Justice And The Peace

More than anything I crave peace. And serenity. And calm. 

With a little crazy on top sometimes, just to shake up the status quo.  Like, ketchup on mac and cheese.  Mmmm . . . get me some of that! Comfort food with red icing. 

I don’t want too much crazy, though.  Just a little.  Which is why I don’t get involved in politics—that’s a whole lot of crazy. 

I’ve dabbled on the nutty side a few times.  Picture me, four months pregnant, as I helped chaperone a bunch of teenagers on a canoe trip down a Florida tributary misnamed The Peace River. I’m not being snide here. Listen—there were alligators in that river. That’s not peaceful.  And when a crazy rainstorm came up—dumping half of us into the freezing current where we walked our canoes back up that gator infested water way—our adventure was cut short. I learned my lesson, though. Now I only wave at gators in a zoo.

After that, I kept the crazy to a bare minimum.  Raising two kiddos changed up the definition a little, and sometimes made me feel like I was back in that river.  But in spite of broken wrists, broken hearts, copycat cuts (identical chin stitches the same month), and other assorted catastrophes, for the most part I’d say we maintained calm in the eye of our storms.

There have been exceptions.  Like the summer our fourteen-year-old son was arrested in our own living room for allegedly shooting a neighbor’s yappy dog with a bb gun. Turned out he just had really bad aim. But he learned what a dumb idea it was to walk through an alley with his finger on the trigger of a loaded Red Ryder. It's good to know there are good judges in the world.  But I’m still not fond of yappy dogs or bad neighbors.

Peace is so valuable it’s against the law to mess with it.  Reference the last paragraph and picture sixty hours of community service.  Here in America we protect our peace.

So that's why my jaw dropped one afternoon while visiting with a friend. Constantly interrupted by the relentless ringing of her phone, we couldn’t finish a sentence. It was like Chinese water torture, and she finally reached her breaking point.  Instead of screening the call, she answered it, and staged her own intervention.

Lord, have mercy.  Hell hath no fury. . .

“No,” she said over and over to the invisible pest on the other end of the line, her voice rising with indignation, “I don’t want an upgrade.  I don’t want to downgrade or downsize or start up or upstage.  What do I want?  I want you to stop calling me!”  And she hung up her own phone.

Which really messed with the peace of the caller from New Delhi with the ethnic name, ‘Bob’.

So he called again.  And again.  And again. No longer interested in making a sale, he focused instead on making a point.  He told her how insulted he was by her attitude.  It would have seemed comical had it not been for the part where he said he knew where she lived and that he was never going to stop calling. Suddenly it felt threatening.

So on the next ring, I took a whack at it. I figured, now that the day’s tranquility had been shattered, I might as well get in on some of the crazy. He never suspected I wasn’t the same woman he’d been harassing.  I asked Bob what his last name was and how to spell it—information he gave willingly, if not intelligently. I double checked his phone number and asked for his manager’s name.  Finally, I asked Bob why he refused to stop calling.

“Because,” he shouted in his best American jargon, “I’m trying to disturb your peace!” Then he hung up.

Well, you'll have to try a lot harder than that, I thought, as I put down the phone. 'Cuz buddy, you just can't compete with gators or guns or hormonal women who survived child birth and adolescence.

Still, how can you stay mad at somebody who gives you an answer like that?  It was the best laugh I’d had in a month.

Peace out, Bob.  You sounded a little stressed.  What you need is a vacation.  Time to chill.  Ever thought about taking a nice, quiet trip down a peaceful Florida river?

Give me a call sometime.  I know just the one. 

Voila!

Can I just, pick a bone here for a minute?

You’ll probably think it’s no big deal.  But, trust me, if you were Parisian and heard something like this, you’d turn up your nose and mutter, “Vous n’avez pas intelligence” which roughly translated means, “what a dope”.  You probably figured that out already.

Ok, enough warning.  Here we go.

It’s Vwah-lah.  Not wah-lah. 

There’s a V in it, for crying out loud, and it’s not supposed to be silent.  If I hear one more news anchor say 'Wahlah' and chuckle at her deluded sense of wit, I’m gonna eat my English/French dictionary.

And that’s not the only word commonly massacred for lunch by Americans.  Here’s a short menu:

Let’s start with dessert.  Maybe a little sugar will help the rest go down easier.  The opposite of ice cream is not sher-bert.  It’s sher-bet.  See?  There’s only one ‘r’ in it—admittedly harder to say, but so satisfying to know you did it right.

It’s not noo-Q-ler.  It’s noo-clee-er.  For Pete’s sake, leaders of the free world who hold our future in their hands can’t even figure out where the “l” goes!  Stop listening to them, I beg of you! Let’s try this again: nuclear is pronounced noo-clee-er.  Rhymes with . . . well, nothing actually.  Just . . . make a note of it. Maybe the secret service could do something for a change and drop some hints to the big guy.

Nor is it al-u-min-i-um.  If you’re gonna throw in extra ‘i’s like that, I’m gonna start charging for them.  I know the Brits say it that way—heck, they even spell it that way (like that’s an excuse.)  But here in the colonies we’re frugal.  One ‘i’ is enough.  All together now:  ah-loo-men-um, accent on the loo.

And while we’re at it, Herb, there’s no ‘h’ sound in your vegetable counterpart.  In this case, the ‘h’ is silent.  The French will like us better if you’d figure that one out, too.

This may seem like much ado about nothing, but listen—there’s a whole new generation of Americans coming up through the ranks and we have to get our collective act together for their sakes! And I admit—there are a couple of words I can’t quite get my brain around.  For example, is it ‘Jag-warr ‘or ‘Jag-U-Arr’?  I always thought it was Jag-wire. I got laughed out of the zoo with that one.

This afternoon I helped my four-year-old granddaughter compose her first phone text. It was a favor I owed her—after all, she taught me how to play Angry Birds. We were sounding out words, making progress, until we got to ‘aunt’.   Here in the west we say ‘ant’.  Back east they say ‘awnt’. Allie decided not to make waves and settled on ‘Ant Aunt Lynette’. Future diplomat, that one.

I realize all of this will be a surprise to some of you, so I really regret any feathers you feel have been ruffled.  Not enough to actually apologize, but still, I regret having to address this issue at all. I learned to read the old fashioned way—phonetically—as should everyone. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask me—just don’t acks me. 

Are we all on the same page now?  Good.  Class dismissed.

p.s.  Lying face first on the ground is described as ‘praw-straight’. Notice the ‘r’ in straight.  Anything else is just embarrassing and I will point and laugh if you trip over that one.

Word to the wise.

Plants Shmants

I’ve warned people.

I’ve been blunt, honest, straight forward—even harsh.  It doesn’t matter.  People think what they want to, and no amount of pleading will change their minds. 

But I am not who they think I am. Just because I’m soft spoken doesn’t mean I’m a softy. So for the last time, I beg of you.

If you like your philodendron—then for the love of Mike, don’t leave it with me.   

I. Kill. Plants.

I mean, I know my reputation.  What I can’t figure out is why no one else does. I have a house full of fake flowers and dead roses, for crying out loud, so why do people think I can cater to their chrysanthemums?  

Do I look trustworthy because I have red hair?  It’s fake.  And, for the record, just because I raised two kids to adulthood doesn’t mean I can raise petunias.  Isn’t it enough for me to love tomatoes without needing to know where they come from?  (It’s a figure of speech. Yes, I know where they come from.  Sheesh.  The grocery store.)

I’m having a guilt attack.  A shame haboob has engulfed me. I didn’t enforce my personal boundaries and now I’m saddled with the care of my friend’s hibiscuses.  Hibisci?  Whatever.  Two codependent plants now sit lazily on my back patio (where I can’t pretend not to see them). Their very presence is a constant reminder that they are thirsty. And I've heard plants like that need to be watered at least twice a week! Doesn’t that seem a little excessive to you?

What do I need to do to convince people I’m not nurturing?  Asking me to babysit foliage is like asking Sylvester to give Tweetie Bird peck on the cheek.  No good can come from this. But nobody listens to me.  Now I have to take a picture of these two little houseguests, and show it to the real pros at Home Depot.  That way I can replace them with exact duplicates after they gork this summer in our Arizona blast furnace.  With any luck at all, the stand-ins will look so healthy my neighbor won’t even recognize them.

All this trouble because I didn’t want to disappoint her in the first place. I don't think she's worried about them, though. She’s been gone for two months and hasn’t written to the twins even once.  I’m beginning to think these bushes have been abandoned. 

And I figured it out.  She could have taken them with her to Wisconsin if she wanted to, but something got in the way.  I think she’s been two-timing her roses back home, if you want to know the truth, and doesn’t want them to find out she’s been fooling around here with hibiscus.

I think it’s time for an intervention.  Someone needs to put the needs of these plants ahead of their own, and I’m just the one to do it.  I’m not going to photograph these babies—I’m loading them both in the truck and dropping them off at Home Depot. Honestly, it's for their own good. And when she's ready to see her hibiscus next fall, she can explain to the experts there why she left her bushes in foster care. 

Now that my conscience is clear . . . I can’t wait to see an empty patio again.

A-Blogging I Will Go . . .

I usually hang out on my own blog—writing, editing, tweaking, snickering at my incredible wit—aha, aha, aha . . . .

Today I decided to venture out onto other people’s blogs for a while.  You know, to broaden my horizons, scope out the competition, compare notes.  But it wasn’t quite what I expected, wandering away from my own backyard. 

I strolled past the photographic journals of young moms and sweet babies, a couple of sports stops with no pictures at all, and mouth watering websites from cooking enthusiasts.

But barely had I begun this journey when the whole terrain changed suddenly, and no one spoke in English anymore. Page after attractive page was written entirely in Spanish, including a site promoting an Asian boy band (I’m so confused.) It doesn’t do me any good to follow foreign blogs--not only is my passport expired, but I was a rebel in high school and took French instead of sensible Spanish.  Je ne fait pas hablas espanol.  But don’t quote me on that.

I thought if I kept going, I might find a detour back to blogs written in my native tongue.  But on the thirteenth click of the ‘Next Blog’ button, poof!  Just like that—a dead end. No pretty graphics or catchy titles or modest bio’s. Just an atheistic stop.  Total nothingness. It was as though there were no more blogs in existence anywhere else in cyberspace. 

Do you know what happens when a blog dies? It’s like a collapsing star, leaving a black hole in the internet. There’s no forwarding address at the top of a deceased blog.  Only a notice that no one else can use their blog name.  Well, who would want to?  It sounds like an Amityville horror.  ‘Move to this site at your own risk.’ I can take a hint.

It turns out, after a quick yet scientific scan of the average homemade blog, that most of them have the lifespan of a common house fly. It’s almost epidemic. In fact, in the minute it took for me to come over here and make notes, a blog actually expired.  Seriously!  It was there one minute and gone the next. By the time I got back, all that was left was this eulogy: ‘Page Not Found . . . this blog has been removed by the author’.  Tragic.  What kind of a writer would DO something like that to their very own blog? It’s just so . . . heartless.

And where does that leave us, the innocent bystanders?  We don’t know where to go from here. The back button just leads to all those foreign language entries.  Who knows what they’re talking about there.  They’re probably making fun of my hairstyle and shoes.  There’s no forward button to click, no ‘next blog’ tab, not even a coupon good for a consolation cookie.   

Thinking that a running jump would send me soaring high OVER the dead end blog, I went backward really fast and then clicked the forward arrow even faster. Pointless. I landed square in the dead letter file again.  Only now the page read, “I told you three times already, there’s no blog here.  Go home and leave me alone.”

Blogs got attitudes.

I only uncovered twelve blogs before crashing into the death star blog Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. There were two with entries over three months old, one with a Dear John blog announcing the author had grown tired of his fling with journalism and wished it well, six written in a language I can only assume was foreign (although the photos were nice), a tenth from a young mother announcing she was expecting again and would now be too busy to update, another from a year ago with the short entry, “I’ve moved on. yup. for a long time.”  And the twelfth belonged to a sports fan whose final post prophesied the outcome of the 2010 World Series.

Wow.  This blogging stuff isn’t for lightweights, is it? Finally, I headed back to the safety of my own blog. 

I guess Dorothy was right—there’s no place like home.  Even if it’s a winepress.

We Homeschooled . . . The End

Somehow the kids survived all of my imperfections and grew up to be intelligent human beings.

But I made some mistakes. They did take some remedial courses in college because, to be honest, I insisted we could conquer the foreign languages of biology and algebra on our own, when I should have hired tutors to help with the subjects that were just beyond me. Algebra Wars saw casualties on all sides. If we hadn’t run out of kids to teach, I would have done some things differently after learning these lessons.

Fortunately, my kids are still speaking to me. 

The best part was how much we loved having them at home.  Educating them there gave us scads of time to enjoy them. There was plenty of time for long talks around the table. While we chased rabbits, they learned to be critical thinkers. We spent long hours in the library, where they checked out every single book on their favorite subjects.  For our son, that meant pursuing his interest in all the weapons mankind has ever produced. A couple of years later it became clear he’d developed an unshakeable grasp of world history, world geography, ancient world geography, and world culture while reading about arms and armor.  But this was no hidden agenda from a book list. He just had time to pursue his passion with the side benefit of education.

We didn’t completely leave the public school system in the dust.  One irony of home education is we purchased all of our own expensive supplies and curriculum while still funding those same items for our neighborhood school, just like every other citizen.  In other words, we paid twice. On the up side, since paying our taxes gave us the right to make use of local programs, we enrolled our daughter in chorus classes in junior high and high school. You can’t have a chorus experience with only two kids, believe it or not, so we’re thankful for the great music teachers she had during those years.

The reactions of the general public were always interesting when we told people we were a home school family. Wide eyed surprise was usually followed by the almost scripted comment, “I could never teach my kids—they’d drive me crazy!  I don’t have enough patience.”  True enough. I wasn’t always patient and sometimes we drove each other crazy.

So why did we do it?  What’s the bottom line, the short answer, the 4-1-1?

Here it is—we brought our kids home so we could be the main influence in their lives.  The education they were getting around the corner was good, but it didn’t take a genius to see they were fighting for their lives on the playground.  And at the end of the day, that was not only unacceptable, it was unforgiveable.

The number one criticism—disguised as a question and directed at home educators—is this, “Aren’t you worried about socialization?”  Our simple answer was, “Not anymore.” 

More than forty years after the resurgence of homeschooling, and with two generations of guinea pigs now grown to adulthood, the evidence supports what the research has always shown—homeschooling works. It even outperforms conventional education.  And nowhere is this seen better than in the area of socialization.  All we need to do is google ‘socialization of homeschoolers’ and the proof is there.  Research shows homeschoolers are more comfortable in a wide range of social settings than are kids in public schools. That’s because kids behave like the people they spend most of their time with.  If they spend all their time with ten-year-olds, that’s the behavior they’ll mimic.  If they spend most of their time around adults, their behavior will reflect that instead. 

It was a no-brainer.  And I met that criteria.

Now that our kids have kids of their own, sometimes the question comes up, ‘will they or won’t they . . . home school?’  Whether or not they decide to home school is between them and God.  It’s not a decision to make lightly. It’s as serious a commitment as deciding to become a parent in the first place.

There were days—okay months—when I thought my own home school retirement would never come. But the second time around this education track proved to be the right one.  We stayed the course and saw it through.  Both of our kids graduated college with honors.  Our daughter graduated summa cum laude with a music degree in three years instead of the normal four. Our son went on to earn his master’s degree in theology, and I don’t argue with him about anything anymore. He could call me a dope five different ways in English and it’d take me a week to figure it out.  

The main thing I want to say here is home schooling works. It’s a valid option which deserves the same respect as its counterparts of public, private and charter schools.  It works even if parents don’t have college degrees.  At its mediocre best, it gives kids a good education.  At its more common norm, the education received is on a level with that of Plato. It produces socially well adjusted men and women who are self-disciplined and know how to think for themselves.  It graduates responsible adults who care about the world in which they live, and generates gratitude in the hearts of parents who are given the gift of extensive time with their children.

It even produces mature mothers whose character weaknesses are exposed and dealt with while they teach their children at home.

Imagine that.

(Photo by permission, Kevin Dooley's Photostream, Flickr. com creative commons, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/)

http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html

http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000000/00000068.asp  (Dr. Larry Shyers, "Comparison of Social Adjustment Between Home and Traditionally Schooled Students," unpublished doctoral dissertation at University of Florida's College of Education, 1992. Dr. Shyers is a psychotherapist who is the Chairman of the Florida Board of Clinical Social Work, Marriage and Family Therapy, and Mental Health Counseling.)

We Home Schooled . . . Part One

We home schooled. 

For ten total years times two children two years apart less five years spent in a failed public school experiment with a side order of kindergarten.

And if you think that was hard to follow, you should have seen me teach my kids algebra.  Scary.

I felt like the most unqualified home educator on the planet.  When I first heard about the radical idea of home schooling, I said in a panic, “I can’t do that!  I’m not trained.  The government has convinced me that they alone know what's best for my kids!”

Silly rabbit.  Tricks aren’t for kids.

So, filled with trepidation, I entered the home school arena with my eldest, the five-year-old.  Those poor firstborns—we’re always testing our ideas on them.  Let’s just say, it was a less than wonderful year.  I got the wrong curriculum for the right kid who had an atypical learning style and wasn’t ready to ‘crack the reading code’ even though he was the age the government says every kid should be when they learn to read and he hated paperwork even though the curriculum said if I gave him enough of it every day eventually I would win him over to the joys of sitting at a desk with a pencil and he’d forget about the great outdoors and how much fun it is to run and jump and climb.

That’s a run-on sentence and completely unacceptable unless you write a blog—in which case you get to make the rules.  This is my blog.  These are my rules.  I like run-on sentences when they make a point and here’s my point:  incessant paperwork isn’t for five-year-olds and reading on their own might not be either.

Yet.

So we ditched the home school foray, convinced that we were not among the amazing few who could successfully pull it off.  And . . . the grandparents rejoiced, breathing a sigh of relief that we had, at last, come to our senses before ruining their grandchildren.

We maintained our senses for the next five years, fully supporting public education in our local neighborhood, serving as classroom helpers, field trip supervisors, class party chairpersons, and even PTO president. We were so well known on the campus even the janitors thought we lived there.

Ironically, though we put our son into school in the first grade without a mastery of phonics, we still were the ones who taught him to read. After enrolling him, I breathed a sigh of relief that somebody else would take over his education. Boy, was I surprised when his reading assignments came home with him every night and we still had to sit next to him on the sofa and force him to see Jack run.  In retrospect, what was needed was for us to ‘let Lee run’.  I’m amazed to this day, twenty-five years later, that he turned out to be a lover of books and knowledge after a tumultuous ride on that reading railroad.

Let me be clear—our kids had some wonderful teachers in their public school years.  They also had a couple of bad ones.  And sometimes the bad ones make a bigger impact than the good ones.  That’s the risk.  And the heartbreak. In second grade, I confronted my son’s teacher about her terrifying fits of anger unleashed in class, thinking that was better than going over her head to the principal.  I should have just gone over her head.  The next year we pulled him out of a gifted program after only nine weeks due to similar issues. Third graders shouldn’t have stomach aches every day just because they answer roll call.

Our daughter started public school in kindergarten, untainted by the failures of a fledgling home school mother, the year after we enrolled our son.  Unlike her brother, she learned to write her full name in class. (I’d only taught our son to write his first name when he was her age—hey, I knew who he was.) She loved school.  She made friends, Christmas ornaments, and good grades.  For the first two years, school was too much fun to miss.  But the first day of second grade, she came home with a dour face and prophesied to her dad and me, “This isn’t going to be a fun year.”  She still has good intuition.  And she was right—it wasn’t fun that year.  (Reference the “bad teacher” comment above.) 

So for a full year we researched better ways to take back the responsibility for our kids’ education than the one we’d chosen the first time.  We picked what was left of the brains of parents still in the trenches, watched them in action, attended seminars and conventions, and prayed.  A lot.  Then we voted as a family, made a unanimous decision, and went all in, never looking back.

It took three years before we caught our stride, found our comfort zone, built some confidence and began to understand the good, the bad and the ugly of curriculum.  Three years before we found our way into already established home school co-ops with other families in our area.  Three years before we stopped thinking we were out of our minds.

But it only took one day for the collective blood pressure of our family to return to normal after five years in a system that lost track of the souls of our kids and sold them out to mass production. 

Which is not to say that we didn’t have blood pressure spikes in the home school environment.  I once heard a speaker, i.e. home educator encourager, tell me and a bunch of other novices that teaching your kids at home is a whole new kind of pressure which squeezes out character imperfections so they can be dealt with – and your kids won’t be perfect either. 

Writing on the wall, baby.

Chickens Live Longer

We knew where they hung out.

Hidden by a low lying cloud of smoke, we couldn’t actually see them, but we knew they were there.  Right across from the high school, smoking together in the dirt every morning before school. Potheads, druggies, non-conformists. The few, the brave, the wrong.

They were the reason I learned to cross my legs in high school and skip potty breaks til I got home.  Everyone did.  To this day, I can detect the smell of pot from a hundred yards away, all because of the girls’ bathroom.  What amazed me was none of the adults ever did anything about it.  I guess they didn’t care as long as no one smoked grass in their restrooms.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not here to discuss the morality of marijuana.  In fact (and don’t suck in too much shocked air here), I have recently come to the conclusion that medical marijuana can be a good idea.  I know—let my red hair go curly, and the next thing you know, I’m ditching my conservative roots.  Not true.  I only ditched my gray roots. 

My dad was a narcotics parole officer in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late 1960’s.  He witnessed the birth of the deadly drug culture. We didn’t get   G-rated bedtime stories when I was a kid—instead, we heard about the glamorous lives of twenty-something junkies who slept off their highs in roach infested flats. I knew what a dirty hypodermic needle looked like when I was ten.  My dad had a display board full of them, all confiscated from free spirited heroin addicts.

So, what does information like that do to a young, impressionable mind?  Well, let me just say I never even smoked a cigarette when I was growing up. I didn’t have my first adult drink until I was way into adulthood. In school I had the reputation of being a ‘goody two-shoes’. The girl who was ‘pure as the driven snow’.  And it’s lasted into my adult years.  I even had a boss who leaned over my desk one morning and said he’d like to get me drunk sometime to “find out what you’re really like.”  I told him that was an idea doomed to failure—not because I’m that good at keeping secrets, as he surmised, but because I’m that good at staying sober.  Then I found a new employer.

I’ve always had an overactive conscience, which is both a blessing and a curse.  It’s kept me out of a lot of trouble.  And it’s given me a guilt complex the size of Trump Tower.  My idea of non-conformity is telling the kid at the Burger King counter that I am serious when I say I don’t want pickles on my hamburger.

So, I’m a chicken.  I’m not clever enough to figure out creative ways to maintain a criminal lifestyle.  I got pulled over for speeding a few months ago, and when the cop came up to my window I was already in tears apologizing for taking up his valuable time with my stupidity. I confessed my transgression before he even had a chance to explain why he stopped me.  See what I mean?  I suck at crime.

Yep, I’m a free range chicken—living inside a fence that restricts my movements very little.  There’s an irony in that.  Usually we think fences are constrictive.  The truth is, they give us security, making the boundaries clear so we can enjoy the freedom we have inside.

Next month I’ll be twice the age of rock legends like Janis Joplin,  Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, whose personal demons secured their membership in the infamous Twenty-Seven Club—a list of celebrities who never made it to their   twenty-eighth birthdays thanks to their risky, self-destructive lifestyles.  If any one of them had found the security they desperately longed for, they’d probably still be around to blow out candles on this year’s birthday cake, too.

There’s nothing wrong with being a chicken.  Chickens live longer.

(Photo courtesy of Le Petit Poulailler's photostream, Flickr.com)

It's Gr-r-r-r-r-reat!!

It was the trip of a lifetime. 

We still talk about it and wish we could do it again.  What amazes us is we did this extravagant thing with  money squirreled away while we raised two teenagers on one income.  Wow.  We used to be good!

Eight thousand five hundred miles by car.  Actually, it was a brand new mini-van with two bench seats, one for each kid.  Awesome!  (Imagine sing-song voice here.)  With head jacks connected to the built-in sound system and rear air conditioning, even the kids thought our new Aerostar was cooler than a Hummer. 

We spent the month of October looking for a real autumn, and breaking in the van on a road trip from Arizona to New England and back.  When we got home, the van wasn’t new anymore.  We drove  through twenty-four states in four weeks, and even tip-toed across a little piece of Canada where we experienced Lay’s potato chips seasoned with sugar instead of salt.  If they’d put more ice in their soft drinks, I just might go back.

But the whole trip was nearly derailed our first week on the road.  After experiencing the beauty of Colorado, Wyoming’s obsessive antelope massacres, cheesy Wisconsin, South Dakota’s presidential profiles, and night terrors on the interstates of downtown Chicago, we thought we’d arrived, sort of.  Believing we were now seasoned road warriors with a few thousand adventurous miles under our steel belts, we decided to deviate from our AAA Triptik a little and avoid Detroit, Michigan.

Triptik knows best.  Make a note of that.

It seemed innocent enough. Even kind of cute.

“Hey, kids,” we said over our shoulders to the two hostages seated behind us, “let’s eat breakfast in Battle Creek and look for Tony The Tiger!  Whadya say?!!!”

They didn’t say anything.  Their headphones were conveniently plugged into the sound system. 

An hour later, filled up and plugged back in, we headed for Lansing, me in the Navigator seat and my hubbie in the Driver’s. And it’s here that I want to interject this thought:  Of the two people seated in the pilot/co-pilot positions, isn’t it logical that the one who most needs a good sense of direction is the Driver??  Oh, shut up.  What do you know?

I’m a good navigator, even without a survivable sense of true north.  I got us through Chicago at night, didn’t I??  All I have to do is keep turning the map the direction we’re going and I can get us anywhere.  So after forty-five minutes of driving east, when we began seeing signs for Battle Creek, Michigan—again­­—I came to the only possible conclusion:  Rob made a wrong turn.

Finally!  A mistake that wasn’t my fault!  Hubbie hadn’t asked me for directions since before we went to Battlecreek the first time, so clearly I was not to blame here.  Gleefully, I rubbed my hands together, thinking how fun it would be to tease Rob about his little faux pas and generously extend my empathetic understanding.

But, once again, I forgot who I was dealing with.  That cool-as-a-cucumber countenance he wears around every day is just a clever disguise for a calculating charlatan.  He calmly admitted making a mistake . . . when he let me be the navigator.  And the next thing you know, those turncoat children I gave birth to jumped ship and sold out to their dad’s side.  Wouldn’t you know they’d all turn out to be a bunch of McLeods, who like nothing better than harassing innocents like me.  I knew if word of this roundtrip-trip ever got out to the patriarch of the clan (who has always liked Rob best)—well, that unfortunate Strawberry Shortcake episode from years past would no longer bear any resemblance to humiliation.

Instantly I began to fast and pray.  To no avail.  I guess it was too soon after breakfast.

Let’s just say I no longer believe Tony The Tiger’s hometown is gr-r-r-r-r-reat! 

But I do know how Battle Creek got its name.  Next time, this navigator is taking us through Detroit.  They don’t have road rage there.

Always A Bridesmaid . . . Again

Second place is the first loser. 

I saw that on a t-shirt once, and instantly disliked it.  Seems like a good reason to see a therapist, but a crummy way to sell clothes.  But after my fourth failure in two years to snag first place, I’m thinking of buying the shirt.

Maybe I set my hopes too high.  Everyone thinks they have a winning speech or they wouldn’t even attempt competition.  And one of those people is right.  But what about the rest of us?  The ‘also rans’?  The ‘close, but no cigars’?  Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, you know.  It’s hard to argue with that logic, especially when I feel like I got nailed in the head by a horseshoe again.

What is a judge looking for?  It’s so frustrating to try and then tweak and try some more in a speech contest, only to fall short again with no earthly idea why.  While the phenomenal organization I belong to is brilliant at providing evaluations for speakers in clubs—and even offering evaluation competitions—the place it matters most goes unaddressed.  No evaluations are ever given following a speech competition of any kind.  Participants are thanked for rounding out the gallery of players, but never told where they need to improve. The result is that we all go home second guessing ourselves.  “Maybe I didn’t move enough or speak loudly enough or have vocal variety or make eye contact.  Was my energy down? Did I run over time? Was the speech defective or just my delivery?  Maybe I should stick to Scrabble competitions.”

If we’re courageous, we’ll try again in six months or a year with a new battle plan and hope this one is a winner.

I know.  This sounds like sour grapes.  And I’m not even much of a wine drinker.  Second place or third place or making it through more than one contest are all honorable achievements.  I just don’t know how to do better when there’s no venue for constructive criticism.  I feel like we’re shooting in the dark—one of us will come closest to the bull’s-eye, but we’re never allowed to view our own target.

Yeah, today I feel like I may always be a bridesmaid, but someday I think my prince will come.  Maybe if I wear one of those t-shirts, he’ll recognize me. 

It couldn’t hurt.

That's Entertainment

I hate sad movies.  I don’t want to pay fourteen dollars for two tickets and sixteen bucks for snacks so that I can go home without the makeup I wore to the show.

I go to the movies to be entertained.  It’s not entertaining to watch me blubber and blow my nose.  Just ask my husband.

Why can’t we have a love story, or an espionage flick, or a dramedy that doesn’t require knocking off the main character at the end?  Don’t movie producers realize that’s a criminal offense? It’s not romantic to kill people!  Otherwise, every February fourteenth  we should commemorate foul play instead of foreplay.  Of course, there was that Valentine’s Day Massacre. . .

Something has gone terribly wrong. And I can’t even blame Hollywood.  Most of my friends think sad endings make a movie “good”.  I ask you, was it “good” when Forrest Gump’s Jenny bought the farm one short year after she married him?  Was it “good” when the Andrea Gail went down in “The Perfect Storm”, taking George Clooney with her?  How about Guido, who managed to keep his son hidden and happy despite being in a Nazi death camp, only to lose his life right before the Yanks arrived, leaving his young son fatherless?  That one was called “Life Is Beautiful”.  See?  That’s how they suck you in—give it a feel good title and pull the rug out from under you when your popcorn runs out.

They should set up counseling centers inside movie theaters free of charge.  They owe us that much. 

I blame all of this on the 1993 movie, “Summersby”.  Jodie Foster and Richard Gere fell in love  during the Civil War  and, when it was over, Richard died for a crime he didn’t commit while Jodie walked happily through the town remembering him fondly.  As the credits rolled, I turned to my husband in disbelief and said, “I just lost two hours of my life that I can never get back.”  That’s the last time I ever watched a love story without looking up the ending first.  Talk about a plot killer.

Of course, my extreme sensitivities have severely limited my theater options.  I’ve never seen “Splendor In The Grass” (but that’s because I have allergies).  I skipped “A Walk To Remember”  because remembering plot catastrophes makes me depressed.  I avoided “Nights in Rodanthe” when I heard the romantic ending included Richard Gere’s demise in a freak mudslide.  The guy just can’t seem to stay alive—so far, he’s two for two.  Finally, I steered clear of “Autumn in New York” because the music was sad and I knew that meant either Richard would succumb in the end, or Winona Ryder.  Or, perhaps, the audience—who wearied of Richard’s womanizing ways and wished the author had knocked him off instead Winona.

All of this might explain why last Friday afternoon found my husband and me sitting in a theater with twenty other fifty-somethings, laughing until our sides split while Moe, Larry and Curly poked each other in the eyes and slapped each other in the faces. 

Now that’s a good movie.  Where violence doesn’t kill and the only casualties are the spoiled egomaniacs from the Jersey Shore.

Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.

"Carma"

I think it could have happened to anybody.  I never expected it to happen to me, but that just goes to show how limited my imagination can be.

I’m a pielady.  And by that I mean, I bake pies.  I enjoy eating them, too, but most of all I enjoy making them.  What I don’t enjoy is watching them fall upside down on the floor. 

The first time it happened, I didn’t actually see it.  I just . . . felt it.  And I learned my lesson.  I really did.  Never put a hot lemon meringue pie in the back of a station wagon and break speed limits while delivering it to a fire station.  When I lifted the tailgate, the inside of our car looked like a giant yellow Nike swoosh. It smelled better than tennis shoes, but the pie was just as inedible. 

I continued to break speed limits, but never with a hot pie in the car.  Until last month.  Procrastination might come into play here, but that’s a blog for another day.  Let’s just say I should have made that fresh blueberry pie the night before instead of parking my chassis on the sofa watching American Idol.  Hot fruit pies don’t slice well, and this one was going to be served in about an hour.  But I figured if I put it on the front seat of my new Tahoe (you’re wincing already, aren’t you?) and aimed all the air conditioner vents at it, it would cool off enough to serve up beautifully to the ‘ooh’s, and ‘aahh’s,  and “hey, everyone, this pie’s still warm!” of my admirers.  Carma was about to kick in.

Baking lesson number two:  never let a good pie go to your head.  As I daydreamed about the compliments, I failed to see the brakelights of the van in front of me.  The good news is I didn’t have to meet that driver by accident.  The bad news is—exactly what you thought was going to happen—a blue Nike swoosh on the floorboard of my formerly new Tahoe.  And I was late for Toastmasters.

A couple of weeks later, my husband and I were in Florida visiting my sick father-in-law in the hospital.  Word to the wise: overworked nurses pay extra attention to sick patients whose family members bring them pizza and pies.  So on a warm tropical afternoon, I made two blueberry pies, one for the nursing staff and one for our fatigued family.

In retrospect, I should have paid attention to my instincts and baked apple pies instead.  The truth is, I was just being lazy.  See, apple pies are more labor intensive than blueberry. So I made two beautiful blueberry pies.  In cheap aluminum pie tins.  Slow down, I’m not stupid - just clumsy.  I put those gorgeous pastries on individual cookie sheets so I could carry them safely to and from the oven.  Sheesh.  You have no confidence in me, do you?

I put one of the pies in the oven.  But when I turned to grab the other one, I bumped the cookie sheet it was waiting on, and the whole thing did a reverse two-and-a-half pike and kissed the kitchen floor with flourish.  Tearfully, I scored it at 9.8 and would have given it a ten if it had landed right side up.

Now, at this point, I want to mention that I had a co-conspirator.  I’m not making excuses, I’m just saying that sometimes audacity requires a push.  My sister-in-law, who shall remain nameless but is the youngest of my husband’s siblings, was watching the culinary aerobics and quickly admonished me, “Don’t touch it!  We can save it!”  And, God forgive me, we scooped the fallen, but not broken, pastry up off of the recently cleaned floor (it was, it really was), scooped out the protected blue contents, made new crusts, and drove the resurrected dessert over to those deserving nurses in the hospital. I heard they really enjoyed it.  I’m so grateful we could save it.

Maybe that was the last straw.  In my defense, I did tell the truth to the family before I delivered that pastry, and they felt, too, how unfortunate it was that the gift pie hit the floor instead of the other one.  So, I don’t really think I should have been the only one held accountable by the “what goes around, comes around” law of life.

We flew home a few days after the last piece of blueberry pie was consumed by my brother-in-law.  It was an unusually empty flight which gave my husband the coveted aisle seat and placed me in my favorite spot next to the window.  Better yet, we  were able to set my computer bag with all of our electronics under the middle seat, giving both of us ample leg room.

Halfway through the flight, my panicked husband grabbed my arm and pulled my bag out from under the seat. I didn’t understand what was wrong until the woman in front of us freaked out--apologizing profusely--and a flight attendant handed us at least a hundred paper towels.  While walking up the aisle back to her seat, the plane lurched, the lady in seat 12C dropped her beverage upside down on seat 12D, and its entire contents funneled directly into my open bag.  My laptop, camera, and our phones were baptized with roughly eight ounces of tomato juice.

I still wonder if that woman worked in the nurses’ station on my father-in-law’s floor. I guess I’ll never know for sure. But she was wearing a Nike windbreaker. 

Carma.  It never gets mad—it just gets even.

Fearless

I tried to prepare for an empty nest. 

But I was not prepared for questioning my parenting career, my mortality, or my significance. I was not prepared for memory fades, heart palpitations or emotional freefalls.  They say growing older isn’t for sissies.  But I am a sissy! A whiner. A weakling! Even worse, a wuss.

And the irony of the empty nest syndrome is that it was the filling of the nest that made my courage take flight in the first place.  Am I the only one who wearies of paradoxes?  (Or is it paradoses . . . . paradi? It can’t be paradise.)

I remember clearly the day my fearlessness ran for cover.  It was my tenth wedding anniversary, and I sat shivering in a tiny tent on the edge of a sloping mountain in a torrential rainstorm.  Any minute I expected my husband and I to be swept over the edge of the Mogollon Rim, along with our soggy shelter, to our certain deaths below.  Our young children would be left, alone, to be raised by people who were not us, wondering for the rest of their childhoods what happened to their parents, while our petrified bodies lay crumpled in the desolate wilderness, undiscovered until only our teeth were left as identification decades later. 

Of course, that didn’t really happen.  Instead, we got in our unreliable vehicle which wearied of my whining and actually started up when Rob turned the key.  Then we drove safely down that frozen mountain to a warm cabin with a fireplace. 

But that’s not the point.  The point is, I didn’t want our children to become orphans.  And I lost my sense of adventure. As a matter of fact, in my little world, “adventure” is now the “A” word.  Don’t even think of using it around me.  I’ll smack you.

Still, I wish I could become . . . courageous again.  After all, my kids are grown.  The risk of leaving them as orphans now is . . . zero.  But the risk of mortality is one hundred percent.  Nobody leaves this earth alive.  I remember the day I first understood that, too.  A cold hearted doctor unexpectedly told me that I had a dangerous cancer on my arm and, poof!  Suddenly I had an expiration date.

Surgery removed the threat, but not the fear.  Fear lasts longer, it turns out. 

So, where does Fearlessness go to hide?  And how do I get it to reappear?  Will a friendly, “ollie ollie oxen free!” do it?  Maybe it’s afraid I’ll confuse it with adventurous and it’ll wind up with a black eye.  Just goes to show you—an empty nest can be a perilous place, full of homeless hormones.

I don’t know what the answer is exactly.  But it does seem like somewhere between fear and fearlessness lies a happy medium where new experiences beckon and seasoned experience discerns.

It’s ironic that even after the baby birds are long gone, the nest remains—guess it was made of sturdy material.  Maybe I’m not done yet.  And perhaps significance is a medal born of courage and tenacity. After all, we did launch those young adults.  They never were abandoned.  Could a nest turn out to be a launching pad? A safe place from which to pursue a new life, for both young and old alike?  

Maybe if I keep turning my face into the wind and lifting my wings, I’ll fly far above the tiny voice of fear below and wonder why I ever let it ground me.

So long, wuss. Hello, wisdom.  It’s time to be who I really am. I was made to soar.