My Mother’s Instinct

My father was trying to figure out how to break the law on Monday and get away with it.

            Then my mother got up the Friday before and said, “I had a dream last night.”

            My father’s predicament wasn’t as strange as it sounds. He was an electrician at an Illinois university at a time when it was illegal in that state to strike against a public entity. But the electricians were paid so much less than those working for private companies in the area that they decided they had to go ahead and take the risk of being fired and perhaps prosecuted.

            My father was torn. He didn’t want to be fired or wind up in jail. He had started his career at the university only a few years earlier, and working there for at least 15 years was his only hope of a comfortable retirement. But he agreed that something had to be done to get the attention of the people who had ignored their requests for equitable pay. What to do?

            He asked my mother what she had dreamed.

            “I dreamed that Angela had her baby. We have to go to Atlanta.”

            Hubby and I had been married a couple of years when he graduated from college and found a job as an aircraft electronics repairman. About six months later, he was recruited by a large manufacturer of aircraft to teach electronics to some of their customers. We moved to Atlanta, where we knew absolutely no one, three months before our first child, and my parents’ first grandchild, was due.

            “She’s not due for another month,” said my father.

            “I know, but I have a funny feeling.”

            My father went to work that day and requested a week of vacation because his wife had “a funny feeling” about their eight-months-pregnant daughter in Atlanta. His boss chuckled and made some wisecrack about “women’s intuition.”

            I had spent Saturday afternoon shopping and was absolutely exhausted. I was so big that people asked me if I was expecting twins or triplets, and the baby—the doctor assured me there was only one in there—was so active even the doctor remarked about it. After a light supper, I went to lie down and watch my stomach bounce while I tried to rest.

            About 8 o’clock, my parents knocked on the door. They hadn’t bothered to let us know they were coming, and when my mother explained why, I laughed. “You’ll just have to come back next month.” I was sitting on the sofa eating one of the donuts they’d picked up on the way when my water broke.

            By six, my pains were three minutes apart, and we all piled into the car and headed for the hospital through an early morning ice storm, my mother timing my contractions while Hubby tried to concentrate on driving.  Turned out there was no hurry, though. Our daughter wasn’t born till 4:30. She still had fuzz on her face, but she weighed more than six pounds and was already trying to lift her head to look around.

            And because my mother’s intuition told her she should come to Atlanta four weeks early, and her instinct told her she should pay attention, she was able to hold her first grandchild on the day she was born.

copyright 2011 Angela Parson Myers

All on a Summer’s Day

The prompt for this week is "summer" or "your favorite thing." We can take our choice or combine the two. Since I love to write and and I love my family, and this is admittedly somewhat autobiographical ; - ), I selected the first page of a short story I plan to put up on Amazon soon. 

Honey held the doll up and stuck her tongue out at it, but the gesture wasn’t very satisfying. She didn’t really have that much against this doll in particular, she just didn’t like dolls in general.

         Actually, this one was rather nice, for a doll. It was a Christmas doll, left under the tree by Santa. A lacy white dress covered its fabric body, and a tiny wig of real hair was stapled to its head. In a lot of ways the doll looked a lot like Honey. In fact, that was part of the reason she didn’t like it. The doll had golden-blond hair like hers, but its hair lay in a long, neat pageboy, while hers curled every which way around her face, with one curl hanging down onto her forehead so people were always saying, “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead…” It made her want to puke.

         She tossed the doll aside and stood, hitching up her jeans and settling her holster low on her hip so the butt of her six-shooter brushed her wrist—the perfect position for a quick draw. She pulled her sombrero down on her brow so the glare of the sun wouldn’t ruin her aim.

         “There ain’t enough room in this here town for both of us,” she snarled at the doll. “Draw, you no-good so-and-so!”

         Her right hand flashed down to the pistol and jerked it out, her left hand fanning the hammer as she squatted in dueling position.

         “Kew! Kew-kew-kew-kew!” Then she added a “Ptieu-u-u!” for a ricochet.

         She straightened and raised the barrel of the six-gun to her lips to blow away imaginary smoke with satisfaction. She spun the gun on her finger forward, then backward, then flipped it into the holster. She stuck her thumbs into her gun belt and tried to stand bow-legged. She was the second-fastest draw in the entire neighborhood, even counting the big boys in the sixth grade. There was only one boy she wasn’t able to best. He said it was because he had a poker face, but she didn’t agree. He wasn’t that ugly or that skinny either.

         She bent down to pick up the doll to take it into the house. She wanted to be sure it got back in before evening, because she’d already ruined one doll last summer by leaving it out in the dew. Mom would be P.O.ed if she ruined another.

REMEMBERING MYRTLE—The Bakery

My mother threw another pie into the garbage.

Don’t judge her. She was trying to duplicate her aunt’s piecrust—a nearly impossible task. After this attempt, the last of many, she gave up.

My Great-Aunt Myrtle, just Aunt Myrtie to me, was widowed shortly after I was born. She supplemented her small pension by baking for a local restaurant. She made the best sugar cookies I’ve ever tasted and pies that melted in your mouth like meringue, crust and all. And her meringue—well the only word that comes to mind is mist. People patronized the restaurant just to eat a slice of her pie.

Her home had a parlor and a porch in the front, and a kitchen in the back that ran the entire width of the house. She slept in the parlor, which was heated by an oil stove, instead of using the unheated bedrooms upstairs, sat to read her Bible in a wooden rocking chair beside her bed, and worked in the kitchen, which was warmed by a coal stove right in its middle.

On one side of the stove was the treadle sewing machine where she taught me to make quilted hot pads, and on the other side was the Formica-topped table that was her only work surface. With grey hair in a net-covered bun and an apron protecting her cotton housedress, she set to work.

She covered the tabletop with flour and rolled out the piecrusts with a huge wooden rolling pin. The crusts always came out perfectly round and just slightly larger than the pie pan. Usually the trimmings went back into the dough to make another crust, but sometimes she let me sprinkle them with sugar and cinnamon and eat them like cookies after they turned golden brown in her oven. No cookie was better, not even her sugar cookies.

When I was about 10, I told her that when I started junior high, my school would be only a couple of blocks from her house and I could come eat lunch with her. She smiled at me sadly. “I don’t think I’ll be around that long, Angel.”

I hadn’t yet experienced the death of a person I loved, so I shrugged it off. But her premonition was true. She died of a massive heart attack a year later.

I thought of her every time I left school to get lunch and had to walk past the bakery to get to Mike’s Ice Cream Parlor where most of us ate. Sometimes I didn’t even get to Mike’s, but stopped in the bakery for lunch. They made great fancy pastries, but their sugar cookies didn’t measure up to my Aunt Myrtie’s.

Years later, I, too, tried to duplicate her piecrust. Not as much of a culinary perfectionist as my mother, I kept trying and gradually got better and better. I discovered that those tasteless plums that grow nearly wild around the neighborhood make tasty pies, that grapes make a surprisingly good pie, and that yellow crook-necked summer squash make a better pumpkin pie than pumpkin does.

And one day, I pulled a pie out of my oven that looked especially promising. The crust was ugly as a mud fence, with cracks and bubbles all over the top, but something about it made me snap off an edge and lay it on my tongue.

Oh. My. God. It was almost perfect. At least it was the best piecrust I’d tasted since my Aunt Myrtie died. And my family didn’t even complain about how it looked.

I never did learn to make a pretty pie, and I don’t bake much any more. The kids are grown and have their own families that are nearly grown, and Hubby and I both have enjoyed way too much good food in the past. I’m proud of many things I’ve accomplished in my somewhat mundane life. But I will always feel a special rush of exultation when I remember that pie that was almost as good as my Aunt Myrtie’s.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

Further Adventures of a Phonaholic

I should have known something interesting was happening when I saw the fire truck outside.

Remember what I told you about my granddaughter’s phone dying while we were in Florida? Well she has bad luck with airlines, too. On her trip home from Dallas last year, she got bumped—for two days. This year her flight was delayed an hour, which was an improvement. And not to worry—she had my BlackBerry.

Then at about 11 p.m., I got a text from her. (Remember, hubby was able to supply a charger for her phone, so I was using it while she had mine.) “Plane running late. No response from Mom. Please make sure she knows.”

So I texted her back, which was really texting myself, since she had my phone—kind of surreal, “OK, will email her.”

When I opened my email to send the note, I found a message from my daughter, “Dropped phone one too many times. Please let Crystal know I’ll pick her up as planned.”

After I answered my daughter’s email, I texted my granddaughter to let her know that her mother ‘s phone was broken, but she would pick her up. The next day we drove up to exchange phones and to give an extra we had to my daughter so she could communicate while I checked into getting her a new one. About a week later, she came down to pick up her new BlackBerry Curve, and when we pulled into the parking lot, there sat the fire truck.

Inside the phone store, three firemen were huddled around the closed door to a back room. They were concentrating intently, mostly on the door, but also on controlling their expressions, which occasionally erupted into quickly suppressed giggles. The salesman who had sold me the phone approached us with a smirk on his face. Seems his coworker had gone into the break room to change clothes when he got off duty, and when he closed the door, it locked.

Because it was not supposed to be lockable from the inside, it was not un-lockable from the inside. But neither did the key outside the door unlock it. And because it was also the room where their inventory of phones was stored, the hinges were on the inside, and the door was reinforced with steel.

The coworker had been locked in for about 40 minutes while the firemen tried in vain to remove the lock from the door, the only way to get the door open.  In the meantime, our salesman chortled.

Other customers were asked to return later because all the stock was locked in the room with the coworker, but the phone I planned to purchase had been ordered from another location, so it sat on the salesman’s desk waiting for us.

Just as we finished our transaction, the imprisoned coworker was able to use a tiny screwdriver (one of those designed to be carried in a nerd’s pocket protector—hubby is never without his) to remove the plate of the lock on the inside. He used his phone to take a photo of the lock’s mechanism and sent it to our salesman, who showed it to the firemen. They were then able to figure out how to unlock the door and release the coworker, who was a bit surly, but not in as bad a mood as you might expect after his experience.

When we walked out with my daughter’s new phone, the firemen, still carefully controlling their expressions, were climbing into the fire truck.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

Hello, my name is Angela and I’m a phonaholic

“You’re such a junkie,” my granddaughter told me.

She had just offered me my BlackBerry and asked if I needed a fix. She had it because her simpler phone had died, and I’d loaned her mine because she was on her way to Dallas, where she needed to be able to contact friends for pick-up at the airport. I guess I looked too eager as I snatched it from her hands.

My co-workers used to tease me because they said I had organizers for my organizers. They were kind of right, because I had a detailed work organizer, a detailed home organizer, and a purse organizer to combine high points of the two so I wouldn’t accidentally overlap. It was the best way I knew to CONTROL the coordination of a 10- to 12-hour-a-day job (sometimes six days a week), my husband’s conflicting work schedule, and our kids’ and grandkids’ activities.

Then my employer gave me my first cell phone with a calendar. I was in heaven. Here, in an easy-to-carry package, not only could I keep track of my meetings and appointments, but I could set an alarm to remind me to go. (Then, as now, I tended to get caught up in my writing and forget to eat lunch, attend meetings, etc.)

When I retired, I got a BlackBerry. Now I have a calendar with an alarm, a separate wake-up alarm, and I can check both my email accounts, facebook  and twitter anywhere I have phone service. (When the publisher who has had my novel for five months sends me that acceptance letter, I want to KNOW, baby!) I can carry my to-do lists in my pocket and jot down micropoetry on my note pad. With my phone and my Mac, I have conferred with clients and written and delivered articles while 1,000 miles away from my home office. In Scotland without internet, I was able to post on facebook and twitter and keep track of all my friends, actual and virtual. I am not a cell phone junkie; I am merely in CONTROL.

But for the last week, I have been without my full QWERTY keyboard. I almost missed my hair appointment because it was on my BlackBerry in Dallas. (Thank heavens I had written my doctor’s appointment on my day planner.) I’m behind with facebook and twitter because I can’t check them while I’m waiting to see my optometrist, and I can’t check the weather forecast for next week to plan my wardrobe. My life is out of CONTROL.

I am so looking forward to seeing my granddaughter on Sunday. She’s a delightful, lovely, intelligent and talented young woman—and she has my BlackBerry.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

Three Strikes for Simultaneous Success

When it comes to success in education, my family seems to like to experience it in multiples. I graduated from community college the same year my older daughter graduated from junior high, for example. But that was the last time my kids and I coincided. I was, after all, 46 before I finally got my bachelor's degree.

But my younger daughter and her family seems to be trying to set some kind of educational success intersection record. The year my younger daughter received her bachelor's of nursing, her daughter graduated from high school and her son from grade school. I took them to Disney World for a couple of days to celebrate. 

This year my daughter received her master's of nursing, her daughter graduated from community college, and her son from middle school. We're going to Disney World for a week this time. I hope this will be our last trip to Disney World for oh so many reasons. Thankfully, my daughter has chosen not to pursue her doctor's degree right now, and my granddaughter will be finishing her bachelor's degree, while my grandson has four years of high school ahead of him, so this should be the end of their coinciding graduations--I thought.

Then a couple of days ago, I realized that because my granddaughter is taking a year off to prepare a portfolio before entering a three-year program, she will graduate from college the same year her brother graduates from high school. In the meantime, their mother will be teaching next year while she decides if she wants to earn a doctor's degree, which could take three years. 

Nooooooooooo...........

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

Nightwork

Before I became a corporate communications specialist, I actually did use some of the knowledge of welding I gained at great loss of dignity and confidence (YOU see what it's like to have a spark down your shirt), doing ultrasound checks of welds to make sure they had no flaws. I worked second shift and sometimes had to stay over four. A casual comment from a third-shifter one of those nights led to this more traditional, rhyming, poem:

Third Shift

I lay beside her briefly before I left for work tonight.
She didn't even know when I arose.
I crept into the hall before I turned on any light,
And silently slipped into my clothes.

In the room across the hall the baby sleeps
In the glow of her Cookie Monster light.
A dream of breast-warm milk moves her tiny cheeks
As I walk out alone into the night.

An empty tar-dark highway leads me miles away
Into a world of noise and fire and smoke,
Where I carve steel into parts for unseen trucks,
And dream about my wife in bed at home.

copyright 2011