Mums the Word

Okay, so if you’re not familiar with Texas, you probably won’t get this. Trust me, I didn’t get it either until recently. It’s about a common custom here in the lone star state and, if I was interested enough, I might explore its origins. But I’m not… interested. Just caught up.

The first time I learned of it was when my daughter was in high school and was actually going to a homecoming dance. I say “actually” because my daughter in high school was much like her mother in high school - completely ambivalent when it came to the popular social gatherings like dances, glee clubs, sleepovers . . . neither of us gave a flip about such things. But on this particular occasion, my daughter was going and I had driven her there and was dropping her off.

“What the heck is hanging off all those girls?” I asked, watching a herd of teenagers cross the parking lot, headed for the school gymnasium. Not only were they dressed in Roper style jeans, cowboy shirts and boots (that particular dance happened to fall during the rodeo), but several of them sported massive arrangements that swung from their overly proportioned chests. From my vantage point, they looked like corsages on steroids. While a few were more delicate and modest, most were ornate to the point of being gaudy. I saw a full sized teddy bear glued to the center of an artificial flower and from it hung a multitude of streamers, ribbons, and bells. ‘Is that actually a cow bell?’ I wondered. Most of them centered around the school mascot - a fluffy stuffed eagle crammed into the middle of the flower. But the dangling mass of jiggling bobbles remained the same. Some were so large they had to be worn around the neck like a tie, suspended by a thick, decorative cord.

“Oh those are mums, mom.”

“What do they do?” I asked.

“They just hang there. The girls wear them to school on homecoming day and then to the dance.”

“Why?”

“It shows they have a date to the dance.”

‘Like a label?’ I wondered. A huge, heavy, dangling label. I couldn’t help but wonder what it said about all the mumless girls like my daughter. Did it scream wallflower like some stamp of disapproval? Not that my daughter gave a flip about that either. We gave each other a smirk and a hug and I told her to have a good time before I drove home thinking what a silly tradition was all this mumery.

Fast forward about ten years and you’ll get to this time last year when my son was a freshman at his sister’s alma mater. However (and isn’t there always a however?), unlike his sister, my son loved the social aspect of high school and couldn’t wait for the homecoming dance. He’d asked a little friend of his and I was tickled for him. Then, about a week before the dance, some of the other moms were talking about the mums they made for their son’s dates. ‘What?’ I thought, feeling a rush of panic spread from my gut up to my face. Was I supposed to make a mum?! I asked my son when he got home that day and he said his friend would be ‘okay’ without one. But I sensed a hint of dejection in his answer.

‘Okay? Just okay,’ I thought. What did that mean? I vacillated for days until finally I talked to some of the moms at the yoga center. They all gave me the same answer and yet still I clung fiercely to my denial – ‘it’s a silly tradition,’ I thought, ‘one we don’t need to feed.’ Nevertheless, from the parking lot, I picked up my cell and called a good friend who’d already gotten her two teenage girls through high school (and countless mums, I assume).

“Oh Linda, it’s a huge deal,” she told me and the emphasis was hers not mine. “His friend will be the only girl there with a date and no mum. In fact even girls without dates are starting to make their own mums because it’s such a loved tradition and everyone wants one as a memento.”

‘Oh good God!’ I thought. I’m about to commit a Texas-mom faux pas over something I think is ridiculous. But, regardless of how I felt about the tradition, it was my son’s reputation we were talking about here. Thankfully for me, there was a flower shop in the same strip as the yoga center and I popped myself in, asking about mums.

“Your lucky!” the florist said, “we happen to have one left.” And she showed me the gaudy, dangling thing strung with ribbons and garland and artificial everything. It was huge! And so was the price. I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t about to pay that much for something the girl herself would have been ‘okay’ without! It probably cost more than her jeans and cowboy boots combined! (Actually, they no longer had homecoming during the rodeo so the girls were back to wearing dresses.)

“So what are my options?” I asked and the florist told me about a grocery store that sold pre-made mums.

“But it won’t be a custom job like this one,” she reminded me, holding the monolith up to her chest so I could get the full effect of her handiwork.

“I think that’s okay,” I said and I hopped into my car and headed toward the nearest Krogers. The florist had been right, there were plenty left there. And the price was only about half as much as she’d wanted for mum-the-gargantuan. But, it was obvious they were mass produced, not unique in the slightest and not nearly as creative as the one I’d just been introduced to.
‘I can do better than this,” I thought, ‘and probably for half the cost.’ And so it was that I spent the remaining two days before homecoming visiting all the Michaels and Hobby-Lobby stores in my locale, desperately searching for mum paraphernalia. The selection was scant this late in the game (or close to the game as was the case). There were no fuzzy eagles left at all so I had to find something else to stuff into the middle of the thing. And when it came time to find gold letters to spell out the happy couple’s names, the only ones left were Qs, Zs and Xs. I ended up buying gold lame paper and using my Cricut cutting device to create my own lettering. Then I ran the letters through my sticker maker to get the gummy surface on the back (yes, I scrapbook too).

While it probably wouldn’t have won any mum awards, it was passable and from what my son said, his date was appreciative.

I thought of mums whenever I visited the craft store for the next few months after homecoming. In fact, I was tempted to start buying little eagles, teddy bears and other such what-not, knowing there was a good chance I’d be making a mum this year too. But I didn’t. And now, as suspected, the saga has continued, only this time, with a new wrinkle.


See this year, my son has expanded his social networking and is dating a girl from a neighboring school. So, oh my gosh! What’s the mum protocol when you cross boundaries! Does the girl wear the boy’s school colors to show her social sophistication? Or does she stick with her own colors so as not to stand out in the homecoming crowd? And what if they decide to attend both school dances? Am I expected to make two mums, one for each school? And if I have to make a mum with her school colors, well, you know what that means - all different colors, all different gadgets and do-dads! And, instead of a fluffy eagle, I’ll have to figure out what the other mascot is and find a fluffy one of them.

But okay, nothing is worth getting so worked up over. And this was no exception. As it turned out there’s only one mum to be made and yes, it does need to be in her colors. But I learned that I can go to the Hobby-Lobby closest to her school and they will, of course, carry all the mum thingies in all the right shapes, sizes and colors. Whew! Just one trip instead of several. And the best part is that her homecoming is scheduled two weeks after my son’s so, unlike the two days I had last year, this year I’ll have plenty of time.

So I sent an email to a couple friends whose sons are the same age as mine. I asked if their sons were taking dates to the dance and if so, had they planned to make their own mums and if so, would they like to get together for a mom’s mum making party - sort of like a mother’s day in. Of course ours would include a lot of wine-drinking to enhance the whole experience for the mum moms themselves.

“You’re such a good mom!” one of my friends said after declining my invitation and confessing to having bought hers from Krogers. ‘It’s true,’ I thought, ‘I am a good mum mom.’ Silly or not, ridiculous a tradition as it is, I think I’ve done well. And I think even my daughter would be proud – of course, after she finishes razzing me about it.

It's Sunday night - do you know where your characters are?

Mine are still in my laptop. Tapping their fingers and waiting. Poor Theo probably thinks I've abandoned him altogether, left him stranded in that alternate reality he mistakenly stepped into the night before last. I guess if I think about it, it was the night before last for Theo but for me it was over a month ago. At any rate, he's still in there, ignored, forgotten, left to find his own way in that strange land.

But hey, at least I didn't leave him alone. Last I saw of him, he'd met up with a boy about his own age named Jayes and the two of them had put their heads together to come up with a plan to get Theo back home.

However, (and isn't there always a however?), unbeknownst to either of them, there are questionable characters lurking in the hard drive of my laptop. And they have no desire whatsoever to get Theo back home. And they certainly don't want Jayes to learn the secret to how Theo came to be there in the first place!

I suppose, if I were any sort of a writer, I'd get back in there and warn the boys before it's too late. Instead, I'm here, cowering in this blog, writing about them instead of for them. Shame on me! Shame, shame, shame.

Okay, that's enough self flagellation. I'm going in after them. Wish me luck!

Poetry in Motion

When I was young I used to write poetry. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always rhyming, and usually about life or love or tormented emotions. I still have the originals somewhere, stuffed into a three ring binder. I'd even given copies to my little sister once years and years and years ago. Back when I was dirt poor. It was a year when I couldn't afford to buy Christmas gifts so I'd made them all. To Lilly, I'd given the gift of poetry. Little did I know that all that bad, horrible writing would come back to haunt me one day!

My mother had been gone for about a year when a bunch of us siblings got together for a shindig in Reno, NV. It was then that my baby sister (now forty four), presented me with her own gift of poetry. She'd taken all my old poems and had them professionally bound. There was a dedication page signed by my two sisters, my daughter, and posthumously by my mother (Lilly had lifted her signature off of a greeting card that she'd also saved). And one of the poems was even illustrated by my daughter, the artist. So there were all my sappy, rhyming love poems, bound beautifully into twelve hardback copies. What could I do but thank her for them. In fact, I think I even cried. But had I cried for the thoughtfulness of the gift or the fact that all that wonderful giving had been spent on such crappy poetry? In truth I think it was a little of both.

I still dabble in poetry from time to time but it's very different than the flowery, Hallmark stuff I'd written as a teen. Again, I save them all, stored away for some big, future event that probably will never happen. But now the repository is my computer instead of a binder. Some are finished, others are in a folder I simply call, Poetry in Motion. These are the ones I come back to and tweak off and on. Eventually, I might edit one enough for it to feel complete, or at least as close to complete as I think it'll ever get. Then I'll move it into another folder called Poetry. But the contents of that folder is light years away from what can be found in my three ring binder. An example of my more recent musings:

God’s Gifts

Coaxing
mold into a
petri-dish
He cultured up
Pasteur.

Crunched some
numbers to the sum
of Pythagoras.

Scribbled out
the first and
original
Picasso.

Pondered up
Plato and Socrates.

Ignored Aristotle.

Then,
throwing in a
monkey wrench
God created
Darwin.

He must have
laughed thinking
“this should keep
them busy
for a while.”

© 2009, Linda Leschak, all rights reserved

Rubbed Out

Inspired by Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell

I wanted to use my body differently this time, to make more of my stay here than I had before. But I got caught up in it again, forgot to remember. And all too soon I was just another suburban soccer mom spending each day the way I’d spent the last and believing in my mind that this was living.

But my heart didn’t buy it. In my deepest conviction, I knew I was wasting my time again. And now I’ve been doing it for years. And this human body is giving out. I’ll have to trade it in soon, some sleek new model, one that comes with a blank slate; except, of course, for the ingrain ideologies that every new body is born with. Too bad those ideals get rubbed out by parents and teachers and by social expectations, all just doing what they beleive is right. And too bad evolution has managed to grow the left hemisphere of the brain beyond the capacity of the right. It seems even now that the intuitive side shrinks with each new generation. Or at least the use of it does, while the left grows stronger, stronger in the notion that knowledge is more important than insight. What’s that phrase? Oh yeah, knowledge is power. Power, what the hell is that anyway but a trumped up, overrated goal? If only we could cling to the ingrain memories, we’d remember that power is nothing more than a need to control. And if we clung to what we need to know, we’d remember that control is something we truly never have.

Nevertheless, the left hemisphere has grown heavy while the right side subordinates. The storage space for our ingrain memories shrinks exponentially until soon the ability to pass them along will be thwarted entirely. And therein will lie the rub.

Personification - where the world turns human

Take that clock over there, the one up on the wall above the table. It’s been hanging there forever, staring at me with that blank look on its flat face as it ticks away the seconds of my life with its right hand, the hours with its left. Damn thing, sometimes I’ll glance up quick enough to find it smirking at me. Then it’ll catch itself and wipe its face back into a mask of unconcern. But I know. I know that it spends whole days just staring, judging, tapping its fingers as I take way too much time writing.

Anyway, I like personification. It can be an interesting way to breathe life (real life) into a scene or story. Take for example:

A Possibility

Earth mother spins lazily on her haunches allowing her occupants equal time with their father. Some of them suffer, wishing to remain in the dark where they can enjoy the tranquil beauty of the niece rather than be subjected to the hotheaded fury of the father. He’s always had such an explosive temper!

Earth mother knows all about her husband’s volatile moods. And yet sometimes even she loses her cool, becomes angry at the behavior of the occupants. Like the time when the carnivores had gotten the upper hand and were bullying the rest into extinction. Look how she handled that! All she needed to do was let her guard down just a bit and glance the other way as the meteor hurtled toward her, hitting her midsection with the ferocity of . . . well, a meteor. That had certainly stirred the pot, hadn’t it?

But now it looks like the same thing is happening again, the need for intervention, a wakeup call to the new inhabitants. She needs to let them know that they are overstepping the boundaries of their pants . . . or is it “getting too big for their britches?” Ah yes, it’s the latter; she’s always liked that phrase, happy she’d picked it up one afternoon as another mother stood looking up into the face of her teenage son, shaking her finger and scolding.

Too big for their britches indeed. It’s time for some lessons, lessons from a mother who knows no language, one who communicates through action. So she’ll intensify the fury of the storm god Baal, melt the polar caps, raise the tides and reduce the value of beachfront property. Then she’ll wait patiently to see if that gets their attention. It should. After all, these inhabitants seem much wiser than their scaly predecessors.

Earth Mother hopes she’s right. She hates the idea of having to start all over - again.

Memoirs in Second Person

It’s Monday, Labor Day and the rest of the vacationers are nowhere in sight. Sleeping in, perhaps. Hungover, no doubt. You’d be sleeping in too if not for the alarm on your cell phone, set to roust you out early enough to get a head start on the rest of them.

There seems to be only one other person awake besides you, a woman standing between the heavy stilts that support her beach rental. Indeed, the only homes this close to the water that managed to survive Ike are the stilted ones, set at least eight feet high. This is the kind you rented and it’s what the woman rented whose now outside, calling her dog. The two cars parked under her rental look packed, poised and ready to put an end to the long weekend. She calls the dog. From this distance, it sounds like the name is Lobo or Hobo and when you finally see the object of her attention you think how fitting the latter name would be. A tiny, white fluff scurries from around the nearest house and then stands about a hundred yards away, ears perked, tail wagging. Even from the distance of three houses and two floors up, you see the dog’s expression. And when the woman repeats her summons, Hobo bounds toward her, bouncing his way through the bushes to run circles around her legs. She carries her coffee cup back upstairs with tiny Hobo tight at her heels.

There are a few cars already vying for position on the beach. There’s even an early bird fisherman wading hip deep in the surf, his pole slanting downward as he tries catching the silvery carp you saw flashing across the water last evening. You smile as you recall the one, how it took six hops up into the air before abandoning its earthbound dream. You remember how you laughed, wondering what could prompt such abandoned glee in the life of a fish.

You hear the neighbors stirring, filtering out onto the deck for some quiet conversation before their gaggle of children wake up. You’ve already decided that they are a strange group. Not by the fact that they have a herd of small children between the handful of women you’ve seen. But by the fact that there are no men; at least not any frequent ones. You remember seeing men only three times the entire weekend: once to fill the ice chest on the deck when they first arrived, another to cook on the grill downstairs and a third to empty the ice chest on Sunday night. But even during these chance sightings, none of the women were present. You recall seeing the children on the beach, romping through the surf while the women guarded from the shore. But even then, the men were nowhere in sight. From your place of silent observation you’ve concluded that, aside from the obvious coupling required to produce the gaggle of children, there is no gender interaction in the adjoining beach house and you wonder whether it’s some kind of cult.

You’re grateful for the fact that one of the women has yet to join this morning’s gathering – the one with the laugh so ridiculous you actually wonder whether she’s been pretending all weekend. It’s sort of a hee-haw guffaw that makes you laugh every time you hear it. But not for the same reasons. You think of tomorrow, of all the things waiting for you back home. And you’re torn between a desire to stay here, sitting alone on the deck watching the sea move in and out, the pelicans swooping low over the surf as you listen to the cadence of the gulls chattering in the distance, or to go back home, return to your “normal” existence, leaving this weekend as some perfect memory.

As it turns out, nothing is perfect - at least not forever. You hear the neighbor join the others on the porch and her goofy laugh drives you inside. Time now to shake the last of the sand out of your clothes, pack up your own two dogs, your husband and your son and head on back to life.

A Brief History of L. Squared

I didn’t always answer to the acronym LL. In the beginning I was LC. Then I spent a few years as LD., back to LC for a while before finally acquiring the L. Squared tag. It didn’t come naturally, though. It was bestowed upon me through the union of marriage and that funky custom where the woman forfeits her own name for that of her husband’s. Maybe not such a bad thing, considering that she’d probably gotten her original surname from her father. Certainly not from her mother who probably had to forfeit her own name when she married, albeit that too was her father’s - and back and back like that through a long line of men’s names. But I’m digressing, aren’t I? Where was I? Ah yes, square one.

Anyway, while I was ecstatic about my upcoming nuptials, I wasn’t too enamored with the name change, (and not due to the aforementioned reason.) It was the name itself that gave me cause for concern - I didn’t like how it had sort of a sing-song sound to it. And to add insult to injury, I soon learned that, not only would I wear the sing-song name for the rest of my life, but I also had to share it with my future husband’s cousin. Seems she’d been LL her whole life (even had the same middle name as me) and while she thought it was amusing that I’d be joining her in the ranks of L. Squared, I did not.

And yet, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been involved in name hijacking. The first time was back when I was a teenager, traipsing about as the only LC in the small farm town where I grew up. I was around sixteen when my older brother married an L. She too shared my exact name right down to the spelling and pronunciation of the middle name. And since the newlyweds were straight out of high school without a penny between them or a place to live, our father (the guy with the name), let them move in with us. It made for some interesting mail sorting. Not to mention the screening of inbound phone calls - conversations that went something like this:

“Hello, is L there?”

“Which one?"

“LC”

“Which one?”

“L A C”

“Yeah, which one?”

“Huh?”

So again, I found myself poised to share my name with someone else. But I realized the other LL didn’t seem any worse for wear having spent her life singing her name. So I eventually got over feeling odd about it and I actually learned to love it. In fact, when I begun my writing “career” (one that has yet to take off), I was contemplating a pen name, something catchy, something people might remember something . . . sing songy! But as it turned out, I already had one! And besides, it's kind of fun having a bit of alliteration in my everyday life.