"In Which I Act Like I Invented Portland"

Although life has been beddy, beddy good to me, the last month has tested my fortitude. Men with scalpels hacked at my husband’s Special Softies; rain on top of snow turned the immediate world to ice; Niblet was diagnosed with shingles; I have—ewww!--ringworm; and our fish is depressed. Of late, I have felt that the house should be dipped in Lysol, a helicopter should aggressively spread sand across the fair hamlet of Duluth, and my open mouth should be sprinkled liberally and repeatedly with vodka.

In short, I’m ready to see a tulip already. But the first tulip is a couple of dark-mooded months away yet.

Thus, our trip to Portland these last four days, under the auspices of my attending a conference, provided just the boost my fragile spirits needed. I was so excited to get out of Minnesota that I had to exclaim upon arriving in Oregon (as though I haven't already been to Portland at least ten times in my life), “Kick my Auntie Mame, but they have rivers and grey skies here! How thrilling! We don’t have rivers and grey skies where I live! Such rare sensoral stimuli are causing within me a cultural awakening!!”

Oh, all right. We sometimes have skies of grey in the Midwest, roughly 274 days a year, and we have some river things, too (they connect all 10,000 lakes so that the kids in the state can go on an extended flume ride, starting at the Canadian border and ending with a crash in Iowa. Kind of like Buddy Holly).

But what we don’t have is this:


--The hot chocolate at Sahagun Chocolates.

I am someone who has 65% cocoa running through her veins. I wear rosewater truffles for earrings. I sport Dagoba flip-flops. I shoot Ghirardelli chocolate chip bullets from my Colt revolver. Honeypies? I know my chocolate.

However and Holy Willy Wonka, but I’ve never had a chocolate experience that equals the hot chocolate at Sahugun, and I’m not really someone who orders hot chocolate, as a rule. At Sahugun, they take single-source chocolate, melt it, toss in some hormone-free milk, and hand blend in some angel wings and cocaine, with the end result being a drink that caused Groomeo to lick his empty cup in a fashion that made me holler at him to take it to the bedroom.

It’s so good, it’d be like if it were 1984 and Journey lead singer Steve Perry decided to take the Howard Jones song “What Is Love” and turn it into a hair metal ballad, a beautiful and soaring cover that would make you cry so hard at the laser light show in your hometown that you'd have to wipe away your tears with the “party-in-back” section of your mullet.

Indeed, this hot chocolate is a total mullet wiper.


--An elegant boite called Ten 01.

Normally a bit spendy, this place offers a prix fixe lunch of three courses for $15. As a side-benefit, the cutie waiter will write out a list of the best local breweries, and not just because he wants a huge tip but more because he really wants you to go to his favorite place, where you can buy a replacement bike tube while you order your coal-black porter.


--The Hoyt Arboretum.



This is where they keep their paths.

Hey, so there’s an arboretum, too, at the college I went to. Unfortunately, they didn’t put a bar in the arboretum, so I was never motivated to find them trees out there in that place. In fact, it was Groom who showed me my college’s arb a few years ago. What a pretty place, even without rum and Cokes in it. The Portland arb is lovely as well, although I think it would be outright gorgeous if it had gin and tonics under the hemlocks.


--A shop called Voodoo Donut.



Yea, so okay, first off, I live in a city with no doughnut shop.

I know.

Portland, however, being a civilized place that understands the beauty of a good glaze, has an awesome punk-vibed shop that turns out whimsical concoctions, like ice-cream-cone-shaped doughnuts and doughnuts with Captain Crunch on top and maple-iced Long Johns bedecked with bacon.

And if you fall in love with that bacon—who wouldn’t?—you can marry it on site in the wedding chapel.


--The crispy and cracker-thin crust at Pizza Schmizza.

Sometimes, if it’s rainy and foggy, and your husband has a blister on the bottom of his foot, it’s a particular delight to limp across the street and suck on warm cheese.


--An import store covering a square block.


Wee Niblet, in addition to being a fan of Julia Child and This Old House, also loves Japanese and Chinese culture. When he heard Portland has a Chinatown, he expressed a Large Kindergartener Hope that he would get something dragonish from that place. Sadly, the reality is that Portland’s Chinatown is more a remnant of a district, and all the dragons and chopsticks have been vanquished, save for a few that live on shelves in the dreamy warehouse store called Cargo. Now we have paper lanterns, a fierce pleated dragon, a porcelain pagoda set, and some prayer flags (which we may hang on our gargantuan compost bins, just in case the neighborhood had any lingering questions about our level of boho crunchiness). If we had $42,000 more dollars in our travel budget, we’d have toted home the rest of the joint in our carry-ons. Er, carrys-on.


--Uno caffe Italiano autentico.

We happened upon the Caffe Umbria at approximately yawn o’clock, at just the moment when we were ready to dip our creepily long pinky nails into some ground espresso beans and rub the grit into our gums. Fortuitously, the Umbria took that notion and packaged it with froth and crema and drowned our dopies with doppio.


--Frantic Thai.



Sweet Basil has an elegant feel to it, and the food was plenty fine, but its outstanding feature was a tight-bunned waiter who skittered about dramatically, giving the impression he could barely take an order because he had so many buttons to push on the cash register as he settled the bills of other patrons. After tapping 72 beeping buttons, he would dash off to another table, breathlessly deliver an appetizer, and then hustle back to punch another 48 buttons on the register. The thing is, there were only 8 people, total, in the restaurant. I imagine, with that kind of efficiency, it takes him half an hour to zip his fly.



--A pub theater that gave us the best Oscars watching ever.

Admission was free, beer was tastily brewed, and the screen was huge. When a screen is that ginorm, and you’re sitting smack in front of it, you damn well better believe you’re going to cry and massage the crick in your neck enthusiastically when Shirley Maclaine comes on stage to pay tribute to a Best Actress nominee. Or maybe you’re just crying at the sight of Sophia Loren’s horrifying facelift as it’s pummeled into your every pore.




--Entire parking lots full of food carts selling ethnic delights.

Bento boxes + Pho + Tacos + Crepes = Jocelyn taking her pulse.


--A nearby outpost of Anthropologie, a store that makes me exclaim loudly to Groom, “I need to go in there right now and hug the clothes. If you try to stop me, I will push you down. Slowly, now, love: step away from the Jocelyn.”


--A place described to us by the hotel concierge as “organic” and “very committed to local food”–yet it managed to be low-key and unpretentious.

We dithered about a bit before heading to Veritable Quandary on our last evening, but ultimately, the choice was a good one, for it gave me a chance to sink my face into a melts-like-butter short rib while my beau cut into a poached egg atop a salad.

Oh, yea, and there was really thick, smoky bacon. You might have an inkling how I feel about bacon.

Finding ourselves quite moved, we both spontaneously made out with the waitress during the course of the evening.

Sometimes a meal is so good that a special gratuity is in order.
-------------------------------------------

Now we’re home. I've wiped the spittle off my lips, done heaps of laundry, gotten back into the homework grind with the kids, and continued to apply anti-fungal cream.

Even without a hint of sun, everything seems a little brighter than it did four days ago.

Then again, I have this new hive-rash-crusty thing that’s popped up on my sternum.


Nothing a trip to Taos couldn’t fix.

"Hey, Anonymous: From Your Mouse Clicking, I Have Intuited That You Like Me; You Really Like Me"


Last fall, in a boffo bit of log-rolling, I nominated a colleague for an online teaching award, and she nominated me. Mostly, we were thinking, “Excuse me? Did someone say free trip to either Oregon or Florida?” What neither of us realized at the time was that a condition of accepting the nomination was making a presentation to our peers on some aspect of our online teaching that makes us award worthy.

Bahahahahahahahaha. My first reaction was: the only thing award worthy about my online teaching is my ability to do it in my pajamas with a glass of wine in one hand. My second reaction was: the thing about a making a presentation in front of my peers is that I don’t. Do that. Because it makes me feel all barfy inside.

Interestingly, there’s something different about standing in front of a classroom of students; perhaps it’s the illusion that I’m the authority or that I’m in control of the material. Wait, here I go again. Bahahahahahahaha. The rub is that the students are willing to act like they don’t know I’m faking because they want an “A.” But with one’s peers? As Joaquin Phoenix demonstrated when he launched his rap career by falling off the stage in Las Vegas, it’s hard to fake out your fellow fakers. Personally, I know that when I’m watching another teacher give a presentation, I’m not only listening for content (if at all), I’m also looking at body language, listening to pitch of voice, wondering why they never come out from behind the desk, etc. So if I’m such a critical butthead as an audience member, I can only assume my colleagues would be similarly buttheadish when watching me.

Thus, consequently, as a result, in sum, me no wanna do it.

All this anxious thinking was already in play before I even knew that this presentation in front of my peers would also be videotaped and put on the Web, so that people unable to attend the presentations in person could still view the presentations online and vote.

Shudddddddder.

As I pictured my colleagues watching me online, I could only see that this would the stuff of a new drinking game, wherein People Annoyed By Jocelyn could gather together in front of their single old, rickety computer—my enemies are always poor--and chug their Miller Genuine Drafts (or whatever other lame drink people who don’t like me imbibe) every time I stuttered, “Um, I, cough cough, er, ahem, sometimes reply to, hack-snorf, my students’ emails, which, er, is an awardish behavior.” Clearly, my enemies are also dumb and sober, as the odds of me uttering this exact sentence more than once would be slim, so they’d get maybe one chug out of the deal. But still. The whole scenario tapped into my every fear.

Except my fear of chipmunks in the kitchen. And my children dying. Oh, and Joaquin Phoenix being serious about his rapping gig.

Whoops, and leggings worn by women over 100 pounds.

Unless, of course, I wore leggings during my presentation. Then that last thing would morph from "personal fear" into "public nuisance."

Feeling so very nervous and anxiety-ridden, I considered pulling out of the competition. That would be easy. And I’m not really a fighter by nature. I bow to Easy; I light candles for Easy; I am Easy (or so Lionel Ritchie whispered in to my ear one Sunday morning as he reached over my prone body to the nightstand and began scratching onto a cocktail napkin something that looked suspiciously like song lyrics).

Strangely, though, my deepest reaction was one of “Well, hell, girl, welcome to age 41 and your 18th year of teaching. Welcome, too, to the idea that it’s okay to do something that feels threatening and full of Landmines of Shame. What better way to slam the gates of hell on the demons of junior high for once and all?”

So I made a plan. I didn’t actually think it proved my teaching is award worthy. I mean, I’m no Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER. I didn’t grow out my hair or get tattoos and jump off the sides of the ring in my presentation. But I stood up there and said some stuff, completely unnerved by the presence of the camera on one side of the room and the small crop of live listeners on the other side of the room. Where should I be looking? At the camera? At the actual people? Would the camera pick up my voice since I didn’t have a mic? How would the sites I was projecting within the classroom show up when viewed online? Why was it so dark? Was that Freddy Krueger in the second row, thumb wrestling with Darth Vader? Where was I? Are you my mommy?

Despite the chaos in my brain, I talked for about twelve minutes (a minute longer than I can hold my breath) and clicked around to some Web pages before spreading my crinolines, curtseying, and diving for the door.

Most importantly, I didn't cry or pick my nose or become caught up in a reverie with the dry patch of skin on the palm of my hand. I comported myself something like not a total adolescent.

And nobody booooed me or fell asleep or threw rotten mangos at me--and if they had, what the hell? Anybody heard of buying locally these days? Way to gut the earth, Craven Consumers of Tropical Fruits in the North Woods.

I had expected, once it was over, to be flooded with a sense of relief and adrenaline and empowerment and maybe a little bit of pride that I'd done something that scared me as much as the idea of a bat crawling into my mouth in the middle of the night to poop and then give birth.

Mostly, though, I just felt flat and done and kind of empty. It was over, and that was about it. Just over.


Then.

Over the course of the subsequent weeks, some folks viewed and voted. And maybe I don't have so many enemies after all.

Or maybe it was the fact that there were two awards and only five finalists, and one of the finalists spent 17 minutes projecting his vacation photos to Italy and noting that they show his history students what Italy looks like when their teacher is standing in it.

Eventually, I was declared winnerish.

Indeed, as I sat at home watching Ellen one afternoon (whoops! I mean "developing curriculum"), I got a call from the VP of Technology, and he let me choose which conference I'd want to attend, and since the conference in Florida would require that I make a presentation while the conference in Oregon would require that I walk around with a folder and register at one of the vendors' booths to win a free Iphone,

I'm going to Portland this weekend.

Groom has never been to Oregon, so we're stuffing him onto the plane, as well, even though we're going to have to pay extra for his Wounded Man Bits exceeding the airline's 40 lbs and 45 inches limit.

As I step onto the plane to head to the conference, I'll take a quiet moment to overcome the flatness of the actual presentation day and remember that

sometimes being a career whore

has unexpected benefits

like getting you closer to free cable and a good cup of coffee.

"Musee Des Beaux Burglars"

There's a famed regional photographer in these parts named Jim Brandenburg; he gets a lot of cred for being the best nature and wildlife photographer around. Admittedly, if you have a taste for foxes emerging from cattails and bison sporting icicle beards, Brandenburg is your shuttershooter. His photos are crystalline and mystical and make me want to put on a parka and eat s'mores.

I posit, however, that Brandenburg has nothing on our resident Groom, who is taking a few more art classes this semester. I already knew he makes really cool pop-up cards and gets charmingly excited up about automata and can scratch out a mean sheep's head on a board and has managed to sketch a self-portrait that didn't make me nauseous, but the truth is, despite his versatility, Groom is not known for his photography. In fact, we've agreed that I have a more innate photographer's bent than he. It's well established that in the marriage, because he's good at all else, I get to trump at a few nominal things: semi-colons, binge eating, and photography.

But then. Harummmmmph.

Then he goes and takes Digital Photography and knocks both me and Brandenburg right in the telephoto, where it hurts the most. Check out this picture The Groom With the Zoom snapped at the beach up the road:



Don't you just hear Enya in your head when you look at it?

Don't you kind of wish Enya would stop her breathy cooing for. just. one. minute. so. you. could. enjoy. the. photograph?

Don't you look at this photo and find yourself believing in selkies and unicorns and fairies and the transgendered?

It's so clear. It's just so clear. As I sit here in the coffee shop, scratching my ankle, reading emails, I glance at my husband's photo and appreciate--yes!--its clarity.

Interestingly, his photo reminds me of a poem I like (one of four, I tell you, one of four, the other three penned by Dr. Seuss), a poem written by W.H. Auden and inspired by a painting of Pieter Brueghel, whom Wikipedia, in its infinite academic-ness, describes as a "Netherlandish Renaissance painter."

Here's the painting:



Here's the poem:


"Musee des Beaux Arts" W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
--1940


See that little crooked leg there in the sea? That's the thing.


Aptly, the poem points out that there's bad shizz everywhere, everyday, all around us, but because we're too busy drinking coffee and scratching our ankles (and innocent, or not-so-innocent, behinds) and checking our email, we miss it. We have our heads turned firmly towards our own business and, thusly, trip blithely past drowning boys whose wax wings melted when they flew too close to the sun. I know I heard a faint splash just last week when I was pulling out of the drive-thru at the Dairy Queen, yet I only stopped licking my ice cream long enough to muse, "Mmm. Yes. A splash of chocolate on this cone next time would be just the ticket to Greater Jocelyn Happiness." Who knew it was Icarus?

The lessons of Brueghel and Auden are sinking in, though. Already, I find myself setting down my latte, slowing my scratching, closing my email, and looking again at Groom's photo, to see what I might have missed.



Inspired, I have written my own poem:

Robble,
robble,
robble.

"Brabeaten"

Contractually, I'm required to hold a certain number of office hours each week, during which I am available to students, ready to answer their questions, comb through their rough drafts, soothe their wounded souls, listen to their tales of unwanted pregnancy and court dates. Contractually, I am supposed to be buzzing and pacing and twitching as I await Students in Need.

The contract can't make the students show up, however. And may I just say, with a dramatic sweep of the back of my hand across my forehead, "Whewww." If they showed up with any regularity, I'd have to be on my game and sympathetic and ready to explain the multitudinous rules of the comma. Bo-ring. Quite frankly, in life, I prefer to ignore the game because I'm too busy chatting with my daughter about how her language arts teacher sometimes bursts into tears when she's yelling at the class; I prefer to un-non-de-sympathaticize and, instead, act the callous brute; I prefer to, use, commas, anywhere anytime anyhow and sc,rew,,,th,e rules,

Indeed, I prefer being left alone in my office during those hours, where, solo, my time unmolested, I embark on Jocelyn's Office Hour Adventures. Usually, they're pretty tame and entail things like:

--visiting Perez Hilton's website to see if Katie Perry has worn a dress made out of cotton candy that then melted in the rain, and if not, did she at least visit MacArthur Park to see if someone left a cake out?;

--grading discussion posts in online classes, wherein I urge students, for the tri-millionth time, to stop using the word "penis" and start using the Shift key;

--throwing some handouts from 1993 into the recycling bin because that old article about the endangered spotted owl would be of more use if it were broken down and revamped into little cardboard "condo" trees that the few remaining owls could retire to;

--dropping for a few push-ups as I pretend to be G.I. Jocelyn, if, by G.I., we mean someone who can do five half-push-ups before weeping softly into her dogtags;

--taking a ballpoint and stabbing at my lunchtime orange because frick if I can get even one edge of a fingernail into the peel to get the thing started;

--calling Groom to see how many fried eggs Niblet required when he got off the kindergarten bus before he was restored enough to speak or act civilly;

--creating a new activity for freshman composition called "Writing a Good Introduction," and, in it, categorizing introductions as "Happy Face Making" or "Sad Face Making" and then drawing stick figures of myself smiling or frowning. 'Cuz this is college, Potsy, and that's a little something we call academic discourse;

or

as happened this past week, in an extended adventure

--locking my office door in a fit of pique so I could tear off my Ladies Foundation Garment, which had undergone an unexpected transformation in the laundry, becoming twisted and angry in the dryer (not only had the fabric experienced a huge falling out with the underwire, but one particular hook seemed to have snagged onto a sweater during the tumbling, whereupon they wrassled and spatted until the hook was unbent, rendered a straightened, proud, sharp, pointed dagger in the swirling mists of Bounce and Relationships Gone Bad).

I had been unaware of Foundation Garment's metamorphosis into a weapon when I had thrown it into my gym bag that morning; at the Y, when I was dressing post-workout and discovered the damage, I spent five minutes examining Tousled Foundation Garment and asking, gently, so as not to alarm it, "What queer kind of creature are you? And where is your head, dearling? What is this sharp little tail you trail behind you? Oh, it's a hook pike! What a clever puss you are! Here, let's try to right you, Puir Li'l Bra, so's Jocelyn can wear you to work today." I stroked it a little before packing my personal wreckage into Garment's empty shells and making for campus. Once there, I weathered the constant stabbing in my back for a few hours like the stoic Finn that I am, but when I finally felt a trickle of blood flowing down my back, I tapped into my inner Irish and got feisty: I knew it was time to perform hook extraction surgery upon Foundation Garment.

And what more opportune time for such a procedure than my office hour?

Cut back to me locking my office door and disrobing as I tore off the offending stabber. I started in a thrifty frame of mind, wondering if I couldn't salvage the thing. After all, if Congress is going to shove 789 billion dollars at the banks and CEO's, shouldn't I do my part to help our ailing economy, too, by, um, continuing to use what I already have so that I don't have to go out and buy stuff? Doesn't my reaction make as much sense as the government's? They can throw around a lot of money, and then, because I don't have any, I won't.

Wanting to preserve Foundation Garment's presence in my life, I sought to excise only the offending hook. Yanking with my Man Fingers didn't work. Gnawing on it didn't work (although it was rather a tasty afternoon snack, but ultimately, much like Demi Moore's performance in St. Elmo's Fire--or any other movie--it was more tease than fulfillment).

So I turned to the scissors.

Twenty seconds later, my strategy of Garment Preservation took a radical turn towards "I wonder if fabric can be composted?" I had forgotten, for a moment there, that fine motor skills are not my greatest gift. I excel, rather, at subject/verb agreement and slashing and pillaging.

Exhibit A:




Exhibit B:

My bangs in 8th grade, after I decided to give myself a trim. They've almost grown back.

Having inflicted a mortal wound, I realized Garment had become unwearable. Ah, well, I only had to get through the rest of my office hour (maybe trying out a handstand against my file cabinet for kicks and giggles and the odd black eye); then I could head home, to a place where I'm known for a patented look we call the low-hang.

The universe being what it is, however...

You know what comes next.

A knock on the door,

followed by a plaintive,

"Jocelyn, I was just wondering if you could go over my thesis statement with me and tell me if I'm on the right track..."

Sure, Megan. Sure.

Unbound, my breasts are well able to wield a pen.

"When It Rains, It Pours Barf From the Upper Bunk"

I love typing blog posts, you know. It's way big many muches of fun.

However, it takes some time, and that I don't have this week...

...now that The Flu has moved in, and we're all fighting off low-level nausea, the likes of which I last felt when watching Steven Bochco's Cop Rock back in 1990. Plus, there are the aches, the pains--oh, and in Niblet's case, the fever and the vomiting all over the bunkbeds at 1 a.m. To his credit, he did manage to earn Yack Points on approximately 100 of his 223 stuffed animals. Score!

The household is feeling like a Little Smokies sausage that's been left on the counter for about 8 days.

Gross.
-------------------------------------------------

So here's a quickie, a little vignette that attests, for once and all, to my occasionally-questioned nobility of character:

Last Sunday, I was tromping around the woods with Niblet's KidSki group, a bunch of preschoolers and kindergarteners on cross-country skis. Mostly, they fall a lot and then lay in the snowbank and eat snow off their gloves. After a few minutes, they look up, a little bewildered, and announce, "I have to pee."

At any rate, through that crazy coincidence-machine called Fate, it turns out that the 4-year-old son of my husband's "When Vasectomies Go Bad" doctor is in the KidSki group.

Oh, Little Simon. Look at you pipping along there, swooshing and falling and leaping up and laughing, all things Groom hasn't been able to do since January 23rd, when he first dropped trou for your daddy, The Scalpel Hacker.

Here comes the part where I'm noble and have good character:

At one point, I was directly behind Little Simon. Holding a ski pole. At right about the level of his future vasectomy.

And I didn't.

Pole him.

In the "Balzac."

While shouting the words, "Go home and tell your daddy how that feels, Little Simon!"

Feeling very proud of my restraint--and the fact that it had only taken three other parents tackling me to keep it from happening--

I looked up

and saw, directly in front of me and my ski pole,

the "Balzac" of Little Simon's daddy, who, breathless and sweaty, had just finished his own ski and had come to retrieve Little Simon from class.










Whoops.

"And He Hasn't Even Heard Ethel Merman Yet"

Generally, unless our orange-jumpsuited kids are off using pikes to stab at garbage in highway ditches, we don't turn on the tv during the daytime hours. Really, there's just dummm stuff on all day, and their little developing brains need to be applying themselves to more important work than watching Thomas the Tank Engine, work like learning to use the espresso machine to make Mama a mocha. So the screen remains dark until dark.

Or longer. Than until dark.



Which I know makes no sense, but I wanted to see your brain swell up and then pop as you try to parse it out.



This last week and a half, however, what with having a really big, really tragic invalid in the house, the tv has been on a lot, at all hours. And since Groom is nothing if not an over-educated white liberal, his viewing habits revolve around the PBS line-up.

What an awakening this has caused in Paco, the Wee Niblet, who has often been glued to Pappy's side, there in the bed, in front of the tv (Girl, never much attracted to moving images, retires to The Reading Corner in her room, where she pours over Volume 221 of The Babysitters' Club and twirls the end of her braid absentmindedly as she gasps over the trauma of Dawn moving back to California when clearly all her friends still need her there in Connecticut!!!!!).

But Niblet? Has been transported.

He nevewww knew before that the waves bouncing through the air from the television could contain such stuff. He nevewww knew that people actually used hot glue guns on real shows and not just at our kitchen table; he nevewww knew how fast onions could be chopped; he nevewww knew that some people find junk in their attics and bring it to a special place and find out that it's worth $50,000, which is, like, enough to buy even the Millenium Falcon Lego set.

In particular, Paco has gotten excited about

America's Test Kitchen ("Dad! Dad! That guy with the glasses and the bow tie who seems kind of cranky is on! Come on! Dad! You're missing it! They're taste-testing ketchups!"),

the understated charm of Bob Ross ("He was painting, and he talked vewwy quietly, and then--suddenly, out of nowhere--there was a waterfall. A waterfall! I'm not kidding. How did he do that?"),

and Antiques Road Show (I came in the other night to find Niblet in full recline across his pops' legs as a Tiffany lamp was being examined on the screen; he only stirred to say, "Mom, I love everything on this show. First they had a Native-American pemmican pouch. Then they looked at a hutchie thing with lots of wood--and it opened and had a latch and was from before Little House on the Prairie times. And now they have this glowing thing, which is made from beautiful and shiny stained glass. Can you even believe that some people get to own a lamp like that?")

It's not for nothing, of course, that I sometimes refer to him as My Fine Gay Son.

What could be more fun than a Fine Gay Son, I ask you? (okay, we could make a pretty srong argument here for a third-grade girl who twirls the end of her braid while bent over a book, but she's in the other room right now, so let's give her some peace)

Not only does a Fine Gay Son love him some PBS, but he also needs help painting on "rainbow fingernails with lots of glitter" and getting into a little pink gymnastics leotard, something that shows off his itty Boy Package to great effect.

Even better, some days when I come home from work, he takes one look at me and points out, covetously, "Mom, that shirt looks silky. I like that shirt."

When I ask, "Do you need to wear it for awhile?", he responds with "Let me just get nudie first; I need to feel the silky on my chest." Then, trying not to over-step, looking a little nervous, he asks, "And can I try on some of your boots now?"

Twenty minutes of shoes later, and he's dancing, twirling, glorying in silkitude and bootdom and textures and heels that click.

On the sidelines, I, the doting mother, just want to squeeze him up, as I envision his future on the stage, perhaps--if I'm really lucky--as a drag queen.

Yum. Aging stage mother of a drag queen. Suddenly, everything clicks into place. Sure, to complete the image, I'll need to take up chain-smoking. Plus, I'll need a wig. And maybe a few polyester pantsuits. I envision myself as a cross between Carol Channing, Shelly Winters (in her later years), and Lucille Ball (post-post-post Desi).

There I'll be, in a dark corner of the venue, inhaling deeply, taking a swig of my highball, and then exhaling in admiration at my son as he presents his spangled interpretation of "When Sunny Gets Blue."

As I fluff my wig with manicured claws, I'll silently thank Bob Ross, Christopher Kimball, and the antiquarians on the road show for opening up his world.

I'll also cackle a little, before breaking into an extended coughing fit, at the fact that he not only has devoted parents in the audience,

but he also has a manager he can trust. When he bombs, and the crowd yells, "Give him the hook,"

The Manager, backstage, will stop twirling the end of her braid and set down her book

just long enough to usher him to the safety of his dressing room.

"Starring Goofus and Gallant"

A few days after his surgery, Mr. Jocelyn’s Groom hit the skids emotionally, a not uncommon occurrence as the body detoxifies from all that anesthesia and hospital food. In the face of day after day in bed, with two more weeks before he’s allowed to take a soothing bath, and a month or more before he’s able to exercise, a certain natural depression has set in. I’m sure it doesn’t help that I am the brilliant, glowing delight of his life, my very presence offering up all the balm of Vaseline on a chafing crotch, yet I’ve been busy taking out the compost and recycling and folding heaps of laundry and chauffering the kids to Girl Scouts and karate and teaching classes and making tacos and frittatas…which means I only ever sit down and look him square in the face after 9 p.m.

Sweet Nurse Cherry Ames, but that makes for some long, lonely hours of convalescence for Our Hero.

Fortunately, all it took was the projection of a “Groom Needs Cribbage Companions” bat signal into the night sky, and our troops of friends and family have rallied ‘round his tender frame and swollen package. He’s been telephoned and cribbaged and Quiddlered and Mexican Train dominoed into distraction. All these pitcher-inners have been the highlight of the week for us.
Of course, because I'm a licensed member of Life's Rich Pageant, I’ve had other highlights:

1) I had one of those crazy-ass hangnails that is painful and long—a real sweater snagger—and, stuck in a situation with no nail clipper, nevertheless managed to use my ferocious incisors to gnaw it off, with only minimal blood loss. Snap.

2) The local microbrewery has just put out its seasonal recipe, an Old Man Winter Warmer Ale, which is essentially a barley wine. It’s artisanal stuff, and I am like the National Endowment for the Arts in my semi-constant, passive/aggressive support of creative efforts. I’ll drink their ale. But only sometimes, when it pleases me. This week, it done gone please me veddy much. Other weeks, I save my support for a crucifix floating in urine.

3) One golden day that I'll call Wednesday, I ran nearly seven miles on the treadmill at the Y, enjoying every minute and setting a PR for that distance. Of course, I was only able to hit that mark due to my immersion in celebrity gossip mags. Thank you, Brangelina, for keeping your twins out of sight and making the tabloids wonder if you’ve eaten them (slow roasted on a spit makes infants particularly tender). I read that story during mile five, which flew by. Jessica Simpson’s high-waisted jeans eased me through the last crippling quarter mile. All I need to get to the finish line is a size 6 frame packed into size 4 denim.

4) Niblet and I reveled in our first visit of the year to one of my happiest winter diversions: the local pack ice. The lad (who also goes by "Paco" around the house these days) got to use his homemade ice picks and scale Everests of jumbled slabs, until scurvy eventually set in and, after a last-ditch attempt to secure help by leaping across ice floes to Wisconsin, well, we collapsed, but not before scratching out, in an echo of arctic explorer Robert Scott, the final words of "For God's sake look after our people."

Of course, since Niblet's six years old, by "people," he meant his Star Wars Lego Anikin Skywalker and a host of Playmobil soldiers. Okay, and an Ariel The Mermaid Barbie that he sleeps with but nobody needs to ever ask about, so just shut up already and look after them like he asked in his final letter, unless that's just too hard for you, Mrs. Poncy-Who-Sits-In-Her-Warm-House-While-Some-Of-Us-Explorers-Risk-Our-Lives-To-Um-Well-Er-Walk-On-Ice.

Despite the dangers, we did have a good afternoon sliding around this junk:











Paco has been wanting a pet. I pointed at that rock and told him I'd gotten him a woolly mammoth at Petco. He totally bought it, and now we have to drive back there every day and drop an offering of 100 pounds of willow and fir boughs into a ginormous doggie bowl.



Just as scurvy threatened to team up with rickets and anemia and end the expedition for good, Niblet and I cleverly resorted to cannibalism, ate each others' ear lobes as appetizers, and found the steam to drive home.

There, while we broke the freeze off our paws and watched Groom wincingly pack another bag of snow to his manlies,

we

restrained ourselves

from telling him

in breathless detail

about

the glory that he's missing.

"Four Days Out, and It's Still the Size of a Whoopie Cushion"

Last week, possessed by all-too-familiar body image demons, I got in a funk, wherein I stomped around and moaned to Groom, "I just can't lose these damn seven pounds. You know I want to blame it on my tortoise-like metabolism, but, yea, it might be more honest just to label it my Wine Weight. Poop, poop, poop, I hate this. I hate being hungry all day and still never losing a pound. Blah, blah, blah, blech, blech, blech, feh, meh, waaaaah."

In response, Groom threatened to throw the scale out the window, assured me people don't gasp in horror when I walk by, and we moved on with our lives.

Then.

The next day.

Groomeo-Groomeo went into the clinic for a quick and easy 45-minute elective surgery, one aimed at controlling global population, particularly within our house. Basically, he went in to have his vas deferens tightened and resurfaced.

An hour later, he was home, and as he stood there, peppily recounting to me the procedure, things changed.

Suddenly. Dramatically.

Eight hours later, freshly back from the hospital, I sent out a quick email rundown to select friends and family:


So if you've ever seen a Hallmark card that reads "Sorry About Your Botched Vasectomy!!!", go back now and purchase it. Then write "Jocelyn's Groom, c/o St. Luke's Hospital, Duluth" on the envelope and mail that sucker.

Yea, having a vasectomy is supposedly an easy in-and-out-of-the-clinic-in-under-an-hour procedure...but when you then get home and start holding forth about how it all went fine, while at the same time your expensive Kavu pants are suddenly drenched with a waterfall of blood...well, then, the "easy" procedure takes on something called "complications."

Within minutes, you find yourself laying on the bedroom floor on a stack of towels, holding three washcloths and a bag of ice to your Boy Parts as you ask your wife to bring you "some of those pad things you wear every month; I need something that really staunches the flow of blood."

Thirty seconds later, you might advise your wife to call the doc, who, upon hearing of the amount of blood smeared all over the floors of the second story of your home, tells the wife to "pack your husband in a plastic bag if you need to, but get him back up here, fast."

When you get back to the clinic, the doc will try to lance your cantaloupian groinal region with a scalpel repeatedly as he notes that he's not seen this type of problem after a vasectomy before. He will excuse himself from the room to talk to the urologist. He will return to the room minutes later and tell you they're expecting you at the ER downtown.

A quick slide down the hill, and you will be in a wheelchair and heading to the operating room at the hospital within six minutes of walking through the doors. By the time your wife hands over your insurance card, they'll have told you "in our parts, we call this an eggplant scrotum." They are very apt in their description.

Eight minutes after you enter the ER, you are in the operating room FOR FOUR FREAKING HOURS.

During all this, a sainted neighbor has watched, read to, fed, and tucked in your children. The low point of the evening occurs when your wife realizes she's just read every magazine in the waiting room, including the AARP periodical. She slaps herself when she realizes she enjoyed an article about alleviating joint pain.

A bit before nine p.m., lovely nurses secret your wife into the recovery room to see you before she heads home to Children of Love. You tell your wife, "I'm pretty confused. I feel like I've been run over." You eat lots of ice chips.

So it's a night in the hospital for Vasectomy Man, complete with complimentary drains in your scrotal sack, plus the bonus of a catheter. But they stopped all the bleeding and tell you there will be no long-term effects.

Despite this assurance to the Males of the World, you would like to urge them to consider continuing their fertility until they die, even if it means they have 24 children.

On that note, the tired wife, who has typed up this acccount, retires to her bottle of Shiraz.

Jocelyn

-------------------------------
The next day, we found out that, for some fluke reason, his vasectomy stitches had popped and caused the arteries on both sides down there to bleed buckets. While he ended up not needing a transfusion, his hemoglobin was low the next day, so Groom ended up spending two nights in the hospital.

He's been home two days now, hobbling around in his pajama pants, asking me periodically to fill another Ziploc bag with snow (the perfect anti-inflammatory). While he's planning a shuffle outside and down to the corner someday soon, just to take the air, it will still be some time before he drives or wears pants with a zipper.

After all the hullabaloo, we did have a lovely moment, though, on Saturday, when I bent down,

kissed his cheek,

and thanked him for finding exactly the right technique to help me

lose five pounds in two days.

"Making the Case"

While there are sparks in my marriage, they're of the "Baby, you so hot I gots to dab the nape of my neck with a moist sponge just to keep off you" variety more than "You swollen gonad, the very sound of your voice is like the tines of a fork screeching down a chalkboard that has been shellacked with aluminum foil and broken sea shells, a sound that makes me want to shriek to the heavens as I snap the fork and yank your head off."

You see, with both of us descending from Northern European stock, Groomeo and I tend towards a certain levelness (as well as a fondness for the combination of vodka and sleeping in snowbanks). Subsequently, we don't really fight.

Indeed, our marital sparks don't fly during fiery exchanges, wherein I throw a wooden spoon from the spaghetti sauce at my husband, and he dodges it, resulting in smears of sauce on the wall behind him that we then watch dry, over the course of ensuing months, to a crisp brittleness, a process matched only by the creeping desiccation of love in our hearts. Fortuitously, the Groom and the Jocey aren't left mopping up sauce--or the pieces of our shattered dreams dipped into a soggy tempura of tears.

Mostly, we look at each other, mutually exasperated, and roll our eyes at kid drama; or we bust a lung guffawing at Flight of the Conchords; or we say "yummmmm" really loudly when we take the first bite of homefries at dinner time; or we ask "How was your ski?" when the other comes into the house covered tip to toe with ice crystals and a hint of frostbite on the nose; or we band together to point out the flaws of people not in our presence; or we wonder aloud why we stopped listening to Liz Phair for a couple of years; or we go into manic-duo-folding-laundry mode before bedtime in an effort to make-go-away the five loads of rumpled clothes that obscure our mattress; or we stand behind our new digital camera and push buttons, noting repeatedly, "Nope, I don't know what that one does, either."

Me likey him. He likey me. It's that easy.

In fact, we live in such monotonous harmony that we were surprised, a few weeks ago, to stumble across a sideways sort of marital disagreement.

See, last month, I went out for drinkies with The Ladies (this one time, I don't actually mean my breasts when I type "The Ladies"; I mean actual people. They have breasts, though, some of them mighty pert. That's part of what makes 'em ladies. That, and their unnatural fixation with shoes). My dinner that evening consisted of foodstuffs taken directly from the nutritional pyramid's recommended blocks of Ultimate Nachos and Big Boat Stout.

Back at home, on kid duty, Groom had a bachelor's meal: leftover chili heaped onto a bed of noodles, all ladeled over a baked potato.

The next morning, as I held my aching head and heard what he'd eaten, I could muster up only a rousing "Blech and more blech. Noodles on a baked potato? Way to carbo-load. Go out and run for three hours now, Marathon Man. Get me some ibuprofen--and a medicinal martini--while you're at it."

"You shudder, but it was really good," he maintained. "I'd seen somewhere that there's actually a dish like that called 'Cincinnati Chili,' so I thought I'd try it."

"There is not such a thing anywhere, ever, on Planet Earthy. And you should not have done that thing to your food. Swear to Gross Meals Anonymous, but no one ever would willingly put all those things together and shovel them into their pie hole. No such thing exists. Stop being a big liar."

"It was good, and I know I saw the recipe in Gourmet or somewhere."

Continuing to elucidate my feelings with all possible ration, I yelled, "You did not go and do bad things to food like that on purpose! And we all know that foo-foo poncey magazine Gourmet is a big story-maker-upper just like you, Mr. Liarpanties."

Ready to take me on, and well aware of my despair over students who write research papers in which all sources on the Works Cited page begin with "wiki-," Groom got a glint in his eye.

"I, uh, just need about five minutes upstairs," he called out, heading for the computer. Moments later, I heard him muttering to himself, "Creating a Wikipedia entry about 'Cinncinati Chili' couldn't take longer than five minutes, right?"

Overhearing him, I bellered, "You are SO busted. You can't try to be right by making up your own Wikipedia page to show me! I cry foul! Step away from the computer, you aggressor against juried and peer reviewed academia!"

Once I stopped tackling him--whoops, sparks were starting to fly!--he gasped, "I can too make up my own Wikipedia pages for anything I ever need to prove to you, like the fact that an entire city in the U.S. does put chili over noodles."

Hey, wait. Just chili over noodles? I was already down with that part.

In truth, it was the last step, of hefting the chili-noodles onto a baked potato, that had made me incredulous. I mean, no one needs the baked potato in there when you've already got the warm, soft clouds of flour and salt called, in some exotic climes, pasta. That's where the whole thing got dummm. But chili and noodles? Yea. Duh.

At this point, Groom clarified: "I was only saying that 'Cinncinati Chili' is chili over noodles. It so happened I was really hungry last night, so I decided to have a baked potato, too, and then I didn't want to dirty two dishes, so I put it all in the same bowl. I wasn't saying they also do the potato part waaaay over there in Ohio. I would never try to sell you on the potato."

Oh. Well.

Nevermind.

Once we calmed down a bit and regrouped after The Great Potato Misunderstanding of Late-2008, calming our breaths to a mere 20 a minute, I realized we'd entered a new era. Groom was, after almost ten years, ready to wrangle:

"I'll be better prepared next time, you know. I'm going to make up the Wikipedia page first, and then I'm going to tell you that astronauts can't cry correctly in space. If they get distressed, say, by an overly-full diaper, their tears--unbound by gravity--only fly upwards, straight into their eyes...unless they are clever enough to hold a cup near the eye region and capture the tears (with quick little squirrel hands) and mix them with Tang. This gives them a refreshing beverage that only ten people have ever drunk. True fact. You can look it up."

"Blind-sided and Gobsmacked"


It was just a regular day, suddenly sucking.

Very fatigued that morning, I managed to dress myself, even hooking my bra--not just letting The Ladies dangle and flap in the wind. I even managed to apply a little slap and hairspray, getting in costume to mimic an adult.

Exiting the house, the door slammed shut, and in that nanosecond, I had a realization: I felt in my pockets. No keys. No way to drive the car. No way to get back into the house.

Scrambling and ringing doorbells 'round the neighborhood, I found a neighbor who could give me a lift; during the drive, I heard about how her marriage is over, for reals this time, and she and the kids will be out by spring; getting to campus, I found Groom (who was working the art show) and hollered breathlessly at him not to leave; then I ran into my classroom eight minutes late and hollered at them not to leave before hitching a ride home with Groom, and, moments later, turning around to drive back to the college, getting there just in time to gather up the comma activities I'd gotten my class working on in the midst of my 18-mile dash; finally, at noon exactly, dabbing the sweat from my forehead, I hit a curriculum meeting.

While I sweated and dabbed, our household had the son of a thirty-four-year-old woman who'd just had a double masectomy over for playdate. Two hours later, our pregnant neighbor slid off the road and had to go into hospital for monitoring, which meant we got to entertain her three-year-old daughter for the evening.

By the time 10 p.m. hit, the kids had just gotten to bed; we'd just eaten pesto; Groom had slapped his prone form onto the bed; and it was off to teach my online classes.

Grading a research paper on how Jenny McCarthy cured her son of autism, I found my inner self rejecting all post-post-post modern ironic conditioning. What other possible reaction was there, when grading a college-level research paper on how Jenny McCarthy cured her son of autism--and network stations went off the air--than to tune into The Cosby Show?



Two decades after tolerating an episode, I, to my simultaneous horror and surprise, watched the show avidly. I found it timeless and smart and realistic and brave. It had characters sitting down and talking to each other, in a relatively-unscripted fashion, in five-minute exchanges. It had self-deprication. It had style.

Surreally, I saw myself reacting positively to the show I should mock; I saw myself respecting an easy target. I hardly knew myself. Where'd. my. beyotch. go?

During that episode, I found myself more surprised than I had been by the day of hurting mothers and missing car keys. I found myself moved, barely breathing, taken back to a moment of fundamental admiration and amazement: I found myself, having just weathered 18 minutes of Vanessa and Denise fighting over a purple sweater, well,

I found myself crying.

In this episode, the entire Brooklyn brownstoned family had been fraught with rammies, butting up against each other. A tentative peace had been struck, but all of them, in their shoulder pads and lame' fabrics, were still stomping around a bit. Then, as they walked through the living room, a voice reached them from the television.

"Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends."

Whatzthat, Scooby?

The Huxtables, plus one pasty white Midwestern girl on a futon, lurched to a stop.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

Cliff, Clair, and I smoothed down our gelled hair and listened harder, the day's hassles falling away.

"I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'"

We sat down on the couch together, me shouldering in against Theo (who never should have gotten his ear pierced without telling his parents), riveted by astonishment. Something wondrous was happening.

"With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day."

Holy Zeke. I may have slammed into the classroom that morning, panting and cussing and apologizing to students for being late, explaining about having hitch-hiked a ride. At lunch, my husband may have fed Pokemon mac 'n cheese to the son of an stricken woman who had been forced chose to have both of her breasts cut off. At dinner, we may have hosted the soon-to-be big sister neighbor girl, whose mom--six months pregnant--was taken hostage by her car as it careened into a bank of trees. We may have found ourselves exhausted and hungry and overwhelmed by 10 p.m.

I may have found myself going to work, grading papers in my online classes, at midnight. I may have felt achey, physically and emotionally, from the cruddy day.

But this?

"And this will be the day -- this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim's pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true."


Well hell.

I, who always chafed at the Pledge of Allegiance, was humbled. I had a flash of recalling that I am nothing, yet I am part of everything.

Cuddling in, I held Rudi Huxtable on my lap, and she was soft and smelled of biscuits. And, as I twirled one of her braids, how could I even fake being cool? I was hanging with the Huxtables, sharing in miraculous rhetoric. We were just people, united across decades and networks, held rapt by truth and beauty and words of justice.

Adjusting Rudi on my lap, I admired Denise's bangles, patted Theo's be-sweatered back, and continued to cry.

"...when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"


---------
My worst day wasn't even on the same continuum as this Best Day.

"Ashen, Ashen, I Bawl and Fall Down"

For the event of Niblet's birth, we bartered for the services of a local doula (if you can't buy the time of a lesbian who works at the Environmental Protection Agency for the price of a gallon bag of frozen pesto and a six-course feast including hand-made butternut ravioli...then it's time to kvetch about the state of the economy). "Doula" is a Greek word meaning "she who will dive into a uterus to pull out the remaining piece of a placenta when everybody else in the room is more concerned with taking APGAR scores."

A doula is kind of a labor assistant, someone who tells the nurses to back-the-eff-off if they're clacking too much in your face, someone who suggests that a pair of feet dug into one's lumbar might be just the ticket to relieve back labor. Some doulas also create written narratives of the labor and delivery, just in case you want to recall at a later time that one of the blood vessels in your eye burst during the pushing.

Our doula, Anne, was cool. When Niblet maneuvered into a bad-bad-no-no position a couple weeks before his due date, she researched various stretches and lunges I could do to get him to shift back. It didn't work, but, as a faux-academic, I can always appreciate failed research.

On the day of Niblet's delivery, when I worked for eleven hours to pass his 10+-pound body, which was posterior facing instead of the preferred-anterior position, I kind of, um, stalled out. I was done and ready to wait until he and I both died, whereupon we could romp together in a heaven much like the scene in 1977's James at Sixteen when James had a crush on Little House on the Prairie's Melissa Sue Anderson, and they ran towards each other across a flower-filled meadow. Pretty much, I was ready to be Lance Kerwin, and my unborn baby was cast as Melissa Sue.

But then the damn doula refocused me and told me to lower my vocalizing out of the high-and-ineffective-wounded-puppy range, to drop it more into a gravelly and powerful "This-is-the-big-one-I'm-coming-Elizabeth" Fred Sandford plaint. So I started grunting real low-like and forcing my breath to do some work. It was a pretty remarkable sound of channeled pain.

Fat lot of good it, and the doula, did. Fancy-schmancy labor assistants and their blather about breathing. I'll tell you how to get a damn baby out of you: let a well-paid team of carpenters take their blades to you and cut the thing out.

Now that worked. They hacked me open, and out came Melissa Sue.

Who knew, however, that nearly six years later I'd be giving the low, primal, Sanfordian groans a curtain call...all due to that same Melissa Sue (now a little boy in kindergarten)?

Who knew that I'd be carrying his 54-pound body towards the bunk bed one night and step on this, a much-coveted ring that I'd picked up off the floor already at least twenty-nineteen times that week:



Of course, I was barefoot, and the ring was turned sword side up. Impaled, dropping Melissa Sue, crazy with the pain, I yanked on it.

The ring didn't budge.

I pulled again, harder, trying to get the sword to yield my foot flesh.

Arrrgh, maties, but it hung tight.

For a nano-second, I wondered what kind of boot Steve Madden makes that could accommodate foot-with-pirate-ring-growing-like-a-barnacle-out-of-the-sole.

If it meant new boots, I might be able to live with the thing.

Contemplating my options, I also hopped around wildly and--apparently--emitted a familiarly deep and extended moan of pain.

Generally, cries of pain are ignored in our house, as they are all overblown act, put on by the drama queens that live with my husband and daughter. But in this case, Groom detected a different tenor. He heard the doula keen. He knew my pain was real and that carpenters might need to be called in.

In fact, he was so convinced actual pain was happening that he dropped his chef's knife (thankfully not into his foot; I could have told him that would hurt like a mudder-effer) and raced up the stairs, hollering, "Are you okay?"

At the moment he crested the stairs, I was delivered of a healthy pirate ring. It popped out with a flourish and belched a weak cry. As when Niblet was born, I managed to heave out the words "That. Hurt. Me. A. Lot. That. Should. Not. Happen. Anymore."

Crankily, I hobbled into the bathroom and scrounged for the Bactine and gauze. That's been Niblet's legacy to me: blood and gauze and misplaced toys and despairing cries. Several times now, he liked to have killed me.

This week, as as the lad turns six, I am twirling dizzily in the circle of life. His birth gave me a new noise to make; six years later, I trotted it out again. In six more years, when he's twelve, he'll whack me in the head with a remote control in a fit of pique. He shall make me groan again, and often.

Yet.

Of course.

Without him there would be

no moon that looks like a "sleeping banana,"

no snowman called Puffy made out of cotton balls and M & M's,

no cadre of stuffed kitties named Star, Butterscotch, Strikes, Jingles, and Flash,

no body made prone with laughter over "sufferin' succotash,"

no science "conspiriments" of growing "jiggly crystals that look like the sunset,"

no Baby Paco who is learning to walk (a character he inhabits through much of the day),

no fried eggs and frozen blueberries for lunch,

no heap of broken junk in the basement for "when Dad learns to weld, and we make a robot,"

no one asking Girl to hold him on her lap and groom his hair "like chimpanzees do,"

no one humming "Allouette" under his breath while throwing a bowling ball at Optimus Prime,

no one naming his betta fish Anikin,

no one seranading me with a song that goes "this is my soft leeetle weenis,"

no one climbing into the bed every morning to hug my cranky body to wakefulness,

no one who moves through the world just as I do, a perfect partner in hyper-sensitivity and goof-ass-ish-ness.
--------------------------
Thus, at the end of an extended visceral growl, I have discovered

there couldn't be a more perfect pain.

"Una Mas Mindy"

The new semester looms, and while I attempt to ramp up the performance energy that is required to stand up in front of 25 dull-eyed under-the-table texters and actually get them to look towards the front of the room occasionally, I find myself missing last semester's crop of students already. I mean, I was used to them; I knew their stories. I knew Jake was mad at his mom for selling his quad (for those of you in the crowd who lean more towards Sarte, Mendelssohn, and cross-stiching than environmental destruction: a quad is a four-wheeled all-terrainish vehicle that is very loud and mud-inducing and not at all something Sarte and Mendelssohn would have ridden tandem on, even though their even attempting that would have required Jean-Paul to participate in a grave-digging caper under cover of darkness, during which he and a pick axe would have worked through the night to exhume Medelssohn's decaying corpse from Trinity Cemetery in Berlin, and really, if we're being frank, I tend to think Sartre would have been too paralyzed by existential angst to carry out the deed; one shovel full of earth, and he'd have been whining about all endeavors being "on principle doomed to failure." Plus, he was a puss of the highest order and had virtually no upper body strength). I knew Elsie was finding happiness now that she'd left the ballet, a place where "community" consisted of everyone sticking their fingers down their throats in unison. I knew Katie and her mom were still sharing a bedroom at her uncle's house. I knew Chris had shaved his head, gotten a black eye, and peed in his own closet while drunk (events that comprised "October" for him). I knew underground-punk fan Ross had had his car broken into and all his music stolen. Oh, yea, and his textbooks. But mostly, he wanted his Kill Mosh F*** Destroy bootlegs back. I knew Obe hadn't spoken to his father for five years. I knew Jon had gone to court in November because he'd "broken some stuff"; I knew this same Jon had recently been elected a student body senator. I knew Brianna used to be on swim team but now thought she was fat. I knew Amy liked only her boyfriend and Burger King since returning from two tours in Iraq. I knew Tamara volunteered at an elementary school's kid connection program.

These were my peeps. We talked about thesis statements and ribbed each other and peer reviewed papers and gave each other rides home. We were cool.

Now, next week, I face tromping into a classroom full of an entirely new crop of 25 dull-eyed under-the-table texters. Certainly, I'll wear my tap shoes and full Vegas showgirl headpiece, but still. It's hard to break through their studied indifference. I know a couple of weeks in, when I've mocked myself and them enough, we'll loosen up and slide into the "coherence through use of transitions" party zone.

Until then, I'll miss the room full of last semester's weebles. One in particular.

You know who.

Mindy.

She squeaked through my class with a C, and she's not taking the next level of composition, which relegates her to the ranks of the other 5,000 students I've had in my teaching career: a fond memory. Fortunately, because Mindy herself was so vivid, my memories of her will be, as well. One of the last times I saw her, we had this exchange:

Mindy: So my boyfriend, the butthead loser, is going to jail.

Me: Oh, that sucks. Do you need a "file-in-a-cake" recipe, so you can bust him out? I have a great one, handed down from my grandma.

Mindy: Huh? I don't even have a stove since the landlord took it, plus I cut off all my nails, so I don't have to file them anymore. I kinda spice them up now, though, with these little glitter stickers that I put on each finger. You likey?

Me: I do. I do. You should send some of those to Posh Spice. She'd appreciate the fashion upgrade. So what's up with your boyfriend again?

Mindy: He got pulled over again and nailed for all his driving without a license tickets that he never dealt with. They arrested him, and the judge is sending him away for a minimum of 30 days, but it might even be 60. At least it won't be two months. That would've just been nasty.

Me: Wow. So that's going to really stress out your relationship, I'd guess. I mean, hasn't he been driving you to school and taking you to drop off your daughter at her daddy's grandma's house for babysitting and stuff?

Mindy: Yea, he drives me sometimes, but mostly he goes out and buys $300 track suits and watches cable all day while he gets stoned. He gets so pissed at me when I yell at him for not getting food again. And the big thing about his going to jail is that they won't let me see him, and he had our rent money on him. So how am I supposed to pay the rent this month?

Me: Really? Can't you just go in and explain the situation and see if maybe the nice coppies would slip you a few hundred out of your boyfriend's wallet? Isn't that how the judicial system works?

Mindy: Nope. I'm screwed.

Me: Well crud, honey. And of course all of this is coming down right during final exams.

Mindy: Okay, I totally shouldn't say this, but I'm actually kind of relieved that he's gone. It's like, I actually want to be in my apartment now. I actually like hanging out with my daughter. It's so much easier when he's not around. I can't wait to clean the place and make some mac and cheese. Truth is, I hope the judge gives him the 60 days, so my vacation can last longer.

Me: I hope the judge gives him 90 days, and in that time, you find a new apartment and a way to pay for it and leave no forwarding address.

Mindy: Wow, that would be harsh. Then he couldn't find me. He's my boyfriend. That would just be wrong. Oh no, my baby's gotta come home to me.
--------------------------------------------------
As the next semester starts to swing, and a new crop of students and I launch ourselves into the swirl of apostrophes and brainstorming and developing paragraphs, my secret hope is that Mindy recalls a few of our classroom discussions about logic, applies them to her own life, and wraps her waiting arms around herself instead of the recently-sprung loser butthead.

And on that note, wiping a quiet tear from my eye with one of her essays--the one she wrote about how it's better to live with someone than live alone--I raise a bong of tribute to Mindy.

Me (inhaling): May you (cough cough) have a (choke gasp) better year (hark gargle) in 2009 than you did (flagglequacken) in 2008. And if (exhaling dramatically) you can't find the tits to dump the loser, may you at least get your fuel pump fixed (pounding chest).

To Mindy.

"Suprisingly Inferior Tamales"

I intend to type short, declarative statements.

We just got back from 12 days in southern California. I had virtually no Internet access there. So I missed blogging and reading and such. But I put my feet in the Pacific and watched whales leap and had a ginger lemon mojito. I got by.

Now I'm home. The new semester gears up in two days. Astonishing heaps of Teva sandals, just-delivered Christmas mail, and soiled undies await my attention.

Thus, I will type only short, declarative statements. The trip was great. We hung with my mom. We visited with dear friends. We went to our first American Girl store--one of four in the U.S. My friend who took us there noted that, upon her first visit to such a place, she understood as never before why Al-Qaida would want to bomb us. She was standing smack dab in the midst of all of our too much, too big, too slick, too smug-ness. She got it. Then, moments later, she spotted her first Samantha & Nellie doll set and was lost in a different kind of romance. I was struck similarly. Like good Americans, we threw dollars at their open cash registers while ducking and covering.

Meh. Short, declarative statements are tough. I re-focus. We also had grand kid days at Sea World and Legoland. We hiked in Palm Springs. We toured the Universal Studios back lot and stood in Whoville and next to the Bates Motel.

Lacking more time to type declaratively, I give you the pictorial overview:

Lots of places looked like this. These aren't birches, Sven.


On Christmas, we spent a good part of the afternoon swimming in the pool at my mom's apartment complex. Because it's an "over-55" place, the elderlies insist that the pool is heated to 80 degrees, or they refuse to attend the water aerobics class. Thus, even though it poured rain on us, we were plenty warm. And airborne. And, in the case of Groom, scary-faced.

This is the inner courtyard of the stunning Mission Inn, part of downtown Riverside. We'd heard Riverside is the armpit of southern California, but personally, I thought it was great. Some nice workers at The Coffee Bean across the street from the Inn handed me a peanut butter cookie with a Reese's smashed on top, too. I could live in such an armpit.


A little drive down to Temecula took us to the "house" of Professor Phinneas Pennypickle. Visitors get to explore his inventions. Niblet and I took this balloon to a place called Oz. Then a house fell on me, and he became munchkin mayor.

Gyroscopes can make you spinny.

We spent an afternoon visiting a couple of beaches between Carlsbad and San Diego. Girl loved it, except when we asked her to do a Baywatch run, and she fell and skinned her knee. And we'd thought the waves were dramatic.


As it turns out, all a five-year-old boy needs is a stick and an ocean. And a change of clothes.


This shizz will leap out of the water at you when you go to Sea World. After we snapped this photo, that beast ate the boy. One gulp. Followed by a polite round of applause from appreciative onlookers.

Shut up already that I burst into tears the first time the music swelled and Shamu swept up into the air like that. Shut. Your. Fuzzbuster.


After we snapped this photo, that beast ate the trainer. One gulp. Followed by a polite round of applause from appreciative onlookers.

This panoodling cactus lives in the Old Town part of San Diego. In the Old Town part of San Diego, if you're driving a mini-van, don't park in a spot for RV's. You'll get a $50 ticket.

Word has it.


Legoland is the best art museum I've visited in an age. Thomas Kinkade could not even make this dragon out of legos.

For awhile now, Girl has wanted a baby brother. In a few years, she'll want a new mother. For one brief moment, she had both. I hope she enjoyed it, 'cause neither ain't happenin' no other way, no how.

Yea. I KNOW.

We also went to Pasadena to stay a night with my mom's friend, Tom. He's an eccentric, but I want his house and art (there's a Darth Vader made out of legos in the guest bath) and furniture. He can keep his eccentricity. I'm sure I wouldn't know where to put it.

One of my college roomies lives in L.A. and squeezed that li'l honey there out of her loins last April. I've advised her to never take Baby to Sea World. A dolphin would gulp her as an hors d'oeuvres, for sure.

Niblet likes to smoke a little reefer before he cuddles A Teensy.

The mountains around Palm Springs do go up. If you comment about this picture, please note loudly how good my pal Jim looks. He's all strung out about "being fat." He should have been more worried about my kicking his sleek ass at Scrabble that day.

You do know that the skies taken on heavenly aspect, and majestic vistas unfold whenever Groom is around, right?

The holidays passed.

A new year began.

Rather than embracing it as a time of change or new beginnings, I am hoping fervently for a continuation of the same.

More. Of exactly this.

For a long, long time.