Publish
I met with my writers group today and the subject of publishing came up. It always does. A local Kansas City writer who had just filed for bankruptcy, landed a three book deal and publishers were falling all over themselves to meet her and get her signed. She hit the writing lottery.
Please, God, tell me how that happens?
Or a writer does a piece on how the mom is never in the picture and it explodes across the internet, makes the national news and everybody is talking about it.
I have boxes of photos that verify my children came from storks because I’m nowhere to be found.
Whenever the subject of this blog comes up, I am very self deprecating. It’s just a little thing I do for fun, I’ll say. And if someone asks what I write about or have I been published my voice gets even smaller and I say, “No, never. And I kinda just write observations of life.” Wow. What a ringing endorsement of my own work.
I have trouble tooting my own horn. I’m more than happy to have somebody do it for me, but me selling the goods? Not so much.
Yet next to Mark and the kids, it is the most important thing to me. I often wake up during the night and think of things to write. Whenever I’m driving I think of writing. I compose sentences in my head all day at work. I read other people’s stuff and sigh that heavy breath of deep respect and wish that I could write that well.
A few years ago I met a woman at a Christmas party and instantly liked her. Every year I’d see her at that same party and we’d chat like we’d known each other since our kids were in preschool. I often thought of calling her for coffee but I heard she was a writer and I was too intimidated. Now she’s moved across the country and we message back and forth on Facebook and a kindred spirit was right in my backyard.
This morning when we met I was nursing a crappy night’s sleep hangover. My head was pounding. We were on our last clean towel and every bra I owned was in the washing machine. I had nothing to offer as far as written work. It is my life these days……..phoning everything in. In the midst of my Pity Party of One, Martha said to me, “I’ve loved what you’ve been writing lately. You’re on fire.”
You do? Really??? Oh. Oh. Thank you. Thank you for saying that cuz I don’t know lately.
Or ever.
Comparison is the thief of joy. As off kilter as the day started, joy definitely came into play.
The File
My first job was at the Dairy Queen. I was sixteen years old and ready to work. And The Queen Mum wasn’t paying for anything fun. The first week on the job was to learn cone-making with the fancy shmancy DQ swirl at the top.
Once that was perfected, it was on to Dilly Bars. The same swirl was used but in the form of an ice cream bar. You’d make several bars on top of a stainless tray, insert a wooden stick into each and carry them into the walk-in freezer. The next day they would be dipped in chocolate.
I was proudly carrying my first tray of Dilly Bars into the freezer when the end one slid right off and onto the floor of the freezer……….where it instantly stuck. In a first-job-sixteen-year-old-panic, I tried everything to get it off the floor. Did I ask for help? Did I fess up to what happened?
No.
I got a wet dishrag from the sink and tried using that to get the Dilly Bar off the floor. And then the rag stuck to the floor. I yanked and yanked on that thing and it did not budge so I closed the door and pretended nothing happened. It would soon become clear that The New Girl made one big mess in the freezer.
I managed to keep the job for six months until winter came and the hours disappeared, but I’m pretty sure they never forgot me.
That kind of information and skill set gets preserved.
Somewhere.
In Hiding
Mallie Bee came home this weekend with a lowdown of recent events in her dorm. Her floor is coed. Boys on one side – girls on the other. The boys happened to come upon a cat hanging around the dorm. Since it is an urban campus in the middle of an established neighborhood, this isn’t all that unusual. She was a friendly cat and used to people, but the boys decided she needed some protection and so they brought her inside and hid her in their wing of the dorm.
That is how she came to be called Anne Frank.
As eighteen year old boys go, they quickly grew tired of feeding Anne Frank and keeping her under wraps and so she was passed off to the girls. Specifically, Anne was being hidden in the room of one Mallie Bee Fisher and her roommate.
Mallie Bee has grown up with cats and fashioned a litter box, shared her to-go lunches from the cafeteria and true to her nature, took very good care of Anne Frank.
It didn’t take long for the authorities to come knocking and Mal was called into her RA’s office. “What do you know about Anne Frank,” they inquired. Anne? Anne who? You know who they said.
The gig was up. Anne Frank was being deported.
Anne Frank The Kitten’s story has a happier ending than the real Anne Frank. She was saved from the shelter (at least temporarily) and has a new home with a friend’s boyfriend.
And Anne Frank is really Frank Frank.
Two Of These Things Are Not Like The Other
Yesterday at the store we had a customer come in who I knew from the lighting shop I used to work at a few years ago. At that job I often helped decorators and designers who were shopping for their clients and Dottie used us often. I asked her how business was going and she said, “I’m 83 years old. It goes as fast or slow as I want it to.” Then I asked her how she got into doing that. “Well, it would take me two hours to tell you my story.”
It was a slow day. I egged her on.
She is a recovering alcoholic. Forty years sober. She was a nanny to her grandkids then they moved to Hong Kong. She always liked to decorate. Her birth sister told her she needed to make a job of it. The sister she found in adulthood after living in an orphanage. She moved from one side of the state line to the other to be in a neighborhood with young families that needed help with their houses. She made flyers and passed them around. She thinks you should use what you have to decorate before you run out to Pottery Barn. Her son started a company that went public and the shares weren’t worth much until a few years ago. All these years of scraping by and now life is easier. That’s why she can come in once in awhile and buy herself something nice.
The writer in me urged Dottie to get this story written down for her grandkids. She laughed, said skip the bag I’m trying to conserve and her and her dog left.
Today I waited on somebody who bought several things – one being a heavy winter coat. Too heavy to carry to the parking garage and so we said we’d hold onto her things and wait for her to pull up in front of the store. I waited and waited and waited. Finally, I left everything in front and finished something else up at the register.
That’s when I heard the honking.
Is that woman honking for her clothes?
Yes she was.
She popped the trunk of her car but I was already putting her bags in the back seat. As revenge goes it wasn’t much……….unlike the disgruntled employee who put rat poison in the salsa at a local Mexican restaurant………..but at least I made her get off her behind to shut her trunk.
She should write that down.
The Good, The Bad & The Birth
Will was born three weeks after my dad died. Maggie and I had spent the early part of the summer at Mom and Dad’s house and returned to Maryland in July. By the end of that month, Dad decided to stop his treatments.
We were insured by Kaiser Permanente and the protocol when you were expecting was to alternate seeing a nurse one appointment, an OB/GYN the next. I was seven months pregnant before I ever saw a doctor.
Things at home were going downhill quickly and Mom said we should think about coming home to see Dad one more time, but a woman as pregnant as I was couldn’t get on a plane without a note from their doctor. I was going every other week for checkups and every time I asked the answer was “no.” No you can’t go, no it’s too stressful, no we won’t write you a note. No. No. No.
On an appointment when I saw an actual doctor and explained the situation again, he said of course you have to go and I’ll write the note right now. He handed it to me and on his way out the door said, “But don’t deliver that baby in Illinois because Kaiser won’t pay for it.”
Mark, Maggie and I flew home with the intent of staying over Labor Day weekend. Mom was under enormous stress trying to take care of Dad and since Mark had plenty of vacation time we ended up staying nearly two weeks to help out.
After Dad died and the funeral plans had been set, we booked our flight back to Maryland with US Air. We went to the church, the cemetery and the luncheon afterwards then packed our stuff and headed to the airport so this baby would be born where we were insured.
I gave my note to the flight attendant and we boarded a very empty plane. After the flight had taken off and I was using the bathroom, Mark told her of the circumstances of the past few weeks. When I came back to my seat she said to me, “Honey, why don’t you rest and I’ll let you know when we’re about to land.” Then she led me to an empty row of seats that she’d put pillows and blankets on so I could nap.
I was cried out by then but I remember how compassionate she was to a fragile pregnant woman who was on a flight into the unknown, and that the crappy doctor’s office I’d been dealing with all year could learn something from her.
Will-Da-Beast
Today The Boy Child has completed another spin around the sun and turns twenty two.
How did that happen?
He was the child that wore me out. He climbed on the back of the recliner, stood on the very top of its back and tried to rock back and forth. He would climb onto the kitchen table and swing the chandelier back and forth. He would pull a chair up to the electric stove and turn all the knobs on until one day he burnt every one of his fingertips. He’d wake us up in the morning by standing in his crib and banging it back and forth against the wall. He helped himself into a neighbor’s house while they were playing outside, all the while we were frantically looking for him. If a storm produced enough water in the gutters he’d be out all afternoon with a boat. His kindergarten teacher was sure he had ADD. Reading was a complete mystery to him and so we’d spend most nights working on homework and flashcards.
Then he calmed down.
Don’t ask me how. He just did.
Last year, he and I were talking about an acquaintance who was rolling her eyes at the career path her kid was choosing. Mark my words, the mom said, she’s going to hate it.
“You know what, Mom,” Will said later. “There was never anything I ever said I wanted to be that you didn’t think I would be good at.”
Well……….despite your best efforts to break me, I always believed you were born with an imagination destined to take you wherever you wanted to go.
Happy birthday my wild child.
Two Things
While I was at work today, my friend, Carla, left a message. I miss you. I’ve been thinking about you. Give me a call.
Sigh.
Carla was the first mom friend I made when we moved to Maryland. She and Jim were fellow transplanted Midwesterners who lived a few doors down from us. While we were moving in her mom kept an eye on the activity and later that day met Mark at the dumpster. Do you have a baby, she asked. Yes, six weeks old, he said. My daughter lives there. Her baby is three weeks old and tomorrow her and your wife need to meet each other.
The Big Daddy went along with Betty’s plan and that is how a twenty five year friendship began.
Since those years we have never lived near each other and long stretches of time go by when we don’t talk, but when we do it is just like the old days when we’d meet each other on the sidewalk with crying babies.
She had seen the photos from Maggie and Nate’s wedding and wanted to know the deets. I filled her in about that lovely day and then we talked about everything from yoga to kids to us both turning into retail girls.
Whenever anyone asks me about the wedding and if I was emotional, I tell them about two things. One was when everyone had come up the aisle and we were waiting for the bride. I stuck my head out of the pew and looked at the back of the church and saw Mark and Maggie.
Oh Lordy, will you look at those two? She’s so happy. He’s so proud.
The other time I wanted to cry was when my hairdresser came to the house. Nearly ten years of her taming my wild curls, hearing about my decorating projects, my dog, the garden, the kitchen I want to gut, my husband………..my husband! There she was with all of her magic, and I still can’t talk about how much it meant to me to have her here that day without getting choked up.
With all that Carla and I talked about I never got around to that part but I didn’t need to. If anybody would know about a full heart spilling over it would be the friend who was there from the start.
Hangry
The other day I was helping a woman buy a skirt. “This,” she said pointing to her stomach, “this is making me crazy.” I hear ya oh menopausal sister. It’s that. It’s the chin. The flag waving upper arms. The butt.
It’s. Everything.
Today in the mail I got a catalog called Blair. I believe it was supposed to be sent to my mother. It had comfy shoes, pumpkin sweaters and there were plenty of models that looked like this………….
I also got Anthropologie.
The same model was on every page looking like this………………..
The Anthro model looks hangry………..as if she’d rip the head off the photographer who asked her to turn her chin one more time.
The Blair models are rocking their mom jeans and they know that if they go out for lunch they have no worries for you do not put Spanx on under a mom jean.
You put on seconds.
The Queen Mum Goes To The Eye Doctor
The Queen Mum has some eye issues of late. My sister, who is the Go To Girl For All Things Mom (and who everyone in the family will owe until eternity) took mom to the eye doctor.
She said it was like being in the middle of an AARP meeting.
Mom had just come from one of her concerts and was looking pretty sharp. Of all the empty seats in the waiting room, some guy came and sat right next to Mom and started chatting shmoozing her up. Ann kept on eye on him as he seemed very interested in our Queen Mum. After a few minutes his phone rang and he said to Mom, “Excuse me. I’ve got to get this. You know when you’re a sex kitten like me……..”
A sex kitten?
Mom got called in to see the doctor in the nick of time. A few more minutes in that waiting room and the grandkids might have ended up calling Mr. Kitten……………Boompa.
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| Rocking a fake tattoo for my nephew’s wedding. |