Granny Greenthumb

Every year, just after Christmas, when the wait has ended for lots of eager children, my wait is just beginning. When will the displays of seeds appear in local stores? How soon is too soon to start my "start inside" seeds? 

All this anticipation makes it a longer wait than it technically has to be--since I usually don't actually plant anything until late February or early March. 

This year, though, the anticipation was more acute than usual since First Granddaughter, at two-and-a-half, is actually old enough this year to be part of the process. Together, we planted marigolds and pansies in tiny cells in big trays. The marigolds sprouted just three days later and the pansies shortly after that. They joined the tomatoes, peppers and basil that I had planted on my own the weekend before. All my little plant babies are doing spectacularly well, lined up in their tiny cells in their big trays next to the sliding glass door in the dining room, awaiting warmer weather so they can graduate to the great outdoors--it's my greenery nursery. 

When First Granddaughter comes over, she almost always checks on the plants without any prompting from me. On Wednesday night, she was gently running her hands across the top of the plants--barely touching them. Like an air kiss except it was air plant patting. Then she took an interest in a particular pepper plant and began sort of pinching a leaf between her fingers. 

I said, "Honey, you have to be careful with the plants. Don't hurt their leaves; they really need their leaves."

She loosened her grip on the pepper plant and paused to consider this information. Then, with her other hand, she pointed out the window at the bare trees in the backyard. She said, "Plants need leaves. My put these leaves on the plants outside."

She then grabbed the pepper leaf again. I disengaged her fingers and picked her up to explain how the trees had their own baby leaves, which would be getting bigger soon. Fortunately, there is a tree right next to the back deck and I was able to show her the itty-bitty just opening-buds. It was enough to convince her that she did not need to sacrifice the indoor plants in order for the outdoor plants to get their much-needed leaves.

G is for Garden

Wii Have the Power...to Utterly Humiliate Ourselves

With a few notable exceptions, I've never really been much of a video game player. The first time I ever saw a Wii game system, I knew next to nothing about the way the system worked.

My kids were teenagers and we had all gone to my father's house for Thanksgiving dessert with other members of our extended family. Eight or ten people were assembled in the living room while two of my kids were trying their hand at Wii baseball. I walked up behind the couch they were sitting on and that's when I noticed the little Wii characters in the bleachers of the game. There was a diverse little group representing many different skin tones, hair and eye colors, but one in particular really popped out at me. He was a little man with sunglasses, bushy blond hair and a thick mustache that drooped slightly at the sides. 

Before I could stop myself, I exclaimed, "Hey, how come that little Wii dude has a Seventies porn star mustache?"  

My kids started laughing, as did several other people in the room. It was only then that I scanned the crowd in the living room and noticed that my stepsister's* newish husband, whom I had not yet met, was glaring at me. And no wonder because had the exact same haircut and mustache as the little Wii dude.

I smiled sheepishly and quickly changed the subject--to what, I have no recollection.

My embarrassment increased exponentially in the car on the way home when my children explained that the resemblance was likely not a coincidence.  The game allows players to create custom avatars (called Miis, apparently) which then become part of the crowd when not in use. So I hadn't merely mocked a character who looked like this guy, I had mocked a character he had hand-chosen to represent himself. 

F is for Foot-in-Mouth

*Being the stickler for detail that I am, I want to mention that she actually wasn't officially my stepsister at the time of this incident. My father and her mother had been together for over ten years at that point, but they didn't get married until this past year. But "stepsister's newish husband" seemed a better construction for the purposes of this story than "my father's girlfriend's daughter's newish husband." For what it's worth, my stepsister is no longer married to Seventies Mustache Guy and since our families are sort of far-flung and not completely blended, I never had to see him again after this inauspicious beginning.

Fooling (With) Mother Nature*

When I was in third grade, my teacher, Mrs. Shank, kept a hermit crab in a small fishbowl on the window ledge. The bowl had a bunch of extra shells in it and the hermit crab was shy so it wasn't until about six weeks into the school year that anyone noticed there was actually a living creature in the bowl. There may have been some initial squealing from some of the kids sitting closest to the window when the hermit crab showed himself for the first time and began scrabbling among stones and shells in his glass home.

It was the first time most of us had seen or even heard of a hermit crab. We found the thing fascinating and when she told us that we would each be assigned to take it home for a weekend, there was a stampede of eager volunteers pushing to be the first to write their name on the list. 

Mrs. Shank introduced us to another wonder of the natural world--a plant that shrunk from the slightest touch, its leaves folding up tightly when brushed or bumped. I've never forgotten the plant, though if I ever knew its name, I've long since forgotten that. 

In fact, I've always wondered what that plant was called and tried over the years to find it, with no success until accidentally, when I was barely paying attention at all, I was flipping through one of those catalogs for a school fundraiser and I stumbled over a kit to grow something called a "sensitive plant." 

I ordered it immediately and when it came, it sat on a stand in my dining room for about six months before I finally got around to planting it. There were about a dozen seeds in the kit, only one of which sprouted. My plant is still a baby, but it is sensitive already and I am as excited about this plant at 47 years old as I was at eight. I make everyone touch it to watch the leaves fold in on themselves.

From what I've read since my kit arrived, scientists are not completely sure what advantages this sensitivity gives the plant but speculate that the rapid movement of the plant may startle away animals, including insects, looking to make a meal of it.

The way the plant shrinks at a touch--or even a too-rough accidental bump of its plastic pot--has inspired a few discussions around our house about whether the plant can "feel" in any recognizable sense of the word, or worse yet, "think." I'm not sure where I stand on that, but the possibility does make me feel a little bad about how much I enjoy poking the little bugger.

E is for Evolution

PS--For those unfamiliar with the plant, this video shows one responding to various stimuli. My own plant is still teeny-tiny and is not really camera-ready. Plus it was closed up for the night when I began working on this post.



*For those too young to get the slightly sideways reference in the title:

The Icing on the Cake

Baby Brother and his family came over on Friday night for game night. When they walked in the door, I was just finishing up frosting some chocolate cupcakes, which were planned for a bake sale to benefit a local family. 

There was quite a bit of homemade cream cheese frosting left in the bowl and six-year-old Seventh Niece walked up and took several fingers full in rapid succession. Her mom told her to stop and without hesitation, Seventh Niece responded, "I can't! Frosting is my destiny!"

As destinies go, it's not a bad one.

D is for Destiny

Ways I Am Not A Grown-Up, The Twenty-First In A Potentially Infinite Series

I don't drink coffee. I never have, not one single cup. 

Sometimes when someone new in my life hears that I don't drink coffee, they are so shocked that an adult person doesn't drink coffee that they will ask me why I don't drink coffee.

I am never really sure how to answer that question. I just never picked up the habit. I had a sip of coffee once, by accident, when I was about eight. It was awful and not merely because I was expecting hot cocoa. Then I worked at Burger King through most of high school, most of that time in drive-thru where the big coffee pots ran night and day so the very smell of coffee is associated with toiling away my adolescence surrounded by other angsty and miserable teens. 

I have awkwardly defended my position on coffee more than a few times. Once, I even defended it in writing. I was reading Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir and came across the following writing prompt: 

"Tell me how you drink coffee. When? Where?

If you don't drink coffee, tell me how you stopped."

It apparently never occurred to Natalie Goldberg, who is one of my heroes on the planet in so many other ways, that a grown-up human being might have never been a coffee drinker. So, therefore, if I don't drink coffee, I am clearly not a member in good standing of the grown-up club. 

Not that that will come as a shock to anyone who has spent anytime around here. This isn't a "potentially infinite" series for nothing, folks. 

C is for Coffee (or the lack thereof) 

Oblivious

One morning about a month ago, my boss came into my office first thing for some intense conversation mostly about residents at the halfway house, but also a little about our personal lives. She was in and out of my office numerous times during the first forty-five minutes of the day. 

During all that time, I never noticed that her hair had changed dramatically from the day before. The style wasn't much different, just trimmed, I think, but the color had gone from an ash blonde shade to something in the burgundy family. 

Worse yet, it came to my attention only when our intern walked into my office and immediately (immediately!) exclaimed, "I love your hair! That color looks great on you!"

Oh, jeez. I apologized to my boss and she waved it off. No big deal. And then, in the next half hour or so, two additional coworkers complimented her hair in gushing tones. 

I launched into a self-deprecating speech about how blind I am and how I really never even noticed and that I just don't notice things like hair and clothes because, I guess, I'm not normal--at least not a normal woman. Even my boss said, "You're like a guy in that way." 

Here's the truth: days go by without me making sustained eye contact with myself in the mirror. I can barely be relied upon to be a steward of my own appearance, to make myself something approaching presentable before leaving the house, let alone notice someone else's cute cut or color or adorable new sweater.

At the office that day, we all laughed it off because what else was there to do? But among women and girls, that noticing, those compliments are currency and I'm flat broke.

B is for Beauty

Accidentally On Purpose

Seven years ago this month, I began working at a job I never expected to have. For ten years before that, I worked as the manager of a small flower shop--which was a whole other job I never expected to have, but I did have it, for ten long years and I had gotten kind of used to it. The halfway house in town was hiring just as it became clear that the flower shop was going to go out of business. 

The ad said they were looking for people with a high school diploma and a willingness to work with addicted men who were working on recovery.  I knew next to nothing about addiction, but I knew there were not many job openings in our area so I applied. 

About two years into this job I never meant to have, I was in the med room with a client who was thanking me for the work I did around the house. He said, "You treat us like we're human beings."

I have never forgotten the wonder and amazement in his voice as he said this. Clearly, he was not accustomed to being treated like a human being. 

It is one of many moments in my time at this job that have informed my understanding and approach to working in the chemical dependency field. It is a field I entered entirely accidentally, but to which I have given over a significant chunk of my heart and soul.

A is for Addiction

Coming Soon to a Blog Near You

Random Quote Wednesday

"I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do. You can think without writing, of course, as most people do and have done throughout history, but if you can condense today's thought into a few symbols preserved on a surface of some kind--paper or silicon--you don't have to rethink it tomorrow."

~~Barbara Ehrenreich

~~Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth About Everything

Masked Mom's Media Monday: Lynn Anderson

For everyone who wondered but didn't ask: That middle-aged woman you saw sitting in the silver van in the grocery store parking lot with the windows up and the engine running for ten minutes belting out "(I Never Promised You A) Rose Garden" on repeat was totally me. 

When I heard over the weekend that Lynn Anderson had passed away last week at the age of 67, I rifled through all my mixed CD's until I found the one with her signature song on. Sure, it wasn't quite the same as hearing it on the scratchy vinyl of the K-tel Country Superstars* album on the stereo my sister and I got for Christmas in 1979, but it was pretty awesome all the same. The baffled looks on passersby? Added bonus. 

Rest in peace, Ms. Anderson.



Masked Mom's One-Word Review: Nostalgic. 

*Seriously? Check out that tracklist. Who even knew you could squeeze so much cheesy goodness into 12-inches of vinyl? I did, that's who. I have this album in a milk crate full of other cheesy goodness in my bedroom right now.

Spiral Notebook Sunday: Sunday, November 2, 2014

Today's unedited excerpt from my Spiral Notebook Journal features me lecturing myself about that thing I always lecture myself about most: writing. Or not writing, as the case may be. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunday, November 2, 2014

Considering how often I disappoint myself, it's amazing I am not entirely immune to my own disappointment in myself at this point. Though I suppose if I were really susceptible to my disappointment, I might endeavor to disappoint myself at least a little less often.

I meant to write today--a lot and much earlier in the day than 9:15 p.m., which it is now. I also meant to write yesterday and the day before and pretty much every day last week and for that matter every day since the last time I wrote. But I allowed myself to get distracted--and not even really all that distracted, honestly, because no matter what else I'm doing (in this case, DVR clearing and Q*bert playing and squeezing in a movie with Hubby, which I couldn't have cared less about--some X-men sequel or prequel or presequel or some damned thing), all I'm really thinking about is how I should be writing.

More disappointment still--now that I finally forced myself to pick up the pen, I'm spending what little time and energy I have to talk about how I should've been here sooner.

Has Anyone Seen My Wagon?

...I seem to have fallen off of it and the bloggy wagon has rumbled along without me, as it always does. 

As always, I miss blogging more than it misses me and find myself sprinting to catch up. 

I could blame my long absence on all sorts of things and, honestly, it really is the product of all sorts of things--busyness, exhaustion, lack of motivation, lack of inspiration. 

The more important question, really, is on what can I blame my return? What is the point of blogging? Despite numerous long absences* and whole periods of spotty-at-best posting, I have not yet been able to give up on blogging entirely. Why? 

Blogging is such a weird thing. It is talking to yourself and inviting others to listen in. It is shouting into a crowd and hoping to be heard. It is a community of isolated, solitary individuals, tapping away at keyboards together alone.  It is writing practice and social networking. It is the study of human nature, your own and everyone else's. 

It is, like most things, the sum of its parts and then some. And I have missed it. 

*This latest absence is by far the longest. We were sneaking up on a year at an alarming pace.

Asymptomatic

As of August 5, when Daughter-Only drove away shortly before noon in search of fame, fortune and a college education in close proximity to her boyfriend, Hubby and I are officially Empty Nesters. 

We've been temporarily Empty Nesters before, when Daughter-Only moved to an apartment less than a mile away, but we suspected from the start that arrangement wouldn't last and even while it did last, Daughter-Only came and went unexpectedly at all hours so our nest never felt all that empty. This time, though, Daughter-Only, our youngest, has moved across the country and her brothers are all fairly settled in away from home lives as well so...Empty Nest.

Hubby says to me the other day, "You know, I miss the kids. I really do. But...I'm really enjoying peeing with the bathroom door open. And...I can even walk from the shower to the bedroom without having to put a towel around myself!"

Be It Ever So Humble

Hello, my bloggy friends, let's begin with a little survey: Where do you stand on weirdness? Do you think it's best to ignore it and hope it goes away? Or do you feel as though blurting out how weird something is somehow takes the edge off the weirdness, at least a little bit?

It's always weird when I come back to the blog after being away for an extended period. My voice sounds kind of echoey and hollow here in this wide-open space and the only relief for it is to keep typing away until the space is a little less empty.

I've spent the vast majority of the day reading piece after piece of flash nonfiction in an online magazine called Brevity. I discovered Brevity in one of those moments of literary serendipity--this blurb in a magazine led to that book which had another blurb which led to a different online magazine which had a link to Brevity and I fell deeply in love. Today's back issue binge was courtesy in part of a new-to-me laptop, which makes spending the day reading a screen ever-so-much more (way too much more, I think) comfortable than sitting at my desk in my office.

The new-to-me-laptop is courtesy of a promotion at work and I have spent the day using it for personal things under the guise of acclimating myself to the new-to-me technology. (I've been strictly a desktop girl up to now--no tablets or e-readers or even a fancy phone to connect to the internet with.)

The constant reminder of my day job has been comforting since the pieces on Brevity are mostly so well written that they are both awe-inspiring and extremely humbling. Please understand, it's been a very long time since I've harbored the illusion of making a living as a writer--probably since fourth grade when Mrs. Wentz had us do a what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up project. Mrs. Wentz was nothing if not thorough and as part of the project, we had to write down what we expected to get paid for our work. Planning to be a novelist, I calculated that I should earn one-third the cover price of every book sold. I figured one-third for me, one-third for the publisher and one-third for the owners of the stores who sold the book. For reasons I didn't understand at the time, Mrs. Wentz was amused and delighted by my formula and made sure to share her delight and amusement with my mother at the next parent-teacher conference.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've imagined quitting my day job and writing for a living as anything other than a far-fetched fantasy, which is good since the pieces on Brevity were, as I said, awe-inspiring and extremely humbling. The cumulative effect of that much good writing all in one sitting was to not only utterly destroy any microscopic lingering illusion of my making a living writing, but also to make me question the wisdom of continuing to write at all.

If I cannot write like this--lyrically with subtlety and grace--what then is the point of writing at all? I try to imagine the amount of writing practice that would turn my writing into that sort of writing--and the answer I smash headlong into each time is no amount of practice or time will turn my voice into voices like those.

This is not false modesty or a fishing expedition for reassuring comments. Instead, it is a clear-eyed evaluation of the skills I possess and the ones I don't. I realize, or I think I do, that my writing has certain strengths. It's just that those strengths are not subtlety or grace or...any of a million other intangible things that I have spent the day admiring in the work on Brevity. 

I can't ever come to the page with the same life experience, the same worldview, the same talent as those other writers. What I can do is sharpen my prose, choose stronger verbs, tighten my sentence structure, dig deeper and dare more in hopes of coming ever closer to making the words on the page resemble the images in my head. And so, finally, again, I discover anew something I've known all along: the point of writing practice is not to learn to write like other people, but to learn to write more like myself.

Nighty Night

Home late after cramming five days of work into a four day work week. (In other news: FOUR DAY WORK WEEK and TEAM TRIVIA!!!!!) So very ready for sleepy time...

Z is for Zzzzzz

Proofreading The World

While driving through town this afternoon, I noticed that the scrolling marquee at the bank on Main Street was advertising a local performance of that beloved children's classic: "Charlottes's Web."

Now, I understand that not everyone has the same (rabid) interest in proper punctuation, spelling and grammar that I do. And I understand that many people lack the aptitude for such things. What I don't understand is why so many of those people are the ones in charge of posting signs and notices.

Y is for You've Gotta Be Kiddin' Me!

And Two To Go...

You know that feeling that combines both "I thought I'd never get here" and "How the heck did I get here so fast?" Well, that's how I'm feeling about A-Z tonight.

X is for X-ing Off The Days

Random Quote Saturday

"Writing is the way I ground myself, and it's what keeps me sane. Writing is the way I try to make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident, reasons why what happens happens--even though I know that why is a distraction, and meaning you have to cobble together yourself. Sometimes just holding a pen in my hand and writing milk butter eggs sugar calms me. Truth is what I'm ultimately after, truth or clarity. I think that's what we're all after..."

Abigail Thomas, "How To Write Your Own Memoir" in O, The Oprah Magazine, August 2008

 

W is for Writing

Random Quote Friday

"They would talk and I would listen. The sound of their voices was a lullaby to me, an assurance that life percolated on through the long night--that I was safe. I would fall asleep with those voices still murmuring in my dreams. To this day, it troubles me to fall asleep in a silent house.

Those long eavesdropping nights made me a storyteller. They communicated to me, without anyone's needing to tell me, that the true apprehension of life's puzzles and pains is not in the living but in the recounting."

 

~~Jacquelyn Mitchard, "All Through The Night" in The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship

 

 

V is for Voices

I'm Lovin' It

[Blurt alert: This post uses some foul slang for female body parts. And also the F-word. But only as much as absolutely necessary. If I could figure out an effective way to tell this story without using them, I would surely do so. But I can't, so consider yourself warned.]

Today, Daughter-Only had to be to work at noon. We left the house at 11:45 and because she'd overslept and hadn't eaten, she wanted to sneak through the drive-thru at McDonald's to grab a cheeseburger to scarf down (I know, I know: the breakfast of champions, right?).

The McDonald's in our town is in the corner of a busy and poorly planned parking lot. Because of this, there is no clearly marked line for the drive-thru cars to wait in. Some people form a line straight off the sign and going far back into the parts of the parking lot intended for other stores. Some people (including me) come in to the line from part of the lot that is set aside for McDonald's customers. (Not only does this feel logical to me, but there is actually an arrow painted on the blacktop to indicate that that is the way to go. However, said arrow is so faded you can only see it if you already know it's there and it can't be seen at all when coming from the other part of the lot.)

Naturally, with all this multi-directional traffic there are issues. For instance, a year or so ago, I was waiting in (what I consider) the correct line for the drive-thru when a woman came out of the restaurant and saw my van sitting behind her vehicle. While she had room to pull out, it would have required some maneuvering. I would have gladly backed up or inched forward for her, but before I could put my van into gear, she started gesticulating in an extremely rude manner and blowing her horn.

I am not normally an inconsiderate person, much less confrontational, especially in public. I feel sure I could muster legions of people, many of whom do not even know my name, who could attest to my random acts of kindness and consideration in retail settings all around town.

But! If someone is blatantly nasty or disrespectful to me, some sort of chemical change occurs within my brain and I become a person I barely recognize and of whom I am not always proud. Which is how and why I refused to move for the woman whose car I was behind until, forty-five seconds and numerous F-words (from her) later, the drive-thru line moved of its own volition.

During our exchange, in which I calmly told the woman that I would not be moving out of her way that very second, this woman called me a "fucking twat."

My first thought was, "I didn't know anyone even used that word anymore." I hadn't heard it since the school bus in seventh grade, when it was the height of hilarity to say "Twat did you say? I cunt hear you."

My second thought was, "What the hell is your fucking problem?!" Which thought came out mouth before I could stop it. Oops. Daughter-Only was with me that day as well and was equal parts appalled and impressed.

Today, as you have probably guessed by now, there was also a multi-directional traffic issue in the McDonald's drive thru. As Daughter-Only and I pulled up to the drive-thru, we immediately scoped out the line to assess her chances of getting to the window in time to make it to work before noon. There were four cars in line, including the one at the sign. I inched forward to position myself to get into the line while she was trying to decide whether we should just drive off and skip the cheeseburger.

Just as she decided that we should leave the line, a big red truck came from the other direction and tried to block me from getting into the line. I no longer even wanted to get in the line, but the set up of the lot meant that I needed to get between the red truck and the black car to pull away from the drive-thru line. As I pulled forward to do that, the young man (or as Daughter-Only referred to him, "the teenage redneck") began gesticulating rudely and pulled alongside of us, thereby blocking us from leaving the line.

I rolled down the passenger window, and he started yelling that he had been in line before us (which I knew was not the case) and that we needed to get to the back of the line. And...uh oh...there went that brain chemistry thing again. I calmly stated that I was in the line and things escalated from there.

I can draw diagrams, and provide additional details to interested parties, but the key highlights are that Daughter-Only was a little late for work, but she did get her cheeseburger. For what it's worth, she got her cheeseburger before the boys in the red truck got whatever it was they were so urgently trying to get.

Oh! And the fine upstanding young man at the wheel of the red truck called me a "fucking cunt" to which I calmly replied, "Do you really think that sort of language is going to get you the results you're looking for?" At that point, he realized the futility of his quest and got into line behind us. There was something disturbingly satisfying about watching the disappointment cross the boy's face when he realized his ultimate verbal weapon was utterly ineffective.

As we pulled away from the window a couple minutes later, both the boys in the truck could be heard screaming unimaginative obscenities at us.

As she got out of the car to go to work, I told Daughter-Only, "Well, now I've been called a fucking twat and a fucking cunt in the McDonald's parking lot. I figure if I can just get someone to call me a fucking pussy, I'll have achieved the lady parts insult trifecta!"

U is for Uncivilized*

*At one point during today's verbal scuffle, after he had flung numerous F-words but before he resorted to the C-word, the boy driving the truck said, "I have to be to class at 12:30!" To which I (calmly) said, "Oh? Is it a class in how to be a civilized human being? Because it seems like you could use a little instruction in that."