Spring Break Trip

We left at 11:30 am on Thursday. 11:30 was a little later than we thought because we’d supposedly packed up the whole camper the night before, just a few sundry items left like phone chargers and tooth brushes. I was moving a little more slowly than usual, considering the fact that I’d accidentally weed whacked my left calf the day before in a freak yard work accident. In case you’re wondering, weed whacking your calf accidentally feels exactly the way you think it might. Take my word for it and mark it off your bucket list.

Another reason we left so late was because we had a giant mushroom growing in a vintage Corning Ware casserole dish in the kitchen and we couldn’t decide what to do with it. If we left it it would die because it needs to be spritzed with water twice a day or it will dry out and turn brown (it’s normally white). The last time I left a mushroom growing when we left for a weekend I tried putting half an inch of water in the casserole dish and wrapping it in cellophane. Upon reentry to our kitchen two days later, we were greeted with the stench of a thousand necrotic slugs with poopy diapers. So the half inch of water didn’t work and a second go was out of the question. I thought about asking a friend to take it, but in the end, we decided the responsibility was too great for a stranger and we would have to take it with us. By the time we had the cold stuff and the toothbrushes and phone chargers and the mushroom packed and I’d changed the gauze on my calf twice, it was 11:30. We headed out west 11th toward the wild blue yonder.

Lion’s Mane in a box (we left the Corning Ware at home.)

Once when I was in college I wrote “wild blue yonder” in a paper while referring to exploring the woods and the teacher made a note in the margins that that phrase refers to traveling on the ocean, not on land. I’ve had serious doubts about the veracity of his claim since I read that note, but I never looked it up until just now. Turns out I was right, as usual. It can mean basically anyplace unknown, as a quick google search would’ve told that teacher. The phrase is taken from an Army Air Corps song written in 1939. I’m not sure google was invented when I was in college, based on the many books I checked out of the library during that time, so he’d have had to do some less casual research to find the truth, but still.

That whole digression reminds me of an internet meme I read recently that said that the first fax machine was invented in 1843 and it was called an electric printing telegraph. That’s thirty years BEFORE the Revolutionary War, just to put things into linear perspective. I was reading about it just now and it said something about Napoleon witnessing one of the early demonstrations of a third generation fax machine, but it was Napoleon II and I didn’t realize there was a II. There was also a Napoleon III as it turns out, and he was the last monarch of France. There’s a cannon named after him-the 12-pound Napoleon. Ostensibly the shells are twelve pounds, not the cannon itself. Or maybe the Napoleon complex lived on throughout three generations and the titular cannon was a last rebuke by a comedic enemy.

Anyway, we left at 11:30 and went to our favorite restaurant in North Bend (Tin Thistle Cafe) and the lighthouse at Bullards Beach, where sea lions flapped their little feet at us through the ice cold waves. We were at Face Rock when we realized that we’d left the mushroom spritzer on the kitchen table, and now we had a rapidly drying mushroom block taking up a third of the floor space in our camper. We decided to hit up the $1 store in Bandon to find a new spritzer.

I went in by myself because my partner Marika cannot exit a $1 store without several hundred items. Upon entry, I encountered an older gentleman wearing socks, sandals, and wide American flag suspenders holding up his cargo shorts. He had on a baseball cap and I hesitated to read it, wishing to keep our encounter politics free.

“You really outta be smiling on a fine day like today!” he told me, grinning up a storm himself. I read his hat. “Bernie for President.” I smiled at him, because, while I understand it’s not right for people to ask other people to smile, it’s really not that hard for me to pull one up. Plus I liked his hat.

I went to the spray bottles and there were about 150 styles to choose from but luckily there was a woman there who had cat litter and athletic socks in her cart and I told her I was having a hard time choosing. She told me the short ones are cuter but 3 out of 4 of them don’t work and stick with the ugly one. I thought to myself that she must have a lot of mushrooms at home to keep moist.

Later on when I pulled up to the checkout line, the suspenders guy was chatting up an old woman, still smiling away.

“This store has the best deals in town!” he announced as his selection of cards (get well soon? birthday? graduation? I couldn’t tell) rode up the belt. The old woman was packing her stuff in bags.

“I’m just so angry that they decided to raise the prices,” she answered. His smile faltered for a second.

“Is it $2 now?” he asked. We all looked at the cashier, who kept his eyes glued on the cards he was ringing up. I imagine he would have to listen to this conversation a number of times per day.

“No,” she answered icily, still looking at the cashier, like he was the one that made the whole decision. “It’s a $1.25 now. And gas too! I don’t think gas should be so expensive.” The cashiers eyes flicked over at her for a split second, I think checking to see if she was going to try to pin the gas thing on him as well.

The man in the suspenders shook his head. “Well with this pandemic..,”he began, but she cut him off at the knees.

“The pandemic, the pandemic! They blame everything on the pandemic. I have my doubts about all of it.”

The suspenders guy’s smile came back bigger than ever and he threw out his best Rodney Dangerfield: “I don’t blame the pandemic for my wife!” he said, and congratulated himself with a big laugh. I forgave him again because of that hat. The woman finished packing up her stuff. “You have yourself a great day!” he commanded.

“You too, honey,” she said flatly, like she said it a thousand times before. I doubted her sincerity very much.

I think he was right though. Where else could I get this mushroom house and three ladies to occupy it, plus an ugly spray bottle for just $3.75?

We pulled out of Bandon and laughed at the giant sign advertising Oregon jam. “JAM!” it said in 2 million point font, which we thought was very hilarious but then we both sort of wanted to stop and get some. We didn’t, because we have a million jams at home and a giant mushroom to keep track of.

We went to a few more beaches and hikes and then ate the BEST pizza breadsticks I have EVER, I mean EVER tasted at Zola’s in Brookings.

We stopped for gas at a 76 station and our chihuahua tried to kill the gas station attendant, even though he was just a nice old man. Like every time we get gas in the camper, Marika wrapped his little dog body up like a pig in a blanket, just his brown head sticking out one side and his tail out the back. I got out to talk to the old gas guy about the weird gas hole in our 1989 camper. He gave me a biscuit for the dogs and muttered “I swear to god, if that dog is named Precious…” I laughed and told him his name was Dingo. We got our gas and as we drove away Dingo snarled and snapped his teeth, more like a wild boar in a blanket.

“Goodbye Dingo!!” the gas man yelled through the window. “Grandpa loves you!! Have a nice trip!!”

We went to Boardman Scenic Corridor and I hiked down into this treacherous and gorgeous spot, where the water is deep aqua and the waves rimmed it’s edges like delicate white ruffles on a fine giant doily and the trees stand on sea stack islands against the blue sky, so perfectly silhouetted against the sun it feels almost fake, like this is how an engineer at Disney would make an Oregon beach look. I made a TikTok video of that place that has 103 likes on it, the second most I’ve ever had, after the one where I demonstrated a special peanut butter stirrer that I got on Amazon, which has 170 likes.

I whipped out my yoga mat at the campsite that next morning and tried to do a yogasthenics workout. It didn’t go well because I was right next to the bathroom path and I felt self conscious. I tried to tell myself that nobody cares if you’re doing cat/cow and breath of fire next to the campground toilet but I didn’t believe me. Later Marika and I quarreled when she was trying to put some dirty clothes into a brown paper bag and cursed my yoga mat, which kept falling down on her. I took her cursing of my yoga mat personally and held up her bag of polyester stuffing, which had been in my way a number of times, and cursed it. Neither of us much liked that conversation and we went on a thirty minute alone hike and met back up later on the beach, feeling much better. Then we went to Natural Grocers and bought sandwich fixings and had soy curl chicken soup and some massive tofurky sammies with vegan mayonnaise that comes in an aluminum toothpaste tube and cost $7. I could’ve bought fifteen gnome ladies in Bandon for less than the toothpaste tube of mayonnaise. It was a gift though and it was delicious.

Next we found our camp spot and Marika used her polyester fill and some brown felt to make a mushroom prototype, while I read chapters from James Herriot’s “All Things Bright and Beautiful” out loud for entertainment. The mushroom prototype didn’t work out, but it was a learning experience.

The last night of our trip I had a dream that Marika and I were staying in a giant dark aqua B and B on the beach. Its windows were rimmed with fine delicate white. I was standing on the side of the house and the waves were getting higher and higher until I finally had to call out to Marika to come see them. They weren’t like any waves I’d ever seen, they were hundreds of feet tall, but thin like a deep aqua wall with a dainty white ribbing along the top, curling down like a beautiful doily. We watched as a wave crashed over the topmost turrets of the B and B and I decided they must’ve made it strong so that it could take a few wave hits. I made a flash decision to lay down on the ground as the wave was coming down from hundreds of feet high and let it smash over me. I second guessed myself and Marika called to me to come back to where it was safe, but then, in a very dreamlike turn of events, the wave turned into the B and B house thundering down toward me. It was too late to move now so as it fell toward me I lined myself up with an open door hoping to not get crushed. I woke up just as it crashed down. I don’t know what it means, but I’m sure it was important.

And now I’ll end with a sunset picture from the last day:

Actually, I’ll end with a photo of the vegan crab cakes I made from the Lion’s Mane:

Happy spring, everyone!

My sister Joan

This is the picture my sister Joan sent to me at 4:47 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. It was sent with no ponzy little description or meme headings. Just a picture of some janky brown shoes sitting there like Eleven kicked them off on the patio to take a ride on the homemade slip n’ slide.

“What r we lookin at here?” I asked, spinning through our last phone call, trying to remember if we’d talked about brown shoes with the soles falling off.

“Lol, Google the brand name shoes” she returned. My sister Joan is a communication artist. She subconsciously knows how to give you just enough and just the right kind of information that you feel like the answer is right on the tip of your tongue, only to find out later in the conversation that you had a better chance at correctly spelling the word hemerhoid than guessing what she’s talking about.

“Looks like B ⭐️ pe” I said, certain at any minute the fog would clear and she would say “these are the shoes I wore when we saw the gar fish at Deleon Springs, do you remember?” And I’d say “Oooooohhhh!! Of course! Thank you for sending me this.”

“Lol,” she said. “Bape.”

Just two words. No more, no less. Was she being held at gunpoint against her will, being fed laughing gas? What if this was some sort of a cruel test and she could only be released if I could figure out what she was talking about in ten words or less? I counted her words so far. Eight! Three more words and my sister would be dead.

I often think about these kinds of cruel games. I once decided that it would be kind of interesting if at every large event the leaders took one of each of our shoes and piled them up in a giant pile in the parking lot and we had to find our other shoe before we could go home. We’d get really good at working together and organizing. I think we’d probably come up with some sort of a reliable pattern, like putting all the shoes we find in alphabetical order based on color so that people would know where to look more quickly. I think this would be a really great way to get people to work together.

I really wanted to figure out what she was talking about without her telling me, because of the gunpoint ten words or less potential. I decided to take a walk and clear my head to really think through this Bape problem. I’d gone about a mile when I decided that if she really was being held captive, she’d probably have tried to include a secret “help me” indicator that only I would recognize. Like she’d maybe say “Les Miserables the musical is terrible,” or “I hate Asian markets,” and I’d know she was held at gunpoint being fed laughing gas. Since it was mostly clear that she was probably fine, I decided to give in and let her win this competition of will.

Me: Did we talk about these brown shoes? Remind me?

Joan: We didn’t. I actually just found these in my attic… someone left the poor babes in there to die!!

This is why I love my sister. She is so down to earth, and sweet, and somehow even more random than I am. That and I tell her all the same stories over and over, mostly about my obsessions—I’m growing my hair out, I love joggers, I can do a pull up, etc., etc.—and she listens to them each time like it’s the first time I’m telling her. The only other person I know with that level of patience with my storytelling is Shannon Powell. I’ll talk about Shannon another time…I’ve got a great story involving a used tampon and a corpse for that.

Joan and I are only eighteen months apart, so sometimes it feels a little like we’re fraternal twins. We are so very different that I used to wonder if we’d have even been friends if we weren’t siblings. I asked her that once in high school, and I could tell it hurt her feelings. If we hadn’t been friends, it would’ve been my loss because she is so smart and randomly funny. Sometimes we get to laughing so hard that we nearly pee our pants. Well, I nearly do. She’s had three natural childbirths so she pretty much goes for it. I remember one time in church we were singing this hymn that goes like this:

Dance! Dance! Wherever you may be!

I am the Lord of the Dance said he.

And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

And I’ll lead you all in the Dance, said he

I danced on a Friday

When the sky turned black

It’s hard to dance

With the devil on your back.

I hit that last line going about a hundred miles an hour in my best church singing voice and I really did not expect those lyrics. A vision of a guy with great hair dressed (inexplicably) in Medieval leggings and tunic dancing a frenzied jig with a hairy red devil in spandex clinging to his back and biting him on the neck popped into my head and I started laughing. It was the quiet jiggle kind of laugh, the one where you desperately wish it would stop, but now everything you see is quickly replaced by a spandex wearing devil biting into the Lord of the Dance and nothing can be done about it. Pretty soon I felt my sister, sitting next to me, quiet jiggle laughing too, and then I was really off. By this time the song was done and everyone was sitting back down for the sermon and we were laughing so hard we were crying but trying to be chill about it so nobody would notice. We did not go to a large church. Picture your living room filled with about forty people sitting in a circle so there’s nowhere to hide. Poor Reverend Ayers had to minister on, hopefully secure enough in his Godly duty to know it wasn’t about him.

Now that we’re older we talk about more substantial stuff, like elderberries and hyaluronic acid and queefs and roombas and, if I’m honest, a lot about poops. My partner says she can always tell when I’m talking to Joan because I’m giggling. Also, my sister is a five star nurse. That means whenever I get bloodwork done I share my results with her and we go over them like it’s a school project and we have to get an A or I will die. Here’s a snippet of our last bloodwork conversation:

Me: My tsh number is 11.8 and I thought it would be lower since I’m taking 75 mg of levothyroxine. I still eat gluten here and there and I think that affects it too, but I thought it would be lower.

Also Me: Do you think I should take t3? I just read that you’re not supposed to take iron supplements at the same time as levothyroxine. Oops.

Joan: Yes you’re supposed to take levothyroxine on an empty stomach. We give it at 6am separate from the other meds Did they check t3 and t4???

Me: I don’t think so. It’s not on the report.

Joan: They will likely want to.. that will help determine why the tsh is low. I mean high.

(Thirty minutes no response)

Joan: Hello Lol

Me: Ok, I’m supposed to chat w her on the phone soon. I’ll ask about that.

Joan: I’m gonna read up on it.. i learned it well in nursing school but forgot it all…It is very interesting. Wonder what your estrogen levels are. High estrogen levels cause elevated tsh levels It’s also what causes the thing you had removed…

Fibroid. Did it show your alt and ast?? Ask what she thinks is causing the elevated levels.. I’m not exactly sure what I’m talking about.

Can you talk?? I got me a new car.

I’ve just now decided in honor of this blog, I’m going to send her a random picture of something from my camera roll and see what she says.

Ok, I found a screenshot I shared my sixth graders tracing the different iterations of Garfield over the years. It’s just right, it seems like it is something she should know about but can’t quite put her finger on it, like Eleven’s shoes. I wonder what she’ll say? I would be confused and wonder why she sent me this random photo. I would say “Awww! Cute! I used to LOVE Garfield. Remember when I got a stuffed Garfield for my birthday? It was a 1988 Garfield, based off this chart. What got you thinking about this?

Fast forward a few hours and she replied:

She kept it simple! She clearly doesn’t have the same need to uncover my deep and unspoken meaning or even wonder if I might be held hostage.

Update: I told my sister why I sent the Garfield picture and asked her if she’d read this post to see if there’s anything in it that she didn’t like before I posted it. Here’s her reply:

“So I sent you the pic because I know you are rather nostalgic like me, and like finding things that were once of value that have deteriorated with time and having been literally forgotten and turned to dust..

I remember how you loved Garfield and trying to find you a perfect Garfield.. I remember the one you had with that cute pale pink plastic nose. And was he wearing a baseball jersey?? I remember wishing he could come alive.. lol. I will gladly read your post!”

Sweet and funny and perhaps not quite as random as I thought. Ps he WAS wearing a baseball jersey and I didn’t remember that until the second I read it. ❤️

Looking up

When I was ten or eleven I let my mom talk me into joining her to a gathering of her witch coven, where we all sat in a circle on some rocks by some water under a full moon and talked about menses.

I’m not lying, that actually happened. Why I allowed myself to be brought along is absolutely beyond me. It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into.

“We’re going to sit under the full moon and talk about menses,” she’d told me.

I think in my mind I’d sort decided that she was inviting me as a desperate cry for protection from these older witches (older, meaning the same age that I am presently). I was there to help her in case they turned on her and tied her up and took her to a gingerbread cottage in the woods where there were lots of herbs drying all over the place and a cage in the corner where people were fattened up for a few days before consumption occurred. Instead we all carpooled to the river and found a silvery rock to sit on and nobody was tied up. There were lots of new age style frame drums with frilly feathers and amethyst bangles. We each chose a drum and, thumping out a witchy rhythm, we went around the circle taking turns talking about the menses. There were stories about the first times and stories about mothers and daughters and stories about tampons and babies. The talking stick came round to my mom and she said something clever and then the inevitable happened and they all turned to me with eyes full of wonder. I didn’t have a menses yet, and so I admitted as much, locked my eyes on that full moon, and burped out a few halting sentences about connecting with the earth and the moon and then it was time to go home. In hindsight, I don’t really think my mom needed my help that night. I think she was just fine.

A few decades later I had my uterus surgically removed because it wasn’t behaving properly, having blanketed itself in abnormal tissue and fibroid tumors. To be clear, I do not think that these two events are connected. It’s all just information. But now my menses is no more, thank you very much.

What’s the point? you might be asking yourself. Is this whole thing just some opportunity to write the word menses a bunch of times? No, I do have something to say besides menses. It has to do with the sky and connection.

As I’m sure you’ve probably heard, on solstice this year (December 21-the shortest day of the year) Jupiter and Saturn are going to be one tenth of a degree apart from one another. The last time they were this close together was just before dawn on March 4, 1226.

That morning in 1226 some peasants were probably plastering their cruck house with wattle and daub to keep the spring chill out or maybe they were reaping the rye or whetting the grindstone or walking around on some wool in a vat of old pee. Then they looked up to see this giant double planet ball burning in the sky, telling themselves that the next time this will happen is on December 21st, 2020, and the people then will probably be super happy that they don’t have to take medicine through a giant conical shaped butt tube.

On March 4th, 1226 Saint Francis of Assisi was suffering from stigmata nail wounds he’d recently received from a seraph. Did he stumble outside to check on his bunnies and see the Saturn Jupiter conjunction? We will never know. We do know that he died seven months later, nearly to the day, of his stigmatic wounds, which is not nice, though he probably did not complain.

In March of 1226 Genghis Khan was in China, western Xia to be specific, meting out revenge on the last remaining Xia and Jin forces who had betrayed him by not helping out with a very special raid. Did you know that Genghis Khan was responsible for the deaths of up to forty million people? Numbers schmumbers, but that was 10% of the world population at the time. His raids killed one out of every ten people alive in the 60+ years he was on the earth. His empire was massive, stretching from Korea to Northern Europe. On the morning of the great Jupiter Saturn conjunction, maybe he glanced up from the siege plans he was diligently working on and noticed the crashing planets. What did he think of such an event? We will never know. He died a year and a half later of unspecified cause. Marco Polo said he got an infection from an arrow wound. Some angry Oirads said he got stabbed by a Western Xia princess whom he’d stolen during a conquest.

In the thirteenth century astrology was mixed into everything. Mathematicians, scientists, poets, political leaders, doctors, farmers, astronomers, cobblers, writers, laborers, priests…everybody was in on it. To be considered for an archer position in Genghis Khan’s army, men had to have vision sharp enough to be able to locate the two stars Mizar and Alcor in the Big Bear constellation. Alcor was thought to have been placed next to Mizar as its protector, and as such was prominent in Mongolian astrology. Could you imagine being trotted out into the night to locate stars as a part of your job interview?

When I look up at the night sky I think about all the people before me who looked up. Ptolemy (wrote the premier book on astronomy that was upheld for over a thousand years), Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (has a lunar crater [Azophi] named after him!), Hypatia (murdered by Christian zealots on the street), Copernicus (did a real number on the Roman Catholic Church when he published a book strongly suggesting that the sun is at the center of our solar system), Tycho Brahe (had a pet moose and a fake nose made out of gold after he lost his own nose in a drunken sword duel), Kepler (might have murdered Tycho to get his star charts), and Galileo (spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest for defending the Copernican heliocentric model) all looked at the same planets, the same galaxies, the same comets as we do. The Anishinaabe lived on the same river where our coven gathered for tens of thousands of years and they gave the same moon we sat under different names for each of the seasonal influences it reflected.

We live in a time of great separation. But the sky holds us all in like a magic blanket and it has done so since the very beginning. I’m really hoping that the skies are clear on the night of the Solstice and that I’ll be able to see the conjunction of the two planets. I’ll be thinking of St. Francis and Genghis Kahn and Hypatia. And I’ll be thinking of the return of the light and witch covens and menses and conical butt tubes. But mostly I’ll be thinking of all of us here together, making things work, tucked up and in over the millenia, looking up.

Christmas is Coming

One cold and snowy Monday evening in 1986, my mom laid herself down on the couch in our living room and gave birth, all by herself, to a real live super shiny pink baby. My dad was off somewhere and my other siblings were pretty much toddlers and were crawling around chewing on teething biscuits so they couldn’t help. Also, teething biscuits are very strange. They’re like tiny vanilla flavored pressed logs but I want to eat them because they’re just for babies. Is it just me?

Anyway, Joan, being eighteen months older than me, got to call 911 and I was only a little bit jealous. Ok, I was pretty jealous about that, but only for a little while because there was a lot going on. Well, actually I still wish I could’ve called 911 but I’m nearly over it. I DID help birth the baby, and by help I mean I mostly stayed in the other room to watch Queen Elizabeth have her own baby on a very dramatic made for television biopic. What are the odds that Queen Elizabeth had a baby at the same time and in the same house as my mom!? All I really remember about my mom giving birth in our living room was the utterly unnatural shine on that pink blob as my mom held it up to the light and made sure it was doing all the things newly minted humans are supposed to do.

My mom’s faithful friend Dawn Crowley came over because she was a nurse. The ambulance took a very long time to arrive and in the interim I helped Dawn wash some stuff off the couch cushions. And by helped, I mean I watched while she rinsed an alarming amount of what might have been blood down the tub drain. By the time anyone else stopped by, the baby was no longer shiny (thank God) and the couch was soggy, but blood free. My dad came home and we apprised him of the details of what happened as they loaded my mom into the ambulance to take her to the hospital (teachers had better insurance back then and so could ride to the hospital without thinking about their copay. I’m really thankful for my health insurance and still there’s no way in hell I would ride to the hospital in an ambulance in a non emergency while there’s a perfectly good spouse/car nearby. Once when I was in Costa Rica I got food poisoning and the doctor wanted me to ride in the ambulance to the next town and I said I can’t afford it and he looked at me oddly and said it was free and I said Oh! How novel).

So then the little blob turned into my sister Anne and my parents realized that we didn’t have enough bedrooms (we had three) for all these people (we had eight) and they decided to build an addition onto the house.

My sister Anne holding a bottle of Rolaids and throttling a stuffed cat, December 1986

They decided on two more bedrooms, one more bathroom, and one odd-ish room that was sort of a library and a dance studio and a room to store dirty laundry and a spare bedroom. My sister Joan and I were to share one room and my oldest sister Rachel would take the other room. My parents asked us what amenities we would like in our new space. Joan asked for a ballet bar and a toe shoe friendly area because she was a budding danseuse, having starred in the yearly “Nutcracker” performance for several seasons. I asked for a deep set window that I could put pillows in and curl up like a bagel and read Farmer Boy one hundred more times. They also asked us what color we should paint our bedroom. Joan said lavender and I said camouflage. They said it was a difficult decision and after some long deliberation, they went with the ballerina bar with toe shoe friendly area and lavender. I wasn’t too cross about it. There was a lot going on. I’ve almost gotten over it. Joan quit ballet a year later. But no matter.

Handily enough, they did build a weird closet with a trap door on top that concealed a ventilation fan (to ventilate the dance studio? I’m not sure, I had never seen such a thing and haven’t seen one since either). I would climb up there and open the trap door and smoosh myself in with the fan and read my book. It was pretty quiet and nobody ever knew I was up there, so it was almost like a romantic reading nook with pillows except there were no pillows and I’d have to be careful not to let my mullet get caught in the fan blades.

I loved me some *Drama in Real Life.* 1990?

During those years in our new (lavender) room, Joan and I had a tradition of listening to cassette tapes as we fell asleep. Our favorites were The Andy Williams Christmas Album and a sound recording of Miracle on 34th Street. We listened to them year round because we LOVED Christmas. It was the time of year when we were all together and merry and there were sparkling lights and lots of food and no school for two weeks and beautiful songs to be sung about snow and sleigh rides. It was romantic and Santa and reindeer were involved and life was sweet at Christmastime. I remember sneaking into my Grandparent’s bedroom one Christmas Eve while everyone was finishing up dinner. They had a wooden half moon Christmas light candelabra in their window and I sat on the floor looking out into the darkness through the rainbow bulbs letting Christmas feelings overcome me. It was such a pleasant feeling, I didn’t ever want it to end. And so we kept the thread alive through the nightly cassette tradition.

A Christmas light candelabra from EBay. It’s quite affordable. I may pick it up.

Me in 1988 enjoying a plastic candy cane filled with Hershey kisses a little too much.

Joan and I still bond over Andy Williams Christmas songs and bubble lights (which my Grandmother always put on her tree) every season. I also still cry every time I watch Miracle on 34th street when the postmen (I’ll point out that they were all white postmen, lest you think I’m leaning too far into the nostalgia camp-though I will say the MO34THST was astonishingly female friendly for a movie made in 1947) start bringing in bags and bags of letters to Kris and dump them on the table in the courtroom. Though why they had to make that ginormous mess I can’t fathom. Surely they could’ve just set the bags down on the floor and Kris could’ve gotten to them just as easily. Now some underpaid cleaning staff will have to clean them up.

A bubble light on my Grandmother’s Christmas tree sometime in the 70s or 80s

I still love Christmas like no other holiday. I start listening to Christmas songs a week before a Halloween. I start planning Christmas dinner the day after Thanksgiving. I lie on the floor in front of the glowing Christmas tree and think about that night in my Grandparent’s room, when everything was so quiet and dark except the ever shining fake candle Christmas lights. Christmas is a night of hope and redemption, when we can all be still and remember the past and think ahead to the future.

I’m not going to say that my sister Anne was like Jesus that snowy night when my mom had to give birth by herself in a house full of unhelpful animals and the wise Dawn Crowley brought gifts of medical expertise and cleaning the schmutz off the couch. And then the world opened up to a joyful time of expansive (reading nookless) rooms where the holiday celebrations were honored year round. I’ll just let you come to that on your own. But one thing I will say: this year, like all the years before it, I am settling in for a season of Andy Williams and quiet reflection and growth and hope for the future and remembering the past. Things, though they are complicated and sometimes heartbreaking and hard, are better than they’ve ever been and love is on the rise.

Sunday before work.

I’m laying on my couch, resting. Today I’ve eaten only tater tots and breadsticks and veggie pizza with no cheese. To my credit, what I lost in nutrition I made up for in quantity. I built a giant fire in the wood stove (the only size fire I am capable of making) and my living room is a pleasant eighty-nine degrees. The bread and tots in my stomach are slowly absorbing the twenty ounces of coffee I drank this morning and are gently rising like a glob of yeasted mocha potato bread dough. I’m seriously considering putting on my pajama pants.

Ok, I’ve just returned from putting on pajama pants.

My quarantine life has evolved as the months fly by. It began with a flurry and a dousing of panic and a sprinkle of fear, buying up rice and beans and $5 ketchups and many boxes of Kleenex because all the toilet paper was gone. Now things have settled into a much milder, less harried life. Things are quiet, quite literally, as the circle of people I see in close proximity on the regular (in three dimensions anyway) has reduced from a hundred down to ten. I only ever see the eyes and hair of a third of those ten.

This is the first time I’ve written more than a few sentences since going back to work teaching sixth grade. My working world used to erupt in shouts of joy and laughter with enthusiastic gregariousness bubbling over. It used to throb with waves of hormone saturated sadness at the unjust actions of others, huge crocodile tears splashing on desktops. I played capture the flag. I made a thousand fart jokes. I shouted “[fill in name] stop that immediately!!!!” across the playground at least once a week. I could feel when fractions were hanging like a pall over the room, rather than hearing about it later, when the damage was already done. It was real life in real time and I could effect real solutions in real problems.

But I also used to come home tense, with my shoulders at my ears, unable to tolerate loud sounds and intellectually spent, the after effect of witnessing the trials of so many bursting pupae year after year. Middle school is loud. It can’t help it, it just is. Lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking, and fluorescent lights buzzing are the everpresent undertones. The noise of the voices is what does it.

Children don’t seem to truly understand volume. So many times a child would be inside the classroom and shriek with joy when they saw a [picture of a puppy/kid falling off their chair/name of someone they like on a piece of paper/flying bug/rain storm/etc.] and that shriek, born from unbridled glee, would pierce into the very center of my bones and fracture them, lightning flashing across my vision. I had to restrain my reptilian reflex to flare out my dewlap like a proper monster and hiss roar while baring sharpened teeth. I couldn’t understand how the child next to them could just sit there smiling through those shrieks while I, halfway across the room, was transformed into my own mother when we had the car radio playing too loud; face red, hair sticking up, eyes crazy, angrily snorting…(sorry mom).

“DON’T EVER MAKE THAT NOISE INDOORS AGAIN!!!” I’d bellow, shocking them into momentary silence before they remembered that my dewlap was useless in battle and my spitting poison was just grumpy old people hot air. Deep down, they know that we’re defenseless against them and they could take us in seconds, if they really wanted to.

I never really understand why kids do any of the stuff we ask them to. When I first started teaching I always marveled at the fact that they came inside when we blew the whistle for the end of recess. I mean, what would we do if they all just decided that they weren’t coming in? Honestly, we probably couldn’t do much. But every day, every whistle, even the most oppositional kids come trotting up the stairs for math class. I think it’s more habit than anything else. Maybe it hasn’t occurred to them to organize.

School is such a strange thing. I can see it’s defects. We ask every kid to learn the same thing, despite their particular inborn skill sets. We make them sit down too much. We box them up and give them labels and make them compete with each other while we tell them that it’s not a competition. But I also see the flip side, when a hundred years ago, a genius thinker was stuck in a field digging up potatoes. Remote school is similar. They are isolated. They don’t have access to teachers in the same way. For some, they are trapped in a dangerous place with no outlet. But there are advantages too, as long as the home is a safe place. Students get to sleep in a little more. They don’t have the intense stimulus of the cacophony of hundreds of people under the age of fourteen all in one building. They have some quiet and some rest. They build skills at communicating with their teachers, hopefully.

As for me, I’m left to read books and look at TikTok and upload activities and research online teaching techniques and attach links and follow EOD to do lists. I’ve taken up calisthenics (though I’m skipping the cardio because I’m a grown adult and I can do whatever I want). I can do a few pull-ups and push-ups and I’m on my way to a handstand. I make really good food and talk to my three friends. I zoom with my siblings and parents on Sundays, something we never did pre-Covid era. I lay around with my partner and we crack the funniest jokes nobody else will ever hear. I plan out the meals we will eat if we have to escape in a zombie apocalypse.

Today I laid down on the couch and let some dough rise in my belly. I drank some bubbly water with plum juice in it that my partner canned up in the summer. I sat on the front porch when it got too hot in the living room. Tomorrow I go back to work. I never thought I’d say it: I miss the shrieking kids.

The Oregon Trail-Camper series pt II

When I was around ten, my mom bought our family a tiny Apple IIe computer. It was an odd beige-ish olive color and it was shaped like a cinder block. I looked on Wikipedia and it said that the IIe cost $1,995, which is equivalent to $5,121 in today money. That little computer was super dope. It had a joystick and a printer and we played games on it and I’m sure my mom used it for something too. Maybe she wrote letters and printed them out with the little dot printer and the paper with tiny holes all along the side.

The games we had were all on floppy disks. We had Pac Man, Q-Bert, some money game where snakes try to bite you, Castle Wolfenstein, Lemonade Stand, and Oregon Trail. I preferred the games that required planning things, because I was never very good at chasing games like Pac Man. I got stressed out and started smashing every button as fast as I could and I then I died.

Oregon Trail was my favorite. Castle Wolfenstien was fun too, but when the SS troopers marched into the castle rooms where I was looting for keys and secret war plans they screamed at me in German and tried to shoot me and I always pooped in my pants and started stabbing the keys like I had woodpeckers for hands trying (unsuccessfully) to escape. Oregon Trail was different. You had to use your wits and your frontier skills to survive. I loved buying all the stuff for the journey-twenty pound sacks of sugar, bullets, flour, coffee. You could decide to be a banker and have more money but not be able to fix a wagon wheel or you could be a carpenter and have less money but DIY it all over the place. I liked to be a carpenter.

I’d start off in Independence, MO and make my way along the trail day by day, shooting green pixelated squirrels (I didn’t like to shoot the bears because it was such a waste of life for only 100 pounds of meat) and watching my family drown or die of typhoid. It was always such a thrill to arrive in a new town along the trail-Chimney Rock, Fort Laramie, Snake River, and the Dalles. At the end, which I rarely made it to, you had to decide whether you wanted to float the Columbia River where you might capsize and die a terrible death, or try your luck on Barlow Road, hoping that you wouldn’t get snake bit.

I think it’s just a coincidence that when I set off to start my life away from Michigan, I chose to start it in Oregon. But I do remember looking at the paper map (no smart phones back then) and deciding which route to take into Eugene. I felt the old Apple IIe thrill as I chose to come down through the Columbia River Gorge. I did not get any snake bites, but a bee did fly through the truck window on I-5 and stung me on my forehead. I had to take a Benadryl and by the time I got to Eugene I was very groggy. I guess they didn’t have Benadryl on the Oregon Trail.

It was here in Eugene where I met my life partner Marika and she loved traveling the state of Oregon. Honestly when we first got together, I preferred sitting in front of a computer pretending to travel Oregon over actually traveling Oregon. There are real snakes and bears and cliffs to fall off of out there. When you’re doing it on the computer you don’t really have to worry about that. If you die, you can just go make a sandwich and watch Little House on the Prairie. It took me a while to really get into the true adventure in real time. One thing that really got me excited about heading out into the wild was Campy.

About fifteen years ago, Marika found a little camper on Craigslist. It was a 1978 Toyota EZ Rider. It had two beds, a working stove, and it’s own little potty all in a quaint 17 foot floor plan. The man wanted $2,500 for it, which seemed reasonable, so we drove out to Jasper Mountain to take a look at the tiny rig.

Do you remember those miniature toys that were made to look like mouse sized Campbell’s soup cans and Saltine cracker boxes and tins of anchovies? They were just tiny bits of plastic, but shrunken down things are just so mesmerizing. I found a tiny cream of mushroom soup can once and kept it in my pocket for weeks because I loved it so much.

That’s how this camper was. It had all the things a big RV camper has (minus a LOT of storage space and an exhaust system that works properly. Oh and a radio. And air conditioning. And a working refrigerator. Everything else, yes) but it’s all shrunken down into this tiny little rendering, just like the cream of mushroom soup can.

We fell in love immediately and so failed to notice the fact that the ceiling was sort of falling down in one corner. And the tires were so old they were bulging in the center. And that the engine sounded like a World War II airplane that’s been shot multiple times. The man told us, unsolicited I’ll add, that the camper didn’t have a leak anywhere in it. “It’s totally water tight!” he told us, eyes bulging. “I’d take it to the coast in a rainstorm tomorrow! I really would!” His aggressive insistence should have jangled the red flag producing section of my brain, but alas, the camper was all so shrunken and cute, my brain had completely melted. And so Marika haggled him down to $2,250 and we left with a rickety old miniature RV with a sagging roof and tires that were probably installed by Jesus or maybe one of his disciples.

Once we got her into town, we took her to a camper repairman. He brought out a ladder and looked at the roof and just shook his head. “See here?” he pointed, even though I was still on the ground. “These are holes in the roof. Whoever sealed it before used the wrong materials. It’s all gotta come off. And it’s going to be rotten inside there. And every seam is bad. The whole thing needs to be redone. It’s going to leak like a sieve.” Unperturbed, we bought a million cans of sealant and drove on to the tire store. The man there acted like it was a miracle we’d arrived without exploding. “I’ve never seen such old tires on a working vehicle!!” he told us. “No wonder it felt like driving a boat, floating all over the road!” we said, laughing like people who have no idea what they are doing. We bought her six used tires and drove her home. I got on top and scraped and scraped and scraped for three days. Then I sealed everything up tight for another three days. And then she was perfect. And she was named Campy.

On our maiden voyage, we (Marika, Maya, my St. Bernard Bridget, our chihuahua Ziggy, and me) went to the Oregon coast. Bridget wanted shotgun the whole time, even if someone was already up there, so I had to sit in back with her behind a board. She slobbered like a slimy shoestring factory the whole way there, shaking her head and slapping me in the face with oozing tentacles. We got near Yachats, found a nook to park, and set up shop. We played on the beach, we made spaghetti on the propane stove and we settled in once the sun went down. We noticed that another rig had pulled into our nook while we were on the beach. It was a big, shiny one. We laughed at the difference between our janky old Campy and that sleek land yacht.

Maya in Campy on our maiden voyage to the coast.

This has nothing to do with campers, it’s just adorable af.

About that time it started raining. I felt like I’d done a fairly good job at sealing the thing, but water started pouring in from a window seam, right over our bed. We couldn’t get it to stop and we couldn’t catch the water before it soaked into our mattress. I wondered out loud if the people in the big rig might have a little something for leaks. I decided to go ask them.

I ran across the nook through the pouring rain and knocked on their door. A woman, looking slightly confused and slightly more concerned, opened the door and looked down at me, drenched in rain. Kenny G was playing softly behind her and a warm golden cloud scented of freshly buttered popcorn wafted down the stairs into the dark, cold night. “Hi there! I’m in the rig next door and it’s our first night out and we have a leak and rain is coming in and I wondered if you might have something we could use to plug it up?” I asked, all in one nattery breath. She looked totally puzzled. “A leak?” she asked, as if she’d never heard of such a thing in her life. She turned back into her mansion and called to her husband. “Honey, do we have anything that might fix a rain leak?” I heard some rummaging and a bodyless hand thrust something to her. “This is all we’ve got. Tell her she can keep it,” said Honey. She gave me a radiant smile, handed me a tube of Shoe Goo, and slammed the door. So here I am to tell you that Shoe Goo will seal an RV window leak in the rain, just in case you ever need to know.

Over the past fifteen years we’ve taken Campy to many beautiful and strange and dangerous places. I’m in charge of planning the meals and buying the dry goods we bring, a fitting job for someone trained up in Oregon Trail. And I’ve learned to love the bliss that comes with waking up under a giant monolithic stone column in the middle of the desert. Or eating spaghetti with the setting sun reflecting off of Painted Hills. Or sitting in a folding chair in the pitch black, coyotes barking closer than I’d like, watching an asteroid shower on the land where the Rajneeshees danced hysterically and planned to poison hundreds of people with Salmonella enterica.

We’ve nearly died in Campy more times than I can count on one hand. But that’s a story for the next installment of this camper series.

Campy at on off-road campsite in Eastern Oregon.

Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup

Recently my partner told me about a soup her mom used to make with potatoes and hotdogs. She loved it and so I tried to recreate a vegan version, based on her description. It turned out really great, but not like the one she’d had in the past, so I texted her mom and asked if she remembered the soup.

Not only did she remember it, she had the recipe written out on an index card that looked like it had time warped through the broadband directly from Brady bunch kitchen recipe Rolodex. It was labeled “Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup” and it had just a handful of ingredients, namely potatoes, hot dogs, evaporated milk, and butter. I was telling my friend about Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup and he said that all recipes from the 70s had those same four ingredients, they just adjusted the amounts from dish to dish.

80s foods weren’t much different, except they were all made by Keebler elves or the Quaker pilgrim or Mr. Kraft. The main ingredients were wheat flour, salt, corn syrup and monosodium glutamate. At least 25% of the average diet consisted of something that started as a powder in a packet that you had to add water to and 25% you tore the top off and microwaved. 25% came from cans and the last quarter was probably meat. And it sure was good until we all got overweight and the oceans filled with trash.

Nowadays everything has to be fresh from the farmer’s market, “humanely slaughtered” (whoever came up with this phrase is a diabolical genius), and you have to have at least three colors in every meal. You also have to “plate” everything and take a picture under some good light or you’re basic.

When did plate enter our vocabularies as a verb? I can’t remember. Nobody I ever heard of plated any food prior to 1997 CE. You used to just take your plate (n.) and put your food on it however you wanted to. If you were fancy, like the Ponderosa, you put a sprig of parsley and a slice of orange on there too. I just read an article that gave some tips for plating food thinking it would be funny and I was not disappointed.They said this:

Plate with a clock in mind. As you begin plating your ingredients, picture the face of a clock. From the diner’s point of view, your protein should be between 3 and 9, your starch or carbohydrate from 9 and 12, and your vegetable from 12 and 3.
Use moist ingredients as your base.
Design and create with sauces-don’t just pour the sauce carelessly all over the plate.
Place your garnishes thoughtfully.
Serve odd amounts of food. Serving 7 Brussels sprouts instead of 6 creates more visual appeal, and diners will also perceive that they’re getting more food.

I’d like to know how many people know about this clock suggestion. I generally just make a big pile of food in the middle that includes all the protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables in a one stop shop.
Please never use the word moist again.
Who pours sauce carelessly all over the plate? What kind of Swedish chefs do you take us for?
How much thought can really go into garnish placement? Anything more than five seconds and you’re probably stoned and it’s going to look and taste great however you garnish it.
They’ll probably perceive that because seven Brussels sprouts is actually more than six, you sociopath.

They end the article with some pictures of a top chef plating up his dishes with what look like surgical tools. Who are these platers? It’s sort of giving me “gateway to serial killer” vibes.

I’m actually not a stranger to food being plated. I used to work at the Four Seasons Restaurant (not the hotel) in NYC. It was veeeery fancy and expensive. I remember that a bottle of Evian water cost $11 and that was two decades ago. There was a twenty foot Picasso painting hanging in the hallway. I’m talking about the restaurant in past tense because I was thinking about that place as I wrote about hot dog soup and pretty food and I looked it up on Wikipedia and found out that it closed in 2019. They sold off furnishings at an auction and someone bought four ashtrays for $12,500.

People seem to think that expensive things are better. Sometimes they are better. I think most of the time they are just different. And sometimes they are exactly the same. I was a host and a service bartender at the Four Seasons. When I first got the job the restaurant manager told me I had to wear tuxedo pants. I thought tuxedo pants were just black pants and so that’s what I wore on the first day. I got sent home because tuxedo pants actually have a satin stripe along the seam. He made it seem like if I didn’t have a satin stripe on my pants the diners would retch on the marble floor. “We have a code to uphold. We need to look polished.” He told me about a few places I could go to buy some tuxedo pants for the low price of $100. Little did he know I’d spent the last of the money I saved to get to NYC on bartending school. So I went to Goodwill in Queens and found a perfect pair for $10. When I went back I half expected him to grab me by the seat of my pauper’s pants and throw me into traffic. He didn’t even notice.

I saw people leave expensive bottles of wine half full on their table. I poured some into a glass and tried it once, just to see what $600 wine tasted like. I expected it to taste like liquid rainbow but it just tasted like wine. I accidentally made a dirty martini out of the wrong kind of gin and WAY too much olive juice for a very wealthy and lovely older woman who’d been drinking the same dirty martini at the Grill Room bar for years. She told me it was the best martini she’d ever had. I never told her why.

One night while I was hosting, I had to take a man upstairs in the elevator because he had a cane and couldn’t get up the stairs. We were entering the elevator and just as the doors were about to close, a cockroach climbed in with us.

Cockroaches in NYC are no joke. Once I came home from work and flipped on the light and I saw a cockroach the size of my thumb that had pulled a dog food into the middle of the room and was eating it. I kneeled down to get a closer look and it stopped eating and gave me the stink eye. I wasn’t scared so I got a little closer and I swear to God it hissed at me! I squashed it without feeling guilty and I always feel guilty about bug killing.

So there I was, escorting a very rich and distinguished gentleman upstairs to the grill room, designed by Mies van der Rohe and Phillip Johnson (they are famous architects if you didn’t know. I didn’t before I worked there). In my memory, the man was wearing a top hat and a monocle, but he was probably just wearing a suit and tie. I had on my very thick Four Seasons jacket, that I believe was fashioned after this guy:

The cockroach was walking toward us. I started to get nervous because it was heading straight for the guy’s cane. Closer and closer it came as we travelled up. My heart was beating fast and I began to sweat as the cockroach made it to the bottom of his cane. What would it do next? The elevator stopped just as the cockroach swished around with it’s disgusting little feelers and I could tell it was deciding to climb up his cane. The doors bing-ed open as it was reaching its hairy beast legs up onto the rubber bumper. “After you, sir!” I said brightly, and practically pushed him out the door just before the roach got a good grip. So even expensive places have to deal with cockroaches.

Anyway, back to the Hot Dog Soup. The first version I made, which was not Mommy’s, had a Béchamel sauce base. I boiled the potatoes and dipped the veggie dogs in the boiling water before I chopped them all up. I added some homemade soy yogurt, which I add to EVERYTHING creamy; and some carrots. Then I thoughtfully tossed in some herbs and spices and it tasted great, I thought. My partner agreed, but said it wasn’t like the one she had as a child because it tasted healthy. That’s when I asked her mom for the recipe.

Today I made an exact version of Mommy’s Hot Dog Soup (except I made it vegan). My mother-in-law told me I should use a couple more potatoes and add some garlic, so I did that. It was delicious. Buttery, creamy, and straight out of Mommy’s kitchen. It wasn’t plated, it’s wasn’t photographed in the perfect light. I did take a picture though. How else could I show you?

I’m not saying that expensive meals aren’t super awesome and fun sometimes if you can do it. But I won’t pretend that a little highly processed hot dog soup isn’t just as fun, in a different way. I got to chat with Grandma about her recipes, connect with my partner about her favorite foods growing up, and reminisce about a short period of time in my own life schooling, all over a bowl of soup. We’ve got to remember to appreciate the smaller things, especially now.

Camper series, part one: Taking it back to the old days.

It’s camper season! Camper camping is one of my most favorite things to do, so I’ve decided to do a series of writings on the topic. It’s on my mind because every year starting right around July, my partner and I pack up our stuff and jump in our camper and head East, to the high desert, where it’s hot as hell and there are dangerous animals that can catch you and eat you and you can get lost and run out of gas and die. You can also imagine yourself as a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, buying supplies from the Dayville Mercantile, fixing broken wagon wheels, and eating squirrels. I’m writing this right now up on the top of remote Hart Mountain, while everyone is asleep, and the stars are burning above like sprinkled fairy dust.

I was introduced to the joys and tribulations of campers long before I ever moved to Oregon. When I was a kid, we’d travel to Paducah, Kentucky on school breaks to visit my mom’s family. In the summers we’d pack up the campers (my grandparent’s pull-behind trailer and my Uncle Alan and Aunt Mary’s ginormous RV) and head out to Kentucky Lake to take a vacation.

My Grandparent’s Prowler pull-behind and my Aunt and Uncle’s Midas RV

My uncle Alan knows how to do life: fast and fun and slightly dangerous. He told us a story one time about how he was riding his bike around the hills as a kid. He crested a nice tall one and saw my great grandad Sam Hook and their neighbor Clyde Grubbs sitting in their trucks in the gully below, chatting through the windows. As he started down the hill and picked up speed, the chain fell off the bike. This wasn’t some fancy hand brake bike, it was old school. With no chain, there were no brakes. My uncle had to make a decision: crash the bike on the way down, or try to make it between the two vehicles, risking an even worse crash. He decided to aim between and hope for the best. I’d love to have seen the look on those two men’s faces as he shot between them out of nowhere, big smile on his face, barely missing the mirrors.

Uncle Alan is also an expert at motor souping. Visiting their house meant riding go carts or ATVs or motorbikes around the track in his field as fast as you could. To this day, he’s out in the backwoods ripping around in a sweet old hot rod that he’s spent years fixing up in his garage. I asked my mom if she knew what kind of car it was and she didn’t know so she texted him. He said “It is a 1948 Ford Super Deluxe two door sedan. The engine is Oldsmobile 355, similar to a 1968 Cutlass 442 with about 325 horsepower.” Just as I thought. (jk I don’t know anything about cars).

My brother-in-law Negash and my Uncle Alan on the homestead with the 1948 Ford Super Deluxe two door sedan with 325 horsepower Oldsmobile 355 engine. The car goes FAST.

You can bet when he picked a camper to buy, it would be awesome. Their RV was nothing short of miraculous. The beds were comfy, the bathroom was clean, and the views were fabulous. The fridge was always stocked with cold Cokes and milk and the cabinets were filled with Chef Boyardee raviolis, Little Debbie snack cakes, and the world’s best cereal: Frosted Lucky Charms, magically delicious. At least that’s how I remember it— a magical cozy tour bus containing all the best cuisine the 80s had to offer. You could basically drive it wherever, park it, and start a new life, dependent on no one.

Those camping trips were the best. The smell of the lake and the bonfire, the delicious snacks, the adventures with my cousins—it was my favorite time of the year. Well, maybe a close second to Christmas.

One year I bought my cousin Pat’s old orange skateboard off him for $10. It was called a Variflex, or something like that. Pat had graduated on to another board and I couldn’t even do an ollie yet, but I went with him to skateboard around the campground. We ended up in a covered picnic zone with a smooth concrete floor and we skateboarded all around in there, trying to kick flip the boards into the garbage cans to knock them over. A bigger boy came over to check out our boards and to establish his dominance. He looked at Pat’s new board and said it was cool. He looked and mine, shrugged his shoulders and said, and I’ll never forget it, “everybody’s got to start somewhere.” I understood kid language and I knew that the boy was actually being sort of nice. He could’ve said “what a shitty $10 board you’ve got there,” but instead he included me in his boarding family, just a little baby who can’t ollie yet, but still, a part of the family.

The boy left and Pat and I saw some leaves under a bridge and we decided to jump over the side into them. We sat in the leaves for a while, chatting, until we saw deer ticks crawling all over us and we ran back to the campsite to pick them off because they carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, a disease that frightens me more than dangerous animals that can catch you and eat you. That name! Plus it makes you dyslexic, if you don’t die, and that would really be terrible.

The next day I accidentally hit Pat in the head with a shuffle board stick that I was trying to lodge into the rafters of the covered picnic zone so I could swing on it. It fell and somehow Pat was standing exactly the same distance away from me as the length of the shuffle board stick at exactly the same angle that the stick fell. The black plastic shuffle horn basically stabbed him in the skull. I’m sure it really hurt and when we went out to go skiing on the lake later (my uncle also had a motorboat that he pulled behind the RV) he fell asleep on the bench of the boat instead of doing ski tricks. It’s a good thing we were young because a strike like that in your forties could cause a serious brain injury. He forgave me quite easily. He’s a good guy.

Pat and me, circa 1989. I’m the one that looks like Napoleon Dynamite.

On another great camper trip at Kentucky Lake, Pat and I were bouldering along the water’s edge and I saw a tiny turtle bobbling along. I reached into the water and picked it up and it was the weirdest turtle I’d ever seen. It had a soft, bendy shell and a long tubular snout. It was adorable. Just about the time I was deciding the turtle was adorable, something that felt like a pebble smacked into the side of my head. I looked over and saw Pat looking up into the trees and followed his gaze to see a giant paper nest hanging from a branch about forty feet up with a blur of hornets swarming around it. “RUN!” Pat yelled and I hotfooted it out of there like Pre Fontaine, still clutching the weird turtle. I got stung in the crack of my elbow and it swelled up so that my arm was the same diameter from shoulder to wrist because I’m allergic to bee venom. I kept the turtle in a bucket and brought it back home with me to Michigan. We fed it turtle food and those moths that get into your bags of rice and turn them disgusting. It lived for several years, which surprised me. I still have the scar in my elbow crack from where the hornet’s stinger went in.

I also remember a time when we were traveling in the back of that RV and we were watching Children of a Lesser God on the T.V. I didn’t want to admit that I get motion sickness VERY easily, because I thought that was super nerdy. As those who get motion sickness know, watching a movie in a moving vehicle, especially one that is making a lot of curvy turns, is a recipe for disaster. I felt it coming on and was still unwilling to ask for anyone to turn off the scintillating movie. All the way up to the split seconds before stomach evacuation, I tried to pretend nothing was happening. Finally I knew I was at the point of no return and, as the chunks rose up my gullet, I ripped the top off an empty Big Gulp cup and hurled into it, filling it halfway up. As I was finishing up, my little brother grabbed the Big Gulp cup and filled it the rest of the way with his own stomach contents. Everyone screamed and my uncle stopped the tour bus and we dumped the cup out into the woods. They turned the movie off after that. I was embarrassed, but recently my cousin told me he thought it was amazing that my brother and I were both put together enough and had good enough aim to puke right into the cup instead of on the floor, so finally we have been exonerated in my mind.

Another funny gross story was when the camper potty broke in the middle of a trip. Uncle Alan had to go underneath to fix it and the whole tank emptied on his head. He popped out covered in toilet juice, steam coming out of his ears. My Aunt Mary snapped a picture of him, which did not make him feel better. We then went on a harrowing rage ride to the camper parts store, kids huddled in the back trying not to laugh too loud, taking turns like a runaway locomotive (emphasis on loco), cans of Chef Boyardee flying out of the cabinets and floor littered with Twinkies. It was awesome.

My favorite camper trip was when we travelled to Myrtle Beach for my other Uncle’s wedding. Uncle Charlie was one of the coolest cats that ever lived. He had long brown braids, lambchop sideburns, a ridiculously awesome moustache, and he made giant cast iron sculptures for a living. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was sure strong. One time I was picking my little sister up and chucking her around for fun and my uncle came over with a little infectious giggle, set down his cold beer and cigar, picked me up, flipped me upside down, and jiggled my gizzard. I was sixteen and I have never been a small person. I was probably close to a hundred and eighty pounds and he picked me up like I was a feather. I mean, he did bend iron for a living.

Uncle Alan and Uncle Charlie lounging by the camper.

Uncle Charlie on a sculpture he made in Florida: “Big Bend II”

My Uncle Charlie didn’t talk much, he was just a cool dude. For his wedding in South Carolina, my mom drove us down from Michigan in our little old minivan, which had zero cold Cokes or Chef Boyardee in it. We got there and met up with the rest of the family and I got to sleep in the ginormous RV. I remember sitting in there at the table with my cousin after a day at the beach, third degree sunburn scorching holes in my aqua Panama Jack tee shirt, drinking cokes and listening to Whitney Houston’s first album, discussing whether or not she was hotter than Hallie Berry. The wedding was the night before and that party was a rager. They served those cute, tiny bottles of Perrier and we got a bunch, dumped them out, and refilled them with Sprite because we wanted to look sophisticated but Perrier is gross. Late in the night we went down to the beach and watched my Uncle Charlie throw fireworks into the ocean because back then people still did shit like that. Then we all went back to the RV to sleep. It was the most fun ever.

Us at Myrtle Beach. Based on my legs that look like they’re made out of two big pieces of chalk with some sweet Reeboks tied on, this photo is before we spent any time on the beach.

Although some of these memories might seem mildly traumatic, to me they were adventure after adventure (except maybe hitting Pat in the head with a shuffle board stick. I felt pretty bad about that one, but it DOES make a good story), recorded in my family annals as solidly as special birthdays, new sibling arrivals, getting my driver’s license, and graduation. As time went by; we stopped camping together at Kentucky Lake, but these adventures (and many others) molded me and solidified my desire to have my own camper someday.

More to come in the Camper Series part two, growing up and getting my own RV!

Addiction

I ordered a $39 bottle of supplements from Amazon on Monday. It had three ingredients in it-vitamin D, vitamin B12, and algae omegas. After it came in the mail my partner pointed out that we already have vitamin D and vitamin B12 and that we can get omegas from flax seed, of which we have a double quart jar under the kitchen sink.

But this bottle was so beautiful, glass, not plastic. Classy. On the info page there was a picture of a man with no shirt, casually stretching his quad muscle. He was looking over his shoulder with an almost bored look on his face, as if his vitamins were so good that exercise was really more of a formality these days. He’d be just as shredded without it, due to the optimal performance of the omegas and the synergistic bioavailability of the vitamin D in each capsule.

The reviews were glowing—more energy, greater focus, sex life is booming, immune system on fleek, skin is great, Alzheimer’s is fading to nothing, irritable bowels have calmed…

My name is Sue and I have a health and beauty aid addiction.

Some supplements I have purchased that were bad ideas (not including hair or skin products):

a $70 bottle of dihydrohonokiol-B capsules (WTF even is that? for anxiety, which I don’t have)
a tiny $100 bottle of Young Living JuvaCleanse essential oil for getting rid of cellulite (extra cringey) (addendum, this oil is now $139!)
$30 Vegan Fat Burning herbs for energy and stamina (these were buy one get one free…my stamina had been suffering a lot when I ordered them)
a bottle of important sounding alpha lipoic acid that was in the cheap cart at the grocery store. I didn’t even know what it was for. It was only $2.99, but who buys a random bottle of mystery medicine on the off chance it might treat an ailment they’ve got?
a $6 bottle of black walnut (also from the cheap cart) that kills intestinal parasites, of which I doubt I have.
a mixture of essential oils that stimulates my vagus nerve (it’s on the back of the neck you sicko) for well being and immune building and a host of other death defying benefits (I’m not gonna lie, this one is actually kind of cool)
a $30 bag of magnolia bark for something or other, I don’t even know anymore, and
a $39 bottle of vegan multivitamins that I already have most of in my VERY FULL medicine cabinet.

Tomorrow I will be dropping off a one month supply of vitamins at the UPS for a return from Amazon.

I joke about having a HABA addiction, but I googled it, and apparently it’s a real thing. I saw one article that gave a four week plan to break supplement addiction. I thought the nuts and bolts part of the plan was kind of funny:

Week 1: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 25%.

Week 2: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 50%.

Week 3: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 75%.

Week 4: No more excess vitamins or supplements.

(For real! Here it is: https://www.doctoroz.com/article/4-week-plan-break-supplement-addiction)

If only all addictions were so easy to break!! I do know, though, that I need to watch this tendency in myself. I’ve had my fair share of addictions, behaviors that allowed me to take a break from reality. I’ve always been really good at escaping the world.

When I was younger, I’d save up whatever money I could find and walk up the road to Rite Aid, where I’d buy a one pound bag of plain M&Ms and some weird clear berry seltzer soda that I thought had a pretty bottle. Pretty bottles are a real trigger for me. I’d bring that bag of M&Ms home, get a book, pull up my hood, and lay in bed for hours reading and eating. I’d take three M&Ms out of the bag, put one in each cheek and one in the middle and let them melt then get three more. Every so often I’d take a sip of berry seltzer to wash it all down. I read and reread my books again and again—Farmer Boy, My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet, Cold Sassy Tree, Hardy Boys, Life in the Leatherwoods, all the James Herriot books, Reader’s Digest, The Happy Hollisters, Encyclopedia Brown, and the McGurk detective books—three M&Ms at a time, over and over. A steady stream of sugar and stories as I slipped out the side door. I can still smell the inside of that bag and the musty pages of those old books.

Later on sugar turned into cigarettes and coffee, then when cigarettes became déclassé, it became beer and wine, burning the candle at both ends. That fun time ended pretty early on in fits and spurts, some years better than others. It was unsustainable. I realized I was being a huge asshole and my growth was majorly stunted.

From there I tried kombucha. I started slow, a little Synergy bottle here and there. It was so expensive I decided to make my own. After a few short weeks I was brewing it by the gallon and drinking a quart or more per day. My partner gifted me a weekend at Breitenbush hot springs and as I packed up eight quart jars of home brewed kombucha and clinked my way down the driveway to the car, I wondered if I might have a problem.

I had scobys coming out of my ears, so many I started to dehydrate them with soy sauce to make jerky (scoby jerky has the exact same consistency of what I’d imagine human skin jerky would have. 1/10, not recommended). Then when I found a passel of white worms floating around in my gallon jar, I knew it was time to let it go. I buried my scobys and dumped the worms in the yard.

I recently quit drinking coffee because the caffeine really messes with my body, but then I started drinking a quart of watermelon chunk tea every day. Each time I move forward, I reduce the harm my addictions can cause. Watermelon chunk tea and too many supplements? Not too bad, but still. Who knows, maybe someday I will be totally free of my burdens, a slave to my own desires no more.

For now, I will just study this remarkable four week plan:

Week 1: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 25%.

Week 2: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 50%.

Week 3: Reduce your excess vitamins or supplements by 75%.

Week 4: No more excess vitamins or supplements.

This dude definitely takes multivitamins.

I Found God at Cocoa Beach

Once when I was in my early twenties I decided I was going to walk from Daytona Beach to the Keys of Florida.

The idea was born while I was laying on my back in the grass at Central Park, having suffered a major break up and contemplating a move from Queens back to Michigan, depressed and lonely. I’d been reading a book called Conversations with God, which is about a man in an emotional transition in his life, who has a chat with God that goes on for like, five books. The book was laying in the grass next to me, both of us watching the clouds roll by.

I got to thinking. Why did this fellow get to have such a great chin wag with the old guy upstairs? (I still thought of God as a man back then, due to all of the world saying it all the time). I’ve never even had a hello, how’s your day, much less enough chit chat to fill a thousand pages.. Come to think of it…I frowned. I don’t think I even know God very well at all. Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely. I mulled that over for a while. Suddenly some words popped into my head clear as day.

“You could have a connection with me. But you’ve never really tried.”

There it was. Words from on high. It was true. I’d never really tried. How do you cultivate a relationship with God? I prayed a little here and there, but it always felt like I was trying to get brownie points, so I’d stopped. What I needed here was a gesture. Something big. Something wild. Something unexpected.

And so I decided to buy a motorcycle and drive it across the country. I saw myself, flying free, hair blowing in the wind, saddlebags filled with the bare necessities for a life on the road: tent, can opener, sleeping bag, jack knife, and of course, beans. And somewhere on that ribbon of highway, I was sure I would find my connection to God.

So I moved back to Michigan with a plan of action. My first problem was that I didn’t have a motorcycle. My second was that I’d never ridden a motorcycle. I had $2,000 in my bank account, ready to spend and my little brother’s friend Travis had a crotch rocket he said I could take for a spin round the block if I wanted to. I thought I really should start to get the hang of this thing before I go spend $2,000. I got on that speedy red bike and headed out onto the pavement.

Everything was going great at first. I was flying free and my hair was blowing in the wind just the way I thought it would. I was getting the shifting down without too much trouble. But then an old man turned in front of me. I grip locked the brakes and the back tire left the ground. For split second, there I was, in the middle of Dixie Highway, balanced perfectly on the front tire of a red crotch rocket like Harry Houdini. I locked eyes with that old man as he passed in front of me and he looked very impressed, as if I was doing it on purpose. Just as fast, the back tire came down and I stepped my foot back on the ground like nothing doing, heart beating from my knees to my eyeballs.

Against all odds the motorcycle dream survived this harrowing event. I blamed it on the crotch rocket. A heavier bike will handle better, I told myself. I found a bike I liked the looks of in the classifieds. I decided to give it a test drive. It was shiny and black and big. I got on, drove down the driveway, and into the road, clicking the gears like a champ. This time my hair never actually even got to blowing. I got to a stop sign and I was slowing down, or maybe I was speeding up, it all happened so fast, and the bike started to wobble. It was just a little at first, then it grew and grew until I felt like I was on a like a mechanical bull that bucks sideways instead of up and down. I bucked along with it turning this way and that, over correcting, under correcting, over correcting again until finally by some miracle, I got it stopped. But the bike had stopped mid wobble and was now at a 45 degree angle with the ground. Motorcycles are HEAVY. I could just see me coming back after a test drive having scratched the hell out of this bike. I somehow got myself off the bike without dropping it and crouched down to put my shoulder into it. It took everything I had to get us back to 90 degrees. I took that bike right back.

I rode up the driveway with dirt on my pants and a grease stain on my shoulder. My muscles were jelly, both because of my near death experience and because of the heavy motorcycle. My hair was sticking out every which way. I was sweaty and red faced. My mom was there, bless her heart for coming with me, and she asked what I thought.

“I think I’ll change my motorcycle trip to a walking trip,” I said, handing the keys back over.

And so I hatched my plan: In the summer I’d go down to Flagler Beach, Florida, twenty miles north of Daytona, where my sister lived. I’d buy a rucksack and a tent, and set off on foot, wind in my hair, foot loose and fancy free. Once I got to the Keys, maybe I’d take a job tending bar on the beach where they played Jimmy Buffet and Journey and the Eagles all day. Surely somewhere along the way, I’d find God.

I started out early one summer morning, all packed up with my essentials (of which the list had grown considerably-sun block, bug spray, shampoo, money pouch, rain gear, etc.) and a freshly shaved head. I thought the head made me look tough and also would be cooler in the summer heat. My boots were cinched tight, my pack was well organized, and off I went, happy as a jaybird.

I set my schedule to walk about ten miles per day for the first few days. I could walk on the beach where there were no bugs and beautiful waves, but it’s way harder to walk in sand with a heavy pack.There’s a road (A1A, beach run avenue!) that runs nearly the length of a Florida, but stops here and there for inlets and cities. I could walk this road and see the ocean and avoid bugs, but I’d have to cut inland as well, when A1A ran out. I decided to walk the first bit on the beach to enjoy the waves and the sun, but I forgot that there’s a long stretch of beach that’s undeveloped and there’s no access to the street for a mile or so. Once I started walking down there I had to keep going until I reached another set of stairs.

About a half mile in I saw a man lying butt naked on the beach, all baby oiled up and the same color brown as Secretariat. His arms and legs were spread wide like he’d just fallen from the sky and landed there, never to move again. I knew he wasn’t dead though, because there was a tiny radio stuck into the sand by his head with some tinny AC/DC playing and he opened one eye as I schlepped past. I guess he thought nobody else would be dumb enough to walk that far into the no access area.

I made it my first thirteen miles to Ormond Beach and found a little area where there was some construction happening. I set up my tent tucked in behind a bush where nobody would spot it from the road and then I called my sister. She wanted to know where I was each night. I told her and then settled in for the night. Fifteen minutes later I heard her and her (then) husband tramping around calling my name. They’d driven the short way to my camp spot to check it out and make sure I was safe.

That morning I woke up early, broke down my tent, and went down to the beach to watch the sun rise. I met a woman and we got to talking and I told her my adventure. She asked me if I wanted to come back to her house and take a shower. She seemed nice enough. I didn’t really need a shower yet, but I decided to take her up on it because it was fun. The shower went fine, but I realized a mile up the road that I’d left my shampoo there.

The second night I stayed at a $20 hotel in Daytona Beach. After that I had to get off the beach and go inland because the Ponce DeLeon inlet cut across A1A making a dead end. As soon as I left the beach, things started to get weird. First it was the mosquitos. As I was walking a wall of them would form just at the edge of where my deet cloud ended. These things were vicious. As soon as the deet sweated off enough and started to fade, they would dive bomb me all at once. I kept the deet in my hand for easy access so I could throw off my bag and spray the crap out of myself every thirty minutes. I checked my map and I saw that I was walking along the aptly named Mosquito Lagoon Aquatic Reserve.

I wandered into a town and found an abandoned field with lots of trees and tall grass that I could hide in. I passed it by a couple times, trying to find the right way in. On the third pass I decided to just go for it and stepped off the sidewalk, just as a police cruiser rolled by. I jumped back on the sidewalk and immediately knew I looked ridiculously suspicious with my big pack and my tent. He paid me no mind and so I went in and tunneled out a sweet spot.

That night I lay in the eerie blue light of my tent, surrounded by green under the purple pink setting sun, feeling lonely. I called my little brother and chatted with him for a few minutes and felt a little better. I drew some pictures in my journal and ate a can of beans. It was quiet and I eventually fell asleep. I woke up several times, thinking the police were swarming in silently, setting up to eject me from my camp. They never came. I guess they knew I needed to be alone.

The next few days passed in a blur. One morning I brushed my teeth at a spigot I found in a city park. I heard some odd splashing in the water of the Halifax River and looked down to see three manatees swimming in circles. A man came down with a hose and hooked it up to the spigot and gently sprayed them. “They love it,” he said. “The fresh water.”

At one point I was walking on a barren strip of land between towns. I’d walked many miles already and I couldn’t make it to the next town before dark. I didn’t want to set up my tent out in the open and I didn’t want to hike too far off the road. I decided I’d try to hitch a ride into civilization. I stuck out my thumb for a while. The first car to stop rolled up next to me and the man inside took a look at me and drove off in a puff of smoke. I decided he’d thought I was a boy from the back and took off when he saw the front and realized I wasn’t. I was glad he left. The next guy that stopped was driving a giant pick up truck. He seemed ok so I got in. Nearly into town he looked over at me.

“You’ve got really nice…boobs.” I looked out the window. “How much would I have to give you for you to show them to me?” he asked.

“Um. I don’t want to do that.” I said. “You can drop me off over there.” To my great relief, he did. As he drove away, I realized I’d left my mosquito spray in his truck.

I hiked on, keeping to my ten to twenty miles a day. My feet were sore and my pinky toenails started to turn black. I made it to Titusville and decided I’d take a bus to Cocoa Beach because I’d made plans to meet up with an old friend there and I was running late. As I sat on the bench, waiting for the bus, a sweet old couple drove up and asked where I was heading. I told them and they asked me if I wanted a ride. I was totally surprised. The man saw my face and smiled.

“We saw you waiting while we were getting gas and we thought you looked nice.”

So much for looking tough. I jumped in the back seat of their minivan and off we went. On the way there they told me all about their kids and their grandkids and their beach house and about the time they’d lived in Michigan. The man’s name was Harold, same as my grandad and the woman’s name was Wilma, same as my mom. I told them a little about my trip, but left off the boob guy. We pulled up to Cocoa Beach thirty minutes later (me painfully aware that that would have taken me two days to walk). I thanked them and shut the sliding door. As they started to pull away, I realized I’d left my water bottle in the seat. I jumped forward and knocked on the window frantically. I saw the fear in their eyes as they stopped, wondering if I was going to kill them after all.

“I forgot my water bottle!” I said. They laughed with relief and handed it back to me and I packed it up.

The night after I met with my friend I decided to stay in a dingy hotel instead of setting up my tent. After I dropped my bag off in my room I walked across the parking lot and got a Whopper value meal and brought it back. There was no table or chairs in the room, so I squatted down and leaned my sore back against the wall and unwrapped the food. My romantic notions of eating beans like a hobo under the stars were completely gone. Hot french fries were the way to go. I squatted there in the dimly lit room eating my whopper, cars whipping by on the street outside, red gold glow filtering through the curtains from the hotel sign, and I thought about God.

Suddenly, I realized that I felt a presence. Not like there was someone else in the room, but that I wasn’t alone. I felt a deep and sudden connection to a higher being. It wasn’t a man and it wasn’t a woman. It just was. Well how about that, I thought to myself, smiling. My grand gesture worked. For the next few hours I didn’t feel even a tiny bit lonely, not while I was eating. Not while I took a shower. Not while I watched tv and not while I lay in bed falling asleep.

The next day I called my sister and asked her to come pick me up at Cocoa Beach. I’d realized the goal of the trip. I was tired and my toes were fucked up. I wanted to get back home and get back to school and have a life not on the beach in the Keys with Jimmy Buffet.

For the next few days, I’d check in every few hours to see if the presence was still there. It always was. I don’t check it anymore, I’ve just come to know that it will always be there as long as I keep trying.

Krista Wietelmann

Earlier today I was uploading remote assignments for my students and I typed in the date and a little thought flashed through my mind. Today, May 19th, is the birthday of my oldest friend, Krista Wietelmann. I haven’t really spoken to her in thirty years, save a few letters, so it was sort of weird that her birthday popped up in my memory so clearly. I’m lying here in bed, trying to think of something to write about, and she came back up. So today I will write about my oldest friendship with Krista Wietelmann.

I don’t remember meeting Krista. It’s like how you don’t remember meeting your siblings, they just sort of show up when your memories start. We lived on the same street with one house between us. Our families couldn’t have been more different. My parents were both hippie artist/writer/teachers. Her dad was a Lutheran minister and her mom stayed home to raise her and her brothers. I didn’t really know what a Lutheran was. Krista told me that her parents told her that Santa didn’t exist from the beginning. I asked her why they told her that and she said it was because they didn’t want her to love anything more than God. It was a real testament to the kind of person she was that she didn’t ever spill the beans until we all already knew. I would’ve told every living soul I could find if I had that kind of intel. That’s the kind of kid I was.

My house was free and unfettered by rules and regulations (except when it wasn’t, which wasn’t a fun time). Our clean clothes lived in a towering heap on the counter in the green bathroom. I preferred to never change clothes, rather than look through the pile to find something that fit. Books were stacked on every spare surface. My mom had various art projects running all the time. She had boxes of stained glass and a potter’s wheel in the family room, a kiln in the garage, and printmaking supplies anywhere you might look. At one point there was a full on taxidermied moose head in our living room, which she’d borrowed from the art department at school to practice drawing. With six kids in the family, being alone was practically unheard of. I shared a bed with my sister Joan for forever. One time I didn’t want to get up to use the bathroom and I thought there wasn’t that much in me, so I went ahead and peed in bed. There was much more in me than I thought. I spent the rest of the night trying to keep my sister from rolling into my very large pee spot, more because I didn’t want her to know what I’d done than that I didn’t want her to get pee on her.

I remember once, in kindergarten, having an opportunity to be alone at home and taking it. I rode home everyday in a car pool. On this day, the mom who was driving couldn’t remember if she was supposed to take me home or to the babysitter’s house. Our babysitter was named Dorita Beal. She was an ok sitter but I’d rather be home alone, no question. I hatched a plan on the spot. I told the carpool driver that I couldn’t remember either and maybe she could take me home first and I could run in and see if someone was there. If not, she could take me to Mrs. Beal’s house. She thought that was a good idea. I knew full well that it was a babysitter day, but I prayed that my plan would work. She drove up to the empty house. I ran inside, waited a minute, then ran back out and told her someone was home. She was satisfied and drove away and I went in and sat in the good chair and watched whatever I wanted to on television for a blissful two hours, giggling at my sister who was stuck at Mrs. Beal’s house, probably wondering where I was. My mom got home and found me with my feet kicked up. As I’d hoped, she was too relieved that I was alive to be too mad at me. My dad came home a little later with a bag of day-old jelly donuts, which you could get for a dime a piece from the donut shop on Dixie Highway. I said I wanted a blueberry one. He started to hand it to me and my mom said “she told the carpool mom that I was home when I wasn’t and stayed home alone for two hours!” My dad gasped and tried to pull back on the donut, but I already had a handle on it and I ran off to hide so I could eat it with nobody to bother me.

Krista’s family probably didn’t eat donuts. Their house was always neat and smelled like pot roast and cookies and clean laundry and pencil erasers. She had her own bedroom and her own bed. She probably wouldn’t dream of peeing in the bed rather than getting up, but if she had, she could have rolled over and fallen back to sleep without worry.

One time Joan and Krista and I decided to write a novel because Krista had a typewriter. We got a couple of chapters done before we lost the thread. It was titled “Call Me Rebba,” and it was about a girl and her disabled brother who lived in a box on the street after their parents died. I remember Rebba was trying (unsuccessfully) to get them some money so they could buy a can of beans to eat. I’m not clear if her name is pronounced like its spelled, or if we meant Reba and were trying to be edgy.

Krista was a lovely person. She had long straight blonde hair. She looked a little like a mom, stuck in a kid’s body. Her features weren’t kid features. I don’t remember her losing her teeth, though I’m sure she must have. Krista was always the best at everything. She was the fastest girl in class (she once told me her secret, it was that you have to hold your fingers stiff and wide while you run, like a petrified starfish. I tried it and took a few seconds off my time. It was a good tip). She won the science fair every year with projects involving plants and light bulbs and batteries and science. I remember two of my science fair projects. One was “do hermit crabs make good pets?” and featured my two hermit crabs. The other was “which bubble gum blows the biggest bubbles?” which got an honorable mention, due to the fact that I’d written to Hubba Bubba and they wrote me back, telling me that they can’t tell me how they make their bubbles so big because it’s a trade secret.

Krista and I both played trumpet and she was always first chair, leaving Steve Samoray and me to battle it out for second. She got the part I wanted in Babes in Toyland AND The Sound of Music. In my mind I saw myself as the quintessential Gretel, but when it came time for the audition I froze. I remember my audition. I tried not to look at Bob Klump, the director, instead locking eyes on my own reflection in the glass of the sound booth, stiff as a board, face drawn in fear, whisper singing the Andy Willams arrangement of Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, which was the only song I knew all the words to. I knew it hadn’t gone well. But Krista nailed it and went on to give what was likely the best Gretel performance probably ever, just the right amount of sassy and sweet.

I didn’t hold any of that against her. She worked hard and she played hard. She deserved her accolades. As for me, this was the period in my life where I learned that if I didn’t really try that hard, I’d have a ready made excuse if I failed. That and the fact that I really only enjoyed playing hard and resting hard allowed me to have a LOT of fun and less accolades, which was fine for a while. But it was good for me to see someone who worked hard and had success. I needed to see that so that I knew what it looked like later in life, when I was less content with just having fun.

Krista moved away in the fifth grade. She went somewhere in Ohio and I never saw her again. We wrote letters to each other occasionally. Even though it’s been thirty years, I think about her pretty regularly, sending out a little happy thought to her. She’s not on social media so I have no idea where she is. Happy Birthday Krista, wherever you are!! I hope you’re still nailing it. I’ll bet you are.

I don’t have a picture of Krista so I’m posting the weird moose head from my living room.

Squirrels

The other day after a squirrel head butted me, I recounted the story of the first time I’d been bitten by one to my partner. I used to like to dress up like a soldier, or at least my idea of what a soldier looked like anyway: camouflage pants with brass snaps and matching cap, leather belt with a giant “Pete Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band” buckle, black tee shirt, and white Macgregor cleats with the big protective flap over the laces. I had a number of tiny jack knives I’d found here and there, mostly at the Goodwill store or in my dad’s clothes chest. I’d stick one in my sock and one in my front pants pocket. I also had a giant plastic Bowie knife that looked pretty real and I stuck that under my belt and went out for adventures.

The day I got bitten by a squirrel I was creeping around on the roof of my parent’s house (you could access the roof from the second story balcony) in full costume, practicing tactical maneuvers—drop and roll, stealth training, quick draw with the Bowie knife, army crawl the perimeter, etc.—and I saw this squirrel jogging along. I decided to track it. I crept along behind it, which pleased it none too much, and it scampered down the roof and jumped precariously onto the gutter that ran along the front of the house. It had nowhere to escape to and I felt like this was dangerous for a little squirrel. I felt compelled to help it out of the pickle I’d forced it into, so I sneaked up and reached out to…I honestly have no idea what I was planning to do, grab it by the scruff and set it down somewhere safer maybe? It leapt at me, bit my finger, and dashed away. I was shocked. And my feelings were hurt. It didn’t break the skin, but it wounded my warrior pride. I went inside after that and my sister Joan told me she’d seen me practicing my rolls through the window and she thought that was so funny until I reminded her that I’d seen her in the backyard pretending to be Diana from the TV show V, tapping secret codes into a white spot on the wall where the paint had peeled off the house and barking orders to her workers back on the mother ship. That shut her up.

Recalling that day got me thinking about how I used to want to be a boy. Well, that’s not exactly right. I didn’t want to be a boy, I just wanted to be myself, and myself enjoyed a lot of things that other boys enjoyed. Playing house with barbies or skirts or makeup just did not interest me in the slightest. I preferred buck knives and fireworks and BB guns and pretending I could whittle. My daughter Maya used to call it “boylish,” which to her was the opposite of girlish.

I was boylish. I kept my hair short (except in the back) and never wore dresses after the age of seven. I preferred dirty jeans and ripped tee shirts and catching crayfish in creeks and wondering what kinds of mushrooms I could eat. I once dug a hole behind a bush at my parent’s house and pooped in it, because it made me feel like I was living off the land. I rarely brushed my hair without complaint, one exception being picture day because we got that free slicker comb. Oddly, though I preferred to dress like one, I lived in dread of people mistaking me for a boy. Many times, kind older ladies informed me that I was in the wrong bathroom and I would either have to leave or tell them that I was a girl. It was terribly embarrassing. I remember once at Redeemer Lutheran, where I went to kindergarten, a boy named Rodney told me I had to come into the boy’s bathroom, “just for a second, there’s something in here you HAVE to see!” It was a hard, fast sell and he practically pulled me inside the door. The principal was there fixing his hair in the mirror. I’d have thought that an adult who works with kids might have surmised what happened, but instead he called my mom and told her he thought I was having “identity issues” or something like that. My mom paid it little mind, but I disliked Rodney after that, even when we met again later on in high school at a different school. He’d hit a trigger.

I remember distinctly the day I knew that I wasn’t allowed to be boylish anymore. My sister and I had some great friends up the road, Krista and Jon, and we played with them pretty much every day until they moved away in fifth grade. One summer day Jon showed me a cool set of plastic weapons he’d gotten, bow and arrows, a sword, and various knives that were begging to stab something imaginary. I went down in the basement with him and we played some sort of game with them, until his mom came down and said I needed to play with Joan and Krista instead. I understood her meaning, even at a young age, and I reluctantly left the plastic weapons and went to find the girls. Later on that day we were riding bikes and it was hot and I pulled my shirt off. Jon told me that I was too old to not wear a shirt anymore. I had zero boobs but somehow I knew he was right. I shrugged and said I didn’t care, but after that I didn’t go shirtless outside again. To this day I am self conscious of being naked in public—hot springs, hot tubs, nudist colonies (just kidding, I’ve never been to one of those)—I haven’t really felt a hundred percent comfortable in my own skin since that day. (It also might partly be my muffin tops.)

During middle school I realized that I was gay. That was a real shocker. For a while I tried to tell myself that I really just wanted a close friend. But after a very little while it became apparent to me that that was NOT the case. I decided that I would just lie. I would never, ever tell anyone. I would get married and have kids and nobody would find out. I grew my hair out long, hiding behind a thick gold wall in hopes that nobody would guess my secret. I made up fake crushes. I stopped wearing outlandish outfits, retired my aqua bike pants, stopped wearing the jean jacket with a terry cloth painting of Donald Duck on the back, eyeball key chain dangling in front. That girl disappeared. I remember when Dan D called me a dyke in the hallway in Jr. High. I panicked. I couldn’t believe it! How had he known? I felt like I’d hidden it so well.

In high school I had some lovely friendships with some absolutely beautiful souls. But I didn’t tell them. I dated a boy who was one of the funniest and most adventurous people I’d ever met. But I lied to him to save myself, and I know that hurt him. I wore a sequined dress that I borrowed from a friend to prom, even though I thought I couldn’t dance and knew I wouldn’t try. The girl I’d borrowed the dress from was probably four inches shorter than me and when I arrived at the dance someone in the bathroom told me that she could see my underwear. I tied my jacket around my waist and got shit faced on wine coolers, wishing I was normal.

It wasn’t until I left for college in Lafayette, Louisiana that I finally dropped the rock. I randomly met a girl named Sheila while working at The Real Superstore. She was bi and she started dating this ridiculously cool diesel dyke named Crystal. We started going to gay bars and I taught myself to dance to Alanis Morissette, watching myself in a full length mirror, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I had my first baby relationship with a girl I wasn’t attracted to and didn’t even really like, but she was mildly interested in me and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t even remember her name.

I cut all that hair off in one sitting at a discount hair salon. I brought a picture of Meg Ryan with me. The cut didn’t look like the picture, but it had the desired effect. I felt free and sassy. I eventually moved back to Michigan and told everybody I was gay. They all pretty much knew already.

The settling into acceptance of who I am was long and tumultuous. It’s not like in the movies where you have a good cry and things just start to get better. I’d lied for so long about who I was, I couldn’t bring that girl back to life in a year or in ten years. I felt comfortable directing the way people thought about me by creating an avatar Sue. This avatar Sue was better, but she still wasn’t real. I still find remnants of her, even after decades of therapy and self help books.

Being boylish as an adult isn’t so bad as when you’re heading toward puberty. I know how to carry myself in bathrooms now, though I still wonder if women will double take in there, especially in the airport for some reason. I’ve begun wearing clothes with color and patterns again. I’m not as afraid of drawing attention to myself, because I have less to hide now. I know who I am, for the most part, and I like her most of the time. I have an awesome partner and friends who know me almost as well as I know myself. (The other day I went on a social distance walk with these friends, one of which told us recently that he “loves our guts six ways to Sunday” and the other was afraid to leave her cell phone in the car during the walk in case I fell off of something and got hurt and she needed to call for help.) Remembering that little mulleted, jack knife loving, crayfish catching pioneer child makes me appreciate my life all the more because now I can finally be myself again, unapologetically (except the no longer zero boobs shirt thing) and I know people still love me. Even after all those years of blocking her out, I remember that girl and I recognize parts of her still in me, written in my DNA. I imagine the settling in will continue until I die and I look forward to remembering more and more.

My old squirrel tracking grounds. They ripped out the bush I pooped behind.

Go Susie! It’s Your Birthday!

Today is my birthday. I’m forty-four years old. I’m a huge fan of event days like Christmas and last days of school and birthdays, BUT I prefer the weeks leading up to those days, because during those times I can still look forward to them, imagine what’s going to happen, dream about the good food, and picture the people all gathered together. I always say that the worst thing about Christmas is that it’s the absolute furthest point away from the next Christmas that you can get. So I’ve been looking forward to my birthday for days and now it’s almost over and tomorrow will be back to the old mundane, which stresses me out. The minutes keep relentlessly marching forward, never to stop, no matter what.

I remember some time, maybe ten years back, I read an article that said that Brad Pitt was forty-five or something like that years old and I felt surprised that he was so old. I felt a small gratification that, even though I’m not rich and don’t have a vineyard in France, at least I wasn’t old yet. Linear time is funny like that. Because now that I’m the same age I judged Brad for being, now he’s fifty-six (I just checked)! No Benjamin Buttons for this guy. He just can’t beat me in the age category.

I’ve been thinking a lot about linear time lately, partly because of my birthday approach but also partly because of my alarm clock. Several nights ago I couldn’t sleep and I noticed the clock was blinking from when I turned off the electricity. As I stared at the numbers, I realized that I could compare the time that was blinking on the alarm clock (2:42) and compare it to the actual time it was (4:06 via my smartphone) and find out exactly what time I turned the power back on after I finished hooking up the grounding clamp in the backyard, because the clock starts at 12 when the power goes out and comes back on. A little mental math told me I finished that job at exactly 1:24 pm.

I started wondering how I could use this newly discovered tool for something useful. For example, when I’m cooking and I need to time something, I could unplug the clock and plug it back in to measure how long it’s been in for (perhaps not as efficient as other time measuring devices widely available). Or if someone sneaks into the house to murder me, I could reach down and unplug the clock and plug it back in to give the police an accurate time of death (much more promising for marketing appeal.)

Mulling this over made me remember how Sipsey stopped the Grandfather clock when Ruth died in Fried Green Tomatoes. When someone dies it’s like shutting off the power. If you believe in reincarnation, when they come back, when the power comes back on for them, they are inextricably mathematically linked in linear time to any other person they’ve ever met, in any lifetime, just like my alarm clock and my smartphone.

Incidentally, this thought process also made me want to watch Fried Green Tomatoes again, which is my birthday request for tonight, along with apple crisp and vanilla AND chocolate ice cream and pho soup with double noodles. I’m still looking forward to that, I’ll admit.

There’s a theory that in the fourth dimension there is no linear time and everything is happening all at once. It’s like if you think of your life as a giant sweet potato. At the pointy left end is your birth and at the pointy right end is your death. If you were to slice the sweet potato into rounds, going from left to right, you could pull out each individual moment—when you were born, your first day of high school, the day you retired, the day you died. That’s the way we experience time in this dimension, one split second at a time. I like to think that right now my sweet potato rounds are at the juiciest part. But in the fourth dimension, I’m a baby and I’m dead at the same time, because there are no singular moments there. Just a bunch of fat, blobby sweet potatoes, where one pointy end exists at the same time as the other pointy end forever and ever. Brad Pitt could beat me in the fourth dimension. Please don’t tell him I said that.

As an aside, I recently read an article that said since we, in the third dimension, throw two dimensional shadows, if you’re in the fourth dimension, you’d throw a three dimensional shadow. I think that’s terrifying. Can you imagine a three dimensional shadow? And you know that it ain’t no sweet potato throwing that thing. It would be some sort of outrageous looking thing, with its insides on the outside, no skin maybe, some crazy looking fourth dimension eyeballs, but they wouldn’t be balls at all because balls are three dimensional. Maybe we couldn’t even see it, because our eyeballs are built to collect three dimensional images. There would just be this creepy three dimensional shadow that’s a baby and dead all at once. Outrageous.

So to wrap up this weird birthday writing, I’ll say that while linear time forces us to experience Brad Pitt getting older and birthdays passing and Christmas being over again and again, one relentless second after another until we die, I also have to admit that it allows for a very specific human experience. Without it, we can’t reflect back or dream forward. We can’t see how far we’ve come or wonder where we’ll end up. We wouldn’t get to feel the growing anticipation that leads up to important events in our life. We wouldn’t feel the connections pinning us to all of those who came before us and those who are still to come, late at night, while watching a blinking alarm clock.

Therefore, I’ve decided that tonight after I slurp up my double rice noodles and watch Sipsey stop that grandfather clock when Ruth dies, and my birthday comes to a close, I’m going to try to feel both the bitter and the sweet sides of time passing and the world continuing its trajectory, rather than mourning the long distance between now and the next fun thing. Someday, when I’ve reached the dry hard point to the right side of my sweet potato, I’ll be able to look back on ALL the slices and feel content.

The Sweet Potato of Life-photo by Fructibus

True Justice is Blind

Today while I was cleaning the kitchen I was thinking about politics and karma. Karma is a funny word that we use a lot, mostly to make ourselves feel better when we think we’ve been abused and we can’t do anything about it. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that, were there really a full blown law of retribution, I would surely be in some hot water. I decided that maybe if I come clean about them, I might feel better and reduce my karmic debt. Here’s a woefully incomplete list of things I’m sorry for in chronological order.

1. I convinced my brother to ride his bike down a 2×4 propped on a giant concrete slab because I wanted to see if it could be done without getting hurt. It couldn’t. He banged his forehead on a rock and it bled a lot. The adults brought him inside to examine the wound. I ran to the bathroom to get a band aid and my dad didn’t take it when I offered it telling me “you’ve done enough here today.” I went away with the bandaid and I felt sorry for myself.

2. I stole a silver compass out of the Sunday School art cabinet. I cased the cabinet for about three weeks of Sunday Schools before I took the compass home, telling myself that nobody even knew it was there. I lost it almost immediately and felt sad.

3. I played a trust game with my sister Rachel on a rock wall. In the game one person has to close their eyes and the other person tells them where to step. I directed her off the end of the wall on purpose because I wanted to see what would happen. I told her it was an accident, but I could tell she didn’t believe me.

4. I found a cough drop on the chalkboard rim in my fourth grade classroom and I took it. I had it in my mouth a little while later when my teacher asked if anyone had seen it. I tried really hard not to breathe because the aroma would give me away. I never owned up to this. I’m sorry Mrs. Snarey, it was me that took it.

5. I put staples in Ms. Tunney’s apple in the 6th grade and got sent to the office. It wasn’t my idea, it was Mark L’s idea. I didn’t want her to get hurt, I just thought it was funny, like a whoopie cushion. I had the chance to apologize while she stood next to me in line on the way to the cafeteria but I chickened out and never spoke of it with her.

6. I slammed my sister Joan’s finger in the door of my parent’s van twice, one right after the other. She was making a silent scream after the first time and I didn’t understand why the door wouldn’t close so I gave it another go. Then I was jealous when a kind lady gave her a piece of gum to make her feel better.

7. I used one of those giant matches to light the kerosene heater in our living room and my little sister Anne wanted to blow it out. I tried to make some sparkler circles with the ember after she blew it out because I thought it would be impressive. The match was so long it went out of control and I hit her in the eye with it. I felt terrible and put some antibiotic ointment on it to make it stop hurting and it got in her eye and made it worse.

8. My friend Gretchen and I found corn cobs in a field behind her house and we lit the ends of them on fire and smoked them like cigarettes. It actually sort of worked. We knew it was wrong.

9. I stole a CD of Celtic dance music from Meijers Thrity Acre and got caught and my mom had to come and pay 10x the cost of what I stole as a penalty. It was $40 and I never paid her back, even though I said I would.

10. My friends and I tried to steal a newspaper machine to take the quarters out of it so we could get McDonalds. The security guard saw us and called the police and we lied and said we were just trying to get a newspaper and they let us go.

11. I’ve told a lot of people asking for money that I don’t have any cash on me when I actually do because it’s easier than telling them that I don’t give money to people on the street. This story has two sub points-1. I started not giving money to people when a lady told me she was out of gas in the parking lot at Market of Choice. I gave her a few dollars and then I randomly saw her again a few days later in the parking lot at Fred Meyers with the same story. We looked at each other and I squinted at her to show my displeasure (I’ve never been one for quality on-the-spot retorts). She looked away in regret (or maybe she didn’t recognize me) and I vowed to never give anyone money like that again. 2. I broke this rule one time outside of Lotus Garden. I’d paid for my dinner with cash and had my change in my hand-it was eleven cents. A man approached me and asked me if I had ten cents. I held up my hand and said “Oh my goodness I do!! Ask and you shall receive!” and handed him the dime. I thought it was an amazing coincidence but he didn’t think it was funny and I can surmise why.

12. I pre-paid for a ½ cord of mixed firewood to a young whipper snapper of a kid I found on Facebook marketplace. He told me five days in a row that he would deliver the wood the next day and he did not. I found his mom on Facebook and told on him. He pulled up at 10 pm that night in a ratty ass pick up truck and threw a ½ cord of logs as big around as my waist into the driveway and told me his mom had torn him a new one. I felt bad and so I didn’t complain that the logs were so big. He told me, “thanks for being so patient,” as he jumped into his truck and slammed the door and peeled away.

13. A boy at school answered a math question with the answer 69 and snickered. I got overly mad and I told him he was ruining math class for everyone including himself. I said “it’s like we’re having a nice party together and you’ve come along and pooped in our cake.” It was a little much and as well, did not have the intended effect of creating obedience. A very nice girl couldn’t stop laughing and I told her to, “go to the office if you think this is so funny!” She went, laughing so hard she was crying. I did apologize the next day, but it still goes on the list.

I could make this list very, very long if I tried. This was just with a little thinking back over the years. Plus, I’ve definitely omitted some things that only those who are close to me will ever know.

But back to karma. I don’t really believe that there is a law of nature that says if you do wrong, wrong will come to you or vice versa. I believe that when I make decisions that don’t honor the values that I believe in, I stop trusting myself a little more each time. Every time I stole something or dropped my sister off the side of a rock wall or lied to someone to make my life easier or got mad and said some weird bullshit to a room of twelve year olds, I respected myself a little less and life became less enjoyable. And every time I come clean and tell the truth and do better the next time, even when it’s hard, I respect myself a little more and my life gains meaning and feels settled, something that took me decades to understand.

A great friend once said that “true justice is blind,” and that has always stuck with me. I try to remember it when I feel like lashing out at people who are doing wrong. This whack-a-doo Osho, whom I love and hate, says it best:

The law of karma is not some philosophy, some abstraction. It is simply a theory which explains something true inside your being. The net result: either we respect ourselves, or we despise and feel contemptible, worthless and unlovable.

Every moment, you are creating yourself; either a grace will arise in your being or a disgrace: this is the law of karma. Nobody can avoid it. Nobody should try to cheat on karma, because that is not possible. Watch… and once you understand it things start changing. Once you know the inevitability of it you will be a totally different person.

-Osho The Wisdom of the Sands

Flirting with Danger-(Bees and electricity part two)

My birthday is coming up soon. I’ll be 44 years old and I’m pretty excited to be back in an even year. I always feel off in odd ages. My partner Marika asked me what I want and I referred back to my notes, where I keep a detailed list of things that would make great birthday presents for me. I start it the day after my birthday and add things that strike my fancy as the days go on. This year I looked back and was surprised to see that I’d added a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightening Brush. It was back in the fall. I’d seen an advertisement on Instagram.

Being 44 has its ups and downs. I HAVE indeed noticed a few stray longies on the ole chin, but nowhere near enough to require a Dual Voltage Multifunctional Electric Beard Straightener. I’m sure I had hatched some plan to use it on my head, which develops new and amazing cowlicks every few weeks. I went ahead and told Marika to get me the Scent of Samadhi underarm powder I’ve been coveting for months, but the beard straightener kept calling my name. What even is dual voltage? I wondered.

I looked it up and it means that you can use it with both 120 volts (used in the US) or 220 volts (everywhere else). Apparently lots of international travelers depend heavily on their beard straighteners for the optimum travel experience. Without that dual voltage, if they plug into the hostel in Northern France they could fry their appliance and have to walk around with an unkempt face fro or some crazy doodle longies if they are 40+ year-old women.

All this electricity research got me remembering something I’d been trying to forget. For the last couple years we’ve had a little problem at my house. Sometimes, when a person is sitting in the tub filled with water and she touches the spigots, she gets a little shock. (I say she because the only males in the house are chihuahuas and they don’t do many long soaks.) The shock is a little worse when there’s Epsom salts in the tub, or when you have a little cut.

It’s concerning, right? I mean, how many times have we seen people die in movies when the bad guy throws a toaster in the tub? We all know it’s bad, we all know water and electricity don’t mix well.

It started a couple years ago really, really small, so much so that I thought I might be imagining it. But then my daughter Maya said she felt it too. It was never a BIG shock. Just a little zap, exactly like the one you get if you chew on a lamp cord while you’re hiding behind the couch at your mom’s house. Which was why I was able to keep ignoring it for so long, I guess. I mean, nobody had died yet, ranking it in the “inconvenient, potentially lethal, probably too expensive to fix” category of problems. I got a special potholder to put on the sink to use to turn the water on and off. Then the potholder fell on the floor and the dog peed on it and it got lost in the washing machine, so I started turning the water on and off outside the tub, which is really annoying when you just need a little heat up. After a while I started using the rubber drain stopper, which I thought was really smart because everyone knows rubber doesn’t conduct electricity.

Each month or so I’d sit down and try to do a little research on why it’s happening and I’d quickly get overwhelmed with information and decide to think about it more tomorrow. You’d be surprised at how many people have this problem and how many things could be causing it. So after the dual voltage discovery, I felt like I was on an electric roll, so I decided to finally really try to find some answers to the tub issue. One of the things that kept popping up was a grounding problem. I vaguely remembered a metal stake in the ground outside under the electric box, mostly because I’ve run over it a number of times with the lawnmower. I decided to check it.

I had to go out and turn off the electric main, and the old paper wasp nest was there, as expected. This time I only wore one pair of gloves and no layers and no apiary hood. After months of getting electrocuted in my bathtub, my threshold of acceptability on dangerous activities has shifted quite a lot. Also there was only one wasp this early in the season and it flew away when I opened the box. I just reached in there and turned it off, no questions asked. I looked down at the metal stake and the wire that was supposed to be attached to it, laying lifeless about six inches away. I had to go to the hardware store and buy a “grounding clamp,” which is a pretty cool little device. Not quite on par with a dual voltage beard straightener, but for $2.39, it was worth a shot. I assembled it all up, grabbed the old tiki torch and used it to turn the power back on, and went inside to test the tub with one of those things with two metal points on wires and a needle dial. Nothin! I turned on the tub, poured a good couple cups of epsom salt in there, took off my electricity fixing carhartts, sat down in six inches of water and grabbed the spigot.

No shock. I may have just saved all our lives. I think, maybe, I might just deserve that beard straightener after all.

Bees and Electricity Pt I

A couple of years ago I had to replace a light fixture in our laundry room because the pull-string switch broke. It’s fun doing small electric repairs in my house, because it’s very old and all the wiring in it looks like it was installed by George Washington. The wires are covered in white cloth, probably woven by Betsy Ross, and have lots of cobwebs on them. It’s like a little history lesson every time I take something apart to look inside. As a side note nothing to do with bees or electricity, when my partner and I went to the Betsy Ross Historical Home in Philadelphia, we learned that George Washington paid Betsy Ross the modern day equivalent of $2,500 ($77.50 George Washington money) to make him a bedspread in 1774. She sewed in between rounds of melting lead for making bullets, her side hustle in the days of the Revolutionary War.

In order to replace the light socket, I had to first turn off the electricity. I went down to the box and pulled it open to discover a handful of paper wasps on their nest staring at me like I’d just walked into the wrong bathroom.

I’m not exactly SCARED of bees, but I am allergic to them. It’s not a lethal allergy, I just swell like an itchy, red, inflamed Pillsbury bun, which sounds disgusting and it is. One time my sixth graders and I walked over a yellow jacket nest and yellow jackets came pouring out and we ran, screaming up the street. But a few of my kids had gotten caught on the other side of the nest and I had to save them so I made everyone stop running once we were out of the danger zone and started to head back. A man slammed out the front door of his house yelling “what’s happening!?” He had what looked like a magic wand in his hand and I felt a fleeting moment of relief. I pointed and shouted “bees!” and waited for him to avada kedavra them, but he just yelled “I’m deathly allergic to bees!” And then I realized the thing in his hand wasn’t a wand but an epi pen. I ran away to save my kids so I didn’t get to ask, but I always wondered why in the hell he would run OUTSIDE, knowing he’s deathly allergic to bees, with his epi pen in hand, during what most certainly would have been obvious to any sane person as a bee attack, when all he had to do to stay alive was not open the door. I only got stung twice that day, once on the head and once on my left muffin top. That’s where I would’ve stung me too.

The first time I realized that I was allergic to bees was when I stepped on a bumble in my grandmother’s front lawn. It stung me between my little toe and my ring toe. It wasn’t that big of a deal, my grandmother just chewed up some tobacco leaf and put it on there with a band aid over it. But that night it swelled up into an elephantitic pink blob with toenails, which sounds disgusting and it was. I had to attend Mt. Zion Baptist Church Sunday School with only one patent leather Mary Jane and one naked mutant blob foot.

So I contemplated these paper wasps for a while, and they contemplated me. After a few minutes they went back to futzing with their larvae and tried to pretend I wasn’t there. Their nest was about one inch away from the cut off switch. It would appear to them, I was sure, like I was reaching right for them and they would surely come for me. I’ve always had a soft spot for insects, quite possibly the most misunderstood animals in the kingdom, and I didn’t want to kill them, especially since they were trying so hard to not jump off their babies and attack me. Also, I learned more recently that paper wasps are beneficial to yards because they pollinate and eat insects that can destroy plants. So I went back inside and put on three layers of thick clothing, cinched my hoodie to leave an opening about the size of a quarter, put on two pairs of gardening gloves and an old apiary hood we had in the basement (we really do have an old apiary hood in the basement and I really did put it on) and went back out to turn off the electricity, looking like a homeless astronaut. I opened the box and the wasps looked at me again, only now they were looking at me with less surprise and more concern for my mental well-being.

It took me forty-five minutes to get up the nerve to turn off the switch. I just stood there in the sun, sweating, reaching my hand up and dropping it away at the last second. My partner called out the back door to tell me the sun was going to go down soon and it would be hard to replace the fixture in the dark. I knew the jig was up. I had to just do it. The bees had now pretty much accepted me. They still turned their little heads each time I started to reach, but I think they had maybe come to like me just a little. So I did it. I reached up, grabbed that switch, pulled it as hard as I could, and RAN, peeing my pants just a tiny bit on the exit. That’s just something that happens to women in my family, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.

It took me about ten minutes to replace the fixture. Turning the power back on was much easier because of the angle. I got my hood back on, grabbed an eight foot tiki torch, marched over there to that electric box and opened it up. The bees barely even acknowledged me this time. They were so over it. I used the tiki torch to push the switch back up from a safe distance and all was well. Until recently…

TO BE CONTINUED

Three years of paper wasp nests in my electric box.

Fingerpainting

The other night my partner Marika, our daughter Maya, and I were taking a family walk with the dogs through Madison Meadow and the sun slipped down behind the trees. I told them that this is my favorite time to be walking the dogs because people haven’t remembered to pull down their blinds yet and you can see them inside, in their kitchens and living rooms.

“Naked?” Maya asked incredulously.

“No,” I said, though I did once accidentally see a hairy man doing a butt naked sun salutation in front of his window at the beach two years ago. “Not naked, just doing life stuff, like baking pies, dipping candles…”

“Finger painting,” my partner added, nodding thoughtfully.

“Really??? I always thought finger painting was a summer activity,” Maya said, quite earnestly, which is why I love her.

This story reminds me of when I was in pre-school and we did a finger painting exercise with chocolate pudding. My teacher, Ms. McGlaughlin, a kind, tall, old lady with giant glasses, gave us each a dollop of chocolate pudding on a piece of paper and we were instructed to make a picture with it.

I was pleasantly surprised with this project. As the helper doled out my medium, I remember thinking to myself that I would only eat a little bit. Not enough that anyone would notice it was gone but enough to get a taste. Then after I’d finished that I tried to paint a little as a voice whispered they won’t care if you eat a little more, followed by maniacal laughter. So I did. Then I ate some more for no other reason than that it tasted great. The jealous boy sitting next to me told me that I’m not supposed to eat the pudding and I felt a little pang of shame. I thought I’d just make a small picture with what was left, fully intending to do the thing right. But by then I had about enough pudding to paint a tadpole. I knew I was cooked and I might as well finish off the job.

As I was licking the last of the of pudding off my paper Ms. McLaughlin came by, peering at me though those enormous 80s glasses everyone was so fond of. She told me she was disappointed in me. I was a little sorry, but not too much, because she gave me another dollop. I made a house that looked like a poop stain out of the second serving, just fine with exchanging a little disappointment for free pudding.

Thinking back on it now, I wonder if Ms. McLaughlin was even really tall, or if I was just short. And maybe she wasn’t even old. Maybe she was like, 48 or something, a few years older than I am now. I wonder if she was mostly disappointed in me because she wouldn’t get to eat the extra pudding after the lesson.

We didn’t see anyone baking pies or dipping candles or finger painting or doing sun salutations on the rest of the walk, despite a lot of rubbernecking on my part.

I fingerpainted a chocolate pudding tadpole in honor of Ms. McGlaughlin, wherever she may be. She was the best!

The Barn Fort

I remember arriving at my Grandmother’s house in Kentucky late at night after a twelve-hour road trip from Michigan. I ran into the kitchen where I knew she was waiting up to show off the tiny magnifying glass I’d gotten from the Long John Silver’s treasure chest. It was about the size of my thumbnail, with a black plastic case and a tiny hinge so the plastic lens could fold away and stay protected on all of my scalawag adventures. I could see details better when I didn’t look through it, but I didn’t care. She was dutifully impressed.

We had a great Kentucky crew: my sister Joan and my cousins Rodney and Patrick, and occasionally my younger cousin Julia and my little brother Andrew would join in, if we let them. We had epic adventures together. One time we decided to be helpful and pulled all the ivy off the old chicken house where my Uncle Charlie was storing his pride and joy, a 1950-something Woodie that he always meant to rebuild but never got to. We ran in to get my Grandmother to show her and her eyes widened with what we assumed was adoration and happiness, until she told us we’d just spent two hours ripping up poison sumac and sent us go shower and change our clothes immediately.

Patrick and I hung out together all the time. Once we saw Grandad kill a milk snake because “it had come to kill the chickens.” He saw the snake in the grass and reached in his pockets for something to kill it with. All he had was this large ball bearing, the size of a shooter marble, and he strode up to the snake and threw the ball bearing at its head and killed it. I’m much more impressed with this story as an adult than I was then. I’d never seen anyone kill a snake before and I assumed hitting it in the head with a ball bearing was the standard way of doing it. I now know that I probably couldn’t stride up to an 8.5×11 sheet of paper and hit it with a ball bearing, much less a snake head the size of a quarter.

That day my cousin Pat had on these sweet new white tube socks with green and mustard stripes. My Mom bought socks for the six kids in our family from Bethesda Thrift Store and it was nearly impossible to find a matched pair of socks at my house, much less a new, white pair. My socks were already dull grey by the time I got them. I coveted his socks so much. We went into the sprinkler to cool down and he took them off and went home barefoot. I saw his socks in the yard and put them on. When he came back looking for them, I pretended that they were mine. I shrugged my shoulders lackadaisically and said I had the same ones. Which I did, but mine were grey with who cares what color stripes because they’re old, grey saggy socks. He put up a little fuss, but I held firm. A little while later I found that dead snake and was swinging it around. I hit a pole with it and its headless stump swung back round the other side like a whip and splashed snake blood all over the socks. I took them off and gave them back to Pat, telling him I remembered they weren’t mine after all.

Another time we all walked to the big pond where my grandad went fishing. He’d go out onto the dock and throw dog food into the water, baiting the catfish to the surface, then he’d shoot them with a .22 and wade out to collect them for dinner. My cousin Rodney told us that there were snakes that lived under the mud and not to let yourself sink too far down or they’d bite your feet. I made a big show of jumping as high as I could and sticking the landing, so my feet went deep into the mud. I actually believed him about the snakes, I just did it to be contrary. I was pretty certain I was going to get bitten, but it never happened.

There was also the game we made up called “Detective,” which could only be played in The Old House, which had been abandoned a decade prior when everybody moved into The New House, built by my Grandad a few yards away. Detective was basically hide-and-seek, but you had to not fall through the holes in the floor to the lower levels. There was also some sort of detective angle, apparently, from the name, but the details escape me.

We decided, on one sweltering hot day, to build a platform fort in my Grandad’s old tobacco barn. So we gathered the crew and cataloged our resources for fort making. Tobacco barns aren’t roomy and spacious on the inside like other barns. They are like giant drying racks inside, with big round parallel, horizontal beams running lengthwise across the inside, on which they hung stalks of tobacco to cure. According to my mom, this tobacco barn was built in the 1920s by the Buchanan’s, before my Grandad bought the twenty acres it sat on in 1948.

The tobacco barn had a log frame that looked like it was made by Paul Bunyan, with well-weathered wooden plank siding. There were three layers of horizontal beams inside, running left to right, with space at the top for air circulation. Since this barn hadn’t been used for curing tobacco in many years, there were strange odds and ends laying around inside–an old bicycle that looked like it could have been used by a soldier in some World War, riding from camp to camp shouting “take cover!!! INCOMING!!” before he cycled away on his squeaky iron dinosaur. There were plastic detergent buckets that my grandmother didn’t want to throw into the burn pile, wooden screen doors, old rusty car parts, pitchforks, tractor tires, and square bales of hay stacked up for Poco, the fat mean horse. All in all, the perfect place for a bunch of kids to be climbing around making a fort.

We dragged an old set of primitive but sturdy wooden stairs my Grandmother had built from the Old House and nailed them to the first tier of tobacco hanging beams so we could climb up. Then we brought in a bunch of dusty planks we found in another barn, carried them up the stairs and placed them across the beams to make the first floor. We hung out there for a day, about six feet off the ground and it was fun. The next day we decided to drag more planks over and make a second story. To access the second story, we had to walk to the edge of the first floor, grab onto the second floor and shimmy onto it on our bellies (about ten feet in the air) because we’d plumb run out of extra sets of primitive but sturdy wooden stairs. We also made a small lookout platform in front of the ventilation flap, so we could spy on people in the yard.

The next day we decided to make another level. This one was a little scary. It was maybe 14 feet off the ground, and dragging the planks up that high was no simple feat, for 10-13 year olds. We got it done, nailed the extra hefty boards in place into the 70 year old tobacco infused beams. Then we decided we needed a communication system, for when some of us left to get provisions from the woods, or to look at something with my magnifying glass. Rodney used an ax to cut open all the bales of hay so we could use the binder’s twine they were tied with to make some can phones that didn’t work. Then, with all that hay laying around, we decided to pile it up and jump into it off the top level. It was great fun until I caught my palm on a rusty nail on the way down and got a deep cut. Instead of going to get a tetanus shot, my dad made me clean it with a toothbrush, hydrogen peroxide, and the pink torturer, merthiolate. The cut brought some attention to what we were up to out there and some adults came by. That was the only time we got into any trouble with the project. Not because we were jumping fourteen feet down into a pile of hay surrounded by rusty, sharp objects, but because we’d ruined the haybales by cutting them open. That’s how things were back then. We were allowed to do some crazy, cool, super dangerous stuff.

With each passing year, as we continued to travel to Kentucky, we’d make adjustments to the fort, fixing broken boards, cleaning up raccoon poop, clearing the stairs of debris. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, pre-adolescence was over and we became teenagers. I don’t remember the first time I skipped a trip to Kentucky, but I know it happened. Conversing with the cousins became awkward as we all tried to grow into young adults. We spent our bandwidth on other important things, like drinking Boone’s Farm at parties, passing AP history, and falling in love. The Old House was torn down sometime in the ’90s never to host another game of Detective again. Grandad died a few years after that.

But everytime I did go back, I’d go out and look at the fort. It’s still there today, dusty and decaying. For a few seasons a mother vulture decided it was a great place to raise her babies. She took up residence on the third story, hatching eggs, feeding her reptilian looking chicks, and pooping all over our creation. The tobacco barn is leaning heavily to one side. I doubt it will remain standing for much longer. A hundred years is a pretty good run.

I flew back to Paducah, Kentucky this Christmas, the first time I’d been for several years. My sister, mom, and niece picked me up and we drove the last ten minutes to what once was my Grandmother’s house, but now belongs to Pat and Teena and their cute kids. My mom has built a studio on the property, and now it’s the New House and the other house is the Old New House. Once I arrived, I was shown around–the new art pieces my mom made, the tightrope that Pat put up for everyone to try, the cappuccino maker that makes perfect espresso every time. It was all different, but it was all still the same. The house looked different, updated, but it still smelled the same. I didn’t know exactly how it would feel, being in her house, with her not there. Most of the time it sort of just felt like she was in the next room at the moment. In reality, she was up the road in Possum Trot, at the Oakview Nursing Center.

We all went up there to see her a few times. She didn’t recognize us, or even really open her eyes much. I laid in her bed with her on the night of January 2nd, with my arm around her shoulders, trying to let some of my heat soak into her because she felt cold. My mom woke me up the next morning to tell me that Oakview had called and said she wasn’t doing well. I wasn’t too worried, because it had happened like that before. But just as we were pulling into the parking lot of the nursing home, my Uncle Alan texted. She’d died a few minutes before we arrived.

We went through the usual motions, I wished I’d gotten ready faster so my mom could be there with her when she went, we cleared out her closet, we called people. The woman who was caring for her that morning told us she’d whispered to my Grandmother, letting her know we were coming, but she went ahead on anyway. It’s impossible to know what she was thinking, if she was thinking at all. She’d been leaning hard to one side for a long time. But ninety-nine years is a pretty good run.