MORE COLUMNS BY MARIANE HOLBROOK

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Denotes Humor 

 

REDEFINING MARRIAGE

John never formally asked me to marry him. Does that mean I'm not legally married? I think at some point in our budding relationship a trillion years ago he just assumed ownership. I don't even remember him getting down on one knee to beg for my hand. I do remember him talking to my father, though, and Dad promising him a new BMW to get me outta the house.

Some people have an unorthodox view of engagements, anyway. When my mom held out her hand for Grandma to see her new engagement ring, Grandma scoffed, "Why don't you take it out and bury it?" I don't think the engagement party made any headlines.

But being married is a trip. It's not for the fainthearted which is why fifty percent of married couples hock their wedding rings at Big Jim's Pawn Shop

Truth be known, I'd probably enjoy being a bigamist or trigamist or quadramist or whatever. How can one man can be expected to wear all the different hats his wife requires?

For instance, when it comes to being a handy man around the house, John makes a terrific science teacher. I could use a second husband for fixin' things. John could own every single tool made by Craftsman and still not have the right screw driver to fix our sagging screen door. But that's okay. He stuck a half-inch block of wood under the door and propped it up just fine. Maybe someday we'll be able to use the door again.

I could also use a mechanically inclined husband; not in place of John but in addition to him. One who could actually fix the engine screech and not just cover it with an entire can of Pam cooking spray, hoping to find the noisy part.

My Mechanic Husband would wash the car and polish it every Saturday, vacuum it out and wash all the windows 'til they shone like glass (which I sorta think they're supposed to do anyway). John's idea of a car wash is to soap the car down in the driveway and wait for heavy rains to come during the night to rinse it off. The next morning he'll open the car doors and let the wind blow the car trash onto our neighbor's yard. Maybe that's why we never get a Christmas card from our picky neighbors.

My new Mechanic Husband would also keep the gas tank full and not ride on fumes for 400 miles hoping to find a mom and pop station where gas is one cent cheaper.

I could use a Fastidious Husband, too, in addition to John. I wanna guy who gets his jollies dusting blinds and vacuuming under chairs and cleaning piano keys with Q-tips, a man who regularly cleans the ceiling fan blades, pulls out the stove to remove any dust behind it, and scrubs bathroom grout with a discarded toothbrush. While he's at it, he might as well learn to cook Thai food and serve it to us with pomp and circumstance and a crisp white linen towel draped over his folded arm, cuz when I dine, I like to DINE.

No state marriage license should be issued until the husband wins a chiropractic certificate or at least a masseur's certificate. I need a husband who can crack back bones, move my muscles around and pour Ahava lotion by the gallon onto my beach-dried skin. And it would help if he'd hire a little Japanese boy to walk on my back every day, too.

Yeah, I could be a quadrigamist with no problem, but I don't want John to have the same privilege.

Color me chicken.

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REVIVE US AGAIN

I don’t think God had teenagers in mind when he invented revival meetings.

Or maybe he did.

As a boy-crazy, not-too-tightly-wound early teen, I wouldn’t have missed revival services in our small church for anything. Every year the pastor scheduled spring and fall revivals for the purpose of revving up the troops, giving them a second wind, and hoping in the meantime that a few sinners might stumble head first into the church, seek repentance, and join the ranks.

These were “Fire and Brimstone” meetings; Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God” services; “Stand Up, Shape Up or Ship Out” gatherings that yielded impressive results for the adults but left the teenagers staring in bewildered incomprehension.

The problem was, we were looking at revivals through an entirely different lens. We were at that awkward age where we were too old to wet the bed and too young to drive a car. Which made us exactly the right age for revival services.

We arrived early to occupy the back rows, grabbing the blue hymnals to fill in all the o’s and a’s, and writing notes to each other on the offering envelopes while waiting for something to send us into gales of laughter. If nothing materialized, we could always use our tweezers to pull the young hairs out of the boy’s legs next to us.

But we could almost always count on Miss Bertie to provide entertainment for us. The minute the sermon began, Miss Bertie left her second row seat and headed for the ladies’ room. Without fail. You could set your Mickey Mouse watch by it. And always she would return to walk the full length of the center aisle with either a three foot strand of bathroom tissue stuck to her heel or the back of her dress stuffed into the top of her cotton stocking. Either way, it sent us diving under the pews in paroxysms of stifled laughter. We loved Miss Bertie.

Then there was Uncle Emery, an elderly man with an Ed Wynne appearance, who got blessed at least once during the revivals and let forth in holy laughter. I mean he’d get just tickled to death over something the speaker said and let ‘er rip in sustained giggling. We teenagers in the back row approved of his blessing and we in turn blessed each other, roaring with delight, punching each other, bending double and loving this five minute departure from the boring sermon. I don’t remember the visiting speaker being amused.

But one night things came to a screeching halt for me in the back row. My dad had been after me for months to make a commitment to Christ. In my early-teen reasoning I was sure it meant I’d have to give up the back row, sit down in front with Mother and Daddy at every service, pray long prayers with “thee” and “thou” and paste a scripture verse on my forehead in bold block letters. So I told Daddy I’d make this commitment whenever my sister, Norma, did.

I knew this would permit me to enjoy my wild and sinful lifestyle for many more years because Norma was the least likely person to ever make this kind of decision. So at the close of one revival service, I was knocked senseless when I saw my sister make her way to the front of the church. All my friends in the back row turned to me in wide-eyed unbelief; they knew my predicament. They knew my dad would come after me. They viewed this as the most exciting thing ever to happen in our church. They were beside themselves in anticipation.

So I did what I always do in cases like this; I ran. Down to the basement, into the ladies’ bathroom, crouched in the back of the stall where my dad couldn’t possibly find me.

But my friends in the back row proved just how fickle teenagers can be. They gave my mother very explicit directions where to find me in the basement.

Do you lose spiritual points if you are taken kicking and screaming to the front of the church by your mama? I need to know.

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RIDDLED WITH RIDDLES

To paraphrase I Corinthians 13, “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I spoke like a child and behaved like a child and now that I’m a woman, I’m still doing childish things”. It’s people like me that gave St. Paul the Apostle a real fit. But I can’t help it. I love to laugh and I’ve never grown up. And it’s too late to change now.

One of my childish habits is that I love riddles and questions that turn your brain inside out trying to solve them. Riddles must be important because Shakespeare mentions them twelve times. I know because I read through The Complete Works of Shakespeare just this very morning and counted them. (I didn’t really; I just wanted to see if anyone was paying attention.)

Former Labor leader James R. Hoffa’s middle name is Riddle which must mean something; I’m just not sure what. If we could solve that riddle, maybe we’d know under which cement slab he’s buried.

We once had a van full of unruly teenagers returning from a skiing trip at Sugar Mountain in western North Carolina. Given the assignment to quiet them down, I told the group, “OK, listen up. I’ll give this $50 bill to the first person who can tell me the only word in the English language which contains three consecutive sets of double letters.” Immediately the kids stopped talking and yelling, brows began to wrinkle, thinking caps pulled way down over their ears. The van was quiet as a tomb for the next hundred miles. The answer, of course, is “bookkeeper” (and its derivatives) but I didn’t tell them ‘til after we arrived home. And, of course, I didn’t have to shell out $50.

My father was the best at this game. He was studying his Sunday School lesson in preparation for teaching when he asked me, “Do you believe God can do anything?”

“Sure, Daddy,” I replied, sitting my skinny little ten-year-old self down beside him. “I believe God can do anything.”

“Do you believe God can make a rock so heavy He can’t lift it?” Daddy asked, smiling.

I must have spent two weeks drawing pictures of God and rocks. I still don’t know the answer.

I once asked my little brother which word in the English language is most frequently spelled wrong. He said he didn’t know and didn’t really care and to leave him alone. If anyone cares, it’s the word, “wrong.”

One night I was bored so I looked around for something to amuse me. I decided to pester my patient husband. “John,” I said, “if we were to stand all the people in the world together shoulder to shoulder in one spot, would that spot need to be as large as the entire United States?”

John looked at me incredulously. “Are you kidding? They could all fit into eastern North Carolina.

“Oh sure,” I replied.

With that, John picked up his trusty calculator and, allowing one square yard per person for six billion people, he proved that the entire population of the world could fit into New Hanover and three surrounding counties.

John’s pretty smart. I used to think the corpus collosum of women’s brains were larger than men’s, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I should find out what corpus collosums are before making that judgment.

In the meantime, should I ask John what the first telephone number in the Bible is?

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RIDICULOUS RECYCLING

I missed the boat when I didn’t invest in the hula hoop. I’ve always regretted that I didn’t buy stock in Pet Rocks. But I missed a golden opportunity when I didn’t invest in pantyhose stock in 1959 when Glen Raven Mills of North Carolina introduced the underpants and stockings all in one garment. Arguably, pantyhose proved to be the single most important stock item for women in the twentieth century. At the very least, it was right up there with industrial strength mascara.

Someone could make millions doing a video of women putting on panty hose. There is simply no lady-like way to do it. Every woman turns into a contortionist/gymnast/ballet dancer/ weight lifter when squirming to pull them up. Probably no other exercise so provokes women into thoughts of murdering the man who invented them and murdering her husband who is bent double laughing at the bizarre sight of his wife performing this necessary daily routine.

Women toss out panty hose regularly after one or two wearings. But every day husbands are found digging through the trash to retrieve them for recycling. A few husbands even purchase new ones for use around the garage or garden.

Lewis Huffer of Carolina Beach purchases new panty hose to store his Vidalia onions, carefully hanging them where they get fresh, circulating air. He refuses to use worn out panty hose as a matter of principle. Hey, the guy gets my vote.

I was watching a small fishing boat being launched at the ramp on the south end of the island when I did a double-take. There, suspended in the cool water and attached to the side of the boat by a rope, was a pair of panty hose with about eight cans of beer stuffed into each leg, forming two stiff, slender columns. I must have registered my surprise and amusement because the young fisherman grinned broadly and said, “I didn’t have room for a cooler. Pretty good idea, huh?”

Some men use old panty hose to tie up tomato plants, because the hose are easy on the branches and don't cut into the stems. And if men have no time to shampoo, they can wrap an old, clean pair of panty hose over their hairbrush, lightly spray the brush with cologne, and brush through their hair. The panty hose will absorb oil, and the cologne will break down the oil and give the hair a nice clean scent. Don’t bother asking my husband, John, if he’s tried this. He’d rather die first.

Fishermen in the Cape Fear River use panty hose to stuff their fresh chicken liver bait in, since the chicken liver isn’t solid enough to put a hook through. And one ingenious fishermen posted these instructions in a bait shop: “When fishing for blues, don’t use a hook. Using your wife’s old panty hose, insert some highly reflective silver, gold or multi-color tape in the legs and bundle up the waist. Insert a heavy duty snap swivel in the waist of the panty hose and cast it into the water. The blues will hit the panty hose because they think it’s an eel and will get their teeth tangled in the nylon. This tip will save you tons of money in lures.”

I ran that suggestion by several fishermen on the pier and the guffaws could be heard all the way to Southport.

But the recycling story I like best involves two men who set out to rob a southern bank, using panty hose as disguises.

The first fellow pulled the stockings down so far that his face was way into the leg of the pantyhose. One leg was hanging down on his shoulder, and the other leg was hanging over his head like a floppy rabbit ear. And because he had his face into the leg of the stocking, it did not disguise him at all and he was easily identified by the video camera. Had a gun not been pointed at her, the bank teller might have died laughing.

The second robber had cut both legs off his pair of pantyhose, tied knots in them and pulled the pantyhose over his face. The knots stood up like a pair of stiff dog ears. The thick panel from the front of the pantyhose covered his face and he couldn’t see, so he pulled up his pantyhose mask to scream at the teller “Fill this bag.” The security camera snapped his picture before he pulled the pantyhose back down over this face. It was something straight out of Keystone Kops.

What a hilarious visual. Right up there with Martha Stewart’s TV segment, “How to Tow A Car Using Panty Hose and Duct Tape.”

We’re all nuts.

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RIDING HERD AT THE GROCERY STORE

by Mariane Holbrook 

What's with this "Self Check-Out" thingy at the supermarket, anyway?

It's an issue with me because I have a bad knee. Well, ok, so I really have a bad leg. OK, OK, don't push your envelope too far on this but I've got an entire bad body! Whaddya expect from someone older than dirt who got her driver's license behind the wheel of a Studebaker?

Anyway, the other night I drag my Methuselah self into the grocery store to do my weekly shopping. I prefer shopping at 2 a.m. simply because there are less victims around when I drive that motorized vehicle like a maniac down aisle 6 and run straight through an 8 foot tall pyramid of Velveeta cheese. Is that my fault? Sheesh. Talk about poor product display! Besides that, those motorized cars only have two speeds: slow and ram.

So I hurry past the debris of cheese boxes, pasting an innocent look on my face, and tool over to aisle 9 where I notice, (oh, lovely!) the Kikkoman soy sauce on the very top shelf, far beyond the reach of my sitting-down-self. So I slowly stand up, being careful not to let out my well-practiced, pain-filled scream which regularly empties the graves at Fort Fisher. I take two small steps and reach for the Kikkoman, placing it and myself carefully back in the motorized vehicle.

Two aisles later a woman with a black Gestapo patch on her sleeve approaches me, plants her feet widely apart, hands on her hips in a threatening manner and hisses, "Didn't I see you walking over there on aisle 9? How can you in good conscience ride that thing when so many others in here who are REALLY, TRULY disabled could use it? Hmm? Hmm? Hmm?"

I look around and see only one other person in the entire store: a teenage boy with zits loading up on Little Debbie cakes.

I stare at her and think of several brilliant answers: "Lady, go drown yourself in the pickle crock!" Or "Which part of your face shall I leave intact after I get through pummeling you through the floor tiles?"

But stupid me sits there with a DUH look on my face, never saying a word as she stalks down the aisle, mumbling to herself. Then I really, really get scared. What if she finds out it was ME who tunneled through the cheese display with wild abandon?

So I hurry to the front to pay for my groceries to get outta Dodge. But there are no cashiers in sight. NOT EVEN ONE! Instead, there's a sign telling us to check out our own groceries, and leave a check (if we wanted to) at the front desk. It's the latest electric eye thingy that management trusts to cut down on shop-lifters. Oh, yeah.

So now I have to STAND UP and take a few steps and put all these groceries on the counter and through that electric eye thingy which reads the bar codes.

And guess who's standing right behind me in line making her "harrumph, harrumph" sounds?

I shoulda run over her while I had the chance.

(Just kidding, Lord.)

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ROAD KILL

Road kill upsets me. It doesn’t matter if it’s a raccoon, a possum, a dog or cat or whatever. And I’m depressed for hours if I see a deer lying motionless and stiff by the side of the road. No animal deserves to be hit by a vehicle. Except one: a snake. Every time I see a dead snake on the highway I cheer and yell and beep the horn and turn around and run over it again just to make sure it’s dead.

Maybe snakes aren’t given a fair shake. Maybe if Adam and Eve had yearned for banana pudding instead of apple pie, we’d be looking at snakes through a more compassionate lens; I’m not sure.

I admit to being a certified, card carrying, flag waving ophidiphobic. I am scared to death of snakes. So you can imagine my unparalleled horror when the father of one of my first grade students brought his six-foot pet boa constrictor to “Show and Tell” one morning. When he draped it around my shaking shoulders and asked me to hold it, I concentrated mightily on trying not to faint dead away in front of 32 wide-eyed students who cheered me on.

Little girls, almost without exception, are terrified of snakes, but little boys adore them. One school day, my friend Billie Jo’s little grandson found a small harmless garter snake on the school playground. Wanting desperately to keep it, Andrew hid the snake in his sock where it wiggled all afternoon trying to escape into the classroom. He managed to keep it from the teacher’s sight and transported it secretly and successfully home where he enjoyed it for several days before it met its demise.

When our cousin bought a grand old house near Harker’s Island, he quickly discovered copperheads in bushes and undergrowth all around the property. Leslie killed a bucketful of copperheads one morning and carried them to the road where he lined them up in perfect symmetry in the middle of the highway. Then he sat on his porch to watch in bemused silence as car after car careened down the highway, brakes screeching to a sudden halt, as drivers craned their necks to stare open-mouthed at the astonishing sight before them. It was a gothic sight straight out of a Stephen King novel.

While living in West Africa, my sister, Norma and her family were hit by spitting cobras, fought off boa constrictors and tangled with pythons. Other very deadly and poisonous snakes were either stepped on or narrowly missed when my sister and her family walked around the mission compound.

One day they discovered that a python had been raiding the chicken coup and eating the eggs.. Eggs are not plentiful in Africa and each one is therefore precious. In an effort to outsmart the python, Norma placed a hard-boiled egg in the nest with the fresh eggs. The python, unable to digest or regurgitate the hard-boiled egg, crawled into the underbrush and died.

But you can overdo it. When my friend, Sandy, discovered a snake in her yard, she didn’t bother with hard-boiled eggs. Having two small daughters and a snake in the same yard was more than just a little frightening for Sandy. First, she paralyzed the snake with a garden hoe, then ran for her .22 rifle and shot the snake seventeen times until it resembled a four-foot rope of raw hamburger. Sandy was one angry little mama.

Near Laurinburg one night, some college kids decided to have fun by cramming three long black snakes inside a suitcase. They shook the suitcase vigorously to agitate the snakes before placing the suitcase beside the country road. The young men then hid in the bushes nearby to watch and wait. As expected, a car sped by, stopped, then backed to grab the suitcase. The young men in the bushes held their collective breaths as the car took off down the road, then screeched to a sudden halt. All four car doors flew open simultaneously as four men jettisoned out like NASA rockets, leaving the opened suitcase and the slithering, angry snakes crawling around inside the abandoned car.

Billy Graham once said that God would provide whatever it takes to make us happy in heaven. Conversely, I suppose that means God would keep out of heaven anything that scares us senseless.

I’ll buy that.

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RUB A DUB DUB

Every time I hear someone hearken back to the "good ole days" I think, "Hmmm, they can't possibly be thinkin' of the old wringer washer days."

Admittedly, this dates me back to Older Than Dirt B.C., but I remember that sturdy, noisy, necessary contraption like it was yesterday.

Mother kept ours in the cellar (Southerners call them "basements;" Yankees call them "cellars.") It was rigged up in the middle of the floor with a round gray and white rope rug beneath to catch all the soapsuds that regularly poured like Niagara over its sides and piled up like snow banks on the Yukon. (I'm sure the suggested use of "a cup of soap powder" didn't mean "use half a box" but I could be wrong.)

The agitator made its loud "ka-thump, ka-thump, ka-thump" noise that shook the entire house but was Beethoven's 6th symphony to Mother's ears. With seven children and the enormous wash load, it's a wonder the thing lasted a week.

The fact is, the wringer on that old washer scared me half to death. I had nightmares about it. I'd dream I was Cinderella with my golden locks being pulled through the wringer, leaving my screaming self not only hairless but scalpless. I feared my kitty going through those menacing rollers and coming out flat as a bookend. And when my little brother got on my very last nerve, I envisioned forcing the little monster through the rollers and making a colorful flat kite outta him.

One day my worst fears about the wringers were realized.

While visiting my brother and sister-in-law in another city, I decided to make my nine-year-old-skinny-self useful; I'd help with the washing. I'd never done it before but, hey, how hard could it be? Besides, I needed to make some points with my older brother who told me every hour on the hour what a pain in the neck and blight on civilization I was.

Reaching into the soapy water, I pulled out the largest pieces first and fed them through the wringer with ease. What a breeze. I watched with satisfaction as they landed in the clear rinse water tub with no discernible buttons missing, a tribute to my impressive, new-found skills.

Then I began loading the smaller items, spreading a wash cloth out before entering it into the rollers.

BIG MISTAKE. In went my fingers, my hand, my ARM. I was being sucked mercilessly into the black abyss I had long feared. My high-pitched screams brought my sister-in-law just in time to pull me from this live Medusa Monster, this Fomorian Fiend, this Barjuchne Behemoth.

Immediately before my head and torso were drawn through the wringers, my sister-in-law, Elaine, unplugged the washer and slowly withdrew my arm. I could say I collapsed in a quiet, limp heap on the wet floor but I was in such wild hysteria that she had to scrape my writhing body from the ceiling with a plastic spatula.

Rushing me in her car to the doctor, he ceremoniously inspected my bruised, battered pathetically thin, little flat arm and pronounced me "unhurt." Was he crazy? I was sure every single bone in my arm was crushed into grits, held together only by small fragments of spared skin.

But he remained adamant, ignoring my desperate pleas to amputate my arm and give me a new one on the spot.

Elaine, embarrassed by my blatant pleas for sympathy, suddenly realized she'd forgotten her purse in our mad race against death to the doctor's office.

She made a bargain with the doctor who didn't know either of us from Adam (or Eve or Seth or whoever). She was willing to leave me in his office as ransom until she returned with the $15 payment for his services.

I let out a yell that emptied the graves at Endwell Cemetery.

"WHAAAT? I know you. You'll never return and I'll be orphaned in a strange doctor's office that reeks of formaldehyde from old skulls in a jar. Besides, I'm worth more than $15."

She returned (not particularly in record time, either) and upon payment of $15, I was released from Dr. Williard Weird's care.

Years went by and I never thought much about washers until yesterday when John's best pen was missing. Finally I called out to him:

"The good news is I found your pen.

The bad news is that all your white shirts in the washer are covered with ink."

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RUTH AND NAOMI

From the start, my mother-in-law and I had a Ruth and Naomi relationship. Her people would be my people and her God, my God.

I liked her the first time I saw her. John and I were developing a relationship in college and she embarked on a long train ride from North Carolina to New York City to meet me. She appeared youthful and, indeed, she was. There was a classiness about her that intrigued me. The way she wore a scarf, a sweater tossed casually across her slim shoulders, her coordinates carefully selected; all these things suggested an innate feel for what was appealing.

Mother Holbrook had not had an easy life. Her father abandoned the family when she was young and her strong, devout mother raised her and her two brothers. Mother Holbrook married a quiet, kind man from the mountains of North Carolina and while they remained deeply committed to each other for nearly sixty five years, they were never blessed with an abundance of material things.

She can’t be described with just one adjective. She was witty and clever. She was compassionate. Her middle name could have been “thoughtful.” She gave new depth and definition to the words “caring and loving.” She never thought of herself as being deeply spiritual, but indeed was. She was humble, forgiving, and self-effacing. She was every inch a lady. She was one of the most godly women I ever knew.

We had such deep respect for each other that we never invaded each other’s privacy. She never took sides in any disagreement John and I had, but quietly excused herself from the conversation. She didn’t offer unsolicited advice or give unwelcomed criticism. If anything, she was too good and more unselfish than she should have been or needed to be.

My husband made sure in their later years that his parents were well provided for. He arranged for them to spend the last twenty years of their lives in the beloved North Carolina mountain community where his father had been born many years ago. They lived simply, they were content, they felt secure and loved. And they were.

Mother Holbrook loved humor and laughed easily and often. Looking at the x-rays of her broken arm, the surgeon asked seventy-year-old Mother Holbrook how it happened.

“Oh, I was just playing football,” she laughed, then explained that while babysitting with a neighbor’s child, she fell while playing football with him on the front lawn.

Our son, Johnny, began calling her “Mamoo” when he was a toddler. The name stuck and Johnny and Tim fondly called her by that name as long as she lived.

Her love for her husband, John A., was legendary. She wanted nothing more than to make him happy, make him feel loved, make him feel cared for. She asked nothing in return but his warm smile and his hand holding hers.

When her beloved John A. passed away, her spirit died. She became only a shell of her former self. For several months she valiantly tried to hold on but the loneliness was too great, the loss too keen, the sacrifice too much.

She wasted away and finally her heavenly father sent a favorite angel to escort her into heaven to be with her loving husband.

I still miss her.

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SATURDAY WITH MY DAD

Daddy placed his straw hat on his shiny bald head and picked up his dog-eared Bible. I groaned. He asked me to tag along while he visited the sick and afflicted at the local hospital. On my list of THINGS I WANT TO DO, “Hospital Visitation” was at the very bottom, right under “Cleaning and Shoveling Out My Younger Brother’s Bedroom.” I always blanched at the thought of entering a hospital; weren’t there sick people in there?

I was a typical know-it-all teenager; I’m surprised my family didn’t shoot me. But I felt sorry for Daddy so I set my book aside and sauntered out the door with him. He was underwhelmed by my enthusiasm.

The bad thing about these visits was their sheer length; they took up half a Saturday afternoon, a time reserved by New York State Law #69403 for teenagers to hang out at the Sugar Bowl Restaurant and squander their entire allowance on Milk Duds and milk shakes.

The first patient we visited at the hospital was a friend of Daddy’s named Stubby Knecht. I adored his name. The name begged to be spoken aloud: Stub-by Ka-necked. The men regaled each other with stories about the Lehigh Valley Railroad where they were employed, ignoring me as I sat in a metal chair repeating Stubby’s name to myself. I made a mental note to ask Mother why I was given a name as mundane and meaningless as mine when this man had a name grown men would kill for.

Starting down the hall to visit another friend, we heard familiar and unfamiliar voices calling Daddy’s name from rooms up and down the hall. “Bub,” they called, one after another, using Daddy’s nickname, “stop in for a minute.” He read a few verses of Scripture to each one, prayed, then continued on to the next room. Everyone, it seemed, knew my dad. He was easily one of the most loved and respected men in our village.

When we finally returned home, I settled down to watch a movie on television. It was a love story, and at age fifteen, I was an expert on love stories. I had devoured every Grace Livingston Hill romance novel in our local library. (Earlier that summer I had approached my neighbor who was engaged to a soldier stationed in another part of the country. “Gladys,” I asked, “do you long passionately for David every single moment of every single day?” “No, I can’t say that I do,” replied Gladys, puzzled. “Well, then, you’re not in love,” I pronounced with teenage authority and marched back home.)

I became more engrossed in the love story on television that Saturday afternoon. Stretched out on the green sofa, I watched the drama unfold and sat upright to watch its dramatic conclusion.

Suddenly, Daddy walked through the room, switched the television dial over to a thrilling baseball game and settled in his easy chair.

“No, please turn it back; it’s almost over. I have to see the ending of that movie. I just have to,” I cried out over the cheering of thousands of fans in the stadium now filling our television screen.

Daddy didn’t hear me. He was so engrossed in the play that he heard nothing above the roar of the crowds. He was cheering with them, pounding one fist into another in approval.

“Daddy,” I cried above the noise, “How could you do that? You made me miss the best part of a movie I’ve been watching for almost two hours.
I ran from the room, sprinted upstairs and flung myself onto my bed, frustration spilling from every pore. I didn’t leave my room the rest of the day.

I didn’t see him when he left very early Sunday morning to preach for another pastor. I didn’t hear his sermon. But I did hear him return home late in the day.

Sitting down beside me in our living room, he put his arm around me.
“This morning I started to preach but I couldn’t,” he choked, “ I closed my Bible and began weeping at the pulpit. I told the congregation I had to ask God to forgive me before I could begin my sermon. I told them I had deeply disappointed my young daughter, that I wanted to watch a baseball game more than anything else and I hurt you terribly. I prayed for God to forgive me there in the pulpit in front of the congregation and now I ask you to forgive me.”

I threw my arms around Daddy, buried my face in his neck and cried with shame. I couldn’t speak. I knew that Daddy watched the ball game on Saturdays. It was his favorite pastime. He knew every score of every player of every game that was ever played, it seemed.

My father worked all week in the blazing sun at the Lehigh Valley Railroad station. This menial job was far beneath him. His brilliant mind should have been utilized as a scholar, writer or teacher, but with seven children to feed and clothe, he worked at this sweat shop for over forty years. Watching baseball on television was his only outlet, his only relaxation. I knew I would never forgive myself for this misunderstanding. And I haven’t.

Many years later when my father lay in a sterile hospital room dying of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that ravaged his body, he whispered to Mother through parched lips, “I hope I haven’t let Marian down too much.”

My loving father has been gone for over 30 years. I have never gotten over his death.

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SIGNS OF OUR TIMES

I love signs. Especially hand-lettered ones. I enjoy sitting in my car in grocery store parking lots, looking for misspellings on hand-lettered signs in the store windows. I have counted as many as eight misspellings on just one sign. Most of the time they are innocuous; occasionally, the misspellings are hilarious, as in “Hambugger: $1.29 pr pond.”

Some of my all-time favorites were seen in various locations around the county a few years ago. Boiled peanuts were in season and were being sold from backs of pick-up trucks in parking lots everywhere. I like boiled peanuts, but it was the signs that made me smile: “Bald peanuts for sale”. “Boled peanuts 4 Sale.” “Bolied peanuts sold here”. “Bollied peanuts”. “Bold peanuts”. Boyel peanuts”. “Boiyeled peanuts”. And my favorite: ”Boilloied peanuts right here”.

One morning we drove past a large, hand-lettered sign stuck firmly and resolutely in the front lawn of a house beside a country church. In large, bold uneven letters, the sign read: “NO TRESPASSING! ALL RELIGIOUS PERVERTS WILL BE SHOT”. (Hmmm. I hope that homeowner was quickly removed the church weekly visitation schedule.)

Church signs have always held a fascination for me. Have you noticed the smaller the church, the longer its name? Conversely, large churches usually have single names: Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran. But it gets interesting when you see small store-front churches with names like “Cornerstone Church Of The Apostles, Saints And Believers Of The Trinity Of The Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” or “First Community Church of Bread On The Waters Bible Fellowship For All Nations Under God ” (Now THAT is a church I could get involved in.)

A minister with an irreverent, but mischievous sense of humor posted this sign in front of his church: “WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY? SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING?”

A road sign in front of a convenience store not far from me advertises: “COFFEE AND WORMS”. (Is this an environmentalist’s version of coffee and donuts? Or is it warning about the after-effects of their store brand of coffee?)

On our church bulletin board years ago, a ninety-year-old lady had posted this sign, written in her shaky handwriting: “You are invited to my birthday party this Saturday at 2 pm. No refreshments. Just presents.”

A road sign not far from my childhood home advertised “SHAW’S LUNCH”. Directly beneath it hung another sign: “PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD.” (Unrelated? We declined to find out. Some other time, maybe.)

But the sign that still brings me joy was written many years ago by one of my first grade students who had an especially difficult time learning to read. In childish block letters and taped to my desk, the small sign read “FOR TECHR.” Beside it lay the commercial Christmas card she had selected for me, solely because of its pretty picture: “Merry Christmas To Our Loved One in the Service.”

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SOUTHERN FRIED MARTHA STEWART

I love Martha Stewart. I think we should clone her and give a copy to every single family in America. Then we could all learn to cook crostini, risotto, rabe, biscotti, arborio or carnaroli. (Right after we find out what on earth they are.)

I subscribed to Martha’s “Living” magazine so I could become a domestic goddess and own imported, hand-carved salad bowls from the Isle of Crete. My four empty margarine cartons have served as my matching dishes long enough.

While I’m anxious to try her Negamaki Whatever, I’m reluctant to give up Southern cooking completely. As a transplanted Yankee, I’ve embraced the South wholeheartedly and even learned that fat back is one of our four basic food groups, right up there with butter beans, turnip greens and grits.

When I moved to the South as a newly-wed, my first faux pas at my in-laws’ table was to liberally salt the slab of country ham on my breakfast plate. I was puzzled by the uncomprehending stares around me and gamely devoured the ham, sending my blood pressure into the far reaches of the upper stratosphere. Then I nonchalantly poured milk and sugar on my grits, thinking it was cream of wheat.

At lunch, my mother-in-law asked if I preferred lettuce on my liver pudding sandwich. I blanched. Liver pudding? I tried to visualize chocolate pudding between two slices of white bread with lettuce. I chose sans lettuce.

Since those early days, I’ve learned a lot about Southern cuisine:

I’ve learned that you don’t walk into a restaurant and order “two eggs and a grit.”

I’ve learned that red-eye gravy is not made from dead red snapper fish eyes.

I’ve learned that you don’t eat pinto beans before going to church.

And I’ve learned that ordering a hot dog “all the way” is not a phrase that would make your mama fall over dead.

Every New Year’s Day, my father-in-law woke at dawn to prepare hog’s jowl, black-eyed peas, collard greens, white sweet potatoes, steamed apples and cornbread for a noon feast. This is a soul-food meal steeped in tradition. And the good luck it always brings explains why our family, like every other Southern family, is inordinately rich, unbelievably wise, and stunningly healthy. Or should be.

So my dilemma now is how to square my new appreciation of Martha Stewart’s Baba Ghanoush using tahini, with Martha White’s Baked Chitlin Cornbread using baking soda. At first glance, it seems to be a no-win situation.

For example, what can we substitute for Martha Stewart’s Sauteed Freshly Picked Fiddlehead Ferns? And would they go well with cheese grits or country ham grits or both? (Incidentally, hominy grits are made from field corn soaked in lye water for a couple of days. I knew you’d wanna know.)

Could we omit the Pasilla in the Pico De Gallo in Martha’s recipe and use bologna fold-overs instead?

And I’m not really sure if Martha’s Masa Harina should be served with chicken gizzards or with calves brains and eggs or what.

On second thought, maybe I should concentrate on Martha Stewart’s home decorating and purchase her Yves Delorme Eau a la bouche damask tablecloth for $400. It might go better with my matching Cool Whip salad bowls.

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STOP, THIEF !

You’ve never really known major trauma until someone steals your purse with your under-eye concealer in it.

My friend Dee was exasperated recently when robbers overlooked her mother’s television, her stereo, elegant attire from Lord and Taylor, and heirloom jewelry, to steal, of all things, Dee’s make-up kit. The world is in free-fall, no question about it.

My run-in with thieves happened at a grocery store on a Friday night when I should have been home baking dill bread or something.

John was casually pushing an empty cart around (all men do this while their wives are piling their own carts high with cartons of Pepsi and giant size Tide detergent and huffing and puffing down each aisle). Finally I finished shopping and met John near the check-out counter.

“Oh my heavens,” I gasped. “Someone has stolen my purse. I have $450 cash in it as well as my checkbook and credit cards.” (This wasn’t the time to mention under-eye concealer.)

John had been through this with me before when I left my purse containing $400 at a fast food restaurant somewhere in Maryland. But we won’t go there.

He instructed me to check our car to make sure it hadn’t been left there while he went for the manager.

Hurrying back inside I sobbed, “Oh no! They’ve stolen our car, too.”
John looked through the store window and pointed to our car. “Don’t be silly. It’s two lanes over.” (Men don’t give OR take directions well.)

I called to the manager to lock the doors and begin strip-searching every single customer.

“Lady, this is Friday night, our busiest night,” he sighed. “I can’t do that for only $450.” (Now why didn’t I tell him I really had $45,000 cash and some under-eye concealer in my purse? Good grief.) I gave him a dirty look which interpreted meant, “You can be replaced, Sonny.”

John and the manager began checking every aisle to see if I’d left my purse somewhere (“Try looking on top of all those precariously perched Kikkoman Soy Sauce bottles,” I wanted to yell. But I didn’t.)

Meanwhile, I stationed myself at the front of the store, giving the evil eye to every customer, wondering aloud if my purse was causing the suspicious bulge under one lady’s coat, but decided it was a case of too many Hostess Twinkies. I wanted to ask another woman if I could peek in her shopping bag but she intimidated me with her Sumai wrestler’s build and her sparse pony-tail held in place with a rubber band.

John returned to the front of the store with the manager and shook his head. It was no use; my purse was gone.

Immediately, a quiet, refined lady approached the manager and said, “Someone must have taken my cart by mistake. I had a head of lettuce and some peppers in mine, and when I turned to place some apples in my cart, this purse was in there.”

She handed my purse to the manager while he removed her lettuce and peppers from my cart. I poked my head out from where I was hiding behind John, thanked her and apologized to the manager.

I checked immediately to see if my under-eye concealer was still in my purse. From the look on John’s face, I prayed it would cover black eyes exceedingly well.

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STRIP-SEARCHING AN ANGEL

If my niece, Debbie, had picked up her classic Daily Light devotions one recent morning, she would have read the comforting words, “He knows the way I take. O Lord, You have searched me and known me.”

But Debbie wasn’t searched by the Lord that day. Instead, she was strip-searched at an airport. And at the order of an airport security guard with a thick accent and an eye for theatrics.

Debbie is not alone. Seventy-five year old Representative John Dingell of Michigan was stripped to his underwear last week at Reagan National Airport in Washington even though he explained he was wearing a knee brace and had surgically implanted pins in his ankles.

Debbie is in her mid-forties, a former missionary in the Philippines, a trim, blonde, blue-eyed woman with an open heart and a smile that would light up Nebraska. Why she was picked out of a long line of airline passengers to be strip-searched is beyond reason. It bordered on insanity and finally spilled over into the ridiculous.

One of her saving graces is that Debbie sees humor in everything. Or nearly everything. I love her like my own kid. I like to think we both frolicked in the same humor gene pool.

(My nephew, Mark, was patted down recently by two young, comely security guards before gaining entrance to a New England Patriot’s game but he grinned broadly at the girls and said, “Hey, I enjoyed that. Can I go through the line again?”)

Debbie was stricken with polio as a child only a short time before the polio vaccine was discovered. Bad timing for her, but she’s the ultimate trooper. Completely devoid of self-pity, she tackles life head on, holds graduate degrees, and works in a management position where she is admired for her skill in dealing with people.

Debbie wears a leg brace, compliments of her bout with polio. It’s cumbersome and bulky and often painful, but she manages it with dignity and wears long pants to keep it covered and to provide added warmth for her leg.

It was the leg brace which sent the security guard into orbit at the airport even though the scanner defined it and Debbie lifted her pant leg slightly to reveal the brace.

Unmoved and darkly suspicious, the security guard crisply and loudly ordered two female employees to escort Debbie to the public restroom where she was to completely disrobe, ostensibly to be searched for Samurai swords, meat cleavers, chain saws or whatever else she could hide on her thin frame. On Debbie’s mental list of “Things I Still Want To Do In This Life,” disrobing in a public bathroom in front of curious onlookers was hardly at the top of her list. She refused to go, declaring this was outrageous and discriminatory. The female employees agreed with her and refused to take part in the strip-search.

Lines of other passengers watched this exchange with fascination, and airport personnel stopped their normal business to stare. It was surreal. Debbie had never received a parking ticket, let alone being stopped, strip-searched and mentally accused of being a terrorist at an airport.

She laughed to herself. She couldn’t even use a potato peeler with facility. How could she wield a machete? And what instrument of destruction did they think she was hiding under these size 8 slacks, anyway? What was so menacing about her Anglo-Saxon looks? She was too “white bread” for her own good.

Debbie was finally advised that unless she obeyed orders, she would be denied access to the plane. She had visions of the airport suddenly closing and hundreds of passengers inconvenienced by her refusal. What if her picture were spread on the front pages of area newspapers and on CNN news?

Finally, she agreed to the strip-search if it could be done in a private room. The security guard magnanimously provided a large broom closet.

No linoleum cutters were found hidden in her leg brace. No paring knives were taped to her torso. No scissors were stuck in her stockings.

What they found instead was Debbie’s dignity still intact, something she’s worn as a lifelong badge of honor. Immediately after the search, she dressed, squared her shoulders and walked past the overbearing security guard toward the plane without so much as a glance in his direction.

That’s my niece! See why I love her?

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THE LITTLE SAILOR

My dad was a sailor in the Mediterranean during World War I and single-handedly brought the war to a close with his bravery and battle skills. Or so I told all my childhood friends when I wrapped Daddy’s well-worn Navy shirt around my skinny shoulders, pulled his white sailor cap down over my curls and sashayed around the neighborhood.

Daddy was a handsome, blond, curly-haired sailor whose picture on the deck of that navy troop ship should have been on every recruiting poster in America. He told me often of standing along the rail of that ship in the moonlight and desperately missing his fiancé, my mother, who waited back home for his safe return.

I have an idea, though, that Daddy had sailor’s blood coursing through his veins from the time he was a toddler for this reason: he gave depth and definition to the well-worn phrase, “swears like a sailor.”

Where Daddy picked up his colorful language baffled everyone, given his Christian upbringing. In adulthood, he turned out to be a saint, became a seasoned Bible teacher and served as a lay preacher. To me he was the most godly man I ever knew.

But his saintliness didn’t prevent his sharing his early childhood experiences with his own children, who doubled over with laughter and delight every time he recounted them.

He was given the nickname “Bub” by his sister who couldn’t pronounce “brother. The name stuck.

Bub’s mother was a well-known Bible teacher, who taught in the small neighborhood church as well as in her own living room. One summer afternoon in the year 1903 she gave seven-year-old Bub strict instructions to remain upstairs in his bedroom during a prayer meeting she was conducting for friends in her living room.

As the prayers were being offered by the large group kneeling in the living room, they were interrupted by a rooster whose legs Bub had tied together with a rope and who Bub was dangling from his upstairs window, swinging the screeching animal back and forth in front of the open living room window below. His mother charged up the stairs, retrieved the enraged bird from Bub’s grasp and locked Bub in his room for the duration of the prayer meeting.

That summer, Bub’s grandfather died after a long illness. Since he was well-known in the community, the funeral procession was long. At the cemetery, the pastor gave the usual farewells, prayed before the large crowd gathered around the grave site, and whispered a quiet amen.

Since Bub’s grandfather was a Civil War veteran, full military honors were afforded and a gun salute began.

As the guns were sending out their volleys of thunder, Bub’s grandmother fainted, both from exhaustion and the blistering summer heat.

“Oh no,” screamed little Bub to the large crowd, “The blankety blanks just shot grandma!”

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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.

 

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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THERE IS HOPE

I wish I’d been more sympathetic to my mother.

I wish I could flip back the dog-eared pages of time to Mother’s life when she was bent double with the torment of unending, unrelenting chronic pain. I would tell her I love her and I understand.

Because now I do.

I was diagnosed at Wake Forest University Medical Hospital with a rare disease known as Erythromelalgia, a condition for which there is no effective treatment nor any known cure. It manifests itself in severe burning of the feet which can only be relieved by plunging the feet in ice water many times a day. The illness is progressive and unless a cure is found or God chooses to perform a miracle, the burning will eventually envelope my limbs and the trunk of my body. at which time I’ll need to wear a body suit with tubing full of ice water, attached to a machine.

Oddly, I am not in despair.

There are three things necessary for sustaining meaningful life: something to hope for, something to do and someone to love. I make sure every day I have all three.

Hope is the expectation that some desire will be fulfilled. I have hope: hope in God, hope for eternal life and hope for more effective treatment for this disease.

I am not a saint nor do I know many. But I have found that hope gets me through the mind-numbing hours of pain, the restless nights when sleep stubbornly eludes me, the days which leave me exhausted and uncomprehending.

My friend, Dee, describes hope in her eloquent poem: “Hope is our tomorrow, and God’s strength for today.”

To cope with pain, I make sure I also have something to do. I fill my days with writing, with painting, with music, with worship, with anything that will give meaning and joy and vibrancy to my life.

Further, I always have someone to love: my heavenly Father, my kind husband, John; my son, Johnny and his wife, Susan; my younger son, Tim and his wife, Heather; my five darling grandchildren, Dena, Ella, Alex, Abby and Jackson, my extended family and many friends. They give me reason to live.

It’s true that no one knows our future but God. I like what one person wrote about the unknown tomorrows that face us all:

When we walk to the edge of all the light we have, and take that step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen: there will be something solid for us to stand on or God will teach us how to fly."

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THINGS I NEED TO DO

I have some unfinished business.

I don’t sit and fret about how I can single-handedly bring peace to the Balkans. I don’t stare at the phone, hoping I’ll get a call from the president (particularly THIS president) asking me to replace Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. I don’t rush to my mailbox each day, looking for a letter from the Pulitzer Committee congratulating me on a newspaper column I wrote about eggplant.

But there are several important things I want to accomplish before I die. Admittedly, it won’t matter to anyone but me, unless of course I fail and my family is left to sponge up the splatter of my failure.

I want to stand on a cliff on the island of Cypress, leap off into 150 feet of sheer excitement on the end of a big rubber band, accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds with optional water touch. The water touch appeals to me. Unlike most sports, bungee jumping allows zero margin for error and if my rubber band breaks, I’d rather hit water than be spread-eagle on the hard tarmac, photographed in that unseemly, unladylike position for the front page of the Cypress News. In color.

I want to ride a hot air balloon in Albuquerque, standing in the wicker basket, watching as the crew attaches the balloon to the basket, pulls it out of the bag and fills it with air. I want to see the burner lit to heat the inside of the balloon, bringing it gently to its feet. Then as we lift off to anywhere from 500 to 3,000 feet, I want to wave to my anxious husband, who knows I will either succumb to the fright of dizzying heights or from inhaling toxic fumes. Either way, I don’t stand a chance.

Before I depart this earth, I want to beat my sister in a game of scrabble. She is someone for whom every game is a mind-numbing duel to the death. This woman literally takes no prisoners. Most people refuse to play with her, their survival instincts forming a protective barrier around their need for sanity. She regularly scores about 400 points per game.

On one memorable play, she quickly and nonchalantly placed the word “quizzing” down in the lower left hand corner of the board which brought her 225 points. I, on the other hand, frowned, perspired, grimaced, studied and juggled my tiles for thirty minutes and finally come up with the word “life” which netted me six points. My sister and I obviously fished in two completely separate gene pools. I think my mother adopted her from a bandana-wrapped gypsy.

Before I die, I want to take violin lessons and perform The Kreutzer Sonata of Beethoven, 3rd Movement at Lincoln Center in New York. I want to wear a sleek black gown, and be a guest violinist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. I want to invite Itzhak Perlman to play Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins in D Minor with me, with all the social glitterati of New York gazing up at us in wonder and awe. But I wonder if I should first learn to read music, a simple concept which has always eluded me.

And finally, I want to learn to scuba dive. At one time, Jacques Cousteau trained to be a pilot but an accident damaged his arm, leaving him unable to fly, so he invented scuba. WOW. Lucky for me. And just in time, too. So, equipped with my Aeroskin dive suit (size 6 of course), my Zeagle’s analog diving instruments and my Fisher Metal Detector, I want to leap from a charter boat near the coast of Cozumel, that splendid tourist attraction in Mexico.

I’ll confidently descend into the deep, float through a myriad of tunnels of sunken shipwrecks, retrieving enough gold coins and artifacts to pay for my hospitalization after I am dragged babbling and incoherent to the surface, scared senseless by my sudden remembrance that I’m a raging claustrophobic and I never even learned how to swim.

Hmmmm. Is basket-weaving hard?

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TWIST AND SHOUT

When my young friend Karen told me she was “really into praise and worship” at her church in West Virginia, I smiled.

But one day, Karen apparently gave new definition to the term “twist and shout” and her church is still laughing about it.

Karen is a genuinely likable, pretty woman in her early forties whose warmth is only exceeded by the sun’s. Someone needs to clone her. She would rather be in church than any place on earth. And she’s there every single time the doors open and her fragile health permits.

Getting dressed one night for church, she was unsure whether her black silk skirt was suitable. Her friend, Joan, reassured her and off they went to the church service where twenty-six people were ready for baptism.

Karen and Joan chose seats in the second row from the front; they were that eager to be part of the service. The large sanctuary and balcony were both packed as usual in this large, active 2000 member church.

After some spirited congregational singing, the baptismal service began. Shouting and singing accompanied each person who was baptized, with the congregation on its feet praising the Lord.

Karen stood in her pew, clapping, singing, keeping time with the loud music with her feet like everyone else. By her own admission, she was “really into it.” Karen explained, “That night the whole church was having a time. This woman got baptized and her 87-year-old granddad and grandmom got up and started dancing, they were so happy. He was a minister and had been praying for this young woman all her life.”

Suddenly, someone behind Karen tapped her on the shoulder. Her first thought was, “EXCUSE ME, but I am praisin’ the Lord here!” But the lady behind her tapped Karen on the shoulder again.

Karen finally turned around to face the lady who said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but do you have a skirt on?”

Karen quickly looked down and all she saw was her green sweater and her panty hose. She let out a scream which was heard above the amplified music still going at full volume. Grabbing a coat belonging to a little boy sitting next to her, she threw it over her head and sat down.

Her friend Joan, convulsed with a mixture of laughter and horror, crawled under the pew to search for Karen’s black silk skirt. It was nowhere to be found. Karen progressed from panic to near heart failure. She knew everyone in the balcony had seen her and likely several hundred people sitting behind her.

All at once, Karen reached up to straighten her sweater and there in a roll around her waist was her black silk skirt.

There was a good ending to her story, though. The three young men sitting behind her made a hasty decision that this was the church of their dreams and they joined the next Sunday morning.

And a new, exciting chapter for the manual, “Innovative Ways To Increase Church Membership” was rushed into print.

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VIOLETS

Quietly, Mother picked up her purse and closed the front door behind her. Walking slowly down the street, she tried to pace herself for the long hike ahead. Our father was recovering from surgery in the local hospital and would be eagerly awaiting her visit.

With no car of her own and no public transportation, Mother walked this considerable distance every afternoon, forcing her own pain into the farthest recesses of her mind. Every step added new agony to her arthritic hips and shoulders, back and legs. Indeed, every part of her body screamed for relief but none was forthcoming.

Passing the halfway mark on her walk, she stopped briefly to admire a young girl playing alone on her lawn. They exchanged greetings and Mother continued toward the hospital.

Soon, pausing to chat with the child became a daily ritual that Mother began to anticipate. It was a treasured few moments in her otherwise long and painful errand every afternoon.

On the last day of Mother’s walk to the hospital, the blonde child was waiting. Her hands were behind her back, a bright smile highlighting her flawless face.

“I have a present for you,” she said shyly. “Take these to your daddy in the hospital.”

In her cupped hands were a freshly-picked bouquet of lavender and white violets, gathered from the wide expanse of her lawn.

Mother held the violets, bending her head while her tears fell in droplets on the delicate petals in her grasp.

Hugging the child, Mother whispered, “As long as I live, I will look on this as one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me.”

She continued her long walk, momentarily forgetting her pain and inhaling the sweet fragrance of spring in her hand. There was indeed a God and He had chosen a caring child to tenderly apply the balm of grace and healing to her tired, hurting heart.

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WAS NOAH’S ARK MADE OF FRUITCAKE?

Fruitcake is an anomaly. It’s neither fruit nor cake. It’s main ingredients are dark, rotted barn boards and tar. Science hasn’t yet identified those hard, little chunky things in a fruitcake; likely, they’re parts of a meteor that crashed and burned somewhere in an Idaho pasture in 8,000 B.C.

If you still have a gift fruitcake sitting on your breakfast bar, let me offer a suggestion. Don’t eat it and don’t toss it out with your other garbage. Treat it like what it is: hazardous waste material which needs to be disposed of with care so it doesn’t further pollute the environment.

Needless to say, I didn’t get a gift certificate this year from any major fruit cake companies. The only time I purchased one of their fruitcakes, I returned it for refund with this note attached: “If I promise to eat your fruitcake, will you promise to roto-root my tummy?” I didn’t receive either their written promise or a refund.

Fruitcake has been around since Roman times when the recipe included pomegranate seeds, pine nuts and raisins mixed into barley mash. Legend tells us Queen Victoria received a fruitcake for her birthday and vowed not to eat it for a year as a sign of restraint. I suspect she made that promise to the donor, but secretly had the cake pounded and packed into bullet casings to destroy Briton’s enemies. That’s how the Brits won the war. Don’t ask which war.

I was shocked when I read that Harry and David (my favorite fruit company) marketed a fruitcake confection this Christmas that got the top recommendation from Consumer Reports magazine resulting in sales of nearly 100,000 fruitcakes. But that hardly makes a dent in Claxton Fruitcakes which sells over 4 million pounds of fruitcake a year. I suspect they also hold the patent on Pepto-Bismol.

I guess I could look more favorably on fruitcake if it weren’t for the citron which comes from a thorny evergreen shrub in India, known for its large lemon- like fruits that have thick, warty rinds. Nobody on earth has a passion for thick, warty rinds which is why you find them in fruitcakes. Citron is used in fruitcakes to fill in the spaces between the small chunks of fossilized coal and sodden, decomposed grapes. In any other bakery product, those grapes would be called raisins, but they lose every recognizable property in fruitcakes.

I checked the web and was startled to see 9,580 sites about fruitcakes. Most were passionate pleas to give fruitcakes their just due. One web site was named “The Society for the Preservation and Promotion of Fruitcakes.” It was a desperation survival attempt by a group of bakers about to lose their collective shirts.

During Christmas, several million fruitcakes are unwrapped by groaning recipients who inwardly vow to get even with the donor. If you were one of the unlucky ones, here are some things you might do with your fruitcake: Use it for a door stop, a home plate, a hammer, a paper weight, for landfill, bricks for a bomb shelter, a foot rest, a manhole cover, an anvil, an anchor for your large Hatteras yacht, or liquefy it and power a Boeing 757 passenger plane.

About 7500 years ago, a massive flood occurred which was recorded in minute detail in Genesis 6. Noah and his family escaped the flood by building an ark and sequestering themselves in it for the duration. I know this isn’t exactly scriptural but I’ve wondered if that ark was made of fruitcake. I mean, the ark was thick, compressed, and durable (just like fruitcake). It was dark and moist (just like fruitcake). It was impenetrable and inedible (just like fruitcake). And here’s the kicker: The ark might still be around (just like thousand-year-old fruitcake).

On October 18, DigitalGlobe launched the world's highest-resolution commercial imaging satellite. This QuickBird satellite will take several shots of what many consider to be the remains of Noah's ark. This should finally resolve whether there’s anything man made on Mount Ararat.
Aha. Fruitcake, anyone?

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WHERE WERE MY FRIENDS?

I was in a hurry. A big hurry! My son had called from the mall where he was employed to request that I bring his lunch pronto. He only had a few minutes between customers to grab a sandwich and get back to work.

Dutiful mother that I was, I made his favorite pastrami on rye, pulled a navy sweater from the dryer to throw around my shoulders and drove hastily to the mall.

It was a lovely day. The kind that makes you sing whether you want to or not. After parking the car, I hurried into the mall which was busy with shoppers and office workers who were headed to their favorite restaurant for lunch.

Everyone was in a good mood. What a delightful crowd. Several men directly behind me were laughing uproariously, probably sharing some inside office joke. It was a great day to be alive. God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.

I hummed quietly to myself as I walked through the mall:

“Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day, I’ve got a wonderful feeling, everything’s going my way...”

After handing the bag lunch to my son, I headed back down the long mall corridors, stopping to look in the windows at shoes, at new spring outfits, and in the pet store window to wave to the puppies who scrambled over each other vying for my attention.

I still heard lots of laughter and wished someone were along to laugh with me. For some reason, people take a dim view of those who laugh aloud by themselves. My spirits were high as I finally headed back toward my car.
In the parking lot, an elderly lady approached me, took my arm and whispered, “My dear, I don’t want to embarrass you but did you know a pair of your white silk underwear is spread all across the back of your navy sweater?”

I died. Right there in the parking lot. My humiliation was so great that a giant hole appeared in the concrete and an unseen force pulled me through it, never to be heard from again. In my dreams!

This kind lady peeled my underwear from my sweater and handed them to me, whispering two words now forever carved into my memory with the excruciating pain of a rusty, jagged knife: “Static cling.”

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WHERE’S THE BIG YELLOW BOAT?

If there’s one thing Huggy Bear Thornton of Carolina Beach doesn’t have to worry about, it’s the Coast Guard asking him to enlist. They may even have his name on a Wanted Poster. Or wish they could.

Cap’n Huggy Bear has been in some tight spots with his fishing boat, fondly named “The Big Yellow Boat,” but he’s a good captain and his friends trust his knowledge of the sea. What his boat lacks in a creative name, it makes up for in dependability and a touch of notoriety.

Ask my husband John and his friend Harry G. They know all about Huggy Bear’s Big Yellow Boat. They were treated to a Perfect Storm experience about twenty miles out on the ocean last summer when twelve foot high waves, rain, thunder and lightning threatened to send Cap’n Huggy Bear and his companions to a very deep and very watery early grave.

Promising to offer his friends better protection or at least let their relatives know where to locate his boat should it ever sink, Huggy Bear purchased an EPIRB on Ebay. For the uninitiated (which is ninety-nine percent of the world), an EPIRB stands for Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. When this small device is activated, it emits an emergency signal which is picked up by satellites and transmitted via land-based receivers to the Coast Guard.

All EPIRBS are a last resort safety measure for Mayday use only by boat captains who fear they are going down and want the little woman back home to know where to toss flowers after the memorial service.

At 4:00 pm on a recent Wednesday afternoon, the Coast Guard received the emergency signal indicating that a boat was in distress and likely to go down. Its EPIRB registration had not yet been filed with the Coast Guard, giving the owner’s name and other vital information, though the boat’s owner was working on the registration.

Revving up their helicopters and boats, the Coast Guard raced toward Carolina Beach for an urgent search and rescue mission. Up and down the coast the helicopters flew. Back and forth from the beach to several miles out on the ocean the Coast Guard boats carefully searched. They found nothing. But the EPIRB kept beeping its steady, unrelenting signal and the Coast Guard was ordered to continue its search.

For eighteen long hours this went on with zip results, the pilots and boat captains working feverishly, searching with spotlights all through the night.

At Steve’s Bait and Tackle Shop the next morning at 11 a.m., owner Steve watched a man emerge from his car carrying a hand-held directional finder, a device resembling a divining rod. Ignoring Steve, the man followed the signal which slowly led him to the parking lot behind Steve’s store.

“I found it.” the man said tersely into a cell phone.

What he found was The Big Yellow Boat on its trailer parked in its usual place behind Steve’s where it had rested for several days.

On board was a malfunctioning EPIRB, beeping a steady distress signal to the Coast Guard receiver.

Steve immediately phoned Huggy Bear who had been unaware of the search and was as innocent as the proverbial lamb. The night before, he had had a quiet dinner with his wife, stretched out for an evening of television, then moseyed on to bed. He didn’t hear about the search until it was over the next morning.

Huggy Bear hasn’t asked the Coast Guard how many thousands of dollars were spent on this futile eighteen-hour search. As big-hearted as Huggy Bear is, he just plain doesn’t wanna know.

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YARD SAILING

If yard sales were held at docks up and down the inland waterway, these three amigos would set sail at 2:00 a.m. and put down anchor at every single one of them. For if there’s anything these guys like better than boats, it’s yard sales.

Around 6:00 every Saturday morning, Harry G., John and Huggy Bear meet at McDonald’s for their usual industrial strength coffee, chat and gossip with the rest of “the guys” and begin plotting their Saturday morning foray. With a newspaper spread over an already cluttered table, they underline, highlight and color code in a manner that would put the average housewife to shame.

Finally, they pile their husky frames into John’s Izusu and head out with their pockets full of loose change, and resolve in their scheming hearts.

Using their folded newspaper as a road map, they stop at a well-appointed house, park in front and head for the fold-up tables staggering under the load of assorted cast off household items and used clothing piled on them.

John sees it first, which puts Harry G immediately in a bad mood: a bright red jacket with an emblem stitched near the collar and a $1.00 sticker affixed to the front. John asks the bewildered lady how much she wants for this fifty cents item and if she’ll gift wrap it.

Harry G has never met a teddy bear he didn’t like. He buys every bear he sees, some with dried baby drool still on them. So far, he’s accumulated sixty. Although he hasn’t admitted it, Harry G’s dream is to discover among cluttered yard sale items an original 1950s $2300 Steiff teddy bear which he can purchase for about a dollar from an unsuspecting young mother who doesn’t know beans about Steiffs.

John finally picks up a winter jacket marked $1.50, inspects it and remarks, “This is a terrific buy. I don’t need it but if I don’t buy it , I’ll lose money.” He asks the lady to set up a time-payment plan. The guys fail to find the one item they’re still looking for: a 400 pound iron wrecking ball and hook to demolish cars and trucks.

Heading up the road, they spot a house, set far back from the street with a “Yard Sale” sign nailed to a fence post. With no place to park, John drives across the side lawn, only to hear Huggy Bear’s rebuke, “John, get off the lawn, for Pete’s sake.” John replies nonchalantly, “Don’t worry; I got four-wheel drive.”

They rummage through shirts, tools, assorted cans of paint, leaving the tables in more disarray than when they arrived. Giving each other the “This one is a waste of time” signal, they pile back into the Isuzu and drive down the block to the next advertised sale.

This time they hit pay dirt: Huggy Bear buys a pair of shoes he’ll never wear, Harry G. adds another teddy to his collection, and John pays fifty cents for a shirt that’s too small but will fit once he loses forty pounds.

Collectively they have purchased a weed-eater that doesn’t work, some jewelry they hope to pass off as antique and therefore precious, a half roll of sandpaper, two candle holders made from sea glass, a vinyl suitcase with a broken zipper, a bronzed baby shoe, a box of greeting cards with no envelopes, and a toilet plunger with wedding bells, ribbons and a card attached reading, “We’ve taken the plunge.”

Wow. All this and heaven, too.

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SATURDAY WITH MY DAD

Daddy placed his straw hat on his shiny bald head and picked up his dog-eared Bible. I groaned. He asked me to tag along while he visited the sick and afflicted at the local hospital. O