People in black came. People in Captain Morgan t-shirts, cut-off jeans and flip flops came. They stood outside the funeral home in circles smoking. The line inside to see the now plastic boy was long. Others drove people to the site where a cross was already memorializing the place on the side of the road.
I love you too. I won’t be able to email for a while. We’re moving to a different base. Tell Julian to brush his teeth.
I ran over you
this morning, squirrel
with my car.
I saw you,
gray, streaking, flash
below the belly,
between the tires.
I heard a thwack
and tumble.
I saw you
in the rearview mirror
twisting and riving,
trying to
get up and scurry
off the road.
But you couldn’t.
How could you
forgive me
when I left you
to suffer?
Jumble Story
8. someone feels like giving up; 7. a 93 year-old woman; 4. an expensive restaurant; 4. after a big meal
Gladys Reginald sipped her water as quietly as she could. She liked to take big sips, although it wouldn’t do to gulp. There was a big sip that came before a gulp that she had mastered in her 93 years, but the ice cubes in her water class were being entirely uncooperative. She was already very unsatisfied.
She looked at the empty seat across from her. Today Gladys was 93 years old and she had decided to treat herself to an expensive lunch at the only French restaurant in town, La Fromage Vert. It was posh and modern. The ceilings had fo-tin plates on them and the lighting was purple tinted. She felt out of place. She thought it would be a place where she would see other mature people but she saw no one over the age of 40 in the dining room.
Her waiter wasn’t more than 20, probably a college student trying to make money for booze and joints. She knew. She could tell his brown hair rebelled against the neatness he had combed it into and she noticed the hole in his ear. She imagined the vulgar tattoos under his clothes and cleared her throat.
She looked down at the menu and was horrified–not that everything was in French–that everything was so small. She couldn’t read the appetizers or main courses, or if they had an AARP discount. And she didn’t want to take out her glasses.
She had gone out for lunch to feel young and the exact opposite feeling occurred. On her 93rd birthday, Gladys had never felt older and she was surprised at how much that bothered her. She had never felt old. She had always joked with her friends who were, for the most part, gone now that she was 60 years young…79 years young…85 years young. When she turned 90, she had a big celebration and had even gotten in the paper. Now all her friends were either buried or in nursing homes with dementia. And as she sipped her water she realized, at 93 years old, the next time she would be in the paper was when she was dead.
She almost didn’t hear the waiter.
“What did you say?”
“Are you ready to order, ma’am?”
“What are your specials?”
“Well, we have…”
“I’ll have that,” she snapped and handed him the menu before she had time to wonder what she just ordered and if she even liked it.
He left. She sat for five minutes staring out the window. When the waiter returned he set down a crusty mini baguette with a long serrated knife and a side salad in front of her.
She automatically placed the cloth napkin in her lap and started eating the salad until she crunched down and simultaneously felt and heard a crack in her mouth. She spit out the half mashed salad and saw a dark brown walnut on her napkin. She rubbed her jaw and right before she remembered where she was thought of taking out her dentures to investigate the damage. She didn’t feel any loose pieces in her mouth but she could have spit them out. She knew something had broken.
She looked up and around at the other tables but no one had noticed her spit. She was grateful. She pushed the salad away and sat waiting for the main course. She had gotten used to dining alone. It didn’t bother her anymore. She used to bring books or magazines or reader’s digest with her to make herself look busy but she had long ago stopped doing that. She had realized people didn’t notice her and she was fine with that. She didn’t want any attention. She knew that usually most attention from strangers was negative attention and could lead to unpleasant experiences. The waiter came to the table and set before a plate he proudly pronounced as: “Pates au Fruits de Mer.” She looked at it and vaguely nodded her head at him. He left. She sat staring at the food a long time.
The waiter stared at the woman across the room. He rolled his eyes. Lots of people come in here who order things that sound cool but they really don’t like. He always thought they were rather foolish. He approached her.
“Can I do something for you? Is everything to you satisfaction?” he asked. She stared at her meal.
“It’s my birthday,” she whispered. The waiter had a grandmother of his own. He replied, “Oh, I’ll be back.”
Gladys wondered why she even bothered anymore. Her husband was dead 28 years. Her children had grandchildren and didn’t need her. When she gave them mints from her purse she could tell they would rather have a check. They were ready for her to be gone.
A interruption came to her thoughts in the form of a loud announcement, ”May we have your attention please…please help us celebrate the birthday of…what did you say your name was?” The waiter was holding a piece of tiramisu with a single candle burning. He leaned down over her, his ear seconds from her mouth. She gulped her name into his ear and heard him shout, “Gladys.” There was some reserved applause and some smiles from the other diners.
Then to Gladys’s mortification the entire staff began singing some generic happy birthday song and clapping to the rhythm in french! When the song was over she realized painfully that now she was expected to blow out the candle. She was supposed to be grateful to this boy who had taken her bewilderment and saw it as desperation to be acknowledged and celebrated.
She sat at her small table, her meal still unconsumed, one glass of wine and an empty chair across from her, the center of eyes, staring into the tiny flame, everyone’s expectations waiting to be gratified. This was worse than if they had seen her spit. Then she would have just been an old lady with bad manners. Now she was an old lady celebrating her birthday alone.
What would happen after she blew the candle? People would go back to eating. And she would have to eat this piece of dessert, alone, take her leftover home in a box, to a refrigerator, to be eaten by no one.
Gladys looked up at the waiter. He looked at her and nodded.
She decided it wasn’t worth fighting for anymore. She turned toward the candle, melted wax dripping on top of the delicate cake and puffed the light out.
feather
lively, gracefully
hoping, breaking, crashing,
going higher than ceiling fan
floatish, sheepish, frozenish
free fall
MEEP!
Last year in the fall, I can’t remember precisely when, lady bugs invaded my house, or fake lady bugs, I don’t know which. All fall and winter and spring I was sucking them up into my vacuum hose. Then they disappeared in the summer and I haven’t seen them since. I was thinking I was safe. I was seriously feeling a sense of security because they haven’t appeared, until today. Saturday October 23rd, 2010 was D-day for ladybugs to once again invade my house. I spent the morning folding laundry, cleaning bathrooms, sweeping and vacuuming. Around 10:30 I looked up from washing the toilet and on the bathroom window were a dozen ladybugs. I put the toilet brush down and ran to our bedroom. Another dozen were wandering around the glass on that window too. Every window pane told the same story. I took the trash out and all around my house was a frezie of activity. Hundreds of ladybugs were swarming around the white aluminum siding and circling the window looking for a way into my hundred year old house. They would bump around and then land, their black wings folding under the red spotted shell, settling themselves in for the rest of the year and half of next. I’ve only had 4 months without them and now I will be shaking them out of my curtains onto the floor so that my vacuum hose doesn’t suck my curtains up with them. In my main bathroom I have two sets of curtains. I bought some white gauzy curtains and was satisfied until it was pointed out to me that at night that curtain wasn’t a strong barrier to the outside world so an ivory curtain also hangs in front of the window. Getting the ladybugs eradicated from that window is a lot of work.
Of course I could just not even bother. Why do they bug me so? Why can’t we co-exist? Honestly, somedays I don’t mind sharing my windows and walls with them. And somedays I just want a bug free house.
I recently discovered that I have a fascination with ear wax. My four-year old has had 2 ear infections in his short life so far. The first one brought us to the doctor where a nurse flushed his ears out. It was a painful process. Julian did not like it one little bit. He is usually not a complainer, but he was crying and trying to wiggle out of our hands. After she squirted his ears full of water three times, huge gobs of ear wax came out. The nurse called them “ear potatoes.” I’d call them ear snot. They were huge. I was amazed that something like that could even fit in a person’s ear, and there were several pieces besides! Gnarly is the best word for them.
Periodically, I use an otoscope that my husband has from his army medic days and take a look in Julian’s ears at the wax gobs building up in there. Recently Julian started swim lessons and being in the water so regularly has been softening and flushing pieces of ear wax out which feeds my desire.
I don’t just like looking at ear wax. If I was a professional who wasn’t afraid of puncturing my son’s ear drum, I would proceed to eradicate those chunks of wax from his ears. Not to keep him healthy or to prevent future ear infections. No. Purely for the selfish reason to get a better look.
I don’t understand this fascination but I’ve come to realize that this is something that I do really get something out of. I think this is connected with my scab picking manerism. I recently googled ear wax images and just surfed through the myriad pictures that surfaced. And let me tell you there aren’t nearly enough pictures of ear wax visible on the internet.
In Shrek when he pulls his ear wax out of his ear and makes it a candle to light his dinner table in the opening sequence…in that moment, I wish it wasn’t a cartoon but live-action, a real person/ogre pulling real ear wax out of his ear. If I were shrunk in Honey I Shrunk the Kids, I would travel down the ear canal and explore the stalactites and stalagmites of human ear wax. I would be sad if it were too heavy to push out of the ear, but if I were small enough to fit in an ear, wax would probably be too heavy for me to do much about. I wonder if there is a Magic School Bus book, or cartoon that can further feed my fascination.
Every year they do this to me. I stay up nights, wake up early, lie in bed only pretending to be asleep trying to figure out how to satisfy sophomores. Freshmen are new and easy…but something happens when they become sophomores that makes it impossible to design any lesson that will be regarded as fun, worthwhile, or engaging. My freshman curriculum has changed little in the almost 4 years I’ve been teaching. We read short stories, and some big classics (Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odyssey). The order has changed, the assignments, the activities have varied, but the content has stayed pretty much consistent.
But the sophomore curriculum stays unsatisfying year after year. I did Julius Caesar the first two years with limited success. Then I did The Tempest the next two years with the same limited success. Now I’m contemplating doing Midsummer’s Night Dream and wondering how that would pan out. Poetry has never been their cup of tea, nor the research project. And Literature Circles…forget about it. If a short story is science fiction, I hear, “Why do we always read about things that are unreal?” If a short story is about high school, or history, I hear other complaints. If they get to choose what they read…they get mad too. I just don’t know how to make them happy happy happy and I don’t seem to be able to just give up trying. I wish I could discover the secret. The problem is its hard for me to relate. My sophomore year in high school was the best year. I had the best teachers. It was the year that decided in me that I wanted to teach high school and not elementary school and here ten years later sophomores are driving me to my wits end….I always feel completely incompetent with them and like jello in the hands of my 4-year-old squeezed out of shape and macerated, pressed into oblivion by his grubby little fingers until chipper jiggles are replaced by slurping green slush.
When I was 9? 10? I wrote a secret letter to myself that I wasn’t allowed to open until I was sixteen. I sealed it with scotch tape and put it in the top draw of my desk. What was so secret about it you may ask? What was so secret even from myself who had actually written the letter? Well… I wrote with my eyes closed, so I didn’t know what it said, and I wrote it with my right hand! I am left-handed! Craziness! Top Secret! Very important stuff! I remember writing in my room right before bed time. I might have been in pajamas or perhaps my mom was pestering me to get into them. My mom was in the bathroom, my brother was getting ready for bed too. I was sitting at my desk under the pink plaid curtains covering the darkness outside. I took a normal piece of notebook paper out and wrote a message to myself in a foreign hand. I think I wrote something like: “This is Christine Taylor’s handwriting of her right hand” and the date. I wrote it in pencil. I immediately turned it over. I folded it in a special triangular fashion. I made an envelope out of another sheet of notebook paper and I put the evidence in. I sealed it and it stayed in my desk for a long time. What so possessed me to do this? I have no idea. Periodically when cleaning I would see it and think about it and wonder what my foreign hand writing looked like. Was it intelligible? Was it big? Was it in a straight line? Was it the same as my left handed handwriting? Could I do some unimaginable task and write beautifully with both hands? I would think about opening it. But I always over came the temptation. I don’t remember when I opened it. Strangely enough, when I reached the age of 16, it wasn’t that important. My right-handed hand writing sucks. I might still have the letter. It might be in my parents’ attic. But I probably threw it away. Perhaps when I was 9?10? my right hand possessed supernatural powers. I guess we’ll never know.
