Month: November 2011

Bloggers Anonymous

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This is where I stand up and say, “Hi, my name’s yearstricken and I blog. It started in October of this year. The blog, not the writing and the drawing. That’s been going on for years. A lot of it (most?) done in secret. For years I’d make late night walks to the curb to put “stuff” in the recycling container. I didn’t want anyone to see the amount of paper I’d written or drawn on or question me about the amount of time I’d spent scribbling.

 

I have used up more paper than I care to admit. I’m saddened to think of all the trees that had to give their lives to satisfy my needs. As restitution, I have put most of my writing on my computer. The drawings require paper, but I erase a lot, which is a form of recycling. It’s been a while since my husband has innocently picked up a piece of paper thinking it was a harmless grocery list only to find he was face to face with a poem in free verse. That was awkward and unsettling for both of us.

 

My poor family has had to endure a number of painful and uncomfortable moments when I have either thrust a piece of paper into one of their hands or cornered one of them by saying, ‘Would you like to hear what I wrote?’ It’s the equivalent of being accosted by a dirt-encrusted wino who puts his arm around you and asks for some spare change. Except the wino lives with you and is called mother or wife. That’s me, folks.

 

But that’s not the end of my ability to unsettle. Earlier this year, I started sending out my words to a select group of strangers, called editors. You have no idea the amount of sorrow and regret I caused them. Response after response came in saying, ‘We’re sorry…we regret to inform…’ Talk about guilt.

 

So I started blogging. My family is visibly relieved. Editors throughout the United States are sleeping better. And I discovered that blogging is an acceptable form of begging for spare change, or in blogese, asking if someone would like to hear what I wrote.”

 

 

 

The world of blog is full of creative, kind, funny, brilliant, and generous people. And kind, I mentioned that, right? One of these shiny beings who creates ten beautiful things before breakfast every day (or so it seems) nominated me for an award. Her name is kathryningrid. She lives over on kiwsparks street. She has regular parties there, and if you go, she will encourage you to dance, sing, paint, make pictures, and build castles out of words. Thank you, kathryningrid.

 

I am supposed to share seven things about myself you don’t know.

  • I have never owned a house.
  • I deliberately shoplifted once when I was a teenager: a tube of Coppertone. This year I had to have cryosurgery on two small patches on my face because of too much sun exposure when I was young. See, crime never pays. Back then, Coppertone didn’t protect your skin.
  • A few years later, I accidentally shoplifted a tube of lipstick. I was at a drugstore looking at makeup sets and was wearing a wraparound skirt with large pockets. When I got home, I found the lipstick in one of the pockets. It must have fallen in when I was picking up the sets. It was bright red, not my color. I didn’t know how to explain it to the store clerk, so I threw it away.
  • I love music from the likes of the Carter Family and their album Gold Watch And Chain: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1933-1934. My children prefer toothpicks in the eyeballs to this kind of music. Oddly “toothpicks in the eyeballs” is not the name of an actual band.
  • I am not particularly musical but during a very difficult time in my life, I wrote two blues songs.
  • I find it difficult to talk about myself. Writing is different. It’s more like what you do in a confessional: talk about yourself with the hopes that whoever is eavesdropping will forgive you and love you anyway.
  • The first time I took a blood test, I passed with an A-. Not bad, huh?

One of the rules of the award is to nominate others. Three of these websites I was going to pick had just been nominated, so I didn’t include them. Once I have time to work more on my website, I will make a blog roll like I see on the real bloggers’ sites.

  • k8edid – funny and nobody makes buttons like this woman
  • corpora – an applied linguistics researcher who plays with words
  • Boomerrantz – funny boomer ranter who now goes by her real name
  • kvenna ráð – bring oxygen, she may take your breath away

In the desert looking for love and radioactivity

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My mother and father met in Arizona in a little town out in the middle of the desert. Mother had the bad habit of marrying abusive men and had just fled her second marriage to come live with her mother. She arrived in desperate need of a dentist, having had several teeth removed, without any anesthesia, by her second husband’s fist. She left two children behind with their paternal grandmother and brought the two oldest with her, a boy and a girl from her first marriage. They traveled three days by bus from Alabama, with no money for food. Other passengers took pity on the children, who didn’t even have shoes, and shared some of their food. Her own mother didn’t recognize her when she got off the bus.

 

Once her teeth were fixed, mother started working as a waitress in a restaurant owned by her Aunt Vern. Mother’s mother, my grandmother, worked there as a cook. At first, mother and the two children stayed with Aunt Vern — a hard woman known to cheat her employees, even those who were relatives. After a few months, they were able to move into their own place. Neighbors and customers donated beds, a table, chairs, and a stove.

 

Early one evening, on the other side of sober, my father walked in. Originally from Texas, he was in Arizona for a job. As soon as he saw mother, he asked her out on a date. She told him to go home, sober up, and come back at 9 p.m. when she got off work. She never expected him to show up, but he did, and he had sobered up a bit. As they were leaving the restaurant, he said , “I want you to know that I’m not the marrying kind. I just want company, somebody to share a beer with and to dance with.”  She responded, “That’s fine with me.”

 

I guess the beer and the dance weren’t enough for either one. They married not long after they met.

 

The desert doesn’t seem like a very romantic place to find someone. Not many go in for moonlit walks among the cactus and rattlesnakes. But that’s where they found love. Later they moved back to the vast desert area of  west Texas, and one of their favorite things to do was to drive out into the desert with their geiger counter and go prospecting for uranium. In the early 1950s there was a uranium craze in the southwestern and western states fueled by the nuclear weapons program developed by the U.S. government. Prospectors armed with geiger counters searched the desert looking to strike it rich.

 

My parents never found any radioactivity, but I like to think they found what they were really looking for. There’s more than one  way to strike it rich.

The Law of the Toilet and Stephen Hawking

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This is a rant and it’s short. Like my temper sometimes. Or my dollars. (A day late and a dollar short.)

 

It’s bad enough that toilet paper in public places has to be locked up in plastic boxes. Boxes designed to hold two rolls: a new roll on one side and a roll with five sheets of paper on the other side.

 

There’s a reason for this. It’s the law. Physics said so.

 

You may remember learning about the law of the toilet in physics class. This can be written as N > 5. Let N stand for the need of the toileter who gets down to business and 5 stand for the maximum number of toilet paper sheets allowed on the first roll.

 

Dispenser designers are constrained by this law. They must obey. This means you have to put your hand up the contraption to push open the plastic flap that is hiding the new roll of toilet paper. Said plastic flap only opens about an inch, so you have to use your fingertips to spin the toilet roll in hopes that you can find that loose piece of paper that gets the whole thing rolling. Good luck with that.

 

That was actually my pre-rant.

 

Maybe the designers had an Edison moment and all their light bulbs turned on at once, or maybe they heard that some talented people with long, skinny fingers were getting the second roll started and so the thrill was gone. We’ll never know (unless we hunt them down and force them to talk). But one day, they decided to make it easy for us to get all of the toilet paper we want.

 

They designed dispensers with a small hole at the bottom. These have one gigantic roll of toilet paper in them, and there is always a sheet or two hanging out for you to start pulling. Go ahead, take as much as you would like. Thoughtful, no?

 

No, because as you pull it through that hole in the bottom, the nice flat sheets of toilet paper are transformed into toilet floss. Yes, just like the floss you use for your teeth, only not as strong.

 

The two-roll dispensers obey the law  N > 5 and are based on mechanical physics. The new dispensers are based on string theory. I blame Stephen Hawking.

 

Pushing the right buttons

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Last month when my brother came to Wisconsin for a visit, we spent the weekend driving around to admire the changing colors. On that Saturday, my brother, husband, daughter, grandchild, and I spent the day up north taking pictures, visiting a pumpkin patch, and enjoying the weather.

We went in my car, but my husband drove. My brother sat up in the front with him, and the rest of us were in the back seat. When we came home that evening, we were all tired. My husband pulled into the garage next to his car, and everyone got out except me.

When I reached in my purse, I must have hit the alarm on the key fob, setting off the horn. I started punching the alarm button, but nothing happened. So, I started punching the other buttons that have nothing to do with the alarm. Makes sense, right? While doing so, I locked the doors.

Flustered by my lack of results, all I could think of to do was to keep punching that same button again and again. (The classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.) My husband could see that I was punching the right one. So he thought, if it isn’t her car alarm that is bursting our eardrums, maybe it’s mine. So, he pushed the alarm button on his key fob. Do you see how well suited we are for one another?

Now, both car alarms were blaring. My husband was standing by his car pushing his button, which made his alarm go on and off. I was sitting in the back seat of my locked car doing the same, wondering why my car wouldn’t listen to me.

My brother and daughter were standing next to my car laughing and talking above the din. He said, “Do you think she will figure it out?” My daughter shook her head, “I doubt it.” Then he yelled something over to my husband who knocked on my window and yelled at me to unlock the car.

He opened the door and said, “It’s your other key fob.”

Yes, I have two key fobs. One is actually a remote starter, and the other one came with the car. I had been sitting in the back seat pushing the alarm on the remote starter. As soon as I punched the button on the right key fob, the alarm went off.

My brother and daughter said it was a lot of fun watching us. I wish I could have seen it, but I was too busy sitting in the back seat pushing buttons over and over.

Fall color in Wisconsin

The reds and oranges

Corn for the silo

Words can be tricky

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In the summer of 2010, my brother invited me to visit him in Europe. Although I have lived and traveled in Asia, this was my first time to go there. I still have not found the right words to express how much I enjoyed that trip.

This past summer, he invited me back, and we are making plans for next year. You’re probably thinking I am fabulously wealthy, but I’m not. My brother covered most of the expenses for both trips. And no, I will not introduce you to him.

In Italy, we traveled to Tuscany and stayed in a hotel, a former villa, near Montepulciano. We each had our own room to enjoy the vineyards and olive groves that surround the villa.

By the time we arrived in Tuscany, we had already been to several Italian cities, walked through numerous museums, and seen countless signs in Italian. You can pick up a lot of Italian words if you pay attention.

The rooms were lovely, but one of the first things my brother noticed was something near the ceiling that looked like a camera. The ceiling was high, so he couldn’t inspect it. He turned the lights on and off, but the box didn’t change or light up.

Then he read the guest brochure on the nightstand. The first part was titled “In camera – In room”. He was miffed, so he immediately went down to the front desk and asked the clerk why there was a camera in the room.

The person at the front desk spoke English, but as my brother expressed his outrage about being videotaped in the privacy of his room, the clerk looked more and more perplexed. “No, sir, there are no cameras,” he insisted. Two other workers were at the front desk at the time, and they all nodded their heads.

My brother had the brochure with him and triumphantly pointed to the words. “See, it says right here that there is a camera in the room.”

When my brother came up to my room and told me what he had done, I laughed myself silly. “You knew?” he asked. While strolling through museums, we had seen the word “camera” countless times. It is the Italian word for “room.” Since we had seen it so often, I assumed that he knew too. Although the information in each section of the brochure was written in English (for the English-speaking guests, I’m sure) the titles over each part were in both languages. But my brother didn’t read all of it because as soon as he saw the words camera and room together, he had to protest.

This is one of my favorite memories of our time in Italy. And it’s a memory we share with the entire staff of that villa. I’m sure they have told the story as many times as we have. I know that the entire time we stayed there, the staff smiled at us more than any of the other guests.

The explanation the clerk gave my brother was that the little metal box that looked like a camera was part of the lighting system. My brother accepted that “In camera – In room” was merely a translation, but both nights, just in case, he threw a towel over that metal box before he went to sleep.

The road leading to the villa

The lavender-lined road

More lavender

The villa

Do you recall Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s governor?

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You may recall reading about him in the news. He has a well-documented allergy to unions, which causes him to break out in legislation that in turn makes a lot of people sick. The only relief he can get from his allergy is to receive regular doses of cash from large corporations. The half of the state that got sick from his legislation hasn’t found any relief yet. Today, November 15, they are going to try to get relief by trying very hard to remember him, or as they say in these parts, recall him.

My brain won’t work – it’s Perry-lized

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Frozen brain is now Perry-lized

As easy as it would be to make fun of Rick Perry and his brain freeze, I will refrain. I myself am in a fast moving vehicle without any brakes on the road called life. The last sign I saw said 60, and it wasn’t the speed limit.

 

According to an article on bigthink.com, the technical term for “I plumb fergot” is “retrieval failure.” Apparently, there’s a bit of a distance from the part of the brain that wags the tongue to the so-called memory banks. That means every time you’re talking and want to remember something, you have to walk to the bank and make a withdrawal. Depending on the brain you’re walking through, there’s a good chance you will get mugged or arrive there to find that your bank account is empty. This happens to me all the time.

 

Not only that, but memories, like teeth, can decay. Which is why we use the expression, “I need to brush up on that.” Learning is how you brush your brain and keep it shiny. Flossing is optional.

 

I had more to say on this subject. However, when I walked over to my memory bank, there was a big sign on the door that said, “Bank Holiday.”

 

The memory of rain

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Dark comes early since we pushed back the tiny hands of time. One hour makes a difference.

 

The other evening in the early dark, I drove home on rain-lacquered roads. In town, going through a line of traffic signals, the road was a lake of clear water; the red, green, and white lights the fish shimmering and swimming across it.  I thought of my father because rain and I share childhood memories.

 

When I was growing up, my family went for a ride on rainy nights. Daddy drove and mother sat close beside him. My sister and I sat in the backseat in a cocoon of sounds: the steady swish of wipers trying to keep up with the rain, the shushing sound of tires on the wet roads, and the clicking of our turn signal winking at the other cars to let them know we were turning.

 

As a family, we watched the rain transform the known world, first with a bright shine, then with a glaze of gray, but always with beauty. In the car, we marveled at the gallery of sights. There was no time or need to tell each other everything we saw in that kaleidoscope of color and shadow – things moved by too quickly.

 

Above the rain’s murmuring, soft but clear, we heard our parents’  voices. They told stories about us, our relatives, and their own lives. My sister and I listened, awash in the intimacy the rain brought. We learned that our Aunt Ann had been not only a psychiatrist but also a pilot. The rain matched the  faint echo of crying we could hear in those stories about her. Much later we learned she had committed suicide.

 

They laughed and whispered too. Mother snuggling closer, daddy putting his arm around her. The two of us in the back, following as they took us farther down the road. My sister and I didn’t realize it at the time that we had already begun our own journeys, away from childhood, away from our parents. But on those rainy nights in the car, we were together going in the same direction.

 

Soon the talk, the dark, and the hum of wheels would lull us to sleep, and my sister and I would lean against our separate doors to dream of catching the brightly colored fish that swam across the rain spattered streets.

 

Later we would awake to the place of our belonging because, as sure as rain, the road always led us home.

 

(Picture is from: http://gossipaboutcars.com/)

Are you a dog or cat person?

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My mother was a dog person who had a lifelong distrust of cats. Whenever the subject of cats came up, she would get a disgusted look on her face and tell us they could not be trusted. Then in the same solemn voice she used when she warned us not to talk to strangers, she would say, “The minute you turn your back on a cat, it will jump on the counter and lick the butter.”

Although we never left butter unattended on the counter or even knew anyone who did, this made perfect sense to us when we were young. I was always slightly horrified when we visited people who had cats and wondered what it was like to eat cat-licked butter on toast.

For most of the last decade of her life, mother lived with my brother. She had raised him right and he had two dogs, miniature Doberman Pinschers called Axle and Alexander. Mother was particularly fond of Axle, who followed her everywhere and was always sitting at her feet. She loved telling my brother that Axle loved her best.

The chair in the living room by the front window was mother’s favorite place to sit and read a book. Every day she would get up early, bring her book and a glass of milk and spend the morning reading. And Axle, her faithful companion, was always there at her feet.

One morning my brother was at the top of the stairs when mother set her book down to go to the bathroom. Axle stood up and watched her go. As soon as the bathroom door shut, he hopped on the ledge where she kept her glass of milk, stuck his snout in, and drank as much as he could. When he heard the toilet flush, he jumped down, licked his lips, and stood at attention, waiting for the one he loved best.

Butter? What butter?

When mother came out of the bathroom, my brother was laughing so hard it took him a few minutes to explain what Axle had done.

I don’t know if mother ever got over that betrayal. She never bragged again about how much Axle loved her. And along with the butter, she never left her milk unattended again.