"What Color Are My Parachute Pants?"

It all started with the brown rice.

There was a muttered conversation with Groom, a little talk that went something like, "Yea, okay, we eat a cow a week, so maybe sometimes we need to compensate by ingesting something uber healthy, like, you know, whole-wheat pasta."

Then we ate some whole-wheat pasta, and pretty quickly I decided I'd rather suck shag carpet through a twirly straw than ever eat another bowl of that whole-wheat schmutz.

So we held to The Principle but moved to brown rice. As Groomeo cooked it up that first night, I twitched around the kitchen, stomach growling, wondering what in the world of ultimate nachos I'd be having for dinner after my obligatory taste of the brown rice, which would, doubtlessly, be followed by dramatic retching into the garbage disposal.

However.

It seems.

When you cook up brown rice and then top it with--and Nostradamus never predicted this in all his crystal ballifying--stir-fried bok choy and soy sauce, it's

how you say

somewhat less than

varmint-inducing...

to the point that it's

hella good.

Nowadays, when the menu is announced, and the words "brown rice and bok choy" are uttered, I do one of my specialized and intricately-choreographed versions of the Happy Dance: the one that goes jazz hands, chasse, chasse, chasse, high kick, standing-half-moon, all capped off with a quick cherry-picker.

As I stand there, curtsying, accepting bouquets, panting, I sometimes think, "Me head is a leetle woozy here. There is some serious identity shifting going on. What's happened to the old 'If it ain't fried in powdered sugar and topped with bacon whipped cream, I ain't eatin' it' Jocelyn of yore?" Truth is, I hardly know myself.

Complicating things is the ongoing Polenta Polemic.

Groom lived for a short while in one of those Carolinas y'all keep down there. While hallucinating in the humidity, he learned to love some funky mush dish called "grits." No, not pronounced "oatmeal Jell-o." Try this: "g-r-e-e-e-e-t-z." Yes, that's it.

So throughout our marriage, he has sometimes pointed to the sky and shouted, "Look, Joce, a flying hamburger" and then, while I'm distracted out there with my butterfly net, leaping around trying to snag the thing, he has quietly hied off to the stovetop and made busy there, only to be discovered some time later (when I whomp in, dragging my net behind me, looking very disappointed), his head dipped into a saucepan, a wooden spoon hovering in his big paw, his mouth coated in hominal flakes. He tries to look guilty, but mostly he looks supremely blissed out and as though he's just realized he married the wrong semi-solid.

In the interests of us developing a few common interests that might sustain the marriage once the kids grow up and head off to cosmetology school, I agreed last month to try--NO, not grits, that bitch--but polenta, the Bergdorf version of grits.

Swat me to next Wednesday, but polenta is ambrosial.

It might have something to do with all that butter and the fact that His Groomitude cracks some eggs on top and bakes the whole thing into a "hold me, Mommy, for I need comfort food" lather.

At any rate, I find myself in off moments, of which I have a satchelful, dreaming of the polenta. I want to fill the bathtub with it and exfoliate with great vigor. Then I want to eat everything in the bathtub with a small spoon and finish off by licking the porcelain dry.

Yea, it's ugly-bad like that.

This whole business of changing and adapting and tolerating new pleasures, well, it's broadcasting into me a freaked-out noise. I mean, who am I, if I'm not a Double-Stuf-chugging, flank-steak-snarfing, Cheeto-deodorant-wearing whore?


It actually gets worse.

Just tonight, as I was typing up this little note to you, Aunt Hepzibah, I was streaming a little tv on the old laptop, as diversion from my own words (lest I find my self tiresome). Before I knew it, I was grunting at the selected program, "Why do you call it cha-cha-cha, Announcer Man? Isn't it just the cha-cha?"

And then.

I realized.

It was 10 p.m. on a Saturday night.

And I wasn't anywhere near the mosh pit at First Avenue (or, better yet, its smarter younger sister, the Seventh Street Entry), nor was I wearing a pair of Docs and a New York Dolls t-shirt, trying to bum a smoke off the guy at the sound board.

Rather, on this Saturday night, I was alone, tucked under the covers, clad in yoga pants,

WATCHING "DANCING WITH THE STARS."

Worse yet, I was weighing in with opinions--and how could I not, what with the appalling state of Crisitan de la Fuente's posture? Stand up, Senor, if you hope to earn the 10's!

Ultimately, I guess my point here, dear Hepzibah, is that brown rice is a gateway lifestyle slider. You let the brown rice in, and you're just a sneeze away from polenta, just a whiffle away from texting in your vote for Kristi Yamaguchi's jive.

Resist the brown, hipsters. Resist the brown.

"Ka-powie"






In an age when Kevin Federline sets the standard as a guy to admire, I'm feelin' the need to go all revolutionary like Mr. Muscle Oven Cleaner did back in the '70s and take a moment to set the bar just a tidge higher.

I can up your K-Fed, culturepeople, and his name is My Cousin Kurt.

The adventures of my road-kill-hound cousin have hit this space before, but, with his latest, I'm afraid he may have garnered Reccuring Supporting Character status on this blog.

Sure, he scrapes moose off the highway; he's a dragonfly expert (yea, he's written a book proving his odonatic knowledge); he builds rustic furniture; he has his teen-aged daughter amusing herself with throwing an atlatl out back of the log house he built...

( This is not My Cousin Kurt, nor is it his teen-aged daughter. But it is an atlatl. If you needed this explanation, is it possible you're kind of dim?)

...but that stuff is so My Cousin Kurt that it hardly bears mentioning in a tribute about why I rank him above Britney's ex.

Here's the source of my abiding admiration:

Last year, one of his daughters was given an audio card--you know, one of those really annoying cards that blares a song every time you open it.

First opening of the card, and the song blares out? How cute! Ain't that just.

Second opening of the card, same song? A little drumbeat on the table.

Third opening--what, again? A sense that it's time to move on and open the next present.

Fourth opening, fer chrissakes? An actual request to stop. opening. the. card.

Fifth freaking opening in two minutes? An exasperated exhale and mounting blood pressure.

Sixth #$%^&&(* opening? A sense of slipping sanity and dialing up one's inner sociopath.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the song being played with every opening of the card, in the case of My Cousin Kurt's kid, was "The Chickendance"?

To give him credit, he made it longer than Dick Cheney would have.

But then, My Cousin, my pal, my boy

finally took "The Chickendance" card out front of the house



and shot it.



My hero.

"Epizeudy Boogie-Woogie"

When I think about the rhythm of my existence, the words "West Coast freestyle" cross my mind, as does a brief Lambadic beat, but ultimately I have to admit the cadence of my life is most aptly labeled "semesterlyish."

Back when I was in college, during the "who'll-shove-Alexis-Carrington-into-a-fountain-this-week?" decade of the '80s, I attended an institution that paced itself by trimesters, each lasting ten weeks. Pretty much, that meant we all felt pregnant for four years, except at the end the only things we expelled from our bodies were plumes of smoke from Camel Lights and fountains of vomit from 3.2 beer.

Later, when I started teaching at the University of Idaho and then the University of Colorado, I made the switch to a sixteen-week schedule. Damn near wore me out, that business. Because seriously, when I was an undergraduate, the mere ten-week schedule was hectic enough, with me juggling absences in my various classes just into that tenth week before each professor started to realize I was actually enrolled in her course. Yup, right about final exam time, I faced down raised eyebrows and questioning looks when I dared to enter the classrooms of the courses I'd been enrolled in for two-and-a-half months. My defense, when the professor stuttered to ask me if I wasn't perhaps in the wrong room, was to glare and act affronted that my constant and active presence had never before registered with that poor, confused professor, even though my only constant activity had actually taken place downtown at the bar.

So you can imagine what those later jobs oriented around sixteen strung-out weeks did to my sense of internal scheduling, particularly because I was the instructor, the one in charge, the one who had to be there, like, nearly every time we had class. Crikey, but that was a whole lot of showing up to do. Fortunately, the beauty of "group work" soon shone its face upon me, and I realized that, so long as I got my carcass into the classroom, I could set them on each other before kicking back for the duration, hefting my feet onto the table and peering under the podium on the off chance that some other instructor had left behind an Entertainment Weekly.

Oh, all right, Matlock. Occasionally I'd address words to the room full of students and make some marks on their papers and do a little jollying along. But, really, sixteen whole weeks of anything is ex-haus-ting, sugar. (Hearty Huzzahs, then, to Da Groomeo, who's kept me on board for nearly nine years now. I stay 'cause he keeps hiding the Nutella.)

Yea, sixteen weeks whups me. But even the ten-week trimester back in the shoulder-pad years highlighted what a fragile and delicate violet is The Jocelyn Who Sways at the Slightest Breeze: at the end of every term, without fail, I'd push through those final exams (introducing myself to the teacher as I exited the room that last time) and, just as I started packing a bag and heading for the airport to grab a flight back to the Homeland, I'd

suddenly

get

swelly-ish tonsils

and a fever.

Indeed, once the push to the end of term was over, my immune system collapsed and invited every random microbe roaming the quad after the previous night's kegger to enter my nostrils for a gnarly in-head continuation of the party. Thus, "end-of-term" always translated to "buy-Theraflu-in-bulk."

Even when I started teaching on that even-more-wearying-sixteen-week-rhythm, I was sure this tendency towards end-of-term illness was simply a Student Syndrome. After all, hadn't I seen how easy it was to be a teacher, how simple it could be to pretend to be engaged in my work? What could possibly be sick-making about filing my nails and pouting out twelve times a week to the tuition-paying kiddles, "No, Jerome, accept is not spelled e-x-c-e-p-t"?

Strangely, though, the sixteen-week semester, under which I still teach, is far-reaching enough to make everyone in the classroom sick. Sure, we're all sick of each other by about Week 11, but who knew physical sickness would continue to set in at the end of every semester for me, even with the eight-foot buffer I like to call the "No Steppie Here, Tiffany" zone, an eight-foot buffer that happens to exist right in front of the instructorial magic carpet of desk?

It's like all those students actually do come up to ask questions; it's like I actually do circulate the room and look over shoulders, making suggestions. It's like all those gettin'-sick students get me sick, too. It's like there's just as much stress for the teacher at the end of term as there is for the rarely-attending students who are frantically trying to get up to speed after multiple absences ("Um, hi. Are you in this class? What's that? Your name is on the roster? Tiffany, is it? Sure it's not Jocelyn? At any rate, welcome to the final exam!").

It's like, right now, as I type this, we're heading into final exams on campus. It's like I've been hacking, dripping, and snerfling into the keyboard as I type and consider the 50 research papers, 40 Novels finals, and 20 English Lit exams I have to mark in the next week, before I start to chip away at prepping my summer classes.

It's like, my external rhythm may be set at semesterlyish, but my internal rhythm innately functions on a six-week bee-bop. On a six-week calendar, by the time anyone even thinks about coming to class...or getting hostile about a grade...or coughing in the No Steppie zone and turning the instructor into some wan Charles-Dickens-orphling-looking thing...

we are out of there--

textbooks tossed into the bonfire,

cars idling in the Wendy's drive-thru as we await the deliverance of the restorative semi-frozen bev-cream known as The Frosty,

hands beating out a highly-personalized staccato tattoo onto the steering wheel as we wait.

"The Spindly Nasturtiums"

Photos like these remind my head to think nice things


about these miniature people--



lest the only thought in my brain regarding them be,

"Horton hears a tinkle, but what age do y'all need to be before the pee actually goes into the toilet instead of getting mopped up by my pasty white heinie when it hits the seat?"

They have made me Human Charmin, so they do well to pump up the cuteness on occasion and save their own sorry asses.

"I Commend My Spirit"


The thing about being in one's forties is that there's a humbling amount of perspective.

As I look behind me and see the wee charmers nipping at my heels and then look ahead of me and glimpse the sometimes quick and easy slide to the grave, it's hard to have a big-picture sense of importance, consequence, bangin'itude.

But then I remember that night in high school when I went to my dad's college (he didn't actually own it outright; it was more of a time share dealie) to sit on a folding chair out in the middle of the football field.

You might be thinking this was my way of lodging a protest against the game of football--of me staging a sit-in to make the point that human kitchen appliances deliberately slamming themselves together under the guise of "strategy" is a proposition approximately as ludicrous as Owen "Pass the dutchie to the lefthand side" Wilson playing a former soldier of fortune in Drillbit Taylor.

However, that night in the early 1980's, I perched upon a folding chair out on the football field, anticipating something far more exciting than the prospect of getting cuffed and having my limp, Martin-Sheeny body dragged protestingly off to jail. You see, I was poised on the turf to watch Billings, Montana's first ever out-of-the-doors performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. It was a premiere event I was attending at Rocky Mountain College, there under the big spotlights.

On the 50-yard line.

In my Flashdance-ripped sweatshirt and patterned overalls.

Then the lights fell, and first, there was nothing.

It was like a slow, glowing dream--a dream that my fear seemed to hide deep inside my mind.

What a feeling.


Wait a minute. That feeling wasn't me having rhythm now, nor was it Mary Magdalene despairing that she didn't know how to love the sandal-clad superstar that was Jesus. Nay.

That feeling was my soft contact falling right off my eyeball and landing on my cheek.

Christ on a sports field. The show had just started, and there I was, grabbing my contact off my face, balancing it on my finger, trying not to drop it in the dusk. Within minutes, as I considered and then rejected a sprint to the bathroom (if I missed Judas' entrance, I'd completely lose track of the chain of events that would ultimately lead to Jesus pushing a big rock away from a cave entrance, rubbing his eyes blearily as he peeled the shroud from his body, picking up a few Cadbury eggs from beneath the bushes for sustenance, and then inventing Rolling Rock beer), I watched my contact lens teeter on my finger, buffeted by the wind, as it started to dry out.

What to do? What to do?

With less thought than I had applied to choosing potato cakes over curly fries at the Arby's earlier that day, I popped the thing into my mouth.

For the next two hours, from Gethsemane to King Herod to that cross business, I sucked gently on the lens. Neither speaking to my companions nor shouting "bravo" after the finale, I focused on keeping the lens nestled in its cocooning little cheek bed.

I remained quiet--some might have assumed reflective--all the way home, until I dashed into the basement bathroom, snatched up a bottle of saline solution, and popped that baby out of my mouth, shouting, "Gag, but that was illin'."

Due to my fortitude, though, the next day at school, when my friends asked me how I'd enjoyed the show, I was able to look them directly and clearly in the eye and report, "Actually, I only saw about half of it. But the righthand part of the stage looked great. So did the actors who stood there."


And so whenever I wonder if my life has importance, if I'll leave any mark, if there has been worth to this puny existence of mine,

I remember that night and the example I set for humanity.

Sure, Jesus was bitchin' out there on the football field, but I, with my admirable unflappability, was schweet to the max.

"Just Sayin'"

This Is Just To Say**
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast.

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold.


This "found" poem, originally a note Williams stuck on the fridge for his wife--is both charmingly clear and provocatively ambiguous, much like Barack Obama on the stump.

On the surface, this poem is just a "Toots, don't even bother looking for those plums, as they are coursing through my personal digestive plumbing this very minute" communique.

More intrepid readers might take their explication in the direction of sex--to the ripe sensuality of those cold plums that creates a desire to plumb through the juice and burrow right down to the pit. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jay-Z married Beyonce the other week just so he could devour the fruit jiggling around in her icebox without ever venturing off-site.

Perhaps equally interesting is the tack of looking at this poem as an apology, specifically as a pro forma apology. Pro-forma apologies go through the motions and creak out the right words, but, because they are rote expressions and lack genuine sentiment, they ring hollow. Famous examples of the pro-forma would be Don Imus' forced public regret after demeaning the Rutgers' women's basketball team and a host of presidents, from Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to Current Guy, conceding "mistakes were made."

Personally, I get a bang out of how unapologetic "This Is Just To Say" is. It's pro forma beauty. Williams isn't sincerely asking for his wife's forgiveness; rather, he commands "Forgive me" as he wipes his chin with the napkin. He minimizes her excitement about eating the plums, chuffing that she was "probably" saving them for breakfast.

Now, WCW, I think you and your wife both remember how you stood idly by as she cut off her hair and sold it at a beauty parlor down the avenue, just to earn enough money to buy those plums. Then, when you took the car keys and wouldn't drive her to the store to get the fruit, she walked five miles, each direction, to the Rainbow Foods. At the store, of course they were out of bags, so Wifey then had to trudge all those miles home with the plums stuffed into her arm pits, staving off coughs and sneezes and all fruit-bruising bodily contortions for the entire hour and a half it took her to get back. Naturally, once she arrived home and opened the icebox, she discovered the thing was stuffed with squirrel cadavers that you were "keeping cool" until your next taxidermy session down in the wood-paneled basement. No room for plums in there, you told her. But she was tenacious. That night, after you went to bed, she crept in to the kitchen and took out one, ONE, of your seventeen squirrels and put it in your beer cooler, just so she could tuck her gorgeous plums into the fridge for even a few hours. All she ever wanted was a cold plum for breakfast the next morning, a plum that would take her back to the summer of '35, when she and her mother shared the perfect plum on a picnic blanket one afternoon at the zoo, three days before her mom suffered the aneurysm that cut her life short. These plums were closure, William Williams. There was no "probably" about them.

But then you cavorted into the kitchen that morning, your face freshly-shaven, knowing your wife was upstairs ironing your shirt and wouldn't be down for ten more minutes...and you. et. her. hard-won. plums.

That measly note, you know, the one that stressed how delicious were the plums she would never taste, well it screamed past pro forma tacky and plummeted directly into Right Bastard.

You didn't mean a word of apology, you power-tripping ogre.

Or maybe you'd bought the plums a week before, and they were about to go off, and since your wife had the flu and couldn't keep any food down, you went ahead and ate them.
-------------------------------------

Whatever the circumstances behind its writing, the template of this poem and the dismissive logic of its undercut apology have become widely known and spoofed.

For example:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
by Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

OR

Sorry But it was Beautiful
by Andrew Vecchione (6th Grade)

Sorry I took your money and burned it
but it looked like the world falling
apart when it crackled and burned.
So I think it was worth it after all
you can't see the world fall apart
every day.

OR, as someone monikered "Anonymous" wrote to J.K. Rowling:

This Is Just To Say

I have killed
the wizard
who was in
your novels

and whose death
you were probably
saving
for book seven

Forgive me
he had it coming
so beardy
and so old

OR

This is Just to Say
by Jason Nicholas

I have pulled the
Pin from that grenade
On the desk.

Forgive me.
I thought it was
My keyring,
And



---------------------------------------------
My drawn-out go at this poem is inspired by fellow blogger Minnesota Matron, whose recent post about an arse-paining student gave me great comfort, in a week when I've been wrangling again with the alcoholic student in one of my classes who caused me to lose much sleep a few months back.

This is Just to Say
by Jocelyn Teacher

I'm sorry you went off your meds
in the '90s
and started to drink constantly

and lie more frequently than you drink
which you probably are unaware of
even as you email me every day that you've
missed class because you were bed-ridden and
your grandmother died repeatedly and your friends
all died, every single one of them.

Forgive me for being a poor teacher, as you
told the dean last week when you appealed the
Failure for Non-Attendance grade I'd assigned.
In your version, my lack of teaching is somehow related to
your having diahrrea for seven weeks which meant you couldn't
come to class.

I'm sorry your absences weren't at all alcohol related.
The dean, and then the registrar, and then the Vice President
might have had some sympathy for that.

A delicious and sweet and cold martini will be great solace to you
during your academic probation
for which you must forgive me.

------------------------
**shout out to National Public Radio's "This American Life" program, which planted much of this in my mind

"Riddle You That"



Overheard tonight here at the compound:

Groom to me: "Wow. Good thing we have these paper towels--because this thing is dripping with honey."



Any guesses?

"Duluth, Minnesota Versus Manhattan, The Island"

Groom and I have been feeling lately that we have too much time and money and not nearly enough stress. It's all "wake up late, stare at the lake, water the seedlings, play some Doodle Dice, go for a trail run, grill a pork roast, read in Jeffrey Toobin's THE NINE about the appalling politicization of the Supreme Court, sit on the curb and chat with the neighbors, and hunker down to await the next hawk migration." Frankly, with the low blood pressure that accompanies such an easy pace, we fear we may live to 95.

And if we're alive at 95, there's a very strong chance that the next Bush generation will have had time to ascend to power. Clearly, we'd go to any lengths to avoid witnessing the reign of facism carried out by "Governor Jenna of Ohio." Indeed, rather than face this prospect, it might be time to undertake some lifespan-shortening.

So we're thinking of moving to Manhattan. There, we could feel the pain of wallet-strapping restaurants, chest-clutching rents, X-ray-thin socialites, and gasps of toxic air--tradeoffs that could kill us younger but still leave behind grinning corpses.

Because His Groomishness and I like to make well-informed decisions, I've been compiling a list of comparisons between Duluth and Manhattan. When the list has reached its final, exhaustive stage, I fully plan to let it slide off the kitchen table and fall behind the radiator, where it will live for three months until the next sweeping up. After the compilation is completed and lost, I'll head outside to lay on a blanket and play Skip-Bo under the apple tree.

1. Hell, the first big difference would be the quality of footwear. In Manhattan, we'd be under constant pressure to have well-shod hooves, no matter the cost or teetering involved. On the other hand, the only pressure in Duluth is to wear water-ready shoes that proudly proclaim, "We ain't afeard of the uglies."


















2. Transportation in Manhattan is all yellow, dirty, and jammed. In Duluth, we're more about not slamming into the forest beasts while mentally figuring out which color of wax to apply to our cross-country skis once we get to the trailhead.













3. New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is an old richie fogart who serves as trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, while Duluth's mayor, Don Ness, is an avid skateboarder who recently learned to finger paint.




















4. In Manhattan, $325,000 will get you a solid chunk of urban grit, while the same, in Duluth, will net a house that serves as a realistic backdrop for games of "I'm Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mistress, and he does so like it when I sport my feather boa atop a saucy smile."
















5. Schools are competitive in Manhattan. If your kid is lucky enough to score an education, it will be spotted with French lessons and staid craft projects like this:













In Duluth, however, we get real with the craft projects. Our preschooler classes work cooperatively and messily to create near-life-sized dinosaurs which are subsequently, upon completion, raffled off and sent home with the "lucky" kid whose name is drawn from a basket woven out of our region's ubiquitous icicles.

Guess what? In our case, the slip of paper with the words Niblet Paco Dinko fairly leapt out of that icicle basket during the drawing, and before we could shout, "Holy Monty Hall, we didn't actually want you to reach in that basket and pull out our kid's name because, fer Christ, even in our relatively-spacious Duluth home, where the pajeebus are we going to put a huge dinosaur?" the thing was loaded into the back of a pick-up truck and driven to our address, where the aforementioned Paco Dinko of Niblet Fame stood jumping and clapping on the front sidewalk as the thing was unloaded, hardly able to believe, at age five, that this life he was living was really so very magical and wondrous.

In true "we don't squawk here in the Midwest but just remain stoic in the face of whatever comes, again and again and again, whether it's the latest Bush generation to seize power or an unexpected preschooler project come home to roost," the Groom and I looked at each other, shrugged, and squeezed the carnivore onto the front porch next to the scooters and trikes.



Try toting this thing home on the Subway, Manhattanites!

Her name is Lily Sparkly Sparkly, and if you err and mistakenly call her Lily Sparkle Sparkle, you will be soundly reproved by an indignant five-year-old who hugs the old paper mache gel quite protectively as he scolds you.

-------------------------

Clearly, then, all the list-making and pro-ing and con-ing was for naught. We'd never manage to fit Lily onto an airplane seat, even in First Class, to make the flight to Manhattan.

Plus, she has a rather sordid history with Michael Bloomburg; should she turn up in his city and sell her tales of pomegranite martinis and ripped camisoles to the tabloids, he'd have to resign.

And damn it if the young Barbara Bush wasn't overheard last week in the Oval Office, yawling, "Daaaady, I shore would like me a mayorship in some big city somewheres, you know, where I could live in a mansion and shop at Barney's and gather 'round me a circle of Wall Street beaux. Any ideas, Daaaaaaady?"

To avoid that troubling possibility, we've decided to stay put in Duluth, where we'll continue to wear our ugly Keen shoes; teach our mayor to use scissors; knock about our cheap and crowded house; dodge moose on the roadways--and keep a muzzle on the sparkly dinosaur.

"Aloha Pillow Talk"

I often trudge, stone-faced, through the hours of 9 a.m.-8 p.m.

At 8:01 p.m., however, I go all Tom-Cruise-On-Oprah's-Couch.

Without fail, once darkness falls, the quarter slides into my internal jukebox, and I light up, song lyrics tumbling from my lips; spontaneous-yet-well-choreographed musicals high kicking it in the kitchen; animated one-way conversations with the creators of The Wire perking out of my mouth; grocery lists for the Girl's quinceanera party (in seven years) scritching on to paper; Scrabulous tiles, particularly the "q" without a "u," pouring onto the board; slates of enemies receiving a well-deserved in absentia back-stabbing; blog posts sliding out of the birth canal, still slathered in vernix.

If I were a Magic Treehouse book written by formulaic-yet-educational children's authoress Mary Pope Osborne, I would be entitled Mania in the Moonlight. You would not buy me, even from the clearance shelves at Barnes & Noble. Instead, you would back away slowly, refusing eye contact (How dippy are you for that? I'm a book, you twittering fool. I don't have eyes), easing the blow by feigning an interest in the gnome calendars, magnetic poetry kits, and color sudoku books that lodge up front by the cash registers.



Fortuitously, my night-time energies play nicely into the fact that I'm one of the twenty-nine married women in Minnesota who still look affectionately at their husbands and think, "Yea, I could hit that." Indeed, once I've stretched out and folded up my leg warmers after the high kicks, jazz hands, and pas de bourrees by the refrigerator, I often still have enough steam to go tackle My Man.

As it turns out, when I'm really in the throes of the Night Time Happies, I can also get giggly. Loopy. Babbley and burbley in the boudoir (take that, Mary Pope Osborne).

The other night, my state of laughing gabble just about derailed us. As we lay there, working into an esprit d'amour, I just could not stop yucking and yacking, blicking and blacking. Every time I'd move in for the kiss, a snortle would come blowing out my nostrils.

Yea. I know. Hot.

Finally, I did a few slow breaths and announced, "I just have to stop thinking of things that crack me up. I need a change of mental scenery. So, okay, we're going to..." I stumped around, looking for an appropos locale, "...Sexy Island now."

When I get snortley, I also get prodigiously lame.

Ever my willing playmate, though, Groom joined in. "So what's on Sexy Island?"

"Well, there'd be monkeys, for sure."

Cuz, you know. Monkeys in a Love Fantasy imply, welllllllllllllll, swinging and peeling.

Groom knows my brain; he free associated right into the peeling. "Yea, monkeys. What else?"

Upping the ante, I noted, "I'm pretty sure there's buried treasure on Sexy Island, from some pirates. They're a bad, bad lot, aren't they? Very naughty?"

Groom was with me: "Yea, okay, treasure. I can dig that. And I'll be more than happy to lay hands on your booty and shiver your timbers. "

After that, it was quiet for a beat.

Another beat.

Then the Hot Mess that is Groomeo queried, "But is there poi on Sexy Island?"

-------------------
Afternote, to be read while smoking a cigarette and running a hand through your rumpled hair:

Yes, yes, there was poi bubbling over the fire that night. And what a way to find out that the consistency of poi is often described as being either "two-finger" or "three-finger."

I am a fan of life-long experiential learning.

"Sound of the Funky Drummer"

I am an enormous pain in the hinders.

On the other hand, I am also a tuition-paying student at the Flava Flav School of Elusive Charm.


Flav and me? We tote our clocks; we sport our grillz; we hook up with statuesque Nordic types; we view life as a cost-effective backdrop to our own VH1 reality show; we throw down internal rhymes while honing prosody, cadence, and speed. In fact, we can only be distinguished from each other by the fact that he looks like a crack-addicted tambourine player in the subway, and I look like the long-lost Gabor sister exiting a particularly-harrowing roller coaster ride.

From the School's monthly newsletter, I've also learned that Flava and I share a dislike of getting up in the morning and becoming functional human beings. Sure, we has the kids, but we can't be bothered to raise them until at least mid-morning. Until 10:30 a.m., we just have to tape one of these


on our faces and put a like sign over the vodka and matches, hoping the wee ones are literate enough to decipher the message. If not, the resulting combustion of fire and booze is simply framed, for the benefit of the police, as "science."

Truth is, it's fortunate that Flav is a semi-absentee dad. And it's fortunate that I married the anti-Flav, the stand-up guy named Groomeo.

See, His Groomishness lets me have a lie-in whenever possible. Like the other day, after I'd been up 'til 2 a.m. grading online class assignments (and, admittedly, playing some Webkinz games to earn enough Kinz cash to redecorate the apartment of my birthday-gifted elephant, Cornucopia), I got up the next morning for about 45 minutes with the fam--throwing water and food towards the children--and then went back to bed. Up again at 11 a.m., I felt a fair bit refreshed. (Across the continent, I pictured Flav peacefully wiped out on a slightly-tatty heart-shaped waterbed, mouth wide open, sawing logs with dem toofs of his.)

At 11 a.m., although I was actually upright and speaking in staccato phrases, the kids were all bickery, with thirty seconds of harmony between them being a far-off dream. At one point, two hours into my wakefulness, they were fighting about whose turn it was on the big red balance ball and on what part of the floor the balance ball should sit when it was someone's turn and for how long that someone should be allowed to stay on the balance ball and why it wasn't fair that someone else would always get longer and a better spot on the floor when it was time to be on the balance ball and how they never actually got a turn for anything or a good spot for it, and it was all I could do not to dial 1-800-Flav and get my mentor on a jet to Duluth.

Cuz, Maynard? We may be podunkish here, but truth is that my city of 80,000 happens to be situated perfectly for refueling between California and England-type-lands, which means, hand to heaven, celebrities like Bono sometimes sit on our tarmac for the gassing up. And if Bono can do it, you better believe Flava could situate his wiry buns on some big, cushy seats and sip pomegranate martinis while coming to my aid. As a bonus, the flight attendant would help him re-set his clock when they landed, taking into account the time difference.

At any rate, as the kiddles impersonated Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at their finest that morning, I was hard pressed to be the adult--or even the Sandy Dennis--in the room, in the face of such a quarrelsome duo. I tried a bit of talky-negotiation, but they just ramped up more.

Exasperated, I finally proclaimed, "Well, then, you're both being buttheads, and you deserve each other" before marching up the stairs, where I turned to Groom and asked, "Would you call that my finest parenting moment of the day so far?"

Assuring me it was, and that I could hardly be expected to feel more kindly toward the ingrates, what with my having been up 'til 2 a.m. the night before playing Atomolicious so I could afford to buy my elephant a new reed-and-lily-pad desk, the Groom patted my arm with great affection.

Which is why I'm thinking it's fortunate I married him and not Flav. Were we the sole adults in charge, FF and I would've grated the kids into a bowl of grits (protein-fortification!) years before.

And then we'd have called in the cameras before picking up our spoons.

"Just Where I Am"


I'm typing this while sitting atop a brick red duvet, leaning back against a bright-purple down pillow. On the tv is a re-run of the Saturday Night Live hosted by Tina Fey (blogging troubador Furiousball best described her as "one of the women I'd like to lick the make-up off of" some months back); right now, Carrie Underwood, wearing some pleated and atrocious rip-off of a 1950's cocktail dress, is belting Idol-style and shaking her unnaturally-golden tresses.


Other times, that screen features the mug of Bawbwa Wawters and her View Crew, Craig Ferguson making me contemplate adultery, and Dinosaur King rocking the youth on Saturday Morning cartoons. Oftentimes, the images on that screen bore rather than entertain, making me glad it's rarely on.

My gaze wanders to the wall-hung quilt my mom made for Dinko (incidentally, the Niblet has also chosen the name "Paco" for himself; to my delight, I get to holler, at dinner time, "Get yer wee rounded tush down here for edamame and eggs, Paco Dinko").


The fabrics in this quilt are from my grandmother's old dresses; Grandma started cutting the pieces for the quilt before she died in 1974. My mom took over her project and finished it in 2007. I think it's a Dresden Plate pattern, and I adore that my mom can sit in front of it and tell a story of her mother wearing a dress made out of the red-and-white gingham, of her mom making dinner in the flowered calico. I look at this quilt and am reminded my mom's enduring devotion to her own mother. I look at this quilt and am profoundly grateful that it will follow my son into his adult life (Mom made another of these for my Girl, too, so no nattering about how maligned she is).

On the stand next to my side of the bed are a couple stacks of books. On the top of one stack is my reading lamp, which is meant for a desk and casts the beam too low for bed reading. So I've hefted the light up to the peak of a stack of five books: a Mrs. Piggle Wiggle (the kids do love hearing about The Showoff Cure), an advance reader's copy of a book "coming in November 2006" (guess I'm running late); The Boys of My Youth, a Jo Ann Beard book gifted to me by my best reading source and finest galpal; The Wives of Henry VIII by Antonia Fraser, which I'm sifting through a second time, having just read the light fiction The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory (boy, did factual history not restrain that version!); and a book of poetry, Mean Time, a Carol Ann Duffy volume gifted to me last Christmas by one of my favorite blog maidens, Glamourpuss. These are the books that sustain my light. In the other stack on my nightstand, I have my active-reading pile: Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral; The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea, loaned to me by a highly-patient neighbor more than a year ago; and I'll Drink to That, another advance reader's copy--this one a story of the French peasant who brought Beaujolais to the world. All of these, plus five thousand more, are my posse.


Behind me hangs a big painting made by my kids one sun-dappled Fall afternoon almost four years ago, out on the deck. They made that painting on one of those rare afternoons when parenthood--when having young kids--felt as easy and gratifying as an episode of thirtysomething would have had us believe. Everyone was happy. Everyone wanted to be doing what we were doing. Everyone was in a groove, got off The Mommy, and painted. Even better, they painted their feet and hands and skated across the huge swath of paper I'd taped onto the deck. It was painting Olympics. It was my life as a highly-rated and -reviewed one-hour drama.

Over on Groom's side of the bed is everything else, for he is not tidy. He gets the clock radio, as I don't believe in keeping time or getting up in the morning. He gets the Kleenex box, as my nose shouldn't run. He gets the stack of Presidents of the United States cards, the fleece "sleeping bag" that a stuffed animal is supposed to inhabit, the hand salve, the massage lotion, the condom wrappers, the cough drops. On the floor beneath the stand is a waterfall of Cook's Illustrated and Gourmet magazines, fleshed out by a book of NY Times crosswords and a curious bit of non-fiction entitled American Shaolin.


All of this visual gratification inhabits one mere corner of our bedroom, one ten-by-ten foot space. Eleven feet out, there is everything else in the world: the desktop computer; the sleeping children (they of huge blue eyes and mouths that only get wiped when I notice the Oreo crumbs); staircase after staircase; uneven ground in the yard outside; cars that take us to new mundane daily tasks and big life adventures; the fifth largest body of fresh water in the world (two blocks from our house...it collects pack ice in the winter and sparkles with diamond dust in the summer); friends I haven't met yet; traffic weaving helter-skelter across the asphalt.

It's all out there: what I know intimately; what I have yet to encounter; the changes that will be wrought by future decades.

It's all out there. For forty-one years, I have always negotiated the world with a certain confidence, even when I have felt a wreck. At least I've always been able to open the front door and take off on a restorative run, no route in mind, just winding and turning along new roads and paths, letting the alchemy of waving leaves and unexpected deer and Spring wildflowers turn my dross into gold.

But now, at the moment of writing this, I question my future as a place of easy confidence. Rather, I feel paralyzed by uneven terrain, by all the options and vagaries of the world.

Three weeks ago, my optometrist, after a series of tests, joined rank with my childhood optometrist, who noted when I was seven, "If your eyesight keeps up at this rate, you'll be blind by thirty-three."

Actually, the verdict three weeks ago differed a bit (she'd have to be a pretty crappy optometrist to examine this sighted forty-one-year-old and declare me a blind thirty-three-year-old); rather, her musing was, "How are you forty-one with glaucoma?"

At last year's appointment, she'd noticed a not-completely-health optic nerve, but a follow-up test proved things were still within normal range. This year, though, she saw a notch in one of my optic nerves, even clearer in photos of my eyes then taken, backed up by a loss of peripheral vision in a visual field test.

The diagnosis was veering, rather frightfully, towards glaucoma. She wanted me to come back for a couple more tests.

In the two weeks of waiting for those tests, I put the poor Google through its paces. On the positive side, a diagnosis of glaucoma is no longer what it was 20 years ago: a sentence that one is on a steady march to blindness. In fact, there are ways to treat glaucoma these days, most often with thrice-daily eyedrops.

Of course, the eyedrops have possible side effects. Like darkened vision. Loss of libido. Depression.

So, should it prove to be glaucoma, it would seem that I can keep my vision, such as it is, so long as I'm willing to spend the rest of my life as a dried-up, flattened, stumbling husk of a gal.

During the follow-up tests two weeks later, the doc checked my eyes' "superior ridge." The resulting graphic print out shows a suspicious dip in that ridge. On the other hand, other parts of the testing look okay.

The bottom line is that the doc is reluctant to give me a lifetime diagnosis and start me on 50 years of meds unless everything points to glaucoma. Since only 2/3 of the results do, and since the vision decline is so glacial in pace, we're in a holding pattern.

I'll go back in 4 months and retest, and freak it if I can't cram for or cheat on this one.

Trust me, between now and then, and for every day thereafter, well into my audio-book-rich dotage, I'll treasure even the smallest glimpse of the fakey Carrie Underwood, the assiduously-maintained Barbara Walters, the loving quilt on the wall, the grins on the kids' faces, the compost bin in the backyard, the puddles in the alley, the cheese melting on my enchilada, the birch trees flanking the trail, the toilet paper as it swirls down the hole.

I am suddenly and profoundly less casual about it all.

"Species: Dinkus Dorkus"

So have you ever thought to yourself, "Well, now, Martha, hasn't it been an age since we've had a nice photo with the kids? And looksie-looksie: we seem to be at that rare moment in time when everyone is clothed and within yodeling distance of a bath! Yes, let's do."

Clapping your hands together brightly, you line up the troops, warn them sternly that we actually want a nice photo this time--no "Look how Niblet smeared his quesadilla all over his torso; isn't that precious?" pictures today. No, this will be one we can show the great-grandparents next time we brave the 85 degree indoor temperatures and go visit them in The Home.

So everyone's really trying here.

But pretty quickly,


you realize it ain't gonna happen. The vibe is off. Clearly, everyone had way too big a bowl of Slack Muscle Flakes for breakfast.



No matter how much you try to look like regglar folk, attempt after attempt,


everyone seems to be embracing his/her Inner Eejit. We try to look natural, but somehow we continue to look just as creepily "wrong" as Priscilla Presley's post-op face.

So whaddya going to do?


For us, it was back to normal. Dropping all pretense, we ditched the clothes and laid off the bathing.

"Mockingbirds and Tortoises"

Damn Darwin. Were it not for his meddling ways, I'd still be catching a daily nap just before--okay, more honestly, during--"Oprah."

But he just had to go to the Galapagos and stare at all sorts of birds and turtles. Then he wrote that thing.

And suddenly, everyone was in a tizzy, wanting to roar at each other over what are clearly apples-and-oranges issues. Religion shines best when there are no microscopes in the pulpit; science convinces better when amazing technicolor dreamcoats aren't hung in the lab.

Despite these truths, people started fighting, and they continue to this day.

Unfortunately, I'm just not very conflict oriented. I let pushy bastard-ass drivers on the highway ram through, a strategy that keeps it their problem, not mine. I smile as bossfolk shovel verbal compost and call it "a new initiative." Sometimes, in fact, I have been known to remain in relationships for, say, six years, simply to avoid a fight.

'Cause most fights require hot air and posturing, and doesn't that sound like a lot of work? Generally speaking, I've got better things to do.

Thus, I shouldn't have been so suprised eight years ago, that night I attended a Creation versus Evolution debate at the local high school. I never would have gone, except a colleague--a pal--had agreed to sit on the side of Evolution and use his philosophical skills to debate the visiting evangelical "I'll-Give-Y'all-God-In-This-Here-Slideshow-AND-Scorn-The-Empiricists-Whilst-I'm-At-It" preacher. My colleague was nervous. He needed clapping hands in the audience.

Given the right cause, my hands can be very clappish.

One time, back in '97, I even did a "woot-woot."

Some Chinese Acrobats had just spun plates with their feet. How could I not?

At any rate, Groom and I slogged our way into the auditorium that night and settled into the hard wooden seats. At halftime, I excused myself to "go shake hands with My Savior" in the restroom.

I sat on the toilet and started to muse. Why is it evangelical preachers always wear powder blue suits? Why is it their hair--

KKKKAAAABBBLLLOOOOSH.

My musings were interrupted by an enormous eruption into the toilet. This eruption was so unusual, it was, like, NUMBER THREE, maybe even NUMBER FOUR, if NUMBER THREE was something just a little bit more impressive than poo but less impressive than what had just come out of me. Let's call NUMBER THREE cake batter.

So, yea, a volcanic thing had just exploded into the toilet water. Generally speaking, that can't be good. If it ever happens to you, make sure you mop up but good afterwards, Moby.

Especially when you're just starting Week 37 of your first pregnancy, and you're pretty sure you have, like, a month left to consider packing a bag for the hospital.

But NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. The Creationists and the Evolutionists had to go all barky at each other up there on the stage that night, getting my knickers in a very particular bind, and before you know it, my anti-conflict membranes had reacted with a pre-term rupture.

I still don't know if it was an act of God or science that caused it. What I do know is that, eyeing the ensuing bloodletting, we hied it over to the hospital an hour later. To this day, I don't know who was right in that debate at the high school, but a part of me hopes God and Darwin fled the building and settled the argument afterwards by kickin' it on the curb and drinking a couple 40's of malt liquor.

Me? I pretty quickly had a monitor strapped around my belly. "Did you have any idea your contractions are three minutes apart?" the helpful nurse asked.

Contractions? Really? Three minutes apart?

This was starting to sound like the Big Show.

And no. I had no idea I was even having contractions, much less that I'd gotten them to repeat with the regularity of a Dick Wolf cop 'n lawyer show in which a corpse is discovered in the first thirty seconds by an early-morning jogger who stops to retie his trailing shoelace.

Crikey, if these were contractions, this childbearing gig was going to be a walk in the park (just not Central Park, where I'd undoubtedly be attacked by a group of wilding youth who could only be brought to justice through the power of Sam Waterston's homey-voiced closing statement).

A couple hours later, though, I had become one with the contractions. While Groom dozed, I stared at the clock during the peaks of pain and dozed through the valleys.

By morning, infuriatingly, the contractions had stopped all together. At that point, the midwife said we could either go home--and come back later when they started up again--or we could follow the momentum and make the birth happen.

Moment of character revelation: I discovered I don't go through twelve hours of contractions just to be sent home with a casual "catch ya on the rebound." So they rolled out the Pitocin and, as long as they were hooking me up, some penicillin to treat the Strep B that had built a vacation home in my downstairs lady flat.

We were in business. Over the course of the next ten hours or so, I started out determined and then got really tired and then cried and got emotional and then had my spine poked and for awhile there got really happy and chatty and then got all panicky and wild-eyed--the whole thing being kind of like a recap of the conception--and eventually I got really, really angry.

Second moment of character revelation: I hated the pushing. Holy watermelon through a bagel, but I hated the pushing. I was surrounded by medical staff, Me Man, and a crew of galpals. They were all being really good cheerleaders, assuring me, with each push, that I was almost done, that this was IT, that one more push would do it.

Sam Waterston should have prosecuted every last delusive one of them for perjury.

It was NOT the last push. It was never going to be the last push. I hated the push. The push was a pisser.

At one point, as I lay damp and panting in between pushes, the midwife announced, "I'm going to go make a pot of coffee."

She was so carefree, so breezy, I 'bout reared off the bed and severed the midwife's tail.

Turns out, the old Pot of Coffee Trick is well-known, in, um, druidic circles for jumpstarting a plateauing labor.

Midwife returned. Everyone told me--the lying sods--that it would be just one more push.

And then, twelve pushes later, it was. And it was a girl. It was the Girl.

I sobbed crazily, like a woman who had been through labor and a Creation vs. Evolution debate in the course of one 24-hour period.

Hot upon that catharsis, I realized that getting the babe out was just Step One. Step Two was expelling and massaging the mother******* placenta out. Where had that bit of information been, in all my pre-delivery reading? Huh? HUH?

But the Girl was good, and that was lucky, so I muddled through the placental hell; soldiered through the bloody, blistered and cracked nipples the next day; and eventually we all went home. For weeks, lovely friends came and went, urging me to "Enjoy every minute of it because it goes so fast!"

More with the lies. For a long time, every minute felt like three days. Nothing flew by. After a short battle with jaundice, we all were doing fine, but never, never did I end a day wondering where the time had gone. Time was sludge. The second hand had been attached to a glacier.

A few years later, we had Niblet--at which point every minute felt like five days.

Yet.
Now.
In the last couple years.
Things have sped up.

Occasionally, a minute feels like a nanosecond. Occasionally, I start to consider the possibility that all my friends and family aren't just big whoreliars. Time sometimes gets pulled over and issued a speeding ticket.

That fact gives me profound joy, yet it simultaneously rents little fissures into my heart. This moment in my kids' lives is very, very good. It will change soon enough, though.

But what can you do? Just be.

Eight years later, we have gotten pretty good at be-ing with our Girl. She's made it easy.

Before, I had expectations of parenthood--about how challenging it would be, how rewarding, how much it would revolve around caretaking. However, I had no idea

that She would become my friend ("Can I braid your hair now?")

that She would teach me responsibility ("I need to put on my coat and hat by 8:00 and be on the corner by 8:03, or I'll miss the bus, Mom. I need to get ready now.)

that She would take care of us ("Ooh, Niblet, that runny nose needs a Kleenex! Let me get you one.")

that She would earn my respect ("I have some questions I want to ask a lot of people, like a survey. Then, when we get their answers, can I make some graphs of them?")

that She would inspire in me a keen admiration ("I want to run this 5K, and I'm going to beat you, Mom.")

that She would have an uncompromising purity of character ("I can't even breathe right when I think about people having to be slaves. It makes my heart inside of me hurt.")

that She would be unflappable (Of a neighbor boy, "He calls me an idiot all the time. It doesn't bother me because he's wrong.")

that She would illuminate how shy, quiet reserve is also gentle, poised confidence

that, by her 8th birthday (today!), She would be one of my best companions, the person with whom I'd most like to take a walk around the block at the end of the day--that She would be one of my calmest and most-insightful chums

that the promise of Her arrival the night of the debate would be fulfilled a hundredfold by 2nd grade

We created her. And what a delight is has been to watch her evolve.

----------------------------
Semi-incidentally, and if you have any more reading time, my post commemorating the Girl's birthday last year is perhaps my personal favorite...

"Next Up: A Horseless Carriage"


"Giddyup!" I hollered to my team after a long day of plowing furrows in the west field. They were whupped, but I had one more section to turn over before heading back into the cool of the soddy to soak up bacon grease with a hunk of hardtack.

Moments later, I slowed the mules and peered out from under my sun bonnet as I spied my two ragamuffins coming at me, hammer and tongs. What was that in their hands? They hadn't dipped into the last of the horehound candy from Christmas, now had they?

No. That wasn't it. What did they have there? Surely not one of those new-fangled, two-wheeled velocipedes?

Pshaw, but it was something much smaller. A new piece of calico? I had been reckoning I needed some new Sunday habiliments.

Gadzooks, but I'd never seen the like. They were holding something as small as the shrew that had bumfuzzled the cornpatch last summer. They'd best not have a shrew there, or I'd tan their hides and barter them for white sugar at the General Mercantile!

"What've you there, you rapscallions?" I asked, discommoded that I'd never get my churning set that night with such interruptions--and never a lick of help from their 'shine guzzling pa, neither, him always passed out in the lean-to.

"Make it quick now," I hawed. "Don't come showing me how your corn cob doll got scalped again when I've work to do. You know winter sets in fast and hard out here on the prairie, and there's no resting 'til the root cellar's full up."

"Um, Mom?" broke in my oldest, a girl.

"Jehosephat, Girl. Spit it out afore the shoats are ready for butchering. Enough of your palaver."

"Yea, so, Mom? It's, like, 2008 and all? Why are you so weird? We actually don't live on the prairie, and you just filled up the back of the mini-van yesterday with bags of groceries at the Cub Foods, so I'm not quite sure why you're out in the yard here, pretending to sow stuff. Plus, you just planted my soccer ball in the sand box."

"Don't bother your ma now, Half-Pint. I'm thinking that dark cloud above betokens a locust attack."

"Actually, Mom? We don't really call you 'Ma,' and that cloud is more like stink smoke from the refinery. Anyhow, Mom, if we can snap you back to reality for a minute here, we've got a birthday present for you."

"Shucks and bother, but birthdays are nothing but a vexation. I am graveled that you pay them any mind when you know full well tomorrow's washing day, and we're plumb out of lye." My mind, to tell you true, was cogitating on what a tight scratch it would be to hamper a new school marm into crossing the Mississippi and taking on that passle of ne'r-do-wells in the one-room schoolhouse.

"Get with it, Mom. We've all decided it's time for you to join the 21st Century. You refuse to carry a cell phone, but that doesn't mean you can't start enjoying an Ipod. So we got you one! Happy birthday! Now you don't have to go out running wearing those big old antennaed headphones like you do," Niblet and Girl went on at exceeding length.

"Eye pawed? What would I go and want something like that for?" I groused, mentally peppering some shot into the grouse that had just flushed out of the brush next to me.

"Cuz, Mom, it's okay if technology is your friend. Don't be afraid. We'll all be there with you. We'll show you how to download a Podcast, how to burn CD's, how to listen to your beloved Jayhawks as you sweat," they harrowed up.

"Hawk? Where? It'd better not be after the barn cats again!"

Sighing, the family reached out gently, unlaced my too-tight stays, and led me to the computer,

whereupon I uploaded, burned, downloaded, and playlisted.

And out in the fields the next day, as I put in an acre of peas, I rocked out, prim and proper-like, to Husker Du, Wilco, The Replacements, and the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Cats.

The day after that, I didn't put in any peas or even head to the fields. I just rocked out.

Hmmm. Maybe there's something to this 21st Century after all.



Next year, I hope they get me one of them high-fallutin' gee-gaws called a "safety pin."

I've got a rip in my drawers that needs hitchin' up.

"Unwrap This"

Roughly forty-one years ago, on March 25th, my mom didn't know what to get my dad for his birthday. Somehow "a child" seemed more creative than "a Mickey Mouse necktie."

So on my dad's 32nd birthday, my mom, spinal-blocked but fully conscious, pushed me out of her girl bits.

Half an hour later, she was snarfing down a ham sandwich.

This was an auspicious start.

Since then, it's become a point of pride that I've never been more than half an hour out from a ham sandwich.

And, except for twice in college, I've been fully-conscious each time I've eaten one.

About two years later, my poor parents had this on their hands.

Of course, Payback never misses an appointment. Right now, I have this on my hands:



And if your questions at this juncture are along the lines of "Is he really in nothing but his boy-panties, is that his sister's sweater he's wearing, and are those his mother's boots?" the answers are yes, yes and more yes, Sweet Ru Paul.

--------------------------------------------
Instead of just wishing me a happy birthday--which you should do, you gauche clod--tell me something about the day you were born, woncha?

Twenty-Seventh Sign of an Impending Apocalypse:

Spontaneously and unthinkingly, I recently did finger guns at a colleague during an English Department meeting.

Should I ever attend a Liberal Arts & Sciences Advisory Board meeting and toss up some gesticular air quotes, that will be your final warning.

Grab canned foodstuffs and run for your bomb shelters.

I kind of hope your bomb shelter is actually a wine cellar. Start with the Rieslings and work your way to the Malbecs. Don't bother with a corkscrew; just crack open the neck of the bottle and start chugging. Kind of like I do most nights.




Oh, and the first twenty-six signs of an impending apocalypse all involve George W.

"Preschooler Oysters"



You know how it's important for a parent to mess with her kid, just to make sure he's ready for the Whac-A-Mole game that is middle school?

I do; therefore, I view every day as a "mess-'em-up-early-and-hard" opportunity.

Case in point:

While the Wee Niblet still has affection for his Pokemon cards and is always game for a Yu-Gi-Oh duel, he's recently expanded his faux-manga-based-consumer-merchandising passions into Bakugan territory, as well.

Pretty much, Niblet is hot for Bakugan's balls.



Admit it. They're strangely attractive, weirdly soothing, these balls. You want to cradle them in your palm, don't you?

Don't be coy. One glimpse, and you can sense they give good hand.

If you don't believe your own impulses, you can