They Say It Skips a Generation

You can fill in the “it” blank with any number of things. Let’s use—oh, say—dancing.

My mother, I’m told, was a heck of a jitterbug dancer as a teenager. My younger daughter took every kind of dance class she could find and excelled in all of them. Guess where that leaves me?

Yep. Middle generation. Two left feet.

Back in the dark ages when I was in middle school (they called it junior high back then) ballroom dancing was part of the PE curriculum. The only requirement was that I learn to move my feet according to pages the teacher handed out. On the pages were pictures of feet connected by dotted lines with numbers showing position one, position two, etc. I can close my eyes and still see those patterns. What I had trouble with were the numbers. This led to some interesting moves on my part and some very unhappy, wounded partners.

There was also this thing about leading that I just didn’t get. If we both memorized those pictures, why would one person have to lead? And why did they call it leading when the “leader” usually was actually pushing. And, by the way, what’s with the leader being the guy, anyway? Why didn’t we at least take turns? That seemed fair, though I knew without a doubt we’d both do much better if girls led. Eventually I learned, though, and developed enough grace to earn a firm C on my report card.

I justified my clumsiness by telling myself I just took after my dad, who had never danced a day in his life. Then, as he and my mother neared retirement age, she finally talked him into taking ballroom dance lessons. My memory of my father from my childhood was of him in khakis and ankle-high work boots, resisting dance classes with every bone in his body. Now in his 50s, he bought dress shoes with leather soles to slide over wood and brightly colored dress clothes to go dancing. He got so good, in fact, that other couples would stand aside to watch him and my ex-jitterbugging mother sweep over the floor to the tune of “Dance Across Texas,” which became “their” song.  I was orphaned, left-feet-wise.

Still, I wasn’t really bothered. I hadn’t needed to dance so far and probably never would. Then, as I approached middle age and had given birth to two kids, I started putting on weight. I knew it was time to put aside my distaste for sweat and find that life-long exercise program I had so carefully ignored to this point. And the studio where my daughter took dance was offering belly dancing…oops…make that “Middle Eastern tribal dance” lessons. Sounded like fun, and at least nobody had to lead.

We learned hip movements first: vertical figure 8, horizontal figure 8, around the world… No problem. I could even roll my stomach and shimmy. I’d finally found a form of dance I could do! Then we learned arm movements. Nothing too complicated: arms in kind of a hula position, arms in front, click those little finger cymbals. Cool!

Ok, now move the hips and arms at the same time... Say what? The lessons ended and I still could dance with my hips or dance with my arms, but I could not dance with both at the same time. For years I looked back at that experience with some bemusement. An anomaly, surely. After all, I can pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time—even rub my head and pat my stomach. Although—that is just hands…

Then, a year or two ago, I tried my hand at tai-chi….

Yeah, it definitely skips a generation.

My Mother's Mirrors

When my mother started talking about “that family in the next room,” I knew we had a problem. The “next room” she was referring to was the mirrored closet door in her bedroom.

            My mother had Lewy body dementia. Lewy bodies are the abnormal round structures that are deposited in the brain when people have Parkinson’s disease. Although people with Lewy body dementia sometimes develop physical symptoms similar to Parkinson’s, the first symptom is usually an inability to separate reality from—what? Dreams? Misinterpretation of sensory stimuli? It’s the second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s, yet most people have never heard of it.

            My mother had been diagnosed only a few months earlier because she called me while I was on my way home from church.

            “Where are you?”

            I could tell by the tone of her voice that something was wrong. “What’s going on?”

            “Well, I might need your help later. I just wanted to be sure you were around in case they didn’t leave.”

            “In case who didn’t leave?”

            “Oh, there’s a man and a woman. I guess she’s his wife. An older man—her father, I think. And some kids.”

            “What are they doing?”

            “Just looking around. They pick up stuff and look at it and put it back down. I asked them what they want, but they won’t talk to me.”

            I wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away, and I wasted no time getting to her condo.  When I arrived, she seemed a little frightened. Her eyes darted nervously around the room—which looked exactly as it had the last time I visited her—nobody there but her, and nothing out of place.

            “Did they leave?”

            “I don’t know where the others went, but the older man went into the bathroom. He must be sick, because it really stinks now.”

            The bathroom door was nearly closed. Half afraid of what I might find when I pushed it open, I was nevertheless emboldened by my inability to smell anything more than my mother’s favorite air freshener. Cautiously, I peeked in.

            The bathroom was empty.

            I spent the next two hours trying to convince my mother to go with me to the emergency room. Worst case, I feared she’d had a stroke; best case, I knew she’d suffered hallucinations several years ago when she had low blood sugar.

            And I did convince her. But four hours in the emergency room produced no explanation for her Sunday “visitors.” In fact, she was surprisingly healthy for her 84 years—her blood pressure and cholesterol were better than mine!

            “I must have dozed off and had a dream,” she said, by way of explanation.

            I didn’t buy it. She’d been awake when I arrived, yet she was convinced one of them was still around. And I discovered later that another of them, a boy about eight years old, stayed behind and kept her company. She named him Peanut. She enjoyed his company, but she wasn’t as sure about the rest of the family, especially the father. She didn’t trust him.

            When my brother-in-law and his family came to visit at Christmas, they covered the mirrors with pretty stick-on paper, thinking that maybe if she couldn’t see the reflections, she’d realize they were simply closet doors instead of a portal into another world where people lived that only she could see. 

             For a while, it seemed to work. But the hallucinations started being triggered by the bathroom mirrors, and they became more frightening. Because she seemed to fare fairly well during the day, I started spending the night with her, but soon realized she needed someone with her who was awake and alert 24 hours a day. The complex she lived in included a section for assisted living, so she moved from her condo into an apartment.

            There, too, she was convinced she was seeing people in another room through her mirrors, but they didn’t come into her quarters as often as they had. For a time, she would buzz for help or walk down to the dining room and help the staff fold napkins if she became frightened at night. Then one afternoon she called me to come get her because she wanted “to go home.” I found her outside the building, waiting for me at the curb. Usually that wasn’t a problem. Residents came and went as they pleased, and she had often met me outside when we were going out to eat, which we did at least a couple of times a week. But this time she was outside because my father, who had died three years ago, was working in the attic, and he and his crew were making so much noise it was giving her a headache. She wanted to go home, meaning my childhood home, which they had left when I started college. If she had started out to try to find it before I’d arrived, she could easily have wound up on a busy highway. We had to move her into the memory unit.

            The memory unit had fewer mirrors. Although she had fewer visits from the family—even Peanut was absent—she started having visits from relatives: my niece of 15 years earlier, a cousin of 30 years earlier. They always needed her help—help she was unable to give. Then one night she was convinced that she was a visitor in someone’s home, and while the attendant stepped out to let her change into her pajamas, she decided to shower in order to free up the bathroom—her private bathroom—for those who needed to shower in the morning. Unattended, she flooded the bathroom floor, then slipped and fell when she stepped out. Her spine, like chalk from osteoporosis, crumbled, leaving her nearly paralyzed below the waist.

            Her room in the nursing home had no mirrors, and she had no invisible visitors during the week she was there. The day she died, she was more alert and lucid than she had been for months. Then she just drifted away, staring into space. At almost exactly midnight, a week after her 86th birthday, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and just—stopped.

            Going through her things, which had accumulated in my garage as she moved to progressively smaller quarters, I found a small looking glass set in a carved wooden frame. It now lies on the vanity in my bathroom.

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. ( - : )

A Pet Peeve of Presidential Proportions

I wish I could tell you that I’ve been absent from the blog because really exciting things had been happening, but the truth is, it’s just life. A half-written essay about the history of my family sits on my computer, abandoned while I worked on edits, did critiquing for the two groups I belong to, sewed one sleeve of lace on the very fancy dress I started as a Christmas gift for my granddaughter, went with said granddaughter to a fashion swap meet in the Chicago suburbs, went with my husband to his cousin’s funeral in Southern Illinois, and spent a day lying on the sofa whining because the room wouldn’t stop spinning.

And this week’s GBE2 subject is pet peeves. Friend, neither of us has the time to go through all my pet peeves! I’ve had many decades to form and collect them. They range from young whippersnappers who call me honey instead of ma’am as befits my rather advanced age to people who misuse the word “comprise.” And in between are people who don’t know the difference between their/there/they’re, to/too/two… Well, you get the idea.

So let’s just settle on one pet peeve, shall we? Given the year, I have to say it’ll be long political campaigns bankrolled by big business in order to elect politicians who make any promise they think will get them elected, knowing full well that they can’t do a darn thing without the OK of all those other politicians who are trying to line their pockets at the expense of the rest of us.

So in that spirit, here’s a poem I wrote to express my bad attitude:

The Woes of  a Presidential Election Year

All hail the coming election spring!

It doth the fruits of politics bring!

Throughout the land, the song of the lyre

Is heard in volume ever higher.

The telephone pole one year of four

Brings campaign poster blossoms forth.

O how happy we all will be

If we can only survive to see

November bring the winds of change

And the political leaflet begin to wane.

The snows of silence will gently fall

Alike on winners—and us losers all.

Work--The Cake Curse

Why would writing a blog about work be so difficult for me? I started answering the phone for the family business when I was in grade school, and by the time I was 12, I was putting in time at the office.  I’ve worked in retail, fast food, and as a waitress. I’ve been a staff writer at a regional newspaper, an office supervisor, a logistics planner, a metallurgical technician, an editor, event planner, photographer and public affairs specialist. I’ve driven a fork truck and side loader and soared up over mining trucks in a cherry picker. Now I’m an author with short story collections available on the Internet and a book to be published sometime this spring or summer. But nothing is jumping out at me.

So I’m going to tell you about how my sister tried to teach me to do her work.

You might remember from my story, “The Anniversary Cake,” that my sister baked and decorated the cake for their 50th anniversary celebration. My sister was better in the kitchen than I even before she spent several years working for a caterer. And no place was this more evident than in baking cakes.

Not that I couldn’t bake a cake. I mean, you just open the box and pour it into a bowl and add the stuff the box tells you to add. I could do that. What I couldn’t do was get the darned thing out of the pan in one piece to make a traditional layer cake. I solved the problem by buying some attractive glass baking dishes. My kids endured years of sheet cakes for their birthdays.

When my brother-in-law, then in the Air Force, had to do TDY at a nearby air base with Thanksgiving coming up, it seemed like a good opportunity to invite my sister and their kids to spend some time with us. We’d cook Thanksgiving dinner together. It’d be fun!

“I’ll do the side dishes and you do the turkey and cake,” I suggested.

“I’ll do the turkey, but you have to help with the cake.”

“May I ask why?” My sister knew about the cake curse.

“I’m going to teach you once and for all how to take a cake out of the pan and decorate it.”

I went cold. This was not going to turn out well. “But you know what happens when I try to make a layer cake.”

“Nonsense. It’s easy. I’m going you to show you, step by step.”  She selected two identical pans and greased one of them with shortening. “Now you do the other one.”

I did, and she inspected it to make sure I’d covered it sufficiently. Then she sprinkled her pan with flour. I did the same, and again passed inspection.

Finally she poured half the batter in her pan and I poured the other half in mine. We slid them into the oven together, and when the allotted time had passed, pulled them out and tested them with toothpicks. After a short cooling period came the moment of truth.

My sister flipped her pan upside down and lifted it off, leaving behind a beautifully formed layer.  She nodded for me to follow her example. Hands shaking, I flipped my pan upside down EXACTLY AS SHE HAD. And when I lifted it off, the cake split right down the middle.

She stood with her mouth open.

And as you know from reading “The Anniversary Cake,” the curse is effective even when I don’t actually bake the cake. Apparently all I have to do is touch it for something horrible to happen.

My sister now believes in the cake curse. When she comes to visit, she brings her own kitchen. She and her husband park their RV in our drive, and I am not invited to help her bake.