A butcher, a baker? I think not . . .

I cook, I don’t bake. Those of you who do too (cook and/or bake), know that there is a difference. So when I found myself in the self appointed position of having to create a Cardamom Coffee Cake, I had a sudden rush of panic. Now I say ‘self appointed’ because I actually volunteered to make the recipe knowing full well that I lacked the proper experience to take on such a task. And here I might just wander back a week or so earlier when I’d decided to bake some Whole Wheat Poppy Seed Cookies for another holiday get-together. I figured that all the other snacks would be unhealthy so why not bring something delicious and yet wholesome! I’d scanned through the ingredient list to make sure I had all the stuff it needed and I’d read the suggested prep and bake time. On the night of the gathering, I’d left myself just enough time to construct and bake said cookies. Now, if I’d taken the time to read through the entire recipe, I would have noticed that the final step required a rolling pin (something I thankfully had on hand, albeit the cheap, plastic model). And finally, the recipe called for a cookie cutter. Ooops.

So there I was with my dough all doughy and without a single cookie cutter in the house. I thought of my mother, an excellent cook AND baker, how she would use a glass cup to cut the dough for her wonderful, mouthwatering, made-from-scratch biscuits. So, I thought, if a cup worked on biscuits, why not cookies? By my dough was thin and the lip of my cup was fat, so rather than make clean little circles, my cookies were sort of pinched around the edges which might have been okay but for the fact that I hadn’t floured my surface enough so every time I tried to cut a cookie, it either stuck to the cutting surface or inside the glass cup. I did finally get the damned cookies baked and, although they weren’t beautiful, I took them to the holiday shindig where they stood on the table in sad comparison to all the gooey, chocolate, cream filled, decadent goodies that the other attendees had brought. I know that there were far more poppy seed cookies brought home than were eaten that night.

But this is not about the whole wheat cookies, it’s about the Cardamom Coffee Cake I offered to make. The cookie experience had prepared me, though, and so this time I read the entire recipe beforehand and knew for certain that I had everything I needed:

Bunt pan - check

Egg beaters - check

Large mixing bowl - check

Wooden spoon – check

Ingredients – check

Also unlike the cookies, I started the coffee cake process well in advance which proved to be a wise decision for I’ve come to learn that the writers of recipes who calculate the prep time all have a thing or two in common. They are all A) bold faced liars, and/or B) have the advantage of a sous-chef, and/or C) are writing their recipes with sadistic grins on their culinary faces. Suffice to say, my cardamom coffee cake took a “tad” longer than the suggested 45 minutes to prep. And here you’ll notice all the gadgets I managed to pull from my arsenal for the baking of said coffee cake. I kid you not; I used every single thing you see in this picture. Well, except for the plastic, greenish yellow mug at the top of the sink.

You might notice the hammer, a thing normally used for tenderizing meat, not necessarily for baking. But I’d forgotten to soften the four sticks of butter beforehand so I went where I always go when faced with a quandary like rock hard butter. You got it… Google! I managed to find several suggestions on hastening the process of butter thawing and I picked the one that offered a fusion of baking and exercise. It involved a zip lock bag, a sturdy rolling pin and a lot of butter pounding. But my rolling pin (remember my rolling pin), well, it would never have survived any heartfelt butter whacking so, like the glass cup cookie cutter, I found myself improvising again.

There I was, armed with my meat tenderizer, bashing butter as a hearty start to my coffee cake experience. I suppose it worked okay. The butter was no longer shaped into granite hard cubes. It was now smashed into four flat patties, perhaps not as hard as they’d been in their original state, but sadly, still frozen. So I let the pounded butter sit for a spell as I put together the rest of the ingredients. I sifted the dry stuff but then realized the recipe said to sift it all together. Out came a second medium size bowl to act as recipient for twice sifted dry stuff. I checked the butter, found it was still hard so I chopped the walnuts for the topping, checked the butter, whisked the egg, checked the butter. Although it was a full ten minutes from the ferocious pounding I’d given it, the damned stuff was still hard as a dead carp. I decided to proceed in spite of its stubborn resolve.

Now as many of you may know, when two people who’ve been on their own for a while, get married they tend to end up with two of most everything. Many of them might take an inventory and decide, well hey, we don’t need two sets of egg beaters, do we? But of course, Ron and I are not most people and we have kept our mismatched pairs of everything these last eighteen years. Sometimes our tendency toward packrat-edness proves to be a good lifestyle choice and this was one of those times. For no sooner did I employ my trusty (yet ancient) egg beater to the task of beating the partially frozen butter than my egg beaters began to object loudly. The sound they made reminded me of that time years back when the throw-out bearings in my old Chevy Super Sport were wearing thin. Every time I used first gear, the thing would scream like a dying banshee. One day I was pulling into a tight spot in a strip mall and I had to jockey the car back and forth, in and out a few times to work it into the parking spot, shifting from first to reverse and back again. I watched as people ran from the nearby stores, staring up into the sky. Now I could have been embarrassed, dug my foot into the pavement and apologized for making such a horrible racket. But I didn’t. I simply finished parking, exited my vehicle and then ambled away, gazing curiously skyward as I left.

But this isn’t about my old Chevy. It’s about baking a cardamom coffee cake with half frozen butter and ancient egg beaters. And this time, rather than looking up in the sky, I was looking down into a bowl, watching as globs of butter pinged off the sides of my glass bowl, flat refusing to be intimidated by the grinding, complaining metal blades, spinning toward them in slow agony.

Well, I thought, maybe if I add the eggs now, they would have some sort of chemical influence on the butter and perhaps coerce it to soften up a bit. Worth a try, right? Wrong! All this did was lend a new consistency to the globs so that now, rather than pinging around inside the bowl, they clung together into one massive, sticky glob that adhered to the inside cage area of the beaters and then climbed up the shafts, threatening to engulf the grinding motor. I had no choice but to retire my trusty old beaters, use a knife to pry the coagulated butter from the metal blades and then resort to using that second egg beater, the one acquired by marriage. Between the three of us, we finally got the butter beating job done.

While you won’t see that second set of beaters in the sink, I assure you, they’re there. Along with three bowls, every measuring spoon I own, two sets of measuring cups, my flour sifter, two wooden spoons and three rubber scrapers. Not to mention the bunt pan that was happily baking away in the oven as I tidied up the kitchen, a full two hours into my cake making project.

The sad part was that, like my poppy seed cookies, the cardamom coffee cake had some stiff competition and most people opted for the handmade biscotti or the raspberry filled butter cookies. Even the mince meat pie disappeared faster than my large, odd shaped monolith. Thankfully though, my husband works in an office where leftover anything can be abandoned anonymously in the break room where it’s guaranteed to be pounced upon within moments of first being sighted. Ron told me that my two hour cardamom cake lasted about a half an hour. I guess it’s nice to know someone appreciated my feeble (and perhaps final) attempt at baking.

The Fourth Chihuahua

I currently belong to two Boston Terriers and I neither want nor need any more owners, especially little yappy ones with pissy attitudes. So why is the cosmos sending me messages in the form of tiny, quivering taco dogs?

The first one I saw while walking my two Bostons. There we were with the split leash, Sampson (the big one) dragging Piper along. I like to think of it as mentoring but I’m not sure Piper would agree. Anyway, we were a few blocks from home when I saw a little brown Chihuahua sniffing around in someone’s driveway.

Now I don’t like seeing dogs running free and I always stop to see if they are lost and need some sort of assistance. In fact, I once saved a little Schnauzer that way. She’d gotten out of her yard and was romping around a busy street. She bounced her way over to me and I managed to snag her. Then I flagged down a nearby jogger and asked him to read the number on her collar so I could use my cell phone to call her owner (see, I walk with my cell phone but not my glasses . . . it’s a long story, don’t ask). So the nice jogger not only read the phone number on the dog tag but also dialed it for me since I couldn’t see the number pad on my phone. When I talked to the owner he was ever so grateful that I’d found his little Diva but he was all the way up at College Station and would not be home until the evening. He said he’d appreciate if I could hang on to her until he got home. So I said sure and, since I only had one leash and it was attached to my own dog (I only had Sampson back then), I carried Diva the remaining mile home, grateful for the fact that she was only a Schnauzer and not a forty pound Labrador. When Sampson and I got home, we learned that Diva was a) not housebroken b) hungry and c) wound up like the energizer bunny. It was a fun day though. Diva wore Sampson out completely and I was glad to have helped her and the people she owned.

But the little Chihuahua wasn’t wearing a collar so I already knew he wouldn’t be as easy to help as Diva had been. And, unlike Diva, he showed no interest whatsoever in either me or my Bostons. In fact, he scampered about twenty feet down the sidewalk where he stood, staring and trembling and obviously impervious to the little kissy noises I made trying to coax him nearer. Whenever I took a few steps closer, he scurried a little further. Finally I decided that perhaps he lived at the house I’d first seen him at and I’d be exacerbating the situation by scaring him further from it. So I took my two charges home, hoping for the best for the little taco dog.

The next one I spotted from my truck. A different dog, a different day but this one was collarless too. It was headed south on Lakedale, focused on some important doggie mission. It didn’t pay any attention to me as I slowed way down, looking around to see if it had any people with it. It was alone though but very intent on getting somewhere. I didn’t attempt to engage this one in dialog from the truck and figured that, by the time I found a place to turn around, it would be gone.

The third one must have followed me home from another of my dog walks. I’d just gotten back into the house and was washing my hands in the kitchen sink when I happened to glance out the window. Lo AND behold, there was yet another Chihuahua! This one was white and a bit larger than the other two had been, but also collarless. I dried my hands and went out the back door, once again, the good Samaritan trying to assist a lost dog. But by the time I got out there she was gone. I wandered around the cul-de-sac, but she had apparently made it around the corner before I’d gotten out the door.

The final one (dare I use that word?) was spotted from my truck as I drove to the coffee shop last Friday for a meeting with my writing group. There were a number of kids playing in yards and I thought surely it must have belonged to one of them so I didn’t slow down, stop or even give it more than a curious glance. The thing I did notice was that, like the other three, it wasn’t sport any bling.

So how weird is it that collarless Chihuahuas keep popping up out of the blue? Am I just imagining them, like those infamous pink elephants? Or maybe there was a surplus of them after that Beverly Hills Chihuahua movie and now they’re being snuck into random cities and dumped, dropped from low flying helicopters like Dumbo Drop or something (not to imply that movie makers would ever do such a thing - heaven forbid.) And why do I keep comparing yappy little taco dogs to elephants? I don’t know. I just hope nothing comes of this recurring Chihuahua phenomenon. Lord knows, I don’t need another owner, especially a little yappy one with a pissy attitude.

The Home Run

The Home Run

To cruise the Internet means to find all sorts of gems. I can open an e-mail, click on an embedded link, then another and another and soon I'm buried in great stuff. Well, maybe not all of it is "great." Sometimes my on-line journey can be pretty frustrating. But other times it's a wild, insightful adventure, one I'd love to share with everyone I know! But of course that's not possible. Not everyone shares my same interests and passions and would get as excited as I do with some of the stuff I find. Not everyone has time to sit through 'my stuff' when they have plenty of stuff of their own! But sometimes, sometimes . . . I find something I just can't keep to myself.

This film depicts an actual event.

On the Occasion of a Three Day Retreat

It’s one thing to spend three days sitting in guided meditation, chanting sutras, holding poses and trading mantras, returning home long enough to grab what’s needed for the next day, completely oblivious to how my behavior neglects and abuses my environment. Why should I concern myself with any of that while I’m so inwardly engaged?

It’s quite another thing to be here at home, trying desperately to catch up once the retreat is over. Here I’ve taken some time off, turned my back on daily obligations, put everything off until “later.” And now that later has arrived, I’m fearful that I’ve let things go too far. The question becomes: how can I neglect the necessities of my own survival (healthy food choices, caring for those who share my home, tending to my own clutter.) How long can I ignore these things before there’s no way back?

I see my weekend as a microcosm, like the world itself, like our country, our home. We’ve all been turned inward far too long, thinking of only ourselves, ignoring the needs of our environment, unconcerned with the future we’ve created. I can’t help but wonder whether fixing myself might somehow have larger implications. And I can’t help but feel the powerful need for something as simple as balance.

Victim of the Wire

Today the internet died - a saturation of the cable sunk in the back yard where a deluge of rain has soaked the lawn to the bone - and I found myself suddenly alone, utterly, completely isolated, without a voice to speak or ears to listen. Completely closed off from my world, abandoned.

I kept telling myself, ‘it’s okay, the conversations you have with friends can wait. It’s not like they hang in mid sentence, waiting with baited breath for your words of worldly wisdom. And it’s not like you stay plugged in all day, every day.’

Yet, the fact that the outside world was unreachable added a sense of urgency to my need to reach it! I tried to focus on something else but my mind kept drifting back to the empty screen. I wandered the house in a distracted fog, touching this, reaching for that. I picked up a magazine, shoved it aside. Tried the book I’d been reading but the words swam in front of my eyes, blurred and unreadable. I phoned a couple friends but only got their voice mail. How suddenly I’d become desperate for a voice, new words flashing across the screen, that little red icon in the lower right corner! But I was shut off from the world, a victim of the broken wire.

I tried to work on something local to my machine, Photoshop or the book I’m writing. But I kept getting distracted by the Internet Explorer icon sitting in the tray at the bottom of my laptop. It kept calling to my mouse, ‘click here, click here!’ And whenever my mouse wandered over of its own accord, not a thing would happen. It was then I decided how desperately I needed an intervention. My life had been hijacked by Facebook, Blogspot, Gmail, Youtube and MSNBC.com.

I tried positive self talk: ‘Ah, Linda, life is much larger than the seventeen inch screen, is it not?” And this helped to calm my angst. My gaze wandered out the window to the yard, still glistening from the morning rain. Where a cool, fall breeze ran its fingers through the fronds of the palm tree and then rippled the surface of the pool. Where a cardinal sat eyeing me from its place in the yaupon holly and where my two dogs romped around, playing keep-away with a small, pink Frizbee. But soon my eyes moved down, down to that strip of lawn where I knew the traitorous wire lie buried in its shallow trench. And I wondered how long it would take the cable guy to get here.

Custodians of the Totally Useless

We (husband, son, and self) have collectively collected enough useless stuff to last our three lifetimes. When I think about it, we’ve probably collected enough for you too. Take that ice cube with a spider suspended inside of it. Something my son made at a Cub scout camp out years back, made of resin and whatever critter the boy happened to locate while foraging in the forest that weekend. I think the goal was to let the resin harden then drop it into someone’s drink when they weren’t looking and wait for them to squirm. But that’s never happened and so the spider sits forever on the sill of my kitchen window where I can visit it on regular basis.

Buried somewhere under our collection of remotes (only three that we actually use), and sitting at the very bottom of the decorative bowl we keep our remote collection in, is my husband’s fart machine. There are two parts to it, the noisy part, that which emits the actual fart, and the remote that prompts its flatulence. I remember how my husband had to have it after seeing the neighbor kid playing with his. The neighbor kid is now in his mid twenties, graduated from college and on to bigger and more interesting gadgets. But we still have our fart machine. My husband and his brothers toyed with the idea of slipping it into their mom’s casket when she passed away years ago. But none of us wives would let them.

Up there in the attic, buried under a thick layer of insulation, cobwebs, cockroach carcasses and dust, hides my son’s baby furniture. There’s a crib, a playpen, a highchair, a basinet and I’ve forgotten what else. Oh and all of my “good” maternity clothes, trussed up tight in a big plastic bag. Now this might not seem such a bad idea to save this kind of stuff - hand me downs and all. But I am in my mid-fifties and not likely to need maternity clothes again unless I really let myself go. And my son is about to turn sixteen, somewhere between the age of needing his crib to sleep in and using it for his own infant child.

Under the desk in the office is every piece of software we’ve ever used on every computer we’ve ever owned. Some of this software was available only on floppy disk. Floppy disk! All of which we still possess. There seems no use for such relics other than to add them to our similar collections, things like the cassettes and eight track tapes that lurk somewhere in the hall closet. Or maybe the four foot stack of albums in the bottom of the china hutch. Note that there is no device in our possession that will play any of these types of media.

One closet in our office is dedicated solely to pictures and paintings we will never hang. They are preserved quite perfectly in sealed boxes and big round tubes, stacked against the back wall of the closet where they’ve begun their own collection of dust.

Following family tradition, I have dutifully saved all my old, chipped (but still usable) Corelware on the slim chance that my daughter might set up housekeeping some day; my daughter, who is twenty six and has been living on her own now for several years. I have to wonder what she’s been eating off of all this time.

In the garage, packed away for that “just in case” moment you’ll find my husband’s leather working kit from high school. Once, about three years back, he actually pulled it down, dusted it off and made a leather money clip. Then he packed it all back up and it’s been there ever since.

I have my ski boots from twenty seven years ago although I’ve only skied once in that much time. They cower in the highest part of my walk-in closet next to my moon boots, ski gloves and mask. Keeping them company are my racket gloves and racket because once, when I was young and lithe, I was quite good at the sport and now I like to wax nostalgic on how it felt to be that way. I have every tee shirt I ever earned running the many 5 and 10 K’s I used to run. This in spite of the fact that I never (ever) wear tee shirts. I have jeans that fit me when I had a body like Twiggie, I have leg warmers. Leg warmers!

But I have to admit that sometimes this rat-packedness comes in handy. We got a new puppy a few months back. She came to us pretty small, weighing in at 4 lbs something. And utterly naked. So I rummaged through the collection of collars we’d saved from seventeen years of previous pets, collars that had outlived their owners, collars that had been outgrown. Imagine how happy I was to find a perfect fit in the later part of the collection! By keeping all those collars, I’d managed to save a whopping three bucks. It was a shining moment, indeed! One that validated the possession of all this other stuff. Because after all, you never know. You just never know.

I Got Nothing

Sometimes words pour forth from this head of mine. Like a mountain stream, they tumble and tumble over one another faster than the rest of me can keep up. They come to me in my sleep, haunt me in the shower, and interrupt me mid-speech. They wait for me to position myself such that I can bring them to life, to spring from my fingertips, joyful and alive! Other times they still come, a tad more laboriously, but they still come. There for the taking, they are, like ripe cherries hanging from a tree in front of my face, waiting to be plucked.

But today, I got nothing. It’s as if the very stillness I seek as I sit on my meditation cushion has found me instead. It’s seeped in through my ear holes, snuck in through my eye sockets and crept through the nasal passages up, up, up straight into the old noggin, settling there like some flaccid idea. It waited until I was focused elsewhere (or rather nowhere which is the goal of meditation) then crept in to replace the synapses that used to find a playground in these folds of dark grey matter. Today my mountain stream has dried up. It’s more like an arid wasteland in there with nary a breath of wind to stir up a thing worth sharing.

So that’s all I got to say today. Nothing. I got nothing.

"Women's" Work

There I was, pushing the vacuum around and thinking how oddly familiar it felt. ‘Didn’t I just do this?’ I thought. And then I looked up at the bathroom mirrors, the smudged surfaces begging to be cleaned. ‘Didn’t I just do that too?’

What is it about housework anyway? It’s like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, no sooner do you get to one end then you have to start all over again. I remembered a theory I used to have, back when I’d been immersed in Corporate America. It went something like this: if both spouses work then the domestic side of the equation should be shared equally. But if one stays home, then its only natural that he or she should become the domestic god or goddess - respectively. It seemed fair to me at the time in a simplistic, naive sort of way. And I must admit, on a physical level, the division of duties did seem right – he brings home the bacon, I cook it. Easy enough, right? But oh my god, it’s the same bacon day in and day out, week after week, year after year without a smidgen of mental stimulation in the pan, just a coagulated glob of leftover grease and the unfulfilling job of trying to dispose of it without clogging the drain. I pushed the vacuum back and forth over the same area I’d pushed it over a week earlier, listening to the sound of “un words” creeping into my head, words like unrewarding, unfulfilling, under stimulating, unappreciated (more on that later).

After the “unwords” came that Jagger song: “she goes running for the shelter of mother’s little helper.” It’s about how women of the past felt the need to self medicate just to get through the day. Any thinking person who’s done this sort of job for any length of time might be able to appreciate that. It’s why, whenever I get serious and want to really clean, I have to start at my laptop, downloading something educational or inspirational into my MP3 player so I won’t go brain dead pushing the dust rag around.

Thank God it wasn’t always like this for me. I’d begun my life in the workforce, never assuming I’d do anything but. I started as a receptionist in a medical lab, moved into the oil industry and eventually into office technology where I got a job in Information Technology supporting global applications. It was a good run of twenty seven years spent in an extremely rewarding, well paid career. It was only when I saw the opportunity to “retire” early that I said goodbye to the corporate world and decided to stay home with my son (then nine years old and needing me). I was glad to have the two comparisons. I’d worn the shoe on both feet and felt bad for women who’d never had that opportunity. I couldn’t even imagine a life so limited in scope that it included only domestic duties.

It took about fourteen minutes to realize the downside of the deal I’d traded myself into. Not only were my new tasks mentally numbing but they were hardly even recognized. Gone were the high profile assignments, the challenging roles, the exciting projects, traded in for work that was about as exciting as lint. I remember a while back when I decided I was just good and tired of it. I let the house go for two, maybe three weeks. Sure we had food to eat and clean clothes to wear but I didn’t bother with anything but dishes and laundry. I began to wonder how long it would take my guys (one son, one husband) to notice. After a while, it turned into sort of a game. I waited and waited until the furniture groaned under the weight of dust, until floors began to crunch and toilets started turning green. Finally I gave in and cleaned the pig sty that had become my home. And yet, it still received the same attention as the house that was not clean and I couldn’t help but wonder whether they’d noticed anything at all! But then I thought, maybe they did noticed . . . maybe they were afraid that if they said anything, they’d be invited to join in the domestic fun. And then I was troubled by another possibility. And a very disturbing one at that: if they had acknowledged the fact that housework had not been done, they’d be unwittingly acknowledging the fact that it needed to be done. And by doing so, they’d be giving housework some sort of value. And therein lies the rub: housework is not considered a value added job, not even by me (hence this rant). It’s truly a domestic dilemma, is it not?

But there’s another part of this whole thing that I’m not addressing – that’s the raising of the children. Now there's a noteworthy job that has lasting and global value! It requires more creativity than any career in engineering, it’s more taxing than an accounting job and more stressful than anything a postal worker has to face. It’s a job that comes with no training whatsoever and yet is the single most important role any adult could ask for. However, having said that, even that job becomes part time once the kids are at a certain age. So what’s a mom to do while the kids are off to school? Out on a date? At the mall with friends?

Why, she should vacuum, of course. Oh groan . . . where the hell is my MP3 player?

First Draft Writing

I listened to a talk once given by a successful novel writer. There was a key phrase he used, went something like this: "Don’t Get it Right, Get it Written." The gist of the discussion was to just sit down and do it: pound out the story and get it all down on paper. Then, after you’ve done that, go back through it again and again and again . . . And again if necessary.

I have done exactly that, but only with short story where the beginning and ending can be belted out in a single sitting. But never have I done it with a longer piece. In fact with my longer pieces, I tend to write a chapter or two that lead in a preconceived direction. Then I go back and edit, edit, edit until I feel good about that chunk of work. Only then do I go forward, following that process chapter by chapter until I am done. It seemed to work perfectly for the first book I wrote and so I began using the same process to write my second.

And yet, there’s something I just discovered about my writing. The book I’m writing now has a few complicated themes running along simultaneously, some subliminal and some conspicuous. And it plays around with time and space while mingling dissimilar cultures. In order to pull it all off, I’ll need to tie up any dangling ends and solve any problems I create for myself along the way. Because of that, just sitting down and writing willy-nilly seemed problematic. I kept wondering whether I’d end up writing myself into a corner, one I couldn’t back out of. So I took a day and wrote a complete, lengthy synopsis of the plot, the characters’ agendas, the complexity of the setting, etc., etc. “There,” I thought, “now I know all that I need to know. All I have to do is fill the characters with life and crack open the scenes.”

But the minute I started to do it, I felt stymied, as if the story no longer held any interest for me. I realized that, by blowing it all out like that, I’d spoiled the surprises for myself. As ridiculous as it sounds, I realized that in writing, I want to be both writer and reader, waiting in anticipation to see what the characters will do next. I want to be amazed and shocked as I turn the blank page and watch the words come stumbling or leaping onto the paper. I want the protagonist to find his or her own way without the writer holding a lantern at the end of the path. And I want the writer to let loose of the reins and allow the characters to have their heads.

It was somewhat of an epiphany and I realized that there are a number of “stops and starts” living here in my laptop, stories that had suffered a similar fate. I’d gotten excited about something and started in on it, all the while having a clear sight to the ending. But time after time, I’d lost interest, abandoning my poor protagonists to their unfinished fates. The more I thought about it, the more I recalled that author’s words: “Don’t get it Right, get it Written” and I wondered whether the process I’ve employed in the past simply doesn’t work the way I thought it would. Maybe I need to take that detailed synopsis I wrote and do what a friend suggested – “Print it out, Linda. And then rip it into tiny shreds and burn it. This will give your subconscious permission to run willy-nilly over the pages again.”

Well, she didn’t put it exactly that way, but I got her meaning. And I think tonight I'll have a little ritualistic bon fire.

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.