Alex's Self-Portrait

 
 

Bad Influence in Recovery

You never know what your children are going to turn into a prop when they replay the tapes and mimic their mother pretending to be an imaginary lady in a brick house with plastic ornaments in her garden who smokes Pall Malls.

Skye and Alex picked up their spelt sesame stick snacks, held them between their fingers, at the webbing between their middle and index fingers, (so I know they're not going to be smokers because smokers never hold their cigarettes that close to their palm - what a relief!) and they practiced saying what a smoker would say.

"Does anyone have a cigarette? I sold mine." (Skye)

"Can you direct me to a telephone?" (Alex)

"Mitsy, how ever DO you get coffee stains out of carpet?" (Alex doing Mommy doing imaginary lady who smokes Pall Malls)

I saw how into it they were, Skye had four spelt sesame sticks in front of him. Alex had the same soggy one he kept puffing on over and over for each line he delivered. His mannerisms were impeccable.

I know Alex will never smoke. But my ears perked up when Little Skye used the word "cool" twice. Oh m'God! I'm such a bad influence! Backpedal! Backpedal!I broke out the You'd-Better-NEVER!-Do-You-Hear-Me?-NEVER!!-Smoke-Cigarettes! speech which included the gory details on the damage smoking does to ones' lungs, and the dangers of second hand smoke.

Then perhaps I got carried away and began giving them scenarios for the future: "What would you do if you got in a car and your friend lit up a cigarette?" I wanted them to say "I'd get out" or "I'd tell them not to smoke". But instead Alex, who doesn't like walking two blocks home from the bus stop, said "Well, I wouldn't get out of the car....."

I said what my parents said during their "Don't-ever-get-in-the-car-if-the-driver-has-been-drinking-
DO-YOU-HEAR-ME?" speech. I told him "Well, if you're just at the high school, you can walk home. If you're farther than a mile, call me and I'll come get you."

They ate their cigarettes and carried on. No more questions about directions to a pay phone or how to get coffee stains out of carpet. What worried me was when was cleaning up afterward and found Skye's secret spelt sesame stick collection he'd cleverly stashed!

My Cigarette Butt Collection

Some kids collect seashells, cars, rocks, marbles, trophies, baseball cards, coins. Most kids collect things they’re proud of. Things they can display on a shelf. Collections that are not just a toy to share with other people but conversation pieces. They can bring them to school for show-and-tell, spread them out for other people to pick over, admire and wish they were the lucky ones who found all those neat things.

Not me. My collection was top secret. I definitely wouldn’t have left it sitting out. My sisters would see it and tell my mom and I'd wind up in a meeting in my parent’s room to get to the bottom of it. "Why!! Why do you have cigarette butts in your closet!! Are you smoking!?? You’re only ten years old, for Christ’s sake!!!"

I kept my butts hidden in the pockets of the plastic shoe caddy that was nailed to the inside of my closet door. I put shoes in over top of them so no one would find them. I’d find myself sometimes pulling out the cigarette butts, examining them, holding them between my two fingers pretending to be the person who absentmindedly smoked this cigarette all the way down to the filter or this person who only smoked half of it because they were in a hurry. I had all the mannerisms worked out. Their voice. Their vocabulary. What they thought about when they were smoking the cigarette. Where they were going and why they dropped their cigarette right there in the parking lot of the A&P.

My collection started out of the blue one day when I was waiting for my mom to finish her grocery shopping at the A&P. I got tired of waiting in the car so I started walking from the car to the sidewalk in front of the laundromat. On the way I noticed the cigarette butts on the asphault. There were quite a few. People tended to throw their cigarettes out in the parking lot before entering the store. The cigarette butts worth keeping were found closest to the storefronts because they were less likely to have been run over by a car. I didn’t want the flat ones. The stories were squashed out of them. I wanted the ones I could hold between two fingers. The ones that still had life in them.

I bent over and picked them up, as if I was picking up a penny, and I slipped them into my pocket quickly before anyone saw me. I was, after all, breaking several societal rules. 1) I was underage; 2) My parents would kill me; 3) I was picking up garbage off the street that was in someone else's mouth. There would be questions to answer and I didn’t have any answers. I didn’t stop to ask myself why I collected them. I just collected them. Did the kids with the baseball cards have to have a reason why they collected baseball cards? Did marble collectors have to defend their marbles? "That marble was in someone else’s hand! Yuck!" No. That never happened to them. But I knew with my collection, it could happen and I knew I could avoid all questions and thus never have to preplan my lie in case I got caught because I had a really good hiding place for my collection.

When I hit the jackpot was the time I found a cigarette that had a beige plastic filter attached. Someone who really likes to smoke makes the effort to buy all the accoutrements. When I found a cigarette lighter in the parking lot, that was a lucky day, too. Especially if it hadn’t been run over by a car yet and it still had a little juice left. It encouraged me to find cigarette butts that had a little more than an inch of tobacco in them so I could have something to light and hold and really pretend I was the lady with the red lipstick who smoked Pall Malls.

She probably lived in a brick house with plastic ornaments like ladybugs and bumblebees in her garden. And faded plastic flowers and a front porch about four feet wide, covered in that thin green indoor/outdoor carpet that you find at the miniature golf course. She probably talked to her neighbors over coffee and said things like "Mitsy, what ever do you use to get coffee stains out of carpet?" She'd use her cigarette hand to gesticulate, and when she listened to Mitsy's advice she'd hold her cigarette between her lips and say "mm-hmmm" then she'd blow the smoke away from Mitsy's face and put her cigarette out in the ashtray with several gentle taps on the end, smothering the hot tip into the remaining butt until the smoke ceased curling up and around her fingers.

I categorized the cigarette butts the same way any child would categorize their marbles or their seashells. In order of popularity, there were non-menthols. They were usually generic brands such as Kent, Parliament, Viceroy, Barclay. There were menthols. Kool and Newport, usually. Cigarette butts with lipstick and cigarette butts with the plastic handle. There were brown cigarettes. The brown cigarette butts and the plastic filter cigarette butts were the rarest finds. The most common cigarette butts were flattened, stepped on and twisted apart sometimes, but usually flattened with tire marks. They were so common that they weren’t of any value. Cigarette butts with no filter at all or sucked on so hard that the filter was a dirty amber were of no value either.

It was the sort of collection that got me thinking about things larger than just my world but the lives of strangers. It got me to think about the weather. If it hadn’t rained in a four or five days then it would be a good day to collect. It took a few days for fresh, unrained upon cigarette butts to appear. The number one rule was to never pick up a wet cigarette butt. They stunk to high heavens. You couldn’t get that smell off your fingers or your jeans pocket until you washed them. You definitely don’t want wet butts in your closet. Only pick the best ones. As your collection grows, you develop a trained eye for detail and can weed out the substandard butts. That’s what makes a good collection.

Exceptions for the use of "scum" in a six-year old's vocabulary

ALPHA SCUM!!!!! DON'T JUMP!!! You have your whole life ahead of you!!!!

Scene I

Commander: [In an exasperated tone, as if he's had to correct Alpha Scum's behavior for the 19th time] "Alpha Scummmmmmmm!"

Alpha Scum: "ooo-kaaaay"

POW!

Alpha Scum: "Huh?"

Commander: "Space attack!"

ee-ee-ee-yaa-yaa [Alpha Scum and Commander are taking a beating]

Alpha Scum [is attacked from behind]: "Huh?"

Commander [falls forward from the blunt force of his attacker]: "Uh!"

eeee-eee-eeee-yuuuu-yuuu-eeee-eee-eee [sound effects of space attack as Alpha Scum and his Commander battle it out with their attackers] They make it out of the battle in one piece.

Commander: "Let's go!"

Alpha Scum: "Okay!"

shweeee [sound effect of wind as they travel through space to their next drama mixed with music that's a cross between Star Wars and an amateur practicing musical scales]


Scene II

Space monkeys show up where Alpha Scum is laying down on the planet's surface due to exhaustion from repeated unsuccessful attempts to jump through a force shield.

Narrator: "They turn off the engines because they don't know how to land because they don't know how to fly this thing because they're monkeys and they come down on an astronaut."

Alpha Scum: "Blue blistering barnacles! What did you do that for!"

Space Monkey [gets out of his spaceship]: "What do you have that rip in your space suit for?"

Alpha Scum: "Because you landed on me!"

Space Monkey: "Oh."

More music as Space Monkey and Alpha Scum try to move past the new planet's force shield. They are both unsuccessful at jumping up and over the force shield.

They look at each other, shrug their plastic shoulders.

Space Monkey [turns to Alpha Scum]: "What in the world do you wanna do?"


The End


......... Alpha Scum met his demise at the jaws of Maggie ............

My Dog Has Road Rage

Maggie was a rescue dog. We rescued her from Petland and they rescued us from spending $900 on something MORE PRACTICAL!!!

Don't get me wrong, she serves a great purpose. And in spite of being a caprophogous, not-quite-but-(we pray to God) almost-house-trained mutt, the boys love her. Skye loves having someone younger and smaller than him to boss around when he walks in the door from a hard day at kindergarten and Alex loves her because "When you look into Maggie's face, it's therapy." I enjoy Maggie for both those things as well.

Big Skye likes to come home to Maggie, after managing engineers all day, because she is smart and trainable. He likes to unwind with Maggie every evening at the dog park. It's their ritual.

My rituals usually are around the children and their rituals, and Maggie has found her way to fit in there. From Maggie's perspective, the ritual goes like this:

"Every morning before the sun comes up they start turning on lights and banging around in the kitchen, interrupting the dreams I have where I'm JUST ABOUT TO CATCH, actually CATCH, a squirrel and wrestle it to the ground. They let me out to pee if they feel like it. They feed me breakfast if they remember. They let me out to poop as if I have leprocy. They give me a bisquit everytime I come back in and they talk baby talk in goofy voices, leaving out prepositions, verbs, pronouns. I have no idea what they're saying. It's as if they've just learned how to talk: "good outside Maggie!". It doesn't matter what the weather is like. It's always good outside Maggie to them. It could be 20 degrees and windy as hell and still, "Good Outside, Maggie!" When I hear that baby talk weather report I know I get a bisquit. When I don't, I won't. I have no idea how to make them stop using that baby talk but if it gets me a bisquit I guess I'll put up with it."

Maggie has still not made the connection: Pee/Poop Outside -> Baby Talk -> Bisquit. She hasn't noticed this: Pee/Poop Inside -> No Baby Talk -> No bisquit -> Put in Crate. We have no idea how long the process will take. Pavlov left no instructions for dogs that have been in pet stores too long.

But long after it works, even after she's wider than she is long, we'll make sure to always reward her with compliments "Good Girl! Good Outside!" and so far it seems to be working. So far, that is, if we keep the half of the house that she preferred to use as her toilet off limits and no one takes their eyes off her after the crunch, crunch, crunch noise from under the table ceases. Soon as she saunters off to a quiet place and starts sniffing we shew her outside and beg her repeatedly to poop outside. I think she's finally understanding "C'mon, Maggie. It's freezing out here!"

Other than this behavioral problem that we blame on Petland for not teaching her to go OUTSIDE during her first three months of life, we just adore her and more and more she has become a member of the family who wants to go everywhere we go.

When it's the time of day for the "get Skye to afternoon kindergarten" ritual Maggie sees this as an opportunity to make it a "dog park" ritual. Skye's kindergarten is the same direction as the dog park. But Maggie can't understand that the playground at the school, even though there are lots of little people running all around like dogs, it is not a dog park and she can not get out of the car. More specifically, I will not be made a fool of if she gets out of the car and runs and chases all the kids with me running after her screaming "MAGGIE COME! MAGGIE COME!", changing my voice to sound more "I really mean it!", more "in command", more "there will be consequences!" if she doesn't. Besides when she finally does come, after the 20th COME MAGGIE, she'll army crawl the last three or four feet and then roll over onto her back, showing me her submissive side. You can't beat your dog when they're doing the right behavior and you can't catch them to beat them when they're doing the wrong behavior. (No, I don't really beat her!) If I can't get my dog to listen then what kind of a parent am I!? Bringing an untrained dog to school can only seal my reputation as a "bad parent".

The other morning, Maggie made it very clear that she was going to be part of the afternoon "get Skye to kindergarten" ritual. While we were putting on our coats, she kept jumping up and biting at our sleeves, trying to tell us something. She didn't just do it to me, she did it to Skye too. So we said "Okay, Maggie. You can come."

She hopped in the car and we began driving toward the school. Maggie was hyperventilating. This was too good to be true! It was a gorgeous sunny day and she was going to get to run around and play! Or so she thought. I was playing it forward in my mind how we were going to get Skye out of the car while keeping Maggie in and I began to strategize out loud. I said "Little Skye, when we get there. Don't open your sliding door because Maggie will jump out and start chasing kids all over the playground and then I'll have to chase her all over the playground and it will be a nightmare. Don't open your door until I have her nice and tight. Okay?"

"Okay. But she's on me and she won't move."

"Well, let go of her so she can come up here."

"I'm not holding her. She's sitting on my shoulder."

I cocked the rearview mirror and sure enough, she overheard us and she did some strategizing of her own! But I was saved by the bus.

If we leave the house at noon exactly we can get ahead of the special needs bus but any later and we get stuck behind it when it stops to pick up a special needs child three houses away from the school driveway.

This unexpected traffic jam foiled Maggie's plans. She couldn't contain herself anymore and jumped down from Skye's shoulder and up to the front seat to see "WHAT'S THE HOLD UP, HERE!!!" She anxiously pounded her front paws on the dashboard. There didn't appear to be any logical reason for this inconvenience. Maggie didn't see the little boy walking two inch steps down his driveway ever so slowly toward the bus. Cars were backed up, four or five, behind us. This kid was taking tiny steps and Maggie was pounding on that dashboard, testing the limits of the airbag deployment until she couldn't bare the anticipation any longer and barked at the bus "MOVE IT YOU BIG YELLOW THING!" Oh wait, she can't see colors. "MOVE IT YOU BIG THING!"

Before she continued barking, thus building up an obsession to bark at any and all future busses in her life's path, I talked her down and stroked her fur. She was inconsolable. Three car lengths away from the school playground and here she was STUCK IN TRAFFIC! She was so rattled that she'd forgotten her plan to slip out when the sliding door opened and Skye got out. She burst at the seams when she missed her chance and when we passed dogs whose owners were taking their dogs out, she went over to that side of the car and whined, practically pointing so that I knew what she meant. "You see that dog? How come I can't be with that dog right now, running outside on this gorgeous day?"

I had been in bed the day before with a virus that knocked me out. I didn't have the energy to take her around the block so I got on the bike, held the leash with my curb side hand and she got her chance to run. She ran so hard I didn't have to peddle. Only reason I did was I thought someone would call Animal Control because I was making my dog pull me. I haven't familiarized myself with the puppy labor laws so I fake peddled just to for looks.

Bioengineered Math

Alex came home with some math homework. It was multiplication. It didn't look like multiplication. It didn't act like multiplication. It wasn't any multiplication Mrs. Stewart taught us in third grade, in 1971. And that's because IT ISN'T REALLY MULTIPLICATION!!!

Math in the United States has gone the way of agriculture in the United States. It's all bioengineered. The soymilk in your fridge is made of genes from petroleum, insects, pigs and strontium-90. So you're really getting the four basic food groups in one glass of milk. But do you really want all that for breakfast?

Everyday Math is also bioengineered to "look" like math but really it's not math at all. It's a genetic combination of (and this is no slight on Muslims)the Koran, the Sunday crossword puzzle, a bad dream and mercury poisoning. The Koran and the Sunday crossword are perfectly fine on their own. But cross pollinating them with other plants or combining them with other compounds is unwise. The results are not safe for children and yet we're exposing our children to bioengineered math every day at public schools across America.

For example,
this is how our children are taught to multiply:
56
x30
_____
1500
+180
_____
1680

"Did you follow that? No? What was that? You're wondering why it went left to right up there on the first step? That's what happens when you combine two perfectly fine compounds on their own such as the Koran (religious text read right to left as math should be computed) and mercury (preservative that, if inahled or ingested, screws up your brain!). The problem is, once you combine the 'Koran gene' with a mercury isotope the ionic polarity gets reversed and from there everything goes haywire."

"What about the part where you move the 15, in 3 x 5 = 15, over to the thousands column with two zeros after it?"

"That's the 'Sunday crossword gene'. You trying to run the other way when you attempt to make sense of it is the effects of 'bad dream gene'."

When you put them all together, it's all packaged and sold as textbooks under the label Everyday Math. It's all in the packaging. Call it math and people will really believe that it's math.

The sad thing is, today's children have no idea that they are being fed bioengineered math instead of heirloom math, nor do their parents fully understand the long-term effects, which will probably show up in the balancing of their childrens' checkbooks when they're in college, and in the economy of our country once it takes its final nosedive when these children go into the workforce.

Have the professors at the University of Chicago who invented Everyday Math taken their heads out of their butts long enough to look at our economy to see where the goods and services are coming from? China! Japan! Korea! You nitwits!! WHERE THEY TEACH NORMAL MATH!!! So if we plan on ever surpassing foreign productivity, and regaining what we've already lost, why don't you brilliant professors design a math program that only includes proper math in its natural state so we can build our own cars and televisions and computers and socks and Nike's and everything else we're buying at Wal-Mart that does not say MADE (AND MULTIPLIED) IN THE USA!

When Einstein was a Caveman

"When Einstein was a caveman his name was "Ook-Ook".

"It was?"

"Mm-hmm. But it was spelled 'o-g-o-g'."




You guessed it. This was Little Skye. I think his pondering of famous people could be fortelling. How exactly remains a mystery.

Shopping List: Eggs....milk.... bread.....and a SLEDGEHAMMER!

We had a little disturbance at our house last night that I'm sure will be the topic of future dog walk encounters around the block. This little incident rates right up there with the time when my family lived in Turkey and my sister, Karen, was trying to light the pilot light in our cockroach-laden gas oven. (No cockroaches were harmed in the retelling of this story. However some deserving critters who hadn't skittered away once the oven door was pulled open, probably died when it happened.) Karen, who was 10 or 11 at the time, had suffered quite a shock but no physical injury aside from scorched eyebrows (and that account could be confused with another scorched facial hair incident. Writer's embellishment. If you want scientifically proven, historically accurate facts, start your own blog.)

Attempt after attempt to light the match failed until finally Karen struck it just so and BOOOOOOMMMMM! I didn't know our rotund upstairs landlord could move that quickly but before the final "MMMMM" of the boom finished vibrating the building, her plump little calves made their way down those marble steps and that was definitely her callous fist knocking on our door. We didn't actually see her because we were hiding but when my father opened the door, unmistakably it was her. In a sing-songy, rage repressed voice, she asked "Do you have something to tell me, Mr. Kehoe?!!!!" That has been a punchline we've used anytime there's a loud noise or some other mishap, such as the one we had last night. My neighbors aren't going to ask me if I have something to tell them the same way a landlord would but they are going to be curious.

If they didn't see the huge ladder truck parked out front with the spotlight singling out our house, as if it had done something wrong and was about to be questioned by the authorities, I'm sure they heard the smoke detector alarms, whose volume controls were set on "wake the whole freaking block" rather than simply "wake the people in THIS HOUSE ONLY". The boys and I could hear the alarms from inside the minivan, where we called and waited for the fire department to help us because Skye and I couldn't figure out HOW TO MAKE THAT HORRIBLE NOISE STOOOOOOOOP!!!!! And it was gaining on us.

In our wee-hour unexpected emergency, we couldn't agree on how to handle the situation either. Our wee-hour emergency training is limited to requests for water, food, medicine, comfort after a nightmare, and on rare occasions, fetching a puke bucket. We have highly developed parental sonic hearing and are trained to wake up when a bedroom door creaks opens or when someone is standing next to our bed watching us sleep, hoping we'll wake up and comfort them. We have no proper training that would enable us to think clearly under EXTREME auditory duress.

There was an unacceptable time delay on my part for responding to this particular "emergency". When I heard one detector go off, I knew it was in Little Skye's room and I suspected that it must have been the humidifier that set it off. And I knew it was under control because I heard "Oh shit!" from Big Skye who had been sleeping in Little Skye's bed with him and had probably just fallen asleep after Little Skye called him in because he'd had a bad dream. I figured "how many sleepy parents does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" and I rolled over. But when a second alarm went off it was my turn to say "Oh, shit!" and fumble into action. I ran around the house looking for an object to wave at the smoke detector in the hall outside Skye's door. I finally found the rug that all the shoes were on at the front door.

So there we are. Skye, in his birthday suit waving his arms frantically at the detector in little Skye's room. Me in the hallway waving a rug as if trying to hail down an airplane because we're stuck on a deserted island. The noise was unbearable and our efforts were futile. Alex left his room with his hands over his ears when his detector went off, too. This noise was like a virus, spreading throughout the house. I grabbed a stool and was trying to pry a detector from the ceiling to yank it from its power source but Big Skye thought that would upset the detectors even more. He made me get down. I couldn't listen. I had to run to the source. The fuse box.

When we had the kitchen renovated, the city code requires the electrician to install electric smoke detectors throughout the house. They have battery backup and they communicate with each other. So if one goes off, it sets all of them off. Another thing we learned that night was that if the power goes off, the batteries will keep them kicking. And kick they did! I was in the basement, flipping the circuit breaker marked "smoke detectors". That set off ALL the alarms in the entire house. There was no place to go to get away from the noise and that's when Big Skye ordered me to take the kids out to the minivan while he got clothes on and he fought the wild beasts alone.

Eventually the ladder truck showed up and six, count them, six firemen filed up to the house where I gave them the lowdown.

"The humidifier in my son's bedroom set off the smoke detector. They're electric. So they all went off and we can't figure out how to make them stop!"

"Are you sure there's not a fire?"

"I checked every room."

No one of them looked as frazzled as we were. They didn't even look tired. They looked refreshed, calm, and heroic. They filed into the house and straight to the back where the bedrooms are. Then spread out from there. I was at the end of the line and paused in front of Skye. Somehow in all this "emergency" I found it in me to be silly and held up six fingers to Skye who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen watching this parade walk by of men in blue uniforms plus the clown at the end. Skye looked at my fingers and thumb and the smirk on my face. I wanted to whisper "Six! Our tax dollars at work!" But I refrained because I would have had to yell it in order for it to be heard over the smoke detectors. And knowing my luck I'd yell "SIX! OUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK!" the exact moment that the firemen got the smoke detectors to fall silent. But we had already yelled ourselves out disagreeing on how we should make the noise stop before the hunky firemen showed up.

We argued in voices the smoke detectors overrode about whether to yank them from the ceiling or leave them alone altogether. Skye was in the leave them alone camp and I was in the yank them from the ceiling camp (and beat them with a sledgehammer!)

Turned out it was a faulty smoke detector. The firemen left it on Skye's desk. When Big Skye went in there to check it out, it was still rebelling, trying to bleat a few last outbursts. It was possessed and was making last ditch efforts to communicate with the other smoke detectors "Don't go down without a fight!" In our post emergency assessment we wondered whether we should have also called a priest instead of the fireman. But numbers were important in this situation. I'm sure we couldn't have gotten six priests.

We managed, after all the excitement to go back to sleep. The boys woke up at their usual 7am. Skye and I slept off the adrenaline until 9am. Just after waking he was heading to the store to get some eggs and asked "Is there anything else we need?"

"Yes! Milk...."

"Yea?..."

"Bread....."

"Yeah?...."

"......AND A SLEDGEHAMMER!!!"

Watch Your Step

This is NOT a Stepped in Dog Poop story. It's a lego story. (Although in either case you definitely want to watch your step.)

If Legos could talk, the hundreds of them, scattered about the house, could tell a story of how they got under the coffee table, in the bathroom drawer, on the front porch, in the carseat, etc., etc. I don't want to stop and listen to any of these stories. I just want to vacuum them up. But I don't. I bend my Puzzle Back over and pick up the Lego City on a Cliff called the tub ledge, lego spies hiding in the plant, the lightsaber tucked in the lamp like a motion detector, microchips on the stairs (just to test me), tiny legos imbedded in the rug, in the dog's crate, and on every floor of every room in the house. Not a lot of them, like a big noticeable pile that you walk around, but a couple here and there -- the way bees spread out in clover so you have to watch your barefoot steps, lest you let your guard down on the way to the toilet at night and you..OWWW! Then you don't mind that clanking sound as they reverse-tornado up the vacuum's hose. That's the sound of an accident averted. Music to my feet.

Back when I was trying to be the perfect mother, which dates back to when we only had a few hundred legos, rather than a few hundred thousand, I would avoid sucking up a lego with the vaccum at all costs because back then, if I did hear that clanking sound in the vacuum's hose, dare I admit, I would actually STOP EVERYTHING. You ready for this? I'd open up the vacuum, pull out the bag and...yes, I really did it. I fished my fingers all around that gross grimey dust mite mardi gras until I plucked out the teeny tiny headlight or taillight lego that slipped through inadvertently. It's sort of like drinking so much beer that you puke. You only need to do it once and you never let yourself get that carried away again.

The story of the chewed up Legos needs no telling. "Maggie, no legos!!" The ones on the rug in front of the toilet....Only one person does that. I suspect at some stage in male development, in that gray area when boys become men, they switch over to a newspaper or a magazine but I wouldn't be surprised if the reason he one day in the future creates a job he can do from home is so that he can always have his legos when he has to poop.

He'll find a way to work that in....the way legos always find their way under the couch cushions.

Atlas was Demoted

 
 

Looking into his bowl of cheerios with much thoughtfulness, Skye, who just turned six a day before thinking these thoughts, lifts his head up from his bowl, tilts it back while chewing as if that will help him swallow his large mouthful of cheerios faster so he can ask me the larger question that he has been pondering during each bite. With still a few cheerios remaining in his mouth, he says "I wonder what God's and Jesus' kindergarten was like?"

"I don't know. What do you imagine it was like?"

"I don't know. I think they had to learn how to kill warriors."

After another mouthful and more thoughtful staring into his cheerios as if reading the news he said "Who did God marry?"

In my ten years of parenting I have never been asked this question before and in my unpreparedness, hoping not to be too transparent that I really and truly have no idea who God married, feebly guessed, "Mother Nature?"

Right away he came back with: "I thought she married that guy who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders." As if he'd heard through Dylan, who had heard through Jack, who was told by Noah who saw it in a tabloid at the checkout line at Giant Eagle with his mom.

"Atlas?"

"Yea. Atlas.......Is he still carrying the world?

"No. He was just a Greek god. They made him up. They thought he was so strong and muscular that he could actually carry the weight of the world."

"Oh. I bet he's just a constellation now."

I Hear That Train A Comin'

 
 

I am a Johnny-cravin', puzzle-crazed woman without a doubt. There is no narcotic that compares to putting together 1000-piece puzzles with good ol' Johnny Cash. Whenever I have a huge undertaking to undertake, like getting ready for a birthday party where I OC clean the entire house right down to and including scrubbing the molding behind the beds, and other hidden places only I will know are clean, I assemble a puzzle as a way to harness all my organizing energy.

First, it will take me days to do a 1000-piece puzzle, and the stall time is essential. Because in that time my subconscious mind is plotting out all the little, tiresome, tedious, tasks I'll have to take on the moment the puzzle is complete. Like picking up Legos, for starters.

Second, a good 1000-piece puzzle is DAYS of stall time, a rest period, that is easily mistaken for an avoidance mechanism by unenlightened onlookers, if you can believe that!

There are two hazards, however, of clearing the table, opening the puzzle box and beginning the Puzzle Piece Exploration and Sorting Process. The first is that it is an unstoppable process. You might be able to get away from the table briefly but the puzzle has a way of luring you while you're in the middle of something else, even if that something is sleep. You are under the puzzle's spell which can only be broken once the puzzle is complete. And even then you still have phantom puzzle, which is like phantom limb. You still think it's there, needing you to come over and scratch it.

Second, there is the hazard of Puzzle Back. In the day in day out, night in night out leaning over looking for "that piece", you don't realize just how heavy your skull is but the fulcrum point in your thoracic vertebrae will remind you with a rhythmic pulse, at first. But after day two, the muscles around that fulcrum point go into complete spasm and they don't stop barking until you stop stooping over that darn puzzle and stand erect. By three or four days of all that leaning over, the spine has completely forgotten what it means to stand tall, hence the dowager hump that resembles my 90-year old neighbor's spine.

I gave three puzzles at Christmas. I got one. And after Christmas I got another. I have put every one of them together, 4,500 pieces picked, piled and placed, to the San Quinten Live concert CD. I know the order of the songs on all his CDs that we own. If you played the songs out of order, I'd know, and I'd know what song was supposed to have come next. Johnny Cash is in my bones. He's in my puzzles -- the ones that "grew up" on Johnny. They're tucked in their boxes on my dresser, waiting to be mailed to Barbara. I hear the Folsum Prison Blues, when I walk by them on my way to the bathroom. That rockabilly guitar is trying to get out: B'bownt-bownt-boowwnt-boowwnt-boowwnt-bownt-boowwnn

I hear the train a comin'
it´s rolling round the bend
and I ain´t seen the sunshine since I don´t know when,
I´m stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps draggin´ on
but that train keeps a rollin´ on down to San Anton..

Home Again Home Again

It started when Barbara Norton told me that she cried in her sleep. She's a displaced New Orleans flood survivor who has temporarily placed herself in a house in West Virginia. I visited Barbara for New Year's Eve. It was a surprise, sort of. We had talked about my going down to visit her but the first time I cancelled at the last minute, assuring her I'd come down for New Year's instead. She didn't count on it. Just like she didn't think I was "going to get married next week" and didn't show up for my wedding. I'm always changing my mind. ATNA (All talk no action.) So the surprise was when I called her up the morning before going down and began the phone call with "Should I bring my camping mattress with a sleeping bag?" Pause...She couldn't believe I was coming and thought I was just joking. It was too good to be true. She wasn't going to get on that roller coaster again.

It was no joke. I really did go visit my post-traumatic stressed friend. We laughed over Chinese food. My favorite line was over a plate of green beans, noodles and coconut shrimp. She was telling me something, went off on a tangent and couldn't remember what she was talking about to begin with. She asked me to help her remember what it was. This was the third or fourth time she couldn't remember something. It was comforting for me, actually, because I often forget where I was and have just accepted this as part of aging, whereas my six-year old finds forgetting what he's talking about unspeakably frustrating. He stomps his feet and turns purple until he can remember EXACTLY where he'd left off. "Stop the world and all the activity in it! I can't remember what I was talking about!!" He has very high expectations of his ability to recall and continue where he'd left off.


Looking for that "star" piece 

But at our ages and with what we've lived through in the last ten years since we've seen each other, I said to Barbara, who was enlisting my help in recalling her last thought, "Let's get something straight right now, Barbara." She looked at me as if she was going to be punished for something. I said "Let's just establish right now that neither of us is capable of helping the other person remember something."

She laughed. I laughed to see her laugh again. It was a great visit. We picked up right where we left off. And for someone, whose life and every fiber of life as she knew it has been completely and abruptly discontinued by this country's largest natural disaster, this continuity of picking up where we left off ten years ago was a blessing for both of us.


Good outside, Maggie!! 

Barbara got out of New Orleans with her white dog, her white truck, a few CDs, a few Christmas ornaments and the tiny television that Tamash, "the fucking genius" was able to gerryrig when she was down there trying to salvage what she could from her oil-mud-sewage laden home. Each item required a separate journey. The dog had to be retreived from Texas. The neighbor who evacuated to Dallas with him had injured him. The truck had to be retreived from the airport. The windshield and body sustained some cracks and dents. The CDs and the ornaments were from another visit and the TV was from the second to last or last attempt to clean out her apartment in hopes of getting her deposit back.

I showed up at Barbaras with my camping mattress, my sleeping bag, some clothes, a cooler and my not-yet-housebroken mutt. The mattress is tried and true. I take it everywhere and, like a tattered blanky, it looks like I do. Barbara thought for sure this mattress couldn't possibly provide me the platform for very good sleep and offered her bed with the warning that she cries, talks, thrashes and watches TV in her sleep. That's not sleep! My mattress was my preference for sure. I asked "Have you cried in your sleep ever since Katrina?" She said yes.

Barbara and Dickey Dog 

I thought about that for a while, tried to compare the extensive, comprehensive loss she's suffered to what I would cry about in my sleep if I'd lost my life as I knew it. What are my creature comforts? What are the things, the places, who are the friends I couldn't bare to lose -- the ones I'd really miss if, like New Orleans, could never be restored. It wasn't just the city that died a tragic death. Many friendships, a way of life, are over. The morning after I arrived back home, I realized how suggestible I am. I awoke from a terrible dream in which one of my best friends, who can bring me into such a place of comfort in my memories just with his voice, had died and I'd never be able to talk to him again. I visited his house and walked through. All his things reminded me of him but none of them could make him talk again. I didn't want a momento. I wanted his body to talk but his voice and all life had left his body forever. I woke up crying, wiping tears from my sockets.

When Barbara's friends heard she moved to West Virginia there were jokes in their Chistmas card emails with jabs about whether she's picked up playing the banjo or the fiddle now that she's in West Virginia. It wasn't funny. She's not where she wants to be. She'd rather be in the Virgin Islands. But in her shock and grief, a house her ex-husband bought as an investment property, is her refuge. It's not where her soul yearns to be so having those emails come through, teasing her about where she is living now, hurt a hurt that has consumed her.

Barbara keeps asking me how long it took me to get acclamated when I moved to Ohio. But that was different. I left my friends, my home, my family, my job, my stomping ground of fifteen years, my New York but I could always go back and visit. I went from being young and thin and single to married and pregnant, leaving one group in society and reluctantly joining another while losing my entire home base. That I couldn't change. It took me three or four years to adjust to the trauma. Actually each change had its own adjustment time table. Feeling like an Ohioan took the longest. I think I'm still working on that one and it's probably because of a childhood of many moves. Getting attached to one certain place wasn't something I had much experience with. Even when I lived in Albany I moved to Troy, Albany, East Greenbush, Rensselaer and Averill Park. That last house was where I could have stayed forever. I'd finally found a place I could see myself staying for the rest of my life, a job I could see myself keeping for the rest of my career, friends I would party with for as long as my health permitted.


Starting off 2006: Putting the pieces back together

It was hard to leave a well-built nest of habits. Establishing new friends was actually easier than getting comfortable as a mother, nurturer, caretaker, wife. It didn't matter that I had a band on my finger and a baby in my arms. It was still hard to make the adjustment fully and completely without the fear of losing myself. It took a few years to make good friends. It took ten to find myself as a mother and a wife.

Adjusting to a different geographical location snuck up on me more gradually than the day to day struggle/acceptance dynamic of being a mom. It isn't until I go out of state and return that I become aware of my developing attachment to Ohio. The first few years that we lived in Ohio and I returned to New York to visit family and friends I'd honk like a mad woman when I entered New York. As the years have gone by that has changed. Now, as I drive into Ohio and under the "Ohio Welcomes You" sign I honk. If I've been out of state for a long time I honk like crazy because it's always nice to go back to my own bed, my own streets, to know my way around the grocery store with my eyes closed. When I drove from West Virginia to Ohio I noticed that I didn't honk at all. Visitng Barbara felt like I hadn't left home at all but had gone home again. I hope for her to have that feeling. Home. And all the comforts that come with it. No matter where she winds up. But for now, I'm glad she's only four hours away, and, for me, part of my home.