Humor Me! More Columns

The only thing that terrorized me more was when I erroneously received an envelope which stated that my pregnancy tests results were enclosed. (I'd just celebrated my 61ST birthday.)

There is no disputing the benefits of regular mammograms. Thousands of lives are saved each year by early detection. Whatever accompanying pain we feel during the test itself should not deter women from this important annual ritual. But like all things held sacred, we have the fun and comic relief of decrying the tests as inhumane and medieval. And it's even more fun to blame it all on men, those necessary figures in our lives who can't endure a scraped knee yet managed to invent the tortuous, notorious mammography machines used on all women.

Men simply don't understand our fear of mammograms. They think nothing on earth can hurt that much or inflict that much undeserved pain.

It's not that men don't try to empathize. My very own dad in the 1930s put on his hero hat long before it became fashionable to do so, and stood at my mother's side while her baby was being delivered at home. At the first sign of blood, Dad passed out cold, crashing to the floor. The attending physician merely pushed him out of the way with his foot and went on to deliver the newest member of our large family.

But on this cloudy winter day a few months ago, I pasted on a fake happy face and headed to 1600 Sadistic Street where the brick fortress known as Mammograms R Us thrust out its jagged tentacles and grabbed unsuspecting damsels who drove innocently by in their Volvos.

I shrunk to half my height as I dragged my terrified self from my car into the sterile, impersonal building.

In the waiting room, hiding behind dog-eared copies of the outdated and improbable Field and Stream Magazine, trembling women of every age waited for their names to blast out over the speaker system summoning them to the Execution chamber.

After three hours, fourteen minutes and six seconds (but who was counting?), I was dragged kicking and screaming through a door marked Thugs Only into a meat freezer with the temperature set at 160 degrees below zero.

Nurse Ratchett appeared, demanded that I disrobe, and handed me an 8 inch blue paper handkerchief with a string to cover my entire goose-bumped, freezing body. She left me alone for 45 minutes while I peeled ice chunks off my arms and tied my jaw shut to keep from chattering all my teeth loose.

Finally, I was led into the mammography chamber and forced to stand without my paper handkerchief in front of a tall, imposing metal drill press with a brass name plate carefully inscribed: Patented in 1939 by Adolph Hitler.

Nurse Ratchett placed my frozen left breast on the drill press and lowered a 40 inch metal steam roller to flatten it to a pita pocket size. I was left trapped in this position screaming, passing out and invoking the wrath of God on her while she casually smoked a cigarette in the back room for 30 minutes.

Finally, she emerged from her break and snapped a picture of me in my agony which appeared the following month in Torture Magazine with an accompanying article, "How To Turn Innocent Women Into Raving Maniacs For Fun and Profit."

Nurse Ratchet scooped up my unconscious, limp body from the floor, still attached by one flattened piece of breast to the menacing metal drill press above.

She repeated the procedure on the right breast while my 986-decibel screams were fed into a Sony S-116 recording device to be used to incite warring tribes of New Guinea to riot. This time she only spent 20 minutes smoking a cigarette before she pressed the button to take a color photo of my breast.

The procedure completed, I was led without my blue paper handkerchief covering to an ice-covered plastic chair in the freezer locker. I tried not to misinterpret Nurse Ratchet's announcement to a passing nurse, "OMIGOSH, can you believe these test results?"

The last thing I remember before fainting again were these comforting words: "We thought we might have to repeat your test but we don't. You're fine."

Plunk.

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MAKE MINE A PENN 9 REEL

My fishing skills leave a lot to be desired; I admit that. But one thing I can do with reasonable facility is handle a Penn 9 reel. And that’s no small feat, believe me. And it didn’t come easy.

The first time I cast my line out over the pier railing many years ago, I used a Penn 9 reel that had been rigged for me by my father-in-law. I not only cast across the lines of several scowling, disgruntled fishermen, but I ended up with the biggest backlash in the history of backlashes.

If you look up the word “patient” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of my father-in-law. He apologized to the other fishermen on my behalf, then began the excruciatingly slow and deliberate job of unraveling the rat’s nest on my reel.

“It’s all in the thumb,” he explained. “You have to keep your thumb on the line all the time so no knots will form there.”

After an eternity, I tried again and ended up with third degree burns on my right thumb. Puh-leeze! This reel was a flesh-eating monster. I looked around at the open-faced spinning reels other fishermen on the pier were using and wondered what I was doing with a Penn 9. Just because it was my father-in-law’s favorite reel it didn’t have to be mine, I reasoned.

But Dad wouldn’t let me give up. He took me to an isolated spot on the beach and I tried casting again. And again and again. Determined to turn me into a good fisherman, he made me practice over and over until I achieved the economy of motion he desired. I was now ready for pier fishing.

Now those were the days when fish were brought up two at a time, when fishermen stood two deep along both sides of the rail. What these avid fishermen didn’t need during a big run was a young bride carelessly casting her lines across five or six of her neighbors’ lines. A girl could get hurt that way! And sometimes did! Like me, for instance.

I made a near-perfect cast, smiled with self-satisfaction and stood ready to reel in an eight -pound flounder. Suddenly, feeling an enormous tug on my line, I screamed, yanked the pole back to set the hook and began reeling in as fast as my tired right arm would allow. Heaving the fish over the rail, I slammed it onto the pier floor and stared in disbelief. The fish was smaller than my bait.

The fishermen around me snickered, then elbowed each other and bent double in side-splitting laughter. I learned quickly that fishermen have their own brand of camaraderie and that good-natured teasing comes with the territory (which isn’t a lot different than bad-natured teasing). I learned to give and take. Mostly take.

But persistence and patience winning over, I finally got my reward.

Standing near me on the pier one day, a teenage boy walked over to me and said, “My dad wants to know if you’d show him how to use a Penn 9 reel like the one you have. He’s been standing over there watching you cast. He’s tried for years and can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

Well, well, well.

Charlotte Whitton, mayor of Ottawa, said it best: “Whatever women do, they must do twice as good as men, to be thought of as half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

Amen and amen and amen.

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MARCH OF THE SUGAR ANTS

OK. That's it. I give up. I surrender. My three year battle with sugar ants is over. They won, hands down. Next year, I'll enter them in the Christmas parade and let ten zillion ants just carry our whole house down the boulevard as one of the floats.

It wasn't that I didn't try. I bought every single item available on the market to eradicate once and for all these little pests that appear in my cereal, on my counter, in my dishwasher, in my desk drawer and in my microwave. One even turned up frozen in an ice cube. I don't dare defrost him. He's so mad he'll kill me.

Sugar ants are indestructible. They can scale hundred foot walls, penetrate concrete blocks, even appear inside airtight medicine bottles. They're the Houdinis of the animal world. I think they're possessed.

Forget spraying, forget those little traps, forget the spray bombs. When you kill a few that are hunting for a tiny grain of sugar on your counter, you applaud your success. But back at her gold-embossed ant throne, Queen Anna Ant senses that they won't be returning to give a report, so she mutters, "C'est la vie" and dispatches an even bigger foraging party. You can't win.

When I get to heaven, I want to have a little chat with God and ask Him this question: "What did You have in mind when you created two things: ants and appendix. I have never found a good reason for either to exist." (I could ask Him about men's useless ear hair, too, but maybe some other time.)

The World Ant Association (yes, there really is one) estimates that one BILLION ants are born every minute. I'll buy that. I submit that one billion ants are born every single minute, every hour of every day just under my house alone.

I realize you can take lemons and make lemonade. You can take cow patties and make fuel (well, I don't but I've heard that some people do). You can take a lot of unpleasant things and make them into something good. But what can you do with ants?

Oh, I read about Wu Zhcheng, the ant diet expert in Nanjing, China who has recipes for ant-based cakes, teas and wines because he wants to eat more ants. He once said, "Ants are a nutritious treasure. They contain more zinc than pig liver." So, who eats pig liver? Not moi. He says the Chinese have eaten ants for more than 3,000 years and the longevity of many people who are now over 100 years old has been found to be connected to an ant diet. Let me remind Mr. Zhcheng that I don't eat ants and I don't eat dogs.

I could try some homemade ant killer recipes, I suppose. I could write all over my house with a piece of chalk, since I heard that ants won't cross a chalk line. Or sprinkle cayenne pepper along my window sills and wait for the ants to walk through it, carry it back under the house where they would ingest it, toss and turn with big-time, major tummy aches, die and go directly to ant heaven.

Or I could mix up some Boric Acid, peanut butter and brown sugar and spread it around for ants and hope my grandson doesn't eat it. Another animal-friendly recipe is Boric Acid and an 8-ounce jar of mint jelly. I wonder if I should throw in a leg of lamb with that.

But if ants are gonna die, they're gonna die. Should I stay up all night worrying if they suffer more from Terro Ant Killer than from peanut butter and Boric Acid?

One friend told me that my dislike of ants borders on the unreasonable, that ants are so popular that 46 ant farms are sold in America every hour. That information is about as useless as "the house fly hums in the key of F."

So, look for our house in the Christmas parade next year, mounted on the atlas shoulders of kazillions of ants who are smiling, confident and carrying a mammoth score card:: ANTS:100. OCCUPANTS: 0.

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MARTHA STEWART'S YARD SALE

If Martha Stewart needs to raise quick cash to defend herself for her untimely unloading of 3,928 shares of ImClone stock, will she first have a yard sale? I need to know.

Martha's in a bit of a jam (and not the jam she make from her dewberries grown in imported Greek humus, either).

This billionaire doyenne of everything from dry goods to daffodils and decadent desserts has got some 'splaining to do about a little matter called insider trading. For someone who owns seven homes, who's K-Mart's spokeswoman, head of a ka-zillion dollar empire, as well as a member of the New York Stock Exchange Board of Directors, she may not have enough Belgium butter cream frosting to cover this current mess.

But that's not what concerns me right now. If she has a yard sale prior to whatever lies ahead, I wanna be there with a fist full of nickels and quarters held in my sweaty, little palm.

With that in mind, I wrote Martha a letter. (We are personal friends, you know.)

Dearest Martha:

So, how's it going, sweetie? I received your frantic phone call but I was sorta, uh, out to lunch. I feel just awful about what you're going through, honey. I mean, a person can't have too many billion dollars and I can understand where you're coming from.

Is there any chance you'll be having a yard sale to raise cash for your legal defense? And would it be okay if I came over the night before to select some of your best items? Here's what I'm looking for, Martha:

Your replica of Westminster Abby made out of sugar cubes.

Fifty of your metal coat hangers covered with sheets of gold leaf and tied with raffia ribbons

Your hand-tooled Tobler chocolate souffle pan made by that Peruvian monk

Last year's Christmas gingerbread house with the intricate indoor plumbing

Twelve of your Strombidae conch shells which you fill with fresh raspberry punch

Your collection of 18-inch tin cookie cutters in the shape of the twelve disciples

That macrame kitty-litter box cover you made from organically-grown hemp

That blanket you knitted from yarn from your Auckland sheep herd. You did it on your loom made from New England barn boards. Remember?

Two of your crescent-shaped bread pans made from imported Latvian clay which you purchased at your local Latvian craft store.

Martha, dear, I can't think of anything else. Keep your chin up and keep repeating your mantra, "It's a good thing, It's a good thing." And maybe add Dr. Laura's mantra, "Now, go and do the right thing."

Love and kisses, Mariane

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ME? WORK?

Having to work is just the pits. Ask my young friend, Andy.

Andy had graduated from high school, lounged around the house for a month until his father suggested he get a job.

“You mean an eight to five job?” Andy asked incredulously. “If I do that, then my whole day’s shot.”

Well, yeah.

My whole day was shot with several jobs I’ve had. One was in a box factory which employed college students working their way through a hard-earned education. My summer job at this steam bath lasted all of six weeks and it ended abruptly when I passed out cold on the concrete floor. A stalwart, caring supervisor threw my 97-pound frame over her shoulder like a sack of pinto beans and took me to a cool, dark room where I finally opened my dazed eyes trying to figure out where I was.

I wasn’t that great an employee, anyway. My job, in that airless, 110 degree sweat shop was to grab handfuls of folded macaroni boxes as they came shooting through a machine and stack them into cartons. I got bored easily with rote work so they always piled up in huge mounds all over the floor while I scratched my head wondering what demented mind invented such a machine anyway. I was fired after I fainted. And I didn’t even get a gold watch from the company.

I was fired from another job for an entirely different reason. Just out of high school, my two best friends and I went to work for the summer at a local toy factory which manufactured tiny lead soldiers for children. Our job was to paint little tan hats on thousands of mini-service men. Sitting at a round table, we tried to relieve the mind-numbing boredom by telling jokes. By mid-afternoon we had laughed so hard that we hadn’t even come close to our quota; not even remotely.

We were fired after working only six hours. That had to be a record of sorts, but for some reason the company denied our request for a framed certificate so stating.

But the job which nearly cooked my proverbial goose happened at a newspaper office where I was receptionist and secretary to the publisher for a year before going to college. Because my boss played a lot of golf, there were times I did nothing but file my nails and dream up foolishness which one day nearly cost me my job.

One of my high school friends was a proof-reader for the newspaper. With nothing else to do one morning, I typed up an entire fake wedding announcement for Dolores and a former high school nerd who irritated Dolores when we were students. I wrote a long and detailed account of their imaginary wedding, replete with bridesmaids, groomsmen and flower girls. I figured it would come across Dolores’ proof-reading desk, she would laugh uproariously, then toss it in the waste basket.

But there was a problem. Dolores had called in sick that morning and I didn’t know it. The account of the make-believe wedding was type-set in its entirety and was ready for printing when an alert pressman heard an alarm bell go off in his head. He telephoned Dolores at home and heard her scream her denial into the telephone.

Looking back now on that dark day when I stood with my head hung low before the editor, listening to his 30-minute angry tirade, I think young Andy was right: “You take an eight to five job and your whole day’s shot.”

I’m just lucky I wasn’t shot.

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MERRY MAIDS

Comedienne Roseanne said it best: “I will clean house when Sears comes out with a riding vacuum cleaner.”

Well, amen.

So, you want a confession? I hate to clean house. I absolutely abhor it. I would rather slosh barefooted through a muddy crocodile-infested river in the Amazon basin than clean house. I would rather crawl through the sun-baked Sahara with an empty canteen than clean house. I would rather ice skate barefoot on a frozen pond in a driving blizzard in the Yukon than clean house.

I guess that makes me domestically-challenged. Well, yes.

But my saving grace is closets and dresser drawers. Bless the man who invented them. May his tribe increase. Hear, hear.

I began to dislike cleaning house as a child. It was a lose-lose situation even then. With seven children in our household, a complete spring cleaning was but a pleasant memory only a half hour later. My response to being ordered to clean was a shrug and a “But, why? It will just be a mess in a few minutes. Why bother?”

Which is where the closets and dresser drawers came in. I discovered that if things were off the floor, off the tables, out of sight, then Mother considered the house clean. So I regularly jammed everything in sight into the backs of closets and into any drawer within reach. Heaving a sigh of relief and considering my part finished, I would hurry outside to continue playing jacks on the sidewalks with my friends.

And no, it didn’t bother me that our family spent half their lives looking for things I had stashed away. My mother didn’t take this lightly, either. She lectured me endlessly and punished me often.

I wish I could say it helped but I still dislike house cleaning and I still spend half of my life looking for things I’ve stashed away in drawers and closets or under beds.

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to reform. I once listened to well-known radio speaker Elisabeth Elliot lecture about how our homes are a reflection of our love for God. That quickly caught my attention and I cleaned the house from top to bottom, washing windows, cleaning behind dressers, dusting the top of the refrigerator, and straightening closets.

But that was twelve years ago.

Today, I have other challenges. I have a sister whose fastidiousness actually gives me stomach pains. Until very recently, Margie climbed on a chair to dust the tops of her doors. Give me a break! Until an eight-foot tall man walks through my front door, these doors are gonna have a quarter inch layer of dust on the tops, and I won’t lose a minute’s sleep over it.

My sister used to iron her sheets, her husband’s underwear and socks, and lacking something else to do, polished his shoe trees. You gotta love her. And you KNOW God loves her. When we stand in the heavenly lineup to receive our Spic and Span awards, please, Lord, don’t let me be next in line after my sister receives hers.

One day I watched with fascination as a friend cleaned her house in a feverish pitch before going on a long trip. With my feet up on the hassock, and resting comfortably in her easy chair, I observed her for two hours, then asked, puzzled, “Why are you doing this?”

Her response was, “I always leave my house in dying condition.” She explained that if something happened to her while on vacation, she didn’t want her relatives coming and finding anything but a spotless house.
Well, my goodness. If you can’t die before your house is spotless, that guarantees me a very, very long life indeed.

And nowhere in the Bible does it say cleanliness is next to godliness. My sister made that up.

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MY FAVORITE STORY TELLERS

My father was a raconteur of the highest sort. My mother was a reciter with awesome recall. Both had honed their skills to perfection which kept their minds razor-sharp and their children spellbound.

Only months before Mother died at age 96, she quoted from memory impressively long sections of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic poem, “Evangeline.” It was not unusual for her, even at that age, to recite many of her favorite poems from her dog-eared, green volume written by James Whitcomb Riley, the Hoosier poet.

There were two stories about my family which Mother and Daddy repeated often at our request. Curiously, they both involved money. Since my parents raised and educated seven children, money was always in short supply. But at no time in my life do I recall either of them being envious of what others had. And even during the severe deprivations of the Depression, my parents made sure that their tithes to the church were paid before any other bills were met.

They lost their home during the Depression when my father’s well-to-do brother refused to lend them the remaining $500 due on their mortgage. Because of this, the story my father recounted to us in vivid detail about his near inheritance, took on great meaning to us as children.

Hidden away in a desk drawer of a relative in the 1800s were deeds to property Daddy’s great-grandparents and other family members would eventually wish to sell. A young wife of one of the cousins inadvertently destroyed the deeds when cleaning out the desk, an act which wasn’t discovered until much later. That property eventually became the Croton Reservoir which is the major supplier of water for New York City.

Many decades later, Daddy’s cousin, an astute businessman, hired an attorney to search the title and prove ownership. He eventually received a very large cash settlement which he refused to share with other entitled members of the extended family. His family lived in relative affluence in the town of Croton-On-The-Hudson in Westchester County for many years. He invested heavily in stock on Wall Street in New York but lost all of it during the 1929 stock market crash.

When asked by my sister if he resented his cousin’s refusal to share his wealth, Daddy smiled and said, “No, if I had become wealthy and lived there, I might never have met your mother.”

A story which Mother often told me endeared me to my parents every time I heard it. It left me filled with pride and with no small amount of appreciation.

Soon after I was born, a lovely, childless couple came to visit Mother and Daddy. The only baby the young wife had ever been able to carry to term was still-born a week before I was born.

Sitting in our living room, they made an offer. Simply put, they wanted to buy me and were prepared to pay Mother and Daddy whatever figure they could agree upon.

Mother and Daddy had known this couple for several years. They were well-regarded in the community, the husband had had work all through the Depression, they owned a lovely home and their financial picture was bright. They explained carefully how they would provide for me, how they would love me, how they would raise me.

Mother and Daddy listened to their presentation without comment or without consulting each other privately. When they finished, Daddy spoke for both himself and for Mother. “We can appreciate your situation and we’re deeply saddened over your inability to have children. We know you will make good parents because you are good people. Some child will have a good life being raised in your home. But this is an offer we can’t even consider. Admittedly, our money is tight now and we’re having it hard. But we can’t give up our daughter. It would be unthinkable to us. We’ll pray that you find just the right baby to bring into your home, something you both need and deserve.”

The young couple adopted a newborn soon afterward. He grew to be a fine young man and was in all my classes from grades one through twelve in our public school. I doubt that he was ever told this story.

But I’m glad I was.

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MY FOREVER FRIEND

I wasn’t expecting her; didn’t know her. But one day she appeared at the door of my heart and knocked softly. I hesitated, debating whether to respond. She appeared fragile, though possessed with an inner strength that left me puzzled as to its source.

I watched her carefully, analyzing her moves. I listened to the intonations of her speech. I looked for clues which would reveal her character, her inner self but she, too, remained guarded. There were walls. There were fences. There were obstacles placed strategically around both of us to prevent easy entrance into our lives.

I pondered whether it was worth the effort. What was to be gained, I reasoned? Friendships come and go. I knew first hand that with just one word, all contact with a friend can be forever severed.

But she still quietly tugged, persistent in her silent pursuit, feeling in her spirit that there could be a bond, there could be a kinship, there could be a melding of personalities.

After weeks of inner thrashing, of questioning, of backing away, I made a commitment to the friendship that she kept offering. I could do no less. Her arguments were well-reasoned, formidable and not easily dodged.

So, I reached through space to her, extended my hand and invited her to press it hard during her times of intense, chronic physical pain. She responded eagerly, anxiously.

She knows my need for reassurance, and I know her need for privacy. Both tax us at times. But we remain committed to a bond that has spiritual, emotional, intellectual and social implications. We are committed to a foreverness that will extend into an eternity with the One who reached down and placed her into a loving place of comfort and security in the room of my heart that had always been reserved just for her.

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MY KINGDOM FOR A BIG MAC

Operating on the theory that you can’t ever be too thin or too rich, I embarked on a diet so extreme that even our local mortuary is on alert. Since my husband joined me on this epicurean deprivation journey, make that two mortuaries.

I’m talking about a juice diet with fruit and vegetables. No meat, no dairy products, no bread, no flour, no sugar, no ice cream, no fun.

The idea behind this diet is to forego everything that has a face. Cows have faces; so, no beef. Fish have faces; so, no fillets. Pigs have faces (if you can call them that); so, no pork. Chickens have faces; so, no poultry.

Our detractors (and they amount to everyone we know) taunt us with reminders that potatoes have eyes; so why are we eating potatoes? They also point out that corn has ears, artichokes have hearts and lettuce is a head, but we ignore their feeble but caustic attempts at humor.

The authors of this diet warn about the dangers of pesticides and preservatives which cause everything from cancer and canker sores to callouses and corneal arcus. There are so many preservatives in one very famous cupcake that it boasts a shelf life of seven years. Can you believe it? Or should you?

The thing about this diet is it makes you feel so spiritual, so righteous, so utterly ....well, snobbish (in the traditional Christian sense, of course). We find ourselves shuddering at the sight of a greasy hamburger covered with dripping bacon and cheese. We are aghast watching french fries sizzling in a vat of disgusting, melted lard. We tsk tsk under our breaths at someone enjoying a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream and nuts. But in the privacy of our own thoughts, we would kill for a sundae, would crawl through a football field of crushed glass for a greasy cheeseburger, or sell our beach house for a half dozen crisp, golden french fries.

We wake up every morning to face a drink that comes straight from the pasture: Barley Green. One tablespoon of this pulverized grass will last you until lunch. Not because you feel satisfied, but because your stomach is screaming “I AM NOT A COW. I AM NOT A COW.” This is the stuff that cuds are made of: green foam that bovines thrive on but humans only endure when they’re thrashing from one senior moment to the next, or whatever you call pre-senility.

Lunch consists of a green salad so huge that we can’t move off the sofa until four o’clock. In this salad are endive, parsley, romaine lettuce, sprouts, toasted soy beans, broccoli and some cauliflower. If we’ve been good little boys and girls, we get to scatter a few unsalted sunflower seeds on top. Forget about Ranch or Blue Cheese Dressing. Forget about garlic croutons. To get the thing down, we drizzle a little flax seed oil and Bragg’s liquid aminos over this dishpan size salad. Just trying to digest this monstrosity expends about ten million calories. More or less.

In the middle of the afternoon we’re treated to a fresh juice of carrots, celery, beets and apples. It’s a good drink except for turning our skin bright orange, inviting little boys in the mall to stare and point, begging their mamas to buy them early Halloween masks like ours.

Before dinner, we lean over the sink to swallow some more Barley Green, grinning at each other through green-stained teeth like giant herbivore monsters beamed from Planet Verdant.

A wonderful fruit salad at dinner saves the day. Cantaloupe, blueberries, apples, bananas, oranges, grapes, plums. Anything we want and as much as we want. The problem is the Barley Green is still foaming up in our stomachs and we want little or nothing. Of anything.

With only one more carrot drink to go before bedtime, we waddle our bloated, sloshing selves into a couple of easy chairs, watch television through slitted eyelids, and fall asleep, muttering Scarlet O’Hara’s famous last words: “Tomorrow is another day.”

Maybe we should try eggplant.

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MY MOTHER, MYSELF

Yep, it's true. I am my mother. And if I'm my mother, then doesn't it follow that I'm also my mother who became a grandmother? Or something. Whatever.

A grandmother's job is to fill her grandkids full of refined sugar, then send them home to their parents wired to the hilt. I learned that in Grandparenting 101.

I was probably too strict as a parent. I wanted my sons to be model children so ostensibly all our neighbors could stand in awe and say, "Wowie, that gal is some kind of terrific mother; just look at her well-behaved, brilliant, beautiful children." Yeah, in your dreams.

But I tried and failed and kept trying. Mercifully, perhaps in spite of me rather than because of me, they turned out to be exemplary young men. I probably should give John some credit, but I'm not that generous.

My mother was way too strict with me, too. She refused to let me party all night in a bikers' bar with other 15-year-olds. She wouldn't let me attend trashy movies filled with gratuitous sex and violence. She wouldn't let me beat up my little brother for getting on my last nerve. She didn't buy me a red convertible when I was 16 so I could drag race down Elmira Street. She refused to let me wear see-through blouses or wear jeans so tight I couldn't sit down at school all day. She wouldn't let me get stoned on hard drugs or tanked up on kegs of cheap Wild Turkey. No question about it; she was one strict little mama.

But as a grandmother, my mother metamorphosed into something so malleable that she gave new depth and definition to the word "mush." There wasn't anything she wouldn't do for her grandkids. All the ground rules for good parenting were tossed casually out her open sewing room window. She wasn't about to discipline her grandchildren. Been there/done that. She wanted them to love her.

Mother didn't raise an eyebrow when her grandson smashed the glass on her cherry coffee table halfway to smithereens with a croquet mallet. She laughed with delight when he tossed an open box of Cheerios down the basement steps, then stomped on them. She exclaimed, "Isn't that just the cutest thing you ever saw?" when another grandson smeared honey on every mirror in the house.

And that's my position as a grandmother now.

My two grandkids (Abby is five and Jackson is a year and a half) could run over me with an 18-wheeler and I would lie supine on the highway and beg them to do it over and over again. Abby could wipe Pillsbury chocolate icing all over my walls and I'd put a frame around it and call it "Nouveaux Culinary Art by Abby." Jackson could break all the beaks off my wooden seabirds in my prized collection and I'd applaud and say it's proof he'll be an orthopedic surgeon. If I have to call Urban Renewal to bring dump trucks and bulldozers after my grandkids wreck my house during an overnight stay, so be it. It's only a house. And I only live here.

Unlike an Aspirin bottle, I don't wear a sign around my neck reading, "Keep Out of Reach of Children." I want my grandkids to climb on me, pummel me with pillows, and paint my face with lipstick. I want their stick figures scribbled on sheets of my expensive embossed stationery and plastered all over my refrigerator door. I wanna wear my grandkids plumb out helping them bake chocolate chip cookies, taking them to the pool and the park, making sand castles for them on the beach. I want them to go to sleep at night simply exhausted from excitement. Worn to a frazzle from fun.

And when I pass from this earthly scene, I want a blanket of daisies from my grandkids that reads:

"She was one cool Grandma. May she rest in peace, (now maybe WE can rest)

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MY MOTHER’S HANDS

Hot tears burned my eyes and I turned quickly toward the bus window. Mother was sitting quietly beside me, her hands resting in her lap.

I was struck with how chapped, how rough they were; the bitter northern winter and long hours as a seamstress in a dress shop had left their cruel marks.

I had met her after she finished work and we were riding the bus home together that cold winter night, I stole another glance at her hands.

I wanted to thank her for working to supplement my father’s meager wager at his thankless job at the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Supporting seven children had not been easy for them. There were many sacrifices. Too many. Her hands were proof of that.

They were soft and cool when she gently wiped the beads from my fevered brow during a bout with childhood measles; swift and firm when discipline was meted out.

They were strong and sure when she kneaded dough for parkers rolls and cinnamon buns, family favorites.

Her hands worked happily to prepare meals for visiting ministers and missionaries whom she entertained in our home year after year.

They worked tirelessly to make dresses for her daughters, attire that became the envy of all our friends. Her loving hands altered and pressed the suits of her two proud sons.

Her hands were regularly folded in prayer for her five daughters whom she prayed into Nyack College. One daughter, Evelyn, became a pastor’s wife; two daughters, Marjorie and Norma, became missionaries to the Philippines and to Africa; Eleanor held positions of authority in a local bank and newspaper, and I received a teaching degree and taught elementary education. Mother was no less proud of her two sons who climbed to the top of their corporate ladders.

Mother’s hands loving cared for our saintly father during his illness with terminal and ministered to her second husband, a kind Christian widower, who also succumbed to cancer.

Faithful until the end, her glorified hands are raised in adoration to her Saviour she now worships face to face.

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MY ROMANCE WITH A FISHING PIER

Fishing piers are like Bar-B-Que. Everyone has his favorite and no one can talk him out of it.

The first time I walked out on Kure Beach Pier, I fell in love. From the sun-bleached, cracked old boards, the dried shrimp bait stuck to the rails, the boisterous waves slapping against the pilings, to the swooping seagulls who beg incessantly for leftovers, I loved it all. Even after years of fishing on this beloved hang-out for serious anglers and casual observers, I’m still in love.

Fishing piers are great levelers of humanity. Fishermen care not a whit if the person next to them is a doctor, a draftsman or a deadbeat. All they want to know is, “Have you caught any fish?” and, “What kind of bait are you using?”

Everyone who has passed Fishing 101 knows that you fish on the south side of the pier in the spring and on the north side in the fall. If you have to ask why, you haven’t passed Fishing 101. Few places of business test your patience, your piety and your perseverance like a fishing pier. One ninety-seven pound woman who casts across the lines of six or seven fishermen during a run of bluefish can reduce gentlemen to gorillas. I know because I was once that ninety-seven pound woman.

One October day on the pier I was fishing next to the pilings where I hoped sheephead were lounging. Since I’d had no success catching sand fiddlers for bait, I hoped a stray something-or-other would bite my dried-up pieces of shrimp. Sure enough, I pulled up two fairly large (for me, anyway) creatures which looked like a cross between a pig fish and a barnacle! Two really ugly fish that made even crabs shudder!

The two men beside me watched with fascination as I prepared to toss them overboard. Finally, they asked if they could have the fish to play a trick on a friend. Their pastor, it seems, had gone into the pier store for coffee and had left his baited line in the water. Quickly, the two men reeled in their pastor’s empty line, hooked my two fish onto it, and gently lowered the line back down into the water. With mischief in their eyes, they resumed their nonchalant stance as their pastor hurried back to check his now bouncing line.

With growing excitement, the kindly man of the cloth began reeling in feverishly, certain that flounder or blues were attached to his line. He pulled the ugly fish up over the rail, slammed them on the pier floor and yelled “Praise the Lord! I knew He’d answer prayer! See what you guys could catch if you just prayed more?”

He was delirious with joy. He didn’t care if the fish were ugly, were of an unknown species, or even dead. All he knew was that he’d caught some fish and his parishioners hadn’t. If that wasn’t a lesson with great spiritual applications, then he didn’t know what was.

There are ka-zillions of reasons pier fishermen give for the fish not biting: The water’s too hot; it’s too cold. The fish were here yesterday; the fish haven’t arrived from Florida. The Northeast wind’s to blame; the Southeast wind’s to blame. There are too many jellyfish in the sea; there are two many minnows in the sea. The moon’s too full; the sky’s too dark. The commercial fishermen’s nets are to blame; the pollution from the river’s to blame. But the best reason I’ve heard came from my son, Johnny, who managed to squeeze four years into six at North Carolina State University (and for whom English was apparently not a required subject.): “Mom, when the fish ain’t bitin’, they just ain’t bitin’!”

If you want to know how much something means to you, try having someone take it away. Every year that our North Carolina coast experiences hurricanes, avid fishermen from all over the east coast and from as far away as West Virginia and Ohio, watch, wait, listen and pray. As the news reports grow more and more grim, one question gets asked more than any other: “What about the fishing pier?”

When Hurricane Bertha in 1996 snapped pier pilings into kindling and angrily hurled boards like missiles through plate glass windows, we watched our televisions from our North Carolina mountain home in disbelief and grief. When finally permitted entrance back onto the island, we looked at the spot where our beloved pier had tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to fight the raging storm, and we wept.

But fishermen and those who cater to them are resilient. Before long, the debris was cleared, a new, more spacious pier shop was erected and a higher, stronger fisherman-friendly pier was built. This was after all, Kure Beach, and the whole town centers around the pier. There is no other like it. Trust me.

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NATIONAL CABBAGE DAY

Dear Congressman:

It’s time we forgot our national obsession with global warming, trillion dollar tax cuts, increased military spending, cloning of human beings, embryonic stem cell research, and concentrate on some really important issues like “National Cabbage Day.”

But “why?” you ask. Well, why not? We already celebrate:

Mar 8 -”National Drink From a Bent Straw Day”
Apr 6 - “National Write Your Own Stupid Epitaph Day”
May 4 -”National Toe Fungus Infection Day”
July 3 -“National Barbie Convicted of Nazi War Crimes Day”
Oct 9 -“National Thomas Clapper Day” (he invented the flush toilet)
Dec 2 -”National Using Dentures for Making Fluted Pie Crust Day”

I’ve done a little research (probably a lot less than I should have, you say, but we won’t go there). I found 1854 web sites for cabbage and only one for rutabagas. Get my point?

Cabbage is so universally loved that the French coined the phrase “Mon petite chou” which translated means “my little cabbage head” or “my little sweetheart.” You might remember that endearing phrase when you have some ‘splaining to do to your wife sometime, Congressman.

Mothers for generations have told their small children they discovered them as newborn babies under a cabbage leaf. How cute is that? I prefer that tale to the stork version any day. As a little girl I worried endlessly over how many babies fell out of that diaper so precariously held in the beak of a flying stork. Probably hundreds of babies landed under cabbage leaves and might still be there, for all we know.

When the Cabbage Patch Dolls hit Toys R Us stores in the mid-1980s, millions of mamas went nuts pushing and shoving to buy one for their five-year-old Bridget. The dolls’ pudgy faces, stumpy arms and small close-set eyes only added to the price tag. Throw in the birth certificate and you have a marketing phenomenon. Now, I ask you: How many Squash Patch Dolls would have sold? It was the name “Cabbage” that made the designer a trillionaire. Get my drift?

In March 50,000 bikers descended on Florida to hold, among other things, a Women’s Cabbage Coleslaw Wrestling Match. I was appalled. I mean, I had no idea. This is the sort of thing beer-guzzling, pot-bellied men do when their wives are 800 miles away. But these scantily-clad women jumped into a huge vat of coleslaw and wrestled each other to a slippery mayonnaise finish. What a desecration of cabbage. I hope they all got zits.

As you know, Congressman, one of the South’s four basic food groups is pork barbecue. North Carolina law #840683-B requires that mamas serve it once a week to their eager families. There is just no way you can enjoy barbecue without cabbage coleslaw. And if you order a hot dog “all the way”, you’ll get coleslaw on top, sitting there just so pretty and fresh and tempting. Well, dripping and soggy, too, but we’ll discuss that another time.

The much-heralded Cabbage Soup Diet is an easy and inexpensive way to lose weight. And you can eat all you want! Is it my fault that it’s so bad that you won’t want much at all?

I worry that without proper recognition cabbage might become an endangered vegetable species. Then we all might end up eating Grated Parsnips and Caper Sour Cream on our barbecue. It’s unthinkable and it’s un-American.

So, Congressman, have I made my case for National Cabbage Day? No?

Then, how does National Bok Choy Day grab you?

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NOAH'S ARIZONA FLOOD

My friend, Dee, was facing a flood of Biblical proportions. Enough to make her wish that Noah, the ageless Old Testament plumber and carpenter, lived down the hall in Apartment 103-A.

The rushing waters Dee was hearing at 2 a.m. in her Arizona assisted living apartment could hardly be monsoon rains. The climate in Arizona is different from any of the other contiguous states; indeed, only 10-14 inches of rain falls yearly there, most of it during the monsoon season of July through September.

But this was late November and the sound of rushing water somewhere in Dee's apartment filled her with such angst that she dashed from room to room, checking the sinks, the pipes and the walls. She even looked in the microwave. Hey, you never know.

Could be a leaky magnetron or something.

Any minute now the walls would burst their sheet rock seams and water would soak every single stuffed animal in her apartment.

For a solid hour she searched, hearing the gushing waters, fearing the inevitable. Then she called the office and yelled for help. A little late, but whatever.

Three female caregivers rushed to her ground floor apartment and listened intently to the roar. Their collective, thoughtful opinion was that it originated from the second floor bathroom immediately above Dee's apartment and would soon pour through the ceiling, ruining their new carefully coifed and sprayed perms.

Oh no.

Dashing to the second floor in Keystone Kops' tandem, they bolted into the apartment above Dee's and found no water leaks. But they could still hear the gushing noise. It was unmistakable. It was loud and echoing. This dam, wherever it was, was gonna break. And somebody was gonna end up really, really wet.

Up to the third floor of this assisted living facility they ran, praying they wouldn't be swept down three flights of stairs on their backs by this threatening Deluge of the Desert.

Nothing. They found nothing but still heard the mighty rush of water.

Back to Dee's apartment they returned, this time grabbing her phone to call the handyman who, for inexplicable reasons known only to himself, thought 3:30 a.m. was reserved for simple, needful sleep.

When he arrived at the facility, he quickly began a thorough inspection of the entire building but came up with zilch. Like the others, he was convinced that water of significant proportions was gushing through some yet undiscovered part of the building. Finally, back in Dee's apartment again, the handyman crawled into a walk-in closet, tracing the sound to the interior wall.

Then he discovered it. Are you ready for this?

From behind a stack of towels, the caregiver lifted a ten-inch device from the shelf that reduced him to helpless laughter.

Dee's mischievous cat, Hope, had earlier in the night jumped to the chest-high closet shelf and through the force of her leap activated Dee's Brookstone Sound Machine, set at full blast volume on "Ocean Waves."

Each recorded wave roared, crested, then retreated, with the swooshing sound of millions of gallons of water unleashed on a helpless shore.

Dee found a hole in the floor, crawled in and pulled it in after her, never to be heard from again. She wished.

The Brookstone flyer suggests its product "will help you fall asleep more relaxed, sleep more soundly and awake refreshed and ready to start your day. WARNING: Keep away from flying felines."

Well, not really. But it should have. They don't know Dee's cat.

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THE NO-FAIL DIET

The only sure way to make money these days in publishing is to write a diet book. You don’t believe me? Check out your friendly Barnes and Noble and count the number of diet books on the shelves and tables. Or bring up diet books on Amazon.com and prepare to sit back, stunned.

Statistically, these diets don’t work. Not the Adkins diet, the grapefruit diet, the Hollywood diet, or a thousand others. Ask any woman.

But remembering how thin and lean and full of energy my sons were at two years of age, it occurred to me that a “Terrible Twos Diet" might make the bestseller list and, only incidentally, make me a lot of money.

It would look something like this:

Day one Breakfast; One pancake, soaked in syrup. A glass of milk stuffed with the pancake, three pennies and a belt loop.

Lunch - 1/2 baloney sandwich covered with chocolate milk, two buttons and a shoe lace. One dried bean stuffed up your nose.

Dinner -1 carrot stick covered with 1/2 cup sugar. Glass of apple juice mixed with creamed corn and paper napkin. Spread generously over dog.

Day Two: Breakfast: 1/2 scrambled egg mixed with grape jelly. Soak in orange juice. Pat neatly on front of stove.

Lunch - Small tube of Vaseline lip gloss. Two dried peas stuffed in each ear. Half a green crayon. Glass of milk poured in shoes and dumped on tray. Slurp.

Dinner - Separate macaroni from cheese and blow toward ceiling fan Squeeze cheese in hands, roll in dog hairs and eat with spoon.

Day Three Breakfast: Squish oatmeal through fingers, form paste and make a face mask. Grin a lot.

Lunch: Pull letters from Campbell’s vegetable soup. Paste on forehead and spell NGRMLX. Eat 1/2 cherry popsicle in living room; Let drip on Windsor upholstered antique chair.

Dinner: Pound meatloaf til flat, cover with peanut butter and wear as hat. Spit up beans onto linoleum and march in it. Drink half bottle vanilla extract. Pour other half in pants.

There! That oughta do it.

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NO THANKS, I'll PASS

I've given considerable thought lately to the subject of dying and decided I don't wanna.

It's not that I'm scared to die; it's what they're gonna do with me after I'm gone that makes me blanch.

Not that we've got a lot of choices. I mean, it's either being crammed into a dark wooden box with six feet of dirt stomped on top of you so you can't get out, or it's being put in your oven with the temp set considerably higher than medium for baking brownies. You'd think with all the technologies available at the Research Triangle Center in Raleigh, there could be other options available to us than just these two. Well, there is the science of cryogenics, but I'd just as soon not spend time horizontally in a block of ice. My feet could freezer-burn.

It's gonna shock my Baptist friends to know I don't opt for burial. I'm claustrophobic. No way would I be happy sealed up in a vault deep underground in a cemetery. Those places get spooky at night. And what if I need some air and nobody hears me pounding on the lid above?

Cremation is more cost effective, more efficient and it's maintenance free. Nobody will have to mow the grass on my grave or repair my tombstone. I'm gonna be free as a dove as my ashes are scattered from a chartered boat and I pirouette across the waves of the sea. I'll give new depth and definition to the term, "blowing in the wind."

Besides, there's much more humor attached to ashes than to burial plots.

To wit: a certain woman kept the ashes of her dearly departed father in a silver box on a table. One day, after not having looked at her "father" for a long time, she opened the box and was horrified to discover it was nearly empty. Furious, she approached the maid and screeched. "Have you touched this box?" The maid protested, "I didn't think you'd mind. That's a very poor quality of Snuff."

Or how about the woman who received a Christmas gift, an ornate box, from her brother in another state. She immediately noticed the wooden box had a broken knob and decided to return it to Wal-Mart without ever looking at the contents inside. When she phoned her brother to tell him she had returned it, he cried, "No, no. Tell me you didn't. Your sister was in there."

Quickly, the woman rushed to Wal-Mart to retrieve the box but it had already been tossed out with the trash. The frantic woman and a friend hurried to the local landfill, sorted through the mot recent trash and finally found the box. "I couldn't stand the thought of my sister spending forever in a dump," she cried, clasping the box to her breast.

Or how about this: A fisherman requested that his ashes be thrown from a favorite fishing pier after he departed from this life. Scattering loose ashes near shore was a legal no-no, so his remains were placed in a plastic Ziploc bag and gently lowered from the end of the pier in a private ceremony.

Three days later a startled fisherman set his hook into an unfamiliar substance on the ocean floor. He reeled in the plastic bag containing the ashes with a name carefully printed on the front.

Can you believe nobody remained to help the fisherman unhook his catch? They all set a world record for exiting a fishing pier.

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NOBODY KNOWS THE TRUFFLES I’VE SEEN

If you’re in the pharmacy, don’t look for me at the prescription counter. Try the Russell Stover chocolate display. I am an admitted, confirmed, convicted chocoholic. I probably should be in jail.

The reason no one has come up with a 12-step Chocoholic Anonymous program is that we just don’t wanna stop. It’s that simple. Like the bumper sticker says: “I’D GIVE UP CHOCOLATE BUT I DON’T WANNA BE CALLED A QUITTER.”

We’ve all seen the current jokes about chocolate:

“Chocolate: Here today .... Gone today!”

“Exercise is a dirty word... Every time I hear it, I wash my mouth out with chocolate.”

“Research tells us that 14 out of any 10 individuals like chocolate."

“Man cannot live on chocolate alone; but women sure can.”

“One of life's mysteries is how a 2 pound box of candy can make a woman gain 5 lbs”.

I can’t remember the first time I tried chocolate. My mama must have mixed it in with my Pablum or something. But as far back as I can remember, chocolate has been part of my nutritional balance; one of my four basic food groups.

When I was thrashing about in puberty, my sister taunted me about the bumps on my face. “Don’t you know what causes those zits?” she asked, poking her face directly into mine. I pretended I had a clue.

“It’s all that chocolate you eat,” she bellowed. “You’re gonna end up with a face full of pock marks and you’ll never have a boyfriend!”

So much for sisterly advice. I didn’t end up with a face full of pock marks and I had enough dates to keep me happy and my mama a little nervous.

Years ago at a small convenient store , the teenage clerk noticed that I bought M&M peanuts with some regularity. Finally, his curiosity got the best of him.

“Does your husband own stock in the M&M company or somethin’?” he queried. “Because, if he doesn’t, he should, at the rate you buy them!” Smart alec. I hope he got zits.

Everyone has fantasies. Some dream of cruises to the upper reaches of Alaska, others see themselves basking on the white, sun-bleached sands of Pango Pango. My fantasy is to swim contentedly, leisurely and without interruption in that huge, swimming-pool-size vat of chocolate at the Hershey Chocolate Company in Pennsylvania.

Failing that, I’d enjoy assembling the $120 Signature Ballotin four pound box of Godiva chocolates with the marbleized scallop shells and milk praline hearts if I could have all the ones I accidentally or intentionally dropped on the floor during assembly.

It’s true: you gotta pick your battles. I might fight smoking or gambling or fastidiousness or Igor, my disgusting, leering neighbor, but a whole panty hose industry depends on my not warring against chocolate. God bless America.

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NUMBER PLEASE

My brother once said that he doesn’t answer the telephone for two reasons: either someone wants to complain about something or he wants to ask a favor of you.

I won’t go that far, but arguably, telephones are a very mixed blessing. They’ve been described variously as “the biggest evil ever visited upon mankind” to “the next best thing to being there” for lovers. The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between.

When I was a little kid, my sister was a telephone operator. She spent half her time telling me to get off the phone because someone was trying to call my mother. I adored four-party lines because we could listen in on all the neighbors’ juicy conversations and then give a blow-by-blow account at our school’s “Show and Tell.” We kept our classmates spellbound but our teachers were aghast.

When I was a teenager, my girlfriend suspected her mother was listening in on our phone conversations. Giving me a prearranged signal by coughing three times, my girlfriend began making up stories about our wild after-school activities just to send her mom into orbit. Of course, her mother couldn’t question us because she’d have to admit she listened in. I’ve later regretted how much we likely contributed to her mom’s general poor health but we were too dumb to know any better.

As an adult, I began to find telephones more of a burden than a blessing. Especially with wrong numbers. I can’t figure out how we can send a man to the moon, split the atom, reattach a severed arm to a body, conduct stem cell research and possible human cloning, and still not learn how to dial seven numbers correctly on the phone.

When Kure Beach residents William and Sue Allison lived in Burlington, their phone number was similar to that of the local radio station. They received so many calls for people wanting the Request Line that William and Sue pretended to accept requests. They promised callers their favorite song would be played in the next thirty minutes. “Just stay tuned to this station, folks,” they advised. Before their ruse could be uncovered, they got outta Dodge and moved to the beach.

When we lived in High Point, we were assigned the same phone number as a local auto repair shop, except for the last digit. I received at least a half dozen calls daily for that shop for months. One day my annoyance level maxed out. It was “get even” time.

My phone rang one afternoon, and a young lady chirped, “Hi. I brought my blue Ford in for a simple tune up yesterday? Is it ready and how much is the repair bill?”

I grinned and told her the car was ready and the bill was $386.43. Her outraged screams were music to my ears before I quickly hung up.
Later, we began receiving several calls a day intended for a local attorney. I redirected so many of those calls that I finally called the attorney and requested that he do something about it. He sent me a terse note on his stationery advising there was nothing he could do about the lint-level I.Q. of his clients. Immediately, I discovered the problem. The printing on his cheap business stationery was so fuzzy that the number six was mistaken for an eight (the last digit of our phone number). He was unsympathetic to my plight.

The next time my phone rang and a slurred voice asked to speak to his attorney, I advised him his attorney was in court. He insisted he must speak to him. I instructed him to meet his attorney at the courthouse and to take an overnight bag because he’d likely be spending the night in jail. Then I laughed and hung up the phone. I wonder why that gave me diabolical satisfaction.

Then we moved to the beach and I discovered that people can actually dial a correct phone number.

Until today. I answered the phone to hear a man drawl, “Is this Big Kahuna Pizza?”

Good grief. It’s deja vu all over again.

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ON THE ROAD AGAIN...

If you look up the word “peripatetic” in the New Collegiate Dictionary, you’ll find our mug shots. No other word describes two people who have managed to maintain twenty-three residences in forty-three years of marriage (unless you count the word “insane”, ascribed to us by our extended families).

We’ve never had any problem with putting down roots; it’s just that we like a shallow root system that can be yanked up in the middle of dinner and moved to a more respectable location.

I admit our frequent moves do cause problems for that harried postal employee who always seems on the proverbial brink, anyway. The “Forwarding Address” file on us takes up an inordinate amount of space! Or so he says!

Our record really isn’t that bad! We’ve lived in houses for as long as five years and as short as twenty minutes. Our reasons for moving vary from boredom to bug infestation. And when you come right down to it, nobody has set limits on how many times you can move, as long as you pay the rent and leave the bathroom clean!

One apartment we moved into and which we vacated before we unpacked, was infested with cockroaches. Now, I don’t mind an occasional roach, but when a whole dish of dog food is consumed by roaches in one night, something tells me it’s not long before the critters develop a taste for human flesh.

Another house provided an epiphany of sorts. My husband was busy scrubbing the bathtub prior to unpacking our van when his knee went through the rotted floor board of this house we had purchased only hours before. He ran to the van bargaining with the Lord, obviously experiencing some sort of spiritual awakening. “Lord,” he sobbed, “if you get us out of this mess, I promise I’ll spend the rest of my life preaching!” (This from a man who once promised me a white Mercedes and gave me a black ‘49 Studebaker!) But the Lord got us out of this mess and to His eternal credit, many more. And John conveniently forgot his promise to preach.

One house, just outside of town, provided an uncluttered view of our neighbor’s back yard in which a tent had been erected to hold nightly religious services, We couldn’t decide if we were witnessing orthodoxy or ornithology.

Birds flew in and out of the tent, saints were singing in a dialect we couldn’t understand, and the preacher used sound equipment he didn’t need; you could hear him for miles! It was such great entertainment that we invited our friends over to watch the services while we churned home-made ice cream in our yard.

We lived in that house only three months. Our neighbor was also our landlord who took a dim view of our boisterous ice cream parties.

One of our first houses was in (to put it charitably) a landscaped-challenged neighborhood. We lived in a a small, unpretentious bungalow beside other smaller, even more unpretentious bungalows. A neighborhood child innocently revealed the general mind-set of the surroundings when one day she asked my mother where mother’s daddy was. “Oh, my daddy’s dead,” Mother replied sadly. “Who shot him?” asked the street-wise little girl. We immediately went house-hunting.

But the move to the country to become farmers was by far the most unexplainable, incomprehensible move we’ve ever made. Having zero farm experience, we nevertheless built a cedar home on twenty-three acres of what I called a “well-watered lawn” and John called “a swamp.”

Soon, we purchased a horse named “Charlie”, a goat named “Billy”. a young steer named “Curtis”, two dogs named “Brownie” and “Blackie”, a rooster whom we refused to name because we threatened to kill him every day, and a mother hen and her six chicks, whom we called “Margaret Truman and her biddies.”

Curtis, the young steer, had an affinity for school buses. He loved to chase the three o’clock bus down the highway with the school kids leaning out the windows cheering him on. Having to lead him home along a busy highway several times made the day of his castration almost a pleasurable experience for me. I was utterly unsympathetic to his cries. But when we took him to the abattoir later in the year, I was filled with guilt and choked on his hamburger.

The unnamed rooster hated me. Maybe it was my red corduroy housecoat, I’m not certain. But every morning I had to dash to the car and drive only thirty feet to the mailbox while he tore after me. He was a mean bird and he scared me senseless. Margaret Truman and her biddies led miserable lives between “No-Name-The-Rooster” and the owls who snatched her screaming biddies and flew off with them into the dark night.

We lived on the farm about a year. During that time we’d set the woods on fire when we burned trash, we’d killed a dozen snakes in our yard and shooed possums and raccoons off our front porch. Our goat had been killed by a German shepherd dog. We’d hauled bags of corn and bales of hay. We’d put up fencing and dug out stumps. We’d planted a large garden only to see it soaking in ground water,

One afternoon I looked at John and said “Are you as tired of this experiment as I am?”

“Yes!” he thundered. We placed the house on the market the next morning and we were out of there, Charlie! So much for animals and hay rakes and fence posts that stood rotting in ground water. We barely talk of the farm today, except in terms of our temporary but significant lapse in sanity.

Would we do it all over again? Of course not! But if variety is the spice of life, we’ve managed to sample an entire spice rack. And who knows how much our frequent moves affected an otherwise lagging real estate market?

Well, we all do what we can, don’t we?

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PEACE AND QUIET AT THE BEACH

I love people; I really do. Normally, I enjoy talking to individuals on the beach and on the pier, just passing the time of day or engaging in more substantive conversations. Some people make you laugh, some bore you to death, some ask for your address so they can keep in touch. With so much time on their hands, everyone seeks out those who have a listening ear or soft shoulders or both.

But one day I felt the need to be alone. I wasn’t in a particularly talkative mood that day on the pier and I was enjoying fishing by myself, breathing the salt air deeply to clear my brain and refill my spiritual and mental reservoirs.

Before I could exhale, a woman in baggy fishing pants plunked down on the bench beside me and sighed, “Let me tell you about my brain surgery and show you pictures of my grandchildren.” Which she did. In excruciating detail and in that order. After a reasonable length of time and having expressed the proper sympathy and compliments, I moved on down the pier and leaned against the railing.

A kindly looking elderly woman nearby was catching Spanish mackerel, so I watched her from a safe distance. Soon she walked over and we exchanged pleasantries and I complimented her on her fishing prowess. She mentioned that her husband of over fifty years had died only the week before.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” I exclaimed.

“Don’t feel sorry for me!” she chortled. “I’m glad to be rid of the old coot. Now I’m free to do exactly as I want for the first time in over fifty years. So don’t feel sorry for me.”

Stunned but amused, I wished her well and decided a walk on the beach might help salvage the afternoon. I walked well beyond the surf fishermen and onto a small section of beach that looked quiet and promised some respite. I sat down in the sand, hugged my knees, closed my eyes and listened to the gentle, lapping waves and laughing gulls. I thought of the verse in Psalm 23: “He leadeth me beside the still waters; He restoreth my soul.” Wonderful peace and tranquility wrapped itself around me like the proverbial warm, fuzzy blanket.

Immediately, an old salt appeared from out of nowhere, squatted down beside me and without preamble stated flatly and loudly, “It’s all Harry Truman’s fault.” Before I could ask why (or why me, Lord?), he began a diatribe which lasted all of twenty-six minutes (not that I was counting) about the evils of the Democratic party in the 1940s and how their machinations were responsible for all the social maladies of today.

While I pondered how to extricate myself from this walking encyclopedia of political minutia, he suddenly unfolded his lanky limbs, tipped his hat and said, “Well, nice talkin’ to ya, lady” and left.

With that I sighed and left the beach. So much for peace and quiet. They’re vastly overrated anyway.

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THE PHENOMENA OF ONLINE CHAT ROOMS

One of the most interesting phenomena on the internet today is the proliferation of chat rooms, a virtual gathering place for people of like minds and interests.

At any given time, twenty-four-hour-a-day chat rooms are open on the internet for people with interests as varied as spirituality, gun control, relationships, current events, motherhood, arts and crafts, health issues, sports, astronomy and on and on ad infinitum.

And if none of these hundreds of chat rooms appeals to your interests (prurient or otherwise), you can construct your own chat room in seconds and invite your online friends to join you. In private, of course. And away from the madding crowd.

Chat rooms are a microcosm of today’s society. Unlimited access opens the doors to the weary, the wary, the winners and the well-off. Carefully selected screen names permit anonymity but scrutiny of other chat room members’ names is the order of the day. And it continues unabated.

Chat rooms are frequented by the Regulars, who meet at the same time in the same room to discuss the same things every day, such as fifteen different ways to cook cabbage, what time of day to expect baby’s colic to occur or how pleasant is the sound of Ball canning jars when the lids seal. They exchange family photos (called pics), meet around the country for regional reunions, and know each others’ birthdays.

Then there are the Timids, who creep into the room, look around, listen to the virtual conversation and decide whether they would be accepted into this august group. They type their frightened hellos in regular font, wait for some response from the Regulars, and if none is forthcoming, they back quietly out the door, hoping they didn’t bother anyone. Usually, no one even notices them.

The Revolving Doors are those who flit from chat room to chat room, looking for something to stir their juices, dropping a few greetings and then skipping on to the next room, never putting down virtual roots, content with only fleeting friendships, or none at all.

The Grumpies are those who walk into a room with arms folded, permanent scowls disfiguring their lined faces. They greet no one, utter not a word. Before leaving, they bellow “Well, this isn’t a very friendly room!” and slam the door behind them.

But my favorite are the Occasionals. They saunter in with the word “Confident” pasted in block letters on their foreheads. They come in not to learn but to impart. They wear their arrogance like badges and take no guff from anyone. They enter into the conversation only when it pleases them, and when they’re bored, they disappear without so much as a goodbye. Most chat room Regulars hate them, which only adds to their mystique.

In most chat rooms there is no scheduled topic. Free chat is the modus operandi and is generally harmless and more often than not utterly boring. But when politics, religion or sexual preference rear their ugly heads, expect a free-for-all, a cat fight, a primordial scream which is effected by using all capital letters on the screen. These are barn-burners and the participants throw verbal chairs, knock down sacred walls and wade through the havoc they have created. I relish these occasions. They don’t happen often enough for me.

Every chat room has a Queen (sometimes called a mayor). This is not the result of a general election; it is a monarchy with grave results for those who don’t recognize her and accede to her virtual demands. She has favorites and flaunts them in the faces of her enemies. Her peons do verbal headstands to gain her favor, they feed her appetite for fresh gossip, and bow eagerly to her selfish demands. She is arbitrary and capricious. But in the chat rooms, you ignore her at your peril.

If conversations are the spice of life, these chat rooms provide a whole spice rack of opportunities to savor. The speech can be at once colorful, catty and caring. Nothing is too sacred to discuss; nothing is too private to reveal.

There’s WINNIEPOO, an older woman who wraps her spiritual shawl tightly around her ample shoulders and insists on decorum, on a meeting of minds, on a total lack of dissension. At the first sign of a disturbance, WINNIEPOO is out the door leaving a stern spiritual admonition in her wake.

POGIRL3, a farm woman from the Midwest, cannot utter a single sentence without using the words “tractor .” Holding the room hostage, she describes in mind-numbing detail the tractor’s need for a new universal joint, while at the same time decrying her inability to afford a new model. We put up with POGIRL3 because she has installed herself as Mayor/Queen. We have no choice. God save the Queen.

LUVSIK spends her nights in the chat room baying at the moon, singing her forlorn melody “Blue Moon” without interruption. This twice-divorced mother, loved by everyone, cannot fathom her future without a husband. She hugs and kisses everyone who enters the room, diligent in her pursuit of Mr. Right or Mr. Will Do. We collectively worry that a stranger will put her name on a police homicide blotter.

In her Madame Dufarge's chair, straight from "A Tale of Two Cities," BERTHA7 knits away, appearing less than interested, but monitoring every word, cataloging every personality who hides behind the screen names. BERTHA7 is a pleasant chat room staple, a preacher’s wife, who takes delight in forwarding off-color jokes to a growing list of recipients in the room.

RANCHGUY3, a retired Texas preacher comes into the chat room for fun and not for counsel. He did enough of that in church, he insists. Now his calling is not to comfort the afflicted but to afflict he comfortable. And he does it with panache. Gentle, unpretentious, he is a balancing presence in the room.

JILLSMOM, an acerbic, witty, urbane elitist, regularly diffuses tension in the room with humor and good will. She breezes in with her usual “Hello, fans” greeting and in a gesture of good will, types out a personal hello to every single person in the room. But JILLSMOM is not without her detractors. POGIRL3 seethes whenever JILLSMOM mentions her shopping preference of Williams-Sonoma over Wal-Mart, of J.Crew over J C Penneys.

CANARYGIRL thinks she can sing. Convinced that her voice will reap vast rewards, she self-produced a CD for distribution to her limited audience. Those privy to the first copies gape in open-mouthed horror. This girl does not sing! This girl CANNOT sing! But room members flatter her, encourage her to “go for it, baby” knowing in their hearts that only her family and close friends will purchase this CD, and only then when facing an AK-47 assault rifle.

Occasionally the conversation goes from the mundane to the melodramatic. IVEHADIT, a regular member, bursts into the room feigning outrage that someone has circulated her picture around the internet without permission. She is quickly reminded that she used her daughter-in-law’s picture anyway, so what’s the big deal?

Chat rooms are a combination of the neighborhood bar and the church fellowship hall. Friendships develop online at lightning speed and evaporate just as rapidly. Loyalties tend to change and confidences are broken. With some, serious flirting occurs because in cyberspace a false security blanket protects members from discovery. Private room conversations provide a quiet, cozy retreat where anonymity breeds intimacy. Sadly, too often, hearts are broken and reputations are sullied in the debris as marriages disintegrate in full view of troubled but caring room members.

Word choices typed in at lightning speed often provide moments of hilarity. POGIRL3 described the meat she was about to prepare as “that meat, you know, that hangy down thingy on a cow” which sent the room into gales of derision and laughter. It was brisket, of course, a meat choice known to many and rejected by most.

WINNIEPOO regaled the room with her account of a family trip during which her husband suddenly sat down on a rotted stump with a beehive hidden inside. On the return trip home, he knelt backwards in the front seat for a hundred miles, facing the tauntings and guffaws of the children in the back seat. WINNIEPOO’s online graphic description of removing the stingers from the derriere of her embarrassed husband would have sent most men appealing directly to Judge Wapner’s divorce court.

Praying online in the religious chat rooms is a new experience for most. Sentence prayers, with several participating, are offered, with members tripping over each others’ words, eager to get their prayer on the screen, hoping to get God’s attention by typing in a larger font or a brighter, iridescent color. Memorial services are held in chat rooms for dear and departed members, with instructions for the bereaved to “enter the room quietly and with dignity, keeping conversation to a minimum.”

Chat room members purchase microphones to facilitate audible and instant conversations with other members. They receive “wavs” from each other; songs to cheer, to bring comfort, to provide entertainment from the routine, the dull and pedestrian. They dream of the approaching day when computer screens provide instant images of their friends nationwide sitting in front of their screens in old sweat shirts or bathrobes, inviting access into their homes and lives and loves.

Psychologists are having a proverbial field day watching chat room activity. Every button of human emotion is pushed every day in every chat room on the internet, providing glimpses into the lives and non-lives of people so diverse that you wonder what brought them together in the first place and what unseen, undefined force holds them together.

Could it be the brisket?