There's A Sucker Born Every Minute

At the risk of outing myself as just another delusional blogger, I want to tell you how close I feel to all of you, even though I've never met most of you in person and in all likelihood never will. Sometimes, I tell you all things I would hesitate to share with my closest friends and family.

For instance, I will now reveal to you a source of deep personal shame, something I've never had the courage to speak aloud before: I suffer from acute infomercial envy.

Intellectually, I know that these products rarely (if ever) live up to their hype--because how could they? The entire infomercial philosophy is about overselling, raising expectations to the point where even a stellar product would underdeliver--and let's face it, these are mostly mediocre products at best.

All this I understand intellectually, but believe me when I tell you that it is not my intellect that is standing between me and the acquisition of a Magic Mesh Door Cover. It is only my wallet.

Never has the siren song of "As Seen On TV" been so strong as when those vacuum food storage systems were all over basic cable. I did not merely want one of those systems--I yearned for one, craved it, coveted it.

But even the "ridiculously" low price at which they were being offered was beyond my ridiculously meager means. Sure, I could've splurged, but it would've blown the budget for a month or so, leaving us with no food to vacuum seal, which would've been a cruel tease, not to mention how difficult it would've been to explain to Child Protective Services.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I came upon the Ziploc Vacuum Freezer System. It is a hand pump that you use with specially designed bags. The starter kit, which came with the pump and three quart-sized bags, was less than five dollars. Replacement bags are about $3 for 8 bags.

In the five years I've been using the system, I've frozen leftovers of all kinds in addition to blanching  and freezing fresh vegetables that are on sale and, of course, I've frozen meat from larger (cheaper) packages into smaller meal-sized portions. Though the bags are intended for use in the freezer, they work pretty well to keep cookies, chips, etc. and brown sugar fresh at room temperature. I've not had any problem resealing/resucking the bags after I've opened them when using them this way.

When I first got it, three of our four kids were still at home and the system really let me take advantage of big pack meat sales. Now that all of the kids are out on their own, rather than doing the complex algebra required to decrease our traditional recipes down to a manageable size for just Hubby and I, I just freeze the leftovers, getting two meals for the work of one.

My only caveat (which, I'm pretty sure, is Latin for "lesson learned the hard way") is to be sure to label the things you freeze lest you, as I have, spend the day looking forward to hot turkey sandwiches made with the turkey and gravy you think you're defrosting only to open the bag and be whapped upside the head by the completely unexpected smell of sauerkraut and pork roast.



Z is for Ziploc Vacuum Freezer System

The Rock, The Hard Place

In kindergarten, Daughter-Only started a rock collection. She was especially drawn to fossils and other bumpily textured rocks and then to some others that had sharply contrasting colors or unusual shapes. All these she called "pretty" rocks and deemed them worthy of collecting. At least once a day, she would update me on the number of rocks in her ever-growing collection. "I have twenty-two rocks," she would say. And then the next day, "Today, I found three more rocks so I have twenty-five rocks."

During this rock-crazed period, I ran into the mother of one of Daughter-Only's classmates at the grocery store. This mom confided that her son had quite a crush on Daughter-Only.

"You'll never believe how I found out," she said. "The other morning, as we were getting ready to go out the door, I picked up his backpack and noticed that it was much heavier than usual."

Thinking he might be trying to sneak a forbidden toy into school, she opened up the backpack and found eight sandwich baggies full of little stones and pebbles. When she asked him about it, he said they were rocks for Daughter-Only's rock collection--"rocks" which he had apparently gathered from their driveway the previous evening.

"I made him put most of them back, but I did let him take her one bag. I hope that was okay."

It was not just okay, it was almost painfully adorable. When I got home, I asked Daughter-Only if this little boy had given her any rocks for her collection. She said, "Yes, Mommy, but they weren't pretty rocks. They were just regular rocks. He got them from his driveway. I took them because I didn't want to hurt his feelings and now I don't know what to do with them."

Despite his questionable taste in rocks, the boy's crush was apparently mutual. It was decided that Daughter-Only would continue to accept the rock offerings and just bring them home and pour the bags out into our driveway.

This rocky ritual went on for quite a while, but eventually Daughter-Only and the little boy drifted apart and the baggies stopped coming. Daughter-Only was probably relieved, but I was sort of sad to see them go.


Y is for Young Love

Old Enough To Know Better

When Son-One was twelve, he needed some push pins for a school project, so I brought home a handful of boutonniere pins from the flower shop where I worked at the time. The pins were about an inch and a half long with a pearly acrylic teardrop on the end.

Son-One had been working on the project for several hours when he wandered into the living room, where his siblings and I were watching some mindless, marginally entertaining show on Nickelodeon. He announced that he was taking a break and he sprawled out on the floor beside Son-Three.

We were all laughing at a particularly hilarious moment in whatever show it was when Son-One jumped up and said, "Mom, I did something really stupid. Am I going to die?"

Without knowing what stupid thing he'd done, but fairly certain that nothing life-threatening had occurred right under my nose in the middle of Angry Beavers or whatever it might've been, I immediately reassured him, "No, you are not going to die, but what did you do?"

Son-One held up one of those inch-and-a-half long pins and said, "I swallowed one of these." He said he had been chewing on the little plastic end when Son-Three, in a fit of hilarity, had nudged him in the shoulder, jarring him just enough that the pinhead had slipped from between his teeth and the pin slid down his throat.

"You are not going to die," I said again, though my heart had begun to race a bit at that point with visions of emergency surgery dancing in my head. "But I do think we should probably go to the emergency room."

When we got to the hospital, the ER waiting room was packed, but it's amazing how quickly you move to the head of the line when you hold up an inch-and-a-half long pin to the receptionist and say, "My son swallowed one of these."

We were ushered in immediately and Son-One was in x-ray within fifteen minutes. They could clearly see that the pin had made its way to his stomach, which the doctor said was a good thing. He said that since it had made it that far without getting lodged anywhere, it was likely that it would "pass normally" within 24 to 48 hours. We were instructed to come back right away if Son-One experienced any sharp abdominal pains or any other unusual symptoms, which, blessedly he didn't.

I assume the pin "passed normally," but I can't say with absolute certainty that it did, which is another blessing, if you ask me.

X is for X-ray

Not-So-Random Quote Friday

"Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing."

~~Fay Weldon, Auto da Fay

 

"All the arts depend on telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation."

~Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

 

"It is not a sin to write one's truth. We have an obligation to the living, but this includes the person living within us, whom we may never know if we do not let her speak."

~~Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life

 

 

W is for Writing

I Can See Clearly Now

In my high school yearbook my senior year, under "ambition," where other kids listed the college they would be attending or the career path they had chosen, one of the ambitions I wrote was  "...to never stop growing and changing."

It's tough, especially at this point, to say how much that ambition represented a sincere commitment to growth and change and how much it was intended as a subtle dig  at the townsfolk in that tiny,* stagnant town where little seemed changed since the Fifties and even the young people acted old. Either way, if I had only realized how much of that growing and changing would be accomplished by learning and unlearning and relearning the same few life lessons only to unlearn them again, all the better to be smacked upside the head by the same old truth all over again, I probably would've picked a different goal.

They say hindsight's twenty-twenty, but if I've got such a clear view of where I've been, how the hell do I keep ending up back where I started?


V is for Vision


*The class of 1986 had 71 students; it was the largest class anyone could remember.

Ways I'm Not A Grown-Up, The Eighteenth In A Potentially Infinite Series

I make assumptions.

For instance, I think it's safe to assume that most of you have long since gotten the news about what happens when you assume. Perhaps you even remember, as I do, a long ago teacher dusted with chalk and a heightened sense of his own cleverness, writing out the word "assume" on the blackboard and then, accompanied by strategically timed underlining, saying, "You know what happens when you assume? You make an ass [ass] out of you [u] and me [me]."

From the first time I heard it, I failed to understand why you would be branded an ass for my assumption--it smacked of blaming the victim. Imagine my bafflement then, years later when I heard Al Franken's Stuart Smalley quip, "Because when you assume, you make an ass out of Uma Thurman."

Regardless of who exactly is made into an ass, I've always accepted that making assumptions--especially about other people--is a fundamentally assy thing to do.

Assumptions, generalizations, stereotypes are mostly inaccurate, often unfair and occasionally even dangerous. Knowing about a person is not the same thing as knowing that person. Just because I know your political leanings, doesn't mean I know your heart. Just because I know your religious beliefs, doesn't mean I know your mind.*  For that matter, there are plenty of valid reasons why you might be at the grocery store in your pajamas at 2:24 in the afternoon, most of which have nothing to do with the impending collapse of civilization and, more importantly, my reflexive rush to judgment serves no constructive purpose for you, for me or for civilization as a whole. I not only believe these things to be true, I have direct personal experience with the consequences of forgetting how true they are.

Still, I spend a lot of time consciously talking myself down from the ledge that hangs out over the conclusions I'm so eager to jump to. I suppose stopping myself before I jump is a kind of progress, but if I were a real grown-up, I don't think I would spend so much time up on that ledge in the first place.

U is for Uma Thurman

*That said, I do believe that how you choose to express those political leanings and religious beliefs can be genuinely revealing.

Who Needs a Flux Capacitor?

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time."

~~Steven Wright, I Have a Pony

Last Friday marked my four year anniversary working at the halfway house. I was extremely fortunate to have started at the halfway house about a month and a half before the flower shop, where I had worked for ten years, went out of business. That month and a half overlap was a crazy time of 70 and 80 hour work weeks (in addition to two kids still at home and two in college). As exhausted as I was, it seemed just this side of miraculous that I never once answered the flower shop phone with the halfway house greeting or vice versa.

Fast forward almost two years, I pick up the halfway house phone early on a Sunday morning and say, reflexively, "The Village Flower Shop" before breaking into hysterical giggles. Fortunately, the person on the other end was one of the residents in our supportive living program who had long since become accustomed to my occasional bouts of goofiness and he immediately ordered a dozen roses.

A few weeks ago, after two more unblemished years, on another Sunday morning, I again answered the halfway house phone, "The Village Flower Shop." A few other times over the past four years, I've caught myself just on the verge of answering, "The Village Flower Shop" or worse, "Video Connection," a video rental place I worked at for a little over a year way back in 1997.

Once, when I was a senior in high school, I was sitting on the kitchen counter and reached behind me to grab the phone that hung under the cabinet five years and four houses before. It was not a conscious enough thought to be considered an intention, but I'm pretty sure I meant to call my friend Michele, whom I hadn't seen or spoken to since eighth grade.

I have it on good authority* that many respected scientists suspect that time, if it exists at all, is not actually linear. Everything that has ever happened or will ever happen is happening all at once, right now, always. Our perception of time as a linear concept is apparently a defense mechanism designed to keep our heads from exploding (I'm paraphrasing). Most of the time, all due respect to people who actually understand physics, that just sounds like crazy talk to me. But every once in a while, I wonder.

T is for Time Warp

*Okay, maybe Morgan Freeman is not actually a scientific authority, but he narrates a science show with his authoritative voice, that's gotta count for something.