Most people have an idyllic Dickensian mental picture of England at Christmastime. As a young American couple approaching our first Christmas in England’s Midlands area, Scott and I were enchanted by the thatched roofed cottages, the decorations at the local pub, and the brilliance of Harrods department store all decked out for the holiday. We soaked up the English traditions of Christmas pudding, Christmas crackers, and roast goose. For our first Christmas in Bedfordshire, we were looking forward to a real storybook Christmas.
Our American military base was a small “listening” base that had a big antenna, but did not have an airfield. We had a small base exchange and a small grocery store for essentials such as milk and toilet paper, but for any real shopping we had to travel to another American base about 45 minutes away or shop “on the economy” in the nearby village. Because the exchange rate was not friendly to the dollar, and we were young and poor, we avoided shopping off base as much as possible. However, we were determined to get a “real” English Christmas tree from a local garden center.
One cold Saturday in early December, we warmed up our old 1975, pea-green, BMW 535 (which we had bought third or fourth-hand), and headed out to the nearby village of Shefford to find a Christmas tree. Unlike in the US where every store on every corner sells Christmas trees in December, there was only one garden center that had trees for sale, and their merchandising method was a puzzle. Rather than having trees in stands and all fluffed out for inspection, all the trees were still in their net cocoons and leaning against the side of the building.
“How do you tell if it’s a good tree?” we asked the lot attendant. He eyed us as if we had taken leave of our senses, so we asked in a different way “How do you know if it doesn’t have a bare spot on one side?”
“If it does, you turn that side to the wall, you see” was the reply. He followed up with “How tall o’ tree do ya want?”
Evidently, English Christmas trees are not marketed by how pretty or uniform they are in shape, but rather simply by height. We slotted that little piece of cultural information away and stated “Seven feet will give us room for the stand and the angel at the top.”
“Bloody ‘ell! Are you sure? That’s a right big tree!” he said.
We were sure. The ceiling in our apartment was eight feet, so seven feet would give us enough to saw off a bit of the trunk at the bottom, too. Didn’t want it to dry out, you know. English houses tended to have lower ceilings than our American style base housing so we figured he didn’t get many requests for the taller trees.
He pointed to the end of the long line of trees and said, “Only ‘uns we have that are that tall are down there at t’ end.” We then noticed the trees were lined up from shortest to tallest, evidently to help make selection easier for customers and make the attendant’s job easier. “Are you really sure you want a seven-foot tree?” he asked again. We nodded and he led the way to the tallest trees, shaking his head and muttering something about “idiot Yanks” under his breath.
Seven-foot tree selected and strapped to the top of the Beemer like a trussed cow still in its netting, we headed home. We unloaded in the parking lot of the apartment and sawed the end off the trunk (so it wouldn’t dry out), then paused to consider our next move. It would be easier if we attached the tree stand to it while it was outside and still wrapped in the net binding. Then we could take it in without dribbling needles from the front door to the living room.
Anything that saved getting the vacuum out was a good idea because the vacuum caused a disturbance in the Force with our dogs, Clyde and Zoe. Clyde and Zoe were Chihuahuas and many things caused them to flip out – the vacuum, the doorbell, the mail coming through the mail slot, a fire truck going by. If we could avoid the vacuum, it would be a more peaceful evening. Attaching the stand outside seemed smart.
Our living room was small as was the rest of our two-story apartment. Downstairs was the kitchen and the living room/dining room area with a sliding glass door to the small fenced-in back yard. Upstairs had two bedrooms and a bathroom. Small, but still bigger than the semidetached house we had rented in the village off base, and much cheaper – as in free cheaper. It even had a washer and dryer, cable TV, and 110V electrical current!
We decided to put the tree in front of the sliding glass patio doors so all the neighbors could enjoy our Christmas spirit and admire our holiday creation. We took care to get it centered and make sure the trunk was straight in the stand. We decided if it had a bare spot, we could always rotate it to put that spot more out of sight.
Clyde and Zoe, after initially panicking at the sight of a large foreign object entering their domain, had cautiously emerged from behind the couch and were sniffing around the base. You could almost see their little brains thinking “Alright – an indoor bathroom!” Clyde was probably more excited than Zoe, because as the male member of the canine pair, it was his job to baptize anything vertical in the house at least once.
The four of us gathered around the tree and admired our selection. The height was perfect – as it stood in the stand, the top missed the ceiling by about 5 inches, just enough for the angel to sit comfortably on the summit. I had our box of Christmas decorations ready and the dogs had taken positions on the floor cushion to watch the goings on. It was time to cut the netting and decorate our real English Christmas tree.
We debated briefly over whether it would be better to cut the netting sleeve from the top down or from the bottom up before agreeing it probably did not matter. Scott slipped his pocketknife under the bottom edge of the netting tied tightly around the trunk and began to saw at the nylon cords. After a few parted, the rest started to part on their own. In fact, the netting seemed to unzip as it if had a quick release feature. In a split second, the entire cocoon split with a huge ripping sound and the bound branches sprung outward like a rapidly expanding shock wave.
Humans sprang backwards falling over coffee tables and love seats while dogs ran for their lives to hide behind the sofa. The words from Monty Python “Run away! Run away!” echoed in my head as my feet seemed stuck in quicksand. It was like a nightmare! You know you need to run, but you just can’t seem to move fast enough. I was about to be killed by a conifer!
As the netting parted, the tree just seemed to grow bigger and bigger! It was eating our living room! In what seemed like an eternity yet still a split second, the tree reached critical mass and the branches stopped expanding, just short of the center of the room.
“Holy smokes!” I uttered from behind the love seat.
We learned of another element of a British Christmas that afternoon. English Christmas trees are as wide as they are tall. No wonder the lot attendant thought we were nuts! This tree filled most of our living room!
We also learned something else – the inevitable bare spot was irrelevant because you could see directly through the tree. Unlike American Christmas trees that are pruned and bred to be the quintessential “Christmas tree” shape with lots of branch ends for ornaments, English Christmas trees were shaped like toilet bowl brushes. There is a ring of branches that are perfectly perpendicular to the trunk, then the trunk is bare for about 6 inches until another ring of branches grows. In between the branch rings, you can look directly through the tree to someone standing on the other side and have a face-to-face conversation.
Recovering from the shock and awe, we considered our options. We could ditch the tree and go with an artificial one bought from the base exchange, but that required the engineering of getting the tree back out of the house without the benefit of the netting. We were not even sure we could get it out the sliding patio door without some serious work with the handsaw. We were stuck with this tree at least until after the New Year, maybe longer.
That year we started a new Christmas tradition of opening a bottle of wine when we decorate the tree. If we had had whiskey on hand, Jack Daniel would have become a holiday visitor, but we only had chardonnay. The situation definitely called for some holiday cheer of some sort, and even today, we continue our wine-and-tree tradition.
Because of the tree’s size, we had to purchase more lights just to cover it. We cleaned out the stock of tree lights at the little Base Exchange. It took hours to string the lights on the tree because they could not be strung the traditional way (round and round), but rather had to follow the branches, going from the trunk to the tip and back. Every ornament we owned, including the ugly ones given to me by former middle school students, went on that tree.
It was a sight to behold when lit. I am sure our house became a ground navigational aid for air traffic to the nearby air base during heavy English fogs. I know we were the talk of the neighborhood. I was very thankful our electricity bill was included in our housing allowance because I am sure we were pulling the maximum amount of current for that thing.
It was a couple of days before the dogs would come out from behind the couch. Soon, they were stretching out in the light of the tree as if it was a band of sun shining in the window on a cold day. From their little short perspective, the tree must have looked like a Sequoyah. I just know that every year thereafter when the Christmas decorations box came out, the dogs went into hiding.
That English Christmas tree lives on our in family legends as one of those incidents in life that just makes you wonder how you survived it. The next year, we purchased an artificial tree that served us well for several years. We have ventured back to the real tree side now, but we still have a secret fear our selection will try to kill us when we are not looking.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Times Passed Away
As my teenage son grumbled about my directive to scrub out the toilet in his bathroom, the thought ran through my head “At least you have a toilet. Heck, you have your own bathroom!” My generation may have been the last one to touch the days of no indoor plumbing. I know people up North or in California think people in Tennessee still don’t have indoor plumbing, but reality is we do. In fact, even campgrounds here in Appalachia have bathhouses now – no more using the creek or the woods for such purposes (that would be polluting the environment, you know). It’s kind of sad really, and represents a loss of some kind of perspective. You really appreciate an indoor toilet (with a warm plastic seat) when you have to use an outdoor toilet with a porcelain seat in the middle of a winter night.
Through the romantic spectacles of time, I look back to my grandparents’ house in the country in Montgomery County, TN. The time period was the early 70’s and neither of my paternal grandparents had become symptomatic of the cancer that was lurking in both of them. Typical of memories of early childhood, my recall of those few years are burnished with love and excitement, unaffected by the world events that bordered on tearing our country apart in those turbulent years. Those were good days for a child, especially a child whose regular home environment was a typical post-war suburban tract house. Ma and Pa didn’t live in suburbia. Ma and Pa lived on a farm!
It is from this farm and these few formative years that I attained my self-identity as a “country girl”. When the pace of modern life starts building tension in me, I will return in my mind to those couple of years in rural Tennessee, a time that was slower and of a different era. Thoughts of walking through Ma’s garden on the lookout for snakes, trying to avoid the itchy scratch of okra plants and corn stalks, simply make the stresses of life in the twenty-first century melt away.
How can modern society appreciate conveniences such as garbage disposals if they’ve never scraped plates into a five-gallon bucket to slop the hogs? It still seems a waste to me to flush all those leftover tidbits down the drain. There are hungry pigs in China, right? And no one appreciates air conditioning. Ma and Pa did not have air conditioning. They had a porch. You sat on the porch at night until it was cool enough to go to bed. You got up in the morning before it was too hot to get outside. Mid-afternoon was a time to sit under the oak tree and shell peas, shuck corn or just shoot the breeze while drinking a cold Co-Cola. And it was tolerable! It was normal! AC was something they had in restaurants, not in houses!
Even more interesting, Ma and Pa had an outdoor toilet – an outhouse. It was down the hill in back of the house, next to the trash pile. It was a one-holer so if someone was in there, you had to squeeze your knees and hold it until the occupant was done. That is, if you were a girl like me. My brother, dad, uncle and grandpa could just whiz across the fence into the gully if they needed to. Somehow that never seemed fair. I must admit, however, it was pretty funny when my brother accidentally peed on the electric fence by mistake. That’s not an error a girl could make, at least not sober.
The outhouse was not a pleasant place at any time. First of all, it was dark. The only light available when the door was closed came through the cracks between the boards. Because of that, I tended to use the facility with the door open to the world. That could be why I’m not all that fixated on modesty. I’d rather show my wiley than risk sitting on a snake any day.
There was another hazard of the outhouse. It had been impressed on me that snakes, especially copperheads, liked outhouses. Being biblically afraid of snakes, I took that admonition to heart and always checked under the seat before plopping down. My legs were too short to hover. Another life-long habit was developed – ability to speed-pee. I’m still the fastest in and out of a bathroom stall regardless of venue. I also still check under the seat of all public toilets. Let’s just say I’m cautious rather than paranoid.
For middle-of-the-night calls of nature, my grandma had chamber pots in each of the two bedrooms of the house. As a child of five, it was easy to hit the round, porcelain target of a chamber pot, but to this day I wonder how my extra-large size grandma ever managed to use that thing. As I creep up in years and in waist size, I have real concerns that I could manage to hit a chamber pot these days. I think of that when I stumble into my modern, warm bathroom at night. Ma must have had great balance and extraordinary strength of knees.
As I mentioned before, the outhouse was next to the trash pile. They didn’t have trash pick-up in the country back then. Everyone had a trash barrel or a trash pile away from the house where you dumped what couldn’t be fed to the pigs. Pa would burn the trash pile once a week, creating a distinctive smelling smoke that I can still identify today when wafting on the wind. I guess Pa figured the smell of the burning trash would mask the smell of the outhouse, thus the positioning of the two in the same vicinity.
One day, I was sitting on a nearby stump waiting on the outhouse to free up, while Pa burned the trash pile. Mom was in the outhouse and was taking her own sweet time. She was never a speed-pee-er like me. Suddenly, an AquaNet can overheated in the fire and exploded, shooting like a missile across the yard and whamming into the door of the outhouse like a rocket-propelled grenade. The sound of the explosion and the hollow impact with the outhouse door were deafening. Both were followed immediately by a blood-curdling scream followed by my mother bursting out of the outhouse with her britches around her knees, running full-out for the house with her white fanny shining in the sun. Pa fell out laughing and the scene is etched on the cells of my brain in crystal clarity. Mom might not have been a speed-pee-er but she was definitely a contender for the hundred-yard dash. I thought of telling that story at her funeral a couple years ago but refrained out of fear of supernatural maternal wrath.
Actually, that was the first of two times I saw my Mom make a mad dash screaming from the outhouse. The second time, she had just settled onto the porcelain thrown when a lizard ran from under the seat and up her back under her shirt. I think she broke her own record for the hundred-yard dash. It certainly made an impression on me. I always checked under the seat and left the door open after that!
Ma and Pa’s farm had many things that are pretty much lost to time now. For instance, there was a rain barrel at the corner of the house that had the coolest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. There was a tin dipper that hung on a peg on the wall beside it. The inside of the barrel was covered in green moss which I think must have worked as some kind of filter because the water was always clean. Long before water fountains or bottled water, there were rain barrels. Thirsty? Pop the top off the rain barrel and dip the dipper in for the best drink of water you ever had. No plastic to fill up a landfill!
Ma and Pa also had feather beds. Real feather beds, not the kind you get at Penney’s that lie on top of the mattress. My cousins and I would stand on the foot board of Ma’s big feather bed and do rolling dives into the feather tick. That was much better than bouncing on a spring mattress. Feather ticks envelope you whereas with a regular spring mattress you bounce. There is no bounce in a feather tick. It’s like quicksand – it just sucks you right in and it is a fight to get out.
Whenever we would go visit Ma and Pa, my parents would take the front bedroom and we grand kids would bunk with Ma and Pa in the back bedroom. There were two feather beds in there. My brother and cousin Tony bunked with Pa in one bed and my two girl cousins and I bunked with Ma in the other. Ma was a large lady and she didn’t fluff her feather bed very often. As a result, it was pretty much U-shaped with the head and foot being higher than the middle. Tuck Ma in there with us three girls and you had quite a load. And it was definitely an unbalanced load. No matter where we kids were in the bed, we’d roll toward Ma. You didn’t want to be the one on the inside because you ended up getting squished between a cousin and Ma’s big hind-end. That could be a dangerous position in a feather bed. You could smother!
Bunking with Ma was still better than bunking with Pa. Pa was devious. He would lie in bed with my brother and cousin and read them the funny paper. Just at the good part, Pa would pause and say “Was that a spider I felt on my leg?” Of course, the boys would dive under the covers looking for the spider only to discover that Pa had farted big-time and was leading them into an ambush. With screams of “Woowee!” and “Oh gosh! That’s awful!” they would evacuate the bed and stand there shivering in their pj’s while we females in the other bed giggled. I never could figure out why they couldn’t see it coming because Pa never changed his tactics yet they fell for it every time. The prospect of smothering in the feather bed while squished against Ma was much better than the absolute certainty of getting gassed by Pa in his.
Not only did Ma and Pa’s house no have air conditioning, but the only heat it had was the coal fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room. Pa would stoke the coal high when we went to bed but by morning, it was cold as a well digger’s butt in those rooms. The linoleum floors were always chilly in the winter and the only truly warm room was always the kitchen. In fact, more living was done in Ma’s kitchen than in any other room of the house except maybe the front porch. The kitchen was the warm heart of that tiny four-room house.
Ma’s kitchen is where we would get our Saturday night baths in the winter. Pa would haul in the number three washtub from its peg on the back porch and Ma would fill it with water hauled from the well and heated up on the stove. We took baths in the order of age, oldest to youngest. Being the youngest, I always got the yucky water. It was also the coldest by the time I got to it. No playing with Barbie and her boat in Ma’s tub. You got in, washed, and got out!
Summer baths were better and in a different location – the back porch. Instead of heating water, summer baths were water hauled straight from the well. Because there was no heating involved, the tub could be emptied between bathers. When I watch HGTV now and someone has an outdoor shower constructed that cost them thousands, I always think a number three washtub on the back porch would have been a lot cheaper.
Ma and Pa’s farm was a sharecropper farm. They rented and worked it, but for a time before they got sick, they both also worked at a factory in the nearby town. On the farm, they raised tobacco and Ma had a vegetable garden where she grew all the normal stuff like corn, tomatoes, okra, etc. Pa raised some pigs and goats and kept bees. There was an orchard and grapevines behind the house. Ma always canned stuff and had a pantry stuffed with Ball jars. It was a veritable cornucopia of self-sufficiency.
I wish I had had more years there to learn gardening and canning and how to operate Ma’s treadle sewing machine. Ma and Pa both fell to cancer within just a few months of each other and the farm was left to my memories. Those few years of monthly weekend visits and summer vacations made a huge impression on me. They serve as a dividing line in my mind between “old times” and “modern years”.
Most people would probably have categorized Ma and Pa as poor country folk, but I think they were the richest people on earth. They certainly imparted a mindset to me that is still with me forty years later. Their farm was a virtual play land for a youngster, populated with cows, pigs, goats, beagles and chickens. Memories I treasure were forged there during those few years I remember. And I never take an indoor toilet for granted!
Through the romantic spectacles of time, I look back to my grandparents’ house in the country in Montgomery County, TN. The time period was the early 70’s and neither of my paternal grandparents had become symptomatic of the cancer that was lurking in both of them. Typical of memories of early childhood, my recall of those few years are burnished with love and excitement, unaffected by the world events that bordered on tearing our country apart in those turbulent years. Those were good days for a child, especially a child whose regular home environment was a typical post-war suburban tract house. Ma and Pa didn’t live in suburbia. Ma and Pa lived on a farm!
It is from this farm and these few formative years that I attained my self-identity as a “country girl”. When the pace of modern life starts building tension in me, I will return in my mind to those couple of years in rural Tennessee, a time that was slower and of a different era. Thoughts of walking through Ma’s garden on the lookout for snakes, trying to avoid the itchy scratch of okra plants and corn stalks, simply make the stresses of life in the twenty-first century melt away.
How can modern society appreciate conveniences such as garbage disposals if they’ve never scraped plates into a five-gallon bucket to slop the hogs? It still seems a waste to me to flush all those leftover tidbits down the drain. There are hungry pigs in China, right? And no one appreciates air conditioning. Ma and Pa did not have air conditioning. They had a porch. You sat on the porch at night until it was cool enough to go to bed. You got up in the morning before it was too hot to get outside. Mid-afternoon was a time to sit under the oak tree and shell peas, shuck corn or just shoot the breeze while drinking a cold Co-Cola. And it was tolerable! It was normal! AC was something they had in restaurants, not in houses!
Even more interesting, Ma and Pa had an outdoor toilet – an outhouse. It was down the hill in back of the house, next to the trash pile. It was a one-holer so if someone was in there, you had to squeeze your knees and hold it until the occupant was done. That is, if you were a girl like me. My brother, dad, uncle and grandpa could just whiz across the fence into the gully if they needed to. Somehow that never seemed fair. I must admit, however, it was pretty funny when my brother accidentally peed on the electric fence by mistake. That’s not an error a girl could make, at least not sober.
The outhouse was not a pleasant place at any time. First of all, it was dark. The only light available when the door was closed came through the cracks between the boards. Because of that, I tended to use the facility with the door open to the world. That could be why I’m not all that fixated on modesty. I’d rather show my wiley than risk sitting on a snake any day.
There was another hazard of the outhouse. It had been impressed on me that snakes, especially copperheads, liked outhouses. Being biblically afraid of snakes, I took that admonition to heart and always checked under the seat before plopping down. My legs were too short to hover. Another life-long habit was developed – ability to speed-pee. I’m still the fastest in and out of a bathroom stall regardless of venue. I also still check under the seat of all public toilets. Let’s just say I’m cautious rather than paranoid.
For middle-of-the-night calls of nature, my grandma had chamber pots in each of the two bedrooms of the house. As a child of five, it was easy to hit the round, porcelain target of a chamber pot, but to this day I wonder how my extra-large size grandma ever managed to use that thing. As I creep up in years and in waist size, I have real concerns that I could manage to hit a chamber pot these days. I think of that when I stumble into my modern, warm bathroom at night. Ma must have had great balance and extraordinary strength of knees.
As I mentioned before, the outhouse was next to the trash pile. They didn’t have trash pick-up in the country back then. Everyone had a trash barrel or a trash pile away from the house where you dumped what couldn’t be fed to the pigs. Pa would burn the trash pile once a week, creating a distinctive smelling smoke that I can still identify today when wafting on the wind. I guess Pa figured the smell of the burning trash would mask the smell of the outhouse, thus the positioning of the two in the same vicinity.
One day, I was sitting on a nearby stump waiting on the outhouse to free up, while Pa burned the trash pile. Mom was in the outhouse and was taking her own sweet time. She was never a speed-pee-er like me. Suddenly, an AquaNet can overheated in the fire and exploded, shooting like a missile across the yard and whamming into the door of the outhouse like a rocket-propelled grenade. The sound of the explosion and the hollow impact with the outhouse door were deafening. Both were followed immediately by a blood-curdling scream followed by my mother bursting out of the outhouse with her britches around her knees, running full-out for the house with her white fanny shining in the sun. Pa fell out laughing and the scene is etched on the cells of my brain in crystal clarity. Mom might not have been a speed-pee-er but she was definitely a contender for the hundred-yard dash. I thought of telling that story at her funeral a couple years ago but refrained out of fear of supernatural maternal wrath.
Actually, that was the first of two times I saw my Mom make a mad dash screaming from the outhouse. The second time, she had just settled onto the porcelain thrown when a lizard ran from under the seat and up her back under her shirt. I think she broke her own record for the hundred-yard dash. It certainly made an impression on me. I always checked under the seat and left the door open after that!
Ma and Pa’s farm had many things that are pretty much lost to time now. For instance, there was a rain barrel at the corner of the house that had the coolest, clearest water you’ve ever seen. There was a tin dipper that hung on a peg on the wall beside it. The inside of the barrel was covered in green moss which I think must have worked as some kind of filter because the water was always clean. Long before water fountains or bottled water, there were rain barrels. Thirsty? Pop the top off the rain barrel and dip the dipper in for the best drink of water you ever had. No plastic to fill up a landfill!
Ma and Pa also had feather beds. Real feather beds, not the kind you get at Penney’s that lie on top of the mattress. My cousins and I would stand on the foot board of Ma’s big feather bed and do rolling dives into the feather tick. That was much better than bouncing on a spring mattress. Feather ticks envelope you whereas with a regular spring mattress you bounce. There is no bounce in a feather tick. It’s like quicksand – it just sucks you right in and it is a fight to get out.
Whenever we would go visit Ma and Pa, my parents would take the front bedroom and we grand kids would bunk with Ma and Pa in the back bedroom. There were two feather beds in there. My brother and cousin Tony bunked with Pa in one bed and my two girl cousins and I bunked with Ma in the other. Ma was a large lady and she didn’t fluff her feather bed very often. As a result, it was pretty much U-shaped with the head and foot being higher than the middle. Tuck Ma in there with us three girls and you had quite a load. And it was definitely an unbalanced load. No matter where we kids were in the bed, we’d roll toward Ma. You didn’t want to be the one on the inside because you ended up getting squished between a cousin and Ma’s big hind-end. That could be a dangerous position in a feather bed. You could smother!
Bunking with Ma was still better than bunking with Pa. Pa was devious. He would lie in bed with my brother and cousin and read them the funny paper. Just at the good part, Pa would pause and say “Was that a spider I felt on my leg?” Of course, the boys would dive under the covers looking for the spider only to discover that Pa had farted big-time and was leading them into an ambush. With screams of “Woowee!” and “Oh gosh! That’s awful!” they would evacuate the bed and stand there shivering in their pj’s while we females in the other bed giggled. I never could figure out why they couldn’t see it coming because Pa never changed his tactics yet they fell for it every time. The prospect of smothering in the feather bed while squished against Ma was much better than the absolute certainty of getting gassed by Pa in his.
Not only did Ma and Pa’s house no have air conditioning, but the only heat it had was the coal fireplaces in the bedrooms and living room. Pa would stoke the coal high when we went to bed but by morning, it was cold as a well digger’s butt in those rooms. The linoleum floors were always chilly in the winter and the only truly warm room was always the kitchen. In fact, more living was done in Ma’s kitchen than in any other room of the house except maybe the front porch. The kitchen was the warm heart of that tiny four-room house.
Ma’s kitchen is where we would get our Saturday night baths in the winter. Pa would haul in the number three washtub from its peg on the back porch and Ma would fill it with water hauled from the well and heated up on the stove. We took baths in the order of age, oldest to youngest. Being the youngest, I always got the yucky water. It was also the coldest by the time I got to it. No playing with Barbie and her boat in Ma’s tub. You got in, washed, and got out!
Summer baths were better and in a different location – the back porch. Instead of heating water, summer baths were water hauled straight from the well. Because there was no heating involved, the tub could be emptied between bathers. When I watch HGTV now and someone has an outdoor shower constructed that cost them thousands, I always think a number three washtub on the back porch would have been a lot cheaper.
Ma and Pa’s farm was a sharecropper farm. They rented and worked it, but for a time before they got sick, they both also worked at a factory in the nearby town. On the farm, they raised tobacco and Ma had a vegetable garden where she grew all the normal stuff like corn, tomatoes, okra, etc. Pa raised some pigs and goats and kept bees. There was an orchard and grapevines behind the house. Ma always canned stuff and had a pantry stuffed with Ball jars. It was a veritable cornucopia of self-sufficiency.
I wish I had had more years there to learn gardening and canning and how to operate Ma’s treadle sewing machine. Ma and Pa both fell to cancer within just a few months of each other and the farm was left to my memories. Those few years of monthly weekend visits and summer vacations made a huge impression on me. They serve as a dividing line in my mind between “old times” and “modern years”.
Most people would probably have categorized Ma and Pa as poor country folk, but I think they were the richest people on earth. They certainly imparted a mindset to me that is still with me forty years later. Their farm was a virtual play land for a youngster, populated with cows, pigs, goats, beagles and chickens. Memories I treasure were forged there during those few years I remember. And I never take an indoor toilet for granted!
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Is There Really Anything New Under the Sun?
I see in the news today that North Korea is threatening “all-out war” after sinking a South Korean submarine last week. Somalia is still messed up and the Middle East continues its centuries-old slow boil. The US economy is on life-support and shows few solid signs of being able to take the IV of foreign loans out of the vein. Is any of this really new? I don’t think so.
Evil is consistent and always has the same game plan. Yes, I said the e-word because that’s what drives chaos. I believe evil is real just like love is real. Notice I didn’t say “good” as the flip side of evil. Good is a relative term and means different things to different people. For instance, many people thought Hitler’s reign of terror was a “good thing” to “cleanse Europe of the Semitic plague”. What’s good to you may not be good to me. However, love is an absolute and is the opposite of evil. The two forces are very real and they polarized. One is the absence of the other.
Evil has a set play book it uses. Examine great feats of evil over the centuries and you will find similarities. The killing fields of Cambodia/Laos are much like the concentration camps of Poland or the refugee exterminations in Angola. Mass killings like the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of 9/11 look a lot alike. Narrow that down to Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood and you still get the same playbook. The same X’s and O’s are on the whiteboard with the same score and the same defensive responses.
Why do we keep countering evil with the same old responses? Hindsight is 20/20 and you would think in the centuries of mankind, we would be able to recognize the warning signs and shut the door before the boogeyman was able to gain entrance. Part of our problem is we misidentify evil. We attribute evil’s characteristics to neutral things. I think we just don’t pay attention. We choose not to see things. We justify things under the guise of “tolerance” or “equality”.
Both my grandfather and my father were Korean veterans, yet here we are again fifty years later facing the same crap. Why? Because the evil people didn’t change. They were just contained and subdued for awhile. Why do people scream about Darfur when millions of babies are killed in this country every year? Because it’s trendy to scream about Darfur. Somehow, it’s not trendy to scream about China and the infanticide that occurs there. Nothing has changed - we just choose not to see it. It keeps us comfortable here in the richest country in the world. If I don't look at it, it's not real.
Why am I writing this? I guess I’m just sick of the whole thing. My generation has trucked along thinking common sense would eventually right the weird tilt the world has taken over the past thirty years before we all slid off the edge. Surely everyone else can see what we see, right? I’m starting to wonder.
Where is common sense? Who is going to stand up and call evil out for what it is – call a spade a spade? I think it’s up to those of us left who have not been deceived into not recognizing evil anymore. So much evil is lumped under “tolerance” or “open mindedness” or “humanism” when it should really be identified for what it is – evil.
Evil is consistent and always has the same game plan. Yes, I said the e-word because that’s what drives chaos. I believe evil is real just like love is real. Notice I didn’t say “good” as the flip side of evil. Good is a relative term and means different things to different people. For instance, many people thought Hitler’s reign of terror was a “good thing” to “cleanse Europe of the Semitic plague”. What’s good to you may not be good to me. However, love is an absolute and is the opposite of evil. The two forces are very real and they polarized. One is the absence of the other.
Evil has a set play book it uses. Examine great feats of evil over the centuries and you will find similarities. The killing fields of Cambodia/Laos are much like the concentration camps of Poland or the refugee exterminations in Angola. Mass killings like the Oklahoma City bombing and the events of 9/11 look a lot alike. Narrow that down to Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Ft. Hood and you still get the same playbook. The same X’s and O’s are on the whiteboard with the same score and the same defensive responses.
Why do we keep countering evil with the same old responses? Hindsight is 20/20 and you would think in the centuries of mankind, we would be able to recognize the warning signs and shut the door before the boogeyman was able to gain entrance. Part of our problem is we misidentify evil. We attribute evil’s characteristics to neutral things. I think we just don’t pay attention. We choose not to see things. We justify things under the guise of “tolerance” or “equality”.
Both my grandfather and my father were Korean veterans, yet here we are again fifty years later facing the same crap. Why? Because the evil people didn’t change. They were just contained and subdued for awhile. Why do people scream about Darfur when millions of babies are killed in this country every year? Because it’s trendy to scream about Darfur. Somehow, it’s not trendy to scream about China and the infanticide that occurs there. Nothing has changed - we just choose not to see it. It keeps us comfortable here in the richest country in the world. If I don't look at it, it's not real.
Why am I writing this? I guess I’m just sick of the whole thing. My generation has trucked along thinking common sense would eventually right the weird tilt the world has taken over the past thirty years before we all slid off the edge. Surely everyone else can see what we see, right? I’m starting to wonder.
Where is common sense? Who is going to stand up and call evil out for what it is – call a spade a spade? I think it’s up to those of us left who have not been deceived into not recognizing evil anymore. So much evil is lumped under “tolerance” or “open mindedness” or “humanism” when it should really be identified for what it is – evil.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Hoo Doo Herald - Happenings in Our Town
By Maye Belle Mitchell
This week was Thanksgiving! I hope you all enjoyed your special holiday meals with kith and kin. I am so thrilled to be writing this new column for our weekly newspaper, The Hoo Doo Herald! It was one of the many things I enumerated during the blessing over our turducken and turnips this year. Praise be to the Lord! The opportunity to put pen to paper and report on the fascinating lives of members of our community is just thrilling and I hope to be a true blessing to our wonderful town!
Speaking of Thanksgiving, did you know a turkey can run 20 miles an hour when spooked? That’s a fast bird! Unfortunately for him, a bullet flies a bit faster and a four-wheeler can do at least twice that. No hope for the turkey when faced with one of our hunters here in Rawlins County, is there! Carter Baker was quoted as saying “Ain’t no bird goin’ to out run my Remington 20 gauge” and he is so right. We have some of the finest hunters in the world here!
The Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette would like to welcome Miss Eugenia Kay Arthur and Miss Bobbi Lee Haskell to our Thursday afternoon class. These two young ladies join the rest of the class of eight students who are learning the fine art of being a Southern Lady. I want to remind everyone of the High Tea on Sunday afternoon sponsored by the Ladies Guild of the First Baptist Church of Hoo Doo. If any ladies out there can contribute sweet meats, tea cakes, or other fine finger food, please bring those dishes to the Fellowship Hall of the church on Saturday afternoon.
Congratulations to the proud new parents Albert and Terri Lynne Rouchet on the early arrival of their bouncing baby girl Antoinette Lucille Rouchet. Little Antoinette, a honeymoon baby, arrived a month early and weighed in at a healthy nine pounds, three ounces. Proud grandparents are Charles and Annette Marie Rouchet and Tom and Shirley Sue Bobo. Shirley Sue Bobo is quoted as saying “I’m not surprised little Antoinette Lucille came eight months after the honeymoon – she was such a big baby she just had to gain some elbow room. All us Bobo’s have big, early babies, you know.”
The insanity of the holidays is upon us and I want to encourage all of you to remember the true reason for the season – the birth of our Lord and Savior. Jesus had a lot in common with little Antoinette Lucille – he was a surprise and his earthly daddy was a little concerned at the beginning. Everything worked out in the end, though! We don’t know how big the baby Jesus was but Mary couldn’t have had a better midwife than the angels of heaven and the Holy Spirit praise God! I do think the Father might have arranged a bit of a better room for them. After all, Mary was a lady and giving birth around those stinky cows and sheep must not have been pleasant. But that was not for me to decide, now, was it!
A community Thanksgiving Service was held at the Hoo Doo Church of Christ last Sunday at 6:00 pm. It was a great time for the community members to get together and fellowship in the name of the Lord. I attended as a member of the press and was pleased at the wonderful array of delicious homemade dishes that were brought by the ladies of the church. Terry Gayle Hampton – I simply MUST get that deviled eggs recipe from you! It was to die for! The punch Bucky Bumpus made up was also exquisite! I could recognize the taste of lemons, Sundrop soda and pineapple juice but there was something else there in the recipe I just couldn’t put my finger on. It was the crowning touch whatever it was!
On Sunday afternoon, after a simply inspiring sermon by Reverend Hezekiah Smoot at the First Baptist Church, my dear husband Porter took me to dinner at the End of the Road restaurant across the river in Caneyville. The food was fabulous and the Christmas décor was simply divine. Porter and I so enjoyed our luncheon. If you haven’t patronized this lovely new, locally-owned eating establishment, I want to truly encourage you. The Divines who run the restaurant are good Christian people of the Lutheran persuasion and have provided a nice eatery for our community. I partook of the lunch special – beans and hamhocks accompanied by turnip greens, fried okra, and Cynthia Divine’s wonderful cornbread muffins.
Speaking of Porter, I want to publicly declare my undying love and devotion to my handsome and virile husband and wish him a fabulous 49th birthday! Happy Birthday Sweetie Pie! One more year before you hit the big 5-0! While I have not quite hit the 4-0 mark myself, I can see it looming on the horizon. I hope you have a supremely happy year and I love you so much Muggle Wumps!
We have our own little actress among us – Miss Carrie Jo Footstone made her acting debut this week at the Dixie Dance Hall and Theater in Viola. She played the role of the light pole in the musical “Singing in the Rain”. She has been taking acting classes for several months at Ted Flower’s Acting School in downtown Hoo Doo. This was her first performance and she did a superb job! She held a straight face the entire performance – something I sure couldn’t do!
The Overcoming Adversity group of Black Creek met last Tuesday for their Thanksgiving meal. Before the meal, the invocation was given by Johnny Mize and then the eating took place. In his prayer, Johnny encouraged us all to be thankful for our blessings. Boner MacIntyre read the minutes of the previous meeting. Door prizes of a gift certificate for a car wash and a cheese board were awarded to ecstatic winners Kathy Jo Martin and Harold Lakey. The next meeting will be in January.
Joe Bob and Jerri Ann Cravens were in town from their home in distant Nashville to visit. They ate at the Hoo Doo Family Restaurant where they dined on fried catfish and chitlins. After their lovely dinner, they attended a movie at the Palace Theater where they enjoyed popcorn, Diet Cokes, Raisinets, and Whoppers as an after-luncheon treat.
I have never seen so many people in our community gathered to see a movie as I saw Wednesday night for the premier of Full Moon. The movie is supposedly a dark flick that revolves around a teenage romance between humans and vampires. As a good Christian, I was horrified to see so many young, impressionable young ladies standing in line to buy tickets. It’s hard to believe parents would allow them to see a movie that promotes demons and evil beings as romantic characters. I am proud to say none of the students of the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette were in attendance!
The funeral for Glennis Ruth-Ann Webb was held on Friday. The Hoo Doo Funeral Home reported a strong turnout for the service despite the holiday and Mrs. Webb’s history of being a liberal all her life. We extend Christian sympathy to the family.
If you have news you would like to be printed, simply email me or drop by the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette on Tuesdays or Thursdays! I would dearly love to hear from you! God bless and allow me to leave you with this thought to guard your heart this week “They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world” I John 4:5. Tootle-loo sweet readers!
This week was Thanksgiving! I hope you all enjoyed your special holiday meals with kith and kin. I am so thrilled to be writing this new column for our weekly newspaper, The Hoo Doo Herald! It was one of the many things I enumerated during the blessing over our turducken and turnips this year. Praise be to the Lord! The opportunity to put pen to paper and report on the fascinating lives of members of our community is just thrilling and I hope to be a true blessing to our wonderful town!
Speaking of Thanksgiving, did you know a turkey can run 20 miles an hour when spooked? That’s a fast bird! Unfortunately for him, a bullet flies a bit faster and a four-wheeler can do at least twice that. No hope for the turkey when faced with one of our hunters here in Rawlins County, is there! Carter Baker was quoted as saying “Ain’t no bird goin’ to out run my Remington 20 gauge” and he is so right. We have some of the finest hunters in the world here!
The Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette would like to welcome Miss Eugenia Kay Arthur and Miss Bobbi Lee Haskell to our Thursday afternoon class. These two young ladies join the rest of the class of eight students who are learning the fine art of being a Southern Lady. I want to remind everyone of the High Tea on Sunday afternoon sponsored by the Ladies Guild of the First Baptist Church of Hoo Doo. If any ladies out there can contribute sweet meats, tea cakes, or other fine finger food, please bring those dishes to the Fellowship Hall of the church on Saturday afternoon.
Congratulations to the proud new parents Albert and Terri Lynne Rouchet on the early arrival of their bouncing baby girl Antoinette Lucille Rouchet. Little Antoinette, a honeymoon baby, arrived a month early and weighed in at a healthy nine pounds, three ounces. Proud grandparents are Charles and Annette Marie Rouchet and Tom and Shirley Sue Bobo. Shirley Sue Bobo is quoted as saying “I’m not surprised little Antoinette Lucille came eight months after the honeymoon – she was such a big baby she just had to gain some elbow room. All us Bobo’s have big, early babies, you know.”
The insanity of the holidays is upon us and I want to encourage all of you to remember the true reason for the season – the birth of our Lord and Savior. Jesus had a lot in common with little Antoinette Lucille – he was a surprise and his earthly daddy was a little concerned at the beginning. Everything worked out in the end, though! We don’t know how big the baby Jesus was but Mary couldn’t have had a better midwife than the angels of heaven and the Holy Spirit praise God! I do think the Father might have arranged a bit of a better room for them. After all, Mary was a lady and giving birth around those stinky cows and sheep must not have been pleasant. But that was not for me to decide, now, was it!
A community Thanksgiving Service was held at the Hoo Doo Church of Christ last Sunday at 6:00 pm. It was a great time for the community members to get together and fellowship in the name of the Lord. I attended as a member of the press and was pleased at the wonderful array of delicious homemade dishes that were brought by the ladies of the church. Terry Gayle Hampton – I simply MUST get that deviled eggs recipe from you! It was to die for! The punch Bucky Bumpus made up was also exquisite! I could recognize the taste of lemons, Sundrop soda and pineapple juice but there was something else there in the recipe I just couldn’t put my finger on. It was the crowning touch whatever it was!
On Sunday afternoon, after a simply inspiring sermon by Reverend Hezekiah Smoot at the First Baptist Church, my dear husband Porter took me to dinner at the End of the Road restaurant across the river in Caneyville. The food was fabulous and the Christmas décor was simply divine. Porter and I so enjoyed our luncheon. If you haven’t patronized this lovely new, locally-owned eating establishment, I want to truly encourage you. The Divines who run the restaurant are good Christian people of the Lutheran persuasion and have provided a nice eatery for our community. I partook of the lunch special – beans and hamhocks accompanied by turnip greens, fried okra, and Cynthia Divine’s wonderful cornbread muffins.
Speaking of Porter, I want to publicly declare my undying love and devotion to my handsome and virile husband and wish him a fabulous 49th birthday! Happy Birthday Sweetie Pie! One more year before you hit the big 5-0! While I have not quite hit the 4-0 mark myself, I can see it looming on the horizon. I hope you have a supremely happy year and I love you so much Muggle Wumps!
We have our own little actress among us – Miss Carrie Jo Footstone made her acting debut this week at the Dixie Dance Hall and Theater in Viola. She played the role of the light pole in the musical “Singing in the Rain”. She has been taking acting classes for several months at Ted Flower’s Acting School in downtown Hoo Doo. This was her first performance and she did a superb job! She held a straight face the entire performance – something I sure couldn’t do!
The Overcoming Adversity group of Black Creek met last Tuesday for their Thanksgiving meal. Before the meal, the invocation was given by Johnny Mize and then the eating took place. In his prayer, Johnny encouraged us all to be thankful for our blessings. Boner MacIntyre read the minutes of the previous meeting. Door prizes of a gift certificate for a car wash and a cheese board were awarded to ecstatic winners Kathy Jo Martin and Harold Lakey. The next meeting will be in January.
Joe Bob and Jerri Ann Cravens were in town from their home in distant Nashville to visit. They ate at the Hoo Doo Family Restaurant where they dined on fried catfish and chitlins. After their lovely dinner, they attended a movie at the Palace Theater where they enjoyed popcorn, Diet Cokes, Raisinets, and Whoppers as an after-luncheon treat.
I have never seen so many people in our community gathered to see a movie as I saw Wednesday night for the premier of Full Moon. The movie is supposedly a dark flick that revolves around a teenage romance between humans and vampires. As a good Christian, I was horrified to see so many young, impressionable young ladies standing in line to buy tickets. It’s hard to believe parents would allow them to see a movie that promotes demons and evil beings as romantic characters. I am proud to say none of the students of the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette were in attendance!
The funeral for Glennis Ruth-Ann Webb was held on Friday. The Hoo Doo Funeral Home reported a strong turnout for the service despite the holiday and Mrs. Webb’s history of being a liberal all her life. We extend Christian sympathy to the family.
If you have news you would like to be printed, simply email me or drop by the Maye Belle Mitchell School of Etiquette on Tuesdays or Thursdays! I would dearly love to hear from you! God bless and allow me to leave you with this thought to guard your heart this week “They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world” I John 4:5. Tootle-loo sweet readers!
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Insomnia
It is half past midnight and I cannot sleep. Insomnia is starting to be a more common occurrence for me. I don’t know if it is early menopause rearing its head or simply the fact that life is going along fairly smoothly at the moment. I’ve gotten so accustomed to life being one huge anxiety attack punctuated by different crises that the relative quiet of normalcy is disturbing. I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Of course, the wakefulness of tonight might also be attributable to Hubby’s being away on a trip. I don’t sleep well when he is not providing that metronomic beat of snores from the other side of the bed. Yes, I snore, too, but I claim it is in self-defense. A join-‘em if you can’t beat ‘em philosophy, if you will.
Whatever the cause, I found myself “writing” in my head while staring at the bedside clock so I knew it was useless to try to chase down the Sandman; I find myself here in front of my dual-screened Dell, pecking away to get these thoughts out of my head. ‘Tis the writer’s curse, this compulsion to “get it out, get it down”. I don’t imagine engineers often find themselves awake at odd hours designing motors, or bridges, or waste water plants.
I’ve spent the last week feeling my way around Facebook at the insistence of my friend Haley. I consider myself fairly technically astute. After all, I make my living on a computer and my audience is mostly web-based for the work I do. Still, I had resisted the whole social networking trend with the logic that I spend all my working day in front of a computer so I don’t want to spend my leisure time there. It seemed more the realm of my son’s world than mine. After a week of surfing, I’m not so sure.
I’ve discovered something disturbing this week. The old friends with whom I went to high school have all gotten old. I am not one to deny my age. In fact, I am proud of every hard-earned gray hair I have. I’m 43 and feel 63 on some days. Unlike a 63-year-old, however, I am blessed/cursed with a memory that is exceptional in terms of trivia recall. I have all sorts of useless crap stored in my head about my childhood and teenage years before Life with a capital L hit. For example, I remember that my good friend Monica’s favorite stuffed animal was named Boo Boo Kitty. I remember that Lisa L., our class valedictorian, took the ACT test three times to score one point higher (a 30) so she would get a scholarship to the college of her choice. I remember that Celina Harris’s mother was French and Celina moved away from our hometown in fourth grade. Why do I have all this junk crammed into my head?
After surfing around Facebook for a week, I’ve found some of the old classmates with whom I went to school but they don’t look like my crystal clear memories anymore. I’m not sure I like that. I think I preferred that we were all still 18 somewhere in my mind and none of us had grown fat, lost our hair, lost a limb, or even lost our lives. I believe I’ve come face-to-face with my own mortality.
I find that odd, because so much of the recent years of my life have been dominated by the death of loved ones or death on the horizon. My parents are dead as are all my grandparents. If you have lost your parents, you know the strange feeling you get when you realize you are now the grown up in the scenario. I have a brother who is quite ill with a genetic disease that I may or may not have. It’s been hard to ignore Life lately. Yet, somehow, I managed to keep those years from 1966 to 1984 encapsulated in a memory bubble and convinced myself that the occupants of that bubble were as frozen in time as the figures inside a snow globe.
I look at my son now and think about how he will look back upon these teenage years of his when he is in his 40’s. I wonder what will stand out to him. By what events will he mark Before and After? What will he say when he says “I can remember when we didn’t have ____”?
My generation was fortunate to grow up during years of great change. I think of my parents’ generation (born in the early 30’s) and they didn’t see a lot of technological change in their youth. They went through the Depression and World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War but those were events, not changes to things that impacted daily lives. Sure, they saw the advent of TV and the Bomb but they were grown and having us by the time the Space Race revved up and the Soviet Union was a menace on our back doorstep. Isn’t it ironic that we now think of those as the “good old days” of knowing your enemy?
One of my earliest memories is of the Lunar Landing in 1969. My father – heck, my entire town – was integrally involved in the space program and I am sure I am not the only toddler who was forced to sit in front of the TV in July of 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong make history. I think that falls into the Event category, though, much like the Cuban Missile Crisis. My thought process is leading to things that are different, things I can say “I remember the first time”.
Here’s a list. Maybe if I get these out, I can find sleep tonight.
I can remember the first:
Time I saw a calculator. It was about the size of a box of checks and did the basic functions (no square roots or exponents).
Time I saw a microwave. It was huge and we were all a bit afraid to stand too close to it. All the convenience stores had big warning signs on the doors that a microwave was in use on the premises.
Time I saw a computer. It was a big mainframe with huge tape drives and lots of toggle switches and lights. I saw one similar in the Smithsonian last year.
Data sheets I ever saw. That same computer spit out reams and reams (and I mean huge feet-stacks) of green and white lined paper. My dad brought it home for me to use to color pictures on the back side.
Car we ever had that had air conditioning. My mom still refused to use it, though, because it made the car overheat.
IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. It was a huge improvement over the IBM Selectric I had learned to type on because it had an auto-correct function, much like the backspace on today’s PCs. Oh the joy of not having to use a typewriter eraser!
Walkman. I saved up and bought one for about $100. It was an AM/FM/Cassette and it was a big advancement over the 8-track tape deck.
Pair of Nike tennis shoes that hit the market. I again saved up my allowance and bought a pair.
Personal computer. My high school had one and it was on a cart that they wheeled around. I never was able to actually touch it, though, because all the math whizzes used it. I think I was a bit afraid of it anyway. At that time, War Games was a hit movie and we had all sorts of illusions about computers.
Time the Space Shuttle flew. Now, over twenty five years later, I am (hopefully) going to get to see my first in-person launch next month.
Camaro with T-tops. Now that was a hot car!
Time the interstate opened. It spelled the death of Hwy. 41 through our town and all the motels and restaurants that were supported by the traffic.
Video on MTV. That was when MTV still showed videos.
Sesame Street Show.
Mobile phone. It was not a cellphone but a CAR phone!
Video game – yes, it was Pong.
There are a lot of things which I saw die, too. Things that my son will never see or experience. Here is a list:
Outhouses and chamber pots. My grandparents lived in a house without plumbing and I experienced peeing in a pot and in a cold shack in the middle of winter
Cold water drunk from a shaded rain barrel at the corner of the house
TV dinners cooked in the oven, not the microwave; ditto for baked potatoes, hot dogs, popcorn…
Water glasses brought to the table by the waitress on her first trip after you sit down
One-screened movie theaters
Sitting on the porch at night because it’s too hot inside to sleep
Volkswagen bugs (the old kind)
TV with only 5 channels – Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel 17
TV from rabbit ears and in black and white
NASCAR sponsored by Winston or Budweiser or other politically incorrect companies.
Old Timers Day
Home-made Halloween costumes
Everything closed on Sunday
Colored toilet paper
Smallpox vaccine scars
Houses heated by coal
Going to school with the same kids from kindergarten all the way through high school
Filmstrips and 16mm films
Cards in the backs of library books
Chalkdust
Polio victims
Riding in the car with no seat belts
What are the next twenty years going to bring? Looking backward at the last two decades and extrapolating forward, it is unfathomable. Just when we feel like we can say “There is nothing new to be invented”, we prove ourselves wrong. What will our children remember fondly when we are gone and they are looking backward? Gosh, I hope it is something good – like flying cars. They have been promising us flying cars forever!
Of course, the wakefulness of tonight might also be attributable to Hubby’s being away on a trip. I don’t sleep well when he is not providing that metronomic beat of snores from the other side of the bed. Yes, I snore, too, but I claim it is in self-defense. A join-‘em if you can’t beat ‘em philosophy, if you will.
Whatever the cause, I found myself “writing” in my head while staring at the bedside clock so I knew it was useless to try to chase down the Sandman; I find myself here in front of my dual-screened Dell, pecking away to get these thoughts out of my head. ‘Tis the writer’s curse, this compulsion to “get it out, get it down”. I don’t imagine engineers often find themselves awake at odd hours designing motors, or bridges, or waste water plants.
I’ve spent the last week feeling my way around Facebook at the insistence of my friend Haley. I consider myself fairly technically astute. After all, I make my living on a computer and my audience is mostly web-based for the work I do. Still, I had resisted the whole social networking trend with the logic that I spend all my working day in front of a computer so I don’t want to spend my leisure time there. It seemed more the realm of my son’s world than mine. After a week of surfing, I’m not so sure.
I’ve discovered something disturbing this week. The old friends with whom I went to high school have all gotten old. I am not one to deny my age. In fact, I am proud of every hard-earned gray hair I have. I’m 43 and feel 63 on some days. Unlike a 63-year-old, however, I am blessed/cursed with a memory that is exceptional in terms of trivia recall. I have all sorts of useless crap stored in my head about my childhood and teenage years before Life with a capital L hit. For example, I remember that my good friend Monica’s favorite stuffed animal was named Boo Boo Kitty. I remember that Lisa L., our class valedictorian, took the ACT test three times to score one point higher (a 30) so she would get a scholarship to the college of her choice. I remember that Celina Harris’s mother was French and Celina moved away from our hometown in fourth grade. Why do I have all this junk crammed into my head?
After surfing around Facebook for a week, I’ve found some of the old classmates with whom I went to school but they don’t look like my crystal clear memories anymore. I’m not sure I like that. I think I preferred that we were all still 18 somewhere in my mind and none of us had grown fat, lost our hair, lost a limb, or even lost our lives. I believe I’ve come face-to-face with my own mortality.
I find that odd, because so much of the recent years of my life have been dominated by the death of loved ones or death on the horizon. My parents are dead as are all my grandparents. If you have lost your parents, you know the strange feeling you get when you realize you are now the grown up in the scenario. I have a brother who is quite ill with a genetic disease that I may or may not have. It’s been hard to ignore Life lately. Yet, somehow, I managed to keep those years from 1966 to 1984 encapsulated in a memory bubble and convinced myself that the occupants of that bubble were as frozen in time as the figures inside a snow globe.
I look at my son now and think about how he will look back upon these teenage years of his when he is in his 40’s. I wonder what will stand out to him. By what events will he mark Before and After? What will he say when he says “I can remember when we didn’t have ____”?
My generation was fortunate to grow up during years of great change. I think of my parents’ generation (born in the early 30’s) and they didn’t see a lot of technological change in their youth. They went through the Depression and World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War but those were events, not changes to things that impacted daily lives. Sure, they saw the advent of TV and the Bomb but they were grown and having us by the time the Space Race revved up and the Soviet Union was a menace on our back doorstep. Isn’t it ironic that we now think of those as the “good old days” of knowing your enemy?
One of my earliest memories is of the Lunar Landing in 1969. My father – heck, my entire town – was integrally involved in the space program and I am sure I am not the only toddler who was forced to sit in front of the TV in July of 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong make history. I think that falls into the Event category, though, much like the Cuban Missile Crisis. My thought process is leading to things that are different, things I can say “I remember the first time”.
Here’s a list. Maybe if I get these out, I can find sleep tonight.
I can remember the first:
Time I saw a calculator. It was about the size of a box of checks and did the basic functions (no square roots or exponents).
Time I saw a microwave. It was huge and we were all a bit afraid to stand too close to it. All the convenience stores had big warning signs on the doors that a microwave was in use on the premises.
Time I saw a computer. It was a big mainframe with huge tape drives and lots of toggle switches and lights. I saw one similar in the Smithsonian last year.
Data sheets I ever saw. That same computer spit out reams and reams (and I mean huge feet-stacks) of green and white lined paper. My dad brought it home for me to use to color pictures on the back side.
Car we ever had that had air conditioning. My mom still refused to use it, though, because it made the car overheat.
IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. It was a huge improvement over the IBM Selectric I had learned to type on because it had an auto-correct function, much like the backspace on today’s PCs. Oh the joy of not having to use a typewriter eraser!
Walkman. I saved up and bought one for about $100. It was an AM/FM/Cassette and it was a big advancement over the 8-track tape deck.
Pair of Nike tennis shoes that hit the market. I again saved up my allowance and bought a pair.
Personal computer. My high school had one and it was on a cart that they wheeled around. I never was able to actually touch it, though, because all the math whizzes used it. I think I was a bit afraid of it anyway. At that time, War Games was a hit movie and we had all sorts of illusions about computers.
Time the Space Shuttle flew. Now, over twenty five years later, I am (hopefully) going to get to see my first in-person launch next month.
Camaro with T-tops. Now that was a hot car!
Time the interstate opened. It spelled the death of Hwy. 41 through our town and all the motels and restaurants that were supported by the traffic.
Video on MTV. That was when MTV still showed videos.
Sesame Street Show.
Mobile phone. It was not a cellphone but a CAR phone!
Video game – yes, it was Pong.
There are a lot of things which I saw die, too. Things that my son will never see or experience. Here is a list:
Outhouses and chamber pots. My grandparents lived in a house without plumbing and I experienced peeing in a pot and in a cold shack in the middle of winter
Cold water drunk from a shaded rain barrel at the corner of the house
TV dinners cooked in the oven, not the microwave; ditto for baked potatoes, hot dogs, popcorn…
Water glasses brought to the table by the waitress on her first trip after you sit down
One-screened movie theaters
Sitting on the porch at night because it’s too hot inside to sleep
Volkswagen bugs (the old kind)
TV with only 5 channels – Channel 2, Channel 4, Channel 5, Channel 8 and Channel 17
TV from rabbit ears and in black and white
NASCAR sponsored by Winston or Budweiser or other politically incorrect companies.
Old Timers Day
Home-made Halloween costumes
Everything closed on Sunday
Colored toilet paper
Smallpox vaccine scars
Houses heated by coal
Going to school with the same kids from kindergarten all the way through high school
Filmstrips and 16mm films
Cards in the backs of library books
Chalkdust
Polio victims
Riding in the car with no seat belts
What are the next twenty years going to bring? Looking backward at the last two decades and extrapolating forward, it is unfathomable. Just when we feel like we can say “There is nothing new to be invented”, we prove ourselves wrong. What will our children remember fondly when we are gone and they are looking backward? Gosh, I hope it is something good – like flying cars. They have been promising us flying cars forever!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
I'm Lovin' It
The world is full of wonderful, pithy adages. Phrases like “what goes around, comes around” and “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” are vividly descriptive and often perfectly describe a situation or occurrence. The phrase “teenage boys will eat anything” is one such perfect phrase and it was proven in our house not long ago.
Son is now nearing the age of 16 and has shot up to over six feet in height over the past year and is still growing. His sophomore buddies are all growing too so when they descend on our house, it is akin to a plague of locusts from the Old Testament. Cabinets are stripped bare; freezers are emptied; and refrigerators are decimated. I’ve seen five packages of Oreo Double Stuff cookies disappear overnight.
A few weeks ago, Son’s two best buds – the Apostles (called such because their real names are Peter and Andrew) – came over to spend the night and play Xbox. I had stocked up the refrigerator with food that was easy-to-fix and did not require any skill other than knowing how to set a microwave. My method is to provide sustenance that they can fix themselves and then just get out of the way. I’ve tried cooking “real” meals for them but normal food is not what they crave during all-night Xbox marathons. They want junk food, plain and simple.
This particular weekend, I had thought I was being smart when I purchased a tub of Chi-Chi’s prepared taco meat and some tortillas. The boys would be able to heat up the meat and make their own tacos or burritos or whatever floated their boat. When Son came into my office and asked about supper I told him there was a container of taco meat in the fridge and some tortillas – they could construct their own soft tacos. They were thrilled! I could hear them in the kitchen arguing over the cheese and salsa as they worked to do a “Taco Bell” at home.
An hour or so later, I wandered into the kitchen to assess the damage and pour myself a Friday-night glass of wine. As I was reaching into the back of the fridge for the pinot grigio, my eye caught on the Chi-Chi’s taco meat container, exactly where I had put it under the sour cream when I unloaded groceries. It had obviously not been touched or moved. Huh? I KNEW they had eaten tacos because Son had asked me specifically how long to heat up the container of meat.
I straightened up and scanned the countertops. There was the empty tortilla bag; there was the shredded cheese; there was the salsa jar…and OH NO! There was the dog food container!
We have a very elderly Chihuahua named Clyde who has few teeth and a very picky appetite. He also has the early stages of kidney failure so I prepare special food for him about once a week. The “Clyde Food” contains hamburger meat, dog vitamins, cod liver oil, beef gravy and ground up Science Diet K/D Prescription Diet dry dog food. I prepare it in a week’s supply and store it in a Tupperware container in the fridge. Since he only eats about a tablespoon at a time, the container lasts quite awhile.
Evidently, what pleases Clyde pleases teenage boys, too, because they had eaten every last crumb of his homemade kibble. And they didn’t even know it!
I yelled out to the living room for them to come to the kitchen. They trooped in expecting to get a lecture on dirty dishes left but I casually asked “So, how were the tacos?”
They were enthusiastic – “Oh, they were great!”, “Yummy!”, “Really good!”
So I asked “Anyone feeling queasy or like you have an overwhelming urge to bark?”
I was faced with puzzled looks.
“Guys, you ate the dog food,” I stated. “HERE’S the taco meat.” I held up the unopened tub of Chi-Chi’s.
These three strapping young men turned white as sheets. No one uttered a word. After several moments of stunned silence, they looked at each other and then Peter said “Well, it was good! Clyde’s a lucky dog!”
Son is now nearing the age of 16 and has shot up to over six feet in height over the past year and is still growing. His sophomore buddies are all growing too so when they descend on our house, it is akin to a plague of locusts from the Old Testament. Cabinets are stripped bare; freezers are emptied; and refrigerators are decimated. I’ve seen five packages of Oreo Double Stuff cookies disappear overnight.
A few weeks ago, Son’s two best buds – the Apostles (called such because their real names are Peter and Andrew) – came over to spend the night and play Xbox. I had stocked up the refrigerator with food that was easy-to-fix and did not require any skill other than knowing how to set a microwave. My method is to provide sustenance that they can fix themselves and then just get out of the way. I’ve tried cooking “real” meals for them but normal food is not what they crave during all-night Xbox marathons. They want junk food, plain and simple.
This particular weekend, I had thought I was being smart when I purchased a tub of Chi-Chi’s prepared taco meat and some tortillas. The boys would be able to heat up the meat and make their own tacos or burritos or whatever floated their boat. When Son came into my office and asked about supper I told him there was a container of taco meat in the fridge and some tortillas – they could construct their own soft tacos. They were thrilled! I could hear them in the kitchen arguing over the cheese and salsa as they worked to do a “Taco Bell” at home.
An hour or so later, I wandered into the kitchen to assess the damage and pour myself a Friday-night glass of wine. As I was reaching into the back of the fridge for the pinot grigio, my eye caught on the Chi-Chi’s taco meat container, exactly where I had put it under the sour cream when I unloaded groceries. It had obviously not been touched or moved. Huh? I KNEW they had eaten tacos because Son had asked me specifically how long to heat up the container of meat.
I straightened up and scanned the countertops. There was the empty tortilla bag; there was the shredded cheese; there was the salsa jar…and OH NO! There was the dog food container!
We have a very elderly Chihuahua named Clyde who has few teeth and a very picky appetite. He also has the early stages of kidney failure so I prepare special food for him about once a week. The “Clyde Food” contains hamburger meat, dog vitamins, cod liver oil, beef gravy and ground up Science Diet K/D Prescription Diet dry dog food. I prepare it in a week’s supply and store it in a Tupperware container in the fridge. Since he only eats about a tablespoon at a time, the container lasts quite awhile.
Evidently, what pleases Clyde pleases teenage boys, too, because they had eaten every last crumb of his homemade kibble. And they didn’t even know it!
I yelled out to the living room for them to come to the kitchen. They trooped in expecting to get a lecture on dirty dishes left but I casually asked “So, how were the tacos?”
They were enthusiastic – “Oh, they were great!”, “Yummy!”, “Really good!”
So I asked “Anyone feeling queasy or like you have an overwhelming urge to bark?”
I was faced with puzzled looks.
“Guys, you ate the dog food,” I stated. “HERE’S the taco meat.” I held up the unopened tub of Chi-Chi’s.
These three strapping young men turned white as sheets. No one uttered a word. After several moments of stunned silence, they looked at each other and then Peter said “Well, it was good! Clyde’s a lucky dog!”
Monday, January 5, 2009
Adventures in Pain
Last Wednesday, we as a family purchased a family membership at our local gym. Hubby figured it would be something he and son could do together. Son likes it because he can work out and “get buff” with weights. I tag along in a state of grumpy martyrdom. Okay, I realize I need to do something to get my butt moving. I sit in front of a computer twelve hours a day. I got so stiff at one point I had to have physical therapy. I’m trying to figure out a way to write off massage therapy as a business expense. I’m 42 and I’ve gained thirty pounds in 2008 after having lost 30 pounds in 2007. It sucks.
My individual introductory session last week was conducted by a fellow I would term as a straight Richard Simmons. He was just WAY too bouncy and enthusiastic. He’s giving me high fives for making it two minutes on the treadmill without falling on my ass and I’m rolling my eyes behind his back. Well, I rolled my eyes until I realized the whole place has mirrors so he was actually seeing me roll my eyes behind his back. I decided that since he was “helping me stretch” (actually trying to dislocate my hip like a chicken leg from the carcass), I’d better be nice. I put on my “Oh! I’m so happy to be here!” face after that.
“Dick” took me through several stretches and ran me through the modern torture machines on the floor to give me an idea of what I should be doing to “loosen up my hips”. Yeah right. That’s gym rat code for shrink my butt. As I’m gritting my teeth and hoping I have lots of Advil at home, I’m thinking “You know, someone somewhere actually designs these weird things. Who sits around and thinks of how to mechanically move the human body in every possible direction?” Sicko.
Prior to running the resistance machine gauntlet, Dick (actually, I think his name was David but who cares) did this thing he called “foam rolling” on the large muscles of my legs. Essentially, this was like taking a rolling pin and rolling the muscles like biscuit dough. It was awful! I don’t have biscuit dough muscles and I’m pretty sure they weren’t ever meant to be rolled like that. I silently decided that was for the birds and those foam things would never get near me again. Dick didn’t realize how close he came to being beat about the head with a sweaty towel. Lucky for him I’ve been through natural childbirth and can endure high levels of pain.
One of the problems I’ve always had with gyms is that it feels like there is an “in” crowd at the gym. They wear all the right work out clothes, have the expensive tennis shoes, and are so skinny that you wonder why they are at the gym anyway. Then you realize they actually LIVE here and you feel even more like an out-of-town visitor. The gym rats are also all in their twenties and have perpetual tans. That means they have no kids and fairly stressless jobs (like waiting tables at Hooters) so they can spend lots of time at the tanning booth or by the pool. And at the gym.
I certainly don’t fit in. I’m over 40, 40 pounds overweight and dressed like I just stepped out of Goodwill. My shoes are Payless specials and I have no electronic “gear” such as an Ipod or a cell phone arm band. I’m thinking maybe I should bring my kitchen timer along next time and pretend it’s some sort of new, cutting edge heart rate monitor or something. I could duct tape it to my calf or something. You know – just to blend in with the crowd.
Saturday was my first “real” day at the gym when I could do what I wanted to without Dick following me around counting reps and saying sappy encouraging things like “Feel the burn!” or
“No pain no gain”. I did my stretches I learned in 1983 from my Jane Fonda album and then got on the treadmill. I knew enough not to stand on it directly to start it but beyond that, it was like looking at the dashboard of the space shuttle. Buttons, lights flashing, all kinds of gauges and indicators. I decided to risk it and started going through the preflight – flaps down, trim up, fuel rich, hit the starter…okay, it’s moving. Now to taxi out carefully. I stepped on it and held onto the hand rails for dear life as I watched the dashboard for anomalies.
I finally figured out that one indicator was time that was counting up – that tells me how long it will take for me to drop dead. The next indicator tells me what incline I’m walking out – set that puppy to 0! The next one is speed. And the one on the far right tells number of calories burned. Okay, I’m getting the hang of this so I increase my speed to 3.1 mph. Not bad. I’m a naturally fast walker so this feels okay. I still can’t let go of the handlebars, though, because I get dizzy but I’m feeling less like an idiot. Confidence is building. I chuck the speed up to 3.5 and now we’re truckin’.
I notice there are TVs in front of me hanging from the ceiling. One is on ESPN (of course), one is on a music video channel, and one is on Fox News. The only one I can hear is the music channel and it has some weird group on it so I try to watch the Fox News channel. I can’t hear it but it has subtitles. I then realize I can’t SEE the subtitles without my glasses. I don’t have my glasses on because they would slide off my face with the sweat that is rapidly building. So I decide to try to read lips but soon realize I can check that off as one more thing I can’t do very well, along with biscuit roll muscles.
My breath is coming shorter and I notice my attitude is starting to change. I’m no longer just grumpy. I’m starting to think evil thoughts such as “Whoever invented treadmills should be shot”, “Whoever invented that foam roller thing should be tortured and then shot”, and “Whoever invented small print subtitles should have their eyes poked out”. I realize I’m breathing really hard and I glance down at the dashboard. I’ve only been on the dang thing five minutes, I’ve walked three-tenths of a mile and I’ve only burned 15 calories. WHAT??? This was going to be worse than I expected and I expected really bad.
Slowly I begin to realize there is a guy in front of me on one of the shoulder torture devices who continues to look at me. Now I KNOW it’s not because I’m a hot babe – HA – I’ve not had a shower, no makeup, I’m sweating like a racehorse, and my face probably looks like the hind-end of a baboon. Then it dawns on me why he’s staring at me. In my ignorance of gym etiquette, I had neglected to wear an athletic bra and instead just wore my regular old, stretched out, comfortable Playtex. Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – was in play under my “I gave blood” t-shirt. Oh brother.
I glanced at the dashboard and saw that I was halfway to my goal of 2 miles so I was darned if I was going to stop ‘cause my boobs were crashing around like ping pong balls in a gallon-size pickle jar. I’d burned a whopping 98 calories, dammit, and I was in the peak of the distance counter. I was going to finish this or die trying.
My only recourse was to give the guy my “evil Teacher Look”. Every teacher and most moms know this look, but former and current middle school teachers are best at it. It’s the look that says “I know what you are thinking and you are going to spend the rest of your life in detention if you don’t straighten up RIGHT NOW.” I leveled my gaze at him and fired away. It worked! Hah! It worked! He suddenly decided that his shoulders were shredded enough and decided to move across the room to the gorilla section.
Now that I was rid of Mr. Pervert, I decided to work on my attitude a bit. After all, I’m in sales and I know that attitude is more than half the battle. I’m also a pretty competitive person, especially with myself, so I decided to challenge myself to think positive thoughts. Positive thoughts. Okay. Think. What is good about this? My mental silence was deafening. It was so quiet that I could actually hear my ears ringing from the residual hangover of that long-ago Bruce Springsteen concert. I was a complete blank.
Suddenly, it was like God heard me and gave me inspiration. Miss Size 4 got on the treadmill directly to my left and started taxiing. I thought “Heh, I’ve got a head start on her! I’m already at a mile and a half!” As she’s tippy-toeing along at a leisurely warm-up speed of 2 mph, I kick it up to 3.7 and increase the incline to .5. I’ll show her! I’ve got this down. I used to be the fastest to complete a mile in my ninth grade gym class and that included the boys so I know I can beat her.
I glance at my dashboard and the heart rate monitor is flashing red. I wonder vaguely in the back of my mind if that is a bad thing. I wipe the sweat off my nose with my towel and keep going. I’m feeling confident then Miss Size 4 starts RUNNING! What is she doing? Isn’t there a rule that you can’t do that for safety reasons? You could get hurt or hurt someone else, right? I kick up the incline on my machine to 1.0. She may be running but I’m climbing Mt. Everest at 3.5 mph. Let’s see her match that!
Out of the corner of my eye, I see her treadmill start to rise at the front. My dashboard starts beeping loudly at me. I glance around for one of those portable defibrillators like they have now at airports because I’m starting to think I may need one. They do train these gym monitors how to do CPR, right? Just don’t let it be Dick that comes to my rescue. I’d rather die, please. Mr. Pervert can stay away, too. Just drag me out to the parking lot and let the Schwann’s truck run over me. That’s the way I want to go.
“Are you going to go into cool down or keep going?” It’s Miss Size 4 talking to me. She can run and talk at the same time? Holy cow! It’s Superwoman in disguise. I glance at her in oxygen-deprived confusion. “Huh?” I puff. “Your timer is going off” she says. I then realize the beeping sound of the dashboard isn’t the warning signal for eminent heart failure but rather that I’ve completed my assigned 2 miles and need to slow down to give my noodle legs a chance to recover before I actually try to walk on dry land.
I drop the incline on my machine so fast my ears pop and start backing off on the speed. I’m almost done, thank goodness. Mentally, I’m rummaging through my medicine cabinet for something more powerful than Advil because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it. I glance up at the TVs once more and lo and behold – it’s Bon Jovi and their new video “Have a Nice Day”. Ah, Jon Bon Jovi! After all these years, he’s still hot and has great teeth.
Suddenly, I time travel back to 1984 when none of my joints creaked, Levi’s fit, and I could squat down without my feet going to sleep. I smile. I made it. Not only through this first two miles of pain but also through the last 25 years of life. I glance at Miss Size 4 and decide I wouldn’t trade places with her. I’ve learned a lot since I was a size four and endured more pain that this treadmill can dish out. My butt may be the size of a barn but my character is Olympic-class.
Now if I can just remember which locker is mine…
My individual introductory session last week was conducted by a fellow I would term as a straight Richard Simmons. He was just WAY too bouncy and enthusiastic. He’s giving me high fives for making it two minutes on the treadmill without falling on my ass and I’m rolling my eyes behind his back. Well, I rolled my eyes until I realized the whole place has mirrors so he was actually seeing me roll my eyes behind his back. I decided that since he was “helping me stretch” (actually trying to dislocate my hip like a chicken leg from the carcass), I’d better be nice. I put on my “Oh! I’m so happy to be here!” face after that.
“Dick” took me through several stretches and ran me through the modern torture machines on the floor to give me an idea of what I should be doing to “loosen up my hips”. Yeah right. That’s gym rat code for shrink my butt. As I’m gritting my teeth and hoping I have lots of Advil at home, I’m thinking “You know, someone somewhere actually designs these weird things. Who sits around and thinks of how to mechanically move the human body in every possible direction?” Sicko.
Prior to running the resistance machine gauntlet, Dick (actually, I think his name was David but who cares) did this thing he called “foam rolling” on the large muscles of my legs. Essentially, this was like taking a rolling pin and rolling the muscles like biscuit dough. It was awful! I don’t have biscuit dough muscles and I’m pretty sure they weren’t ever meant to be rolled like that. I silently decided that was for the birds and those foam things would never get near me again. Dick didn’t realize how close he came to being beat about the head with a sweaty towel. Lucky for him I’ve been through natural childbirth and can endure high levels of pain.
One of the problems I’ve always had with gyms is that it feels like there is an “in” crowd at the gym. They wear all the right work out clothes, have the expensive tennis shoes, and are so skinny that you wonder why they are at the gym anyway. Then you realize they actually LIVE here and you feel even more like an out-of-town visitor. The gym rats are also all in their twenties and have perpetual tans. That means they have no kids and fairly stressless jobs (like waiting tables at Hooters) so they can spend lots of time at the tanning booth or by the pool. And at the gym.
I certainly don’t fit in. I’m over 40, 40 pounds overweight and dressed like I just stepped out of Goodwill. My shoes are Payless specials and I have no electronic “gear” such as an Ipod or a cell phone arm band. I’m thinking maybe I should bring my kitchen timer along next time and pretend it’s some sort of new, cutting edge heart rate monitor or something. I could duct tape it to my calf or something. You know – just to blend in with the crowd.
Saturday was my first “real” day at the gym when I could do what I wanted to without Dick following me around counting reps and saying sappy encouraging things like “Feel the burn!” or
“No pain no gain”. I did my stretches I learned in 1983 from my Jane Fonda album and then got on the treadmill. I knew enough not to stand on it directly to start it but beyond that, it was like looking at the dashboard of the space shuttle. Buttons, lights flashing, all kinds of gauges and indicators. I decided to risk it and started going through the preflight – flaps down, trim up, fuel rich, hit the starter…okay, it’s moving. Now to taxi out carefully. I stepped on it and held onto the hand rails for dear life as I watched the dashboard for anomalies.
I finally figured out that one indicator was time that was counting up – that tells me how long it will take for me to drop dead. The next indicator tells me what incline I’m walking out – set that puppy to 0! The next one is speed. And the one on the far right tells number of calories burned. Okay, I’m getting the hang of this so I increase my speed to 3.1 mph. Not bad. I’m a naturally fast walker so this feels okay. I still can’t let go of the handlebars, though, because I get dizzy but I’m feeling less like an idiot. Confidence is building. I chuck the speed up to 3.5 and now we’re truckin’.
I notice there are TVs in front of me hanging from the ceiling. One is on ESPN (of course), one is on a music video channel, and one is on Fox News. The only one I can hear is the music channel and it has some weird group on it so I try to watch the Fox News channel. I can’t hear it but it has subtitles. I then realize I can’t SEE the subtitles without my glasses. I don’t have my glasses on because they would slide off my face with the sweat that is rapidly building. So I decide to try to read lips but soon realize I can check that off as one more thing I can’t do very well, along with biscuit roll muscles.
My breath is coming shorter and I notice my attitude is starting to change. I’m no longer just grumpy. I’m starting to think evil thoughts such as “Whoever invented treadmills should be shot”, “Whoever invented that foam roller thing should be tortured and then shot”, and “Whoever invented small print subtitles should have their eyes poked out”. I realize I’m breathing really hard and I glance down at the dashboard. I’ve only been on the dang thing five minutes, I’ve walked three-tenths of a mile and I’ve only burned 15 calories. WHAT??? This was going to be worse than I expected and I expected really bad.
Slowly I begin to realize there is a guy in front of me on one of the shoulder torture devices who continues to look at me. Now I KNOW it’s not because I’m a hot babe – HA – I’ve not had a shower, no makeup, I’m sweating like a racehorse, and my face probably looks like the hind-end of a baboon. Then it dawns on me why he’s staring at me. In my ignorance of gym etiquette, I had neglected to wear an athletic bra and instead just wore my regular old, stretched out, comfortable Playtex. Newton’s Third Law of Motion – for each action, there is an equal and opposite reaction – was in play under my “I gave blood” t-shirt. Oh brother.
I glanced at the dashboard and saw that I was halfway to my goal of 2 miles so I was darned if I was going to stop ‘cause my boobs were crashing around like ping pong balls in a gallon-size pickle jar. I’d burned a whopping 98 calories, dammit, and I was in the peak of the distance counter. I was going to finish this or die trying.
My only recourse was to give the guy my “evil Teacher Look”. Every teacher and most moms know this look, but former and current middle school teachers are best at it. It’s the look that says “I know what you are thinking and you are going to spend the rest of your life in detention if you don’t straighten up RIGHT NOW.” I leveled my gaze at him and fired away. It worked! Hah! It worked! He suddenly decided that his shoulders were shredded enough and decided to move across the room to the gorilla section.
Now that I was rid of Mr. Pervert, I decided to work on my attitude a bit. After all, I’m in sales and I know that attitude is more than half the battle. I’m also a pretty competitive person, especially with myself, so I decided to challenge myself to think positive thoughts. Positive thoughts. Okay. Think. What is good about this? My mental silence was deafening. It was so quiet that I could actually hear my ears ringing from the residual hangover of that long-ago Bruce Springsteen concert. I was a complete blank.
Suddenly, it was like God heard me and gave me inspiration. Miss Size 4 got on the treadmill directly to my left and started taxiing. I thought “Heh, I’ve got a head start on her! I’m already at a mile and a half!” As she’s tippy-toeing along at a leisurely warm-up speed of 2 mph, I kick it up to 3.7 and increase the incline to .5. I’ll show her! I’ve got this down. I used to be the fastest to complete a mile in my ninth grade gym class and that included the boys so I know I can beat her.
I glance at my dashboard and the heart rate monitor is flashing red. I wonder vaguely in the back of my mind if that is a bad thing. I wipe the sweat off my nose with my towel and keep going. I’m feeling confident then Miss Size 4 starts RUNNING! What is she doing? Isn’t there a rule that you can’t do that for safety reasons? You could get hurt or hurt someone else, right? I kick up the incline on my machine to 1.0. She may be running but I’m climbing Mt. Everest at 3.5 mph. Let’s see her match that!
Out of the corner of my eye, I see her treadmill start to rise at the front. My dashboard starts beeping loudly at me. I glance around for one of those portable defibrillators like they have now at airports because I’m starting to think I may need one. They do train these gym monitors how to do CPR, right? Just don’t let it be Dick that comes to my rescue. I’d rather die, please. Mr. Pervert can stay away, too. Just drag me out to the parking lot and let the Schwann’s truck run over me. That’s the way I want to go.
“Are you going to go into cool down or keep going?” It’s Miss Size 4 talking to me. She can run and talk at the same time? Holy cow! It’s Superwoman in disguise. I glance at her in oxygen-deprived confusion. “Huh?” I puff. “Your timer is going off” she says. I then realize the beeping sound of the dashboard isn’t the warning signal for eminent heart failure but rather that I’ve completed my assigned 2 miles and need to slow down to give my noodle legs a chance to recover before I actually try to walk on dry land.
I drop the incline on my machine so fast my ears pop and start backing off on the speed. I’m almost done, thank goodness. Mentally, I’m rummaging through my medicine cabinet for something more powerful than Advil because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need it. I glance up at the TVs once more and lo and behold – it’s Bon Jovi and their new video “Have a Nice Day”. Ah, Jon Bon Jovi! After all these years, he’s still hot and has great teeth.
Suddenly, I time travel back to 1984 when none of my joints creaked, Levi’s fit, and I could squat down without my feet going to sleep. I smile. I made it. Not only through this first two miles of pain but also through the last 25 years of life. I glance at Miss Size 4 and decide I wouldn’t trade places with her. I’ve learned a lot since I was a size four and endured more pain that this treadmill can dish out. My butt may be the size of a barn but my character is Olympic-class.
Now if I can just remember which locker is mine…
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