Category Archives: Family

June 3, 2013 · 0:00

It’s A Cookbook!

You probably don’t know this, but at one time I was a terrific cook.  And I have the books to prove it.  I’ve bought cookbooks wherever I’ve gone — I have them from all over Europe, although following the recipes in another language and using a different measuring system can be a bit of a challenge.

I even have one with recipes from Bill and Hillary Clinton and other political notables.  It’s called the Congressional Cookbook, and it came out in the late 1980s.  It has recipes from governors, congressmen and senators and their wives.   Hillary’s chicken, by the way, is awesome and easy.  She is a damn smart lady.

A small sample

A small sample

These days, I don’t cook as much as I used to.  And so my cookbooks are mostly gathering dust instead of flour.

But today I learned that in spite of the fact that I don’t cook so much any more, there will soon be another book I’ll need to add to my collection.

You see, Ann Romney has penned a Cookbook called The Romney Family Table.

Yup, You just can't get away from Ann. Cover photo courtesy of Politico.com

Yup, You just can’t get away from Ann. Cover photo courtesy of Politico.com

 

In it, I’m sure she’ll tell us all how “To Serve the 47 Percent – a la Twilight Zone.”  Yum.

Because folks like Ann and Mitt wouldn’t want to eat with the 47 percent, now, would they?

{My thanks to The Last Of The Millenniums who first alerted me to this important news.  Well, sort of.  I think I’d sleep better not knowing about Ann’s plans for the future, but still.]

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Filed under Campaigning, Elections, Family, Humor

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June 1, 2013 · 0:00

A Sticky Wicket

Would you behave yourself better if you knew that when you didn’t you’d be found out and there’d be no mistaking that it was you who perpetrated the “crime”?  That someone could actually finger you in the misdeed?  If the crime had your face all over it?

Just about 30 years ago when I was so very sick with colitis-that-was-really-Crohn’s, I was also very poor.  I had some big bills that had materialized as the result of the fact that I would buy stereo equipment and televisions when I got depressed.  Oh, and there were hospital and doctor bills.  And rent and food.  Maybe you’ve had your share?

It was the last day of the month, and I had to go across the street to the bank to check my bank balance to see if my rent check would clear.  On occasion it, ummmm, didn’t.  (It was my landlady’s fault though – the money was always in the bank when I wrote the check.  She should have cashed it right away, right?  You’re with me on that one, right?)

Anyway, when I got to the bank machine, it looked like this:

Would You Like To Make Another Transaction?

Would You Like To Make Another Transaction?

The previous customer, whom I didn’t see, had left their card behind.  Their pin number was still registered with the machine.  All I had to do was press “Yes” and I could have made another transaction.  Helped myself to some bonus bucks.

Now I am basically an honest person.  I have in my lifetime told a few lies – OK, so some were whoppers.  But I don’t do that anymore.

And when I was a kid I did steal a troll doll.  I still don’t know how I didn’t get caught – I stuck it under my shirt and was the only pregnant 8-year-old in the store.  I haven’t stolen a troll since.  I haven’t been pregnant either, but that’s a different story.

I will not, however, fess up to having maimed or murdered anyone, unless you count doing so with my razor-sharp wit.  Still, I am not perfect.

Anyway, when I saw that screen in the bank, when I actually knew that my rent check was likely to bounce, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to buy food, well, I was tempted.  I stood and stared at it for the longest time.  I felt my heart race.  I felt sweat on the back of my neck.  I heard that damn devil on my left shoulder talking to me.

What's a poor girl like me to do?

What’s a poor girl like me to do?

I reached towards the buttons and pressed:

Return Card

And I walked into the bank and handed the person’s ATM card to the nearest teller.

Of course it was the right thing to do.  And, frankly, I was especially proud of myself because I really was broke.  I could have used a windfall at that moment.

It would have been great!

It would have been great!

Of course, had I succumbed to temptation, I would have gotten an altogether different card.

The way my luck was goin' anyway.

The way my luck was goin’ anyway.

That was when they were just starting to put cameras at ATMs, and the branch I was at had one. I didn’t know that, though.  So I felt honest, sanctimonious and lucky all at the same time.  And when you’re broke and sick, well, honest, sanctimonious and lucky are as good as life gets.

I don’t think stealing money is something that people (even me) should be able to get away with.  But there are many lesser crimes that, well, maybe aren’t so bad.  That maybe, we should let slide.  That perhaps, the faces of the perpetrators of these lesser crimes are ones we don’t really need to see.

One of the little crimes that drives me crazy is people who throw chewed chewing gum on the ground.  It’s unsanitary.  It’s sticky.  Worst of all, it’s gonna end up on my shoe.

I don’t want to know whose mouth that wad came from.  Because it would be hard to not slap them for being so gross.  And Mom taught me not to hit.

But now, thanks to modern DNA technology, we can now see the faces of the culprits who transformed that gum from a dry, powdery stick into a piece of ABC gum, spit it out and let me step on it.  (For those of you without siblings, that’s ‘Already Been Chewed’ gum.)

Huh?

Yes, courtesy of the New York Times, I have this minty morsel to share with you:

While staring at the wall of her therapist’s office, the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg noticed a strand of hair stuck in a hanging print. Walking home, she noticed that the subways and sidewalks were littered with genetic material on things like chewing gum and cigarette butts, some still moist with saliva. Curious about what she could learn, Ms. Dewey-Hagborg began to extract and sequence DNA from these discarded materials. Then — and here it gets a little eerie — she began to make computer models of their owners’ faces, using genetic clues to print 3-D masks that she concedes “might look more like a possible cousin than a spitting image.” Hanging these portraits along with the original samples, she says, is “a provocation designed to spur a cultural dialogue about genetic surveillance.”

Ewwww.  Click on the links, it gets ewwww-ier.  Here’s one perp:

Now this is just speculation on my part, but perhaps picking up wet ABC gum and cigarette butts is what Ms. Dewey-Hagborg should be talking to her therapist about.  Personally, I would make it a priority.

I was tempted to skip posting about this, but then I try not to give in to temptation.

These are all Google images. Except the last one.  That’s the artist’s rendition from her website, Stranger Visions.

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Conspicuous consumption, Criminal Activity, Family, Humor, Law, Mental Health, Stupidity, Technology

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May 10, 2013 · 0:00

Untarnished

No matter how old we are, when we’re sick we want Mom.  When we hurt physically, that’s who we call out for.  When we have been wounded emotionally, we want her more than anything.

Several of my bloggin’ buddies asked me to repost this piece for Mother’s Day.  I am delighted to grant those requests.  Because one of the best things about writing is that it lets you bring back folks you miss, hold them again, and let them know that you love them.

I love you, Mom.  And thanks for being such a nut.

*     *     *

My Silver Lining

Thursday, November 22, is Thanksgiving in the U.S.  It is also the 30th anniversary of the surgery I had for what was then thought to be severe ulcerative colitis.  It was a difficult time for me, but one for which I will be thankful for on Thanksgiving and really every day.  Yes, I got my health back as a result of the surgery, but that wasn’t the best part.

The most important part, the silver lining, was that I got to know my Mom, and it started a close relationship that lasted for the rest of her life and that I will feel grateful for for the rest of mine.

Mom was the sweetest woman on the planet.  My friends adored her.  Our house was always open to hoards of kids.  We lived near the beach, and it was convenient for everybody to just hang at our house.  But it was more than that. For years dozens of teens used our house as their home away from home.  There was always room, always plenty to eat, always a welcome.  No one was ever turned away, and the answer to “can So-And-So stay the night” (or “the weekend” or in some cases “the summer”) was always “sure.”

But we weren’t close, Mom and I.  I was Daddy’s girl from the start.  Mom, well, I loved her.  I even liked her, mostly.  It’s just that there wasn’t a whole lot about Mom to make me respect her.  She was completely helpless, you see.  Hopelessly so.  I can’t stand that and never have been able to deal with dependent people.  And “helpless”?  That was Mom in a nutshell.

She didn’t drive.  She didn’t shop without Dad.  She didn’t go for a walk alone.  She didn’t try to take control of family problems and help figure out how to solve them.  She waited for my dad to get home to reprimand, make a decision, to blow her nose, or so it seemed.  She was utterly and totally dependent upon my Dad.  It was incredibly annoying to this girl growing up in the late sixties and seventies during one of the strongest pushes for equal rights for women.  My friends’ mothers were out protesting the Vietnam War.  Mine didn’t even vote.  They burned their bras; Mom ironed hers.  They voiced their opinions ever more loudly.  Mom looked to Dad to indicate which way was up.

After I left home and became more self-sufficient, my irritation at Mom’s inability to do anything without Dad’s help, grew.

So when Mom announced, just weeks before I was to have radical, difficult surgery, that she was going to come to help, well, I panicked.  She was going to help me?  Yeah right.  Her announcement sent me into apoplexy.  It was the worse possible news heaped on a whole ream of really shitty news.  Who the hell was going to help her?

I lived with my roommate, Keily, and my 120 lb. alcoholic German Shepherd, Goliath, in a tiny Washington, DC, townhouse, in a not terribly safe area.  I was sure that Mom would get mugged — she’d make an easy target.  I feared that she would let the dog out and they would both die.  I drove a battered and temperamental VW Bug with a stick shift that Mom didn’t know how to use.  And of course, I wasn’t going to be able to help her because I was going to be recovering from having my guts totally ripped open and reorganized.

I couldn’t believe she would do this to me.

At the same time I couldn’t hurt her feelings and tell her that I didn’t want her.  Nope.  I could never have done that.  Not if my life depended on it.  Which of course, it might.

But once she dropped that bomb, I stopped worrying about the surgery, about the recovery, about everything except how I would take care of my caretaker.  Thankfully, my brother Fred came to help too.  He could drive my car; he could help with Mom for the week he took off from work.  My roommate, Keily, was a star, too.  (That’s a whole different story.)  But Mom came for what was a very long recovery, 2-1/2 months, so felt like I’d be pretty much on my own in taking care of her.

It wasn’t long after she arrived before I realized that Mom without Dad was a different person.  Dad loved the caretaker role, and she was happy to let him play it.  Without Dad, Mom had opinions on stuff, could make decisions and could give savvy and sage advice.  I decided quickly that maybe she and I were related after all.

And as soon as we got to the hospital, I was incredibly glad she was there.  I was admitted and headed up to my room, sending Mom and Fred to get settled in their hotel.  It was about dinnertime, which didn’t matter to me; I’d been on a clear liquid diet for about a week.  And while I was starving, I knew I couldn’t eat.  I had my instructions from my doctor:

(1) Do not eat;

(2) Continue taking your medicines just like you are now;

(3) Show up to the hospital.

Always pay attention to the details when your guts are on the line.

Now Hopkins is one of the best hospitals in the country and it was also one of only two places in the country where the operation I was to have could be performed.  The surgery was brand, spankin’ new – just a smidge beyond experimental.  It was dangerous.  It was highly specialized.   My doctors were to take out my large intestine, rearrange what was left of my plumbing so that things worked normally, and close me up.  Two surgeries were involved – they had to give me a colostomy (ewwww – a bag) in between the two surgeries while my innards healed.  Only 100 of these surgeries had been done in the world.  I was my surgeon’s 7th.  I was scared shitless which is saying a whole lot for a girl with bowel trouble.

But when I got to the hospital, everything went wrong.  They tried to insist I eat; they tried to give me the wrong medicine; they forgot about me and left me hanging out in my room where I fell asleep for several hours before someone wondered who I was.  The grand finale came when two nurses wheeled in an EKG machine, hooked me up and turned it on – and the machine started smoking.   The nurses, trying valiantly not to laugh, had to quickly unplug it and get it out of there.

“MOM!!!!”

I called her at her hotel in a complete panic, hysterical.

“I am not going to have this surgery.  What kind of a hospital is this?  They can’t even get an EKG machine to work.  It was smoking Mom, SMOKING!!!!  I’m not.  I’m not. I’m not.”

How is it that Moms know just how to calm down the most hysterical daughter?  I was and she did.  And she didn’t need Dad one little bit.  Yup, she calmed me down, and then, I heard later, called the nurses’ desk and chewed them out royally.  I’m pretty sure that was the first time she’d ever chewed anyone out.  But she wasn’t going to let anybody or anything upset her daughter or get in the way of the surgery that her daughter desperately needed.  And whatever she said worked.  Nothing else got screwed up.  They paid attention to her daughter.

In fact, Helpless Mom became SuperMom.  She corralled doctors when they didn’t come in a timely manner, she sweet-talked most of the nurses and they seemed to come around more and more often as they laughed and joked with Mom.  She was on a first name basis with all the residents and interns, knew if they were married, where they were from.  They got a little bit of mothering whenever they came into the room, and she charmed the lot of them.

She was always full of laughter, encouragement and fun.  Except when her sixth sense told her that I was feeling sorry for myself; then she’d tell me to stop sniveling.  Sometimes I needed that.

Back at home, she was great too.  She found the grocery store and walked to and from, lugging bags of food.  She fed me and Keily, gave beer to the dog, helped me get upstairs and downstairs.  Helped me do many things that were totally disgusting.  She helped me be independent again.  We laughed our way through Christmas together and then my birthday in January.  We laughed for two months, barely coming up for air.  We talked a whole lot, too, about everything.  We became fast friends.

There is one incident though, that made me realize that I’d never really known her before.  Could this crazy woman really be my Mom?

We’d driven my VW to Baltimore for a pre-surgical checkup before the 2nd surgery, scheduled for the 9th of February.  It was late January, and there were several inches of snow on the ground.  On the way back home, the VW died in the center lane of a busy highway.  I managed to coast to the side of the road, where the bug sighed once and died.  Shit.  I was still not at my best, and the promise of a long snowy walk was not a pleasant one for either Mom or me.

But a blue Honda Civic two-door driven by a big burly guy pulled up along the roadside next to us.  He rolled down the window and asked if we needed a lift.  I was about to explain that my car had just died and would he please call a tow truck, when, well, Mom jumped into the back seat! I stood there with my mouth flapping. Because I could hear her voice from my childhood talking in the back of my head:

NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GET INTO A CAR WITH A STRANGE MAN.

THEY ARE ALL RAPISTS

But there she was, the woman who taught me never, ever, to get into a car with a rapist — she was in the back seat of a stranger/potential rapist’s car.  WTF?????  What the hell was she doing?

I didn’t know what else to do, so I got into the front seat.  And there on the floor was something else that shocked me:  A  teddy bear with a green t-shirt that said “I’m Going To Steal Your Love.”

“Wonderful,” I thought, “a rapist with a sense of humor.”

As it turned out, the guy wasn’t a rapist!  He took us to a reputable garage where they agreed to tow and fix my damn car.

But the adventure wasn’t over yet — we still needed to get home.  The hotel across from the garage had a shuttle bus that went to BWI Airport.  From there, we were told, there was another shuttle bus that could get us back to DC.  It sounded perfect.

Perfect except for the fact that we had hardly any money left  The shuttle to DC only took cash.  No credit cards.  No beads.  No chickens.  Cash.  Shit.

We didn’t have enough for the fare, and couldn’t have come up with any more money.  But that didn’t stop Mom.

She walked up to the shuttle driver and chatted her up.

“Do you think you can let us both on for $16.50?”

“Sorry M’am, the adult fare is $10.”

“What’s the child’s fee?  I mean, after all, she’s my little girl.”

The driver let us both on, shaking her head and smiling at Mom.  Feeling like she’d done a good deed (she had).

Mom was there for my second operation, and then she headed home with Dad who had come up for it.  When he arrived, Mom didn’t just let Dad do everything as she always had before.  She showed him around — showed him her turf.  She had realized that she really liked feeling in charge, and doing things on her own, for herself and for me.

For the rest of Mom’s life, she and I had a whole different relationship.  I had always loved her, always liked her.  But her care for me, and her resourcefulness and sense of duty and just plain fun let me develop a respect for her I’d never had.

I’ve always felt lucky in a way to have had these health problems.  Because they gave me my Mom.  I would never have known her, never have laughed with her so very much.  I wouldn’t have heard the stories of her life, told with love and humor, the way she did everything.

*     *     *

On Mother’s Day, I will raise a special toast to Mom, my SuperMom.

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Filed under Bloggin' Buddies, Childhood Traumas, Dogs, Family, Health and Medicine, Holidays, Humor

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April 22, 2013 · 0:00

Earth Day/Birthday — The Recycled Edition

Today, April 22, is Earth Day!  It’s the 43nd Anniversary of the very first Earth Day.  Here for Angie of Childhood Relived (because I am her primary new source) is Walter Cronkite’s report on the first Earth Day, 1970:

It would also be my late sister Judy’s 61th birthday.

Whoever made the decision to turn Judy’s birthday into Earth Day chose wisely.  Judy was a born environmentalist and recycler.

On the first Earth Day, Judy was a new, very young mother who believed in saving the planet.  She was the first “environmentalist” I ever knew personally, and well, I thought she was nuts.  There was a recycling bin in her kitchen for as long as I can remember.  And this was back when recycling took effort.  She believed in gardens, not garbage, and she made life bloom wherever she was.

“I’ve got kids,” she’d say.  “It’s their planet too!”  

But years later, Judy took recycling to a whole different level when she helped people recycle themselves.  In the 1990s, Jude, who was then living in Florida, began working with the Homeless, assisting at shelters.   Then she actively began trying to help homeless vets find food, shelter and work — to enable them to jumpstart their lives.

When she died in early 2000, the American Legion awarded her honorary membership for her services to homeless vets.  A homeless shelter was named in her  honor.  So she’s still doing good works, my sister is.  That would make her wildly happy.

Jude also gave me the Beatles.  So it is very appropriate that they wrote a song for her.

You see, the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, it was MY turn to choose what we were going to watch.  And we were going to watch the second part of The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh starring Patrick McGoohan on the Wonderful Wide World of Disney.  My four (all older and MUCH cooler) siblings were furious with me.  But I was quite insistent.  You might even say that I threw a Class I temper tantrum over it, but I wouldn’t admit to that.  But hey, I was seven.  And it was my turn to choose.  Fair is fair, especially in a big family with only one TV.

Somehow, Judy talked me out of my turn.  She was always very persuasive.  Thanks Jude.

Hey Jude, Happy Earth Day-Birthday.

*     *     *

If this looks/sounds familiar, it’s because I recycled this post from last year.  Because you should never use fresh when you can reuse something already written.  And you can never get enough of “Hey Jude.”

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Filed under Family, Global Warming, History, Holidays, Humor, Music

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April 8, 2013 · 0:00

Why I’ll Never Murder My Husband

If you should hear that I’ve been arrested for killing my husband, don’t believe it for an instant.

It’s not that there aren’t moments when,  in spite of being a most devoted spouse, that I’d like to to bump him off.  There are.

Baseball season comes to mind, for example.  Although if John dies of boredom from the constant droning of baseball announcers, I don’t think it constitutes murder.

And music differences might send me over the edge.  Some day, I might just need to listen to Linda Ronstadt without someone asking me to change the music.

So why shouldn’t you believe I’d murder him?

John does our taxes every year.  He has been doing them since we got married.  Before that, I filed a 1040EZ form.  I plan to die first just so I never have to do them.

Google Image

Google Image

John spent the weekend tearing out his hair, scratching his head and swearing.  Me?  I went out to lunch and read blogs.

Life is good.

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