Living Dangerously

Grocery shopping is dangerous.

I’m no newby at it, either. I’ve been navigating produce aisles for forty years and, while I consider myself an expert, don’t be fooled. I make this look easy. Retail therapy is not for the faint of heart.

I deserve a purple heart or a medal of honor for all that I’ve endured while bringing home the bacon.

Every time I see a man pushing a shopping cart while his wife tags along behind him, I think to myself, “Sweet thing, just wait for him in the car with bandages and a cold beer. He’ll be along soon enough and never try to take over for you again.”

Experience is a mean-hearted tutor.

Just this week, I was attacked by a three-pound bag of flour. Actually, it was gluten free baking mix. That means it already had an attitude based on an inferiority complex and was looking for an easy target like me. To be completely fair, it had suffered a serious injury—a side laceration. Apparently a  careless stocker got carried away with his utility knife and murdered the top six bags of Pamela’s Baking Mix right there in the middle of the natural foods aisle. Tragic. Not because the store was attempting to sell the damaged item, but because its fatal wound bled all over me when I pulled it down from the top shelf.

Not.Funny.

Grocery stores should offer liability insurance for their patrons—something that covers laundry bills. I only had that black shirt and clean pair of jeans on for an hour before I was annihilated by rice flour.

Usually my injuries are the result of poorly designed shopping carts. Never wear open-toed sandals while driving one of those. It’s just another example of buggies designed by men in expensive Florsheims who have never actually measured the stride of a woman pushing a cart or exposed their own sensitive toes to the dangers of tiny, treacherous wheels. I’ve lost more toenails than I want to mention here in this public forum, and—while it keeps nail techs busy with my repeat business—I’m tired of people pointing and laughing at my lopsided pedicures.

I repeat—I demand compensation for pain and disfigurement.

And one more thing. If I go home sporting any more bloodstains on the days I wear a white shirt while shopping, I’ll also need a disclaimer printed on the bottom of my store receipt so the polite police officer will know I was simply selecting a fresh roast and there’s no need to make me stand spread-eagle against my car while he searches the trunk for dead bodies.

So.Embarrassing.

Grocery stores think they’ve got us fooled providing Lysol wipes for us at the front door so we won’t pick up streptococcus from the handles of our carts. But I’m not afraid of baby bacteria. I raised two children and babysit at least three grandbabies on a regular basis. It’s grownups I’m afraid of.

So I come prepared. I pop 20K milligrams of Airborne every time I park in the only available space in the store’s north forty. Then I cross myself, kiss a rosary, and step through the automatic doors into forty-million square feet of oxygen that’s already been breathed and exhaled by mobs of disease carrying customers who haven’t yet decided whether or not to get this year’s flu shot.

I’m not even Catholic.

“It’s a war zone in there,” I told my husband yesterday, while I rubbed a wet washrag on the white powder all over my leather shoes.

“Did you get stopped by the cops again? That white powder looks suspicious.”

“It’s Pamela’s,” I answered in frustration.

“Who’s Pamela and why are you buying white powder from her?”

“Listen, honey,” I said, “I’ve had a hard day at the office. In the forty-five minutes I spent in Fry’s, I logged my entire ten thousand steps for the day criss-crossing the store and still forgot to pick up eggs. I can no longer wear white or black shirts when I go shopping, and while I desperately wanted to buy a peppermint mocha at the inside Starbucks, the line was so long it wrapped around the sushi bar and stopped in front of the candy aisle. I decided to skip all the drama and buy a bag of Peppermint Patties instead. Now half the bag is gone.

“Not only that, but the snowbirds are back, and before I could even leave the store, the high school let out, that new housing development across the street invited five hundred new residents to use one of six operating checkout lanes in the grocery store, and I broke another toenail pushing my cart out to the truck.”

“But you’re not wearing sandals,” he said in confusion.

“I kicked the tires of a car next to me. Well, it was the last straw! It was parked so close I couldn’t even open my door to get in.”

“How’d you get home?” he asked.

“The driver offered me a ride when he saw me kick his car. I guess it’s not a good idea to do that to a police cruiser. I have a court date for next Thursday.”

“You want me to do the shopping from now on?” he asked carefully.

“Not a chance,” I said over my shoulder. “I know you mean well, but you and I both know the truth—you’re way underqualified.”

He's not. He doesn’t have the nails for a job like this.

With many thanks to the following link for the use of the awesome photograph above.  https://www.flickr.com/photos/imcomkorea/3017159061/in/photolist-5ABJgP-5Yf6tH-sDTyWV-buGYsk-hCb2fp-99u2Ac-avPVq3-b6RUK8-9iQsGq-7EH3JH-8zTBCS-dYRvJv-aDCRQm-9tbGP4-5ABmEV-99x9Rh-pZTajj-o8bSbG-fQcvc9-fjd3zk-sn9fU7-q49rxT-oWxDUD-8Bzr4Y-hFkYGk-d9EgY5-9h2vkK-9dHPxt-bUXozK-8zTCwb-9iQtbS-5ABHAX-9TXnu2-8zQw3R-5AFzjj-5BqnUi-5ABFFc-6kBJxV-pV1Wro-93J9hf-9sgeD5-spJw3p-dX16By-8otDWs-7PMxT3-qtPp3L-8NCtdR-7HbTME-dAWcAo-daa8xF

And The Rockets' Red Glare . . .

. . . the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night,

That my house was still there . . .

And my yard . . .

But not my peace of mind. Okay. My sanity.

Ever since they made the purchase of fireworks legal in our state, my former favorite 4^th of July holiday has become an explosive event. I’m not just talking about my neighbors and their lack of thoughtfulness or even their lawlessness. I’m also talking about my reaction to their thoughtlessness.

There’s never been a more bottled up rocket launcher than the emotions I keep shoving down inside of me during every amateur micro-burst that shakes our chandelier. I keep doing that because I don’t want anyone to be mad at me. Or shoot at me. Or take direct aim on my house with their “legal” fireworks.

Okay, because I’m a chicken and it takes a lot to make the transformation into a mama bear.

Here’s something weird, but very important about fireworks.

It’s legal to buy them. It’s not legal to shoot them off in neighborhoods—not aerial missiles, anyway. You know, the colorful, photogenic kind that terrify everyone’s dogs and cats and leave me with PTSD until the next pyrotechnic event. So far, those dates include New Year’s Eve (also no longer my favorite holiday), Halloween (never a favorite holiday), and random weeknights—just because people bought fireworks half-price the day after a holiday and thought we’d enjoy a little background noise for no particular reason.

I don’t.

I am, too, a patriot. No, I am not old. I just want to enjoy fireworks shows in appropriate places, like shopping mall parking lots, city parks, and Disneyland, where professionals with all three fingers on each hand control them. Not overhead, six houses from mine.

So I cooked up a plan.

“Next July,” I yelled to my husband above the commotion of our neighbors’ late night, celebratory explosions, “I don’t want to be home on the 4^th of July. I want to go somewhere else to see fireworks.”

“But we just got back from going somewhere else to see fireworks,” he said. “And why are you yelling?”

“Because I don’t want to be home at all on the 4^th next year!”

This is the next year. So we booked a room with leftover hotel points, dug out all of our Christmas gift cards, and planned ourselves a date night so our neighbors could spend the evening being obnoxious and we could spend the evening not caring.

Somebody told them.

On July 2^nd, a few preliminary rounds exploded down the street for about a half an hour. Okay, I thought. That wasn’t too bad. Ridiculously early, but short.

On July 3^rd, one of our neighbors staged his own production, complete with lights and booms and cheers, for three and a half hours. I’ll say this for him—it was free. When bedtime rolled around, though, and the lamp on my side of the bed was still shaking, I lost my cool. And probably my salvation.

Now, hubby and I have different temperaments. I married him because he is the epitome of patience. And I usually get mad at him because he is the epitome of patience. So while I was fuming and losing my mind over the selfishness of our neighbors—don’t they know there are babies trying to sleep and people who get up at 4 in the morning every day?—my husband, the retired firefighter, who, for years, was serenaded to sleep by a symphony of firefighters and their foundation-shaking snores—really couldn’t have cared less that the neighbors were committing misdemeanors behind our house.

It took a little honest communication to sort all of that out. And I’m happy to report that we resolved our differences before anything other than an innocent neighbor’s backyard went up in flames. It looked like we’d find the July 4^th of our dreams after all.

On Independence Day, we left our house because we didn’t have the freedom to enjoy any peace there. We headed to our Shangri-la hideaway in Phoenix, went out for a nice dinner, and returned to our room to wait for the sun to go down. 

Now, listen. Enjoying fireworks in the Valley of the Sun is almost an oxymoron. The high in Phoenix yesterday, July 4^th, was 109 degrees. That’s the boiling point for frogs and tempers. We’ve tried to enjoy this holiday a dozen different ways before, but all of them left us with heat exhaustion and second degree burns. Finally, we discovered the one and only way to view a good light show in Arizona—from the inside of our air conditioned truck.

We found the perfect empty parking lot, aimed our windshield in the direction of the floor show, and sat back for forty minutes waiting for the big pay off. At ten after nine, we looked first at the dark sky in front of us, then at each other, and said,

“Where’s the show?”

We’d researched this. We were one mile east of the park where the big production was supposed to go off, and three miles northeast of another one the local casino was in charge of. They were late. Both of them. The next show we knew of was thirty minutes away. If we left now, by the time we got there we’d be lucky to see the finale. We pulled out our cell phones, searched Safari, and brought up the unbelievable truth. We were late. Two days late. Both events had gone off without a hitch on July 2^nd.

I blame my neighbors for this. 

Since when is the Fourth of July celebrated in its entirety on the Second and Third of July? Is this a communist plot or a socialist prank in an election year? Who’s stealing our legal right to Independence Day? Was it written in the fine print somewhere in Obamacare that we had no right to find fireworks on Fireworks Day? I wanted answers. I wanted names.

I wanted people to stop messing around with the Fourth of July.

We turned around in the empty parking lot and headed back to our hotel, where on the way we saw eight cars lined up side by side against an open stretch of desert, in full fireworks viewing posture. Two cute college girls sat on the back of their open convertible, with John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever blaring from Pandora, while the man in the next car leaned against his vehicle looking at his cell phone. His wife stood against a wooden barrier, looking longingly off into the dark night. Everyone was waiting patiently. For something.

“Honey!” I said in excitement. “That must be where the show’s going to happen.”

“But it’s after nine,” he said, driving past the onlookers.

“Maybe it starts at 9:30 instead of 9,” I told him.

“But you looked it up,” he said. “The fireworks blew up two days ago.”

“Well, eight cars full of people over there think there’s a show about to start. I’m just one woman with a cell phone. I could be wrong.”

He sighed. Poor guy. What choice did he have?

He turned around, and we headed back to the impromptu parking area, where we took the last spot alongside the man with the cell phone. My husband rolled down his window and asked him,

“Are there fireworks happening here soon?”

“I sure hope so,” the stranger answered.

“Well, we wondered because online it says the show happened on Saturday.”

Silence. And then .  .  .

“Ohmigosh.” He looked up from his cell phone to my husband, staring at him blankly like he’d just been told there was no Santa Claus.

“You’re right,” he said. “And we’ve been sitting here in the heat for thirty minutes for nothing.”

We backed out away from our misinformed peeps, and drove away. I wish I’d taken a picture of that sad group of cars all lined up side by side. Thirty miles north, like a pinhead of light on the horizon, a distant fireworks display in a town that still owns a calendar punctuated the dark to the delight of the blondes in the convertible.

“Yay!” they shouted.

It was all the show any of us got. Some reward for the only true patriots in the south end of Phoenix.

I’ve got a new plan, though. Next year, we’re not even going to be in the state for the Second or Third or Fourth of July. We’re getting out of this stinking desert and going some place green. We’re gonna leave three days early and find a pretty place with good temperatures and a working calendar. Then we’re gonna watch fireworks without any early pre-show bologna, and cheer and eat hot dogs and applaud when the big finale lights up the sky.

“They don’t celebrate the Fourth in Ireland,” my husband said, when I laid out the plan.

That’s when I finally blew up. Talk about a rocket’s red glare.

In Spite Of Me

I have a confession to make. When I became a mother, I had no credentials.

It gets worse. 

My husband and I raised our two children by gut instinct. There was no village. There was just me on the days my firefighter husband was on a twenty-four hour shift. And the rest of the time—there were just the two of us.

And . . .

wait for it. . .

we didn’t know what we were doing. Close your mouth.

I wonder sometimes why God gives babies to barely grown adults. Completely uneducated, with no significant prior experience, we’re supposed to train them up in the way they should go. We barely knew where we were going. How were we supposed to know where our kids should go?

We’d both had examples, of course. Not perfect, but examples. So we turned to them for advice.

“You’re entitled to your own mistakes,” I was told. Which didn’t exactly sound like advice to me. It sounded more like a life sentence with no hope of parole. What had they learned about raising kids?

I felt like I was being warned. Like I was put on notice that I was definitely going to screw up somehow, which was either a reflection on me or on the frustrating responsibility of parenting. Or both.

 

So I set about to do it right. Do it perfectly. Fix all the mistakes in the next generation that had been made with ours.

It wasn’t easy. 

It wasn’t possible.

I was determined to do it anyway.

Mold my breed. Train their minds. Give them my values and watch them live a perfect life.

Like mine.

There was a problem, though. I wasn’t perfect.

Like a temperamental cake in the oven, I was in process myself the entire time I was in the process of raising my children. I’m not even the same person today that I was thirty years ago. Today, if I had the energy of my twenty-seven-year-old self and was given another child to raise, there are a lot of things I’d do differently. Then when those twenty years of second chance parenting were finished and this time I was sure I’d done it perfectly and trained my children to be as near perfect as I could make them . . .

They’d still live life on their terms, not mine.

I don’t want my kids to be my clones. This temperamental cake isn’t done yet.

I want them to live life in the same freedom God gave me. Free to be themselves in a complicated world, able to respond to life’s challenges with their own varied points of view, and completely assured we’re on their side.

Thank God it was never up to me to decide who my children should be or how they should live. It’s always been up to the One Who loves them perfectly and never shoulds on them.

Look at that. I think I just grew up a little.

Safe!

“Run, Tully, run!” the woman on the bleachers yelled.

No, it wasn’t me hollering—she had a Kentucky accent and I was at the fence taking pictures. But somebody in the stands wanted her to score a run as much as the coach did. My five-year-old granddaughter picked up her petite little legs and ran for home like her life depended on it.

“Safe!” the umpire yelled, crossing his arms in a fluid “x” at the same time Tully jumped up and landed, planting both feet on the white triangular base. It was like he was pronouncing a blessing on our little Dodger, ecclesiastically.

She made it home and now she was safe. I wonder if that’s why they call it “home” – because you’re supposed to feel safe there. You get to be who you are even if you’re covered in dirt and your ponytail is messed up. After all, everyone else on the team looks about as put together as you do. That’s part of being a team.

But some homes don’t run according to teamwork. Heck, they can’t even spell ‘teamwork.’ It’s like everyone is trying to cover their bases all by themselves and spend most of their time playing defense against their own team members. That’s a pretty good way to lose the game. And the team.

Don’t we all wish there was a safe place where we can be ourselves, even if our socks are smelly and our hands are dirty? And if there isn’t a safe place, at least we’d like to find a safe person to pour our hearts out to. Somebody who knows how to listen without judging and especially without breaking our confidence.

Those are rare people. Of all the people I cross paths with every week, or every month, there are about four or five who I feel ‘safe’ with. And when I describe someone as ‘safe,’ I mean I trust them enough to be myself with them. They make me feel accepted and won’t sacrifice me to the other team to make themselves look good.

Wisdom reminds me to watch what I say and who I say it to. I have to protect myself in case I let something slip in the presence of someone who’s not safe. Maybe it’s not their fault. Maybe no one ever cheered for them while they tried to make it home. Maybe home never was a safe place for them. Maybe they believe that honesty is the best policy even if it wounds one of their own team members and takes them out of the game.

Tully made it home because the coaches and her teammates had her back. If they’d booed her from the bleachers or chewed her out while she was up to bat, she’d have never even made it to first base. But they all did their best to support her while she did her best. That’s teamwork. That’s safety.

When you're running like your life depends on it, you need a safe place to land. 

That's home.