Husband

This is the sort of man I am married to: He hates to kill things. He is not a hunter, but it goes much further than just not owning guns and shooting deer or birds or lions or tigers or bears, oh my. He doesn’t like to kill anything and this can sometimes lead to problems in our marriage, because there are a few things I don’t mind seeing killed – like spiders and mice and (ugh!) cockroaches. He is the person who will take a spider outside to freedom rather than kill it. I am the person who will step on it faster than you can say, “Oh – my – God – is – that – a – spider – about – to – land – on – your – head.”

We recently moved to a new (old) house and I hired an exterminator ten seconds after I saw the first roach (albeit, dead) in the house. The cockroaches in my new town are apparently a different breed of roaches than I’m used to and I was not about to encounter one of the huge things alive. The nice man came out immediately and sprayed the house and voila – I haven’t seen a roach, dead or alive, since. (I’m sure I will develop some heinous carcinogen-related illness as a result of this someday, but at present I’ll take that over vermin in my home.)

I don’t think mice are susceptible to the bug man’s bag of tricks. I found a mouse in the sink drain of the guest apartment and pretty much went ballistic, so much so that my husband had to take the plumbing apart which led to a myriad of issues in our 75-year old house. But, alas, problem solved. Or was it? One can never be too sure when it comes to mice, so I did the unthinkable (in my husband’s book) – I bought glue traps and put them under cabinets and in closets. My husband hates glue traps, thinks they are cruel and inhumane. I couldn’t care less about the suffering of a rodent. I’m sure that makes me a horrible person and I will probably come back in my next life as a mouse and get stuck on a glue trap and die a horrible death, but for this life I’m killing the little bastards any way I can.

Yesterday, before we left on our vacation, I went to the guest apartment closet to get an ice chest and there on the aforementioned glue trap was a huge lizard, not a vile mouse, but a big brown and white lizard. Oh dear God, what have I done? I like lizards. I wouldn’t wish this kind of death on a lizard. The glue trap was specifically put there for a monstrous mouse, not a sweet lizard. Now I had to face the reckoning. I had to tell my husband that a.) I had put out glue traps and b.) I had imposed a horrific death upon an innocent lizard. I passed him in the hall, shuddered, and said, with tears in my voice, “Go look in the guest house closet.” I was ashamed of myself.

My husband was gone for a long time. What was he doing out there? Could he be holding a burial ceremony for the lizard? Could he be calling a divorce attorney? Could he be giving the lizard mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? When he finally came into the house I meekly asked and found out the lizard was still alive and my wonderful and caring husband had freed it from the glue trap. How in the hell can one free anything from a glue trap, I stepped on one once and almost had to throw away my shoe. But patient and diligent and not willing to let the lizard die, my husband worked gingerly until he freed the little guy.

Was my husband upset with me for setting out the glue traps? Nope, how can a guy who won’t kill a spider and spends hours setting free a lizard be mad at his wife? I sure married a great man, even if he won’t kill bugs for me.

The Estate Sale

Another chapter in my life has come to an end – the closing up of my dear grandmother’s house. This past weekend we held Big Red’s estate sale and it wasn’t at all what I expected. I was dreading having strangers in her home picking through her things, but amazingly it turned into a nice experience.

A funny thing happened. A lot of people came to the sale and just stayed – they stayed to hear about Big Red. Who was this woman who quilted and tatted and knitted and loved books and did calligraphy and had a green thumb and collected stamps and made porcelain dolls and painted ceramics and baked bread and taught school and raised ten children and lived to 104 years old and had 104 progeny and collected rocks and pottery shards and driftwood and loved cowboy lore and poetry and owned every Weight Watcher cookbook and had a great record collection and costumes and vintage hats and an aquarium for a boa constrictor? Who was this woman?

And, what a great house. Yes, I can see that it hasn’t been updated since 1953, but what a great vibe it has. Good bones. I’ve never seen a bathroom (kitchen, living room) this large. I love the original linoleum. She raised how many kids here?

As the day progressed the estate sale bargain hunters became our new friends. As we told the history of the antique trunks and the dining room table we found the people we wanted to be the new owners our grandmother’s things. The young couple who bought the claw-foot iron bathtub and so many books, the university graduate student and her husband who came back on the second day and were thrilled to take home the Robert Wood print for half price and the man who bought the antique sewing machine because his family had one just like it that had been lost in a fire.

While we told the story of our Big Red and sold the household goods already picked over by her family and friends we silently wished for the love, happiness and good karma certainly contained within her “stuff” to follow their new owners. I think Big Red would have been pleased.

Thinking Outside of the Bag

This week I read a story in the Parade Magazine insert in our Sunday newspaper about three generations of a family who wrote notes on napkins in their loved ones’ sack lunches. I used to do that for my daughters. I am inspired to start doing it for my husband now that he is brown-bagging it every day.

The article got me thinking about all of the sack lunches I’ve made in my lifetime. From the time I was old enough to reach the kitchen counter my mother passed on the job of making lunches to me. First it was just my father’s lunch and mine, then my brother’s, a year later my sister’s was added, and finally, four years later, baby brother began school and his lunch box was lined up with the rest of ours. I seem to recall his was a metal Dukes of Hazard lunch pail. By this time, I’m sure I was too old for my Barbie-themed lunch container, handing it down to my little sister and opting for a brown paper sack with my name written on it with a black or red Bic Flair pen to distinguish it from my father’s lunch.

Lunches in those days consisted of a sandwich; cold cuts and American cheese, mustard on the meat side, Miracle Whip with the cheese. This was a rule no one in my family considered breaking until I grew up and discovered that mayonnaise was much tastier than Miracle Whip, but I still put the mayo on the cheese side. The lunch meat of choice at our house for years was a thin-sliced, packaged ham; a pressed meat sliced so thin you could actually, as my father would say, “read the newspaper through it.” He got more than one slice of ham, but we kids got only the one. In hindsight, I’m sure my frugal parents saw this ham as a budget-minded school lunch for four children. Mother did, however, always splurge on the best cheese – real American cheese, Kraft, none of that imitation processed American cheese food for her family. What is cheese food anyway?

Along with the sandwich we had a baggie of chips, not the small individual serving bags, but sandwich bags filled with chips from a family-sized bag of Ruffles or Fritos or Cheetos. I do recall a period of time when we always had a five-gallon can of Charles’ Chips brand potato chips. I’m not sure where they came from, but I’m almost thinking it was a bonus product one could have delivered to the front door with our gallon jugs of milk by the milkman.

A sweet treat rounded out our lunchtime fare. Typically cookies in another baggie; Oreos or gingersnaps or Fig Newtons or vanilla wafers. We knew we’d hit the big time when we graduated to Ding Dongs and Twinkies and garishly pink coconut studded Snowballs. I always nibbled around the edges of these desserts saving the bite with the white cream filling for last.

Every evening Daddy’s pocket change went into a plastic cup in the shape of an orange with “Smirnoff” molded onto the side, a promotional item pushing the consumption of screwdrivers. Every morning Mother gave us coins from this cup admonishing, “Don’t lose your milk money.” I never bought milk; I opted instead for a cup of crushed ice and grape “juice” from the fountain machine. I can still smell the artificial grape aroma wafting off of this pale purple excuse for juice. I’m sure it was nothing more than corn syrup and water dyed to look like Concord grapes.

By high school I was too cool to take my lunch, so I bought spaghetti or hamburgers or burritos in the lunch line at the school cafeteria and sat with my friends and flirted with boys. Then came the “open campus lunch,” probably the worst idea to hit school districts since New Math, where we got in cars and exceeded the speed limit to arrive en masse at fast food establishments where we wolfed down quarter pound hamburgers and over-salted French fries and washed it all down with large Dr. Peppers before speeding back to school in time to hear the lunch tardy bell ring as we pulled into the parking lot thanking our guardian angels that we weren’t all killed when we ran the last three red lights.

I hope school lunches have changed since my days of eating too much processed food from sacks, cafeterias, and fast-food restaurants. I hope what my sister tells me about the lunches her students bring to school is true. She reports that the pre-school aged children of today’s modern parents bring organic fruit and goat cheese and mineral water from France. I’ll keep that in mind as I pack my husband’s lunch and I’ll be sure to tuck a little love note in the bag as well. I hope he gets as much pleasure out of a random “I love you” in the middle of the day as I once did from the real American cheese my mother insisted on buying.

Being Brave

The freshman album release of one of my favorite singer/songwriters, Amanda Shires (www.amandashires.net), is titled “Being Brave.” I love that title, I love that premise – Being Brave. I know Amanda from the days when she was just beginning to sing. She began as a fiddle player and it was fun to watch her “earn her chops” singing at small local venues and then move on to a full-time music career in Nashville. I’m sure it took Being Brave to pull off what she has accomplished. I’m very proud of the hometown girl.

Even though she has gone on to release several more albums with much better music I don’t think she will ever be able to top the title of that early work, Being Brave. I think about it all of the time. It was my theme when I first came out of the closet as a writer, it was my mantra when I was faced with seemingly insurmountable work goals and deadlines, it got me through my husband’s career crisis and subsequent move, and now, right this very minute, it is getting me through living in a new town and making a new start..

Being Brave. It is hard to do sometimes, but if Amanda can do it, then so can I. Thanks Miss Amanda Shires for being a good example and a damn good writer. Keep Being Brave and so will I.

Muscle Up

As I climbed the stairs to my home office this morning I was brutally reminded of my approaching 55th birthday. My legs screamed at me for abusing them. The muscles in my back, arms, shoulders, rear, thighs, calves and feet (There are 33 muscles in each foot!) objected in unison to any further attempt at running.

Whoa, just who do they think they are talking to? Am I not the boss of them? I’ll teach them to try to squelch my running goals.

I went to the River Walk with the intent of just walking the soreness out, but after a few minutes I took off at a slow trot (which is what I call running). Almost immediately I felt a pain in the center of my right kneecap. I have no idea what a meniscus is, but I imagined that was where the pain was coming from and I know enough to know I don’t want a torn one, so I stopped running and began a walking pace again (which is pretty much the same as my running pace, just not quite as spastic looking).

I quickly grew bored of walking and got up the nerve to test the knee again with another attempt at running and this time it didn’t hurt. I was able to run for a greater distance and with fewer walking bits. I am still not running on the inclines, or hills as I prefer to call them.

Coming from Lubbock, the flattest place on the planet, I’m finding San Angelo’s hills lovely, but it is daunting to think of running the up-sides. Locals will probably laugh at my interpretation of the hills, we are not, after all, officially in the Hill Country, but after 35 years on the Texas High Plains I feel like I’ve moved to the mountains!

My muscles can scream at me all they want – I’m just happy to know I’ve still got ‘em!

Run

As many times as I have started, stopped, and started my blog, quadruple that number and you get a rough estimation of how many times I have started, stopped, and started running. Not an athletic person by nature or nurture I succumbed to the Jane Fonda fad in the eighties, but mostly just to wear the tights, leotards, legwarmers, and headbands. After a long history of joining and quitting every gym in town I finally found a trainer who taught me how to run. I’m not one of those born-again runners touting the awesomeness of the runner’s high. I have never had the runner’s high. I have had the runner’s knee, the runner’s sore big toe, and the runner’s heat exhaustion, but never the runner’s high. It was because of the runner’s knee that I quit running, but I’m as bad at quitting things as I am at, well, at quitting things. That is to say, I quit quitting.

I ran today. I didn’t intend to, it just happened. I enjoy my morning walks in my new town. There is a fabulous trail around the Concho River that just begged me to run it. I tried to ignore it, but there is something about the rhythm of running that gets me every time. It is like typing or writing when you are really in the groove and it just flows, sort of a writer’s high of sorts.

Will I run tomorrow? I don’t know. I hope I will. I hope I can make a better showing than I did today. I must confess to only running on the downhill parts of the trail, but at least it was a start. Maybe I’ll keep it up until I experience the runner’s high I’ve heard so much about. Or, maybe I’ll just keep trying for the writer’s high – it is a lot easier on my knees.

Lost Opportunity

My grandmother told me there was a perfect age at which to memorize poetry. Unfortunately I cannot remember the exact age, but judging from her propensity for poetry recitation, I know she was right. She memorized many poems in her youth and remembered them for as long as she lived. She could recite long passages from Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” and just about anything Tennyson ever wrote. After she lost her sight I enjoyed reading aloud to her and wasn’t too surprised when she could recite most of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” with me as I read.

I must have been at that perfect age for memorizing poetry when I learned “Three Things Come Not Back” (author unknown) as I can still recall the poem today.

Remember three things come not back:
The arrow sent upon its track
It will not swerve, it will not stay
Its speed: it flies to wound or slay.

The spoken word, so soon forgot
By thee; but it has perished not;
In other hearts ‘tis living still
And doing work for good or ill.

And the lost opportunity
That cometh back no more to thee
In vain thou weep’st, in vain dost yearn
These three shall never more return.

Today it is the lost opportunity which haunts me. I missed so many opportunities when I stopped writing last December. My blog is allegedly about cleaning house and I missed the chance to write about actually doing it. In the months between March and July I completely purged and cleaned the home I’d lived in for almost thirty years (yes, even the garage) in order to put it on the real estate market. (Maybe not writing about it enabled me to get it done.)

The move would have been excellent blog fodder. Packing, deciding what to keep and what to let go, schlepping my “stuff” 170 miles downstate, dealing with moving day and movers in their semi-truck size van – all would have made great blog material.

But the event I’m saddest I didn’t write about was the death, at 104, of Big Red, my beloved grandmother. I didn’t document my thoughts and feelings. I didn’t put on paper that I really believed she would live forever, that we’d seen her decline and rally so many times in the past this time couldn’t be “it,” or that I was three hours away on the morning of her death and made it to her just before she passed.

Big Red is gone, but her spirit lives on. Her spirit will be in every poem I read and in the voice of every child reciting the verse which they memorized at just the right age.