Apparently I'd rather die . . .

. . . than walk in the Avon Walk For Breast Cancer again. Or at least that’s the subconscious message I’ve been sending myself.


Sure I did it once—walked those forty grueling, painful miles in two days. I thought I’d properly built up to it, thought I’d sufficiently trained during the weeks before. And maybe I did. Maybe it was the actual weekend event that did me in, the way I hooked up with that friend I hadn’t seen in six years, the friend with the extra loooong legs that took one stride to my three. The friend I insisted on keeping up with that first day.

Mile twenty six saw me wearing more blisters than feet. 

Needless to say, day two was torture. If not for my meditation practice and my ability to send my mind to a happier place (a place far from my feet), I would not have made that second day. It was two weeks before I could walk normally again, two weeks before my feet stopped oozing with every step.

That was three years ago.

Proud and stubborn, I signed up for the walk again the following year, dutifully starting my training walks twelve weeks before the race. About five weeks out, I dropped a paper cutter onto the top of my foot and had to have stitches. I was told no walking for at least three weeks so I laid off long enough to heal. I started the training walks again until, a couple days before the race, I pinched a nerve in my neck doing a yoga pose. I’m talking excruciating pain all down my right side whenever I moved. So that was it for me . . no walking.

I didn’t sign up the following year. I was too busy and (gulp) somewhat intimidated by past events. So I just gave myself to my team, offering support and help in fund raising. I had planned to be out there the weekend of the race, cheering them on and handing out water . . . that kind of stuff. But, oh my gosh! If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll remember this. It happened the day before the walk. So last year, instead of walking those forty miles, I was sitting in a hospital bed with tubes dripping someone else's blood into my arm.  

So now April is rolling around again and I’m a little terrified. The Avon Foundation is sending me e-mails and cards reminding me that it’s time to sign up again. And I'm trying really hard to pretend not to see them. See... I hate to imagine what kind of avoidance strategy my subconscious has in store for me this time. 

Walks along the bayou

One thing I like about Houston's suburbs is its sophisticated system of channels that drain the once copious amounts of rain away from the thousands of homes that live here. They're not really bayous . . . that's just my pet name for them. My dogs love them as much if not more than I do and they pry me away from my computer for their daily romps. It's an interesting enough adventure that I've taken to carrying my camera along.

Here are some of the things I see during my adventures on the bayou . . . lots of birds, lots of turtles and lots of water.

Day after a big rain

Piper LOVES chasing the Blue Herons and the Ibises (or sould that be Ibi?) 

Such are our walks on the "bayou." Lots of exercise for everyone. Even, begrudgingly . . . the birds!

Those !@*& Worthless Piss Ants

Today’s blog is brought to you by the Pharaoh Ant, aka the sugar ant—or piss ants as my uncle used to call them. Specifically the ones roaming my kitchen cabinets this morning. I can't help but remember my uncle's joke where the kid is sitting on the sidewalk, using the lord’s name in vain and swearing at the uselessness of piss ants as he methodically squishes them one by one under his thumb. Along comes a priest (of course) and lectures the boy on how nothing in God’s good earth is useless. The kid’s answer is far from politically correct so I won’t share it here. Suffice to say that it’s that punch line that filters through my head whenever I get pharaoh ants in my house. This morning’s object of their teensy, little affection was the honey I keep tucked up in my spice cabinet, delicious on my morning oatmeal.

Now, I love our multi-legged friends as much as the next person. I even saved a cockroach the other day. Saved a cockroach! ME! I kid you not! He was outside scurrying along the sidewalk on some mission of utmost cockroach importance. My husband went to step on it but I stopped him . . . I mean -- what’s one more cockroach in a city where they outnumber us a gazillion to one? The key, though, is that the cockroach was outside, right where it belonged. Unlike those piss ants, crawling in and out of my spice cabinet, lusting after my honey. MY honey! I got stingy with those ants, thinking hey . . . get your own honey, this is mine! But then I realized . . . that’s sort of what they were doing.

Anyway, here’s my breakfast . . . the same one I have most mornings. Some fruit and steel-cut oatmeal drizzled in honey. And sometimes seasoned with teensy little piss ant bodies. 

Excuse: n. a plea offered in extenuation of a fault or for release from an obligation

I haven’t blogged in a while. You’d think I’d have time. I mean . . .  I don't work outside the home. I’m kind of a lousy housekeeper so there’s not a lot of time spent in that useless, never-ending endeavor, I don’t lounge in front of the soaps in the afternoon—in fact the T.V. is never on during the day. The meals I cook are healthy yet simple so there’s not a lot of planning or prep time.  So yeah . . . you’d think I’d have tons of time to post a blog or two from time to time.  

Oh, but wait . . . I have one of these: a Senior Varsity Football Playing Boy Scout. Yep . . . I've got an SVFPBS. And because I have an SVFPBS, I’ve spent my potential blogging hours in different ways. Like running kolache /doughnut interference for a bunch of sweaty Boy Scouts as they sawed, hammered and screwed boards into frames. See, Ronnie’s Eagle Project was to build three cages for the Texas Wildlife Rehabilitation Coalition. 

Which was a pretty cool project! And while the boys worked, I made sure they were fed and hydrated, found myself schlepping filtered water in and out of the house because basically, I refuse to buy a bunch of plastic bottles . . . they’re the bane of  our current existence. I was also responsible for spraying the boys with the concoction of their choosing,

“Bug spray anyone?”

“How about sunblock?”

Next it was a whole day of installation. I was designated historian, out there in the 100 degree temps taking pictures while the boys delivered and installed the cages they’d built. Each cage took a little over an hour to assemble in the yards of the selected rehabbers.  The pictures will be installed too… into the Scout Scrapbook I’ve been working on . . . as soon as I find time for that!  

I turned my attention away from scouts on Monday and attended a Project Prom meeting, signing up for a couple of fund-raising teams. If you’ve never heard of Project Prom here’s a little bit about it: it was invented by some brilliant parent a long time ago who realized that kids have a tendency to go out after prom and work on perfecting their partying techniques. Teenagers being what they are, this sometimes means drinking. And sometimes driving. And sometimes this night of celebration can turn tragic instead. So Project Prom provides a safe place for them to hang out after prom. The kids get bussed to a large lock-in where they have all night to play all sorts of games, win stuff and have a bunch of fun before being bussed home, tired, happy and best of all, safe. Project Prom is a ton of work and cost a lot of money but . . . hey, we’re saving teenagers! Definitely a worthy cause!

Later in the week, I donned my creative thinking cap and created a JPG file from a picture of Ronnie when he was just a baby, all diapered up and reaching for a football. I added some verbiage to it, cut it to the right size and then grayscaled it for an ad that will display in the program for local varsity games.  

Concurrently, I was rushing to the dollar and craft stores for stuff to use to decorate the Varsity locker room before the first game. I bought a bunch of crepe paper and football themed party stuff. And I spent a bit of time making about 90 cute little magnets for the boy’s lockers.  

Then, on Wednesday night, some of us moms and dads sneaked into the locker room and gussied it up a bit.  First thing we did was to hang about a gazillion of those little scented trees because, well . . . ewwww! I learned that we actually are supposed to do this for every game! Great.

Thursday night we were at the first game of the season which didn’t end until after 10:00. (Our guys kicked butt by the way). It was out for a quick dinner till 11:00 or so, then home, exhausted and having to get up at 5:30.

So that’s my excuse for not blogging . . . it’s all because of my SVFPBS. Even though I’m actually blogging about the fact that he’s the reason I’m not blogging. Hmm . . . sort of nullifies the whole excuse thing, doesn't it? Guess I'll have to come up with something else.  

Are these things funny? Or is it just me?

There were four of us out to eat that first night in L.A.—Mary, Tina, Dana and I. We’d gone to Rock Sugar, an Eastern cuisine there in the mall close to the hotel. The food was outstanding and we got a chance to share some of it with Dana’s son’s dragon (the one who hitched a ride in her purse). The dragon ended up having many wonderful adventures and met some pretty famous writers during his trip. 

Dragon

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about funny things people say and the even funnier way other people interpret them. 

Linda, Mary, Dana, Tina

For example, as we were leaving the restaurant, we decided to get a picture in the lounge. I was shooting my three friends when a nice woman came over and offered to get all four of us in the shot.

“Perfect!” I said, and “Thanks!” And I handed her my camera.

So she shot a few pictures and while she was still shooting, one of the nice waitstaff walked over and offered to take the camera from her so “we could all be in the shot.” 

We all laughed. I mean, can you imagine! It could have gone on and on with me having all sorts of strangers in my picture.

Four days later Dana and I shared a flight home. It might as well have been a red eye since we got into Houston so late . . . pretty much the middle of the night. After a really long, brain sucking day, we were pretty fried. Very tired, very giddy. So when we landed and the flight attendant was making all of his normal announcements, the last thing he added set us off way more than it should have.

“Hope you enjoyed your flight and have a pleasant stay here in Houston. Or wherever your final destination may be.”

That was all well and good but then he added: “Whoever needed the wheelchair can come on up and get it.”

Now how the heck was that supposed to happen? 

Human Clay

I was thinking today about a woman I met a while back. I’d been filling in for the teacher in my Core Training class. The class has gotten fairly popular recently and gets pretty crowded. But back then, only a few of us die-hards would show up on a regular basis. And on that particular day, there was only one woman besides me. Needless to say, it was an easy class to teach! 

So it was that the two of us talked a lot for that hour. And somehow we ended up on the topic of how/where/when we grew up. She, it turns out, was raised in New York City where her first nineteen years were spent in an apartment. She talked about how it felt to live sixteen stories up. How the sound of the street was non-existence and how safety was in height.

She told me about when she’d gotten married, taken straight from daddy’s arms into those of her new husband and how the first thing they did was to move. Out of the city and into the suburbs where her one story, single family house freaked her completely out for the first few months. She told me how terrified she was of being at ground level, to hear traffic on the streets outside. To know that the window of her bedroom was all that separated her from the potential stranger lurking somewhere out there.

How odd that I never considered a lifestyle so different from my own. So different from the farm where I was raised, where safety was in distance not in height. In being close enough to the earth to touch the dirt with my bare feet. To walk outside and get lost in the silence of trees and orchard and land and sky . . . for as far as the eye could see.

I tried to place myself in her setting: a taxi cab at the curb instead of an old, rusty truck. Skipping along crowded sidewalks to get to school rather than that one mile walk along a country road where a car might pass on occasion. Tall buildings that reach toward the clouds and crowd the horizon like they own it. As opposed to those endless almond trees, grape vines and barbed wire fences stretching on and on to infinity.

To a certain extent, we’re all carved and shaped by our beginnings. Formed into the persons we become by the mold of our surroundings. I could no easier imagine being rooted in the city than she could envision living out her youth on the farm. And yet, there we both were, together in Tim’s Core Training Class in Houston,Texas, flung together by life, time, age. And possibly the shared need to transcend our flabby middles—a shape we now shared . . . regardless the earlier molds we were cut from.  

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.