1 Memory Ln

I could write today about the indignity that was my 4th of July, about how I sweated and strained my way through the neighborhood pulling my 5 year old son up hills on his bike, yelling hoarsely at him to pedal while my neighbors lounged on the curb and enjoyed.  About how my skirt didn't fit quite exactly right, or how I nearly biffed in front of the entire breakfast line when a gawking teenaged boy wouldn't get out of my way.

But instead I think I will begin our trip down- you called it- Memory Lane.  Our first house is small, really just a single blue room with a vintage velvet couch and a simple view of yellow-green meadows.  In it is my first "boyfriend," and clinging to the outside of the roof, alternately stroking its shingles and attempting to claw it to pieces, my mother.

I put "boyfriend" in quotes because really he fits only a loose description of the word.  He was a tall and gawkish junior that year, a glamorous year older than me and clearly the studious, responsible, "nice" boy every mother wants for her daughter.  Until we were placed in the same choir that year, the only thing I'd known about him was that in elementary school (when I would have NEVER talked to him) he'd been given the part in the school play that I had spent the semester understudying for, at the very last minute.  Jason Levitis had actually been sick closing night- I couldn't believe it!  But the music teacher (curse you, Mrs. Ramsey!) gave my part to Darren Turner in the final hour.  Luckily, I never held this against Darren himself, as it would have surely put an unfair damper on our otherwise beautiful relationship.

I remember the first time he called me, the first time I sensed that he "liked me;" the first time anyone had ever liked me.  I spent hours daydreaming about him on my bed, listening to the soundtrack to The Little Mermaid, rewinding the tape to replay "Kiss the Girl" as if on an endless loop of passion...  Ah, those wonderful days, culminating in our first memorable date in my living room on a Monday afternoon watching none other than The Little Mermaid itself, out on video just that week!

He may have kissed me afterwards; I don't remember.  I do remember him kissing me on a later date (perhaps our 4th out of 5) on the couch in the music room; five little consecutive kisses, like a bird pecking hesitantly with its sharp little beak.  That was the time I looked at the back of his thigh and was instantly and terminally repulsed by him, much as I tried to ignore it for another week.  It was also the day my mother excitedly ordered me to make him a sandwich; I made a ham and cheese sandwich in my 16-year old way, lettuce and tomato and mayo, pressing down with my left hand on either side of the knife as I cut it into rectangles.

"You smushed it!" my mother shrieked at me.  Sure enough, there were the impressions of my fingers on the bread.  I didn't see the problem, and I knew he certainly wouldn't either...  The sandwich continued on to its intended recipient.

A few days later, my mother again started worrying at me to make him brownies.  I called him to see if he liked brownies, he said no, and proceeded to "break up" with me.  I took this in stride (I'd seen the leg, after all) and cheerfully dismounted.  I reported to my mother that the brownies wouldn't be necessary after all; Darren and I were no longer dating.

"It's because of the sandwich!!" she wailed.  "You smushed the sandwich and he doesn't like you anymore!"

Then she turned on me in accusation.  "YOU drove him away!" and so on and so forth.

Looking back on this 18 years later (my mother has no memory of this, by the way,) I can only think of one way to understand this obviously... amusing behavior.  My mother started dating my father at 16.  She was obviously living my life with me through the framework of her own.  When Darren broke up with me after our deep and meaningful 3-5 weeks of "dating," she was losing her future son-in-law.  Little could she imagine what a different route from hers my life would take.  Here I am at 34, divorced, a single mother of two, having dated and broken up with more guys than she has years.  It's a good thing she managed to get over her bizarre emotional attachments to my boyfriends, or at this point she would be raving and blubbering hysterically in a mental institution instead of upstairs in her room.  

Just kidding.  That was mean.  She's a good lady.  :-D

wind-up whacko

I laid in a twin bed just across the Idaho border, feet hanging over the end as if I were a tall person, (which I'm not), when I heard it first:  a rather

 loud, distinct sort of pattering, followed by a few stragglers scraping and bumping along.  It was so obviously... obvious that at first I wasn't alarmed, thinking it was perhaps my backpack readjusting itself on the floor at the foot of the bed, or a kid moving about in the hallway.  A half minute later or so there were a couple more pats, clearly something moving on the carpet either just inside or just outside of the room.  As I couldn't see anything, it was apparently something very small, or even conceivably someone lying down.

I'm not the type to get jumpy when I'm alone, or freak out at strange "house" noises.  But these persisted for nearly a minute and I admit it, my imagination began its inexorable grind toward hysteria.  What should I do?  What could I do?  If I stepped out of the bed to investigate, would whatever it was launch itself from under my bed, attaching itself in rabid fervor to my ankle?  I certainly didn't want to disturb my cousins down below; I was in my underwear, it being a hot night, and how ridiculous would it be for a scantily clad 30-some year old woman to come creeping downstairs saying "there's something under my bed" and waking the whole household at 2 in the morning?

After a few more moments of consideration, and

 unable to see any other way, that is exactly what I did.  With a bound I flew over most of the floor (so that it was less likely to be able to reach me in my moment of vulnerability) and minced down the stairs.

"Jen!" I whispered from the hallway outside the room she shared with her husband.  "Jen!"  We had just parted a mere 15 minutes earlier; hopefully she was still awake.

No such luck.  "Is that Anne-Marie?" murmured the sleepy, disbelieving voice from the bedroom.  

"There's something in my room!"  I hissed agitatedly, hating myself every second.  

"Well I don't want to look for it!" she answered worriedly.  "Troy will."

"No!" I exclaimed passionately!  "Don't wake him up!"  But it was too late.  The hard-working farmer had been awoken in the middle of the night by his bizarro cousin-in-law, a guest in his home, cowering in her underwear in the dark and blubbering on about strange noises in her room.  Ah well.

I flew up the stairs ahead of them and hid in the room next door.  Poor Troy (in his underwear, incidentally) stalked through the doorway with his flashlight, followed closely by a nervous Jen, and knelt down by the bed.  He flung up the bed skirt and crouched down, scanning his light back and forth along the carpet....

Now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that there had most definitely been something moving in the room.  But I also knew just as certainly that there would be nothing there when Troy bent to look.  And, wonder of wonders, there was not.  The kind man looked for a good 15 minutes around the floor as I apologized continuously from the neighboring doorway. 

Eventually we came up with the theory that perhaps a toy had spontaneously come to life for a few seconds in the night.  We couldn't find a toy that made the noise I had heard, but I knew of such a toy.  Colin has one; a little wind-up spindly thing that jumps up and down maniacally and looks like this:

I couldn't find it anywhere, but I knew it was there.

Eventually, Troy was satisfied that there was no animal running around his house, and he and Jen went to bed.  I felt ridiculously foolish to be sure, but knowing there was nothing under the bed gave me enough peace of mind to fall into a deep, restful slumber...

This morning as I was packing my things, there under the dress I wore yesterday, resting innocently on Cian's flame-decorated Target backpack, was the very toy I'd suspected.  I'd been right.  It gives me hollow satisfaction.  I can only hope that this incident is one that Troy and Jen will forget as quickly as it will take me to teach that toy a thing or too about disturbing people in the middle of the night in its underwear...  or was that me?

Life is full of Strawberries... and Lobsters

They're everywhere.  Cut into slices, into chunks, some whole, some with the leaves removed, remnants of days past when strawberries were eaten but not finished, in crepes, salads, shortcakes and muffins.  And the strawberries that remain to clog the fridge, some carefully stored in Ziploc baggies, others still new in their boxes; those strawberries have plans.  Plans for future salads, green and fruit; plans to be sliced and scattered over angel food cake, baked in a tart, or arrayed simply in a semicircle around a white pile of sugar.  Will they fulfill their destinies?  That, I am afraid, is solely up to me, and I feel the weight of it nagging at the back of my mind constantly along with painful memories of the countless brown, furry, too-soft strawberries in the past that have been cast into the disposal or the trash can... ah, the waste of it.

It's all made a bit worse by the fact that for the next two days I will be on a phase of my diet where I myself cannot eat strawberries.  Hence, I must devise a way to stuff strawberries into others.  No berry must go uneaten!  It will be my mission.  Too bad I have other things to do with my time or I could, and would, safely ensure that each of my strawberries would find their purpose in a human belly, all juicy and lush-red and studded with their seed gems...

OK that's enough.  You're being cut off.  You want strawberries, there are plenty at the grocery store these days as I know all too well.  Go there.  Then you too can feel your front teeth sinking down through the flesh, from red to white, the bite you've taken then floating back onto your tongue which deftly shifts it between your molars where each meeting releases a rush of sweet tartness, shining like sunlight and warm ice cubes and rose petals and...

Let's talk lobsters.  A couple of days ago I was in that same strawberry-filled grocery store, numbly pushing my cart through the aisles, shuffling slightly as I struggled to take in the meaning of each item on my list.  I was tired, in the store for the fourth time in as many days, barely keeping up with the mad bonanza of birthday parties and wild family gatherings that, with my parents in the Middle East, my sister unable to drive, and my brother and sister-in-law closeted with adorable baby triplets, have seemed to be pretty much all my responsibility this year.  I passed the tank of lobsters once early on, a sliver of my brain taking in their softly swaying antennae, realizing in some sort of mild daze that yes, those creatures in there were alive, then sweeping on towards the bread aisle.  

Some minutes later on my next pass through the seafood section, the lobsters caught my eye again, except this time they commanded a full two-thirds of my brain because they were what can only be described as running.  It was a mad rush, a lobster stampede.  They'd all spooked each other, it seemed, bolting around the perimeter of their circular tank as if their lives depended on it, the red-brown spindles of their legs churning back and forth, searching for purchase on the smooth floor of the tank or on each other.  I shouldn't say all, because there were a core few at one spot on the bottom who couldn't be bothered with the madness.  They huddled together there and got run over. 

I found myself reminded of the exhilaration of being trampled in the mosh pit at a Pantera concert.  I'd been pulled into it by a cheerful brown-haired guy who I'd never met before or after, and I'd say my four inch wood-soled platforms were most definitely the wrong shoes.  I lasted perhaps one minute before an ankle turned and I found myself in the dirt, feet over every exposed inch of me, the rush of motion and the pattering of curiously painless steps on my back.  Around and around they went as I curled up into a ball I wondered for a moment how this would end.  Then unfamiliar hands gripped me under each armpit and I was lifted effortlessly up and deposited into the watching crowd, as if set onto the side of a swimming pool.  The owner of the hands asked me if I was alright; I assured him I was and thanked him, and then was inexplicably swept into a blaze of mindless exultation, there on the edge.  I found myself doing "rock hands" for the first time, pointers and pinky fingers outstretched, arms raised.  It seemed the natural thing to do in the situation, and I lifted them into the air and roared, mouth wide, eyes wild and shining...

I resurfaced from my memories to find there was a man standing there across the tank, also watching the lobster race.  He had wondered what I was looking at and had found the lobsters as apparently riveting as I had.  The man was in his forties, overweight, wearing conservative golfing-type clothes and white sneakers.  He looked normal.  Soon after, another man joined us, a tall one, and the three of us stood there motionlessly for a moment as if we were in an aquarium, eyes glued to the angled limbs and bound claws in the tank.  It was too much for me, the strangeness of it, and with a half smile I turned my cart away and glided off to frozen foods.

Big Red

Say "Hello Wynonna."  Come on, all together now:  "Hello Wynonna!"

        Meanwhile, I just Googled Ms. Judd to verify the spelling of her first name, and found a rather interesting website:  http://www.famousfolk.com/real/names-j/jon.shtml

       As someone who has toyed with changing my name several times in the past (I have gone by Anne-Marie Hildebrandt, Anne-Marie Hildebrandt-Claus, Anne-Marie Claus, Anne-Marie O'Connor and, you guessed it, Rowan!) but was never quite able to make the transition, even when married, I find fascinating the occasionally bizarre things entertainers have changed their names to, and of course, from.  How about the scholar Benjamin Jowett who changed his name to Benjamin Jowett?  OK, obviously there's an issue there.  James Earl Jones was once Todd Jones.  I suppose James Earl does have a bit more of a ring to it.  But what I find most mystifying are examples such as actress Carolyn Jones who left behind the name of Carolyn Baker.  Now since when is Jones such an attractive, desirable name?  You know, those flashy Jones'!  MUCH better than Baker OBVIOUSLY.

       I could go on for too long about this; I love names.  But I must comment on two more.  One is talk show host Janina Stronski who changed her name to Jenny Jones.  Jenny Jones!  I can't even say it- the absurdity!  If you could change your name to anything in the world (and of course, you can) is THAT would you would choose?  And the last is Spike Jonze who was, most amusingly, Adam Spiegel.  I'll keep my mouth shut on that one too, although it does remind me of a most amusing blog I was introduced to last week at http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com.  Check it out for a good laugh!

        

Speaking of names, this afternoon our yard was invaded by a big, friendly Golden Retriever.  My boys have been in heaven, GLUED to him, which is actually kind of nice.  But my youngest was particularly disturbed about the lack of a collar; how would we know what to call the dog?  So not three minutes ago I hear the two of them running around outside calling "Hey Carlos!  Come here Carlos!"  OK, so I think it's cute they came up with a name to call the dog, but Carlos??  The randomness is overwhelming!

        So now why Wynonna (whose original name, btw, was Christine)?  Well, it's my hair.  I visited my beloved hairdresser today and made the questionable move of telling him I wanted "eye-popping" hair.  Now I didn't know what I meant by that, but he took it to mean a drastic change of color, so... here I am.  

I have never strayed far from the honey brown hair I've had since teenage-hood (before that 

it was just plain brown) so seeing myself in that chair today with a bright red halo was a bit of a shock.

  I will get used to it, I'm sure...  yeah...  well, you tell me.  What do you think??  Yes, the curls were not my idea.  As I was saying, "Hello Wynonna!"  

        OK- just one more thing.  Now my boys and I are occasionally obsessed with the Pirates of the Caribbean online multi-player game.  We each have our own pirate (mine is really hot, if I do say so myself) who fights Navy and sails the seas and plunders any non-pirate it can find.  But I just discovered a moment ago a bizarre new interest which my 4-year-old has adopted.  Apparently, when he is playing alone, HIS pirate gets tattoos.  Nate Squidskull the pirate has at least three so far that I know of:  a huge anchor on his chest, a skull tattooed on his FACE, and, I just found out, a key on his left arm.  What, may I ask, does this mean about my child??

raisins, pee, and folk

      It started out yesterday as March should be; grey and very windy but mild.  I'd woken up exhausted, head full of sand, feeling like I'd been run over by a train the night before.  (Actually my choir and I had just had a gig.)  At noon I roused myself off the couch to the grocery store for some necessities:  yogurts, orange juice, cereal, the ingredients to beef stew.  Colin and I braced ourselves against the wind as it buffeted us about on the way to the car.  I was barely holding it together by then, already feeling sorry for myself for the several trips it was going to take me to get the groceries into my kitchen, and then how long it was going to take to put them away.

      As I stood in the slim triangle between car door, car, and cart, the wind gave a particularly potent just and whipped the door shut, slamming it into the cart with a loud bang.  The cart had saved me, but I was startled into a loud scream.  I felt heads throughout the parking lot turn to me, but I was too absorbed in my misery to care.  I dutifully trundled the hideous cart back to its bay, as always seeing how far away I could stand and still make it in, a sort of grocery cart free throw.

     Colin needed a snack when we got home, of course.  Not unusual, but this time he grabbed a bag of raisins he'd picked out at the grocery store earlier.  I'm always supportive of a snack that isn't donuts or cookies, so it pleased me.

     "I want some 'grapes 'n' sunshine' please," he announced suddenly in his deliberate, still-babyish 4-year-old voice.

     For a moment I thought I hadn't heard that quite right.  "What?"

     "Grapes 'n' sunshine," he repeated patiently.

     This was still one of the weirder things I'd ever heard him utter; I needed more explanation, more confirmation.  "What do you mean?"

     He seemed slightly put out at this point that I couldn't seem to grasp this simple concept, but he launched into a long description of the process in which grapes are made into raisins:  lying out in the sun, getting brown and wrinkly, etc.

     Once I had ascertained that yes, he really was referred to raisins, I attempted to coax out of him where he'd learned this bizarrely specific information, but that was a little beyond him and he floated away. 

     Speaking of Colin, he gave me a good laugh this morning.  I was woken to the blessed announcement that he'd crawled into my bed in the night and then wet it.  I calmly ushered him into the shower and then crawled back onto the dry side of the bed.  (Is that gross?  I'll tell you in a minute why it isn't that gross.)  After he'd saturated himself in there for a good long while- he's capable of happily staying in a warm shower for at least an hour- I got up to wash his hair and body.

     Colin hates soap in his eyes, and can't quite seem to grasp yet the idea of closing them when danger nears.  After I'd sent him back under the water with a soapy head, he began immediately begging me not to wash his face.  I grunted non-commitally and towed him back out of the water by one arm, making a quick pass with the bodywash over his body and, yes, his face.

     "Aargh!" he screamed in betrayal.  Then reproachfully:  "I didn't pee on my face!"

       Then I had this strange disconnect where for a few seconds I couldn't remember how to turn off my own shower, which I use every day.  But that's neither here nor there.

       OK so this is why lying on the dry side of the bed this morning wasn't the grossest thing ever.

     Last summer the family and I went to Europe on vacation.  On the way back we had some delays in the London airport; actually they were long, infuriating delays initially due to some bizarre fist fight on the incoming flight- I kid you not.  Just before we boarded (five hours late) I grabbed a chicken sandwich from a little deli where we'd been waiting in the airport and proceeded to become violently ill in the air between London and Cincinnati.  I was paralyzed in pain all the way through the Cincinnati airport as well, where they required us to pass through security on the way out of the airport (I think I remember flinging my confiscated water bottle down at the security officer's feet in frustration; luckily they didn't press charges) and all the way through the long bus ride to our fabulous, comped-by-Delta hotel in Kentucky.  (Kentucky!) 

     This hotel was a gem.  I wish I could show you a picture of it, but I've blocked its name from my memory.  It was, however, castle-themed.  I won't go into how ridiculous it was, because it's not really relevant to the story, but basically it... was not quite the fairy tale it was trying to be. We had two lovely adjoining rooms, spacious and with en-suite bathrooms, one of which I inhabited for a good part of that evening.

     So this is the gross part.  I was starting to feel a bit better, which isn't saying much, so I would occasionally shuffle, doubled over, from the bathroom to the bed and lie down there for a while.  The bed had a strange feel to the sheets; kind of cold/wet and with a sort of a film on it.  I immediately suspected the sheets hadn't been dried all the way after being washed, perhaps hadn't even been completely rinsed, but I wasn't exactly in a position to think too hard about it.  

      After a couple of rotations between the bed and the bathroom, I started feeling well enough to just lay there for a while on my back, knees curled up to my chest, rocking gently from side to side to soothe my many aches.  In about a half an hour my suspicions that the bed was indeed wet were indisputably confirmed.  My nightgown was soaked and caked to my body.  I turned over to sniff the sheets and smelled the ever so distinctive smell of... urine!  There in my suffering, in my defenselessness, I had been marinating in the previous guest's pee!  In horror I threw myself from the bed and into the shower.  The long sequence of unfortunate events were enough, though, that at that point I could do nothing but find it amusing.  At least I'd recovered from the food poisoning, and I think I've washed off all the pee by now...  :-)

     Funny that I'm babbling on and on here and I haven't even mentioned the coolest experience I had just last night.  Sam Payne came over and sang some of his songs at my house for a bunch of people.  It was awesome; I loved his jazzy/folky style and I enjoyed the intimate, in-home setting.  There were several kids there, including mine, and I was glad to give them the experience of hearing that right there in their living room.  It reminded me a little wistfully of a time not too many years ago when my life hadn't been far from what it was last night; music was all around me all the time, and not just mine.  There were folks playing in houses together, enjoying good company, children running through, spontaneous dancing, songs sung and stories shared.  Back then it was mostly Irish music, but sometimes after gigs we'd get together to jam with other types; bluegrass, folk, jazz.  Those were times I might find again, I realized last night.  Different, yet still recognizable at their heart.  And I look forward to that, to my children knowing intimately that music is real, that it's a way of life, that it's one of the things that makes it all... worth it.

President's Day, 2008

I'm so tired I start sucking through my straw before I've put it into my drink and for a half a second wonder why nothing is coming out of it.  I sit there alone in California Pizza Kitchen after having assured LouLou that I didn't mind eating alone and wonder if people are looking at me because I'm, well, alone.  They're looking at me, that's for sure.  Is it my hair style?   Do I seem like I'm trying to look too young in my snowboarding braids, like one of those freakishly tan older women in pigtails?  (I may look older these days; I've been wondering about it lately.)  Maybe they're looking at me because I'm so hot.  Yeah. That must be it. Exhausted from a full day of snowboarding followed by an organ lesson, I am obviously oozing with attractiveness.

Actually I was thinking yesterday that I don't mind looking a little older.  I've long admired attractive middle-aged women.  I like the slightly dry look to their skin, the fine lines on their faces.  I think it's actually more appealing than that rosy, over-ripe look of youth that so many find attractive.  But that's just me, and I'm sure what I think of this subject is just revolutionizing the known world.

Ooh- they're playing Robin Thicke now.  I like this song, although something about the general hum and clatter in the restaurant cuts out all the mids so it comes out sounding like some large bird chirping over a bass line.  Perhaps I only imagine this because of the inherent birdiness of his name, but as I let my mind wander further along this avenue I'm hearing hippos on the bass, woodpeckers on the claves...

"How's everything tasting?" a waiter asks cheerily as he breezes past on the other side of the bar.  Gay! my mind trumpets as I answer him reassuringly.  A second later another young man comes prancing by in the other direction, clearly effeminate.  Hmm.  I wonder what connection California Pizza Kitchen has with gay men in Salt Lake.  It certainly doesn't extend to the all-Mexican cook staff before me.  But then I wonder if I've ever noticed a gay, fresh-off-the-boat Mexicano.  There must be plenty of them.  Perhaps it has to do 

with their culture, perhaps they hide it more than Americans do...

Earlier I sat waiting for the lady before me to finish her organ lesson.  We were in the Assembly Hall, practicing for our recital this Saturday.  There was my teacher, sitting on a lone chair in the middle of the stage, head down to avoid the bright sunlight

 piercing through an upper window.  What a great lady she is, my teacher.  Surely in her late 70's she's funny, smart, dry of humor; I love that kind of older woman.  My ears perked up suddenly to hear a much higher pitch coming out of the organ.  That's strange, I mused, and not so attractive.  In a moment, my teacher got up and rushed to the organ.  I could hear her student explaining about how it was her new, upgraded cell phone.  My teacher bustled away again, stopping to check for dust on a covered piano, adjust her

 chair before she sat down

 on it.  Then she was pulling a long hair off her skirt; it glistened in the sunlight as she waved it over the stage beside her and let it fall.  A moment later she had relaxed into her head-down position again on the chair, letting the soft notes of the pipes have their moment in the sun.