Watson I am not

One of my days off eclipses the school week, and I get to play kid chauffeur while my mother roars to work on her motorcycle. This is something she needs to do once a week, like a church service. "It's spiritual," she says. "In the mornings, you can smell the rice and bacon." This is the kind of spiritualism you can't argue with.

So in the afternoon, I drove up the coast to the little school to pick up the boys. As I passed the sewage plant, there was a man sprawled flat on his face by the side of the road, as if he had been dropped from the sky. I looked in the rear view mirror as I passed, and saw his leg lift briefly. Not dead, then. Homeless? Hit by a car? Drunk? There hadn't been any blood that I could see. I was far enough away by then that I would have had to leave the baby in the car and jog back to check on him if I pulled over, so I decided it wasn't worth getting stabbed by someone pretending to be asleep and being late to pick up the kids. A few minutes later, a cop car and an ambulance blared by. If they weren't sent specifically for the not-quite-dead man, they would probably spot him on their way by. My duty was done.

The next morning, our local officer stopped by on his patrol to chat with my co-workers. I overheard, "... fell out of a truck. Had to go to the hospital." I skidded into the room. "Where? Where?" They shrugged. "Someplace on this side." Shit. It could have been the man I saw splatted on the side of the road. Am a terrible, terrible person, and a worse detective. I specifically asked the cosmos to deliver mystery and adventure, then drove right by the body it threw at me. There have probably been feet sticking out from under bushes all over the place that I haven't even noticed, and this was an act of exasperation. Try leaving the body by the road where she can't miss it. WHERE IS SHE GOING? If one of the yard men keels over right on our door step, I accept cosmic responsibility for this.

St. Patrick's Day

In my life, I have had four really memorable meals. Nothing seasons food like hunger and exhaustion.

1990: instant rice and powdered chicken gravy. I was 10 years old, in camp at Alford Lake, and had hiked for 12 hours over Baldpate mountain in upstate Maine

I looked at a picture of Baldpate just now, and it's tiny. I remember it being a lot bigger. I had an enormous backpack, trembly child's legs, a hyperactive imagination, and no dignity or stamina. Most of the hike was on my hands and knees - miserable, complaining, and certain the birds were leading us to our deaths. By the time we reached the campsite, our limbs were ready to snap off, and that rice with gravy was the most delicious thing ever to reach my mouth. We would have eaten it raw, if the counselor hadn't had a spatula to slap our hands away from the little aluminum pot boiling over the camp fire.

2002: Thai eggplant and chicken green curry. Eaten on the living room floor, sitting on a towel, when I went into labor with Gavin.

2008: Scrambled eggs, rice, and bacon. Wolfed down between contractions in the hospital waiting room with my gown flapping open, before the nurses could find me and take it away.

2013: Jello and beef broth. Consumed while hanging over a birthing bar at a much better hospital that allowed laboring women to eat.

I should probably take up marathon running, just for the food appreciation.


So now St. Patrick's Day is beef-and-jello day. I bought two corned beef briskets and put a grasshopper pie on to set, then chased the family into the car and drove to Waikiki for the parade. Which it turned out we were actually walking in, behind a banner for the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society and in front of a man dressed like Saint Patrick. One of our members made the bold decision to come mostly naked and barefoot, wrapped around the waist with just a long piece of tartan. I plowed ahead with the stroller, trying not to imagine all the Instagram feeds I would be appearing in, right between St. Patrick and the Impractically Naked Man. The kids were given flyers for the Highland Games to pass out along the route. Twelve-year-old girls waved at Gavin. He waved back, a little uncertainly.

We met the cousins at the end of the parade, while my mother caught a ride back to fetch the car. A minute later she texted, "You have the car keys." Damn. We walked in a group back through Waikiki, Leif asking about every sprawling homeless person we stepped around. "Are they dead?" "I don't know, and I'm not going to check. Isn't that terrible? I feel bad. Move faster." We stopped at a crosswalk by the busiest stretch of road, with vans and buses whizzing by. My aunt stood at the edge of the sidewalk and asked her 6 year-old to press the crossing signal. Instead of walking behind her to press it, my cousin jumped out into the road to run around her. I screamed. Her hand shot out and yanked him back by the shoulder. A speeding bus missed him by inches.

NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO BE VIOLENTLY CREAMED IN FRONT OF ME OR MY CHILDREN ON A BIRTHDAY OR HOLIDAY OR ANY OTHER DAY.

ALL CAPS.

That child owes me a year on my life.

We headed home, ate corned beef, opened baby presents, threw the birthday girl into bed with only a bit of cake in her hair, and didn't realize until morning that we had forgotten the jello. I guess that will be the tradition.

And nobody took pictures, because I was helping with the cake. A lesson never learned.

One

New is not yet normal

It says something about my athleticism that after one day of standing and handling books, I feel as if I've been beaten all over with a bag of oranges. Gravity, my natural enemy.

The first day went very well. Keys! Circulation! New co-workers! Donut holes! I accidentally broke the donut box and had to scramble and juggle to save them all before everyone came back in the room. Some ended up in my face. I think I won.

Then I was given a cupboard. 

This is who I replaced. FFS.

I replaced the sign with one that says, "Holly's cupboard. Something is in it." Which is a bit long for a sign, but still pretty clear. It isn't like a stop sign, which needs to be very short, and not say something like, "STOPPING IS REQUIRED UNDER PENALTY OF TICKETING AND POSSIBLY EVEN DEATH".

Feeling good about the job. And myself, as a professional and good citizen. And the strengthening of my pudding muscles into springy librarian jerky. Feeling less good about the backed-up milk supply I am smuggling around in my shirt, and about my baby learning to fend off slobbery daycare babies, but we are both adjusting pretty well.

Next: fun with 6-week payroll lag.

Replaced

My mother called me as I drove home from signing employment papers. "Stop at your aunt's, she has a robot for me." What?

I came home with a used roomba. "It needs parts replaced," said my aunt. "It makes grinding, screeching noises," she did not say. "It sucks up and then spits out dirt, bird seeds, and cat-shredded cardboard all over the floor in a perfectly uniform layer," she did not say, because she does not have cats or birds.

We watched the robot bump around the room and cheered for it when it escaped from beneath the high chair and dragged socks out from under the recliner. The cats stood their ground while the robot banged into their legs and then politely backed away, spewing rubbish. By the time it docked itself, we were too entertained to care that it had trashed the house. I named it 1812 and offered to glue antennas on it, after the robot in Farscape.

1812 has been taken to the school library, where it will receive a replacement trash container and spend its life sucking up crumbs and kid droppings. 

"But you'll be moving out now that you've got a job," said my mother, "I need to replace you." 

So she drove to Costco and bought a new roomba.

WHAT. I am better than a roomba.

The cats have been spreading out all over the rug, as if I don't vacuum every day anyway. 

The kids ran around after the robot, picking up toys in its path in a way I've never been able to get them to do. FINE. 

I guess I need one. And a house to put it in. 

Penis pillow

Every time I convince myself that this type of fiber is ok to work with, my kid's lungs go all to hell. It could be vog or gross kindergarteners or the multitude of animals - but it could be the wool, and I don't want to be the cause of it. So last week Leif came down with pneumonia*, and I buried the kilt hose in my knitting drawer, cursing.

My down time is interrupted every few minutes, which is why I have projects I can pick up and put down throughout the day. Since I can't knit until I get a budget for safe yarn, I decided to dig in my fabric drawer and give Hawaiian quilting a try, since I'm in Hawaii and all. But I wanted something fun, so I made a mushroom pattern instead of a floral one. I knew this could potentially look like a pile of dicks, but I went for it.

Oh no.

So I've got some wieners to prune. 

Mushrooms aside, I have discovered that this process is absolutely perfect for me. (I may change my mind about this after spending 80 hours stitching echo lines for a 2-foot square pillow.) It's inspiring, meditative, satisfying, portable. There is a world of possibility - anything that can be cut from paper like a snowflake can be used in Hawaiian quilting, and now I want pillows and blankets for all my favorite books - snitches, mandrakes, and hipogriffs; roses and gunslinger revolvers; standing stones, heather, and daggers. In better colors than the remnants in my stash. And less wieners. I'm learning here.

*characterized by a constant wet cough accompanied by skipping, singing, and stick swordplay. He is one of those sick people you have to tape to the couch to force them to heal.

Weekending

My latest interview was in an overlarge room, too far away from the panel of interviewers to charm or alienate them with my scary bug jewelry. I stopped at Walmart on the way home, and it was a good thing this happened after the interview, because it sucked my brain out my ears and replaced it with something like a bath loofah. When I was a kid, my mother and I once stopped in the aisle to listen closely to the Christmas muzak playing over the speakers, and stared at each other in horror when we heard the actual lyrics, "Walking in a Walmart wonderlaaaand." Now those words play in a distant, grainy loop in my head while I wander in unsettled confusion from section to section, unable to remember what it was I had hoped to find, and unable to articulate what is so very, very wrong with the way the light and space and bodies are both expanding and shrinking as I move through them.

Walking in a Walmart wonderlaaaaand.

Run. Run.

So that was a mistake I am already forgetting.

Birds again

Three of the chicks have been returned to their delinquent mother on the school grounds. One of them, however, was horrified to be left in the care of what was obviously a chicken, and ran into the fourth grade classroom looking for its people. It came home in a cat carrier, with a feather duster crammed alongside pretending to be a companion. 

The chick was not fooled.

So we've spent most of the weekend outside with a chicken.

The dove is not a fan of the chick, because it climbed her and rode her like a pony. She flounced off to sunbathe, which, on a bird, looks a lot like dying. They get out in the sun, and then suddenly keel over, go limp, and sprawl  with their wings out.

People do this, too, come to it. Evidence against UFOs is the fact that they are not trawling the beaches, sweeping up limp bodies in a panic to rescuscitate them.

While this was all happening, I sewed a couple more quilt blocks.

And then I pestered my mother into writing me another story to illustrate. With anthropomorphic animals in little outfits. "Power of the SEEECRET," I hollered from downstairs. "Power of the simple REQUEEEST," she called back.

So that is all happening. And beer brewing. And meatballs. I'm a fan of weekends.

MOAR CHICKENS

These things are multiplying.

There is an irresponsible teenage hen carousing with roosters and jettisoning chicks all over the school. My mother (the school librarian) is the official homeless bird caretaker, and in her absence, the kids pile lost chicks on Gavin. In the thirty seconds it took him to walk from his class to the car after school, classmates stuffed two more chicks into his hoodie. I peeled out, leaving a wake of children running and lobbing chickens at the car.

 I am locking up the grain and barring the storage compartments.

eleventy-first anniversary

When I met Mike 17 years ago, I was looking at his bare feet while he lay napping on a dorm room floor, and had a sudden, clear, weary thought:  That's the man I'm going to marry. It was like cresting a hill and seeing that the road you still have to walk stretches on for miles and contains a few arduous uphills and some crumbling footholds on the side of a cliff. Probably worth it for the scenic bits, but exhausting and scary. Some people say that trust is everything in a relationship, and this has not been true for me. I don't have any trust left in me, but I have faith. If I am lost, Mike will come find me. If I am angry, he will bear my wrath. If I've done something stupid and fallen on my face, he will haul me up again. He has remained stubbornly beside me for 17 years, and despite the terrible things, the majority of our daily life together has been just as filled with laughter and adventure and children as I imagined for us as a lovestruck teenager. My brain still sharpens its knives at 3am, and forgiveness isn't something you can just choose to feel, but the meat and bone and blood of me loves the meat and bone and blood of him. Half our lives have mashed together into this story, we know each other as well as two people can by now. 

So last year, on the 10th anniversary of our first marriage, we went and got married again. It wasn't documented, just done quietly under a plastic trellis in front of a judge. "We had our divorce annulled," he told his mother afterward over the phone. 

This year makes 11 and 1, in government document years. So here are some things that I think of when considering my husband. 

This poem, by Ogden Nash, which makes me laugh:

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of a marriage conducted with economy
In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.
We’ll live in a dear little walk-up flat
With practically room to swing a cat
And a potted cactus to give it hauteur
And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.
We’ll eat, without undue discouragement,
Foods low in cost but high in nouragement
And quaff with pleasure, while chatting wittily,
The peculiar wine of Little Italy.
We’ll remind each other it’s smart to be thrifty
And buy our clothes for something-fifty.
We’ll bus for miles on holidays
For seats at depressing matinees,
And every Sunday we’ll have a lark
And take a walk in Central Park.
And one of these days not too remote
You’ll probably up and cut my throat.

Some romances are played out in song, but ours isn't. I keep my music to myself. If I had to pick a song about us, this one comes to mind:

You just have to plunge ahead in life and hang on to who's on the other end of your arm.

Power of the SEEECRET

I start making quilts when I'm having feelings. 

When I was 10, I made friendship bracelets for the same reason. More accurately, I used friendship bracelet techniques to make rope out of thread, which my barbies then used to rappel down cliffs and truss up Jem and the Holograms. I could have just used kitchen twine, but my characters had survival skills to hone, and all they could scavenge in my bedroom were spools of thread. Yesterday, I taught Gavin how to make bracelets, and he's been walking around with floss pinned to his jeans, weaving maniacally and tying colorful ropes around everyone. It warms my cockles.

Then I went to two more interviews. I tossed the fancy black pencil skirt over my shoulder (at home, not during the meeting) and wore my own jeans skirt, put on a scary bug necklace, drank a cup of fully leaded coffee, and told gross hobo stories. These interviews were much better. Feeling marginally more like myself.

Came home and discovered that we had acquired ANOTHER BIRD OH YAY.

And then I fell in love with it. Stupid adorable fluffy chickens.

Three more interviews, then tenterhooks while I wait to find out if any of them took.