Imagine you are an 8 year old girl. It's summer break. But what the heck, it's hard to break tradition, so you get up super early on Saturday. Saturdays are all about the butt-crack of dawn. Your going to pop on some clothes and run outside, before 6! You're changing your unders and that is how you discover that a tick has embedded its head in your crotch. It's legs are wiggling delightedly in the air. What do you do?
Obviously, you throw yourself on the ground, thrashing, wailing, kicking, screaming. That is, if you are alive, at all.
Imagine you are a mother. You are laying between your favorite sheets, entertaining wildly inappropriate fantasies of sleeping-in on a Saturday morning. Suddenly crazed shrieking smashes through your silky fog. You grumble and stumble across the "hall", croaking about how much blood you expect to see with screaming like that. When your eyes pry open enough to see the wiggling tick in your daughters crotch, what do you do?
Your body remains upright, tenses a little, and frowns. Your soul tosses itself on the floor with your daughter and thrashes and screams. You begin dialing 911, but accidentally call your husband, at work already, at the front of a 10day, 12hours per day, project in the field.
Imagine you are a father. You are at work in a field, literally, at 6 am with several large pieces of equipment drilling and testing around you. Although you are the newest guy there, you've been put in charge of the whole shebang. You are trying to not be stressed or inordinately excited. Your cell rings. You step away from the noise. It's your wife. She's says she's calling from the closet but she's screaming so loud you can't make out what else she's saying. Eventually the picture becomes clear. She needs to know how to remove a tick from your daughter's crotch. What do you do?
You yell, "OH MY GOD!!!" Recover yourself and continue, "For crying out loud, ask the interweb! And try to remain calm...er."
The mother boots up and googles, after ten minutes of the Mircrosoft theme song, of course.
The thrashing child refuses to go pee, but she really really has to. A CD of fairy tales distracts and the mother spends five blood-curdling minutes extricating the squirmy, wiggly bug. And then drowns him in rubbing alcohol and freezes him for good measure, because the interweb told her to do it.
And that, my friends, is how you tick...er...kick off a weekend.
The week's been too busy to report back until now, but I hope I'm in time to consult you for the coming weekend. Good luck creating your own tick-tastic adventures! If your not quite up for all that excitement, you should check all existing orifices of your wee ones for invaders every night before bed. Which is also just too much fun...really.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Doll House
Mine was a nondescript dollhouse. A donation to the pastor's family. It was sort of like a 1970's suburban split level made of thin boards tacked together, if that's not redundant. The furniture however, was AMAZING! Little plastic Victorian pieces that tickled and thrilled my imagination. Among them was a red couch, wavy backed and trimmed with ornate "wood". The Classic.
I've seen them from time to time. Huck's been with me as I've swooned at antique store windows in New Orleans, wondering how much delivery would be, when the couch itself was a month's wages. Ah. Dreams.
I wasn't really looking for a couch. On the list of large purchases we need to make (the '94 Cutlass Sierra S isn't going to go on FOREVER, and Jersey's in milk are expensive) a couch was really way down the list. Everyone hates the futon. I, because it reminds me of this past year. And everyone else because it's hellishly uncomfortable. But a couch wasn't in the foreseeable future.
I was actually perusing Craisglist for more vintage wicker, which I'm finding nice and cheap and is filling the solarium with an adorable, ornate wackiness. All I did, honestly, was just to type in "antique couches" just to see. Just so I could start casing the market. Just to see what's out there. What the prices are. Just to see.
And the last entry, the last one, was the couch from my dollhouse.
My mother-in-law was visiting and I showed the ad to her because she KNOWS antiques and is a hoity toity interior designer: "GASP! If that's in any kind of shape it's worth at least twice the price!!" But she warned it was likely uncomfortable and not suitable for a family.
I saw the conclusion. I could see it a mile away. And I felt like a lamb being led to slaughter. I hung my head and slowly trudged along this path I felt was predestined. I was pained. I didn't not want to spend money on a couch. I don't highly value couches in general. But I knew I had to see it.
After a few days, I called. A few days later, I visited.
It was a perfect, healthy, comfortable piece of furniture in exactly the right color. And she came down in price by a 1/3, which made it very hard to resist. I told her I'd sleep on it. But I didn't. I tossed and turned on it. For two nights. I hemmed and hawed. The expense. The kids. The cat. The imagining of a puppy. The beauty. The materialistic love. Wrong? Right?
I thought, Well, if I get this then I can't get that or that. But I caught myself. While Huck's salary is a modest beginning engineer salary, it's not like that anymore. That's a false choice now. Before, it was ACTUALLY true: if I buy a new swimming suit, we'll have to go without lunch for a week. But it's no longer true.
Where is the debriefing retreat from poverty? Why don't they have a little island you can go to with a counselor who helps you to understand: you are not on the verge of starvation any more, you can buy new underwear whenever you feel like it now, you don't have to search the seats for gas money, some old friends may despise you now, you won't feel like you deserve any of the material possessions you can now say yes to. But you must, you must move on from this humiliating place of deprivation.
It seemed that I was going to Just Say No to this couch, just because I have grown so unaccustomed to wild materialistic fantasies materializing.
In the meantime, Huck's birthday is tomorrow, so the kids and I went shopping for an afternoon on Perdition Road... er Division Street, Spokane's version of Aurora and the Guide... just a long strip of national chain hell. I don't know where to shop around here, and that was the most obvious place. I've had to spend three afternoons on that road since we moved in and each journey eviscerates my soul. Each time, I return home, exhausted, dirty, and icky inside and out. I hate it. The only cure I know is to read the Mystics.
So, I sat on my vintage wicker chaise (Craigslist/cheap/I'm madly in love with it) and read St. Terese of Avila and this is what she had to say about the material world:
I LOVED WHAT I COULD LOVE
I had a natural passion for fine clothes, excellent food, and lively conversation about all matters that concern the heart still alive. And even a passion about my own looks.
Vanities: they do not exist.
Have you ever walked across a stream stepping on rocks so not to spoil a pair of shoes?
All we can touch, swallow, or say aids in our crossing to God and helps unveil the soul.
Life smooths us, rounds, perfects, as does the river the stone, and there is no place our Beloved is not flowing, though the current's force you may not always like.
Our passions help to lift us.
I loved what I could love until I held Him,
for then - all things - every world disappeared.
On the way to see the couch the first time, a HUGE rainstorm hit, like I've never seen before. Rivers in the street. Rivers of God. I could barely drive through them.
As we drove home from that first meeting, a double rainbow arched above us. I know that rainbow was not just for me. But I felt it: our lives are going to be okay now. If I spend a little money on such a whimsy, it will be okay. This couch would not cause us to starve, nor return us to living in a garage. Our lives are on a different course now, one that a whimsical couch could not derail.
This week, I finished reading Marilyn Robinson's latest masterpiece, HOME. I finished it so intently today, that despite awaking with my very best intentions to uphold my cleaning duties, the house never got cleaned and in fact the kids made it way way worse while I was ignoring them with my book. Anyhow, I wept like a BABY, a freaking BABY at the end of this book. The whole point of the book is Home: being home, having a home, welcoming home, and accepting the good and wonderful things this life, and "god", want to give us.
When I finished weeping, I called Mary up and I told her I would buy her couch.
Tonight, as we drove home with it in bouncing behind us in the trailer, another rainbow grew up around us, and looked, from a certain angle, to sprout straight from our doorstep. And I know it's just an act of physics, but I couldn't help but wonder: the universe may just be longing for me lounge and relax on this, ANOTHER, amazing dream in my reality.
I've never said it before about blessings, but today I did: "What now?" I asked the rainbow, "What next?"
Well.... I've got a small list here... if you'd like to look it over....
I've seen them from time to time. Huck's been with me as I've swooned at antique store windows in New Orleans, wondering how much delivery would be, when the couch itself was a month's wages. Ah. Dreams.
I wasn't really looking for a couch. On the list of large purchases we need to make (the '94 Cutlass Sierra S isn't going to go on FOREVER, and Jersey's in milk are expensive) a couch was really way down the list. Everyone hates the futon. I, because it reminds me of this past year. And everyone else because it's hellishly uncomfortable. But a couch wasn't in the foreseeable future.
I was actually perusing Craisglist for more vintage wicker, which I'm finding nice and cheap and is filling the solarium with an adorable, ornate wackiness. All I did, honestly, was just to type in "antique couches" just to see. Just so I could start casing the market. Just to see what's out there. What the prices are. Just to see.And the last entry, the last one, was the couch from my dollhouse.
My mother-in-law was visiting and I showed the ad to her because she KNOWS antiques and is a hoity toity interior designer: "GASP! If that's in any kind of shape it's worth at least twice the price!!" But she warned it was likely uncomfortable and not suitable for a family.
I saw the conclusion. I could see it a mile away. And I felt like a lamb being led to slaughter. I hung my head and slowly trudged along this path I felt was predestined. I was pained. I didn't not want to spend money on a couch. I don't highly value couches in general. But I knew I had to see it.
After a few days, I called. A few days later, I visited.
It was a perfect, healthy, comfortable piece of furniture in exactly the right color. And she came down in price by a 1/3, which made it very hard to resist. I told her I'd sleep on it. But I didn't. I tossed and turned on it. For two nights. I hemmed and hawed. The expense. The kids. The cat. The imagining of a puppy. The beauty. The materialistic love. Wrong? Right?
I thought, Well, if I get this then I can't get that or that. But I caught myself. While Huck's salary is a modest beginning engineer salary, it's not like that anymore. That's a false choice now. Before, it was ACTUALLY true: if I buy a new swimming suit, we'll have to go without lunch for a week. But it's no longer true.
Where is the debriefing retreat from poverty? Why don't they have a little island you can go to with a counselor who helps you to understand: you are not on the verge of starvation any more, you can buy new underwear whenever you feel like it now, you don't have to search the seats for gas money, some old friends may despise you now, you won't feel like you deserve any of the material possessions you can now say yes to. But you must, you must move on from this humiliating place of deprivation.
It seemed that I was going to Just Say No to this couch, just because I have grown so unaccustomed to wild materialistic fantasies materializing.
In the meantime, Huck's birthday is tomorrow, so the kids and I went shopping for an afternoon on Perdition Road... er Division Street, Spokane's version of Aurora and the Guide... just a long strip of national chain hell. I don't know where to shop around here, and that was the most obvious place. I've had to spend three afternoons on that road since we moved in and each journey eviscerates my soul. Each time, I return home, exhausted, dirty, and icky inside and out. I hate it. The only cure I know is to read the Mystics.
So, I sat on my vintage wicker chaise (Craigslist/cheap/I'm madly in love with it) and read St. Terese of Avila and this is what she had to say about the material world:
I LOVED WHAT I COULD LOVE
I had a natural passion for fine clothes, excellent food, and lively conversation about all matters that concern the heart still alive. And even a passion about my own looks.
Vanities: they do not exist.
Have you ever walked across a stream stepping on rocks so not to spoil a pair of shoes?
All we can touch, swallow, or say aids in our crossing to God and helps unveil the soul.
Life smooths us, rounds, perfects, as does the river the stone, and there is no place our Beloved is not flowing, though the current's force you may not always like.
Our passions help to lift us.
I loved what I could love until I held Him,
for then - all things - every world disappeared.
On the way to see the couch the first time, a HUGE rainstorm hit, like I've never seen before. Rivers in the street. Rivers of God. I could barely drive through them.
As we drove home from that first meeting, a double rainbow arched above us. I know that rainbow was not just for me. But I felt it: our lives are going to be okay now. If I spend a little money on such a whimsy, it will be okay. This couch would not cause us to starve, nor return us to living in a garage. Our lives are on a different course now, one that a whimsical couch could not derail.
This week, I finished reading Marilyn Robinson's latest masterpiece, HOME. I finished it so intently today, that despite awaking with my very best intentions to uphold my cleaning duties, the house never got cleaned and in fact the kids made it way way worse while I was ignoring them with my book. Anyhow, I wept like a BABY, a freaking BABY at the end of this book. The whole point of the book is Home: being home, having a home, welcoming home, and accepting the good and wonderful things this life, and "god", want to give us.
When I finished weeping, I called Mary up and I told her I would buy her couch.
Tonight, as we drove home with it in bouncing behind us in the trailer, another rainbow grew up around us, and looked, from a certain angle, to sprout straight from our doorstep. And I know it's just an act of physics, but I couldn't help but wonder: the universe may just be longing for me lounge and relax on this, ANOTHER, amazing dream in my reality.
I've never said it before about blessings, but today I did: "What now?" I asked the rainbow, "What next?"
Well.... I've got a small list here... if you'd like to look it over....
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Over-research: phase I
I'm in the over-researching phase of family cow ownership. This is the part where, despite having already made my decision based on the typical mix of rashness, bravado, intuition, and probably hormones, I pretend that what I am about to do is perfectly logical. Hence: the over abundance of post decision "re"search. This phase also provides ammunition for later remorse. No decision of mine is complete without the full set of self-doubts, regrets and a loaded pre-set my own "Told You So"s, ready to fire should the occasion present itself.
As part of this research phase, I took the kids to the local dairy.
Holy Shit.
It's a small dairy. It's a family thing. Exactly what I grew up around. I helped my grandpa every other weekend with his cows. Yet time erases all of the important details, except the green field with the rainbow and gramps at my side. So, I brought the kids to a dairy. A GREAT dairy. The cows are happy, artificially inseminated, and free of fake hormones. And they are really really large.
I haven't had anything bigger than a really really big cat in the past about 15 years (check that! time has passed! It's been 18 years!). Sure, I've been employed on a dude ranch. I've retrained a few horses. But that was before kids. That was... holy ovulating octopuses! nearly nine years ago!! Large animals have gotten larger in the intervening period, apparently. They are actually larger than kids! And they have big, hard, feet. And they have even more crap coming out of their butts than children! Cows are really big. Not lap companions.
I nursed for 6 years straight. Sometimes with a machine. There's this creepy familiarity to what those girls do. A mammalian recognition of the shoot-shoot-shoot sounds. And it's weird. It's like just reaching over a squeezing some other lady's breasts. So inappropriate! There must be some right of ownership, the familiarity of a proprietor to presume to just reach over and squeeze some mammals teets, like you own them, like their bodies don't belong to themselves, but to you. Absolutely mind boggling. I'd really have to understand that we are not equals. That I am their master. That I OWN their boobs!
I'm not sure I'm ready to be the top of the food chain yet.
The tour was amazing and wonderful and smelled like old times. And the woman of the farm even ground grain and made us cookies from it! To have with our big glasses of milk. And she sent us home with a gallon, cream still in it! Fresh from that morning! Coyote is already dead gone on the stuff and won't have anything else since we moved to Spokane. And I love it too! I had several tall glasses!
And now we come to the major unforeseen glitch in my little plan: milk makes me really sick! For decades, more than just a bit in my tea and little on my cereal has turned my insides into knots and these knots tell me things: you are going to die! Hari Kari is committed from the inside out! There is an alien trying to escape from your abdomen! Just to make sure, apparently, creamy milk addict that I am, I tried to guzzle even more milk the next day. Same near death experience.
So now I'm perusing cheese books. Camembert is unfortunately really difficult and they say I should spend several years in less worthy cheeses working my way up. Whatever. We all know by now that my best results are achieved when I'm in way over my head. As long as I carefully accomplish everything contrary to advice, it'll at least turn out. But - damn. It says to clean the kitchen first. And backwards or frontwards, that's my Waterloo.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Eternally Damned
Dear Spokanticles,
It's come to my attention that most of you know where you are because you have lived here your whole lives. I think that's wonderful. That's what gives a place character and local flavor. Thank you, you stayers you.
Consider this, you've never been lost in Spokane. You've never been new here or anywhere. The one way streets, the curving, sudden dead ends, the roads that suddenly bridge to other states, these you know like the tiles on your bathroom floor. These are quirks you can't even see. But we newbies, we uninitiated, we lost folks just trying to get home before the school bus... to us, these things are not obvious. When you honk at the 24-way stop without street labels, all you are saying is this, "I know where I am! I know what to do here! I wish you did too!" Believe me, when I say this: I wish I knew too! I wish I knew where I was. I wish I knew what to do at 36-way stops. I wish I knew what you know. But I don't. And your honking isn't going to suddenly make it clear. You're simply crowing about how smart and special you think you are because you know all 'bout Spokane's streets. Big deal. You know this town you were born in. Good for you.
Spokane is a very old town, with very old roads, and very quirky paths. The map of South hill looks like root-bound chives. It may be hard to believe, but there was a day, a time, an era, when I loved new towns. When I was never lost because I was free to follow any path. But the Old me, the me without a child sitting on the front porch, locked out of the house because I've been lost for two hours, that old me couldn't get lost. How can one get lost when one has no destination? I bragged, perhaps even to you here: I've NEVER been lost, except once in a town in Mexico. It's true. I've an infallible sense of direction. And if I were a crow, I'd be in luck. But here. I'm driving North, and suddenly the road careens west, then east, then south and now North again. Yes, I am going North. But where? In Idaho? In Canada? And if I take this road, does it get me back to the neighborhood I need to be in? Apparently not. It looked like it would, but then it doubled back and I'm going North again, in Istanbul.
My mis-adventures have, as they always do, brought be to beauty I didn't know I was missing. Your town, your 130 year old boom town is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Jaw dropping architecture. Tear jerking ancient estates. I have already wept beneath arches and embellished wedding cake towers, and not only because I am lost, but because I have found buildings worthy of the resources and hours put into to them, buildings worthy to stand through time, testaments to the greatest potential of human imagination. Sooo... perhaps that's also why I'm drifting into your honking lane. It's the surprising grace of brick and the elegant curl of stone, these perfect oxymorons your eyes are likely numbed to, that prevent me from driving straight and finding my way home.
So, my dear Spokanticles, if I'm not quite driving between the lines, it's because I'm drunk on the beauty of your town. And if I'm lost at the 48-way intersection, it's because they just shouldn't exist. I'll be laying on the horn too, just to vent the frustrations of the foreigner. Consider it the sound of the eternally lost, the eternally damned.
Love,
Sarajoy
It's come to my attention that most of you know where you are because you have lived here your whole lives. I think that's wonderful. That's what gives a place character and local flavor. Thank you, you stayers you.
Consider this, you've never been lost in Spokane. You've never been new here or anywhere. The one way streets, the curving, sudden dead ends, the roads that suddenly bridge to other states, these you know like the tiles on your bathroom floor. These are quirks you can't even see. But we newbies, we uninitiated, we lost folks just trying to get home before the school bus... to us, these things are not obvious. When you honk at the 24-way stop without street labels, all you are saying is this, "I know where I am! I know what to do here! I wish you did too!" Believe me, when I say this: I wish I knew too! I wish I knew where I was. I wish I knew what to do at 36-way stops. I wish I knew what you know. But I don't. And your honking isn't going to suddenly make it clear. You're simply crowing about how smart and special you think you are because you know all 'bout Spokane's streets. Big deal. You know this town you were born in. Good for you.
Spokane is a very old town, with very old roads, and very quirky paths. The map of South hill looks like root-bound chives. It may be hard to believe, but there was a day, a time, an era, when I loved new towns. When I was never lost because I was free to follow any path. But the Old me, the me without a child sitting on the front porch, locked out of the house because I've been lost for two hours, that old me couldn't get lost. How can one get lost when one has no destination? I bragged, perhaps even to you here: I've NEVER been lost, except once in a town in Mexico. It's true. I've an infallible sense of direction. And if I were a crow, I'd be in luck. But here. I'm driving North, and suddenly the road careens west, then east, then south and now North again. Yes, I am going North. But where? In Idaho? In Canada? And if I take this road, does it get me back to the neighborhood I need to be in? Apparently not. It looked like it would, but then it doubled back and I'm going North again, in Istanbul.
My mis-adventures have, as they always do, brought be to beauty I didn't know I was missing. Your town, your 130 year old boom town is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Jaw dropping architecture. Tear jerking ancient estates. I have already wept beneath arches and embellished wedding cake towers, and not only because I am lost, but because I have found buildings worthy of the resources and hours put into to them, buildings worthy to stand through time, testaments to the greatest potential of human imagination. Sooo... perhaps that's also why I'm drifting into your honking lane. It's the surprising grace of brick and the elegant curl of stone, these perfect oxymorons your eyes are likely numbed to, that prevent me from driving straight and finding my way home.
So, my dear Spokanticles, if I'm not quite driving between the lines, it's because I'm drunk on the beauty of your town. And if I'm lost at the 48-way intersection, it's because they just shouldn't exist. I'll be laying on the horn too, just to vent the frustrations of the foreigner. Consider it the sound of the eternally lost, the eternally damned.
Love,
Sarajoy
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
LinkWithin
