How to Get Out of Bed

I know what you’re thinking.

But if you ever come down (heaven forbid) with a full-blown case of sciatica like I’ve had for the last several weeks, you’ll realize how difficult getting out of bed can be.

Lying in bed is fine. In fact, it’s the only place you can be comfortable, since sciatica makes both standing and sitting painful. The problem comes when you just really have to get up—usually to use the bathroom, though eating breakfast before lunchtime is also a consideration.

So there you are with a full bladder and empty stomach, lying flat on your back on a memory foam mattress that has formed to the shape of your body, holding you like a warm hug—and creating a valley you must somehow climb out of. Here goes:

1.     Slowly, without using your right hip or leg, roll out of the body-shaped indentation in your bed and over onto your stomach. The might require several attempts. Tighten every muscle in your body, because when you finally make it, you’ll be lying on your full bladder.  No! Not your glutes!

2.     Massage the spasms out of your hip.

3.     Carefully slide your left leg off the edge of the bed, groping with your foot for your clogs.

4.     Slip your left foot into the left clog.

5.     Slide the right half of your body toward the edge of the bed. Do NOT use the muscles on the right side of your body.

6.     Grit your teeth and pull your right leg off the bed, because now you have to use those spasmed glutes to lower your right foot to the floor and slip it into your right clog.

7.     Use your nightstand to push yourself to a standing position.  Take your cane, stored nearby over night, and hobble to the bathroom, praying you make it in time.

8.     Say a prayer of thanks that Hubby is an early riser, because you know how ridiculous you must look, and anyone who laughed would have to die. 

      With any kind of luck, you can get to breakfast before ten. 

      Now, How to Climb the Stairs…. 

Beginnings: "Call Me Ishmael"--Or Maybe Not

When you get to be my age, you’ve had so many beginnings and endings that you lose count. So far, at least, a beginning has followed every ending—and I have faith that will always be the case. But the sheer number of beginnings is a bit overwhelming.

And that’s my excuse for being late with this blog. I couldn’t decide which beginning to write about.  So I just decided to write about beginnings of novels.

When I first started studying fiction writing, I was told, “If you don’t capture your reader in the first three chapters, you’ll never capture them.” 

Have you stopped laughing? Yeah. The last thing I read said a writer has one sentence.  ONE SENTENCE!  “Call me Ismael,” isn’t going to cut it any more. On the other hand, I think one of my favorite authors got it right. Thank Jim Butcher for, “The building was on fire and this time it wasn’t my fault.” (Quoted from memory, so don't blame me if it isn't exact.)

How do my own first sentences stand up to that? Not so well. Which might explain why I’m not a best selling author. The first sentence of my published novel, When the Moon Is Gibbous and Waxing, is, “When Natalie recorded the final reading for the blood she had drawn from her guinea pigs that afternoon and looked up from her meticulous notes, she realized how quiet the lab was.” Not very exciting. But you do learn a lot from that one sentence: the name of the protagonist, her job, the approximate time of day, and something about her personality. And trust me, by the end of the opening scene, you get all the excitement you need.

Looking through my works in progress, I see that’s my pattern—I begin quietly, giving the reader several paragraphs to get to know the protagonist, then finish the first scene with a bang. But in the sequel to Gibbous Moon, I break one of the cardinal rules of fiction writing—I don’t even begin with the protagonists. Then I kill off one of the characters I do start with. In the second chapter, I kill off the other one. (Can we, like, call that a prologue maybe? No? OK, then just live with it--no pun intended. That’s how it has to be.)

Book three—or it might be book four—in the series actually does begin with a prologue, which we are told is simply not allowed. But when I presented the first chapter to my critique group, they demanded it. Once it was written, I agreed with them, although it means the book follows the pattern I’ve established. I do like the first sentence of the official Chapter One, though:

“In the genetic crapshoot that preceded David’s conception, something had gone very wrong.”

Does that beginning get your attention?

I'm a Fairy Tale Princess

My bathroom is avocado green. There. I’ve said it. And, shameful as it is, it’s all true. But hear me out.

When we moved into this 1970s house, the fixtures in the guest bathroom, which I claimed as my own, were avocado green, and the walls were covered with cream, pink, and green wallpaper in very narrow stripes and topped with a  border that looked like a Monet painting. One day I was walking through Wal-mart, a place where I spend as little time as possible, and saw a shower curtain with exactly the same look. I almost didn’t pick it up because the shower already had beautiful glass doors. But I did, and I hung it up over the glass door. It was perfect. A few months later, I talked Hubby into removing the shower door. That’s where it started—a Monet’s garden look for my bathroom.

A few years later, I covered the tile floor with new vinyl that looks like green Italian slate. I put a swag of silk flowers over the mirror. I found a cute bunny statue to peek out from behind the basket of silk vines I put on the floor. At an art fair, I found two watercolors by a local artist that also fit into the Monet theme. Yeah, I know. It sounds just too, too precious. But I like it. And because Hubby and I don’t share a bathroom (much as I love him, he’s kind of a slob), it’s one of the few rooms in the house I can have pretty much the way I want it.

When my mother died, I inherited the silver tea service my sister and I bought our parents for their 25th anniversary. Now I understand the look of dismay on her face when she opened the gift. It’s impossible to keep shiny, and nobody in her—or my—mostly bluecollar world has tea parties anyway. When I want a cup of tea, I stick a mug in the microwave. But I kind of like the patina on old silver. So I put a bunch of silk flowers in the teapot and sat it on the back of the toilet. (Who says a toilet can’t be pretty?) The sugar bowl and creamer hold plenty of cotton balls.

As a corporate employee, I had to be calm and decisive. As an author, I write about cops and werewolves. In my bathroom I can be all girly. I can have perfumes lined up on the vanity and a drawer full of makeup. I can be the fairy tale princess. OK, the fairy tale dowager queen, then. No jokes about thrones…

Cobwebs in my Brain--and a Poem

Cobwebs are nearly a feature of the decor in my house. I hate cleaning, and my theory is that as long as the spiders stay up there and catch flies, we can coexist. But this morning I woke up with cobwebs in my brain. 

Not the kind made by spiders, of course, but the kind made by staying up too late and getting up too early--plus taking a couple of medications that say, "Do not operate heavy machinery while taking this medication." 

Which brings up a question: Just what qualifies as heavy machinery? Heavy is pretty subjective, don't you think? I assume I'm allowed to use my blender and not allowed to drive an end loader. But in between lies a vast category of machinery that's "a little bit heavy" or "almost heavy" or "heavy, but not quite heavy enough to prevent the taking of medications." What about my car? Is it heavy machinery?

This morning I opted to let Hubby drive to church--that's how cobwebby my brain was. I also opted not to volunteer to run one of the television cameras--a job I sometimes do because everyone else is too busy or too lazy or too intimidated to tackle it. (It isn't that difficult if you have more than four hours of sleep. A college class in studio production helps, too.)

A long afternoon nap cleared the cobwebs out of my head. Wish I could clear the cobwebs out of my house that pleasantly.

On a more serious note, I'm sure I've used this here before, but with the prompt for this week being "cobwebs," I couldn't resist. Besides, it's one of my favorites of the poems I've written.

Love

Is like the silken touch of cobweb

Against the cheek,

And often just as absently

Brushed away.

RITE OF PASSAGE--In Retrospect

That fateful day, I became a senior citizen.

No, I didn’t turn 62—or even 55. That came later. The change, while unofficial, was much more fundamentally significant than mere age.

I bought a luxury car.

Yes, it’s true. No longer would you see that gumball red sports car zipping around town, careening around corners, leaping away from stop signs at the head of the pack as I plotted the next chapter of my novel.

At the height of my mid-life crisis, after I’d cast aside the practical economy cars of my youth, I was often heard telling people I’d drive a sports car until I couldn’t find room in it for my wheel chair. But I failed to consider that irresistible and inevitable force brought to bear on those of us of a certain age and familial persuasion. I became a grandmother.

At first it wasn’t so bad. An infant seat could be wedged into the anatomically shaped, albeit nearly nonexistent, back seat of the turbo-charged, five-on-the-floor bomb, and an infant needs almost no legroom.

True, when I wanted to take my husband and daughter along on my outings with the grandbaby, one of them had to more-or-less curl up into a ball to fit into the other back seat. But it was only for short distances. They could handle it.

But babies grow. And this one grew and grew, until, at age six, she could barely walk under my outstretched arm. My back seat still had enough room for her lanky legs as long as I didn’t have to move the driver’s seat to get in and out. But I could see my fate staring me in the face from a year or two in the future. I couldn’t let my granddaughter be uncomfortable, no matter how short the trip.

Then fell the final blow. She became a big sister.

Talk about fate staring me in the face. The little guy was built like a fullback from day one. And now we had to use two cars for a family outing. The logistics were beginning to get unwieldy. I had to give up and admit I needed the dreaded “nana-mobile.”

I set out on a search to find something of adequate size that wasn’t too much of an affront to my self image, firmly believing no such thing existed. I must have looked at every van, mini-van, SUV, and sedan in town before I heaved a heavy sign, patted the hood of my sports car, and bid it a fond farewell. I had selected a sleek, black two-door with room in the back seat for three adults abreast. My grandchildren would be comfortable even after they outgrew me (by the time they were 10 years old).

What sold me on that particular car? Well, it wasn’t really the prestigious maker and model. It wasn’t really the roominess or living room comfort. It wasn’t even really the somewhat ominous look of it.

I think it might have been a comment the salesman, unaware that I’m a writer of horror/mystery novels, made while showing me how spacious the car was.

“Wow,” he said. “I wonder how many bodies you could stuff into that trunk.”

note: The granddaughter in the essay now drives her own car. The grandson is looking forward to driver's training later this year. Theoretically, Hubby and I could be back into a sports car in less than three years, provided the crack about the wheelchair remains only a joke. That'll be another rite of passage--into second childhood. : - ) We'll see...

Captain Marvel and the Seven Deadly Sins

Does anyone else remember reading Captain Marvel comic books, or am I the oldest codger in the group?

I LOVED comic books when I was a kid. Spent HOURS reading them and more hours with those I was tired of reading in the basket of my bicycle, riding around the neighborhood, trading with my friends for comics I hadn’t read yet.

And the adults all said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk. What are these kids nowadays coming to? Those comic books are eating their brains and morals.” Well, except my parents. Not sure what they thought of comics, but they realized that I read ALL THE TIME, and was reading real books at least as much as I read comic books. They just wanted to get me outside in the sun so people would quit asking them if I was anemic. (Now I pay the price for their good parenting by having occasional skin cancers. It’s OK—they aren’t the scary kind. Just leave my face with white polka dots when they're removed.)

Anyway, the Captain Marvel comic books were my introduction to the seven deadly sins, though according to Wikipedia, I don’t have it quite right. First, they say Captain Marvel had lost most of his popularity by the time I was old enough to read. Then, though I remember greed, gluttony, envy, sloth, hubris, wrath and lust, they list a slightly cleaned up version they call the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man: greed, envy, laziness, pride, hatred, selfishness and injustice. (Wouldn’t want to expose the kiddies to the word lust, right?)

I also remember Billy being a crippled newsboy. Wikipedia says he was homeless, but doesn’t show him with one crutch as I remember.

The one thing Wikipedia and my memory agree on is the origin of the word SHAZAM. It’s an acronym for six legendary heroes who grant attributes to Billy to turn him into Captain Marvel: Solomon for wisdom, Hercules for strength, Atlas for stamina, Zeus for power, Achilles for courage, and Mercury for speed. When Billy says the word, a bolt of lightning transforms him into Captain Marvel. Unfortunately, it didn’t work that way for me or Gomer Pyle. (Actually, Gomer Pyle pronounced it SHAZAYUM, but I pronounced it correctly, and it still didn’t work.)

So most of my childhood memories have been rent asunder by research into the seven deadly sins. Man, I just KNEW I learned the word hubris from Captain Marvel. It’s such a cool word.

The Stranger With My Face

The first time it happened was when I started college. People kept waving at me and saying, “Hi, Inga,” as we passed on the street.

It was kind of a shock to me. I’d been raised in a small town, and nobody who lived there looked like me except me. Even my sister could easily be IDed as not me by her mahogany brown (not blond) hair and dark brown (not green) eyes. But now, on the brink of adulthood, I had to come to terms with the possibility that I was not unique—that I shared at least my appearance with a stranger I knew only as Inga.

But I was still the only me, right? Inga might look more like me than I do, but anyone who really knows me well would see in a second that she wasn’t me. After all, I am more than the sum of my features. I am a certain awkward way of moving, that abstracted expression that says I’m living in my own little world again, those favorite expressions only I am silly enough to repeat, the unmusical tone of my voice.

And I was secure in that fallacy a few more years. Then, on a trip back to my hometown, I went to visit a childhood friend at her parents’ home. She knew me about as well as anyone who wasn’t a member of my immediate family. She’d just finished nurse’s training at a hospital in St. Louis.

“You wouldn’t believe my roommate,” she said. “I was shocked enough when I first met her, and she looked just like you. But later, I realized she moved like you, she talked like you, and her voice even sounded like yours.”

I just chuckled. “Oh, surely not.”

She reached down into her purse and, pulling out her billfold, flipped it open to hand to me.

And there, instead of the stranger I expected to see staring back at me, was a photo of me I didn’t remember ever having had taken. It looked that much like me.

So, beware dear friends. I have finally had to accept that somewhere out there is at least one—and maybe two—doppelgangers of me. And one of them is bound to be my evil twin. Because, you know, I’m definitely the angelic one.

The Strangest Christmas Gift

I’ve tried all week to come up with a list for the blog assignment. Sure, I make lists. I have a grocery list in the little notebook I carry in my purse: milk, toilet tissue.... I have a list of tasks to accomplish in my day planner: write another scene for my next book, critique chapters for my writers’ groups… Yeah, I make lists, but they’re about as entertaining as—well—reading a grocery list.  So what have I done that would make a list anybody would want to read?

Nothing.

For some reason, though, my thoughts kept returning to a Christmas party I attended while I was working for the Fortune 500 corporation.  I was seated at table with the vice president of the division, his wife, my supervisor and her husband, who was a factory manager, and a department manager and his wife. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at that table, there only because my job had high visibility in the division and in the community.

Needless to say, I sat quietly and listened to the conversation—something I’m quite good at because I’m a devoted introvert. Somehow, that conversation drifted to listing the strangest Christmas gifts we’d ever received. I can’t remember all the gifts that were added to the list. I was just trying to keep a low profile because, really, what could I say that would top a Porche?

But then all faces turned to me.

And I just blurted out the gift my husband had given me last Christmas.

“An atlatl and three spears.”

I won.

Furnace Troubles

Troubles was a dog of completely nondescript appearance. Nothing about his floppy ears, bobbed tail or pudgy body alerted an observer that here was an animal with a remarkable ability to act dumb.

     Yet it was an act. And he was so good at it that even we, his family, fell for it. Well, the adults did. My sister and I knew better all along. For example, the three of us—me, my sister and Troubles—liked to play a game in which my sister and I ran and he tried to catch us by the heels, causing us to trip and skid across the polished wooden floor of our living room. (My mom wasn't as fond of this game as we were.)

     Troubles knew that he had to grab our shoes, not our heels above our shoes, or he'd hurt us.  We learned that he knew this and would yell ouch to get him to let go. And he always did! He was smart, but he wasn't willing to take the chance that he might have a little Achilles tendon in his teeth. When we laughed because we'd fooled him, he'd sulk until we scratched his ears and shared our penny candy with him.

     It was a simple case of revenge that finally tipped off Mom and Dad. He was a housedog—a people house dog, that is. Outside he had a doghouse that he refused to use. If we left him out and it happened to rain, he'd sulk for days. 

     But in our house we had a utility room with a concrete floor. Even if we were gone longer than we intended to be, and he had an accident, he couldn't do any damage.

     He didn't have accidents. He'd wait all day—even 10 or12 hours—to avoid using the papers we so conscientiously put down for him.

     Then one day, when he was a middle-aged dog, he must have had enough. Maybe we'd been gone too often or stayed too long. Whatever it was he was definitely pissed off. (No pun intended.) And in that indestructible room, he found the one thing he could do that would really, REALLY get back at us.

     He peed on the furnace filter.

     We came home to an entire house that reeked of dog urine.

     Of course, my parents thought it was just an unfortunate accident—the first time. After about the third time he did it, even they caught on. And yes, they were upset. Very upset.

     But my father, though not so nondescript as the dog, was no dummy either. And he was determined that no dog was going to outsmart him. Chuckling as he worked, he connected one end of a wire to the metal honeycomb that held the filter and the other end to a battery. "This'll teach even a dumb dog like you a lesson,” he informed the dog.

     Troubles watched intently. And the next time we left home for the day, leaving Troubles in the utility room... Did you guess? Troubles did NOT pee on the furnace filter.

     In fact, he NEVER DID pee on the furnace filter for all the months my dad left it wired to the battery. The day after my frustrated father took his invention apart and we left home—yup, you guessed it. Troubles peed on the furnace filter.

     My dad stood in our highly perfumed house with his hands on his hips and said, very seriously, to the dog, "OK, you win this round. But if you don't cut it out NOW, you're going to find yourself out in the ice and snow next time we have to leave town."

     And Troubles never peed on the furnace filter again.

Time--Running Out of Somedays

I was listening to one of my favorite songs the other day….

Yeah, one of my favorite songs is sung by a frog. You got a problem with that?

So I was enjoying the part about following your dreams and how you hear destiny calling your name when I heard it:

Someday I’ll find it—

The rainbow connection—

The lovers,

The dreamers,

And me.

And it hit me. Crap! I’m running out of somedays!

No, I’m not ill or anything—I’m just getting old. (I refuse to accept that I’m old now, but I will admit I’m progressing in that direction.)

Not sure what made me so introspective that day, but it got me thinking about how many people run out of time before they realize any of their dreams. Of course, as the rock star said, our dreams change as time passes, but more often we just give up on them—convince ourselves that we’d really do this than that anyway. But when we abandon our dreams like worn out refrigerators, they (the dreams, not the refrigerators, though the thought of being haunted by a refrigerator is amusing in a surreal way) come back to haunt us like bittersweet nightmares.

When I was a child, our mother used to entertain my sister and me by drawing pictures of our favorite comic book characters. She had real talent. Only months before she died, my mother mentioned how she’d once dreamed of becoming an interior decorator, but had instead married young and decorated only her own homes. Did she regret it? Not really. But the dream never died, and she wondered “What if?” all her life. I think many people suffer that same fate. Is it because we choose dreams that are too far above us? Perhaps we just aren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. Or do we just drift into other things and let our somedays play out without ever moving toward our goals?

When I took my brief detour into melancholy, I had already realized several of the dreams I’d listed when I graduated from high school:

1.     Be first in family to earn a college degree—check.

2.     Become a staff writer for a newspaper—check.

3.     Work for a large company writing and editing their publications—check.

4.     Write novels—check.

5.     Become a published author—oops.

That last one eluded me. But since I’ve cut about 40,000 words, my first novel appears to be on track for publication. I’ve finished a novella, started two more novels, and have plots for three more novellas.

Ok, so I worked for a regional newspaper instead of a national one, for a division of that large company instead of headquarters, and I didn’t get a big advance on my novel. I still feel a little like that country song, “Why Me Lord?” because I can’t think of one thing I’ve done that makes me deserve even to come close to fulfilling so many of my dreams.

Now I find that I need another dream to inspire me through the rest (may they be many) of my somedays. But I did have a Number 6 that I haven’t told you about, and I kind of suspect it’ll be enough to keep me writing as long as I can sit at a laptop—or even croak words into a mike. What do you think?

           

6.     Win a Hugo. *

(*author’s note: Please be aware that the author realizes that her chances of winning any award, much less a Hugo, for her novel are nil to none. The author will be ecstatic if a few people admit they enjoyed reading it. ( - : )

Curiosity and the Munt Knee

Have you ever been curious about an adult’s odd pronunciation of a word? Especially if when they say it, they get that sad/happy look that tells you it’s connected to a cherished memory.

“Mommy, I want a munt knee.”

The expression on my two-year-old’s face was intense and sincere. A munt knee. 

I’d had a similar experience with my older daughter, who’d looked up from play one day and said,  “Mommy, I want a rubber ducky.”

How cute, I thought. She’s been watching Sesame Street. She spoke very plainly, and I knew exactly where to get her a cute, yellow, rubber ducky.

So next time we went to the TG&Y, I picked one up.

“No,” she said when I presented it. Her tone and expression added, Silly adults. They just don’t understand anything.

“But…but… It’s a rubber ducky.”

“Not that kind of rubber ducky. The other kind.”

“I don’t understand. I don’t know about any other kind of rubber ducky.”

Her expression said, Of course you don’t. Poor old thing.

“What does this ‘other kind’ of rubber ducky look like?”

“It looks like a real rubber ducky.”

I finally had to take her to the store. “Show me this rubber ducky you want.”

She led me directly to the sporting goods section. The decoy she selected still sits by our bathtub and has entertained both children, four grandchildren, and assorted nieces and nephews.

But you can see why I might be set back a bit by a request for a munt knee. If I couldn’t figure out a rubber ducky, how was I going to figure out a munt knee?

“Ummm. What does a munt knee look like?”

She stomped her foot and shook her head, sending all the strawberry blonde wisps of hair I had carefully combed down back to floating in the air.

“You not sayn it wight. It’th a munt knee.”

I knew I wasn’t going to win this argument. “OK. Next time we go shopping, can you show me this munt…uh….thing you want?”

“OK.” And she danced off.

Some time later, while shopping at Sears, I saw one of those stuffed chimpanzees with a banana in his hand, and it hit me. Munt knee. Monkey! She wouldn’t know the difference between a monkey and a chimpanzee. I snatched it up and took it to her.

Tears welled up in her little eyes. “No,” she said. “Not THAT. A munt knee.”

OK. So she did know the difference. “I’m sorry I got the wrong munt…uh…monkey.” I thought maybe now that I had discovered what she didn’t want, maybe she could give me some kind of clue about what she did want. “Please tell me again what kind of monkey you want.”

She screwed up her face so hard I could practically see the thoughts zooming through her head: How can I get this dense grownup to understand what I’m asking for?

Finally her face relaxed and she said, “I want a kyoo we us Joe wedge munt knee.”

Oh, great! I wracked my brain trying to remember if we’d seen a monkey named Joe Something-or-other anyplace. At the zoo? No. No Joe Monkeys there. But then, no cows lived at the zoo, either, and she’d insisted she’d seen cows last time we went. Never did decipher that one.

“OK,” I said, surrendering. “We’ll look again.”

So next time we went shopping, we looked again. Nothing. No Joe Monkeys anywhere. But we kept looking. And we finally found what she wanted. You’ve figured it out already, haven’t you?

We were walking by a bookstore when she grabbed my hand.

“Mommy! There him is!”

“There who is?” (Ok, I’m kind of slow sometimes.)

“Kyoo we us Joe wedge!”

She pulled me over to one of the displays, and there it was—the latest book about Curious George the Monkey, accompanied by an assortment of stuffed Curious Georges. 

And that’s how Curious George became her bedtime companion at least until she married, and how our family came to pronounce “monkey” such an odd way.

Time for a Little Laughter

Years ago, I took a poetry class at a local community college. The teacher was a well-known Illinois poet named Kathryn Kerr. During one class she showed us "Another Muse Poem" that she had written in response to a number of poems on that subject, and she challenged us to write about our own muses. This was the result. And I hope this makes up for the poem I posted a couple of weeks ago. : - )

On Reading Kathryn Kerr's "Another Muse Poem"

The Greeks thought of art personified

As nine beautiful and graceful ladies,

Each lovely lady identified

With an aspect of creative activities.

They gave each a melodious appellation

Like Terpsichore, Urania, and Calliope,

And seemed to derive satisfaction

From calling them Muses collectively.

In our day of scientific knowledge

We talk about right-brain phenomena,

And when desiring poetic tutelage,

Run back to the arms of Polyhymnia.

But one lady poet of my acquaintance

Swears her Muse is no lovely Erato--

He's a dirty old man of impatience

Who makes advances at inopportune moments.

I think my Muse most definitely

Can be diagnosed manic-depressively.

He's split my personality effectively,

So I write horror and humor successively.

 And there are some times of near normality

When the idiot just sits on his hiney

Staring cross-eyed in total banality,

Twiddling his lips with his pinky,

Going “Blub—blub—blub.”

Balance—Or the Lack Thereof

I pulled the car next to the curb, turned off the engine, and said, “Home safely again.”

My daughter, grandkids and I had spent the weekend at Anime Central, a convention of anime and manga fans held each spring in Rosemont, near Chicago O’Hare. When I’d pulled out of the parking garage, Harry Plotter, my GPS, decided to take us home via the most direct route—right through the heart of Chicago. Getting out of that traffic in one piece was major. Plus, I’d had to use the bathroom for the last 30 miles or so.

But I spoke too soon.

Leading up to the door of my daughter’s house are three concrete steps. Hauling a suitcase with one hand and carrying a tote in the other, I negotiated the first step and made it up the second.

Then, when I lifted my foot to step onto the porch, my toe caught. I remember realizing I was about to land on my knees, which had been a bit tender ever since they were replaced, and thinking, “This is gonna hurt. And I’ll probably pass out and wet my pants.”

And in my concern over messing up those marvels of modern medicine, not to mention my underwear, I was able to prevent them from hitting the concrete. Unfortunately, in doing so, I further lost my balance and pitched forward headfirst into the doorframe with the full force of my ample weight.

I sat back, thinking, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. Wonder if I dented the aluminum?” Surprisingly, no pain. And I still needed to pee. Which, under the circumstances, was a good thing.

But I remembered being told never to allow anyone who had suffered a head injury to get up and try to walk. Several scenarios ran through my damaged head. In one, my daughter tried to carry me into the bathroom and threw out her back.  No, that wouldn’t do. She had to work Monday. In another, she called 911 and told the paramedics I didn’t need to go to the hospital, I just needed to go. No, that wouldn’t work either. And even if she’d had a bedpan handy, I wasn’t about to use it on the front porch.

So I crawled over the threshold, through the living room, down the hall, and into the bathroom, where I was thankful for the first time that the room was so small that my knees nearly touched the tub when I sat on the stool. Made it easy for me to use the tub to pull myself up off the floor.

After breathing a sigh of relief, I assessed the situation. I still had no pain or dizziness, so maybe I’d be OK if I got up.  Holding onto the sink just in case, I rose and looked at myself in the mirror.

Not good. Through my bangs, I could see a fine line on my forehead and continuing back into my hair. And it was about to drip blood. My daughter, who had followed me into the hall, grabbed a clean dishtowel and instructed me to hold it to my forehead while she made sure I got to the sofa safely. I sat a moment wondering what to do next. I was still nearly an hour from home, and although I felt fine, I knew I had no business trying to drive.

So I called Hubby and told him I’d tripped and hurt myself and didn’t think I should try to drive home. Would he please come up and get me? He said, “OK. Be there in about an hour.” No questions. None. You’d think he was used to my making strange requests.

My daughter, nurse that she is, kept checking to be sure I hadn’t suffered a concussion. I pulled the dishtowel away from my forehead and was surprised it hadn’t soaked through. “I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said when she wanted to examine my head more closely.

Then I felt something tickle the back of my neck and reached up to rub it. My hand came away covered with blood. No wonder the dishrag was relatively dry. My daughter now insisted on examining the wound. “I can’t tell how far back it goes because your hair is so thick,” she said. “But blood is running down the back of your head, and you’re going to need stitches.”

So by the time my husband arrived, we had determined I had two choices: 1. Go to the emergency room in the city where she lives., or 2. Bleed all over Hubby’s car for an hour and go to the emergency room in the city where I live.  The former seemed more logical.

I didn’t realize how bad it was until the emergency room nurse and the physician’s assistant started cutting away my blood-matted hair. The nurse, wide-eyed, said, “Oh my. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a head wound that big before.”

The doctor put six stitches in my forehead and used nineteen staples to close the split scalp in my hair. About 1 a.m., after an MRI to make sure my head had suffered no damage beyond the obvious, Hubby and I finally headed for home.

Over the next week, my eyes nearly swelled shut and my face turned several interesting shades of purple, green, and yellow. Needless to say, I didn’t go out much. Then I wore hats for about another week until I was able to get all the blood and antibiotic out of my hair. Now I have kind of a Harry Potterish scar on my forehead and a looong natural part.

And oddly, it never did hurt. Which gives Hubby way too much ammunition when he tells me I’m being hard headed.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011

The Anniversary Cake -- Judgment

“Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment.”

Any man and woman who put up with one another for 50 years deserve a party.  My sister, Holly, and I agreed that was especially the case with our mom and dad, who had eloped during World War II after a one-month courtship, skipping all the non-essential trappings of a wedding—like guests, a reception and a honeymoon.  They'd had their honeymoon to Hawaii after they had grandkids, but they'd never had a wedding reception. Now, we reasoned, they could have the party they couldn't afford when they were barely 21 and not quite 18.

So we rented the hall, booked the band, ordered the hors d'oeuvres and sent the invitations.  Holly, a professional caterer, would drive up a few days early and use my kitchen to bake and decorate a special cake to take the place of the wedding cake they'd never had.  It was going to be beautiful. (Bad judgment call #1.)

I had only one oven, strictly amateur-sized, so the cake had to be baked in shifts.  Holly started early in the morning, reasoning that although May in Illinois is usually cool, because I didn't have central air, there was no point taking chances.  She'd get a jump on the sun.

It was the hottest May 13 on record.

As layers and layers of cake accumulated on the dining room table, heat accumulated in the kitchen, spilled out into the dining room and started to intrude on the living room.  All the windows were open and fans running. 

My sister is a trooper.  She worked on until she had a multi-layered tower with roses filling the top, spilling over the edge and down one side.  Then the icing, turned into sweet lava by the sun pouring in the glass patio doors and the heat pouring out of the oven, began to flow.

"Let's put it in the basement," I suggested.  "It'll be a lot cooler down there."

We carried it carefully down the stairs into the cool, dark quiet and placed it on a fold-up table in the middle of the room.  The icing firmed up, my sister repaired the sags, and we shut the door and went back upstairs, relieved that it had worked out so well and we could now finish up the rest of the preparations for the big party the next day.

But before we could continue our work, we decided that my sister's dog, who'd spent the morning shut in the guest bedroom, needed to get some exercise, not to mention relief.  Thumper was a docile, friendly little dog who seemed sublimely ignorant of the fact that some of his ancestors had been bred to subdue stubborn bulls.  He coexisted happily in my sister's house with three cats, a rabbit and a bird.

My dog, Vargi, was a golden ball of fluff with a curled, feathery tail and a little pug nose who was the sweetest, most enthusiastic, most affectionate dog you'd ever want to meet.

With people.

When other dogs approached, she morphed into a hairy pit bull.  That's why Thumper had been in the bedroom, which, judging from his stretching and yawning when we let him out, hadn't been especially taxing for him.

We kept them apart and made Vargi be, if not nice, at least distantly aggressive.  Then, when my husband came home from whatever errand he had been on, we went to do our chores, instructing him to "watch the dogs." (Bad judgment call #2.)

When I returned about 15 minutes later, I saw Thumper in the back yard and no sign of Vargi.

"Where's Vargi?" I asked.

"She wouldn't leave Thumper alone, so I threw her into the basement."

"The basement!" I shrieked.  "That's where the cake is!"

I ran down the stairs, nearly crashing through the door at the bottom, my husband only a step behind me.

It was too late.  Vargi sat there looking up at us innocently through the bangs that nearly obscured her big brown eyes, daintily licking her pink nose and protruding lower teeth. Nearly too small to reach the table top, she had nevertheless taken a large doggy bite out of one side of the bottom layer of the cake.

I broke the news to my sister when she returned a few minutes later.  "The bad news is" I said, explaining how the dog and the cake had come to be in the basement together.  "But the good news is, she's a small dog, so it's not a very big bite."

She gave me "the look," rolling her dark eyes at me the way she had when we were kids and I'd said something she considered typically big-sisterish. Then she sighed and went down to inspect the damage.

"You're right," she finally admitted.  "I can fix it so no one will ever know.  We can put this side in the front because we'll be cutting from the back, and we can just work around it. (Bad judgment call #3.) But Mom and Dad will have a cow."

"They never need to know," I said softly, with a wink, “and neither does anyone else.” (Bad judgment call #4.)

And they never did—until they read this essay several years later.

And neither did the person who, in spite of all our efforts, cut himself a big piece of cake from the center of the dog bite. 

Dirty Old Woman

Dirty Old Woman

OK—so I’m fortyish and soft in all the right places

To be instantly identified as someone’s lovely mother,

Well endowed with all the good housewifely graces.

And I am.

OK—so I’ve been married for twenty-four good years

To the same dark-haired man who thrilled my twenties.

You might even wonder if I’m as contented as I appear.

Well, I am.

OK—so when that tall and sun-tanned youth goes jogging by,

You wonder if I’m turning my head to watch his rippling muscles,

Especially when you see that certain sparkle in my eye.

You bet I am!

Just because my own flower garden fulfills all my wishes

For beautiful bouquets to pick and carry home with me,

Can’t I still admire the blossoms growing on my neighbor’s bushes?

You bet I can!

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

The Tooth, the Whole Tooth…

Ladislas wept as he pulled his limousine into the drive of his gothic mansion. Nothing could console him—not even the song of the howling wind as it blew clouds across the face of the full moon. It was over—all over. How was he to survive?

His dentist’s words echoed, “I’m sorry. I’ve done everything I can. They’ll all have to be pulled.”

Who knew that his favorite food contained so much sugar? And how could he explain to his dentist that he needed two sets of dentures—one with very long, sharp canines?

(Written in response to a GBE2 challenge to write a story in 100 words, including the title.)

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

Books, Horses, and a Fullback—First Love

Geeks did not exist when I was in high school.

Well, we existed, but we were called eggheads. Introverted and shy with dishwater blond hair, bad skin and hay fever that lasted from April till the end of October, I really had little interest in boys because they were—well, boys. Seemed like they were interested in only two things, sports and sex. I never cared much for sports. 

But like many adolescent girls, I did love horses. Unfortunately my family had neither the room nor the money for a horse, and that love remained unrequited. So I spent most of my time with books, which I had learned to love even before I loved horses. The result was that I was a pretty good student. That’s why I took chemistry. And the combination of that love of horses and chemistry led to my first real love.

No, really. Chemistry can happen.

All year I had walked into class with a friend and sat down in the second row in front of a contingent of football players who completely ignored us. We had nothing in common with football players, who, I thought, tended to be not very bright and interested in only two things (see above). One day, for some reason I’ve forgotten, my friend turned around to them and said, nodding toward me, “She loves horses, but she doesn’t have one.”

One of the football players I’d noticed a couple of times before, even though I wasn’t really attracted to tall, dark and handsome guys, looked very thoughtful and replied, “Oh, that’s a shame. I can get hold of a couple of horses any time I want, and I’m not that interested in them.”

And this very shy, introverted egghead, blurted out, “Is that a proposal?”

Not long after, he asked me for a date.

We were 16 and 17. He wasn’t intimidated by a runny nose, a few zits, or good grades. He had a wacky sense of humor and a wide-ranging curiosity, and he used up all his aggressiveness on the football field. We were married at 20. He studies science, and I study literature; he leans right, and I lean left; he likes country music, and I like classical. I won’t even tell you how many years we’ve fussed, argued and debated everything from what to have for dinner to the space-time continuum, but I will tell you it’s never been dull, and we’re still married.

He will always be my first love.

copyright Angela Parson Myers 2011