yes, it’s Florida, but we still might go skiing…. Of course, by the time we dragged all that stuff out again, the only thing that still fit was the scarf.

I still wore that scarf three or four times a year – it actually does occasionally get cold enough in Florida in January to merit a scarf and coat.  I was wearing it when I went on a quasi-date with a guy who might have made a colossal mistake and married me, and I think all he remembered about the encounter later was that I was wearing that scarf and eating ice cream. I wore it through cold snaps when I was in college in California.

I haven’t worn it in a long time – it’s tattered and long and it’s not as soft as it used to be.  It’s one of the few things I didn’t wear when I was pregnant, because I had moved into liking the whole matching black hat-scarf-gloves thing. But  how could I get rid of it? I couldn’t. So I didn’t.  But what do I do with it?  Stuff it back in the box and … let the moths eat it? Figure out a way to turn it into a Christmas ornament? (Don’t laugh too hard, I did that with my wedding veil.)

I have no idea.  What would you do with it?

Don't You Miss the Big Time Boy, You're No Longer on the Ball

So, I've mentioned my dad is throwing in the towel after (mumblemumble) years of public service. (I mumble because 1; I'm not actually certain, 2; I don't want to do the math, and 3; I'm not old enough to have a dad who's retiring.) I don't know if I've ever mentioned what he actually does. He's the head librarian for Orange County, California. Translation: He's more politician than librarian, and most of his time is spent administrating, creating budgets, keeping building projects on schedule, dealing with personnel, and sucking up to local government officials so he gets enough taxpayer money to keep books on the shelves and mp3 files in the computers.

Except that's not true anymore. As of a week from tomorrow, all that is over. He's retiring and shipping out to Illinois. Since he's a big honcho and he's been with the county for (mumblemumbleagain) years, lots of people are sorry to see him go. Apparently there are all kinds of big happy hootenannies being planned in his honor.

Because of various things, (work, work, and oh, did I mention work?) the Blogger family will be missing them, opting instead for a quieter celebration in August that will probably involve spending a few days unpacking boxes or scrubbing windows in Illinois. However, I am never one to pass up an opportunity for a tribute, so here is the speech I would give in his honor, were I to actually be anywhere near a place where people would be making speeches about him.

Ahem.

I’m sure my parents are horrified at the idea of me talking about my dad’s job. The last time I was allowed to speak in public about libraries, I was 8 or 9, and my mom had just gotten on my case -- or maybe my dad's case -- about something or other, so I told a local television crew doing a piece on the library children’s room that it was “a great place to get away from the screaming parents.” If memory serves, my public statement resulted in some private remonstrations – but, to be fair, none of them were screamed.

My dad’s been in libraries for as long as I can remember. I’m told I was born while he was in college – library school, presumably -- but my first awareness that my dad did anything other than deal with me came when he was working in the Philosophy and Religion department of the Los Angeles library. I remember I asked him, “What happens when you die?” He and my mom looked at me, shrugged in tandem and asked in unison, “How would we know? Do we look dead?”

This is philosophy? This is religion?

My dad then went on to tell me that “some people think this, and some people think that, and some other people think some other damn thing,” and that where he worked there were LOTS of books on the subject. What he didn’t tell me was that I’d be 30 before I understood what any of them were trying to say. I think it was his optimism and faith in the possible that made him keep that part a secret.

Shortly after that, we moved to Illinois, where he became director of the Moline Public Library. Now, I’m pretty sure my dad went into library work in an effort to avoid career fields involving such things as sales and/or physical labor. In Moline? He wound up doing both. He decided he wanted to build a branch library and launched the biggest fundraising campaign in that town’s recent memory with great success – which of course required a lot of talking and hand-shaking and cajoling and encouraging. In short, sales.

As for  physical labor – that is the better story. As director of a fairly small library in a fairly small town, my dad was more than just the administrator, he was also the go-to guy for pretty much anything that needed doing. Well, one day what needed doing was the ejection of a drunk. Unfortunately, my dad had done a little too much indulging of his own the night before, and was off his game. In the midst of the altercation, the vagrant somehow managed to clout my dad on the ear. My dad came home, told the story with great amusement – not least of all amusement that the guy would probably feel as lousy the next morning as my dad had felt that day. Then my dad took several aspirin for his own hangover and went to bed. Well, I’d been to the movies. I’d seen TV shows. I knew fights were not all that big a deal. And Daddy seemed just fine! Imagine my shock, then, when the next day one of the teachers at my grade school came up to me and in hushed tones asked if my father was doing all right, handing me a clipping from the local paper with the headline, “Homeless Man Slugs Librarian.” Poor Daddy. I’m pleased to report his ear survived the assault and his ego survived the article, and he didn’t even declare a grudge match against the local homeless population.

Some time after that we moved to Tampa, where he continued his adventures in fundraising and empire building. Moving up a notch from the homeless, one of the biggest coalitions my dad had to deal with in Florida was the low-income community, whose ringleader was a gal named Gussie Livingston. Gussie might have been low-income, but she did it in style – pretty much every photo you ever saw of her in the paper showed her in a mink coat, or nice jewelry, or some incredibly fancy shoes. It was Gussie, in fact, who taught my dad a valuable lesson in fund-raising, when she told him her personal motto: “Hey, you never know what someone might give you until you ask.” I’m going to hope that all she had to do to get the coat was ask for it, because I don’t want to speculate on what someone might have asked her to give in return.

And then? Well, then I went to college. I decided the thing to do would be to move 3,000 miles away from Tampa to attend USC. Imagine my shock during junior year, then, when my mom called up and said, “So, what are you doing next week? Midterms? Huh. Well, why don’t you blow them off and come help us pack the moving van? Where are we moving? Oh, Irvine. Yes, the one that’s only 45 minutes away. No, I don’t find anything ironic about that, why?”

Fortunately, my dad was too busy with work to want to hang out at the dorms. Right about the time he showed up, the county went bankrupt. Talk about timing! And the hits just kept on coming. I’m sure you all have much better stories about his tenure here than I do – and some of them might even be stories you could tell him to his face!

Anyway, I took two lessons from watching my dad all those years. One was, whenever possible, surround yourself with great people and hire only the best and the brightest, because they will make you look so much better than you really are. I thank everyone here for their part in doing that for my dad. The other lesson was that when I grew up I would never equal my father’s talent for dealing with people, and so I should stay far, far away from careers involving interaction with state or local government. So what did I do? I went into journalism and landed in a place where all I do all day is keep tabs on the federal government. Something went wrong there. I only hope that his grandson learns from two generations and gets a job in sales. Or physical labor.

Happy retirement!!

The Year of the Falling-Down House

So, my parents. My dad is retiring in months to come, and he and my mom are moving to Illinois. They are moving to a farmhouse that has been in my mom's family longer than I've been alive -- I think even longer than she's been alive, but I just realized I don't know for sure. (This is saying something for a family that has a collective relocation history that looks somewhat vagrant-esque – my grandparents lived in several houses strewn across California, Illinois and Virginia, my parents subtracted Virginia and added Florida to the mix, and somehow I’ve wound up living in all four states at one time or another. I don’t want to count how many different houses the clan has gone through in each of those states, but I’m pretty sure we hit double digits before my grandparents were 10 years along.)

I have never lived in this house. Well, long-term, anyway. My mom and I stayed there for a while – a month, maybe? -- when I was six and we moved from California to Illinois. But because this house is the one constant in my ever-changing address book, it has pretty much always been Home. It’s the fallback. It’s the safety net. It’s where you go when the bomb drops, your bottom falls out, you need a safe haven. It’s not something anyone in the family has ever had to use in this way, mind you. It’s just always been there, just in case. And now, after 30 years, it’s once again going to really be a home to my family. Like any home, it has good and bad associations. I killed a dog there by accident when I was too busy having a snit to close a gate and she bolted for the highway. I remember my great-grandma having a birthday party there and her not buying it when I tried to convince her I thought that “babe” was pronounced “baby” because it ended with “e.” “Don’t even. You know better than that,” I remember her twinkling at me. (The funniest part of that story was that then I tried the same thing on my Aunt Mettie, who just smiled and nodded. “Yup, that’s what it spells, all right.” I remember thinking even then that I knew who would be straight with me and who would coddle, and when to hit up which person for what.)

Anyway, this latest move is likely to be my parents’ last. And they’ll have plenty to keep them busy for ages to come: Not only are they rehabbing my great-grandma’s five-room farmhouse from floor to ceiling, they are also ripping out the existing galley kitchen and by the time they are done will probably have doubled the size of the house.

This is a project my grandparents considered, then rejected. Grandma knew all her stuff wouldn’t fit into five rooms and she hadn’t found anyone she trusted enough to build more rooms. So instead, they bought one of, if not the, biggest house in town and have spent their golden years refurbishing it.

My grandparents’ house is across the street from the house my great-grandma had bought to entertain in, which is weird because that is such a depressing story I find it funny my grandfather wanted to be within 500 feet of it. Great-Grandma Eileen browbeat my Great-Grandpa Glenn into buying the house, then almost immediately had a stroke that precluded any entertaining. She made everyone in the family promise not to put her in a facility, to let her die at home. Then she had a massive stroke and was in a vegetative state for six years. Grandpa Glenn wouldn’t let anyone break that promise, and he hired round-the-clock nursing care to come in and look after her. He spent most of his time drunk, one nurse stole some silver, and Grandma died in her den, probably completely unaware of where she was. (Kids, let this be a lesson to you not to make your family promise things they might later wish to reconsider.) After my great-grandpa died, my grandparents threw the biggest party the town had ever seen, fulfilling my great-grandma’s original whole friggin’ reason for buying the house, and then they immediately sold the thing.

Anyway, my grandparents have put all kinds of effort into the town-house, as we call the houses in town, and my parents are taking on the farmhouse, as we call the house that is out on the land surrounded by corn and soybean fields. This explains why I took two days to zip back to the Midwest – originally to visit my grandparents – but wound up scrubbing drywall up off the floors and painting walls for most of the 48 hours I was there.

The funny thing about the trip was that I haven’t been in the farmhouse since I was 10 or 11. My grandparents have been renting it out and although I still drove by the place occasionally on trips back there, I never slowed down or visited. So seeing it in detail again as an adult was a bit of a shock. For one thing, that house was much, MUCH farther back from the road when I was a kid. I don’t know who moved it, but man, it used to be set back miles from the highway, and now there’s barely enough room in the front yard for a decent demolition derby. For another, the backyard items seem much smaller. I remember playing in the barn when I was the Young Prince’s size, and the thing seemed to reach heaven. Now? Now it’s just a barn with room for a car and some other stuff in it.

It’s also a lot more decrepit than I remember. But this one, at least, isn’t just me. It was a shock for my mom, too, which led to the following exchange:
Mom: “If Grandma could see what’s happened to her house, she’d have a fit.”
Me: “If Grandma could see this, it wouldn’t look like this in the first place, because someone who cared would have been living here.”
Mom: “Well, that’s true. And she would have made the guy who made this mess come back and clean it. Though your grandfather did try.”
Me: “Yeah, but all Grandpa can really say is, “Do it or I won’t pay you.” Grandma would have said, “Do it or I’ll tell your mother.”

The really nice thing was seeing the Young Prince puttering around the place. He seemed to really take to it. He had a wonderful time playing with my grandparents’ dog – though she wasn’t nearly as fond of him – and he had fun jumping on their trampoline even if he wasn’t the most gifted of bouncers. I’m looking forward to seeing him grow up spending time here. I’m happy that he already seems utterly at home, because that means there’s a shot it will be “home” for him too, even if he never lives there.

I know my grandfather – the YP’s namesake – is hopeful about this. (He did not learn the aforementioned lesson about promises and has already tried to exact vows from all of us that we will never sell the land no way, no how, and not turn it into golf courses or condos or what have you. It’s easy for me to say yes now, but seriously, in another 40 years who knows what the story is going to be? Will my parents still be running the show? It’s conceivable. Even if they aren’t, will farm subsidies still exist? And even if they do, will NYAB let me cash in on them?)

So half of me was delighted when my grandfather commented that my kid “managed running through that cornfield pretty good — much better than I’d expect of a city kid,” because the kid really was having a great time chasing the dog across a wide open field where the only trouble he could possibly get into would be to fall in a pile of trash we’d just dumped (Grandpa uses his farmland as a sort of giant composting experiment,) and he wasn’t going to get hit by a car or abducted by aliens or break anything by slamming into it, or-or-or. And half of me cringed, because I suddenly realized that my kid will be every bit as entertainment-deprived visiting his grandparents in Illinois as I was when I visited my grandparents in Virginia. Sure, there’s TV (and now, movies on demand, which I would have killed for,) but there aren’t any people around for miles, probably none his age that my parents will have any contact with, and unless my dad carries the day, there won’t be a lot of leaving the property just to keep the kid busy.

I’m sure my mom will say there are plenty of bricks to be laid and foundations to be poured and barns to paint. And hell, maybe the kid will dig that.

But maybe I should try talking my mom into installing a swimming pool where the doghouse is.

One thing this trip did do; it solidified my plan for this year to be what NYAB was laughingly calling The Year of the Falling-Down House -- which means I'm going to make an effort to take pictures of decrepit and crumbling structures whenever I run across them. I don't want to call it a project, as that implies a certain amount of effort and hobby-ness, whereas this is more like a happy accident version of "Hey, stop the car, that is cool!"  So keep an eye out for those in coming weeks and months.

Slave to Love

So, I was going to post about all our excitement with the log splitter this weekend, but really, the pictures at flickr say it all.

I have a grosser-than-gross post, but I'm saving that for tomorrow, and I’m likewise saving Halloween stuff til Wednesday.

So today, I give you a departure based on Jurgen Nation’s post, wherein I learned it was National Love Scene Haters Coming Out Day.  How she knows this, I am not sure, as I could not find such a declarative anywhere, but I’m willing to take her word for it and join her in celebrating it.

Why? Well, I tell you what. You try watching 9-1/2 Weeks with YOUR grandparents and see where you wind up.*

I don't remember exactly how this came to pass. I know I was in college and visiting them for a weekend or holiday. I’m pretty sure it didn’t just show up on TV, that I actually rented it. (Well, hey. My grandparents had a VCR and I did not.) What I can’t remember is if I didn’t know what it was about, or if I had a vague idea but was unclear on the extent, or if I actually knew but for some reason assumed my grandparents would bail out for the evening at some point and I’d watch it alone.

In any event, I don’t recall flinching when my grandmother said, “Well, I think I’ve got one more movie in me before I go to bed. Let’s see that one.”

Because even if this flick hadn't totally sucked in and of itself as a piece of cinematic hooey, nothing says sexy like watching Kim Bassinger get rubbed down with ice cubes while your never-cussing/never-raising-her-voice/never-even-remotely-inappropriate grandma is SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU.

I think my grandfather started out watching with us too, but as I remember it he huffed his way out of the room before things got really uncomfortable. I sincerely hope he went to bed, with the intention of sleeping. Because even now I don’t want to think about the other possibilities.

So there we were, Grandma and myself, and we watched that thing to the bitter end. Occasionally we’d say something like, “Man, what an ugly dress,” or “Um, why is she even checking her phone messages at this point? Why doesn't she just shoot this guy?” But nothing could really cut that whole “I’m very squicked out to be seeing this stuff right here right now with this particular relative and ewww!!!” atmosphere.

Finally, it’s over, and as we are sitting there with the credits rolling, both of us studiously avoiding making eye contact with the other, and I’m really seriously considering taking a shower, my grandmother takes a deep breath, smoothes down her skirt and says, “You know, I really hate when movies demonstrate such a total lack of respect ... for food.”**

Because really, what better criticism is there?

*I will, however, embrace my 80s-ness and declare that the soundtrack kicks ass.

**Before anyone asks: No, I hated strawberries LONG before this flick came out. It probably didn't help their case, though.

Too Late

You'll note the title of my last post was "Don't Turn Out Like Your Mother." Except it has been driven home to me with stunning clarity in the past three days that this is exactly what I've done.

First, you need to know that my mom is ... well, she's not June Cleaver, for sure. She's been out of the work force for a while, to be sure, but the similarities pretty much stop there. I think the last time my mom shucked her blue jeans for a skirt was my wedding, five years ago. One entry in the family annals is the massive excitement she showed one Christmas morning when my dad got her a sledge hammer and she ran right outside and tried it out without bothering to open the rest of her presents. She has installed professional sprinkler systems without professional aid. She has rewired houses, torn down, refinished and reinstalled window frames, and rebuilt and bored out the engine in her '69 Camaro with only a little help from my uncle in the heavy lifting department.

OK, so I haven't exactly BECOME her, because that would indicate I've accomplished something on that level, which I haven't. But I'm obviously on my way.

Indicator One: We talked on Sunday. She and my dad are in the process of retiring from California to Illinois. One of the agreements they reached was that they would stop flying for domestic trips and drive everywhere once my dad is no longer punching a timeclock (well, figuratively, I mean, he's actually an executive.) So based on this idea, she went and looked at buying this car:

A Dodge Magnum RT with 340 horsepower, 390 foot-pound HEMI V-8 engine. As neat as this is and all, the part where it became obvious I'm on the wrong path was when she said, "The dealer guy says if we buy this car, we get signed up to learn to drive it by spending a day on a race track," and I said, "Squeee!" and she said, "I KNOW!!" 

Indicator Two: Tonight when we got home from work, UPS had delivered this:

And you know I wasted no time in busting that thing out of its box and trying it out. (Well, making Not Your Average Blogger come help me. Of a log that got split three times, he did two and I did one.) It is fun, people. Way faster and easier than trying to split a log with a wedge and hammer, and way, WAY more fun. And then? Then I called my next-door-neighbor so I could squee to her about it. Bless her heart, she is clearly related to me in spirit, because her immediate reaction was "Yay! But you tried it without me!?! Shame! But good! We have plans for Saturday!"

If beer is not too heavily involved, I may have photos.

Full of Words and Music and Signifying Nothing

I realize I've been quiet lately. I don't know if that's because I have nothing nice to say or nothing to say, period.

There has been some rumbling about changes afoot at work, but I'm still waiting to see if any of it amounts to anything. I'm basically in a holding pattern to see if I get to keep my four-days-a-week-at-home gig, in which case I have to start looking for preschools around here, or if I shift over to a more managerial five-days-a-week-in-the-office, in which case I start looking for preschools around there.

Which means that the big event of today was this: My kid took a bite of my roast beef sandwich, chewed it up and swallowed it. Without making a face, without spitting any of it out. He certainly didn't take a second bite, but hey, baby steps.

We had a busy weekend, complete with photos and video, and maybe someday I'll get around to posting some of both.

Instead, an anecdote: Not Your Average Blogger says this is his favorite childhood story of mine. He swears it's for the loyalty factor, not the blood factor, but I guess there is a little something for everyone.

When I was 8 or 9, we lived in Illinois. We had a big circular driveway that took up most of the flat space behind our house, with a big rose garden in the middle of the circle. This driveway, it was gravel. And not the nice smooth round pea gravel, no. The big,chunky white rock gravel like you see on back roads in the hinterlands.

As you might guess, this gravel plays a role.

So one day, I'm out with our dog, Anjin. I don't know what was going on, but for whatever reason I hadn't just put him into our fenced-in part of the yard, I had him out on his leash. Anjin was, I kid you not, the best dog on earth. He was an Irish setter, but he wasn't one of those dingy brainless ones, he was sharp. He once ate an entire dinner off our kitchen table in 15 minutes without moving a single utensil while we were all in the living room to talk on the phone with my grandmother (in the days when long-distance calls were a big deal.) This was a dog who  wandered off once from a back yard six hours from home that he'd never left before, was gone for at least three hours, had three people looking for him to no avail, and ambled back on his own when he got bored. Generally, he snapped to attention, did what he was told, never made a wrong move.

On this day, however, he was a Very. Bad. Dog.

So I've got him there on the leash. It's a summer day. I'm wearing shorts. And Anjin sees a squirrel, or a cat, or God knows what, and 50-lb. him takes off. With 65-lb. spastic me on the other end of the leash.

What would you do? Yes, that's right. A sane human being with any brain at all would let go of the leash. Not me, though. I was just sure that if I let go of that leash, he would run right out into the completely deserted street at the end of our driveway and the one car a year that drove up that dead end road would be there at that very second to run him over.

I have to admit, though, that the vision of Anjin getting smushed was only the first image to flash in my brain. The second was of my mom dispatching me after him with little hesitation and our reunion in the great hereafter in a matter of moments.

So I held on. And gravel-skied for about 2 feet before of course, I inevitably fell over. I'd never heard the term "road rash" before, but man, was it ugly.

I think it was probably the first time I can remember that my mom didn't sort of secretly chortle when I came in covered with blood and grit and told her what had happened. Not that my mom was particularly cruel, you understand. I mean, I'm pretty sure that  I will laugh too if Tom ever comes home from school 45 minutes late and tells me the ice crust broke while he was walking on it and he got trapped between a snowbank and a car and had to dig his way out.

The dog? Didn't get whatever he was chasing. But he did get a severe beating from my tiny girly fists. I'm pretty sure his reaction was "Wow. What big mosquitoes are out today."