Tiffany Talks

A New Year Indeed

2012-01-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I wasn't all that optimistic about 2012. It wasn't that we'd been warned that the world would end--that seems to happen all the time. And it wasn't that by the end of the year I'd been unemployed for more than three months. I'm bizarrely unconcerned about that. It might have been in part due to the fact that I was sick for both Christmas and New Year's Eve, we didn't have any snow for the holidays and when 2012 began it seemed like there was a lot of unfinished 2011 business hanging on. And it was partly, I'm sure, due to the state of the world. When most new years dawn, I'm thinking about what the year ahead holds for me and my family. This year, more than most, I was thinking about what 2012 would hold for the country and the world; my expectations on those fronts were pretty bleak. That's still true.

But something changed for me with the new year, something I didn't plan for or resolve about or even anticipate.

2012 became the year to finish all of those dangling projects of the past, to clear out my filing cabinets and find a home for whatever was in them, to clean house not by tossing things and donating things as I usually do but by following a thousand paths mapped out in the past and interrupted or abandoned.

For example:

In November of 2006, I wrote a romance novel on the train. I did it for no reason other than that a lot of women I knew were participating in NaNoWriMo and I wanted to find out whether I could write an entire novel in a month. Because I had a full time job and a 2+ hour round-trip commute and was a single parent, I didn't have a lot of time to write...but I managed to wrap up that novel largely during my commute (by train) that month. Then I basically let it sit on my hard drive for five years. During the first week of the year, I reviewed it, proofread it and added about 5,000 words; then I uploaded it to the Amazon Kindle store.
During that same week, I vetted the children's books my daughter and I had written together during her early childhood--books that have been sitting around much longer than that romance novel had. These, in fact, only existed in hard copy. I picked the two we wanted to publish first, sent one off to get a quote from an illustrator I'm super-excited to be working with, and set Tori about making illustration notes on the second.
This week, I finished creating e-book files, uploading them to my website and creating Paypal code and then created a sales page for my law school admissions e-books. Mike Gifford turned that content into an actual web page for me and added it to my site this evening.

I have two freelance projects to wrap up over the weekend, so that's probably it for this week, but really...I can't wait to see what next week holds.

Everyone Is Alive

2011-12-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

When my kids were in elementary and middle school, we went around the table at dinner every night and each of us told the best thing that had happened to us that day. My theory was that sometimes there's something great to share, but there's always something at least a little bit good, and the smaller good things tend to get lost. A friend giving you a cookie at lunchtime or making it to the top of the monkey bars for the first time might pale in comparison with getting yelled at unfairly or someone pushing you down on the playground, and you just might come home focused on the negative--especially in middle school, where negative experiences outstrip positive by about 50 to 1 for a lot of kids.

Sometimes talking about the good thing can turn your whole view of the day around, or at least the way you're feeling in that moment.

Now that it's just me and Tori, it's not something we do all the time. We're always talking about the things that are going on in our lives, good and bad, and with only two of us in the house I don't have to work so hard to make sure everyone is heard. But every now and then, I'll pull it out.

So that headline there...that's mine for today. No one is dead. And please don't think I'm being cynical or using this as a backhanded way to say nothing good happened. I couldn't be happier that everyone is alive.

See, we were supposed to take my grandson Andrew home this morning, but yesterday afternoon while my son-in-law was on his way to work, his timing belt snapped. Fortunately, a relative loaned them a van almost immediately; if she hadn't, my stepdaughter Beth would have been home alone with no transportation when my younger grandson, Caleb (1), stuck a ruler in his mouth and turned to run from her, tripping before she could grab him and jabbing it through the roof of his mouth. But that didn't happen. She had the van available and swept him right out to the emergency room, where they shipped him to Indianapolis for some frightening testing and then determined that the blood supply to his brain had NOT been affected and they could just stitch him up, rehydrate him and, as soon as he was able to eat soft food and drink, send him on his way.

That hasn't happened yet. That means that his mommy (who is 6 months pregnant) was up all night at the hospital and Andrew didn't get to go home this morning...and he took it hard. So hard that when he told me at McDonald's Playland this morning that he had to go to the bathroom and I said, "Okay, let's get your shoes on," he threw a fit instead and stood his ground until he peed all over the floor. And that, of course, made him all the more hysterical, not to mention pretty darned uncomfortable when we went out in the freezing cold to take him back to my house and change him.

And Tori, who was up most of the night waiting for calls or exchanging texts with her sister at the hospital (and hasn't gotten a whole lot of sleep since she's been playing aunt-in-residence this week, anyway), actually fell asleep in the shower this morning and woke as she was falling. She managed to protect her head, but hurt her wrist a little and her ankle quite a bit.

So that's my good news for the day. We're all alive. If that's still true at the dinner table tonight, I'll be counting my blessings...if I can stay awake long enough to get dinner on the table.

Update: Though we're all still alive, I told the story of our day just a bit prematurely. Andrew took a flying leap into Tori's nose about 8:00 this evening and we ended up at the emergency room having her checked out for a broken nose. Verdict: maybe it's broken, but it's straight and her nasal passages are open, so no need to take any action. Go home, take some Motrin, put some ice on it, and stop envisioning slivers of nasal cartilege in your brain.

A Few Things I'd Forgotten

2011-12-07T20:41:00.001-08:00

1. Sitting in the car for an hour or driving in circle because I know what the rest of the day will be like if I interrupt an unexpected nap.

2. Really sticky kisses that for some reason aren't icky at all.

3. How long something like watching a train pass by can remain interesting to a three-year-old.

4. The warm weight of a sleeping child.

5. How HIGH UP tiny children look when they climb almost anything.

6. The smell of Johnson's Baby Shampoo.

7. The extreme difficulty of staying focused on the misdeed at hand while looking into big, shiny brown eyes.

8. The willingness to appear in public wearing antlers.

9. The fact that a small child will scream "help!" when the television goes fuzzy with the same tone and degree of urgency he might employ were he trapped in a burning building.

10. The immeasurable value of fresh-from-the-bath-in-clean-pajamas hugs.

11. The endless capacity for repetition.

12. Being unable to remember when I last found time to take a shower.

The Best Things in Life are Three

2011-12-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as you know if you read this blog, know me in real life, are friends with me on Facebook or have crossed within 100 yards of me in the past few weeks, I picked up my three-year-old grandson from Indiana. He'll be staying with us for a week, and there are a lot of firsts involved: the longest he's been away from mom and dad, the longest car ride he's been on, his first trip out of state (and a few more to come).

Here's a little snapshot of our first twelve hours together:

I'm not really prejudiced, though. Some of the best things in life are also one.

Double the Power of Your Christmas Gifts

2011-11-29T11:46:00.000-08:00

I suspect I'm not alone in that I always feel a bit torn at Christmas. Yes, I love buying shiny, expensive things for my children and grandchildren and watching them exclaim over them; yes, I love all the bright lights and sparkles of the season. And yet, it always feels a bit much, a bit greedy in light of what's going on all around us and far beyond our borders.

I love the idea of making charitable donations at Christmas, but they're hard to wrap and you can't hand them out around the tree, which typically means that I'm spending double the money every year, buying stuff for my loved ones and handing out cash to feed and clothe and otherwise support all those folks we should think about all year but often forget about until food drives and fundraisers put them back in our line of vision.

And that's okay; I'll probably do the same thing this year and feel good about it, too. I want my kids and grandkids to have shiny packages that make their eyes light up on Christmas morning. I want everyone else's kids to, too.

But this year, at least, I've found one option that covers all the bases. If you're a regular reader here, you've undoubtedly heard me mention Kwagala Project before. Kwagala (fka Purse of Hope) is an organization that provides aftercare to young victims of the commercial sex trade in Africa.

I first became involved with Kwagala because my former employer, Total Attorneys, funded a house in Gulu where these girls could live, learn, become a family and prepare for their new lives. In the intervening four years, I have been consistently amazed by the resilience and capacity for joy in these young women. Many of them were kidnapped, sold or forced by desperation into prostitution at an age when our girls are still playing with Polly Pockets and dressing up as princesses. But instead of holding on to bitterness and focusing on what they've been through, these dauntless young women work hard, play hard, laugh, sing and are endlessly grateful for the support they receive and the new lives ahead of them.

I don't think anything has made me cry quite so often as the hearts of these girls.

One of the first things the girls can do, while they're starting to transition, when they have little training or limited time, is to make jewelry. For many, this jewelry-making is the first paid work they've ever done outside of prostitution, and their first step toward saving money to build new lives for themselves.

Now, Kwagala is offering that jewelry for sale in time for Christmas. Please check it out, and check back over the next few days--we'll be adding many more items. Wouldn't you and the recipients of your gifts like to know that you're supporting a courageous young woman in her new life as you shop?

Thankful for Just about Everything

2011-11-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

It's official: Thanksgiving is once again my favorite holiday. Well, for the moment. We haven't had Christmas in our new place in Rochelle yet, so check back with me after that. It's hard to know how having the Whos' Christmas tree in my yard will impact that holiday season.

Today, in celebration of our first Thanksgiving "back home", Tori and I stayed put. We didn't go to anyone's house; we didn't have anyone over. We cooked a little turkey in our kitchen (in Rochelle) and Tori made an elaborate fruit salad and we ate dinner and watched A Christmas Carol and went for a long walk around our neighborhood to look at Christmas lights and played with the dog and played a game of Scrabble, and...well, you get the idea.

And when the song about how "this is how life should be" broke out, I couldn't have agreed more.

So here's the short list; there's definitely more, but a little Yorkie dog who's high on the list is waiting for a last walk before bed, so I'll try to keep it reasonable:

All of the friends who have, in different ways, ensured that I haven't been alone in the many years I've been a single mother. They are legion, but I am especially thankful for Margo, Jo Ann, Barb, Todd, Mike, Don, Judy and Andrew. I think about you guys every day.
My totally amazing daughter, who makes everything fun and inspirational.
The other children who still let me be their stepmother many years after the separation (and the next generation that came with them...have I told you all that my grandson is coming to stay with me next week?)
Little Yorkie dogs...one in particular :)
Rochelle
Being in Rochelle
How happy Tori is to be in Rochelle
The people in Rochelle
The way downtown Rochelle could easily be mistaken for Bedford Falls
The big windows and sunlight and clean whiteness and light wood floors in our townhouse
The fact that we're solvent (so far) even though I'm unemployed
The fact that I have had so much flexibility in the way we build our lives and I get to balance being a parent and supporting my kid
The many amazing people I came to know in the job I recently left and what I learned from them
The opportunity to put my skills to work for the forces of good

Yeah, I'm not even close to done. But Jake is threatening to leave the list and become someone I have to clean up after if I don't cut this short, so I'll leave it at that for now.

My Virtual Family

2011-11-15T19:54:00.000-08:00

No, I don't mean a bright and smiling easier-to-manage set of kids in Second Life or a farm full of Facebook cows that I milk instead of walking my real-life talk: I'm talking about the joys of technology for the far-flung family--and not even especially NEW technology.

As tends to happen as we age in the modern world, my three kids are in three different cities in two different states. One still lives with me, but the others are each five hours away...and not even the same five hours. To make matters worse, one of those distant children keeps my grandchildren in her faraway home.

There just aren't many days like this anymore:

And though we make an effort to get together when we can, too often it's hectic holidays and planned events and big crowds and none of those ordinary days that broke out into a squirt gun war or a multi-city quest for Tiddly Winks.

Last night, though, my girls reminded me (by example) that those days aren't about the perfect situation but about taking everyday life as it comes. I hadn't been feeling well all day and had ordered a pizza for an early dinner so that I wouldn't have to cook. When the pizza arrived at the front door, Tori was nowhere to be found, but the open front door provided a clue. I couldn't see her, but I could hear her voice: she was walking the dog and talking to her sister on the telephone. I called out to her that the food was here and she came inside, but rather than hanging up the phone she put it on speaker and set it down in the living room.

While we ate pizza and chatted, Beth bathed her kids and got them ready for bed. Tori likened this, later, to standing in the bathroom doorway and talking to her sister while she bathed the kids. And it was...except that we were 200 miles apart.

Afterward she put the kids to bed and Tori and I both started crocheting, sitting on separate couches with the dog curled up on my feet and we talked...and talked...and talked. Somehow, as we talked about the kids and laughed about escapades gone by and books and movies and yes, a few other family members, more than three hours passed. And it was much more like those nights we'd make popcorn and play a game in the living room or hang out late in our hotel room when we visit than I might ever have imagined.

It's Hard to Get a Sick Day When You're Unemployed

2011-11-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

I think it was a week ago that I woke up dizzy, queasy, kind of shuddering all over and generally feeling too weak and achy to get out of bed and then got up anyway and discovered that there was a small river running through my back yard.

One of my first thoughts was that it was a great time to be unemployed. I could stay in bed. I could take time out to do what I needed to do with the flood. I could, in short, pull the blankets back over my head and...

Well, no. I did have a few freelance projects in the works, and the deadlines weren't going to change just because I was sick and flooded. In fact, it turned out to be more complicated than when I'd had a full-time job: if I was really too sick to work in my employee days, I could just call or email one person and let them know and then that was it for the day.

Not so much with this freelance thing. There were three or four different people at different companies involved. There were different deadlines, and it was tough to know which (if any) would be affected, since I didn't know how long I was going to be sick. No one cared what I was doing that day in particular, which meant that no one needed to know that I was sick or that there was a newly formed creek running behind my house.

But the work still needed to be done, the dog still needed to be walked (in the rain, around the flooding), Tori still needed a ride to choir (in the rain, around the flooding)...and six or so days later, I still haven't gotten a down day to rest and recover, and I'm still feeling like crap. And still pushing to get things done, even though they're fewer things, because I'm not all that diligent or efficient when I feel like crap.

I'm starting to think it might have been very helpful to have a job to stay home from.

Because I Totally Didn't Have Enough to Do...

2011-11-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

Since I've been unemployed, my life has been pretty hectic. I thought that I'd have all kinds of time to catch up on some projects that have been sitting for a while, but of course it hasn't played out that way. I've had some freelance opportunities; I had some e-books to wrap up; Tori's schoolwork is at a point that requires more input from me than usual. And then, of course, there's the whole looking for a job thing, and the fact that there were quite a few boxes still stacked around my house from that move we never quite finished.

So today, I did the only sensible thing and started another blog.

That doesn't even surprise you, does it?

My Least Favorite Holiday

2011-10-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

Halloween has never been my favorite holiday. I still remember the relief, in 6th grade, when I realized that I was no longer required to dress up for school or make the neighborhood rounds or otherwise participate in the "festivities".

I had this kid, though. Halloween was fun when she was little, mostly because she was just so damned cute and because she delights in everything. And sitting up late at night sewing star-spangled capes or searching stores for components of a costume she'd conceived in her mind and drawn for me became kind of fun. And she didn't have that moment of relief in sixth grade; she's 15 now and the whole Halloween season still delights her.

Which is how things like this happen to me and to Jake. And, somehow, turn out to be more fun than I remember or anticipated (though of course that's easy for me to say, since no one pulled my ears through little slits in my hat for the occasion. It's possible that Jake feels differently.)

It turns out, too, that there's more to Halloween than dressing funny and paying too much for candy that you can pass out to other people instead of eating it and then go around and try to gather up candy from other people to eat since you gave all yours away to strangers.

Pumpkin seeds, for example. I learned this year that you not only can but should eat them raw, which was a big bonus for me because I've never had much patience with that whole "let them dry overnight" thing. And having them available immediately provides a great diversion from the candy I'm supposed to be handing out to other people.

But it's not all about food. There are also corn mazes. I'm not sure why corn mazes are Halloween-specific: now that I've discovered them I'd like to go all the time and can't quite work out whether they're seasonal because they look Halloween-ish, because they're often haunted, or because that's when the corn is at the right point in its life cycle to form a maze instead of, say, dinner.

This year, we went to the Jonamac Orchard corn maze in Malta, and it was great--wide, clear paths, intricate pattern, and some fun checkpoints along the way where you could get a hint if you answered a question correctly or didn't mind singing Old McDonald's farm while pointing back and forth and counting in the middle of a cornfield.

At one point, we found ourselves alone in a clearing, surrounded by corn and bright blue fall skies, and Tori said there was only one thing to do in a circumstance like that. This isn't what I was expecting:

Then, of course, we headed out to teach neighborhood children to take candy from strangers. We'd spent Saturday morning creating this nice place to sit and hand out candy, and although it was a little chilly we weren't facing anything like the snow and slush my eastern friends were reporting.

After dancing around a bit, Tori announced that she was going to be a gypsy permanently. It's always risky letting her try something new.

Then, of course, we made our traditional holiday pizza and watched Scream 4.

Being a parent is educational in a lot of ways. You learn patience; you learn to go without sleep; you learn to smile even when you're stretched so thin that you're pretty sure you're going to snap; you learn to say "It's okay," in a soothing tone and not flinch when someone throws up in your hair...but I'm coming to believe that the most important thing we learn from our kids is how to see the world. In this case, that nearly anything is worth celebrating.

My Career as a Reluctant Unpaid Extra

2011-10-15T00:31:00.000-07:00

If we're friends on Facebook, then you know that my status right now is:

This may be the only chance I ever have to make a statement like this: I've left the kids in the street and gone to the bar.

The reason I ditched the kids (just one of mine, and a friend of hers) in the street and went into a bar was that they'd committed to hanging out on the corner hoping to catch a glimpse of Zac Efron for...as long as it took. I stuck it out for three hours before walking the half-block to a local bar/restaurant where I often have dinner when Tori is out with friends. I drank coffee and ate cheese garlic bread and chatted with the regulars and the bartender about what a long night it was going to be.

My daughter and her friend were herded off the street onto the lawn of a nearby building, from which they couldn't see a darned thing. I watched Zac Efron shoot about a hundred and seventy-five takes of the same scene while the girls huddled around the corner and wondered whether they were ever going to see him...and then a DA pulled me out of the bar and asked me to be an extra.

Fortunately, in the exact moment that I was stepping out onto the street, the girls showed up at the back door of the bar (a family-owned pub attached to a restaurant) and asked for me, and so ended up watching the final takes of the movie from a perfect vantage point directly across the street from Efron while I stood and chatted silently with a couple of other extras and the owner of the bar.

Yes, chatted silently. Turns out all those people you see talking and laughing in the background on the street aren't making any sound. It's kind of tough to do. Fortunately, they only shot "my" scene four times.

The crazy thing is, this is the second time this has happened to me in the past 90 days. My kid's interest in the film industry isn't playing out exactly the way either of us intended.

See that silver car in the background? Zac Efron was totally in that car. We saw him. And they let Sydney touch it.

Tori's Famous!

2011-10-04T22:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, big exaggeration (from me...imagine that).

But the Motivational Growth website launched tonight, and her picture is on the front page.

It's been quite a while since I talked about the filming, though I'm told that it hasn't been all that long at all in film years. This project has been a real education for me in terms of what goes on behind the scenes in between filming and release, and it boggles my mind that movies get made at all.

Tori's part in this one is small, but it's been getting some good advance press from star Jeffrey Combs (of Star Trek fame) and could easily become a cult classic with a certain audience. I'll readily admit that I'm not that audience: too much blood, vomit and weirdness for my personal tastes. But I walked out after viewing the rough cut asking questions, and that's usually the sign of a movie that people will watch and re-watch.

Can't wait to see what happens with it. We've met some great people in the process and the talent is first-rate all around.

You CAN Go Home Again

2011-10-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

Last night, aptly enough, was the Homecoming dance in Rochelle. The last time Tori went to school and participated in school activities here was in the third grade. Though she's been taking one class at the high school since late August, this weekend she re-entered the social scene in her hometown and, somewhat to my surprise, she picked up without a hitch.

Maintaining My Sense of Humor

2011-09-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

One week unemployed, a lot of unanswered questions and a surprising amount to do: I've just come back from a four mile walk and I'm feeling pretty good.

The dog is dancing to go out when I come through the door and I slip him into his harness and grab my phone and head out. I'm feeling thankful as I close the door behind me; I've just walked four miles and I have the energy to go right back out with the dog. I'm not short of breath. My heart isn't racing. I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about it, but it wasn't all that long ago that I thought it would never be possible again.

Smiling, I shift my phone to the hand with the leash so I can lock the door. The dog yanks. My phone flies out of my hand and lands face down on the concrete, shattering.

Who knew Yorkies were so tough?

Okay. Deep breath. I'm pretty sure I have insurance. I try to dial customer care and the call goes through, but apparently they can't hear me. All I get for my troubles is an index finger full of tiny glass slivers. When the call disconnects, "No Service" pops up and stays.

Have I mentioned that Tori is on a field trip out of town? Or that they didn't know what time they'd be home and I was waiting for a call to pick her up? Or that we don't have a land line at this new place?

So I'm a little rattled and the dog doesn't get the nice long walk he was hoping for, but I'm still feeling pretty good. I've decided to run to Wal-Mart and pick up a TracFone. Not only have I come up with a solution in just a few minutes, but it's come with another "things could definitely be worse" moment--even though I'm unemployed, I didn't have to stop and think about whether I could afford a TracFone.

My luck held, too. I got my new phone purchased and activated just minutes before Wal-Mart caught on fire, and was already on my way to the door when they started to evacuate.

The Birth of Kwagala Project

2011-08-30T14:41:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me in real life has probably seen quite a few posts on Facebook and heard quite a bit in person about Purse of Hope, the charity founded by the amazing Kristen Hendricks and supported in a very significant way by the equally amazing folks at Total Attorneys.

When you look at the work that gets done and the lives that are changing every day, it's hard to believe that the organization is only a few years old, and that Total Impact House is even newer. Our first high school graduate just started at University!

Perhaps because the organization has grown so quickly beyond its roots, "Purse of Hope" no longer seemed to encompass all that it was...and that meant not only a name change but a whole new look. The organization is still providing full-service aftercare to victims of child prostitution, from education and vocational training to food, counseling, shelter and an incredible sense of family and community that many of these girls have never before experienced: it's just doing so under a different name.

Kwagala Project, so named because "kwagala" means "love" in Lugandan, is Purse of Hope grown beyond its seams--and growing in its impact every day. When you have a moment, please check out the new website and/or "like" the new Kwagala Project Facebook page.

Excuses, Excuses

2011-08-20T20:46:00.001-07:00

I could tell you that I haven't posted in nearly a month because the end of July was crazy with moving and my Internet service has been sporadic and frankly crappy since I moved, and all of that would be accurate.

Truth is, though, if my Internet access were flawless I probably still wouldn't be posting much. I just have too much to do.

By that, I don't mean the old "I'm running behind at work because I just moved and I have these freelance jobs to keep up with and admissions consulting season is starting up and I'm not even finished unpacking," though all that is true.

I mean that the gym is close by and not a hassle to get in the evening, and that we go swimming at least a couple of times a week. I mean that it's so pleasant to walk here that I sometimes walk with Tori, alone and with the dog all in the same day. I mean that Tori started taking one class at the high school last week and comes home every day with some new plan or invitation--a choir picnic, a field trip to see My Fair Lady, an audition, performing at a football game...

The library is familiar and inviting; the Lincoln Highway Heritage Festival is going on downtown this weekend.

It kind of makes me laugh; I said to Tori the other day, "How is it that there's so much more to do in this rinky-dink little town than there was in the suburbs?"

I think I know the answer, though. I think that really probably all of the same sorts of things are going on in the suburbs and more, but it's so much more complicated to participate in any of them--longer drives, traffic, parking issues, crowds, etc.--and then they're populated by strangers when you get there. At least, that's my guess at why it suddenly seems reasonable to pop out to the gym or the pool more often than not on a weeknight, and why I see a parade as an opportunity rather than an obstacle to getting around town on a particular day.

And, of course, the normal stuff is still in play as well. I've been working on a new website for Kwagala Project, and Tori is getting set up to sell the jewelry the girls have made online. And last weekend, she was part of the Imagos Films team for the Windie City Shootout, which meant arriving in Chicago well before sunrise both days (on Sunday, we left home at 1:30 a.m. to start shooting at 3:30), so we're a little tired and not as far along in the decorating process as we'd like to be.

But not so tired nor so busy that we can't take a couple of hours out for a swim. Somehow, in this place, I never feel like there's something else I really should be doing--even when there is.

Moving to Who-Ville

2011-07-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

So the truth is, the place we're moving into isn't the place we chose at all. We had a house all picked out--it wasn't perfect and some things weren't in as good condition as we would have liked, but the neighborhood was perfect and I was charmed by the breakfast bar and the tiny fenced backyard. The landlord even reacted favorably to my page-long list of repair requests. But in the process of making those repairs, and ELEVEN DAYS before my current lease expired, he decided that since the previous tenants cats had done so much damage, he didn't want this guy living there.

Obviously, we don't travel without him.

That left us in a crunch (read: complete, blind panic). We really wanted a house, but I'm nothing if not a realist and that just wasn't likely to happen in the handful of days I had to find a place and still give us time to get moved.

The girl at the one and only local property management company had a few townhouses and duplexes to show me, but I was having a hard time changing gears and I only agreed to look at them because I had visions of homelessness. Or, worse, having to renew my current lease and stay in The Wrong Town for another year.

At the very last place we looked, I saw this in the courtyard:

I'll admit that The Grinch was never my favorite Dr. Seuss story (even before Jim Carrey got at the character) and I really wanted my own yard, but who doesn't want the Whoville Christmas tree in her front yard? (Save your breath--if you claim that you wouldn't I won't believe you.)

Fair warning to my new neighbors: we will be decorating that tree. Yes, I did say "we".

So it's not everything we wanted, but it's in the place we call home. And the child who sometimes laments that we don't live near her grandmother in rural Indiana has this outside her bedroom window:

And she was so eager to establish that "I live here now" that she settled right in and announced, "I'm sitting in my living room. I took my shoes off."

And, you know, tiny people incapable of malice are going to gather in my yard and sing on Christmas morning.

Moving

2011-07-22T09:29:00.001-07:00

Just a brief announcement for anyone who might be interested: after 6 very long years in the wrong place, we're finally going home. This week.

Enough said.

And it's a good thing it is, because between work and packing and picking up the keys and connecting utilities and organizing a truck and all of that, I really don't have time to say more. But I will.

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

2011-07-02T20:48:00.000-07:00

You know the stuff I'm talking about--the teenagers in the movie sitting on the hood of a car looking out over the city and talking about things that seem immortal in that moment; the kids jumping fearlessly off an old rope into the lake on a seemingly endless summer day; the moment when a man's hand touches a woman's at the edge of the water at sunset; the family singing together in the car.

It happens.

Maybe your best friend cuts a foot off your hair in a dormitory bathroom one night, both of you giggling at your own daring; maybe you stand with an old friend at ocean's edge at sunset, your child by your side and hers in her arms, and watch an unexpected school of dolphins play in the surf; maybe a man spontaneously picks a flower for you walking by the river at dusk; maybe you and your closest friends drink wine coolers out of two-liter bottles by the lagoon late one night and end up singing old songs together on a tiny island; maybe a little girl carefully makes you a picnic lunch of bologna sandwiches and juice boxes to eat on the lawn with her on Mother's Day; maybe your conversation on a road trip with a friend keeps you laughing so hard that you almost don't want to reach your destination. Maybe you stand on a bridge at midnight and watch fireworks with all of the people you love most in the world; maybe a man plays a song just for you in a room full of strangers who will never know what it meant; maybe a tiny child looks up at you with shining eyes and says "this is fun!" and transforms everything about that moment; maybe wine tasting on a winter morning makes you reckless enough to say something you really, really should; maybe you dance in a downpour with your children; maybe you hang your purse in a tree one evening and roll down a hill with your oldest friend, forgetting for a moment that you're both in your forties and laughing like children; maybe a child who isn't yours gives you a heartfelt Mother's Day card; maybe any of a hundred thousand other moments you could recall happened when you least expected them, when you were walking down the street with a friend or awakened by a child or surprised by a lover or caught a glimpse of something magnificent.

Here's what almost never happens, though: you plan to have a magical movie moment and it turns into something memorable. The reason is both obvious and ironic. What makes those moments magical and memorable is their authenticity, the moment of connection, the spontaneous laughter, the way you feel when a certain person's hand covers yours. And you can't plan those things. You can plan the trappings, but the trappings don't really mean anything. Sunset doesn't make for romance; the sun sets every evening and most of the time most of us don't even notice it. It's the right company, the loosening of your sense of time when you're sitting with that person at dusk that lets you see the sunset differently, that makes it something memorable. And there's nothing inherently beautiful about a bologna sandwich. It's the tiny hands that worked so hard at making it just right for you and the tiny heart that motivated it that fix that lunch in your mind for the rest of your life.

How very sad that so often we get so caught up in staging the perfect moment that we're too busy to let one happen.

All That and a Bag of Ducks

2011-06-17T06:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, I stopped at Chipotle on my way home from work. It's a compromise we've reached--Tori is obsessed with Chipotle and picks it for dinner every time she's asked; I won't buy it more than once a week. Getting tacos on the night I go in to work makes sense, since I don't get back into town until 7 or 7:30 and don't much feel like cooking.

But I have, apparently, opened with a digression. This post is about ducklings.

As I left Chipotle with my paper bag of food, I found myself stuck at a stoplight for what appeared to be an accident: a bicycle was lying on the ground in the middle of the intersection, nearly underneath a van with its lights flashing. As I looked around for the bike rider, I noticed a group of people behaving strangely in the street. From where I sat, that was the only way to describe it. They were running about in odd directions and waving their arms, changing course for no apparent reason. When I leaned out the window, I saw that the reason: six tiny ducklings running to and fro in the middle of the intersection of two heavily-trafficked four-lane roads.

The flapping people were herding the ducklings. But they were finding them hard to manage, and they kept getting them to relative safety on the grass in front of the gas station only to have them veer out into the road again. Finally, they settled under my car. Yes, truly settled--they lay down under my car.

The light changed, but I couldn't move. I got out of the car and looked under it; the whole family was snuggled up behind my rear driver's side tire. In all 16 lanes of traffic, no one honked or drove carelessly through the duckling area. While we were trying to figure out how to get the ducklings safely out from under my car--and "we" by this point was me, a teenaged boy who had been on the bicycle, a pretty blond college-aged girl from a neighboring car and a middle-aged woman who presumably owned the van standing in the middle of the intersection--two other women pulled up behind me and told us where the ducklings had come from and where their parents were. They knew because they'd seen them walking away from that field and followed them, trying at intervals to steer them back in the right direction.

Now we knew where to steer them, but it was a long way and the ducklings frankly weren't that good at being herded. They'd curve off in beautiful formation when you moved in on them one way or the other, but they wouldn't follow, and they'd strike back out in their own direction as soon as a gap appeared. The middle-aged woman suggested that if we had a box to put them in, we could carry them back, but none of us did. I checked my trunk and came up with only a plastic bag, which I was wary of putting them into. She thought it would be okay if she carried it open--it was only for a few minutes--but that was resolved when we discovered a hole in the bag.

Then she looked through the window of my car and said, "That paper bag might work." So I unpacked our dinner all over the passenger seat of my car, scooped up a couple of ducklings and set them gently in the bottom of the bag. The rest came easily. They were very soft and did not appear frightened. The driver of the van struck out on foot to return the ducklings to safety and I headed home, texting my daughter to meet me outside.

I very much enjoyed the cute softness of the ducklings, the efforts of the passersby and the fact that no one seemed angry or frustrated by the delay the ducklings caused, but I think my favorite moment came when I handed my daughter a foil-wrapped package of tacos and a plastic container of salsa and said, "You have to carry your dinner--I had to fill the bag with ducks."

Regrets

2011-06-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday morning over toast and jelly, my daughter said, "I'm going to write until noon and then I'll have lunch and take my math test before voice." And I wondered for the hundredth time why I'd waited so long to rescue her from a school system in which she didn't read or write voluntarily and believed that she wasn't good at math.

I've done some pretty crazy things in my life, and for the most part I have no regrets. But I've heard it said that it's the things you don't do that you regret, and I'm beginning to believe that it's true. I started thinking about home schooling when my daughter started middle school, but it wasn't until the middle of 8th grade that I actually pulled her out--and at that point it was more a reaction to untenable circumstances than an actual decision.

As I watch her crank out 1,000+ words on her novel every day, return to her music, return to reading voraciously and tackle math and science reluctantly but diligently and with a new confidence, I very much regret ever having sent her into the morass that is public middle school. And here's the thing: I knew she'd be better off out of school.

At the time, I thought that I was concerned about issues like socialization and how I could manage to home school with a full-time job and sending the wrong message, but in truth those were never my concerns. They were concerns that others voiced so often and so strongly that I started to believe they were real issues. I'm not usually one to substitute other people's judgment for my own, but when it was most important--probably because it was so important--I didn't trust what I knew to be true.

When I was finally making the decision and nearly everyone around me was against it--some to a degree that was outright abusive--I remembered a moment shortly after I separated from my husband. My daughter was understandably going through a rough time then, and everyone had a conflicting opinion about how I should be handling that. My then-husband took a ring my daughter had bought me for Mother's Day a few years earlier--a silver ring with a heart-shaped pink stone that said "Mom" in the band--and put it on my finger. And he said, "YOU are Tori's mother, and you know what's best for her. Don't let anyone make you question that."

Given what so many parents and children go through during separation and divorce, that vote of confidence was a bit emotionally overwhelming in the moment. It was also one I took to heart because it was coming from the person who had lived with us and watched me parent for eight years. But I forgot it, when the judgments started flying from all sides again, and I let myself be swayed by the opinions of people whose judgment I knew I didn't trust.

"Never again" is a big promise, and one that I think most of us make and break at one time or another. But right now, as I listen to my daughter singing while she's doing algebra, I'm trying to stamp those words on my brain and on my heart.

What's Really Happening Outside

2011-05-21T23:08:00.000-07:00

Almost every week, I get an email or see a post on Facebook or in some online forum about how no one goes outside anymore. It's usually some touching lament about how "in our day" kids chased lightning bugs and rode their bikes and such, but now no one ever goes outside.

My daughter and I walk and/or ride our bikes for an hour or more every day, and here's what we've seen so far this weekend:

A young woman sitting by a duck pond reading
A group of pre-teen boys playing basketball in a driveway
Several teenage boys on skateboards
A multi-generational group hanging out on lawn chairs in a driveway
Three separate groups of young men working on cars
No fewer than five people walking dogs
A group of children of several ages riding bicycles
Two separate lone men riding bicycles
Five people jogging, alone or in pairs
A woman and her teenage daughter (I presume) out walking
A youth baseball game with many families in attendance
Kids hanging out on the school playground
A man and a ten-ish girl painting their house
A child sitting in the lap of an older man and "helping him steer" a riding lawnmower
A young woman walking a baby in a stroller
Two women sitting in a yard watching a toddler and a girl of about six play
A couple teaching their toddler to throw a ball
A man gardening
A group of elementary-school-aged kids playing kickball

After making it a point to observe on a few different days, we think we have an idea why those wistful posters don't see more people outside. We've come to the conclusion that they should shut down their computers and step out their front doors. But first, I want to say "thank you", because if I hadn't kept hearing about how no one goes outside or talks to their neighbors or plays in the grass anymore, I'm not sure I would have thought to take note of just how much life is going on in my own neighborhood.

How Facebook Has Changed the World

2011-04-08T21:17:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening, I left my office in the Chicago loop and hailed a cab. The train station is only about a mile from my office, but it was Friday evening and I had nine minutes to catch my train.

In typical harried downtown professional fashion, I slid into the cab and offered up my destination while at the same time digging for cash for the fare and checking the new email making my phone jingle repeatedly...and then I looked down.

Sliding out from under the driver's seat was a satiny black bra, somewhat padded, with rhinestones.

I looked at the driver. It didn't appear to be his size.

In days gone by, I would have debated about what to do next. Should I mention it to the driver? Pick it up? Pretend not to see it? Get out the other side in case cooties might jump off of it and assault me?

But no more. Today, my course of action was crystal clear: I snapped this picture and posted it to Facebook from my phone, before I ever left the cab.

On Irony, McDonald's and It Just Not Being My Year

2011-03-30T18:57:00.000-07:00

I was planning to make Chicken Parmesan with garlic noodles and Italian bread for dinner, but Tori asked for chicken strips from McDonald's. On a better day, I might not have gone along, but Tori has Torticollis, which it turns out is not an Italian food. Rather, it's a neck problem the doctor described as being akin to having a three day charley horse in your neck. I'm very indulgent of Tori right now.

I'm also worn out. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, thus far this year:

-my car died forever, not just in another state but in a rural stretch of Interstate at midnight on a Saturday night;
-after about a month without a car, we replaced it and got the old one cleaned out and scrapped just in time for us both to get sick;
-an unexpected new expense cropped up in my life to the tune of $500+/month;
-my doctor joined a local clinic of very questionable quality and integrity on no notice, leaving me low on crucial maintenance drugs and without a physician;
-my father was diagnosed with a serious medical condition;
-I got a serious flu--both bronchial and stomach--that lasted for more than three weeks;
-frustrating things started to happen at work, which is probably par for the course for most people but was pretty much previously unheard of in my formerly Utopian workplace;
-my stepson dropped out of JobCorps and didn't tell anyone in the program or the family that he was leaving or where he was going, so that we weren't sure whether he'd run away or been killed (turned out it was "run away");
-I lost my debit card and discovered that fact while I was downtown Chicago with $2 in cash;
-I spent Saturday night at the hospital being evaluated for a blood clot; and then
-I spent this morning at the ER with Tori and her neck problems.

(Looking for a much better Q2, by the way.)

But I digress.

I went to McDonald's and got the chicken strips. While I was there, I noticed a sign that made me think about a new blog post series. I was thinking something along the lines of "Signs that Shouldn't be Necessary". This one said "Sorry--free drink refills are available only for the duration of your visit. No free refills in cups brought in from outside the restaurant."

I left the restaurant thinking about why that sign had been necessary and wishing I'd gotten a picture of it to post on Facebook or one of my blogs but then, before I was out of the parking lot, I realized I hadn't seen the cashier put the sweet and sour sauce in the bag, and I pulled into a parking space to check.

My coke tipped over and spilled all over the floor of the car and my feet.

You can see it coming, can't you?

So I went back into the store with my bag and my now-empty cup to ask for the sweet and sour sauce. But the bag was wet from the river of coke in my car and started to tear as I was carrying it, and I didn't have a free hand. And no sooner had I gotten that under control than my pants started to fall off. No, really. I'd changed out of shorts to run out to McDonald's and the pants I'd put on were pretty loose...and apparently getting looser as I walked around. I'd been hiking them up the whole time, but this was a whole different ballgame...I felt them sliding past my hips. Long shirt or no, I had to rescue them...but I didn't have a free hand and I couldn't do it walking, so I ended up standing in the parking lot blocking the cars attempting to come out of the drive-through line while I reassembled my clothing.

Good news, though. I got the sweet and sour sauce and then no one even attempted to stop me when I refilled the cup I'd brought in from outside the restaurant after the duration of my visit had expired.

Seven Minutes…errr…15 Years Ago Today…

2011-02-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

Absurdly, it’s Tori’s 15^th birthday. I know it’s a cliché to talk about how the years have flown by and ask where the time went, but it’s a cliché for a reason—it’s a near-universal experience.

15 years and 12 hours ago, I was sitting at a rather grungy Denny’s, having been unceremoniously booted out of the hospital for not being far enough along in the process. The lasagna I’d made that evening was still sitting in my oven untouched, but that wasn’t why we went to Denny’s. Eating was out of the question, given that I was in so much pain I couldn’t even stand up straight. No, we went to Denny’s because it was across the street from the hospital, and you KNOW when you’re having a baby.

It was a long, strange night that seemed rough in the moment and has evolved over time into a fond and entertaining memory. My little sister’s pay phone fight with the condescending nurse has become legendary; we’ve all come to love the boy with the sno-cone colored hair whom I first met on that night. No one seems to remember who read Tori’s charts on the day she was born (or whether it was even someone anyone among us knew), but we all remember the dramatic predictions she (he?) made.

That part, I’ll admit, seems like another lifetime. Maybe more than 15 years. But something strange happened the very next day. I had a beautiful baby girl, and then she started kindergarten and a couple of days later it was middle school and now she’s 15.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about how each new stage in a child’s life brings its own joys, and I’m happy to report we haven’t reached the end of that road yet (though my friends with teenagers keep warning that the end is near).

In fact, it often seems to me that it's only the details that change--and sometimes not even those.

So rather than looking at all of the many ages and stages we've passed through and all the milestones my baby has left behind today, I'm thinking about how she's been the same remarkable, sweet, funny, positive, lovable and creative person for as long as I've known her.

And I've stopped waiting for something to change. I've stopped believing that one day I'll get used to her, and that she will come down the stairs in the morning and I won't notice all over again how beautiful she is. I'm going to stop believing that one day she'll run out of new discoveries to share with me, or that her enchantment with those new experiences will cease to enchant me. Yes, she will be driving in a year and I don't know how that happened, but it doesn't frighten me. Because I do know the sound of her half excited/half frightened laughter, and I can't wait to hear it the first time she eases her foot onto the gas pedal...I've heard it before, when she rode a two-wheeler for the first time, and it was delightful.

She's gone from baby to schoolgirl to "the big kid" to teenage aunt

and so far, every day is just as much fun as the one before. Somehow, I think that's going to continue even when she's all grown up.

Exciting Developments

2010-11-08T15:03:00.000-08:00

I never meant to let more than two months pass without at least dropping by to post a picture or a quick update, but it's been a crazy few months.

First, as you already know, my new grandson Caleb came along at the end of August, just a few days before my last post. Here's a picture of Caleb, even though you've already seen him, because I just like to look at him they change so fast at this age.

Naturally, all that hanging out waiting for Caleb to be born and then hanging out looking at Caleb cut into my work schedule a little bit, which left me playing catch-up a bit. It wasn't so bad at my day job, since I work for Total Attorneys, a company that made a name for itself with concepts like corporate culture and work / life balance and puts its money where its mouth is. But, as luck would have it, I also had a freelance project in the works with a hard deadline at the end of September.

I was working with the founder of MadeinUSAForever.com, editing an eye-opening book called Re-Made in the USA: How We Can Restore Jobs, Retool Manufacturing, and Compete with the World. The tight deadline was a downside in the wake of Caleb's more-time-consuming-than-anticipated arrival and all of the other things that had fallen by the wayside in the interim, but the material was both fascinating and frightening and I'm very glad to have been a part of the project. I hope everyone in America takes the time to read this book and think about the decisions most of us make without conscious thought every day.

With that wrapped and homeschooling back on track, I kept telling friends who wanted to get together that things would be back to normal in late October, and we did manage to fit in a little bit of Halloween fun:

But then, just when I thought it was over, it was right back to work. Tori landed a strange role in a crazy movie, Motivational Growth. Thus, she spent more than ten hours on Friday vomiting repeatedly while sitting on a cheerful looking couch with a bunch of kids playing video games. Nah, I'm not going to explain--you'll have to see the movie. Little inside bit of humor, though: she accidentally puked on the knee of the kid in the striped sweater. He was very good-natured about it.
I thought I had time for a breather, now, but it turns out Tori's entertainment schedule is going to break November for me. The "one day only" Les Mis tribute concert is on the 17th, and Harry Potter 7A comes out at midnight the next night...and then we're going to see Miranda Lambert on the 19th. Anyone want to borrow a teenager for a few days? The week before Thanksgiving looks good....

Stuff I Wish I Wouldn't Notice

2010-08-30T18:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, I haven't even gotten started and...the title is a lie. A more appropriate title would be "Stuff I Wish People Weren't Dumb Enough to Do, But Since They Can't Get It Right I Guess I Wish I Didn't Catch It". But that would be too long.

The other night, far too tired after our adventures in waiting for Caleb to do anything productive, Tori and I went to see The Switch. She wanted to see Inception for the third time, but I nixed that because I didn't want to have to think.

Oh, the irony.

Since the whole premise of the movie is divulged in the previews and summaries, I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that Jennifer Aniston's character believes she's had a baby with a paid donor, but in fact someone has switched the samples.

When Aniston sits down across from the donor years later, the flaw is instantly obvious--they're sitting there flashing pale blue eyes at one another and the child has brown eyes. I thought it was a clue. I thought it was brilliant. Anyone who went to 7th grade would know that two blue-eyed people couldn't produce a brown-eyed child! And to top it all off, the kid was something of a medical geek...he'd probably know that!

Nice touch, I was thinking. Good close-ups on the faces of both alleged parents to make this crystal clear. Great set-up with the kid previously spouting medical information.

And then my world came crashing down. Or not, actually, but my ability to enjoy the movie took a big hit. See, a minute later the "real" father popped up on the screen and...he, too, had blue eyes. Yep, all three of them. Not a chance in hell that old Jen could have produced that puppy-dog-eyed boy with either one of them.

How could everyone involved with the film possibly have missed that? How? And why, oh why, couldn't I have joined them?

Random Thought about Garbage

2010-08-30T12:31:00.000-07:00

Is generating thousands of disposable paper stickers each week really a good way to handle trash disposal?

Conversations With My Daughter

2010-08-27T14:46:00.001-07:00

So we're hanging out in my stepdaughter's hospital room chatting and staring at my new grandbaby (in order to set the scene, I'm compelled, quite against my will, to post this video)

when Tori casually tosses out "Mom, we should get DVR."

I'm tired, and (though I didn't tell her this) not even entirely sure what DVR is, so I said, "Why?"

A moment of silence while she stares at me as if she doesn't quite know what to do with that, and then she says, "'Cause...then we'd have DVR."

I guess that's a good thing. After we had that whole conversation and everyone laughed at her response, I can't bring myself to say, "By the way...what IS DVR?"

It's Margo's Birthday

2010-08-24T15:21:00.000-07:00

Today is my friend Margo's birthday. I won't say which one, but I'm sure that when you get a look at the range of photos and the hairstyles here, you'll have some idea.

I'm not, as I've mentioned before, big on fuss and celebration. Greeting cards make my brain explode. $4.50 for a piece of paper you're going to recycle fifteen minutes after opening? Really? How does the tree feel about that? But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize that there are certain days that bear celebration. A birthday, after all, marks the day a person came to exist...and for those of us in that person's life, that's kind of a big deal.

This is what I looked like when I met Margo:

Well, not exactly. I didn't wear a toga made out of one of my bedsheets all of the time, of course. The purpose of this photo is really just to show you my hair, but I chose this one intentionally, because this night (Halloween night, 1984) was a very special one in my history with Margo...

as you will soon see.

My hair had never been shorter than shoulder-length in my whole entire life, and even that was short-lived, so without Margo, I might never have found out what I looked like with short hair.

Because clearly, that long wavy hair I was originally sporting just DID NOT GO with a toga. We had absolutely no choice but to cut it off in our dorm room bathroom before going out for the night, and Margo was perfectly qualified to do the job...after all, her mom owned a beauty shop.

(It was only years later that she mentioned that she'd never actually worked in the beauty shop or learned to cut hair from her mother...but by that time, it was funny. And my hair had grown back.)

Of course, without Margo (and a bomb threat, but we had nothing to do with that) I'd never have met Jim Belushi, either.
Margo, of course, took this picture...and we're not even out of our freshman year of college yet. You might want to get a cup of coffee, because we have more than a quarter of a century to go.

Speaking of being dorky freshmen:

When my daughter saw this picture, she said, "I notice you both have some interesting hair stuff going on." It was the eighties, but somehow even that seems inadequate to explain...

Margo's always been full of words of wisdom, too.

But there's much more. Without Margo, I'd never have been suspected of contemplating Hari Krishna; I'd never have carried a legendary set of red and black marbles in my pocket; I'd never have perfected the art of looking someone in the eye and, with a perfectly straight face, saying something so outrageous that we'd still be laughing about it two decades later.

We were really cool when we managed to buy wine (2 half gallon bottles for $5!) at Jewel-Osco when I was 18 and she was 19. I use "we" loosely here, since part of our strategy was for me to get the hell out of sight while she bought them since it was clear that I'd never pass for 21.

We were so cool, in fact, that my MOM took this picture, in her kitchen, right before telling us that we couldn't drink the wine unless we committed to staying in the house for the night.

So eight or nine years later, when Margo was working in Chicago and I was practicing law out of state and came visiting for BluesFest, we couldn't resist recreating the moment in our hotel room.

We didn't actually drink the wine at BluesFest--nowhere near as much fun if it's not contraband, I guess--just grabbed it from the hotel room bar to snap the picture and then put it right back. That was the weekend that I met Margo's fiance and also that I learned that my soon-to-be fiance had picked up a family ring from his mother to give to me. Neither of us actually ended up marrying those men, though, proving that friendship is far more enduring than romantic love.

Without Margo, I'd never have known how to walk into a newspaper office and talk my way into freelance work ("stringing," she emphasized. "Don't say freelance, or they'll know you don't write for newspapers.") when my only previous professional writing experience was in the legal field. And without that experience, I might never have written my book.

I suppose that there are many things I could point to over the past 26 years and say, "Without Margo, I would never have..." Many of them are mischievous, impulsive, highly-entertaining-only-to-us events like improving the signage at the River Walk in Naperville.

I mean, seriously--what's the point of putting up maps all along a miles-long River Walk but not giving you any indication of where along the route you might be?

We saw this as a public service. Really.

Of course, we felt the same way about taping "This too shall pass" and "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" up in the hallway of our dorm, and that netted us a $25 "vandalism" fine. Seriously. I mean, it was TAPE. It peeled right off with no damage whatsoever. Just like the tape flags we used on the maps.

Most of all, though...without Margo I would have had much less laughter in my life. So happy birthday, Marg. I'm glad you were born.

The Waiting Game

2010-08-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

Waiting really isn't all that bad.

Circles of Life

2010-08-21T08:13:00.000-07:00

Last night, I spent a very long night at the hospital with my stepdaughter, Beth. We were hoping (in vain, it turned out) to transform that very large bump in her midsection into a very small child we could hand around and coo over and share the burden of carrying. Being pregnant when it's 93 degrees at 6 p.m. is no picnic, even without the contractions and odd compulsion to clean.

With Beth, Beth's husband Shawn and me all at the hospital, my 18-year-old stepson and 14-year-old daughter stepped up to take care of Andrew, Beth and Shawn's older child (older being a relative term that sounds a little silly when applied to a 2-year-old).

They did a great job, and even managed to get him calmed down to sleep in a strange hotel room with mom and dad both away. And that's when my life retrospective unexpectedly began.

As I sat in the hospital thinking about Beth at five, playing mother to her younger brother, and listening to the heartbeat of her second child, Tori sent me a text message. It said, "I don't know how Beth ever sleeps. I think I would just look at Andrew all the time. He's so beautiful."
I couldn't argue with that, but I have to admit that my beautiful grandson didn't have my full attention. Because in that moment I was transported back to Valentine's Day of 1996. At daybreak, my little sister tiptoed into my bedroom, looked at my 37-hour-old daughter and said, "Have you slept at all, or do you just look at her?"

My sister was 23 that morning. She wore silver shorts that zipped all the way around and had her new boyfriend in tow; his rainbow-snow-cone tinted hair was covered by a red velvet hat and although he insists to this day that it was a crooked smile he had painted on his face, I know that it was a fishhook coming out of the corner of his mouth.

Today, my sister is a 36-year-old librarian at a Catholic College. I haven't seen the silver shorts in years, and she's handed off her fishnets.

The infant she joined me in gazing upon that morning has become the babysitter, sitting up late at night watching her nephew sleep.

And the boy who trailed into my bedroom behind my sister in the early-morning hours, carrying a black rose, is married and about to become a father himself.

And, of course, that baby my daughter sat up watching last night is just days--or even hours--from becoming the big brother. And after that, the babysitter...the bridegroom...the expectant father himself. It may seem strange to think that far ahead--to look at a toddler and see new generations--but it would have seemed just as strange to think about the four-year-old wishing on a star at the drive-in as the mother, or the little boy whose "best birthday ever" happened at Chuck E. Cheese in July of 1997 as the 18-year-old babysitter, or my own infant daughter as the teenager who would get out of bed to comfort her nephew when he missed his mother in the middle of the night.

Going Home Again

2010-07-04T10:47:00.001-07:00

I live in the town I grew up in, less than a mile from the house I grew up in and my parents' current home and the elementary school I attended. And I'll admit that sometimes I enjoy the parallel experiences, the flash of memory that comes as I set ice cream in front of my daughter at the green picnic table outside Dairy Queen and remember doing the same for my sister the summer I was thirteen and babysitting her while my mother worked, or the familiar crunch of gravel under my feet as I carried my toddler to the concession stand at the same drive-in where my cousin Richie and I watched the Planet of the Apes movies side-by-side in early childhood. But the sad fact is, this isn't home.

Home, in my mind, is the little town my daughter grew up in. It's a place of Christmas walks where you know everyone on the street and local businesses owned by your neighbors and restaurants that aren't franchises. It's only 40 miles away, but traveling there is more like journeying back in time than a 45-minute commute. We don't visit very often. Even when we lived there, most of my friends were in the suburbs--I'd grown up here and I worked here. And the years between 3rd grade and 8th are big ones; my daughter has lost touch with most of her childhood friends as well.

But every once in a while, she'll turn to me late at night and say, "It's a good night for a drive." It's always a cool, summery night, and it's always well after dark. Last night, she followed that up with "We could take the dog. He's never been there." The "there" made me smile; apparently, all drives end in the same place.

So just after 10 p.m. we gathered the dog and the cord that attaches Tori's iPod to the car radio and bottles of water and hit the road. First stop, always, is Tori's elementary school playground. It's small and quiet and the grass is soft, and we both have fond memories of our first late-night visit there, when Tori hadn't yet started school and she and my sister and I played on the swings in the dark and talked about her upcoming kindergarten days.

The place is changing, but slowly. It hasn't yet been overrun with franchises and look-alike signs. A new video store has moved in; Tom & Jerry's has moved across the street. The school has done some new landscaping. But the late-night sounds are the same: frogs and trains and a slight breeze in the trees. The parking lot where I drew fake sidewalks in blue chalk so that Tori could learn to turn corners on her two-wheeler still stands open and welcoming; the pier at the tiny lake is just as rickety and yet somehow always holds. Our church is unchanged, and at midnight there are four or five cars in the lot--something I've never seen in the suburbs. The swimming pool where we sat day after day when Tori wanted desperately to learn how to swim but was too frightened by her early "drowning" experience to jump in (and where she eventually let me hold her in the water, and then jumped into my waiting arms, and then one day swam to the deep end and back all alone) still carries the same soft scent of chlorine and sunshine.

But more important than the specific places, more important than the way the town moves more slowly and appears to exist in an earlier era, is the way walking its quiet streets carries us back. My daughter is 14 now, but on her grade-school playground we both touch, for a moment, the days when she walked by my side, holding my hand and looking up and me and talking about her day on the way home from kindergarten.

The Difference a Quarter of a Century Makes

2010-06-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

The first time I saw the movie The Big Chill, I was in college. Being in the midst of those heady days of intimate relationships with those whose lives overlapped my own minute by minute, it was easy for me to believe not only in the depth of connection the main characters shared, but in the implication that nothing better had ever come along. When Glenn Close's character said that she'd been the best she ever was back in those days, with those friends, it seemed only natural to me. College was, after all, the best time of your life, right? That's the way it looked to me, sitting in the Student Center movie theater watching The Big Chill for a dollar. That's what seemed to be suggested by authors like Anton Myrer and Erich Segal. That's what my friends and I anticipated when we camped out on the bridge on a starlit night or drank wine coolers from 2-liter bottles by the lagoon and sang old Supremes and Van Morrison songs to one another. It was the underlying assumption in the writings I so carefully preserved from those days, the descriptions of the moments I'd never want to forget.

At 19, I thought the way those characters came back together and the things they shared were romantic and touching. In some ways, they were. But at 44, Glenn Close's line made me sad. Not, as it might have made me sad the first time through, with nostalgia for those lovely lost days, but because with a quarter of a century of additional life experience under my belt, it struck me as tragic that a woman in her mid-thirties would have peaked during her college days (or even feel that she had).

I loved college, and I had an amazing group of interesting, eclectic, talented and supportive friends whose influence in my life I will always cherish. But I was just beginning when I spent those long winter afternoons in the dorm with them, talking about art and philosophy and politics. I was just beginning to learn how to do something about the things I believed, and the things I saw as most important in those days were informed in part by a lack of information. I like to think that I'm the best I've ever been with my daughter; I like to think the best I'll ever be has yet to come.

It's Not Nice to Laugh at Your Old Mother

2010-06-20T09:39:00.000-07:00

At least, that's what my mom tells me. Fortunately, my mom isn't all that old, so stll consider her fair game.

Because we live in a split-level townhouse and our living room and kitchen are below ground, there is approximately one month out of every year that we have an earwig problem. Since we have a dog only marginally larger than an earwig, I'm afraid to spray, so we just have to deal with it and count the days until they die off for the year.

Unfortunately, my daughter has a fear of earwigs that borders on phobic. This was undoubtedly triggered by the fact that when she was little, we were sleeping over at a lock-in in the children's department of the Rochelle Public Library when she saw an earwig crossing the floor toward me. I was asleep. She shined her flashlight on it and one of the library workers ran over to tell her to turn it off and go back to bed. She reported the earwig and the woman said "Okay" and turned away. Tori thought she was going to get something to kill it with, but instead she just went on about her business and the earwig finished its journey and bit me on the arm (or pinched me or whatever they do), leaving my arm red and sore and swollen for days. That's a lot of responsibility for a pre-schooler.

Her fear, in fact, is so great that she won't say "earwig" and doesn't want anyone else to. It conjures up anxiety. Every year, she comes up with a different name for them, but this year she's settled on "devil bugs". She says that she refuses to believe that God could have created them, so they must be minions of the devil. She often invites them to go back "home" where they belong.

The other day I was out and she was on the phone with my mother when she spotted one. She exclaimed, "devil bug! devil bug!" Then told my mother to hang on because she had to kill a devil bug and needed both hands. When she returned to the phone, she said something like "Okay, I killed the devil bug."

My mother asked what a devil bug was, then said, "Oh, are they those ones you don't like? What are they, earwigs?"

Tori said, "we don't use that word" and my mom said...

"Oh, okay. What do we call them?"

I Call This One "Irony"

2010-06-10T18:10:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday to Me

2010-06-05T18:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not a fan of birthdays. It's not that I mind getting older--I'm actually pretty comfortable with being a middle-aged grandma, and I come by the gray in my hair honestly. The thing is, for some reason things go wrong around my birthday. Someone suggested recently that it might be a curse, and if I believed in such things I'd be inclined to think that it was: for five years my birthday has brought everything from sewage backing up into my kitchen to a friend's house burning down to my father ending up in the hospital with heart trouble (and that's just a random sampling). I've reached the point where I try to keep the whole thing low key, as if perhaps if I gloss over it, the fates won't notice and nothing terrible will happen.

This year (thus far) I did manage to avoid catastrophe, even though my family refused to let the whole thing slide by unmarked and couldn't resist putting together a few presents and some cards and a strawberry shortcake with fresh strawberries from my dad's garden. We also had a nice dinner out, and I can't really complain (now that I know they didn't trigger a flood or plane crash with their efforts). But the best part of the celebration for me was when my daughter sang this song for me, making all of the women in my family cry.

Life-Sized Jenga

2010-05-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

I'm hoping to find time to write a longer post about the holiday weekend in the next couple of days, but definitely wanted to share this with anyone who might be looking. At the Saturday party I attended this weekend, the family had a life-sized Jenga game in the backyard. It would be easy to make--it's just uniform-sized blocks of wood--and kids and adults alike really enjoyed it (even the spectators).

Curly Fries, Too??

2010-05-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, I went to meet an old friend for dinner and my daughter ate with my parents. When I called to let Tori know I was on the way home, she picked up on the first ring and said, "Mommy??" My stomach twisted just a little. She was with my parents, no one had called me...surely nothing could be seriously wrong? And then she followed up: "Are french fries made of potatoes?"

"Yes," I said, not quite laughing yet. Apparently, there are some gaps in her education, even now that we're home schooling.

"Dude," she said. "What about hashed browns?"

"Yes," I told her, unable to entirely keep a straight voice. "Hashed browns are shredded potatoes."

"Dude," she said again. Then, hopefully, "I'm going to ask dad."

By the time I arrived to pick her up, she'd checked it out with her father by text message and he'd confirmed that the tricky french had in fact passed off potatoes as something called french fries and she'd been eating them without complaint for years.

She chose not to give it too much thought, but apparently it was haunting her. At dinner tonight, she held up a Crispy Crown and said, "So, is this made out of potatoes?" When I confirmed that it was, she said, "No." And then, it seems, continued to stew on the issue. Minutes later, when my mind had turned to other (frankly, more interesting) things, she said with something like resignation, "Curly fries, too?"

Sinking Flagship: Macy's Kills the Magic of Marshall Field's

2010-04-27T20:44:00.001-07:00

I'm from Chicago, so naturally I was a little disturbed by the whole "Macy's buying out Marshall Field & Co." thing. The flagship store on State Street was class and good smells, matchless chocolate and the essence of Christmas. The green-tinged plaque on the cornerstone, the aging clock on the street, the view of the Christmas tree from the seven-story escalator...it was, in a strange twist of fate, exactly the image that the mention of Macy's in New York conjured up. Wouldn't a store famous for its Santa Clauses and its Thanksgiving Day parade have that kind of glamour? The well-dressed clerks who virtually melted into the background, only to magically appear at your elbow with the size or color you needed or a gesture toward a register with no waiting?

When I was in college, my cousin (a flight attendant) did her Christmas shopping at Macy's one year. I never wore the sweater she gave me without thinking about the fact that it had come from the glamorous department store I'd IMAGINED Macy's to be.

And then reality struck.

I'll admit that I wasn't entirely objective. The classic green turning red, the change in bags and logos and all of the little trappings was unwelcome for me. But Macy's talked a good game about maintaining everything we loved about our flagship store, and I was inclied to believe they'd come close, because even though they weren't Marshall Field's, they were MACY'S.

Last week, on the Quest for Navy Shoes, I shopped at Macy's for the first time since the changeover. Fickle though it might be, I didn't expect much difference. I needed to stop on one, pick up a pair of hose, then pop up to four for shoes.

I entered the building through the pedway, since it connects the store with the building where I work. The first thing I discovered was that the elevators across from the book section didn't work. There was a floor-by-floor directory in front of them, but pushing the buttons didn't seem to summon a car. After a few minutes, a clerk in books called out "None of them elevators works. Go down there." She gestured vaguely to the other side of the food court and I thanked her and moved on. I should have paid more attention, because it turned out that was stellar service for Macy's.

I finally made my way to the first floor and went looking for hose. I checked two directories without anyone offering directions (something that would never have happened in Marshall Fields), but was virtually assaulted by no fewer than four women who wanted to push perfume samples on me. I was reminded of the jewelry-peddlars we used to encounter on the street when my mother visited her old doctor at 95th and Stony Island--the ones my father advised us never to speak to or even look in the eyes.

It turns out that navy hose aren't much easier to find than navy shoes these days, and it took me upwards of 15 minutes to find a brand that offered navy. I spent that time alone in the department with a clerk who studiously focused on some busywork and avoided acknowledging me. Yes, I could have asked for help, but as I discovered a few floors later, it probably wouldn't have yielded much. As it was, I didn't make contact with the clerk until I carried my purchase over to the counter and she brusquely said, "Got to go over there" and made a sweeping gesture a little like she was shooing a fly.

I found an open register feeling a bit depressed. Perhaps I was glamourizing the old Marshall Field's help in my mind. Perhaps they didn't really glide more than they walked; perhaps they hadn't really always appeared at just the moment when having my clothes hung in a dressing room was really appreciated. But I KNEW not one of them had ever said, "Got to go over there" to me. I knew I'd never been shooed like a fly when the shopping bags were green.

Still, I had only twenty minutes until my meeting and I wanted navy shoes. The fourth floor was my only option, so I headed that way (this time taking the escalators to avoid any confusion with non-operational but unmarked elevators). A quick circle around the shoe department didn't reveal a single navy dress shoe, so I carried a black shoe over to a clerk and asked her whether it came in blue. No, she said, only black, brown and red. She was already turning away when I asked whether she had any other navy pumps.

"Not really," she said, turning away again.

As it turned out, I did find navy shoes in time to save myself from wearing black and navy together, but I left the store sorry I'd ever stepped inside. If I had it to do over again, I'd remember the magical Marshall Fields of my youth and carry on, happily oblivious to the third-rate discount store it's becoming.

Black Shoes DON'T Go With Navy. They Just Don't.

2010-04-23T15:57:00.000-07:00

Several years ago, a secret underground movement began: a movement to persuade all Americans that it was perfectly fine to wear black shoes with navy clothing. This movement has been so successful, in fact, that if you are under the age of thirty you are probably furrowing your brow right now, wondering why I might think that was not okay.

If you've read my writing blog (or know me in real life), you might think I'm just a bit of a stickler. But the truth is, I'm not a color purist. I'm really not the kind of person who fusses much about appearances, and I haven't an artistic bone in my body. What's more, I LIKE the new acceptability of brown and black together--I love my chocolate-brown suit with a black blouse and black shoes. But certain lines must be drawn, and this one is definite: black shoes do not go with navy clothing.

Perhaps you're thinking that it should be a matter of personal choice. I don't disagree. The problem is that since the Myth that Black Goes with Navy has begun to seep into popular consciousness, it's almost impossible to find a good pair of navy shoes.

Earlier this week, I had occasion to wear a suit. A navy suit. Suits aren't often required in my current profession, so I hadn't worn the suit in a couple of years and it had slipped my mind that I hadn't been able to find any good navy shoes the last time around. Reluctantly, I put on some black shoes and set off for the city, worrying about them every step of the way. But on the train, I had a revelation: I work in the same building as Macy's (formerly the flagship Marshall Field & Co.). I can buy new shoes!

This shouldn't have come as a surprise to me. After all, it's not the first time I've had to go emergency shoe shopping at work. So there I was, all relieved. I could just pop into Macy's and buy a pair of navy pumps!

Ha.

Obviously, I'd forgotten the Endless But Unsuccessful Quest for Navy Heels I'd undertaken a couple of years earlier.

The first shoe clerk I asked at Macy's told me they didn't really have any navy shoes (more on the whole Macy's experience to come in my next post). The second was able to find me a few options, but said that they really didn't have much navy. "It's odd," she said, "because I get a lot of requests for navy dress shoes."

I laughed and asked her whether those requests mostly came from women my age. The poor girl looked hesitantly at me--she was approximately half my age and probably wasn't sure whether or not "women my age" was an insult. I didn't want to leave her hanging, so I added "We haven't really bought in to that whole 'black shoes go with navy' thing." She smiled and said, "Yeah, that could be it." And then she found me some lovely navy slingback pumps that were...you know...THE SAME COLOR AS MY SUIT.

So what's your take? Do you wear black shoes with navy? Was it a tough adjustment? Or are you too young to know better?

Want to Look at 7,346 Pictures of My Kid?

2010-04-13T13:10:00.001-07:00

I promise I'm not going to make this blog a copy of Tori's YouTube channel. Really. I do. But the video the other day was her first world issues video, and this is her first music video. After this, I'll scale it back. Probably.

Conversations With My Daughter - The Bible

2010-04-11T16:08:00.000-07:00

This afternoon I was washing dishes when my daughter came down and sat on the stairs. Our townhouse is split-level, and the stairway runs into the kitchen, so she often sits there to talk to me or play her guitar or pet the dog while I'm in the kitchen. This time, though, she had a purpose.

As soon as she sat down, she said, "Mom, I have a problem with the Bible."

To be honest, I was a tiny bit concerned. I encourage independent thought, but I also tend to take Jesus' word for stuff, so it seemed like a couple of core values were about to hit head on.

"Okay..." I said neutrally, waiting for explanation.

"Well, you know how Herod made everyone go to the place they were from to be counted?"

"Mm hmm..." I'm thinking maybe this isn't so dangerous after all. We all knew Herod was a bad guy, right?

"Well, I don't think Mary and Joseph were from the same place, but they were traveling to the same place to be counted."

I didn't laugh. Instead, I said seriously, "Well, they really only counted the men. If Mary was counted it would have been as part of his family."

"Ah," she said, and then there was a pause. And then she said, "Mom, I have a problem with the Bible."chil

One Day Without Shoes

2010-04-08T20:56:00.000-07:00

Tori decided to accept the TOMS Shoes challenge to go one day without shoes in honor of the millions of people worldwide who don't own shoes at all. She learned how challenging even the little things can be when you're missing something as basic as shoes, and documented her journey.

Confessions of a Non-Romantic

2010-03-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

I was thinking last night about teenage emotions. I think this was triggered by the fact that my 36-year-old sister copped to a crush on Edward Cullen. She explained the concept of "Twilight Moms" to me by claiming that Stephanie Meyer managed to resurrect all of those "teenage emotions". I was dumbfounded.

Not about Stephanie Meyer--I haven't read the books and have no idea whether or not what my sister says is true. It was the idea that resurrecting teenage emotions was a good thing that blew my mind.

It's not that I don't remember those overpowering emotions. I knew how to wallow in those emotions with the best of them. In fact, I had little choice: I came of age in the era of Air Supply.

If you're too young to remember Air Supply or have engaged in hypno-therapy to help you forget, the band made a big smash in the early 80s with the ingenious branding strategy of recording the same song over and over again and changing the title slightly. After "Lost in Love" and "All Out of Love" they attempted to mix it up a bit with "Every Woman in the World", but it didn't make much difference: even though they'd taken the radical step of deleting "love" from the title, their third hit was largely interchangeable with the first two, and even their theoretically positive songs were mournful. In any case, the departure was apparently too extreme for them, and the next release put them back on more familiar ground wtih "The One that You Love". Recognizing how easily we might have confused their songs, the band stepped up and helped us out by repeating the title line ad nauseum in each one so we could remember exactly where we were.

The musical backdrop to our lives reminded us all day, every day that we'd never get over that one special guy--that the heartaches we were feeling now would never fade and in our golden years we'd still be looking back on that one special guy from the summer after our freshman years in high school and knowing that life had never been what it might have if we hadn't lost him. And that thrilled us. It made our romances so much more important to believe they'd have a lifelong impact. We wanted to keep them going for as long as we could, even if "keeping them going" meant crying ourselves to sleep.

We knew, in fact, that Olivia Newton-John was LYING when she claimed that she didn't want that "button pushing cowboy" playing the song she'd shared with her ex. What better way to wiggle the sore tooth of lost romance than to listen to "your song" over and over again?

Oddly, this certainty wasn't shaken in the slightest by the fact that the targets of our lifelong love kept changing, that we did, in fact, get over the guy we were never going to get over and then connect with another one we were sure we'd never get over and then get over him...

A funny thing happens as we age, though. It's called "reality". One day, you open up a box of old heartfelt letters (unsent) and love poems (horrendous) and find that you're not entirely sure to whom you wrote them. Barry Manilow lied to us! Did he even remember who "Even Now" was about?

It took most of us a long time to apply this information to our present lives, though. Those old near-forgotten romances were so easily distinguishable from our present ones, which--unlike our teenage loves--were "real". This time it really was the relationship we'd never get over!

Eventually, though, most of us caught on. Eventually, we began to recognize that while we felt like crap in the moment when a relationship ended, odds were that the sun would shine again and we would love again and, in short, life would go on. And reality was liberating. So when an adult woman talks to me wistfully about being swept back to the "good" old days in which she thought the world would end with every relationship and lived in fear of losing some boy whose name she's since forgotten, I just don't get it.

In Honor of Valentine's Day...

2010-02-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

I usually try to keep the lines pretty clean--I don't think that most of my writing blog readers care about my personal life or my dog blog readers want to hear my philosophizing on Catholicism or...well, you get the idea. But since it's Valentine's Day, I thought I'd break tradition and remind you all (or maybe tell you for the first time) about my dating and relationship blog at http://life-love-and-online-dating.com

In addition to the obvious irony of the fact that I even have a relationship blog, my co-author is pretty entertaining (even if he does seem to think he has something up on Tiger Woods because he can operate a jackhammer...or something).

While you're in the Valentine's Day spirit (or the anti-Valentine's Day spirit), stop by and check us out. And while you're there, weigh in on our Valentine's Day Poll.

What the Heck is This?

2010-02-03T17:48:00.000-08:00

No, really.

Kathy over at The Junk Drawer does this cool thing where she'll show us a photo of some crazy thing you feel like she must have unearthed in her grandmother's attic and ask us to figure out what it is...but this isn't that game. This is a sincere, "What on earth could this possibly be?"

While I hope you'll volunteer answers, I can't possibly offer up a prize (or even kudos to the first person who gets it right), because I won't have the slightest idea whether you're right or not.

I have a terrible fear about what it might be, but I'm not even going to say it out loud because it's more of an indictment of our society than I'm willing to make without evidence.

So here it is. If the context isn't clear from the photo, this is a part of a new grocery cart, and is positioned between the area where you place your baby (or your purse, if you don't have a baby) and the handles you use to push the cart.

Tell me it's not what I think it is. Please.

Wordless Wednesday #3 (approximately)

2010-01-27T15:58:00.000-08:00

We're Not Going to Make it to 2012

2010-01-22T10:59:00.000-08:00

In fact, our world has just about 15 months remaining. D-day falls in the spring of 2011, though I haven't taken the time to calculate the exact date. That will become apparent as time passes.

I can understand why you might be skeptical. There have, after all, been a lot of false alarms. And if you're inclined to believe in a doomsday prophecy, 2012 has a lot going for it. It's not just a trendy, flash-in-the-pan sort of end-of-the-world philosophy. It's been around for centuries, and has the (theoretical) backing of some pretty smart people (who aren't around to jump up onto soap boxes and take to the Internet yelling, "Wait...WAIT! That's not what we meant AT ALL!"). It even had a successful box office run.

But I have proof:

I know this probably isn't what you thought the Doomsday Clock would look like. You might have imagined it black, for instance. You probably thought it would be bigger. You may not have envisioned sticky fingerprints. And I'm almost sure you didn't expect it to be branded by a national test prep company. But be honest: haven't a lot of things in life worked out quite a bit differently than you'd expected?

Back in January of 2008, I went to work on a special project at Kaplan, a project that (I can now tell you, though it was top secret then) launched on August 7, 2008. Shortly after I started, I received the "countdown clock" you see pictured above. It was running backward, counting down the then (roughly) 200 days until our launch. And let me tell you, it ran fast. Nothing like watching the tenths-of-a-second spin backward when you're on a deadline.

I actually really enjoyed the countdown clock but, like all good things, it came to an end. August 7, 2008 arrived. All of the numbers on the clock hit zero. It flashed zeroes for a day and then, on August 8, it was a regular clock, running in the right direction.

Or so it appeared. Of course, I now know that it was simply dormant, awaiting the right moment to share its true message with the world. One morning I looked at the clock and it was running backward again, racing toward a new, unexplained date that hadn't been programmed in by some corporate project manager.

451 days.

Use them wisely.

Forks in the Road

2010-01-09T16:50:00.001-08:00

This morning, I sat in the cafeteria of a small private high school my daughter might attend next year and stared--discreetly, I hope--at a man. It's happened to all of us, hasn't it? In some unexpected place, you suddenly spot someone you're 95% sure is someone from your past--someone who was once so significant that you wouldn't have believed you'd ever be unsure--but you are unsure. Unsure enough that you're afraid to speak, not because you're afraid that you're wrong, but because the question mark you'd have to attach to his name would be unforgivable if you were right.

We were both early. I had plenty of time to study him (discreetly, I hope) before the meeting commenced. I thought about walking in the snow with him, about eating rhubarb straight from the garden and blackberries plucked from a bush. I summoned up the one time I'd seen him with his wife and children, years earlier, and tried to remember exactly how he'd looked then, but it was futile. I could only see him refusing to dance with me under the first disco ball I'd ever seen, jumping to defend me during a basketball game in his friend's driveway, appearing at my side with a delicate, powdered-sugar laced Christmas cookie after some silly spat.

I come from a large family. I have cousins I've never met and cousins I've seen only once or twice in my life. I probably have cousins I don't even know exist. But this cousin, I loved. We played with Play-Dough and crayons together, imagined arctic expeditions in his back yard and went to movie matinees together every Wednesday in summer. It was to his house that I took my brand new Pong game and my handheld electronic football game; we made tattoos with marker and applied them to one another and to our younger siblings. I remember what I bought him for his ninth birthday, the day he brought his new puppy to my house, the first time I walked to his house alone. I even remember waiting impatiently for him to get up from his nap when he was still in his crib but I had achieved the lofty age of three.

And now I don't know what he looks like.

I sat in a room for two hours this morning and didn't know whether or not he was sitting thirty feet from me. And somehow, not knowing whether or not I was seeing him made me sad in a way that knowing I wasn't never did.

Mitchel Musso Gets My Vote for Teenage Celebrity of the Week

2009-11-23T16:55:00.000-08:00

Okay, so far as I know, there's no such award (and I'm certainly not instituting one). And I don't really give all that much thought to teenage celebrities, and I have to admit that I didn't really see the draw when my daughter and her friends kept babbling about how "hot" Mitchel Musso was. I was thinking something more along the lines of "he seems like a nice kid". But I do believe in giving credit where it's due, and I think Mitchel Musso deserves some credit--especially in contrast to Ashley Greene, who we encountered earlier the same evening.

Yesterday, I took my daughter and two of her friends to see New Moon at the Hollywood Palms theater, where the stunningly beautiful Ashley Greene (aka Alice Cullen) was signing autographs.

For a price, that is. A fairly hefty price, actually. $20 per person to take a picture with her, even if it was the same photograph. $20 for an autograph even if you'd just bought a $20 photo. So I paid $80 for my daughter and her two friends to get a picture together with Ashley Greene and then have Ashley sign my daughter's t-shirt. All together, I think that the three of them spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 minutes with Ms. Greene for my $80.

To her credit, she did take the time to add my daughter's name and a few hearts and kisses to the back of her shirt. Maybe I expect too much. But as many of you know I've spent some time around celebrities interacting with fans, whether by design or because they got caught trying to eat dinner or grab a cup of coffee. Some of those celebrities set the bar pretty high. All of which is to say that I'm not easily impressed, and I'd had my fill of shelling out cash for a twenty second smile when Mitchel Musso unexpectedly appeared on the scene and my daughter's brain melted. And her friends' brains melted. And I'm pretty sure that I actually felt my wallet cringe.

Musso was only signing CDs. It was free if you already had his CD; if not, you had to buy the CD to get his autograph. But the powers that were made it clear that the artist made the rules, and the rules of this game were much more lax. For instance, I only had to buy one CD to get all three girls into the line to meet him, and he was fine with posing for a picture with all of them, CDs or not. But that was only the beginning.

Since my girls had just seen New Moon, they were still wearing matching "Team Mike Newton" t-shirts. He commented on their shirts and asked whether they'd just seen New Moon. When they said yes, he asked whether it was as good as the first one. When my camera acted glitchy and I was afraid the picture wasn't going to turn out, he smilingly held the pose and waited while I pulled out my phone and took another couple of shots for back-up. Sweetest of all, he noticed that there were three of them and only two CDs (long story) and while he chatted with them, he pulled the insert out of one of the CDs and signed that too, saying casually, "Here, I'll just sign this too, just in case. Then you'll have three."

One of them asked for a hug and he hugged all three, one at a time, in no apparent hurry. And the oldest (15) slipped in a "you're hot" before quickly walking away, he ducked his head, smiled up at her and said, "thank you".

The girls walked away flapping and twittering like they were going to take flight, and repeated their conversation with him and their commentary on how hot he was and how nice he was and how HIS CHEEK WAS RIGHT AGAINST MY FOREHEAD all the way home, where they used On Demand to rewatch what seemed like every episode of Hannah Montana. Treating your fans well is good business, too.

It was nice to see; having hoards of people waiting in line to see you, touch you, stand close to you, get your autograph can go to your head. I imagine that could happen much more easily if you were a teenage boy, and the screaming hoards were teenage girls. But thus far, Mitchel Musso comes across as a good kid who understands that his fans are individual people, and that how he responds to them matters. I hope it lasts.

Baby Envy

2009-11-08T20:01:00.000-08:00

When I was a teenager, I couldn't wait to have a baby. I loved to babysit and kept it up well into college. I planned for the day I'd have my baby and thought about what toys and books I'd buy her and admired every picture of a baby that appeared in a catalog or magazine and every live baby who passed my way.

When my daughter was born, though, I more or less lost interest in other babies. They were still cute, but everything had changed. All of those other babies, after all, had just been reminders of the baby-to-come. Once she was in my life, everyone else paled in comparison. And so it went for several years.

But she's thirteen now. Don't get me wrong--I'm no less excited about her than I was in her infancy. In fact, I continue to be surprised by how much it doesn't change, by the way that each new age and stage has its own magic. But she's clearly not a baby anymore; she's a teenager and very nearly a woman. And that means that the whole "in comparison" thing doesn't come into play anymore. At 43 (and long past the point at which I could think about giving her a sibling), I find myself coveting babies again just as I did in my teens.

This afternoon, I went to my cousin's baby's christening. The place was awash in babies, and as I listened to new mothers complain about the lack of sleep and constant crying and older mothers talk about how glad they were that those days were gone, I was thinking about whether or not I could still adopt.

Not the Jodie Foster I Wanted to Be

2009-11-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it--I wouldn't mind at all identifying with Jodie Foster in a lot of ways. She's done some interesting things in her many roles, and has generally looked great and often kicked ass while doing them. Her character in Flight Plan, for instance--wouldn't want her problems, but her fortitude? Her cunning? Her muscle tone? I'm in.

Today, unfortunately, I had a sudden flash of myself as a Jodie Foster character, and it was Dede Tate.

Today, my daughter performed at the Illinois Music Educator's Association festival--an event organized to bring together the most talented singers and musicians from the northern half of the state and give them the opportunity to work with professional directors. She was totally in her element, soaking up advice and basking in the sound and feeling of a hundred well-honed voices from all over the state joining in a single note and I...I am basically tone deaf.

Oh, I can hear enough to know that she's basically a good singer. I love to listen to her sing, both when she stands in front of me and performs and when I open my bedroom door in the morning so I can hear her in the next room as she gets ready for school. But when she hits that one difficult note that she needs to work over and over again, I can't tell that she went wrong...and I can't tell when she finally gets it right. When I watch her sing a solo, I don't know whether it was her best performance ever or she faltered a little.

In short, she's already moved far beyond the point at which I have anything useful to offer her in what is fast becoming the most important area of her life. I can applaud, I can drive, I can sign permission slips and pay entry fees and even hire teachers, but I can't simply say, "That was really good" and have it mean anything other than "Mommy loves you."

Someone to Look Down On

2009-11-05T20:41:00.000-08:00

I've always subscribed to the theory that racism is largely a white-trash phenomenon, and that its roots lie in the fact that most people have some kind of strange need to feel like they're better than someone else...anyone. If a man can't feel superior because he's good looking or good at something or makes a lot of money or has a nice house or drives a hot car, well, by God, he can at least say he's WHITE (or whatever distinguishing characteristic he fills in here to give him "pride").

About a month ago, my daughter had a substitute teacher in social studies; as they discussed the growth of the United States beyond the initial 13 colonies, he repeatedly referred to the southern United States as "where all them hillbillies are from". This upset my daughter (who doesn't have a southern cell in her body) enough that she seriously considered whether or not she should raise the issue with the school administration. She opted not to because there's enough absurd behavior in the school to keep us all busy for a very long time, and we've learned that we have to save our complaints for the serious safety issues. So she didn't say anything, but she remained troubled.

This evening, because she was kind of down in the dumps because we had to cancel our tennis plans this afternoon due to her bruised ribs (another fiasco brought to you by our friendly neighborhood school district), we went out to a local pizza place that has a game room. Video games, while not quite so good for the health or the spirit as a good tennis match, also don't put much strain on an injury. So we ate dinner and went to hang out in the game room, and as we were loading up our keys with cyber tokens, she said, "remember the guy in the glasses".

Yep, you guessed it. Mr. Superior works behind the ticket counter in the game room at our local pizza place. I begin to believe that there are, in fact, only seven plots in the world.

Bad Day at the Coffee Shop

2009-11-04T19:55:00.000-08:00

I had a tough day at Panera.

First, when I got there this morning, I discovered that none of the electrical outlets were working. None. I figured they'd gotten tired of us all hanging out there with our laptops and flipped a switch. Oh, well. My battery is good for nearly four hours.

The only problem was that they had cream of chicken with wild rice soup, which is my absolute favorite, especially now that the weather is turning cold. And I knew that my battery would be dying by the time lunchtime rolled around.

I weighed my options, worked a little more, drank some coffee and asked an employee why they'd turned off the electricity. It was news to her, so she went right off to ask the manager. Unbelievably (no pun intended), she came back almost immediately to tell me that he didn't believe her. Told her to go plug something in and see what happened.

So I plugged my laptop in and showed her that nothing happened, but when she returned to the kitchen...nothing happened once again.

It was getting close enough to lunchtime that I thought maybe I could just stick it out long enough to get my soup. But when I walked up to refill my coffee, I inquired of the manager. It was easy to get his attention, because the business was at about 50% of the normal weekday volume. He feigned surprise that the outlets weren't working, swore that they'd never do that intentionally "at least that he knew of", and said he'd look into it.

I got a Diet Pepsi and discovered that the syrup was off. I drank it anyway and went up for a refill, only to discover that the ice machine was empty.

An hour later, when I went up to order my soup, he asked whether they were working now, as if he thought they might have spontaneously regenerated. He seemed surprised when I said no, but I didn't care anymore. I was going to eat my soup and then go home and work there, with full access to electricity.

I ordered my soup.

I paid for my soup.

And then I learned that they were out of my soup.

With ten minutes to spare on my battery, uncertainty about my debit card having been credited and ten minutes left on my laptop battery, I left Panera--and spent the next fifteen minutes waiting to get out of the parking lot because apparently healthy young men had to sit with turn signals blinking for several minutes in an effort to get a parking space ten feet closer to the door.

All in all, it was the worst day I've had at Panera...and that said a lot to me. It said a lot about how nice things usually are at Panera when I go there to work during the day, but it also said a lot about how nice life usually is. Usually, apparently, the conveniences are plentiful and the soup is available and the soda is just right and the road is clear. Sometimes, a day filled with every little obstacle is nothing more than a reminder of just how little they are.

I Had This Really Great Idea Today...

2009-10-28T22:46:00.000-07:00

Since:

I didn't like dating even when I was young and it was supposed to be fun; and
I have a very full and busy life and no room to really add anything; and
I've been separated from my husband for 5.5 years and haven't gotten around to getting divorced; and
I'm thinking seriously about moving out of town in six months; and
I'm really not all that interested in starting a relationship; and
I think planned dating is artificial and doomed to fail; and
I think online dating is creepy,

I decided to join an online dating service.

Since I...you know...don't want to date, I definitely didn't bring my marketing A-game to profile creation. In fact, I broke the cardinal rules of online dating by posting realistic pictures and telling the truth about my weight.

Have no fear, though. I got exactly what I deserved. On the first night, I received four messages. One of them had a strange emoticon in the subject line and nothing but "got curves??" in the body of the message. (How does one respond to that, even if one were so inclined?) Another said only "Sooooooooooo pretty!!" in the subject line and HAD no text in the body of the message. (How does one respond to that, even if one were so inclined?)

To top it off, it's apparently considered bad form not to respond when someone sends you a message, even if you're "not interested".

It's been approximately six hours, and I'm ready to bail, but I have learned some very interesting things:

Although the average American man is 5'9.4", nearly all men on dating sites are 6' or taller;
A surprising number of men have photographs of themselves with horses;
The world would be a better place if the phrase "and take it from there" were stricken from the English language;
Many, many innocent men have accidentally stumbled into the clutches of women who want to do unseemly things with them, and thus through no fault of their own had their messaging privileges restricted;
Most men consider having coffee or a meal with someone with whom they lack chemistry a "waste of time" for both parties;
Most men aren't even aware of what it says about them when they announce in a public forum that they think human interactions are only worthwhile if they're likely to lead to sex;
A large percentage of men say they're different from other men for the same reasons; and
Spelling is not a priority.

Any doubts I might have had about bypassing the whole dating scene and carrying on with my life as-is have been laid to rest, but I'm wondering whether I should hang around just for the sake of my art. There could be a whole new blog in this. Or, you know, a new career as a stand-up comedienne.

College Student or Middle-Aged Mom - What's the Difference?

2009-10-23T07:01:00.001-07:00

College sophomore Charley Cooper put out an ad for a personal assistant and got national news coverage. There's even a popular poll running: Spoiled Rich Kid or More Power to Him? But it's the wrong question.

When I heard Cooper's explanation--he's in school full-time, working a part-time job in his field, and has a family member who is seriously ill--my first thought was that it reminded me a lot of my life a couple of years ago. When I was trying to work 90+ hours a week and parent and help out other family members and getting very little sleep, several people said the same thing to me: "get some help". And it was good advice.

See, most of us get into a blind cycle of believing that we have to do everything ourselves. Even when I had money enough to hire help, I felt like I had to do my own cleaning. I felt guilty when I didn't do my own cooking. I kept on trying to find time to pay my bills manually instead of just setting them up to be paid through my bank and moving on. And those were bad choices. Or, rather, they weren't choices at all...they were just ways of staying stuck in the rut I was in for no reason.

I say "no reason" because there was nothing about vacuuming my living room or making sure the bill payments went out on time or doing my laundry that required my personal attention. It was a poor use of my time to focus on those things when there were so many other things in play that DID require my attention. My daughter, for instance. And the major project I was buried in at work.

And finally, only because I hit the point of literally not being able to do it all, I realized what professionals have been telling us for decades: giving the important things in life the attention they deserve sometimes means delegating the things you don't really have to do yourself. Any good professional organizer will tell you this. Any executive who doesn't delegate will soon find himself completely ineffective. Focus on what matters--isn't that really a simple concept?

When I finally did decide to call in some help (and never, really, as much as I should have), that decision was greeted with universal relief among my friends and family. "Spoiled" never crossed anyone's lips. Why? Because I was a middle-aged woman? Because I hadn't grown up wealthy? Does that change what constitutes a sensible decision?

Because Charley Cooper made a sensible decision--and one that many of us don't learn to make until we're near the breaking point. At 19, he said, "school, career, family...the rest I'll dump if I can". I suspect that he'll go far in life, having gotten past that hurdle a couple of decades earlier than most of us.

Is he a spoiled rich kid? Maybe...but I don't think this decision proves it. More power to him? Maybe...but I don't know how he lives his life, so I can't really say. Neither is appropriate in response to this decision...it's just a life management choice that, were he older, he would almost certainly have been encouraged to make. The one thing I know for sure is that it wouldn't have been national news. MSNBC surely didn't show up when I contracted out my paperwork and started having food delivered.

I Have a Confession to Make

2009-10-21T18:14:00.000-07:00

I think I'm from Mars.

Of course, I've recognized this before in the abstract. Every time someone starts talking about the differences between men and women, the "men" descriptions sound a lot more like me. But this week it hit home in the concrete when my dear friend Barb's husband had an emergency appendectomy. And Barb, she was a little put out because her husband drove himself to the hospital with a ruptured appendix and notified her once he was on the gurney and headed into surgery.

And you know, I sympathized. I really did. I understood why she was upset, and how stressful it was not to be able to see him before he went into surgery and all that. I felt her pain.

But I had a secret.

See, in her husband's shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing. It just MAKES SENSE. I can totally see, since I was introduced to the situation from her perspective, that it was a little insensitive. But I also know beyond a doubt that in his circumstances, that would never have crossed my mind. After all, just getting in the car and going was the fastest, most efficient way to get the problem taken care of.

In fact, I'm not just speculating. Several years ago when my blood pressure skyrocketed, I drove myself to a clinic fifteen miles away and then called a friend from there and asked him to pick up my daughter at school. The second time my blood pressure got dangerously high, I discovered it at work, when I walked into the bathroom saw that all of the blood vessels in my eyes were broken. I returned to my office, Googled for the nearest walk-in clinic, casually told my boss that I was going to lunch and walked to the doctor's office. It was only after the doctor said I couldn't leave the office until my blood pressure was down that I called work to let them know I wasn't coming back, and only after they decided to ship me over to the hospital that I called my family.

I wasn't trying to play hero or exclude anyone, and I didn't think I was being reckless. I just couldn't see a reason to cause a fuss, and I took the most expedient route to do what needed to be done. In retrospect, of course, I can see that there were risks. At the time, I was very focused on the quickest, most hassle-free way to take action. If I told my boss what was going on, conversations would have ensued: Did I think I'd be back? Did I need someone to go with me? Would I call when I knew what was going on? My head felt like it was going to blow open and I knew I only had a few minutes before I vomited again and I didn't want to have a discussion. I wanted to get to the doctor.

Until I saw the situation from the other side this week, it never crossed my mind that other people might have feelings about my choices. Perhaps more importantly, it never crossed my mind that anyone else might have a right to have feelings about how I took care of myself. Managing crisis mode is a very narrow state of mind.

And now I get it. I really do. But I'm pretty sure that when the next emergency situation arises, I'll react exactly as I always have.

She Will Do as I Do

2009-10-15T19:26:00.000-07:00

I wrote this some time ago, and have been undecided about whether to share it, or where. Today, I learned that October is domestic violence awareness month, and decided that the time was ripe to get my piece of the word out, in hopes that it will help someone to break a cycle that is passed down from generation to generation. It's not what you're used to here, but I think it's important.

The most significant moment of my life occurred in the fall of 1994. It wasn’t my marriage, the birth of my precious daughter, the day I was sworn in to the practice of law or when I held my first book in my hands and ran my finger across my name on the cover. No, the most significant moment of my life took place in an apartment-building driveway in a run-down town, well after dark on a week night.

A man I loved lifted a rock—a very large rock—and said, “Shut up, get in your car and drive away and don’t look back or I’m going to bash your head in.” The original statement, of course, contained a few colorful adjectives. I believed him. I got in my car and drove away without looking back, and as I did, I sighed.

That was it, that sigh. A man I loved and trusted had threatened to kill me with a rock, and I’d believed him, and it made me SIGH. It didn’t shock me, appall me, or even really frighten me. If I’d put that sigh into words, I think they would have been “here we go again.”

I’d grown up with violence, of course. And like every child who grows up with violence I’d sworn I’d never tolerate it and meant it from the bottom of my heart. I’d grown up to fight violence, training and volunteering in domestic violence shelters and sexual assault programs for several years. And then, when violence came back into my life, I greeted it much in the same way I would have greeted a flat tire on my way to work.

In my mind, of course, I knew all the things I’d been telling victims for years. But in my gut, in my physiology, deep in my psyche, this kind of thing was just part of life. I knew how serious it was, but I couldn’t feel it. And because I didn’t experience it as anything life-altering, it didn’t alter my life a bit. I left when I was told, to avoid getting my head bashed in with a rock, and then I returned the next day.

I didn’t recognize the significance of that sigh then, of course. It was years before I looked back and realized that my reaction was the result of a kind of programming that can only be erased by long, hard work and extreme awareness. I’d thought that in mentally rejecting violence, in my training and volunteer work and the way I saw violence in the lives of other women, I’d moved past that programming, but I hadn’t. It was only lying in wait. In fact, that programming has never entirely been erased; I’m not sure whether it ever can be. The difference is that I know now that my emotional and instinctive reactions can’t be trusted in that arena, that I have to have a concrete bottom line and stick to it as if it were a law, because my gut won’t tell me to do what needs to be done.

The other difference is that I have a child now, and because of that one moment—because I sighed when I should have screamed, and briefly retreated when I should have run—I know that what she experiences in her day-to-day life as a child will be what she perceives as normal, no matter how much lip service I pay to it being wrong, no matter how clearly she recognizes that herself. And it’s not just about violence; our children become familiar with, and comfortable with, the type of relationships we model, our financial stability or lack thereof, and every other aspect of the lives we live from day to day and thereby present as normal.

A thousand studies have told us as much, have told us that girls who grow up with violence enter into abusive relationships and boys who grow up with violence become abusers, and we think, all of us, “Not my kid.” It’s not just denial: children object, they see the problem, sometimes they’re more clear-headed about it than their parents, and it seems impossible to imagine that they’d ever tolerate that same pattern in their lives.

I was that child: the one who threatened to call the police, who advocated bolting the doors, who had a hundred suggestions for when and where and how to get away. And when the chips were down, more than a decade later, I sighed. And I stayed.

Say It Ain't So, Guys...

2009-10-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

In a two different recent discussion threads, men have insisted that all men talk about with their male friends is "beer, sports and chicks you wanna bang". I'm sure there's some of that, but I was emphatically assured that it was pretty much all there was--which doesn't seem to fit the men in my life. Do I know a better class of men, or is there a secret-society thing going on, where you all become different people when the doors are closed? Please, fill us in...without fear. The poll is anonymous!

Cliquez-ici pour accéder au sondage.

Retail Therapy for People Who Aren't Into Stuff

2009-10-13T17:23:00.000-07:00

I've never understood the term "retail therapy". Spending money unnecessarily makes me anxious. I don't enjoy shopping. And I'm not much into stuff--especially not stuff like clothing and shoes and handbags that my friends seem to consider the stuff of "retail therapy".

I am, however, having an unusually rough week. I usually work close to a flat 40-hour week, and I'm on my third week of running closer to 55. Not the end of the world, but I'm stretched a little thinner than usual, especially since my daughter has been home sick from school for a solid week and has been very needy and malcontent. I fell asleep accidentally in the middle of the afternoon today, and then went into the evening with hours of work still to do.

In the midst of all this, I ran to WalMart to pick up some NyQuil and Motrin, and while I was there I picked up a few other things:

A John Grisham novel that sounds like it's pretty much the same story as The Firm, which was my least favorite of his books. To top this one off, I'm 75% sure that my mother has this book sitting in her living room, part of the last stack of books my book-club-loving aunt dropped off.

A Whatchamacallit candy bar. It should be noted that I rarely eat candy and haven't eaten a Whatchamacallit since I was 12 years old (for those of you who haven't been following along, I'm 43 now). It's king size.

A Hootie & the Blowfish greatest hits CD (which I'm almost sure should have been a single...really. Didn't they just have one song?) But it was only $5, so I pushed Janeane Garofalo out of my head and tossed it in the cart.

All 26 episodes of Ally McBeal. I was surprised to learn that there were only 26 episodes. That sounds like a single season, and it's hard to believe that the series had jumped the shark to the point of the dancing baby within a single season. I don't really know for sure because I...well...couldn't be bothered to watch the show regularly when it was on television.

Kind of makes me wish I gave a crap about shoes or home decor, or something I'd still have some use for when I'm feeling better.

Now, Ma'am--We Both Know You Have Insurance...

2009-10-10T09:52:00.000-07:00

A discussion thread about getting out of speeding tickets triggered this very old story. I didn't have a speeding ticket story to share because I don't really speed. Ask anyone who rides with me or follows/leads me anywhere--it's a constant source of annoyance. I did have a funny story (or at least, I think it's funny) about blowing a stop sign, but it was too long to throw into a forum thread...so here we are.

One evening, I had a crippling migraine. (Note that I say "crippling" not for dramatic effect, but because migraines come in varying degrees, and usually those of us who suffer them regularly go on about some semblance of our lives. Every once in a while, though, a migraine comes on that's the biggest thing in your world for as long as it lasts. This was one of those.)

I didn't have any medication, but my mother (who lived about a mile away) had the same prescription, so I decided to drive over to her house and get some.

Mistake # 1: Why didn't I ask her to bring it to me?

Once at her house, I decided that I'd better not take the medication until I got home, because it made me a little woozy and I was already more than a little woozy (see Mistake # 1). So I put a few pills in a ziploc baggie.

Mistake # 2: Why didn't I bring my own bottle, or something a little less drug-dealerish to carry it in?

Eager to get home and take the medication, I got back in the car, tossed the plastic baggie full of little blue pills on the passenger seat and took off.

Mistake # 3: This one speaks for itself, right?

In front of my house at the time, there was a stop sign. You'd stop, then turn left and pull over to park about 20 feet from the corner. In theory, anyway.

As I pulled to the curb to park, I noticed a police car with lights flashing behind me. A young blond cop--a rookie straight out of central casting--approached my window.

"Do you know why I pulled you over?" he asked (This, apparently, is mandatory in every state and local police agency in the United States and perhaps beyond.)

I shook my head, shrugged one shoulder and said, "Honestly, I didn't even know you were. I live here."

Mistake # 4: Did I really want to tell the nice officer that I was driving around SO OUT OF IT that I didn't even notice the flashing lights behind me? While I had a plastic baggie of unmarked drugs in arm's reach? Really?

He said, "You ran that stop sign back there."

I looked at the stop sign. I said, "Did I really? I'm sorry. I have a migraine."

(See Mistake # 4)

"Oh, that's okay," he said cheerfully.

Then I expressed surprise, pointing out that the stop sign was right in front of my house and it certainly wasn't like I didn't know it was there.

(See Mistake # 4)

"Yeah," he said, still good-naturedly. "You didn't even roll it. I probably wouldn't have stopped you for that. You just ran right through it."

I should note that, in addition to the baggie of drugs on my passenger seat, I had enough junk in my car to start my own second-hand store (or garbage dump). Just that afternoon, I'd returned from an interstate car trip with all three kids. So when the officer said, "I'm just going to run your license and check your insurance, and if that all checks out I'll let you go since you're home already," I was in a new bind.

I hadn't the SLIGHTEST idea where my insurance card was.

I know. I know. Odds are that the kids didn't get into the glove compartment and remove it from a neat plastic sleeve or anything like that. I have to admit to a bit of pre-existing disorganization.

"Oh, man," I said. "I have no idea where my insurance card is." I looked helplessly around the cyclone-struck car and said, "I just drove back from Indiana with three kids."

"But you do have it?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," I assured him. And I did. I really did. But WHERE was anybody's guess.

He was kind of negotiating against himself at that point. He said, "Well, let me just run your license. What's your driving record like?"

FINALLY, one I could answer! My driving record was PERFECT.

While he went off to run my license, I dug frantically through the backseat in search of my insurance card. Lucky he wasn't the suspicious type--isn't this how cops get shot on routine traffic stops?

When he came back, he told me my license checked out and I said, "Look! I found my insurance card!" He barely glanced at it. "See?" he said triumphantly, "I knew you had it!"

He went on his way after saying that he hoped I felt better soon. I, at least, had sense enough to wait until he had turned away to grab the bag of drugs.

Mockery Revisited

2009-09-29T16:01:00.001-07:00

When I said I was almost done mocking the school district, I meant it. I really did. But that was before they set about teaching my child nouns.

"What," you may be asking, "is wrong with nouns?" You might even think that as a writer, I'd be happy to have my child learning grammar. And so I was, when she learned to identify nouns the first time, in the third grade. Now that she's in 8th grade, and in an enrichment class for the gifted and talented, not so much.

But no worries--that's not all they're doing. She's also learned what "glossary" meant and been quizzed on her ability to circle pronouns in pre-written sentences thus far this quarter. I can only assume that the regular class is working on the alphabet.

It's the Internet Age - Do You Know How Your Child's been Tagged?

2009-09-26T16:11:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that I'm cautious about what I say about my children online. Not cautious in the "there are predators everywhere" way (although there do sometimes seem to be), but cautious in the "is it really my place to be sharing this information with the world?" way. I've addressed this from a professional perspective on my writing blog; it's a common pitfall for parenting writers. And I've addressed it from the standpoint of a concerned citizen on my social commentary blog
, after I was appalled to stumble upon a blog devoted entirely to the trials and tribulations associated with the unwelcome arrival of a baby whose father was going to "do his best" to love it because that was his job.

But the Internet is ever-evolving, and even the most vigilant among us make missteps. For instance, I never expected my post about my daughter's first Jonas Brothers concert to end up on the front page of a Jonas Brothers fan site. Before that day, my readership among middle-schoolers was fairly limited, but a well-placed RSS feed can change everything.

This time, though, my oversight was a little more serious--and one I'm not quite sure how to protect against in the future. It's the result of strangers tagging content. It might be useful, and it might mean that a lot more content gets tagged, and it might mean that multiple users tagging the same content results in better tags, but it's looking mighty ugly to me at the moment. Back in July, I posted about how learning to swim had been a long and harrowing process for my daughter after an unfortunate incident on day one of swimming lessons. That post included a photograph of my daughter (13) and her friend (12) holding on to a bright yellow inner tube at the park district pool. You may have seen it; it's a cheerful snapshot (taken with my phone) of two CHILDREN laughing in a public swimming pool.

Unless you ask Bing. On Bing, it's currently the number one image result for "waterslide bikini".

The Monday Morning Greens

2009-09-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, I know "greens" isn't technically the opposite of "blues", but I picked it for a reason. It's my favorite color; there's nothing negative about green. And it's also the color that--in the United States, at least--means "go".

Most Monday mornings, I post something in my Facebook status about how excited I am about it being Monday morning, and invariably I get a pile of responses questioning my sanity. Except this morning, the invariable responses...well...varied. This morning, no one suggested that I was crazy. Five people, however, wished to know my secret. So I've decided to share.

Like most secrets to happiness, love, positive outlooks on life and good parenting, this one is no secret. It's all a matter of perspective. Monday morning is traditionally viewed as the day we have to get up early again, the day the "daily grind" starts anew, the day we have to run to get the kids off to school and ourselves off to the office by some usually-outrageous hour of the morning. And it is all those things. But it's something else, too.

Monday morning is a blank page. A clean slate. Okay, I'll stop with the cliches, but since I'm a writer, those are powerful images for me. It's a new week I can do anything with. Monday morning I can take stock and prioritize without pressure. Sometimes by, for example, Thursday afternoon, I'm starting to feel the pressure, pushing hard or working late to get something done before the weekend. But on Monday morning I have forty hours laid out in front of me to chip away at my "to do" list, and that makes it easy to focus and easy to start knocking items off the list.

My daughter is in middle school, where drama runs high but memories are short. If conflicts arose during one week, odds are very good that they'll be forgotten by Monday morning. And while my memory may be longer, I find that I can make the same choice: I don't bring last week's stresses to the table. I'm not running behind, even if I was when I called it a day on Friday. The re-set button has been pressed, and it's a brand new week with a brand new list.

Top it off with the fact that I'm usually reasonably well-rested by Monday morning and my house is as clean as it gets, and my stars are perfectly aligned for a positive, high-energy day.

A Little Hope on a Dark Day

2009-09-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

I’m not really the type to write a blog post about how much I like my friends. First, as you all know, I’m not exactly the warm and fuzzy type. I’m pretty logical. And logic tells me that you all KNOW that I like my friends, because if I 9/didn’t I…well…wouldn’t be friends with them.

But last night, I wrote a short post referring back to my pre-9/11 post last year. That post was all about how sad it was to me that the one positive thing we’d gained from 9/11 had been so quickly lost. In the immediate wake of 9/11, everyone was nice to everyone else and people donated whatever they had and those who were near to the scene reached out in any way they could. Perhaps my view was a little different because of my religion, but in that moment I saw the closest thing I’d ever seen to the world I believe God made—a world in which we were “one body”. And despite the terrible tragedy that inspired it, it was a beautiful, hopeful, affirming thing to watch and to be a part of.

And then we moved on.

Eight years later, we remember the tragedy. We remember the anger, and maybe the fear. We mourn for those lost and maybe even for the sense of security lost, but we don’t seem to remember that we discovered that we were all one people, in this thing together.

While I was lamenting the loss of that feeling and wonderingly vainly and naively (ever notice how close those two words are) why we couldn’t live that way every day, I suddenly thought about my friend Barb Cooper. Because Barb is that person every single day of her life.

You may know this already, because you may read her very popular blog, So, The Thing Is… Barb’s blog is, in a funny, non-preachy, self-deprecating kind of way, all about love: loving her family, her friends, her neighbors, her babysitter, the postman, and the stray cat peeking around the side of the house. Offering them her heart, willing their best good, and greeting every problem with an earnest, “Gosh, how can I help?” It’s an added bonus that she makes us laugh out loud in the process.

She’s a wonderful friend to me every day, but on this sad day, she’s more. As I contemplate the way most of us have drawn back into our shells and reverted to “me and mine” thinking, she’s an inspiration, and a point of hope. They may be few and far between, but there are people out there who live every day as we all should be…and maybe in a quiet, simple way, they’ll be the seeds of sustained change in a way that a national tragedy couldn’t.

Faded Memories

2009-09-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening, I re-read the post that I wrote on the eve of September 11 last year and realized that what I see as the most important message surrounding that day hasn't changed. I wish that weren't the case, because when I wrote that post last year it was with a deep sense of having--as a society--dropped the ball. September 11 was undoubtedly the most powerful message this country has ever received...and we couldn't hold on to it for even a handful of years. That may be sadder than all of the raw tragedy and loss that occurred on that day. It will certainly have further-reaching effects.

Mental Snapshots

2009-08-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

Tuesday afternoon, as we were packing to travel out of state for my daughter's great-grandmother's funeral, I picked up my camera.

"I don't think you're going to want to bring your camera to a funeral!" my daughter protested.

No, I agreed, but we were going to be spending a couple of days with her father's family. We'd be spending the night at my stepdaughter's house, and we might want to take pictures at some other point during the trip. Since that grandbaby came along, I'm pretty good about remembering the camera.

It turned out that I didn't take any pictures during the trip, but I definitely found myself wishing that it weren't inappropriate to take pictures at a wake or funeral. Maybe that sounds morbid, but I can tell you that I was snapping pictures in my mind, pictures of family at its very best.

If it were proper to record a funeral as we do weddings and birthday parties and every other occasion of our lives, I'd have snapped my sister-in-law quietly slipping into the chair next to her mother after she saw her start to cry from across the room. I'd have photographed my daughter and stepson from the back, her dark head under his blond one, buried in his shoulder as he held her close. My grandson stretched out sound asleep on a bench in the hallway. My future son-in-law whisking his baby out of the room at the first peep, before my stepdaughter was fully out of her chair. My ex-husband's cousin on her knees in the grass, lifting a flower from the casket to hand to her mother. One young man slipping a supportive arm around another. A glass of water or a tissue quietly extended. People I love at their best.

Yes, funerals are sad and solemn, and it would be inappropriate to be snapping pictures. But I'm holding them in my mind, those snapshots of people unselfconsciously loving one another, reaching out to share.

Almost Done Mocking the School District, I Promise

2009-08-20T04:32:00.001-07:00

Well, I can't actually promise. I mean, who knows what the rest of the year holds?

Last week, I mentioned that I'd received an automated call from the school district letting me know that--news flash--my daughter should attend the first day of school. A few days later, I got the same call again, and told my daughter (in my best imitation of the mechanical voice on the line) that teachers would be covering information important to her success for the whole school year on that day.

"They're lying," she said.

I wasn't surprised by her view, given that on the first day of school last year, each of her seven teachers spent the first class session reading and discussing the same four rules. It was like Groundhog Day with a soap-opera-style cast change: the part of the boring teacher is now being played by....

I didn't really need to sell her, since until those calls started coming in we'd both thought it was sort of assumed that students would start school when...you know...school started. More to point out an upside, I said, "They're going to have ice cream."

"No, they're not." She shook her head; her tone was flat, but she looked mildly amused.

"That's what they said on the recording," I told her. "They made a big point of the fact that they're going to have ice cream on the first day."

She shrugged. "But they're not."

I told her I couldn't see why they'd call me up and lie about having ice cream, but I knew what she was thinking. They were lying about the important information, so why not the ice cream?

School started yesterday.

No ice cream.

Seriously. Not even a mention.

Eighth Grade Apparently Has Its Own Language

2009-08-19T15:57:00.001-07:00

My daughter came home from her first day of eighth grade today and told me that she'd met a new girl. She didn't know her name, though, only that she was in "LA2" with her.

"LA2?" I asked.

Pause.

"Language Arts?"

"Yeah," she said. "That's not that hard."

"Okay," I agreed, "but what's the 2?"

"2," she said. "We have it twice."

"Okay, so she's in your LA2 class..."

"Yeah. Well, actually, she's in my LA1 class, too...but LA2 is first."

Fortunately, I didn't have to go any further with that, because it was time to read and sign the rules for science.

For instance, "do not remove animals from the classroom" and "do not taste any materials used in class".

I'm not at all sure the right lessons are being conveyed.

School Prep - Take 9

2009-08-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, my daughter starts eighth grade. Yeah, let's not dwell on that...I mention it only because that means that this week, we've been preparing for the first day of school for the ninth time. Last night, I looked at her new clothes hanging neatly in the closet and her new school bag neatly packed with all the supplies she'll need (for the first 24 hours, until teachers start making their individual demands) and realized that we were Ready. No, really. She could have gotten up this morning and walked out the door to school with no fuss, no stress, no last minute search for anything...and school didn't even start today.

And it only took nine tries.

I should be feeling good, but instead I'm looking suspiciously at her bag and wondering what's going to escape from it and become hopelessly lost before tomorrow morning.

The Overcommitment Hangover

2009-08-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

You know that nagging feeling you get in your stomach when something is hanging over your head that should have been done, when you know that the next time the phone rings it’s going to be the landlord looking for a past-due check or your boss wondering why some project hasn’t wrapped up?

Well, I’ve got it. Thing is, my rent is paid and my work is up to date. My nagging feeling isn’t caused by any dropped balls or time pressure or shortage of cash. It’s caused by the simple fact that I took most of the past two days off. An unexpected sick day followed by an afternoon off for the company softball game was more than I could cope with.

I took my daughter to the game and we had a great time. We ate out on the way home. We went to see Bandslam late, had the whole theater to ourselves, and sang out loud. The popcorn was unusually buttery.

And then when I finally lay down to sleep…nothing. Just that queasy, waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop sense of anticipation about the fallout from all those balls I’d dropped.

I searched my mind. I searched the floor. Nope, couldn’t find a dropped ball anywhere.

There was a time, I’m sure, when I could take a nice, relaxing day in stride. In fact, when my daughter was young and I worked very part-time, most of my days were nice and relaxing. A lot of changes intervened and life got very busy, and for about ten months I went to bed at midnight worrying over what was undone and woke up at 5:00 a.m. (or sometimes 3:30), bleary-eyed and shaky and already feeling behind.

And I forgot how to relax. I forgot how to feel okay about enjoying a day. I forgot what it was like not to cringe when the phone rang, because I knew that there was going to be some wildly unrealistic new demand coming across the wire. But I escaped that job—a victory that feels a lot like having ended an abusive marriage—more than eight months ago. And I’m still in recovery.

I know what’s going on and can name it and try to push it aside. I’m blessed with employers who believe in work-life balance and not only accept but agree with the idea that my daughter is far more important than anything they might ever ask me to do. But I’m still lying down at night with that fear that I haven’t done enough, the feeling that something is wrong just because I’m not feeling any pressure and I’m getting a full night’s sleep.

Magical Cereal - Day 5

2009-08-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

I'm a creature of habit,and one of those habits is that I eat Quaker Oat Bran every morning, with 2% milk and fresh berries. Every morning. You got the habit thing, right? Occasionally, if I'm feeling adventurous, I'll vary the mix of berries.

One day not long ago, I went to the grocery store and they didn't have oat bran. I didn't panic. Okay, I panicked a little, because it seems like the selection of foods in the grocery store gets smaller every week, while the shelf-space dedicated to a single variety of a single brand mushrooms. But I took a few deep breaths and decided to try Kellogg's All Bran. Just until I could find Quaker Oat Bran somewhere else, mind you. This was an interim measure, not a life change.

You're probably thinking that this little cereal crisis isn't really worth mentioning, and I would agree with you if I hadn't, just yesterday, read the back of the box.

Kellogg's All Bran is going to make me HAPPIER.

I kid you not; it's guaranteed. In just ten days.

Although ten days seemed ambitious, I didn't take issue with the assertion that their cereal was going to make me feel lighter and healthier. It has a boatload of fiber in it, and I'm a big fan of fiber. "Happier" gave me pause. The kind of pause that makes a person wonder whether the FDA or the Department of Agriculture is aware of these claims.

My daughter, of course, is the princess of positive spin. When I first pointed this out to her she said, "Maybe it works. Maybe it's like exercise."

This morning, on day 5, I said to her, "Well, my cereal hasn't made me any happier, but I lost two pounds overnight," and she said, "And that makes you happy, right?"

SHE makes me happy. I'm thinking that maybe I should label her with a 10-day promise, since there is apparently no regulation of that kind of thing.

But I'm still skeptical about the implication of the quote at the bottom of the box, which seems to suggest that Kellogg's All Bran is going to be good for my SOUL. I'll let you know how that works out.

Life on My Own - Day 4

2009-07-22T16:05:00.000-07:00

Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic. My daughter is only gone for two weeks. But it's THE LONGEST SHE'S EVER BEEN AWAY IN HER LIFE.

I'll be honest. As much as I dreaded her going, Sunday and Monday were a bit of a revelation. I'd entirely forgotten how easy life is when you have no one to think about but yourself. I'd forgotten what it was like to eat whatever I wanted, and to do it when I was hungry rather than at a pre-determined meal time. I'd forgotten what it was like to clean something and have it stay just as I'd left it. Most of all, I'd forgotten what it was like to be able to wander freely without thinking about how long I'd been gone or whether someone was looking for me/waiting for me/had been home alone too long/needed a ride somewhere/etc., etc., etc.

It was nice.

And then came Tuesday.

To be honest, I was still feeling pretty good on Tuesday. I worked all day at Panera--had a cinnamon roll for breakfast and some cream of chicken and wild rice soup for lunch, reading and writing on a comfy couch in front of the unseasonal but welcome fire...and then, suddenly, mid-afternoon, I had a thought.

The thought was: It's Only Tuesday.

But through the magic of technology, I'm doing okay.

I got to "watch" when she and her brother helped their dad around the Indiana Ghost Doctors office:
Well, they were AT the office, anyway.

And when she and her sister did each other's hair at Beth's apartment:

And nails:

It's not all bad. I'm off to eat a quiet dinner of foods I love and Tori won't touch and watch a movie I wouldn't want her to see...but I don't know how mothers managed before text messaging.

How Times Change

2009-07-11T14:34:00.000-07:00

In less than an hour, we'll be leaving for our third Jonas Brothers concert, and Tori is upstairs watching Harry Potter.

This is exactly why, in February of 2008, I spent $353 on two Jonas Brothers tickets. They were a twelfth birthday present and, as I wrote then, I suspected that her days of wonder were nearly over. A year and a half later, I'm not so sure that those days ever end--at least, not for everyone. But each wonder-inspiring moment, I think, has a small window.

Once upon a time, my daughter said in wonder, "You took me to the BEACH?" Once, Don Lee's Wild West Town was an adventure for her. Once, she was delighted to spend her day throwing worn wooden balls in the skeeball room at Indiana beach with me, and I was exactly the person she wanted to have water balloon fights with and chase down the water slide. And once, she was so excited at the prospect of seeing the Jonas Brothers live that she screamed and stomped her feet and danced in circles. And, of course, called her friends to announce, "OMG MMR!"

Once I spent my lunch hour ironing "I love Nick Jonas" onto a red t-shirt because she'd realized that she had no appropriate attire for the concert, and she spent the days leading up to the show covering the living room floor entirely in Jonas Brothers pictures. Today, she's wearing pink shorts with a white t-shirt, black tights and hightops, and watching a Harry Potter movie for the dozenth time. Nonchalant, detached, strangely dressed...like a teenager.

And I, of course, am not dying to see the Jonas Brothers for the third time. But it's all good, because thus far there's always some new object of wonder around the corner.

"Paybacks" Are Actually Quite Lovely, Thank You

2009-07-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Part of this post is undoubtedly a rerun. It's one of those things that rises up to touch me again every summer, and whenever it does, I can't resist talking about it.

This afternoon, I went to meet my daughter and her friend at a local pool. The other girl's mother had taken them while I was still working, and at 5:00 I got changed and headed over to meet them. My late arrival afforded me the opportunity to watch from across the room as my daughter grabbed her friend's hand and the two of them took a running leap into the pool. A little later, returning to the pool, she simply stepped off the edge and dropped into the water.

Yeah, I know. You're probably wondering what the big deal is, especially if you know that my daughter is 13.

This is it: the summer my daughter was five, she was so eager to learn to swim that she was practically quivering with it. She, like me, loved the water passionately, and she couldn't wait to swim. I signed her up for lessons and on the first day they lined up along the edge of the pool and the teacher said, "Okay, let's get in the water..." and Tori popped off the edge and straight to the bottom. By the time I reached the edge of the pool, she was safely back on the side, but sobbing. When I asked her what had happened she said, "I drowned."

For the rest of that summer, her craving to get back in the water warred with her terror. She resolutely got ready to go to her lesson each week, but could never bring herself to get in the water. In between, we went to the pool every day, and though she stared out at the water with longing, it was a solid month before she moved off the stairs...and then only to allow me to carry her a few steps out into the water, while she clung to me with what seemed like more arms and legs than I'd known she possessed. It was the end of the summer before she'd allow me to hold her at arm's length in the water, and the weather was turning before she relaxed enough to ride on my back while I walked through the water. Even then, she clenched her little arms so tightly around my neck that sometimes I had to carry her back to the safety of the side just so that I could get a few good breaths.

But every day, she asked to go swimming.

The next summer she steeled herself to jump from the side of the pool into my waiting arms, most of her body never reaching the three-foot-deep water. Slowly, ever so slowly, we edged forward: she'd jump in holding my hands, then just one hand. She'd ride on my back while I swam across the pool in shallow water. She'd hold on to the side and kick if I stayed next to her, and then if I didn't. We edged our way all the way to today, when she splashed laughing into the pool at the bottom of the water slide, oblivious to my presence.

In the greater scheme of things, I suppose it doesn't matter much that my child is happy in the water, but I have a moment like this every season, when I see her laughing and confident in the water and am overwhelmed with the feeling that it was just SO WORTH IT to sit on the steps of that pool for an hour every afternoon and not push her to go any further.

So much of parenting seems to be about second-guessing ourselves. We want to be so much for and offer so much to our children that it's inevitable that we're going to fall short, and the small mistakes and missed opportunities often loom much larger than the successes. But every summer there is at least one moment when I sit by the edge of a pool or on the sand at a beach--once even at the edge of the ocean--and am reminded of the things I've gotten right.

That Stuff We Used to Drink at Your Grandmother's House

2009-06-27T23:09:00.001-07:00

I overheard that phrase when my daughter was on the telephone the other day. She tends to talk on speaker, in the room with me, so eavesdropping is almost mandatory. In fact, it's not unusual for her friends to ask whether they're on speaker and then address something to me. A couple of days ago, I just caught this reference to "that stuff we used to drink at your grandmother's house" from a girl who moved out of state two years ago. It turned out to be Ovaltine.

It made me smile. I could picture the girls, back in fourth and fifth grade, sitting in my mother's kitchen and drinking chocolate Ovaltine. It was funny that something so universal should be specifically associated in her mind with my mother's house. And I liked that this child, who's had a tough life since she moved away, had such clear memories of those days. But I was also reminded of a conversation with one of my childhood friends.

We were in our early thirties, at the grocery store together, when I spotted Necco wafers and reached back to grab them. She said she'd never had them. "Impossible," I scoffed. "There's no way that you were around my father all those years and never had a Necco wafer." I tried to describe them, to no avail. She'd never seen them, heard of them or tasted them.

Later that afternoon, I cracked open the roll and offered her one. A pink one. No sooner had she popped it into her mouth than her eyes widened. "We used to eat these in the convertible!" Indeed we had, a full three decades earlier, sitting up on the back of the backseat in the years before common sense and seatbelt laws. It wasn't the only conversation we had like that, either. One lazy summer Sunday morning as we contemplated brunch she asked, "Do you know how to make those eggs?"

And I said, "yes". With no elaboration, at least 25 years after we'd last eaten them together--and as far as I could recall, we'd never discussed them before--I knew that she was talking about the fluffy baked omelette with deviled ham inside that my father had made when we were children.

It made me think about the way we're forming memories in all of the little, seemingly meaningless things we do with our children, or that they do themselves. I'm sure that my friend never sat at my parents' table and thought "I'll remember these eggs for the rest of my life." My daughter and her friends just drifted through the days, carefree and taking each moment as it came, like children should. Did they know that the day they tangled themselves up in yarn in the front yard would stick in their minds for years to come? That my daughter would know years later what song they had on repeat the day they sat on lawn chairs on the back patio and read Girl's Life together?

I suspect not. Yet somehow, it's these ordinary pieces that form our lives, our memories, and our relationships. And in a way, that's a relief--because it's easy, as a parent, to get caught up in trying to make memories. It turns out, they take care of themselves while we're just living everyday lives.

Okay, Michael Jackson is a Freak and Everything...

2009-06-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

but dead? Seriously? Come on.

It was bad enough when I heard this morning that Farrah Fawcett was dead. I was 10-12 during the Charlie's Angels years, so in my mind she'll always be frozen in time, racing after a bad guy in high heels and a bikini with a gun in her hand and sharing significant looks with other beautiful women.

But Michael Jackson--he wasn't just an icon of our youth: he was young with us. We watched him grow up. We watched him gradually turn white and his nose shrink and change shape. We listened to his music nearly as religiously as we voiced our denials.

33 million people bought Thriller in the initial rush, but no one I ever met in my teen years would admit to having purchased it. A few admitted to owning it, but always with a roll of the eyes--they'd gotten it for Christmas from an aunt or their sister had wanted it or they'd found a copy laying on the street and taken it home just because it seemed a shame.

But lie as we might, Thriller didn't rack up a record 7 top-ten songs because nobody was listening to it--and it isn't still making pop-culture appearances in current movies because everyone cringes when they remember it.

"Rock With You" was the skating song of the early 80s--the one where the lights dimmed and swashes of gold swept across the floor. There are certain teenage boys I can still clearly see gliding around the floor to that song. I sang "Billie Jean" in Pizza Hut the night my best friend got me drunk in high school (though it would be 18 years before I found out there had been vodka in the 7-Up and understood why I'd been singing). And, of course, even those of us who couldn't dance to save our lives could recreate the entire "Thriller" video--and did so at the drop of a hat.

I haven't followed Michael Jackson's career as we've both aged, and I wasn't planning to head out for the new tour. But somehow, he was part of the landscape. The "Thriller" scene in 13 Going on 30 made me smile, just like it did when I'd see a clip of "ABC" and a tiny Jackson with his improbable hair on television. And his death came as a shock--so much of a shock, in fact, that I initially thought it was the opening of one of the many Michael Jackson jokes I've heard over the years.

It's strange how you can feel the absence of someone you weren't paying any attention to.

Burning Question of the Day

2009-06-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Why is the Google Chrome logo red, yellow, blue and green?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine - Burning Questions

2009-05-31T19:46:00.001-07:00

This evening, I took my teenage daughter to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I really enjoy being a mom, but one of the iffy aspects of parenting is that you get to see ALL the movies based on comic books and comic book characters. All.

So, of course, I've seen all of the previous X-Men movies, and I must admit that ~~Hugh Jackman~~ Wolverine has always been my favorite character. I was less reluctant to see this one than I was, say, Spiderman 3. I also like to Know Everything, so a line of films tagged "origins" seemed promising to me.

It turned out, though, that the movie raised as many questions as it answered.

For instance, why did the man who WASN'T anyone's father at the beginning of the film look so much like Wolverine?

And were those Hugh Jackman's arms, for real, or did they do that with some of that crazy putty they use to make people look bigger than they are?

My daughter also pointed out that they never really told us how Logan or Victor obtained their powers (or those nifty little retractable claws)--they explained how Wolverine became indestructible and lost his memory, but nothing about his actual ORIGINS, if you will.

And are those Hugh Jackman's real biceps? Because I've never really noticed them in any of his other movies.

We also wondered when Logan became Canadian, since most of the early catch-up scenes had him fighting in American wars (including, apparently, the Civil War, so it's not likely that the Canadians were just backing us up).

And why, if those are Hugh Jackman's actual shoulders, he looks so slight when he's dressed more professionally. Or, you know, at all.

The list could go on, but it feels futile. After all, this was the "origins" movie. It seems unlikely that we'll get another installment called X-Men Even Further Back: Wolverine. Or even The Origins of Hugh Jackman's Biceps.

Turns out I DIDN'T Know What Roses Smelled Like

2009-05-27T11:31:00.000-07:00

If you know me well, you've probably heard me say, "I know what roses smell like...let's move on." I'm a multi-tasker, not much about sitting around and watching the sun set. Maybe, then, it's appropriate that I am at this moment at the Get a Life conference in Chicago (blogging...see, there's that multi-tasking thing).

It's actually a very interesting and entertaining program of legal marketing and practice-management speakers, created around the concept that lawyers needn't actually kill themselves or give up food, water and sleep in order to build successful law practices. And it's been highly informative thus far. But I learned something at lunch that might be even more important.

Different colored roses smell different.

No, really.

You might not think that's a particularly important piece of information, and maybe standing alone it's not. But here's the thing: I'm 42 years old and for years, I've been saying, "I know what roses smell like...let's move on" and it turns out that I DIDN'T. I assumed I knew what roses smelled like precisely because I hadn't ever taken the time to truly smell them before. Now, maybe it turns out that I don't care (that seems likely, at the end of the day), but who knows what else I've been missing?

Today, at a conference designed specifically to remind me of such things, a woman stepped forward and offered me roses to smell. That probably isn't going to happen in most areas of life. Maybe I'd better stop multi-tasking and listen up.

If you're reading this on May 27 or 28, you can too--free streaming video at http://www.totalpma.org/events/get-a-life-2009/live-conference-updates.aspx

Laughter, Hilltops, and Utilitarian Signage

2009-05-25T09:15:00.000-07:00

Last night, I had dinner with a very old friend. Well, she's not THAT old, but we've been friends for a very long time--25 years this August. We're both pretty strong-willed and we've hit some glitches over the years, but one thing that has never changed is the laughter. She's pretty funny--a former stand-up comedian, actually--so I have no idea whether this is a function of some chemistry between us or she makes everyone she comes in contact with laugh non-stop.

Well, that's not entirely true. I'm pretty sure we were only entertaining ourselves the day we returned to our college dorm and earnestly proclaimed our conversion to Hare Krishna ("I know it sounds crazy, but we really listened to these people, and what they're saying made a lot of sense...") or with the tea-time marble ritual. I suspect that it would have been the same last night, when we decided it was imperative that we use brightly colored post-it notes to improve the park district signage. I mean, what good is a map with no "You are here" icon?

But some things are universal. EVERYONE (yes, this means you) should go out at once, find a grassy hill, remove his or her shoes and roll down it as quickly as possible. I know you're skeptical, but I'm really sure on this. Seriously. Take your kids. Lie on your side, stretch your arms over your head, and just roll. Let the momentum build.

My friend was a little skeptical, too--especially about the part where she had to hang her purse in a tree and leave it unattended to climb the hill. But I think she's been converted now. Rolling down a hill barefoot in the cool grass has much more to offer than the Krishnas ever will (no offense to any followers who might happen to be reading this).

There was one somber moment, though...the moment when I noticed this sturdy and utilitarian sign marring the otherwise lovely landscape of the riverbank:

I feared I might be responsible.

In the summer of 1989, I walked that same path late at night with a young man. I don't want to name any names, since he's now a respectable professional with a wife and two kids, a member of my church and (most importantly) my friend on Facebook, where this blog feeds into my notes. But in those days he was best known as guitarist for the dive-bar band Big Daddy Pickle & the Sweet Midgets.

Long after dark, we encountered a yellow and orange sculpture that purely begged to be climbed. It was created in a sort of woven grid--it looked for all the world like a jungle gym. And at its foot was a quaint, hand-painted sign that said, "Please Keep Off the Sculptures". I remember the sign clearly (and not just because I still have it somewhere in my storage unit). It was wood, painted a lovely sea green with pale blue writing on it, and it scarcely disturbed the landscape. I was something of a legalist, though, and when Bruce..errr...the guy I was with...suggested that we climb the sculpture I pointed to the sign. "It says right there..."

Smile.

Shrug.

Snap.

He placed the sign neatly face down in the grass and gestured to the sculpture again. It was, indeed, meant for climbing. Since it was already broken, I took the sign home with me. My mother, never conventional, laughed and said, "That's almost worth getting some sculptures."

This new sign couldn't be removed by human hands. It's much smaller and much more modern, and I'm quite sure those signs would have been updated by now anyway...but I'm willing to give back the original, if they'd like to go back to those quant, hand-painted signs that sat so nicely among the flora.

The best thing in my life...

2009-05-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

is this pear tree:

Okay, that's an obvious lie.

I have, for instance, a fabulously beautiful daughter. I have a job I love working for people I respect and admire--from the comfort and convenience of my own home. In short, I'm Spoiled Rotten.

But this pear tree, somehow, just changes my whole day every time I walk outside. For about half the year, it just looks like a regular tree and I don't pay it much attention. But then one day in spring--and I do mean one day--it blossoms. Suddenly, like an explosion. One day it's green, the next it has a few little spindly things opening up on it and then BOOM...it's a mass of white flowers and perfumes the whole yard.

This year, it bloomed at the end of a full day of rain, so that the blossoms seemed to come out with the sun. They don't last long, but later, of course, there will be pears.

I'll try to eat them when it's far too early, and they'll be hard to bite into and not at all sweet. Later, when the tree is hanging heavy with fruit, I'll be more discriminating, choosing the pears that are exactly right. And toward the end of the season, when fruit is rotting on the ground and bees are circling, I'll have to pull this out:

Pretty rudimentary, yes. You've probably noticed that it's basically a stick with a bent piece of wire hanger attached to it with electrical tape. But it does what I couldn't do for the first three seasons I lived here: pluck the fruit from the uppermost branches while it's still good to eat. Maybe just as importantly, it was a gift from my father, who dropped by on his Harley and witnessed my efforts to reach that fruit one afternoon and came back later that same day with this tool in hand.

Occasionally, I'll look out the front door and see strangers, often families, picking pears. I usually offer them a helpful hint or a bag or the use of my pear picker, not so much because I think they need my help as because it's the most subtle way I can think of to say, "Welcome. Help yourself."

Hm.

I'm starting to think maybe it WASN'T such an obvious lie, after all

I've Kissed 4-6 of My Facebook Friends

2009-04-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier this evening, I announced that I was a little afraid of "Friend Facts" on Facebook. It was serving me up a lot of questions that I just didn't want to think about: "Do you think Angie Rogers (my sister-in-law!) has ever performed a strip tease?" "Do you think Branden May (my NEPHEW, for God's sake!) has ever had a one-night stand?" Straight yes/no questions--nowhere to click "Good Lord, I hope not!" or "Ugh, I don't even want to think about that!" or any such thing.

You can pay "pieces of silver" to discover who said what about you, and a friend suggested that they were just trying to arouse our curiosity and get money. "Ha," I responded. "They're barking up the wrong tree with me." I have, as you probably know, virtually no curiosity.

Later this evening, a Facebook application proved me wrong. It dropped me a little note telling me that one of my Facebook friends had answered "no" to the question "Do you think Tiffany Sanders is a good kisser?"

Now, if this is speculation, I don't care who said it. And, in fact, "no" might have been the quick response of someone who REALLY DIDN'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT. I can definitely identify with that.

Thing is, I've kissed a few of my Facebook friends.

I thought of three right off the bat and considered each in turn.
Two I was pretty sure wouldn't have said that. Pretty sure. Then I remembered that my husband is also my friend on Facebook...so that was four. And raised the stakes a little, since we were together for ten years.

I wasn't quite ready to pay 96 pieces of silver to find out who said it, though.

Okay, I didn't have 96 pieces of silver.

I went to my friends list and scrolled through it and, to my chagrin, found two other men I MIGHT have kissed in my youth.
Give me a break--I'm 42 years old. If it happened, it was more than a quarter of a century ago...can I be expected to remember every little detail? Hell, until I started scrolling through the list, I didn't even remember that my ex-fiance is also my friend on Facebook. (For those of you keeping score at home, that brings us to 5-7, depending on the two "possibles".)

I spent a little time answering questions and racking up pieces of silver, but it was late and I wasn't that committed to finding out--or at least, not to finding out immediately. So I gave it up for the night and turned my mind to other things, and that was when--BLAM!--out of the blue #6 (or 8) occurred to me.

I’m beginning to see what wisdom there would have been in buying 96 pieces of silver and getting the question answered quickly, before I had too much time to think.

What's Wrong with Caterpillars?

2009-04-12T11:47:00.000-07:00

I hate to admit it, but this post is inspired in part by the Hannah Montana movie. See, there's this theme that runs through it (and ties in to Miley Cyrus's latest song) about caterpillars turning into butterflies. This issue was already on my mind because a few days ago I saw a quote that said, in essence, that in order to become a butterfly one had to want to fly badly enough to be willing to give up being a caterpillar...and I thought, "What's wrong with caterpillars?"

Of course, there's nothing wrong with butterflies, either, and I'm all for encouraging those who really want to fly and are willing to put in the work and make the sacrifices and hone their talents and give it their all. But I'm not quite sure everyone should be so willing to throw away the caterpillar life.

On the way home from the movie, I repeated the quote to my daughter. Predictably, she immediately pointed out that the analogy was flawed, because "all caterpillars are meant to be butterflies". But are all humans meant to "fly"? I'm not so sure. Or rather, if we are, I'm not sure that it means what we think it means. And I'm not sure that we have to give up being caterpillars to do it.

Caterpillars, after all, come in various shapes and sizes. Once, when my daughter was 8 or 9, she was looking out an upstairs window and spotted something that sent her running for the front door. It was a big, fuzzy, bright yellow caterpillar--so big and bright that it looked like a dandelion moving across the lawn. She dropped to her knees in the grass and asked softly, "What are you?" and we watched it all the way across the long front lawn. Butterflies had nothing on that guy. What a shame if he'd spent his whole life being dissatisfied with what he was because he couldn't fly, hm?

I've flown; I've been a butterfly. It has its advantages and maybe it's something everyone should experience. But should we aspire to live our lives in the air? I'm not so sure. I think I'm a caterpillar when I'm walking with my daughter in the evening, when I'm making her dinner and taking my mother to the doctor and sitting by the fire in a coffee shop with a friend. I think I'm a caterpillar reading novels on winter Sunday afternoons and sitting here in my not-so-orderly bedroom writing this blog post. I'm a caterpillar when I'm bowling with my kids, or feeding my grandson, or helping a neighbor child with her French homework. And I don't think I want to trade all that in to fly--I think I'm good with the ground under my feet.

Spring Wonderland?

2009-04-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

This morning, we walked out to several inches of soft new snow, beautiful story-book pine trees laced in white, and lovely spring weather. I had to clean off the car to take my daughter to school, but I didn't have to put my coat on to do it. The snow was heavy and packed perfectly and you could hold it comfortably in your bare hands.

My daughter looked around and said, "So...we're in a Barbie movie?"

Rules You Never Thought You'd Have to Make

2009-03-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, when my stepchildren came to live with us, we hit some glitches. They'd been raised differently than we were raising our daughter, and it seemed like almost every day, something would arise that would stun me (who would ever have thought anyone would think that it was okay to....?) and stun them (who would ever have thought that anyone would object to...?)

The result was a video series--a series of brief "television spots" called "Rules You Never Thought You'd Have to Make, with Tiffany Sanders". All of the kids participated in filming, and I dressed professionally and spoke very seriously as host/narrator. We didn't have the technology back then to put red Xs through the bad scene and some kind of cheery encouragement around the good one, but we did it wrong first, then explained the hazards, then did it right. Very exaggerated. The kids sometimes dressed up for their parts, and everyone laughed a lot. Mission accomplished: the message came through loud and clear and was remembered without a lot of yelling and conflict, and everyone had a good laugh.

I was convinced, back then, that there was simply no way to anticipate everything that might arise, that no matter how many rules you made and how many scenarios you played out in your head, there would always be a surprise...a rule you'd never thought you'd have to make.

Until this week, that is. My daughter's middle-school science class made slime this week, out of glue and water and Borax and I'm not sure what else. And one of the boys in her class raised his hand and said, "Can we taste this?"

And without missing a beat, the teacher said, "You signed a contract at the beginning of the year agreeing not to eat anything we worked with during labs."

Spring Cleaning My Life

2009-03-28T22:11:00.001-07:00

Since I knocked off work at about 6:00 p.m. on Friday, I've cleaned up a few things. Some of them were the standard "spring cleaning" sort of thing--I took two Jeep loads of stuff to storage (not that any of it was Christmas stuff that's been boxed up in the corner of my living room for 2.5 months or anything), did a few loads of laundry, bagged up a bunch of stuff for charity, put shelving in my upstairs hallway so that we could keep all of our puzzles and games in one place instead of four different ones (though my daughter always insisted that she knew exactly which games were in which place and it wasn't a problem), filled a couple of garbage bags, bought some plastic file boxes so that I can get my old files out of my file cabinets and into storage, shredded a bunch of paper bills that have been sitting in a stack unopened for months because I pay my bills online, and finally cleared out the materials I was keeping on hand for a job I left over a year ago.

But it wasn't all work. I put out some calls for submissions for my webzine, Rational Outrage. Rational Outrage is a GREAT webzine (and that's not something I'd ordinarily say about something of my own creation), but it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. I pulled out a novel I started in 2003 and re-read the first 18,000 words in preparation for finally digging back in to it. I bought five CDs this afternoon. And, of course, this all comes on the heels of having cut off all my hair last week.

But perhaps the most significant thing I did today was to clean out my tub drain. The tub has been draining more and more slowly for weeks, but...well...who wants to go digging around in there? Who even wants to THINK about what's going on down there?

Today I equipped myself with some tools and some chemicals and dove in. Not literally, of course. I don't want to create the impression that this was an upleasant experience, but when the job was done and I was all pleased with myself and claiming victory, my daughter looked suspiciously at the tub and said, "Now you have to wash it." And so I did.

The last thirty hours or so have been very productive, and in the midst of them all I've managed to watch a movie and last week's episode of LOST with my daughter, spend a little time at my parents' house, do a favor for a friend, and talk to my stepdaughter on the telephone. And I'm not even tired (stand by for massive crash).

There's only one problem.

Since 10:00 this morning, while I've been storing things and throwing things away and hanging up clothes and reorganizing and creating all this great space in my life, I've been piling up things that I wanted to keep but wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with. I've been piling those things...um...on my bed.

And now it's 12:30 a.m., and I've got lots of floor space, but nowhere to sleep.

I guess the next phase of my personal renovation should involve something about PLANNING.

High Score...97

2009-03-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, that's not a test score. It's a bowling score. My stepdaughter's bowling score, to be exact--in our first game this evening, she unfortunately beat her boyfriend, me, my daughter and my stepson with that 97. Our "team" score was 351. That was just the first game, though. I swept the second one with a 132--just 32 pins below my once-upon-a-time average. But I don't think anyone was really in it for the bowling, anyway.

My daughter seemed primarily concerned with snapping pictures of her nephew with her cell phone. We haven't seen him for a few months, and he's changed a lot. Then, she showed him the pictures. I'm not sure he really got it, but it LOOKS like he's paying attention.

The boys had a good time.

But it seems that bowling was hard on the girls. They look more like they're stranded in an airport than out for the evening...

Mommy and baby cheer daddy on (while in the background, daddy falls on his butt as he releases his ball...)

Falling was a big theme of the evening, actually...Shawn tried to scoot over to pose with Andrew and his aunt, but something went wrong...something about only two legs of the chair being on the ground.... There was no alcohol involved in this evening, I swear!

Somebody's worn out at the end of the day.

In all honesty, the "somebody" is probably me--but this little cutie rubbing his eyes when he came in to say goodnight was too good to pass up.

Recycling 101

2009-03-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't about environmentally friendly re-use of products. I'm all for that, but it's not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk about the 80s.

Last night I ran across this link on Twitter. The post begins "You know you grew up in the 80s if...", but an interesting thing happened. See, I didn't exactly GROW UP in the 80s--I started high school in 1980. I expected to have missed a few of the trends, but then, I have a sister who is 8 years younger. I expected to recognize a lot from her days, and that's exactly what happened: SHE had Strawberry Shortcake dolls...SHE watched Fraggle Rock.

But the real winner--the person with the most "yes" responses and therefore, according to this list, the person who "knows" she grew up in the 80s, was my thirteen-year-old daughter (born in 1996).

Thus, I've concluded that the test is flawed. One bit of good news, though: we've decided to have an 80s party this summer, and she's agreed to let ME tweak HER.

PS: Apologies to Gerri for getting her hopes up with the title.

Never Ask a Question...

2009-03-14T00:58:00.001-07:00

if you don't already know the answer. That's a fundamental piece of courtroom wisdom--you simply don't put a witness on the stand and go fishing, because when he answers, the judge and jury and opposing counsel are going to hear that answer, too...and it just might be a grenade.

Of course, there are times when this rule must be disregarded, but they're few and far between. I'm thinking that a middle school drunk driving lesson might NOT be one of those exceptions.

Earlier this week, my thirteen-year-old daughter's health class conducted an "experiment" in drunk driving. In order to simulate the effects of alcohol, they were asked to spin, fast, for a prescribed period of time. Each child was asked to perform the walk and turn test before spinning and then immediately after. They were scored on ability to stay on the line, consistently touching heel to toe, and speed. The lesson could have sent a strong message, but in our case, it didn't work out so well.

You see, once upon a time my daughter was a ballerina. Even before that, she was surefooted as a little mountain goat--at ten months she could stumble and catch her balance and keep walking. The heel-to-toe-straight-line thing was just no big deal for her...straight or "drunk". Zero errors, same speed.

Fortunately, my daughter has pretty good sense. When I pointed out that the fact that she was able to perform that test after spinning definitely DIDN'T mean that she wouldn't be impaired by alcohol, and certainly not that it would be safe to drive, she said: "Well, duh." And I think she meant it.

But you know...this seems like the kind of experiment where you might want to know the results BEFORE you start demonstrating stuff to the kids.

Shoes, Take II

2009-03-10T15:15:00.000-07:00

Some of you may recall that this blog was born because of a pair of shoes...or rather, a couple of shoes that were decidedly NOT a pair. Yesterday, I made the disappointing discovery that my shoe impairment is hereditary.

It came as a shock, to be honest. For me, it was a bit of a stretch to HAVE enough variety in shoes to mismatch them. My daughter is of another world. She has silver shoes and red sparkle shoes, orange sandles and hightops painted with roses. She has shiny cream colored shoes and high-heeled black boots and brown suede shoes with flowers on them. She has paint-spattered tennis shoes and shiny aqua Skechers and...well, you get the idea. She knows shoes. She pays attention to shoes.

Well, except these shoes:

In case you can't tell (since the contrast, admittedly, is nowhere near so dramatic as the contrast in the original shoe post), the shoe on the left is a size 5 1/2 little brown number, and the shoe on the right would be its perfect companion...were it not a size 6 1/2.

My daughter and her friend bought identical shoes for their show choir performance at Disney last week, and we all happen to have shared a hotel room. The result was that, about three days after we returned, Tori noticed that she had brought home the "pair" above. Apparently, another child has a mirror image pair at HER house...

The only piece of good news is that the smaller one is my daughter's, so at least I know she wasn't dancing with that plastic loop with the pointy thing on it inside her shoe. And maybe that she's not QUITE as shoe-obsessed as I had originally feared...

The Great Thing About the Cyber Era

2009-03-08T12:52:00.000-07:00

is that we can force you to watch videos of our kids even without having you over for dinner.

(Of course, on your end, the great thing is that you can just choose not to click...)

Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids

2009-03-06T10:30:00.001-08:00

I usually try to keep the subject matter on each of my many blogs separate, but if you're a parent, please take a moment to check out this post on my social commentary blog: Two Girls, One Cup, and Your Kids.

Last week, as you undoubtedly guessed from the pictures, I traveled across the country with a group of wonderful kids aged 11-14. These are the "good kids"--well-mannered, talented, involved in extracurriculars, kind, good students, good families. What they knew made my blood run cold.

No Time for Words...

2009-03-01T19:43:00.000-08:00

Getting Tweaked at Disney World

2009-02-26T18:55:00.000-08:00

The other day, my daughter got assertive about reorganizing my clothes...the ones I was wearing. She told me that I was a cool mom, but I didn't look like one, and the worst part was that I HAD cool clothes, but I just didn't wear them right.

"I'm going to be tweaking you at Disney," she warned.

I inquired as to why we'd be worried about my clothes to walk around out in the sun all day hundreds of miles from home. She sighed.

"Mom," she said patiently, "there are a lot of hot guys at Disney."

Confusion.

"And you think they won't talk to you if your mother isn't dressed appropriately?"

Another sigh.

"I didn't mean for me!"

That didn't clear things up for me at all. "Why," I asked her, "would I want a 'hot guy' 800 miles from home?"

She rolled her eyes. "You are so not a girl."

I reminded her that when she'd overheard someone suggest that I should start dating again, she'd practically gone into convulsions.

"Yeah," she agreed, as if there were no inconsistency.

"So?" I pressed.

And she signed again. "Hello?" she said, "it's FLORIDA!"

Apparently, I'm going on spring break.

Things I Learned at Panera

2009-02-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

I work from home most days, but today I really needed to be free of distractions, so I decided to get out of the house. I know there's a certain irony in the fact that I needed to leave my own (empty) house to get really focused, but it got me away from the phone, and also away from the usual daily routine of doing fifteen things at once--like answering every email as it came in and keeping a dozen browser windows open and all that.

It worked out very well and I got a lot done, but I also couldn't help overhearing a few things. The first came from a couple of young women who were apparently studying for a test. "Is it considered a muscle?" one of them asked. "Yes, it's considered a muscle." She answered her own question, which was good, because I was stuck back at "considered". I'd previously been pretty sure that something either was or was not a muscle.

The main thing I learned, though, was that most parents are Different From Me.

I really wanted to write that I'd learned that a lot of people shouldn't have children, but different people have different priorities, right? My way isn't necessarily the right way, right? We're all just Different.

The first parent who caught my attention was the mother who said derisively that her 15-year-old was still "watching Hannah Montana and drinking chocolate milk". Please, God, we should all be so lucky. I'm no fan of Hannah Montana (or Miley Cyrus), but I know what's going on out there in the world. If my kid wants to watch G-rated shows on the Disney channel and drink chocolate milk at an age when a lot of kids are paying someone to buy them beer and getting decidedly R-rated in someone's basement, I'm going to be delighted.

That was nothing, though. The next story I heard was a little sketchy, but it related to a boy who apparently had a penchant for violence that troubled mom, so she got him some shooting lessons to kind of give this a productive, disciplined outlet. Admittedly, I didn't catch all the details here--something about that rushing sound in your ears when you go into shock, perhaps--but what I heard was enough to make me want to pull my kid (and all the other kids I know) out of the local school system just in case.

The thing is...this was just one day, in one spot in the midwest. One small thing, one not so small. But it's got me thinking about all of the other conversations out there, all of the moments and thoughts and things unimaginable to me that are going on all around...and the things I think or do or take in stride that others might see the same way.

It's troubling me in a way I can't quite put my finger on. It's something like this: if we can't even agree on whether or not it's a good idea to give your kid a firearm to work out his aggressions with, what hope do we have of finding common ground on the laws and the wars and the troubles that plague our streets?

Not Enough Hours in the Day

2009-01-05T22:19:00.000-08:00

There's too much that I want to do.

I suppose that's true for most of us; life is busy and the necessities take up most of the front seat for a lot of us. For me, though, it's a bit of a revelation. If you know me, or you're a regular reader of this blog, then you probably know that for the past three and a half years, I haven't even had time to think about what I wanted to do.

First my mother had heart surgery and then my daughter had a very rough time adjusting to the move, and then I went back to work full time for the first time since she was born (complete with 3+ hour round-trip commute) and then I ended up in the hospital and then I changed jobs and ditched the commute only to find myself working 90-100 hours/week...and in all that time, I didn't have the energy to want anything. Of course, in the moment, I didn't know that was just the fact that my mind and body were already stretched to the breaking point. And maybe it's just as well. Maybe, in fact, it's some kind of survival mechanism. Because while it was going on, I didn't feel like I was missing anything. There wasn't a book I was eager to read; I didn't wish that I had time to travel. Friends asked me to get together and I thought they must be crazy, thinking I'd have energy for something like that.

I should be asleep now--getting a full night's sleep is one of the perks of my new job. But I'm too busy to sleep. It isn't anything dramatic that's keeping me up...I didn't suddenly recall a passion for nightclubs or a desire to try rock climbing. It's the backlog of little things that I'm suddenly discovering a desire for: I'm exploring social networking sites, but I'm in the middle of an excellent book that I'm eager to get back to. I had a great chat online tonight with a dear friend from high school whom I haven't seen in years, but that took up the time I'd intended to use to return another friend's New Year's call. I want to finish editing my novel and send it out; I want to write a new one. I'd love to take the wonderful book I'm reading and head off for a long bath...but maybe a nice cup of black cherry tea and some writing? I have a long email to write; an article for my webzine that's going to require some research. I have friends in three directions I'd like to plan to see, and my grandson is growing like crazy without me along yet another road.

I'm reminded of college days when I sat up too late, reading and writing and talking. In those days, though, too little sleep was easily shaken off, or pushed aside with caffeine. I grew old while I was busy, and so sleep I must...but as I prepare to set the computer aside and lie down, my eye is on that book. Maybe just a few more pages...

The Night the World Didn't End

2008-12-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

Just half an hour from the new year, I find myself thinking back to the moment we passed out of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. In fact, I've been thinking about that moment quite a lot today.

The world, you may recall, was projected to end that night...or if not to end, to be transformed into something we'd never anticipated and wouldn't know how to live within, a place without electricity and other services we'd come to think of as necessities (all because someone back in the sixties or seventies forgot that there would one day be a 21st century when he was programming the world's computers).

Despite the impending collapse of our infrastructure, my husband and I took our kids downtown to First Night. First Night apparently occurs all over the country, and is a bit different everywhere, but our version that year included ice sculptures and street musicians, puppet shows, bands, hot chocolate, story time, live animals...something for every age. Our kids were three, seven and nine, and so we bounced from children's stories at the library to live animals to art. Then my sister and her boyfriend joined us, and we threw some live music into the mix.

My sister had a boyfriend then that I loved; he and my husband were friends. Ten years after their breakup, my daughter still calls him "Uncle Matt"--she called him that at his wedding two summers ago. We were at the animal show when they walked in, some amazing specimen of big cat on the stage seeming far too powerful for the small room, and my sister took my breath away. Eyes wide and dark from across the room, in a brand-new gray wool coat over head-to-toe black, she was so beautiful that she momentarily eclipsed everyone and everything else in the room.

At midnight, the seven of us walked out onto the bridge over the river and watched fireworks in the snow. I remembered, while hundreds of people in the street counted down to the new year, that it was all supposed to implode at midnight, and I couldn't have cared less. If the world was going to end, I couldn't think of a better time or place for it, happy children warm in our arms, eyes toward the sky, my husband and my beautiful little sister at my side. If the world was going to end, I couldn't think of a better note to go out on.

Of course, life went on. The wide-eyed nine-year-old who had never seen an ice sculpture before is a mother this New Years, the boy who lay down on the chairs in the animal show is in high school, and my baby in her father's arms on the bridge will be thirteen in just a few weeks. Sometimes that makes me smile and sometimes it makes me sad--but never has a New Year's Eve passed since that I haven't remembered that moment on the bridge.

The Best Thing that Happened to Me This Christmas...

2008-12-25T07:40:00.001-08:00

was that I got my car stuck in a snowbank.

It's no secret that I'm no fan of Christmas, and even on the "I could really live without this holiday" spectrum, this one is falling pretty low. My mother was sick for the couple of weeks leading up to Christmas and ended up cramming all of her shopping into a couple of terrible weather days just before Christmas. I'm really stressed about something important at work, and the temperature was well below zero during the week leading up to Christmas, and my Christmas tree was in storage. All around, it just wasn't going well--nothing catastrophic, but thejoyo of the season was lacking. Even my daughter, a holiday junkie, said a few days ago, "It's just NOT Christmas."

Of course, not being Christmas would have been all good with me, except that none of the stress or expense or running in a thousand directions went away just because it didn't seem like Christmas. By Christmas Eve morning I was encouraging myself with the fact that it was all going to be over any day and we could go back to normal.

In fact,when I headed out yesterday morning, I wasn't feeling too bad. The weather was, finally, beautiful. The snow was deep and soft and I was off on my last errand--one that wouldn't take l long at all.

Ha.

But here's the thing. Within minutes of my getting stuck, a neighbor I've never met came over to help, and he stuck it out to the bitter end. Then a complete stranger stopped and offered to help push--a stranger in a $60,000 car who I'd never have expected to get out and push a Neon out of a snowbank. Then my landlord arrived to shovel (a bit too late, I think) and started digging out UNDER my car. Then my dad came, and when he found that he couldn't pull the car out with his Jeep, he called a friend with a 4 x 4 truck...who showed up in minutes and yanked me out like he was plucking an apple off a tree.

In the end, though I felt bad about the time it had eaten up for all of these other people and all of their efforts, I was feeling like the time had been better spent than if I'd just hopped off to the store, because I was really overwhelmed by the sense of community and giving, and even by the teamwork among these people who didn't know one another and came together to solve my problem.

I was really starting to think that I DID dimly remember what Christmas was supposed to be about, after all.