Tuesdays with Grandma

Yesterday, I was feeling pretty perky for a Tuesday, so I decided to use that energy for something good.  I went to visit Grandma.

Grandma lives in a senior retirement community.  It kind of reminds me of a cruise ship.  She has a lovely, clean apartment, and access to the following:  2 beauty parlors, a cinema with recliners, a quaint café, two gorgeous dining rooms, a little store to buy milk and other sundries, an exercise room, an art studio, and a library.  Oh, and a bar. 

“Have to have the bar!” Grandma says sarcastically. 

At the community, there are movies played and various cultural excursions offered daily.  They provide transportation to church, to the grocery store, and to the mall.  They offer diversions like Bingo and Po-ke-no, a game that requires a lot of pennies.  (Grandma is always flush with change.  If she’s had a good night at Bingo, she’ll pay for my lunch when I come to visit.) 

They play Lawrence Welk in the community room every evening at 7:00.

Here are some events planned JUST TODAY:  Pet therapy with Diane!  A Chair Exercise class!  Guest Speaker Mike the Getaway Guy in the Meeting Room!  Band practice at 7:00!  Beth’s Classical Music Program at 3:00!

I get excited looking at all of these events.

“Grandma.  Want me to come watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with you?  I’d like to sit in those comfy chairs.”

“A movie?  I’ve gone to four movies since I’ve been here.  I walked right out of the last one.  I couldn’t hear a thing.”

Grandma is overwhelmed by the calendar. 

“These city people always have to go go go.  They can’t just sit and be still.  When I tell them it used to take me 40 minutes to get to the mall, they just can’t believe it.  City people just expect everything to come easy to them.  They have to be entertained all the time. “

“So that’s a no to Poetry with Mary Lou on Saturday? “

“Poetry with who?”

Yesterday, I met her at her apartment.  We always walk to the café, which is about three to four corridors away. That’s how you measure distance there, in corridors.

“Just leave your purse here,”  Grandma commands.

I place my purse on the floor and deftly pull out my cell phone and slip it into my pocket.

“Can’t you be without that thing for even an hour?” Grandma says. 

I’ve been caught.  We go through this every time I come to visit, which used to be weekly but is now more sporadic.  Some days, I’m just not perky enough.

“I have to take it with me.  The kids’ school expects to be able to reach me if there’s a problem.”

“And what did your mother do when you kids were in school?  Stay by the phone all day? “

“It’s different now.  This is just the way it is.”

Grandma throws her hands up in the air.

“All this technology has to stop someday.  Don’t you think?  I mean, how much further can they go?  There has to be an end.”

“I firmly believe that computerized robots will take over the world within 20 years, rendering the human race obsolete,” I say.

“Well, I’ll be dead by then.”

We walk rather quickly to the café.  Grandma has a new hot pink walker.  The nice thing about these walkers, I have to say, is that if one gets tired, there’s a seat built right into the thing.  You just have to turn the walker around and plunk down.  Very convenient.

The café is bright and clean, and has an eclectic staff, which Grandma always comments upon.

“Look at that boys hair.  Have you ever seen something like that?”  I have to admit the boy’s hair, which is shaved on one side of the head and long and wavy on the other side, is unusual.  The long side is constantly falling into his eye.   He kind of looks like a cocker spaniel with only one ear.

The food is good.  I eat a grilled cheese sandwich with a pickle.  Grandma always gets a chicken sandwich on a roll.  We each drink a diet Pepsi. 

There is a large, two-sided faux fireplace in the café where a man has pulled up his walker, which he sat upon, slumped over, asleep. 

“That man was here at 10:00 when I was out for my walk this morning,” says Grandma.

“Aww, he’s like a puppy.  Curled up by the fire.”

“I don’t understand why they can’t sleep in their own rooms.”

It does seem to be a common issue at retirement communities.  There are scores of elderly men and women who choose to doze off in the most public of places.  You walk into the main lobby, and there are three of them, drooling and dreaming. 

We walk to one of the other lobbies so Grandma can show me the damage that occurred when the pipes froze last week during the Polar Vortex.  I have to duck under a tarp.

“How tall are you, anyway?”  Grandma, who did not have to duck, asks.

“I’m 5’5”. “

“I was 5’4” once.”

Back at her apartment, we settle in chairs and I get the scoop.  Avis back in Schroon Lake is still blind and living on her own.  Virginia is adjusting well to life in her nursing home.  There’s a new person who moved in down the hall.  They come, they go.  Mostly they go because they die. 

“I felt very overwhelmed at Christmas,” Grandma says.

“Where there too many people?  Were the kids too crazy?”

“No, I mean the presents.  I’ve NEVER seen so many presents.  Kids these days just have so much stuff.  We got one present at Christmas.  One year, I got a suitcase because I was going on a class trip to Washington D.C.  Your grandfather never got any presents.”

This is the part that gets wearisome.  It’s the same every week.  I want to tell Grandma that I’ve read Tom Brokaw’s book: I know all about the plights of the greatest generation.  (Full disclosure: I have not actually read Tom Brokaw’s book.) 

The trick is to smile and nod, and eventually the lecturing stops and she delves into some story from the past.  This week, it was about her father and the store he ran, the store that my grandfather took over when he and my grandma were married. 

Grandma is turning 90 this month.  She’s lived through two world wars, a depression, the introduction of the washer and dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave, the television, vaccines, Beatlemania, space shuttles, the computer, and (alas) the cell phone.  She’s lost her husband, her brothers, her parents, her newborn son, her 7-year old sister, and most of her friends. 

I’m cutting Grandma some slack.  But, since she disdains computers, I know it’s safe to blog about her. 

She makes for excellent blog fodder.  

The Job Hunt

This spring,I decided to go ahead and get one of those permanent-type jobs, one where you show up at an office building in nice shoes every day and don’t have to hound your employer for payment since it automatically comes bi-weekly in check form.  I started the application process two weeks before school started, because I did not want to start a new job in the middle of summer.  I thought getting a job two weeks after sending out resumes was a plausible outcome.

That eager optimism is gone.  It took about six weeks for it to die.  Job leads have fizzled, interviews have led nowhere, and flat-out rejections arrive in my inbox daily.  I now have what you might call a “lack of confidence.”  I stay up late at night worrying about the future and feeling very sorry for myself. Desperate for affirmation, I sometimes, in the early hours of the morning, put my face about two inches from John’s and wait for him to wake up.  If he doesn’t wake up, I pinch his nose so that he can’t breathe. 

“What?  What?” he gasps.

“Do you think I’m smart?”

“Yes.  Let me go to sleep.”

“Do you think I’m pretty?”  By then he’s already dozed off, and I have to pinch his nose again. 

Needless to say, we are both cranky in the morning.

I loathe job hunting.  I’ll find a job advertisement and think to myself, "This suits me to a T!" only to be deterred by an arbitrary specification.  Here’s an example of a promising copywriting position:

·         Must have a minimum 4 years of total, technical writing or copywriting experience with track record of increasing responsibility  (I do!) 
·         Ability to convince and drive receivers of communication to take action (I have four kids.  Got this covered.)
·         Collaboration and team building skills (There is no “I” in teamwork.)
·         Superior English writing skills (I do not split infinitives.)
·         Writing samples required.  (I have those guys!)
·         Must speak fluent Greek.  (What the hell.)

How hard should it be to find a job that pays at least $40,000 for 20 hours a week?  COME ON.

Sometimes, friends will give me helpful suggestions.

“Working in the lunch room is a great way to keep an eye on your kids in school!” they say.

“I almost have a master’s degree,” I want to say.  But I don’t.  I smile graciously and start singing, “sloppy joes, sloppy sloppy joes!”  I would probably make a great lunch lady.

As I contemplate my future career in food preparation at the local elementary school, I begin ruing the day. 

I rue the day I decided to get my degree in Literature and not Marketing or Communications or even Library Science!  I rue the day I let my teaching certificate expire!  For now I am useless.  I rue the day I ignored the little voice in my head that said, “taking Greek language classes will really behoove you in the long run!”

And then, I think the craziest things:

Maybe I should have gone to law school.  Maybe I should get an unpaid internship at the age of 35, like Chandler Bing on Friends. Maybe I should become a doula.  Or an artisan of some kind.  Or a mystery shopper.  Or the person who does overnights with the Girl Scouts at the zoo.  Or a bank robber.  I hear there’s good money in bank robbery.

I spent this morning combing the internet for job possibilities, and then devising plans to launder the money I’m going to rob from banks.  Is it suspicious to pay for a new roof with cash?  Does the IRS pay attention to things like that?  Is the IRS hiring? 

Today, I had to get out of the house.  I went to Wegmans to eat lunch by myself.  I made eye contact with no one, because I was irrationally fearful that someone would blurt out what happened on the series finale of Dexter, and I had worked very hard not to look up any spoilers on the internet. Staying at home without my kids has made me weird and creepy.

At Wegmans,  I grabbed a sub, a diet Pepsi, a copy of ABC Soaps, and found a small, quiet corner where I could read in peace.  Robin is coming back from the dead, and ABC Soaps had the scoop.  Job hunting on the internet and General Hospital-watching go together like peas and carrots.  There’s no reason I can’t tweak my resume while watching Sonny descend into yet another bout of madness. 

Is ABC Soaps hiring?

It's really only been six weeks.  That's not very long.  And I have things to do, like hounding my freelance clients for money, sticking the frozen dinner in the oven, and chasing Kiah off of Mt. Laundry.

Why don't you just fold the laundry?  That way, maybe Kiah wouldn't be compelled to lay on it?

Sheesh.  People are so judgy of the unemployed.  

Things I'm Learning in Therapy

“You don’t drink enough water, do you?” she asked.

“Oh no, definitely not,” I replied.

“I can tell by your dry lips.  Also your teeth.”

“My teeth?”

“You have lines on your teeth.

“I have lines on my teeth?”

These are the things I’m learning in therapy.  

I’m in therapy because apparently I have issues that can actually be fixed just by… talking a lot.

I’m also learning to handle my anxiety and my depression, which apparently are polar opposites that exacerbate one another.  I’m not even kidding.  I don’t know how I even get up and walk around during the day, what with the anxiety and the depression.

On the way home from my session, I accidentally cut off a car which did not, I might add, have its headlights on even though it was snowing.  The driver beeped and made some inappropriate hand signals.  I moved lanes to let him pass.  He moved lanes, too.  I got off on Buffalo Road.  He did too.  I got into the right lane; so did he.  I decided to pull into a public place and run for help while dialing 911.  I’m not even kidding.  The anxiety had piqued and I was totally flipping out.  TOTALLY FLIPPING OUT.

I pulled into the Home Depot.  He pulled into the Home Depot.  I pulled into a parking space and waited.  I got out my phone.  An elderly man pulled in beside me.  He smiled at me, unaware that I was having a panic attack and was inwardly screaming for help.

The car that had been following pulled up to the front of the Home Depot, and a man of indeterminate age jumped out of the driver's seat.  He reached into his trunk, I was certain, to get a baseball bat or an AK-47. 

He didn’t.

He pulled out a large Home Depot bag and trotted into the store, probably to return some pipes or something. 

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? 

My nerves were shot.  I ripped out of the parking lot and drove straight to Tim Hortons, because one needs a donut when one’s anxiety is completely out of control.

I got home about fifteen minutes before the kids' bus and used the time to try out some breathing exercises (also learned in therapy), and then ate a white cream-filled donut.  I have to say, the white cream-filled donut worked better than the breathing exercises.  Caleb walked in the door with an incredulous look on his face.

“Walruses aren’t German, are they?” he asked.

“What?”

“Are donkeys actually Japanese?”

“Why are you asking me this?”

“Connor said… oh never mind.”

A moment later, my therapist called with a reminder for me to do something, and asked how I was doing.

“I was stalked on the way home.  But then I wasn’t.  I imagined the whole thing,” I said.

She paused for several seconds.

“Do we need to schedule another session this week?”

Ay, it’s been a very weird day.

All I Know About Hockey I Learned From The Mighty Ducks

When deciding whether or not to accompany John to various soirees, I seriously consider two things: the horrors of mingling versus good food. Sometimes the food comes out on top. Sometimes it doesn’t. On Wednesday night, the food was linked to a free Sabres game, so I went. I had a massive hankering for a stadium cheeseburger.

I had a bad day Wednesday. My cowlick refused to conform to the basic architecture of my head, I had a huge zit right smack in the middle of my forehead, my kids were completely stir-crazy, and I’d received what I’m sure are the first of many rejections in the mail. Writing rejections are the worst. There’s no sugarcoating. They never say, “It’s not you, it’s us.” They might as well write the following:

Holly,


It’s not us, it’s totally you.


This isn’t what we’re looking for at all.


I guess you can submit again sometime, but get a clue first. Sheesh.


From,
A very, very mean editor.

Little did they know I would later attend Buffalo’s most highfalutin event on a Wednesday evening. That’s right. My day was bound to get better!

And what does the stay-at-home mom wear to a post-work highfalutin event at a hockey arena? These are the types of fashion questions that boggle my stay-at-home mom mind. John intended to go in his suit. If I had gone in a suit, people would’ve assumed I’d come from work. I would be faced with awkward, “What do you do?” questions. So, I opted for jeans, a nice top, and high-heeled boots. I made John change into khakis and a sweater.

We were very underdressed. And there were no cheeseburgers. Just a lukewarm pasta bar. I shook hands with one of the most powerful men in New York State government, and stood by sanguinely while John chatted with Mayor Brown and former Mayor Masiello, who shook my hand and told me it was lovely to see me again.

We’ve never met.

“The food here sucks,” I told them. “I want a cheeseburger.” (I didn't really say that.  But I was thinking it.)

One state legislator shook my hand for what seemed an excessive amount of time and then gave me his card, and told me to call him if I needed anything, anything at all. The card is still in my jacket pocket, and I intend to use it the next time I get lost in Buffalo.

“I'm looking for the exit to 33. No, I don’t need a GPS; I have your business card.”

At least there was the hockey game to look forward to! And we had great seats. Unfortunately, we were seated next to a perfect contender for that show Girls Gone Wild, and she also happened to be a Rangers fan. In the middle of the first period, we moved down and proceeded to watch the most boring hockey game that has ever not been broadcast on Time Warner Cable.

Luckily, at the beginning of the second period, Buffalo’s only gay, black, die-hard Sabres fan joined us, automatically raising our spirits, warming me up with a good cuddle, and flamboyantly explaining the makeup of the Sabres’s fourth line, which was helpful because even though I’ve watched hundreds of Sabres games over the past 15 years, I still don’t know what icing is.

“Icing! Icing!” I yell.

“That’s not icing,” says John.

“High sticking, then? Was it high sticking?”

Honestly, everything I know about hockey I learned from the Disney film The Mighty Ducks.

“Treat it like an egg, Gerbe! You’re not treating the puck like an egg! Form the flying V! Where’s the flying V? Why don’t they ever do the flying V?”

This is when John buries his face in his hands and doesn’t come up for a while. Gay, black, die-hard Sabres fan wasn't embarrassed to be seated next to me. We scorned the hot Rangers fan and yelled at Ryan Miller for his lazy goal-keeping.

On the way home, John and I listened to a most excellent podcast called, “How Did This Get Made?”, a show that discusses movies so terrible they’re amazing. They deconstruct gems like “Jingle All the Way,” “Twilight,” and “Superman 3.” We listened to the podcast about "Superman 3", or, "Superman: The One Where Supes Gets all Rapey."

On Wednesday night, I took a gamble, and I chose food over the horrors of mingling. And I lost that bet. But I had a good time anyway.

Mayor, it was lovely to see you again, too.

When I Worked At Borders

I’ve had a lot of jobs. I’ve been a retail clerk, a waitress, a childcare provider, a receptionist, a high school English teacher, and now a freelance writer extraordinaire (tell your friends!) I even had a three-hour stint as a telemarketer, where I harassed people at home for money. I called myself Cassandra, because I’ve always liked the name Cassandra, and because I was so ashamed I couldn’t admit my real name. I may have also talked in a hybrid English/ Scottish accent unique to the region of my head.

My favorite job, however, was the year-and-a-half I spent as an employee at Borders Books and Music in Buffalo, New York.

You can see where this post is going.

If you love books, there’s obviously no better place to work than a gigantic bookstore. God, I loved that store. After I was unexpectedly fired from a position a week after September 11th (a sad story for another day), I applied at just one place: the bookstore I retreated to when I wanted to get away from it all. I was hired and put in charge of the children’s department. Soon after, I was promoted to training supervisor. Later, I popped out a 9.8 lb child. It hurt so bad, I decided not to work again for a long time.

I’ve got great stories from that place. My second week there, I overheard a guy talking about me in the back warehouse. (I was the new girl, so I was subject to scrutiny.) No one noticed my searching for a book among the warehouse stacks, because I am quiet, like a little library mouse. (I was skinny back then.) One of the sales clerks said to his girlfriend, and I quote: “Yeah, she’s hot, but she’s dumber than a bag of nails.”

Now, if this had happened yesterday, I would’ve dismissed the dumber-than-a bag-of-nails bit and focused on the hot part. I would’ve been delighted! Back then, though, my skinny butt was mortified. And stuck.

How was I going to get out of the back room without being discovered?

By crawling! On the floor. Where I came face to face with my newly-formed arch nemesis. Or rather, face to knee.

“Just… getting something,” I whispered. Then I got to my feet, walked briskly out, and cried for twelve hours straight.

“They think I’m stupid!” I sobbed to my husband.

“Who cares?” he said.

“We’ve never even had (snivel) a conversation (snivel) before… why would he say such a thing? Why does he hate me?”

“He didn’t say he hated you.  He said you were dumber than a bag of nails."


“I won’t go back there! I WANT TO DIE!”

I went back. Aside from a few awkward encounters that involved me shoving my GRE scores in a certain person’s face, all was forgiven.

The store was large, with books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Literature, biographies, memoirs, books about science, business, anthropology, cooking… you name it; Borders had it. The literature was on the far left, bargain books toward the front, the expansive music department filled the back. Borders employed people from all walks of life: freaky looking teenagers with shaggy hair and rings hanging out of their noses to grandmotherly types who manned the registers during the holidays. Some employees had been there for many years, taking comfort in the daily routines, the quiet of the store in the early morning, and the assurance that there would always be books to stock, people to help, titles to track down.

As a training supervisor, I made sure new employees knew where popular books like Tuesdays with Morrie, Founding Fathers, and The Millionaire Next Door were located. I taught café workers how to make a frothy cappuccino and music employees how to re-wrap CD cases that had been ripped open.

The store was full of interesting, quirky people, including the customers. I mainly resided in the children’s book department, where I stocked shelves, gave impassioned readings of The Monster at the End of this Book and There’s a Wocket in my Pocket during Saturday morning story hour, and was a brave arbiter during a divorced couple’s weekly Sunday morning child swap.

One evening, a graduate student came in and demanded books that had pictures of Lake Ladoga in Russia. She needed it for a presentation that was due the next day.

“I find it hard to believe you don’t even have a calendar with a picture of Lake Ladoga in it,” she said.

“We have calendars of the Finger Lakes,” I suggested. “Your classmates probably wouldn’t know the difference.”

She left in a huff.

Another day a Krispy Kreme opened next door, and we welcomed a whole new breed of clientele, like the man who came in every Saturday, selected five different magazines, and carried them (along with a half-eaten donut) into the bathroom for a mid-morning poo. I was made aware of this tradition by the café staff who had been watching this take place for weeks, but were too fearful to say anything.

“He goes to the bathroom, and then he returns the magazines to the shelves!” We agreed this was gross. I confronted him, and it went really, really well. I offered to hold his magazines while he did his business, he handed them over, and we never saw him again.

Another time, I confronted a woman who was taking advantage of the free coffee sample promotion we had going on. This did not go as well. To this day, I argue that filling your travel mug with coffee meant for sampling is “stealing.”

I had close encounters with celebrities. I sold Ani DiFranco some tea, took Rudy Giuliani to the bathroom, and helped a woman chase down Johnny Cochran at the airport after he gave a talk in our store. (She really believed he would take her case.)

And then there were the perks you weren’t supposed to talk about. I read The Lovely Bones, I Don’t Know How She Does It, Stupid White Men, and The Nanny Diaries before they were released to the public.

I listened to “Sweet Baby James” over 100 times on the loudspeaker.

The first time I puked after I became pregnant was in the Borders women’s bathroom, and the first book I bought for my son, I Am a Bunny by Richard Scarry, was purchased on a Monday before I left the store for the night.

Every now and again, I would go back and visit. Two years ago, I was unnerved to discover that the music selection, once the largest in Buffalo, had dwindled down to a few paltry shelves full of movie soundtracks, copies of Bach’s Greatest Hits, and the latest Britney Spears. There were, however, shelves full of stationary, lip gloss, journals, iPod cases, and other gift items.

I cried when I heard they were closing.

I don’t want to discuss why they failed- it’s moot at this point- I just want to say that my store was a really great store, and thousands of other Borders employees feel the same way about their stores.

Borders employed stores full of book lovers. And what better people to work with than with book lovers? And is there a better work environment than one filled with books? (And scones. Lots of scones.)

This Sunday, the last Borders stores will close their doors forever, including the flagship store in Ann Arbor.

I will miss them.

________________________________________________
Think you could have worked at Borders? Take the quiz! It’s fun! http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/09/09/borders.quiz/index.html

Beware the Nevi

Unfortunately, I grew up with the skewed belief that if I kept at it religiously, I would become a person who tanned well. This led to years of blistering sunburns. I read somewhere that each blistering sunburn increases your chance of getting skin cancer by like 900%, so it’s no surprise that in the past few years I’ve had several basal cell carcinomas freeze-dried off my face, shoulders, and back, each time leaving a small, shiny, white recessed scar. (I call my doctor Mr. Freeze, like the Batman villain. He seems to get a kick out of it.)

It’s a highly unpleasant process.

We watch my moles like hawks. In the past year, a freckle beneath my eyebrow started expanding like it was Napoleon and my face was continental Europe. So the doctor shot novocaine into my head, removed the thing with a scalpel, and sent it off to be biopsied.

“I’d be highly surprised if it’s melanoma,” he said.

Never say the word “melanoma” in front of a pale person whose major regret in life is that her vanity led her down the path of sunburns, sun rashes, and some dehydration that may have led to mass faintings. Especially is she has libertarian leanings. She’s liable to go all Yosemite Sam, shooting at the ground and vowing to destroy melanoma varmints like she did when she discovered the sudden appearance of an ugly black mole on her chin. Thankfully, her self-diagnosis proved the spot to be completely benign (chocolate cake batter) and a crisis was averted.

(If I could go back and kick 16-year old Holly’s skinny little a@$, I would. Then I’d douse her with SPF 30 and tell her to stop skipping gym class; she’s gonna fail the semester and have to make it up her senior year.)

Last week, a nurse called me with the biopsy results.

“Your biopsy came back. It showed a dysplastic compound nevi.”

There was a moment of panic. A dysplastic compound nevi sounded like major cause for concern. I glanced at my poor sweet children who were playing happily with blocks, completely oblivious to the fact that I was suffering from a dysplastic compound nevi. The sun kept shining, my neighbor kept mowing his lawn, the world kept rotating in spite of the fact that I was sitting there with a severe case of dysplastic compound nevi.

“Oh no,” I said.

“Nah, this is good. That’s just fancy terminology for a benign mole. No cancer. Okay?”

I strongly believe she should have led off with the benign mole bit.

Crisis averted again. I remain happy, relatively healthy, and pale. It’s disconcerting, however, that the husband doesn’t seem to understand that I have to lay pretty low for the next month or so. I had a dysplastic compound nevi surgically removed from my eye. Or above my eye. Same thing. It was traumatizing. I demand chocolate pudding and popsicles.

And sunscreen. Lots of sunscreen.

Neurotically Yours

Woody Allen:  Neurotic Looney-Bird

Dear Blog,


Today, I was absolutely certain a man was following me in Wegmans. I turned down the soup aisle; he turned down the soup aisle. I skipped four aisles and went straight to frozen foods, which I never, ever do, and so did he. Then, abruptly, he grabbed a box of ice cream sandwiches and briskly passed me on his way to the checkout line.

I don’t know what his game was. It’s very possible he just needed soup and ice cream sandwiches. But that seems unlikely.

This incident prompted a conversation with the husband.

Holly: I think I have the neuroses.

John: Excuse me?

Holly: Neurotic. I think I’m neurotic.

John: What do you mean?

Holly: Don’t you know what neurotic means?

John: I know one definition of neurotic.

Holly: What?

John: Never mind. Why do you think you’re neurotic?

Holly: I’m not telling you until you tell me your definition.

John: (Sighs.) Well, when a girl starts acting all crazy, guys will say, “she’s neurotic.”

Holly: Oh. (Pause.) You never say that, though.

John: No. Never. I would never say that.

Holly: I should hope not. Okay- I think I worry too much about little things that don’t matter. I worry constantly. I’m highly anxiety-prone. I apologize like a fiend for silly things. All indicators of the neuroses. (Silence follows, followed by what sounds like snickering.) Are you laughing at me?

John: No! I would never.

Holly: See, now I’m feeling like it’s not neuroses at all. Perhaps my anxieties are well-founded.

It went on like this, but I’ll spare you the rest, and move on to a conversation that took place yesterday:

So yesterday, my brother and I were discussing Betsy Lerner’s classic book for writers, The Forest for the Trees. In it, Lerner addresses six different kinds of writers, including: The Ambivalent Writer, The Natural, The Wicked Child, The Self-Promoter, and The Neurotic. Despite my self-diagnosed neuroses, I do not quite fall into the category of “The Neurotic” writer. I’m an Ambivalent to the core.

(Josh never said what he was. He’s probably “The Natural.” That would figure. He’s hitting ‘em out of the park like Ray Hobbs while I’m picking daisies out in left field.)

Here’s the first paragraph of Lerner’s chapter on “The Ambivalent Writer.” My thoughts are in italics.

Do you have a new idea almost every day for a writing projects? (Yes!) Do you either start them all and don’t see them to fruition or think about starting but never actually get going? (Yes! Both! Indeed!) Are you a short-story writer one day and a novelist the next? (I wear many colorful writing jackets.) A memoirist on Monday (Well, there’s you, dear blog…) and a screenwriter by the weekend? (Nope. No screenwriting. Too technical.) Do you begin sentences in your head while walking to work or picking up the dry cleaning, sentences so crisp and suggestive that they make perfect story or novel openers, only you never manage to write them down? (Yes! Such a waste.) Do you blab about your project to loved ones, coworkers, or strangers before the idea is fully formed, let alone partially executed? (No. But only because I’m shy.) Have you ever accidentally left your notes, diary, or disk behind on a train or plane and bemoaned the loss of what certainly had been your best work? (Yes, yes I have.) Have you ever been diagnosed with any combination of bipolar disorder, alcoholism, or the skin diseases such as eczema or psoriasis? (No. Dear God, no. Maybe the first a little, but no skin diseases. I do abuse Benadryl.) Do you snap at people who ask how your writing is going? (Yes.) What’s it to them? (Indeed.)

Do you fear that you will someday wonder where the years went? (I do. I do.) How it is that some no-talent you went to high school with is being published everywhere you look? Or some suck-up from graduate school is racking up prizes and being interviewed in the “At Lunch With” column of the New York Times, a series you used to enjoy. Now you can’t read it at all without thinking back to your classmate and the fawning way he used to schmooze your professors. (I know just the student. He wrote magical realism novels. He thought he was freaking Marquez.) God he was so transparent. (He really was.)

If you can relate to the above, you certainly have the obsessive qualities, along with the self-aggrandizement (Ouch. Was that necessary?) and concurrent feelings of worthlessness (It’s true. I am dirt.) that are part of the writer’s basic makeup.

It goes on. It’s a great book.

In order to arm myself with evidence that I am neurotic (because neurotics are forever in search of tangible proof), I took a test by the foremost authority on psychological matters: the website Psychologist World. According to Psychologist World, I am 86% neurotic, and should probably have my head shrunk on a daily basis.

These results are rather shocking.

Thankfully, I do not have OCD tendencies like some neurotics (it seems like very hard work to be a neurotic writer. How annoying it must be to have to have 12 perfectly sharpened pencils and a coffee with exactly two teaspoons of sugar before you started writing at exactly 8:32 in the morning? Gore Vidal had to have coffee AND a bowel movement before he could start writing.)

Instead, I worry about bizarre things. Is spending an hour writing a travel article as lucrative as spending an hour clipping coupons? Will wearing my hair in a pony-tail every day make me go bald? Why has everyone forgotten that Arkansas was raining birds a few months ago?

All of this to say that for a person who is suffering from both the neuroses and the ambivalence, I wonder how it is I'm faring so well. In fact, I think the quiz results might be greatly exaggerated and I'm rethinking my fervently held for 1 hour conviction that Psychologist World is the foremost auhority on all things psychological. 
So- no major self-realizations in this post.

And with that, dear blog, I must go. I have to finish my novel before the man from Wegmans finds me, murders me, and throws me in a freezer right next to the ice cream sandwiches.

There are worse ways to go, I'm sure.

Neurotically Yours,

Holly

The Albany Widow

I have a bruise the shape of Eurasia on my thigh. It is colored various shades of the earth: mossy greens and browns and slate grey.

Daniel came up to me the other day blubbering about a hangnail.

“I have a boo-boo!”

“That’s not a boo-boo,” I said in my best Crocodile Dundee voice (which admittedly is terrible.) I hiked up my pant leg. “Now THAT’S a boo-boo.”

Daniel inspected it closely.

“No blood. Not a boo-boo.” he said, and sauntered off.

What does he know. He’s four.

I banged my thigh into the corner of the oven in the dead of the night. I will dispel all rumors now: I was NOT up because I had a late-night hankering for a jello pudding cup. I was up because Kiah was barking and growling ferociously at the closet door. Again. Because the closet, apparently, contains some vestige of evil that can only be seen by her.

I’ve put Kiah in the laundry room at night because she is boycotting her crate. She refuses to come inside at night because she knows the crate is her final destination. Chasing her around the soggy backyard during monsoon season has not been a whole lot of fun, let me tell you. I think the neighbors get a kick out of me running around the backyard like a looney-bird in my pajamas and tall, rubber boots screaming, “Sit! Sit? SIT! Pleeease sit… Come back! No! KIAH!”

All of this would not be my problem if I were not an Albany widow. Because once John comes home, that dog is his responsibility. All of her quirks and her misbehaviors become his problem. If John is home and asks, “Did you feed the dog?” I respond, “She’s your dog, sucker. You feed her.” I think 30+ months of breastfeeding babies entitles me to this response.

Being an Albany widow is dangerous. I need John around to make sure I go to bed on time and to keep me from daydreaming too much.

“Holly. Are you daydreaming about Timothy Olyphant again?” (Timothy Olyphant is my new Viggo Mortensen.)

“What? No! She’s your dog- you feed her. Sucker.”

I turned the light on in the laundry room and stared at my dog, who for whatever reason, decided that was the moment she would obediently sit and look at me with submissive, beautiful puppy-dog eyes. I opened the closet door and let her sniff around until she was satisfied. I turned off the light, closed the door behind me, and immediately ran into the pointy end of the oven door. I shrieked, which stirred up Kiah of course, and swearing and barking commenced. (We’re working on Kiah’s potty-mouth. And apparently my barking when I’m upset is “weird.”) And that’s how I came to have a bruise in the shape of Eurasia on my thigh.

I felt very sorry for myself, so on my way to bed, I grabbed a jello pudding cup. And I ate it in bed.

And it was delicious.

Toothache

I wish I could muster up a true abhorrence of dirt and dust, but right now a sickness has rendered me apathetic to my surroundings. In other words, things are bad here. This probably life-threatening illness has strangled my vocal chords, making singing Disney princess songs while sweeping impossible, so of course I don’t want to clean. Plus, I have this headache that seems to be aggravated by motion.

The kids are not all that pleased with me. Caleb and Ben came home from school to find me lying on the couch.

“Mom! Hey mom! Can we have a snack?”

“There is no mom, there is only Zuul,” I replied.

Honest, when I talk I sound like Kathleen Turner if Kathleen Turner had smoked three packs a day.

Plus I have a toothache. An ache within the cavernous depths of my tooth. This is my first-ever toothache, and I must say, it too is aggravating the ache higher up in my head. It’s this horrible throbbing that emanates through the nerve and into my jaw. I’m kind of hoping it just stops, but I have a feeling I’m going to have to succumb to some dental work.

I saw my dentist last week. I had lost a filling about six months ago and finally made an appointment to get it replaced. For the past six months, the tooth has been a horrible food trap, forcing me to floss after every meal and snack. Usually, I figured if I was already flossing in that area, I might as well do the whole mouth. The decay in my tooth got deeper, but my gums have never been in better shape.

So I went to get the tooth fixed last week. My dentist, whom I adore, announced he had joined the army. Immediately, I was concerned about how this was going to affect me.

“How is this going to affect me?” I whined.

He assured me it wouldn’t affect me, as he was just joining the army reserves and would still be maintaining his practice. I may have commented that he seemed a bit old to join the army, and he admitted this was the case, especially since he was “falling apart.”

“You’re falling apart?” I asked. “How is this going to affect ME?”

He told me he had recently suffered from gallstones and was scheduled to have his gallbladder out. I informed him that I had already been through that arduous process. We commiserated over the incredible pain of having a gallbladder attack.

“Isn’t it just the most horrible pain ever?” he asked.

“Worst pain of my life,” I insisted. “Worse than childbirth. And I gave birth to twins.” He reached for the phone.

“I’d like you to please tell that to my wife.” (I didn’t.) “How long did you last before you went to the hospital?” he asked.

“Oh, I was up all night and my husband made me go to the ER in the morning.” His eyes got wide. “Why? How long were you in pain?”

“Ten minutes. I was in pain for ten minutes before I insisted on going to the hospital.”

Men.

He filled in my tooth and warned me that the decay had been very deep and that he had drilled frighteningly close to the nerve. He warned that the pulp within the tooth could swell and a root canal might be necessary. If this should occur, I would experience pain, and I should call him right away.

He stated that now that he knew my high tolerance for pain, if I called he would know it was serious and he would get me right in.

That’s a lot of pressure on a girl.

I’m in pain, but not, y’know, horrible, awful pain. This might be because I swiped some of my husband’s codeine. Which, by the way, is another reason perhaps we should be sending more women and fewer men off to war.

My husband has a sinus infection and his male PA gives him cold medicine laced with codeine. I give birth to twins, and I get extra-strength motrin. What the heck?

Still, I think a visit to the dentist and possibly the doctor is in my imminent future. I don’t know if I mentioned that my throat hurts, too. Not a horrible hurt, mind you, but I can’t really eat. I would say I hurt from my shoulders to the tippy top of my head. Gotta get that all fixed up so I can get back to singing… and sweeping.

The Post where Holly Treats Inanimate Objects as Babies

Two summers ago, on a balmy evening, I went grocery shopping alone. When I returned home, I opened the door to retrieve the groceries and found I had buckled my watermelon into Daniel’s car seat. It sat there, snug and comfy and completely strapped in. If I had gotten into an accident, it’s safe to bet the watermelon would not have been harmed. I wasn’t used to going shopping without the twins, so I suppose when I pulled the watermelon out of the cart, it being the same size and having the same general proportions as Daniel at that time, I subconsciously treated it like one of my babies.

I only just remembered that occurrence this past Wednesday evening, when I went grocery shopping alone and found myself starting to buckle a large bag of Puppy Chow into Ella’s car seat.

I think I need to get out more. Alone.

Grocery shopping by myself is a wonderful treat. I can stop and examine prices and nutrition labels without the twins planning a mutiny within that car affixed to the front of the shopping cart. And I can drink a soda without having to share and therefore be subjected to three-year old backwash.

On Wednesday, I bought the kids’ Valentine’s Day treats and decided to go ahead and get the husband a Valentine’s Day card. Of course, choosing the right card takes time. One wants to get just the right sentiment without it seeming trite or cliché. I passed over the “Love is a Journey. I’m so glad I get to take every step with you,” card, which was tame as cheesy cards go, and only made me vomit in my mouth a little. There was one that went something like, “Every time I think of the day we met, I smile. When I think of our first kiss, I smile. In fact, every time I think of you, I smile. (Open card.) You make me smile. Happy Valentine’s Day.” Did someone get paid to write this?

I picked up one with two kids, a boy and a girl, glaring at each other. The front read “If we knew each other in kindergarten…” The inside read, “I love you.”

I didn’t get it. You probably got it right away. My head tends to get fuzzy after 7:00 in the evening. And I had just seen a 5 lb Hershey’s Chocolate bar in the bulk candy section of Wegmans. I mean, I'd heard such things existed, but I’d never actually seen one in person. Coming to terms with its existence was definitely messing with my smallish brain.

I stood there, stupidly, thinking that the sentence “If we knew each other in kindergarten… I love you,” just didn’t hold together very well as a coherent statement. I stared around, the bafflement surely showing upon my face, my frozen items melting in my cart. Perhaps someone would come along and explain the card to me. Surely, someone would notice my confusion. No one did. One mother and her teenage daughter ambled by and I overheard the following:

“You’ve only been dating a week. I don’t see that a card is necessary.”

It was the daughter speaking.

I got the joke as I realized I was attempting to buckle in puppy chow. And I thought it was stupid. “Hey- if we had known each other in kindergarten, we would’ve hated one another! Ha ha ha ha! I love you!”

I could totally create Valentine’s Day cards. I can do cheesy. Like the following:

There's even a baby drip. 

Someone out there would buy this. 

I've gotta go now.  Gotta finally get the puppy chow out of the van.  It's in Ella's car seat, still, albeit not buckled in. 

I'm such a drip.

Bad Habit

I’ve somehow picked up a really bad habit. I’ve taken up winking at people. And animals, too. Anyone’s game. In my defense, it’s not done in a flirty way, but rather an “I get you, sweetie!” kind of way. You know- conspiratorial winking. However, I could see how it could be misconstrued as flirty, as it was yesterday by the young man working at the Home Depot.

It started with Caleb. Caleb and I have secrets, secrets that I will never divulge, even under great duress. Sometimes, Caleb and I allude to these secrets in public (public= in the presence of Ben, Daniel, and Ella), and when we do this alluding, we wink at one another.

Caleb LOVES to wink. He has since he learned how to about a year ago. Ben loves to wink, too, though he hasn't figured out how yet and only manages to blink really, really hard. But Caleb and I, to boost Ben’s self-esteem, assure him he’s a great winker. And then we wink at each other. Conspiratorially.

I’m not sure how many people I’ve winked at in the past month. I started becoming self-aware about a week ago, and I’m really trying to curb the habit. Of course, since it’s a pretty established habit, it’s been difficult to quit it cold turkey. Winking has become spontaneous, like a tick. I’ll be talking to someone, we’ll share a laugh, and before you can say Bob’s your uncle, I’ve winked. Conspiratorially, of course.

I went to Home Depot to get a doohickey that reaches down into drains to grab hair. They sell said doohickey for under $2.00 right next to the Drano. Initially, I was wandering around the plumbing aisle with its long and intimidating tubing, looking very out of place. A Home Depot employee spotted me and thought, “A woman in the plumbing aisle? She must be lost! I will help her!”

I told him I was looking for a thinger I could stick down drains. That’s literally what I said. A thinger I could stink down drains. And he knew exactly what I was talking about. He led me to the doohickey and said, “Is this the thinger you were referring to?”

I grinned. “This is the thinger I was looking for!” I said. Then I winked at him.

And let me tell you that if I were you, I would not wink at helpful, slightly chubby young men working at the Home Depot. They might put their hand on your arm and ask if there’s anything else they can do for you. And you, startled, might take a big step backward and say something like: “Oh, that’ll do it, sir! Yuppers!” Because you’re a dork. And he’ll smile, wanly, and walk away.

The thinger you can stick down drains worked out great. I pulled out miles of black, gunky hair, and had fun doing it, too. Clearing the shower drain gave me a sense of accomplishment I’ve never felt before. Except last week, when I fixed the garbage disposal. And the week before, when I re-wired Daniel’s battery-operated car.

Soon, I’ll be right at home in the Home Depot’s plumbing aisle.

Wink.

The Day I Ate Mold (Accidentally)

Yesterday, in a moment of solitude and extreme weakness, and in spite of the fact that I had burned off 450 calories at the gym only an hour before, I took it upon myself to consume the last sizable piece of vanilla cake from the twins' birthday party. (It was a corner piece with ample frosting.)

Three bites from the very end of the cake, I happened to pause and saw that there was a bit of green fuzz clinging to the bottom of the piece I was about to put in my mouth. In fact, all three remaining bites had green and grey fuzz. It is more than likely that the entire piece of cake had been decorated similarly.

This is the point where I ran upstairs and googled “I accidentally ate mold.” If google prompts and online forums are any indication, this is a common problem that should probably be discussed in town hall meetings.

Apparently, the type of mold that grows on cake is not generally toxic, so I was temporarily reassured and proceeded with my day. (Sadly, the remainder of the chocolate cake was similarly afflicted and needed to be discarded. Ella discovered the cake in the garbage and kept peering down at it, saying, “Birthday?”)

A little after 3:00pm, Caleb’s school nurse called me at home, which is always distressing. Caleb, she said, was covered in hives. He was not having any trouble breathing or swallowing, so we decided to allow him to come home on the bus since it was the end of school anyway.

He arrived home very itchy. The hives were large, white monstrosities that covered his arms, his legs, his back, and his stomach. One of his knees was swollen to the point where I felt mildly repulsed, so after giving him a dose of Benadryl, I called the pediatrician and talked to a friendly nurse:

Holly: Caleb is covered in hives.

Nurse: Is he having trouble breathing?

Holly: No… they’re very itchy and they look gross.

Nurse: Well, it’s probably just an allergic reaction. Is there anything different going on at school? Any new pets in the classroom?

Holly: Caleb- are there any new pets in your classroom?

Caleb (with serious expression on his face): The worms are gone now.

Holly: No pets. The worms are gone now.

Nurse: Well, people aren’t generally allergic to worms.

Holly: I suppose not.

Nurse: Has he eaten anything unusual? Anything different?

Holly: No…. everything’s the same…. Oh my gosh, he ate MOLD!

Nurse: He ate mold?!?

(I will now note that I have had very little sleep of late, thanks to persistent insomnia and some bed wetting. Not me, my kids.)

Holly: No, wait. Caleb didn’t eat mold. I ate mold.

Nurse: You ate mold?!?

Holly: Well, not on purpose. I didn’t know I was eating mold.

Nurse: You didn’t know you were eating mold?

Holly: Correct. But the point is, Caleb did not eat mold.

After we cleared the whole mold issue up, the nurse told me to give Caleb Benadryl before he went to bed and to just “watch the situation.” The hives were gone twenty minutes later and there has been no recurrence so far.

As for me- I feel fine. I think mold agrees with me.

Weight lost, weight gained

As I lay writhing in pain on the hospital bed, a nurse leaned over and listened to my heart. She looked at me quizzically and said,

“Do you workout?” My friend, who had driven me to the ER, responded.

“Yes, she does work out. Quite a bit, actually.”

“I can tell,” said the nurse. “You have a very strong, low heart rate.”

Through the intense pain, which easily rivaled labor pains but without the in-between contraction reprieve, I felt a glimmer of pride. I was an exerciser. I was lean. I could run three miles without breaking a sweat. I looked better-than-average in my one-piece Lands End bathing suit with swim skirt. I weighed almost as much as I did when I was first married, ten years and four children ago.

After they sliced me open and took out my gallbladder, I couldn’t go back to the gym for six weeks. (Something about my stitches ripping open or me hurting myself or some other such post-operation silliness.) Six weeks went by. I got the okay to resume my routine. Eight weeks went by. Ten weeks. Three months. Six months.

I feel like I now finally understand Einstein’s law of energy: matter can neither be created nor destroyed. The pounds I lost slowly came wandering back from their vacations in cool places like Thailand and Hawaii and re-adhered themselves to my stomach and upper-arms. It’s like they never even left. They were perturbed, however, when I tried to squeeze them into the new size four pants I had purchased last March in their absence. They require more room than that. A lot more room.

Last night, things got bad. We had a Super Bowl party and for about an hour, I posted myself right next to the bean dip. During the course of the evening, I ate guacamole, buffalo chicken wing dip, pizza, cake, brownies, and munched on one piece of celery. Just one.

I don’t even know who won the stupid game.

It is time to get my increasingly rotund derriere back to the gym.

This February, I am committed to getting back into a workout routine. I am also committed to giving up oatmeal cream pies for breakfast and my kids’ leftover peanut butter and jellies for lunch. I am committed to discontinuing the use of my treadmill as a storage rack and repurposing it as an exercise machine. I did it once; I can do it again. Finally, I am committed to making sure those pounds stay overseas this time.

(I don’t even want a postcard.)

Winter Songs

It is still winter.

This is how depressed I am: I have been teaching myself Jeff Buckley’s morose song “Hallelujah” on the guitar. Or rather, I was.

It was going swimmingly. I was strumming and singing along, probably as well as KD Lang, when suddenly, at the end of the third verse, the A-string broke during “it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

Irony is never lost on me.

John came home to find me playing and singing- I had shifted from guitar to still out-of-tune piano- while the kids ran amuck in the kitchen.

John knew it had been a rotten week for me. (When it’s a good week, he finds me playing rousing Friday-evening tunes like “The Phantom of the Opera,” the theme to Tommy, or “Joy to the World” by 3-Dog Night.) He offered to go out and get new guitar strings THIS VERY NIGHT if that would make me happy.

I responded by crooning the words to “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

(I guess I’m not THAT depressed. When it gets really bad, I sniff at John while singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”… both the Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand parts. Still, I’m really, really looking forward to spring.)

Grace, Amazing

I have done something horrifically awful to my left foot, which is my laziest foot, so I’m really not surprised it was the one that got injured.

The noodles were in the pot, boiling away, the children scattered about playing amicably, and I was multi-tasking: preparing dinner and changing loads of laundry. I took a load out of the dryer and brought it across the kitchen toward my sunken living room. Sunken is important. If it wasn’t a sunken living room, if a year and a half ago we had gone with the house that had the living room on the same plane as the kitchen, I would not be in this mess right now.

Two steps lead into our living room. The first step I took was without incident. It was the second step that killed me, that and the matchbox car on the floor. I crumpled like a soda can that’s been stepped upon. I screamed as it was happening because in that instant, I saw the days stretched out before me, days where I would be hopping about the house on one foot, hopping after my kids, crawling up stairs, unable to put pressure on my foot.

The reason I think it might be broken is because after the initial pain, which was severe and endless and nauseating, there was no short reprieve. The pain lessened, but was consistent. Generally, when I twist my ankle or foot, the pain eventually subsides and gives me the illusion that everything is going to be okay. I fall for this trick EVERY TIME. I lope around, further injuring myself, when what I should be doing is resting and icing my foot. A day later I wake up all swollen with a great excuse for avoiding housework.

My foot swelled right away, and continues to do so. After the fall, I sat on the floor waiting for the throbbing to cease and desist. It never quite did. The timer went off and I just sat there, knowing I was overcooking the noodles. The kids stared at me contemplatively. They were probably thinking Mama has lost it… again.

John was and is still out with a client. I fed the kids and then I put on the television, my faithful and loyal babysitter in emergency situations. I crawled into the other room and sat on the window seat, my leg laid out before me, and I slowly removed my sock and stared at the purple jumbo-sized egg that seemed to be growing beneath my skin. Then, I put a bag of frozen peas on it. And then I cried. Because it hurt. Because I was alone. Because I felt really really sorry for myself and I wanted my mom.

The kids were watching Dora the Explorer. Dora is always “engaging” her young audience, asking them questions… is this kind of television superior to the kind that completely ignores its audience? Anyway, Dora was talking about thankfulness. She asked her television audience: What are YOU thankful for?

I heard Caleb’s soft voice answer, “My mommy.”

I’m the mom now. Not that I can’t call on my own mom, and believe me I do, but I am now the one who needs to provide a sense of security and unconditional love. And there are evenings like this one, where I’m taking turns gazing out the window at the cold, dark November night and then at my cold, purple foot, that I feel so inadequate for the job. I wonder, how can I do this right? How can I be a parent who won't feel the need to apologize to her adult children for all of the ways she failed? And I fail in so many different ways every day.

But he’s still thankful for me. I’m the person he thought of when Dora asked the question. And I don’t think he would lie to Dora. She’s intimidating for a cartoon. Plus, she has a crazy monkey sidekick I wouldn’t mess with, either.

Listening to that voice from across the hall, I felt a sadness settle on me. It was quiet and lovely, but sad… and it was one of the few times that I’ve thought to myself… this is what grace feels like.

Amazing.

Steak and Books

Last evening, we jettisoned off to Buffalo to celebrate my good friend Katie’s 30th birthday. We ate at Hyde Park Steakhouse. It was, quite honestly, the very best steak I’ve ever had. All contemplations about becoming a vegetarian were vanquished last night. I like meat and I like it bloody. Yum.

Since we were in Buffalo, we took the opportunity to pop over to my former place of employment, Borders Books and Music (only I think now it should be called Borders Books and a little tiny bit of music.) Darn you, MP3s! The Borders in Buffalo used to have the largest selection of cds in the city AND the surrounding suburbs. They had the most extensive selection of classical and jazz and I used to love browsing their soundtracks section. The music department used to take up a majority of the back area. Alas and alack, it seems to be less than half the size of what it used to be. This saddens me to the core.

With the advent of the Sony Reader and the Amazon kindle, could this very thing happen with books? No. I think not. Certainly not. The fact that I have a kindle doesn’t bias me either or make me a hypocrite in any way.

We purchased some items and as I stood to checkout, I thumbed through a book that was one of several of the same title stacked by the register. The title was In a Perfect World, a novel about a flight attendant who marries a pilot and guess what? They have problems. I can’t believe it either… seemed like a perfect match. Anyway, as I handed the clerk my debit card, she asked me if I wanted to purchase one of said books to donate to Roswell Park.

“What’s Roswell Park, again?” I asked.

“A cancer center,” said she.

“Ahhh. I’m going to have to say no.” She nodded and scanned my card. She seemed disappointed in me and my lack of generosity.

“Can I tell you why I would rather not purchase this particular book for Roswell Park?” She gave me a dead stare. She was a typical Borders employee: long, straight hair, a nose ring, a tattoo.

“Okay?” she said.

I opened the book and recited to her the first line of the first chapter, which states the following:

If you are reading this you are going to die.

I gave her a dead stare and said,

“I am very disturbed that Borders thinks this is an appropriate gift to give to cancer patients.”

Her eyes grew wide as saucers. I gave her a curt nod and left the store.

Sometimes these moments just drop into your lap and you have to take advantage of them.

Happy 30th birthday Katie m'Lady! Guess what? You're OLD. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!!

(I love you lots!)

Laboring is for the Birds

And she learned that cutting her daughter's hair herself was a bad idea.... a really, really bad idea.

Happy Labor Day. Or the day after Labor Day by the time I get this published. In honor of this great holiday, I feel I should share my brief but memorable involvement in an American-made union.

For one summer, I was a clerk who notoriously refused to wear her blue smock while stocking magazines at Rite Aid. (Or while stocking anything else, for that matter. It was just plain ugly and unnecessarily bulky.) My union rep came in two times over the summer “just to check up on me.” I guess he was supposed to make sure my mouthy manager wasn’t abusing me, that I had access to a potty, and that I knew I was up for a $.03 pay raise should I stick with the job until November.

The union rep was young, had greasy skin and greasy hair and looked south of my eyes when talking to me if you catch my drift. I hated when he came in. He made me feel squirmy.

And that is my only experience as a union member and quite frankly, it’s a pretty forgettable one. Still, I’m happy that law firms give their employees a day off and I’ve personally always felt that Labor Day Sales are a cruel slap in the face to retail employees.

This particular Labor Day weekend marks the one year anniversary of the Great Move of 2008. We have lived in this big yellow house for 365 days now. I should really start unpacking.

I think this is a big house, despite what Better Homes and Gardens tells me. Every time I open up the magazine, I see an article that starts out with this general scenario:

“When Tom and Miranda decided to move from their family-sized colonial in Charleston to a modest, 2300 square foot home outside of Pittsburgh, they needed new décor to celebrate the great change in their lives.”

If 2300 square feet is modest, then I’m a stuffed duck or I’ve been seriously deluding myself. I’m thrilled with the spaciousness of our 2000 square-foot home. My kids can drive their ride-on toys from the great room into the living room at lightning speeds. They run in circle-eights throughout the downstairs. They have an entire playroom just to make messes in. Someday, I’ll get the basement cleaned up and de-spiderfied and we’ll have even MORE space to roam free.

The house has its quirks. For instance, one cannot run the microwave AND have the kitchen lights on at the same time without blowing a circuit. So come winter, I will be microwaving frozen broccoli in the dark.

It’s not a new house, so it didn’t come with granite countertops or whirlpool baths or anything like that. But it fit all of our criteria, was in our price-range, and its walls were neutral enough that we didn’t have to paint anything when we moved in. AND it has a completely fenced in backyard, which is akin to having an enormous playpen attached to the back of your house. I cannot tell you how much this has behooved this scatterbrained lady who shouts out “Where’s Daniel? Where’s Daniel!!!????” about twenty times a day.

This past year has not been kind to this house. My kids have markered the walls and the carpet, have chipped paint off the corners of the walls, have made permanent indentations in the laminate flooring, have banged the doors too hard too often, smudged all of the windows with their tiny fingers, and have definitely altered the appearance of the stair railing in a way that I can’t quite put my own finger on. But I stopped trying to be Little Miss Better Homes and Gardens a long time ago and so my house may be a little beat up, a bit of a relic from the eighties and quite sticky in places, but I’m hoping that it is precisely these qualities that make my house a home.

And since this is Labor Day, I’m not even going to pick up the toys before I go to bed. My union rep, who is completely imaginary and very handsome, told me that was perfectly acceptable.

The Day In Which Holly Deems Herself Capable Enough to Tune Her Own Stinking Piano

Tomorrow, being September 1st and all, means that school and winter preparation must commence. On the September page of my calendar in the kitchen, which is the only organizational method I really have for knowing what exactly I should be doing on a day to day basis, what year it is, how old my children are, etc., I have put down the costly expenses that come with the onset of a new season. These include things like: get chimney cleaned, get furnace cleaned, tune piano, plant bulbs, get snow tires, get school clothes and supplies and withdrawal bribe money for the teachers, etc.

As I looked over this list, I immediately crossed off plant bulbs. (I have never ONCE done this in the fall. No… once. I remember. My dad and stepmom helped and it was cold out and my hands hurt.) I scrutinized the list to see what other things I could scrimp on.

The piano desperately needs tuning. Caleb starts piano lessons shortly and I can’t bear to listen to him practice if the piano is going to sound as it does in its current state. In its current condition, it would not be fit for a seedy bar in a bad part of Detroit.

However, shelling out $100 for a tuning always seems so terribly painful. And it was with furrowed brow that I sat at my kitchen table sipping W-Coke when I thought to myself, SELF… perhaps you could tune the piano!

And why not? I can tune a guitar! And guitars and pianos are both string-type instruments! I consider myself a resourceful and a somewhat intelligent being; how hard could this be? Though I wasn’t blessed with perfect pitch like my father, I have a good ear and know flat from sharp. It’s just a matter of tightening or loosening the strings.

I began to get excited. Ideas always seem so good and innovative in the first few minutes after you’ve thought of them.

I do have a history of tuning musical instruments, beginning, I believe, in seventh grade band. I played the sax-a-ma-phone and if memory serves me correct, I don’t recall tuning it much in years before seventh grade band. I suppose our instructors were more concerned with us eking out an actual note in the general vicinity of a correct pitch. But in seventh grade band, everyone tuned their instruments before practice. I sat and listened through the cacophony of instruments playing concert A to see if I could tell if I was in tune. (I couldn’t.)

The girl next to me, and I don’t remember her name, was older and didn’t talk to me much. But I remember the following exchange vividly. During the first week of school, she turned to me as we were tuning our respective sax-a-ma-phones.

“You are very flat,” she stated, rather flatly. So I adjusted my mouthpiece accordingly and played again. “Still flat,” she said. I adjusted my mouthpiece again. I let out a nice long concert A with a bit of vibrato at the end. She shook her head, sighed in disgust, and turned away from me.

I quit band after the ninth grade. It was for the best, really, for everyone involved.

After making the decision to tune my own piano, which is an upright Steinway, I went and removed all items perched on the piano with gusto. Then I dusted the top of the piano, because it really called for dusting. I opened the top and peered in at the hammers and strings and then played a bit of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 and imagined Jerry dancing around trying to tire out Tom.

Caleb came by to see what the heck I was doing.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m going to tune our piano.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m going to make it sound better.”

“Are you going to fix the D-note?” (The D above middle C sounds especially bad.)

“Yes. Yes I am.”

“Well that’s good.” And then he went off and played “spy on Daniel” which is the latest craze at the Jennings’ household.

As I fiddled with the innards of the piano, I couldn’t help but note that the strings were, well, thicker than I imagined them to be. And the tighteners (I don’t know what else to call them) were not like tuning pegs on a guitar. They weren’t gonna budge with hands. I immediately thought… I shall use a small wrench for this project. This is when I decided to google “how to tune an upright piano.”

Apparently, there are specific tools one needs to tune a piano. Using a small wrench is NOT recommended as you could break strings. For a couple of brief moments, I considered purchasing such a tool, known in the piano tuning industry as a “tuning lever.”

As I browsed the exciting website pianosupplies.com, I also realized I hadn’t thought about what I had in my home that could dispel a perfectly pitched tone. (Unless, of course, I could get Ella to scream continuously for hours. Her highest pitch is a perfect E flat. How do I know it is perfect? One can sense these things.) My first thought was my old harmonica… and I think it was then- when I realized I was considering using a harmonica to tune my piano- that I saw the absolute lunacy of my plan.

So, I closed up shop and put everything back where it belonged and played the D above middle C and shuddered. And then I looked up the piano tuner’s phone number and resolved to call him before the week was out.

One the plus side, while browsing the internet, I discovered new and exciting items available for music lovers. If you should come to my house within the next couple of months, you may very well find yourself staring at keyboard themed toilet paper while sitting on the pot. (Because one must support the arts somehow.)