This is My Body, This is My Blood

How to Make Friends and Influence People (like me)

1. Surprise me by sneaking my car to the gas station and filling the tank so I don't have to play chicken with the warning light next time I get in.

2. Spend Thanksgiving Day tearing down the fence that rotted and fell over last week

3. Put your hands over your ears and go "la-la-la!" so I can fart in bed without getting (too) embarrassed or having to leave the room (again).

4. Unscrew the cap from the bottle of Morello Cherries you bought when you see me struggling and before I even ask.

5. Fan me when I'm having a hot flash.

6. Let me warm my ice cold feet on you when I'm freezing.

7. Bring me a fuzzy, soft, adorable pink scarf "just because".

8. Rub my feet twice in the same day.

9. Take me to Rite Aid to get those pink slippers we saw and not be embarrassed when I wear them in public.

10. Slip a $20 bill in my purse so I have "walking around" money.

11. Say, "What's wrong, Baby?" when something in my voice is the slightest bit off.

12. Watch the video of J's play even though most of the songs are horribly off key. (not his, though)

13. Scratch my back until I fall asleep.

14. Go out for coffee with my client's 90 year-old husband to keep him company while I massage his wife even though you have a bunch of other stuff to do.

15. Drive 2 1/2 hours to see me and back home again 48 hours later.

16. Laugh with me when I make fun of your tired cliches.

17. Let the dog sleep with us. Under the covers.

18. Risk loving me when it's so, well, risky.

A Little Rain

 

I received news today that a young man with whom I had an irreverent (and inappropriate) teenage fling was found dead of a gunshot wound this weekend. They're not sure if it was murder or a hunting accident.

Strange that I was thinking about him just a few days ago, remembering how we stole glances across a smoky room where crooked sofas cradled lazy teenagers as they passed a joint under the haunting spell of Led Zeppelin. Viet Nam was supposedly over, Patty Hearst had robbed a bank, a peanut farmer from Georgia was vying for the presidency and somewhere beneath the whitecaps of Lake Superior, The Edmund Fitzgerald was beginning to rust in its blackwater deathbed.

These are the seasons of emotion and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion - I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient - Upon us all a little rain must fall

We we sat in somebody's basement, hiding behind a haze of apathy while eating stale Halloween candy and grinning like anorexic pumpkins left too long on the porch. We didn't have a clue what to do with the torch so we just let the rain soak it until the flame died out. At the time, I was married to a boy who spent most Fall evenings drinking beer while shining a bright light into the faces of deer, stunning them long enough to pull a trigger.  I'd wed at sixteen in order to escape the jurisdiction of my fundamentalist father.  A year later I longed to escape the tyranny of my alcoholic husband, and when F made eye contact beneath the brim of his camouflage cap, I held it.

He was beautiful, a top wrestler, voted Cutest Smile in our high school yearbook-- a well deserved title. No words passed between us when he moved to sit next to me. Beneath a ratty blanket, he gently stroked my palm with his thumb as if he were reading my future. I closed my fist around his hand. I was willing to share my body, but not my soul.

After a while he asked for a ride home. During the next song, I stood and offered my goodbyes to friends. F waited a few respectable minutes before following me toward a disrespectful act of defiance against my life choices. On the way to his rural farm, we stopped at the creek and made out in the front seat of my Chevette. Teenage passion overtook space and we spilled out of the car into the leaves, clawing at one another like hungry children which in a way, I suppose, we still were. It started to rain but we didn't notice or didn't care.

 

I woke the next morning with leaves in my hair and guilt gnawing at my gut. I was seventeen, sorry, and six weeks pregnant. Though we never spoke of it again, there was a sadness in F's smile the next time I saw him. He and my young husband,T, were hunting buddies. Secrets were told over campfires. It was a very a small town. I later heard that F stood before T and offered himself up as an unmoving target, an act of honor against dishonorable offenses. My husband threw one drunken punch, that amazingly made it's mark, before collapsing in sobs.

 

Our child was born 7 1/2 months later. The marriage never recovered from the dent left in  wet leaves beneath a tree by the creek.  I left T when our daughter was five months old, left that town a few years later, and left the Midwest a dozen years after that. I've made a lot more mistakes since then, but leaving my abusive husband wasn't one of them, and for that I have F to thank. If there is an afterlife, I like to think his smile will light the sky on his way to the next one.

 

 Speak to me only with your eyes. It is to you I give this tune.
Ain't so hard to recognize - These things are clear to all from
time to time...

Driven to Distraction

I love writing. Really, I do. It's the revising I hate. Surgically removing big chunks of writing, inserting new matierial, moving whole chapters around, changing the ending for crying out loud--it boggles the mind. And when this particular mind is boggled, it tends to travel toward any number of distractions.

For those of you doing NaNoWriMo and searching for ways to sabotage your precious writing time a mere eight days before the deadline looms, look no further, for I am the Princess of Procrastination. Grab your mouse by the tail and follow me.

We'll start with that trip to Vegas in January where I'm meeting my sister for a few Cheap Thrills My sister and I hail from a place where you'll see guys like these doing things like this, who shoot these, and who voted for him. That was before I moved a few hundred miles from a city where the girls don't eat and take diet pills that make them feel like they live here.

See how easy it is to waste hours of precious writing time? In fact, what am I doing posting here when I could be doing this?

Girls Just Wanna Have Fu-un

Yesterday I couldn't get my hair to do anything I wanted it to do so I did what all girls learn at a very young age: pulled a couple wads into rubber bands behind my ears. Granted, my hair is barely long enough to gather it into a ponytail holder, but I was in a hurry and nothing else was working. As I checked myself in the mirror, I couldn't help but grin at the two stubby puffs sticking out of my head like faded pom poms.

Despite my chronological age, inside I'm still a mud pie-making, frog-catching, tree-climbing, bare-footed girl who loves rolling in leaves and telling secrets under the covers. And I happen to like that about myself. So I snatched a couple of pink ribbons from my roommate's stash and lashed them around the elastic binders just as my client knocked on the door.

After the massage, I jumped on my old Schwinn and, with red and blue handlebar streamers flying,  headed for the grocery store. On the way down a hill, I squeezed my eyelids shut and let the wind kiss my face, remembering every pot hole on Third Street, every scab on my bony young knees, every crack to break your mother's back, as I flew past a blur of houses occupied by people whose names I knew: Mr. Rabie, who raised rabbits and once gave me a bunny that died in its cage while I was away at Bible Camp. Miss Vannette, my Kindergarten teacher--an old maid who lived with her aging father and tended a secret garden in her back yard. The Burcons, owners of the furniture store and the only house in our little town with a pool, though I never was lucky enough to swim in it. Mrs. Powers and her two children, Stephie and Bobby, the German wife of a U.S. soldier stationed overseas.

When I opened my eyes I wasn't at Vanderven's Grocery, the place where Mr. Vanderven sometimes let me watch him grind hamburger in the back of the store and where I often stood at the candy counter with a sweaty nickle clenched in my hungry fist, unable to choose between a candy necklace or a box of Milk Duds. Instead, I was standing in front of Alberston's, where a nickel won't even buy a donut hole.

I leaned my bike against the wall and headed toward the dairy case for milk and eggs. On my way back up an aisle stacked high with bottles of spring water that never taste as good as the water that sprung from the well that fed my childhood home, I recognized C, a prominent person in my local writing community. I slipped behind him in line at the cash register and tapped him on the shoulder. "Hi, C."

He turned, looked me up and down, then sort of laughed.  "Just how old are you, anyway?"

Suddenly I felt silly, a middle aged woman in pigtails and flowered flip flops trying too hard to forget herself. I shifted, stood on one leg and scratched my right calf with my left toe. Before I could answer, my favorite cashier winked at me as she weighed C's bananas. "You look adorable today, Ellie. Love the pigtails."

I smiled and looked C straight in the eye. "I suppose I'm every age I've ever been," I said. "Just like you."

My writer friend snorted, resting the bag of fruit on his bulging belly as he headed for the door, shaking his shiny head.

"Will that be all, Ellie?"

I paused, eyeing the rack of treats behind me. "Not quite," I said.

Pedaling up the hill near my house, I sat high on the seat, legs pumping fiercly. With a candy necklace stretched tight across my mouth, I chewed my way to the sweet center of another memory.

Double Dutch

I come from a family of penny-pinchers. My mother's people happen to be predominantly Dutch, as was most of the population in the West Michigan area where I grew up, and they were the tightest of the tight. The joke went like this:

Q.: How do you drive a Hollander crazy?

A.Put him in a round room and tell him there's a penny in the corner.

Due to  an act of confounded stupidity an unfortunate accident a few weeks ago, the above-mentioned inbred frugality came in handy when replacing my trusty laptop with a new one. Ever the discerning shopper, I managed to nab a brand spanking new Dell Inspiron 8600 for  $1000 $600 OK, $479 less than retail on my favorite shopping network: eBay. My gloating, however, was short lived. Two short weeks of using a borrowed 17 inch external monitor was all it took for my eyes to take a permanent vacation from the job of focusing and I've had to increase the font size twofold in order to read my email. This act about kills me. Because the other thing I inherited from my mother's side of the family was vanity.

I can still remember the prickly curlers Mom wore to bed on Saturday nights, those awful girdles she wriggled herself into, and how joyous she once became upon finding a size 8 dress that she could get zipped, even though her hips required a 12. "Look at the tag," she said, backing up to her younger sister. "Size eight." 

Not to be outdone, my Aunt Ginny pulled off her shoe, shoved it in my mother's face. "Size 9 1/2. Narrow." (FYI: Dutch girls are known for their big feet. So much so that it takes a tree rather than a cow to shoe them, hence the wooden clogs.) And then, in the ultimate slam dunk, she added, "On sale. $2.99." Unable to conceal her awe, my mother gasped in admiration, the extra breath being all it took to pop the button on the belt of her too-small dress. I watched from my quiet corner (with toilet paper shoved into the toes of my hand-me-down shoes) as they sat at the kitchen table and drank coffee from chipped cups while my mother sewed and my aunt rubbed her blistered feet.

So, there's my excuse for bragging all those years to my wasband how great my reading eyes were, teasing him about having to use magnifying glasses to read field guides or check ingredients on the back of food items.  I didn't believe him when he just smiled and promised that it would happen to me, too. At forty-one, I was still gloating, gleefully reading the tiniest text with naked eyes. A year later, the words began to blur a bit.  No problem. I'd just hold the book a little further away. When I turned forty-three, it came down to a choice between weak reading glasses or arm extensions.

Recently I met my wasband for lunch, squinted at the menu before groping around in my purse. I tasted bitter hunks of humble pie, the occasional crumb of crow, a fleck of foot as he teased but  dismissed his jab with a wave of my hand. "Yeah, well these are only 1.5  strength," I said, perching a new pair of sparkly pink reading glasses on the end of my nose,"Not like your coke-bottle lenses." And then, before I could stop myself, I heard my mother say, "Plus I got these babies at the Dollar Store. For, only, um..."

He grinned over the top of his menu. "A hundred pennies?"

"Shut up and order." I kicked him under the table with my size 8 (I'm half Welsh)  sandals.  "Your turn to buy, right?"

   

Bye Bye Miss American Pie

There we were all in one placeA generation lost in spaceWith no time left to start againSo come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quickJack Flash sat on a candle stick'Cause fire is the devil's only friend.As I watched him on the stageMy hands were clenched in fists of rageNo angel born in hellCould break that satan's spellAnd as flames climbed high into the lightTo light the sacrificial riteI saw satan laughing with delightthe day the music died.

My dad used to tell me that hardship builds character, yet waking to the results of yesterday's election has left me feeling as if I am made of sandstone. I've been walking around in a daze, unable to concentrate, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I only heard part of Kerry's concession speech on the radio but it just broke my heart when he said he wished he could wrap his arms around all of us.  Then some guy yelled out, "We've got your back!" and he responded, "And I've got yours."

That did it.  My body sagged like a limp pillow under the weight of one too many heavy heads and I cried. 

I couldn't even stomach the first sentence of Bush's speech. The man makes me physically ill. So I switched over to Air America where the day's mantra was to hold each other through the shock and awe of a nation gone mad. But even Randi, Al, and Janeen couldn't cheer me up. I switched off the dial and drove in silence under a gray sky that matched my mood. Along the way, hundreds of Kerry yard signs, bright and hopeful, stood like faithful soldiers in the rain. I thought about Kerry's words, thought about pulling into one of those driveways, knocking on the door and opening my arms, not saying a word, not needing to.

I am so scared and sad for this country--one I hardly recognize anymore. And I am seriously thinking of leaving.  We have to stay and fight, you say, but when the youth can't even save us with their fresh, untainted enthusiasm, what's left but a bunch of tired ideologues and graying hippies clutching faded protest signs?  Face it. Miss American Pie is full of rotten apples and the good ol' boys don't care if there's water in the levees so long as there's oil for their chevies.

*I usually use my own photos when possible but found this perfect one via google, with no credit to the copyright owner. If you know where it came from let me know.