Things not to do when you're over Fourty

“So, what are you doing this evening?” says cute guy sitting beside me at the hotel bar. Now I want you to understand he’s blond, 31, single, and a personal trainer in his spare time. He’s traveling on business related to the health field and he is also a paramedic. My young coworker has whispered to me earlier to find out if he’s gay.“Tonight?” I say to the hunk. “Well, I’m going to a club to dance.”“What club,” asks the hunk?“Oh, it’s a gay club downtown. You wanna come with us?” A look of obvious heterosexuality plays across the hunk’s face like a neon sign.“I guarantee you won’t get me there” he delivers in an “I’d rather be dead” voice. When he leaves for the toilet I give my coworker the sad news.“How can you be sure,” he intones pleadingly.“Trust me on this honey,” I tell him firmly, “He’s straight. He showed me pictures of his girlfriend. He told me she wanted to come here with him but he’s playing it cool because she’s so needy. He showed me pictures of several other girlfriends that he is also dating and he asked me what I was doing this evening.” I reply definitively. “Besides, he asked me about the hot blond bartender with the big boobs and told me he would love to have her in room 430.”“Wait, says my coworker, “aren’t you in room 429? OMG, how are you going to sleep knowing he’s next door?”I echo his alarmed tone and the mid west accent he’s using, “Do you think you could trade rooms with me?” I can’t keep a straight face for long though because I could see he was considering the exchange.The hunk heads off to his room with dinner on a tray and my friend and I wait for the other girls to get ready to go to the club. Struggling with directions and driving a strange rental car we finally arrive about 10 PM. I’m DD and have to stay sober, but the music is definitely enough to get me high. The boys are young, beautiful, mostly shirtless, and they dance like demons. I dance along, sometimes with one of them, sometimes alone, as the music and the people interweave like silk ribbons being torn by the wind. One pulled me against him as I passed by, all of 22, his shirt tucked in his pocket, his undulating body wet with sweat. I smile and put one arm around his neck, the other hanging behind me as I lean into him for one very dirty dance. As our hips thrust in a mock sexual rhythm and his oh so piercing brown eyes look into mine, I become aware that he is not exactly playing a role. I lean back, give him a look as hard as what has come between us and say, “You are gay, aren’t you?” His head shakes “no” and he pulls me back into his body. Oh shit, leave it to me to find a straight guy in a gay bar. We dance to the pulsing music and the tension of the beat and his expert maneuverings drive me to places I know I dare not go. His name is Vince and he’s the hot young thing that you see working in car wash, the gas station, or perhaps in a porn film. He’s here with a gay uncle who looks like he might have been Vince back in the day, but life has been hard for him. I think about that baby face becoming the grizzled mask of his relative and I want to find words to let him know what life has in store, but I know my advice would be wasted. When he asks me for my phone number I touch his cheek gently and tell him it wouldn’t be wise. Inside I am laughing at the sweet audacity of youth. Driving back to the hotel at three in the morning my drunken workmates demand that I stop at the golden arches so they can have junk food. It’s not a good time to mention calories or cholesterol, and they already know my opinion on fast food, so I comply. The car reeks with the smell of grease and ketchup the rest of the way to the hotel. I do not escape the odor until I slip my key card into the door of my room where it always smells of lemons and fresh laundry. Vince is somewhere still trying to get lucky this evening and the hunk is apparently sleeping peacefully on the other side of my bedroom wall. I sink into the crisp white sheets of my king size bed and think about the throbbing in my right knee. It will ache for days after recklessly attempting all the moves the twenty two year old could do, and I lie there wondering why I tried. It’s probably for the same reason middle-age men buy sports cars, get jaunty hats to cover their bald spots, and work like hell to get a young blond to ride around in the seat beside them. Most likely, but having stupidly squandered my first childhood, I’m going to make the most of my second. I doze off peacefully, smug in the knowledge that it is by choice I sleep alone tonight.

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, mixed

So, that manager that I had to side step cautiously when he made suggestions about us seeing each other outside of work, well, he’s gone and I am being promoted. I am not a particularly patient woman but I play one at work. Sometimes my ability to make things happen worries me. I’m on a roll here and I’m wondering if I should have set my sights higher. I should take a minute to apologize to anyone who is still looking at my blog for not posting more, but hell, I’ve done it so many times before and I’m not getting any more consistent. I’m not ready to give it up, but I have no idea where it’s going in the foreseeable future. The new position brings with it increased responsibility and probably more time in Denver, not a place where I spend much time writing. Of course, I have not given up my serious writing. I am entertaining you today with the first few paragraphs of the second book I’m working on, the story of my father’s life. I hope it leaves you wanting more…


My father would have told his story differently, of that I am sure, but he left without writing it down, leaving me to tell the tale in my own way. I’m not even certain I know chapter and verse, but I knew my Dad as well as any human knows another, and even though there are things he would have rather not have done and words he would wish unspoken, we are the sum of all that is inflicted upon us and all we inflict on others. I will not swear every word is true, that would be too big a blot on my already spotted soul. Even eyewitness accounts are notoriously erroneous, but I promise to tell it the way he lived it, lovingly, imperfectly, and unforgettably. In the end you can make your own judgment on what his life meant, but it will not change a thing about the almost equal parts of love and exasperation I feel when I remember him.

His mother was born on April 1, 1882 into a life I truly cannot imagine. I have a few snaps of her taken when she was young, posed almost seductively with her best friend, her soon to be husband sitting in a chair in front of them, a rawboned country boy sporting an untidy mustache and a wild look in his eye. There is a lace curtain covering the barn wall behind them, a professional touch by what must have been a traveling photographer gleaning a pittance of a living in rural America. No one in the backwater of Kentucky could have afforded such a luxury as a personal camera, certainly not my ancestors scraping out a living from the rocky soil of Grayson County. In all but one of my pictures of my grandfather appears to be wearing the same dark suit. Here he poses with his fiancé, here later with the mules he bred, here on the wedding day, all in the buttoned up wool vest, stiff white collar, and broad knotted tie. There is also one younger portrait of him in a different ill-fitting suit, with what may have been coordinating striped pants, poised with his hand on a table and an intricate hand worked crazy quilt as backdrop. He has a look of health and vigor about his face in that one, and a half smile on his lips. I realize this may be the only picture taken before he developed the TB that finally took his life in 1927, a few years before the great depression hit.

My father only dimly remembered days before the illness. The life of his Father, his Mother, his brother, and himself revolved around the disease like the lesser moons of a gas giant, vast and inescapable. They traveled first to Colorado trying to find respite from the damp humid air of the Ohio valley. My father told me nothing of the journey, but surely it would have been by train, the fare scraped from somewhere in those flush days after the First World War. My grandfather began to feel improvement in the dry mountain air, but my father tells me he and his brother did not thrive. I never questioned him about his statement that his skin “turned yellow” because of the climate. I knew my grandmother, a stern but loving woman, stubborn and opinionated. I am sure she hated the isolation from her mother and siblings, felt the pull of the eastern woodlands, despised the sandy alkaline soil in her barren yard. I can see her in her sunbonnet, hoeing the alien earth, planting the seeds she brought from home, carrying bucket after bucket of water to the beans, tomatoes, and corn. I know her reaction to the first taste of the crops she may have forced to bloom in the strange land. It was not home, could never be home. She packed the children up and headed back to Kentucky. Her husband hoped for her return, but finally decided death with her would be better than life alone and headed back to Kentucky so his body could lie on the hill overlooking the farm where he was born.

When he died they left the rock scrabble farm behind with the two boys sitting on the back of a road wagon, pulled by the mules his father cherished. They arrived in the small flourishing town of Beaver Dam after a torturous trip over dry creek beds and cow paths until reaching the then dirt path that is now Kentucky Highway 62. The seat the boys had chosen for the trip was the ill placed mirror of their mother’s chest of drawers. Lying flat on the back of the wagon and covered with a quilt, the boys had no clue of the fragile nature of their perch. My father clearly remembered the shame of his innocent act and the fear of punishment he thought would be forthcoming. He never said what his mother did when she discovered the minor tragedy, but I doubt she saw it as too significant considering what she knew she faced in the months ahead.

At 14 my father became the man in the family. He always spoke of his older brother in tones of reverence, never questioning the family dynamics that demanded he work and help his mother so the older boy could complete college. Dad dropped out of high school and spent the rest of his life admiring the educational attainments of his sibling; the one who lived in a tiny house on a schoolteacher’s pittance while my father became a millionaire by working with his hands. Perhaps the thought of his wild early years shamed him into believing his brother some kind of saint. The inconsistencies in him when he bragged to me in secret about those days still baffle me. He always followed the tales of debauchery with a moral, a benediction for some saving grace that pulled him from the very pit of hell to what he admitted was an undeserved position of prestige in the community. To say he was a humble man would be erroneous, but he always seemed to leave that impression on those who did not know him well, a group that included all but myself and my mother, and perhaps my siblings, although I’m not sure about my brother. It would be more accurate to say he was a man filled to overflowing with contradiction and dare I say it, a touch of hypocrisy.

There were few jobs available in 1929, the year my father turned 16 and left high school for good. He used what he had, his 6’3” frame and the muscles earned from hard work to land a job as a bouncer in a roadhouse. His mother prayed for him nightly but accepted the money he earned gratefully. His reputation as a tough customer came after a run in with the town bully, a man older, larger, and more accustomed to solving problems with his fists. The man called him out one night and preceded him down a dark alley with great bravado. When the man finally turned to face the frightened boy, my Dad already had his fist drawn back, laid an immediate and unexpected shot to his jaw, then watched in wonder as the man’s head hit the brick wall, knocking him unconscious. I listened to him tell another young man about the shame of those days, but in a way that sounded a lot like bragging to me. “I remember his face,” Dad said with a devilish grin. “He looked real surprised for a second then slid down the wall and crumpled to the ground at my feet. A few minutes after he fell all the other men from the roadhouse came around the corner to watch the fight. They were pretty surprised to find out it was already over.” Dad laughs along with the young man to whom he’s telling the tale, but just when he has him hooked, admiring, Dad lands his punch again. “If it had not been for,” and here he names a man know to the two of them, but not to me, “I could have ended up living like that my whole life. He took me aside, told me to stop reading trashy magazines. He gave me good and decent things to read and kept checking up on me. He got me to turn my life around.” The young man hangs his head, but Dad puts his arm around his shoulders and towering over him, tells him he has a choice to make about his future.

It would be a great story if it were accurate, but while I don’t know for sure about the details, I do know who turned my Dad’s life around. She was only woman he ever loved, my mother, Evelyn.

Raising children in the Rainshadow

The fickle mountains have hidden themselves again, and a light snow is falling. I live my life in unfinished chapters, neither here nor there. Colorado is my half home and I search the faces of strangers for their stories. I wonder what’s inside their oddly garbed heads, underneath the knitted hockey caps complete with flaps and hanging strings, the myriad varieties of permanently affixed baseball caps, and other more indescribable variations. Sometimes I think if I actually talked to them they would be no more interesting than one of my cats suddenly developing the power of speech, but the intrigue of the unknown has not worn off yet. It’s rare to find a native however, especially living in a hotel.

Sunday morning, in my rented car, I sought out a local bar on trendy Pearl Street, a spot that boasts the best Bloody Mary in Denver. Vodka mixes fairly well with breakfast food but I deferred on the offer of chocolate cake and a second spicy tomato intoxicant and ordered coffee. I sip it as I sit in the corner by the window and engage in my favorite sport, watching the throng pass by. They are natives, defined by the shoes and hats, plus the peculiar habit of wearing shorts in all seasons, regardless of the temperature. There is a certain amount of tribal garb, busy patterns, odd jewelry and color combinations, but the foot and head gear is definitive Colorado. A ninety year old in a mink coat, baseball cap and pink tennis shoes, a really cute girl with dog ear pony tails, baseball cap on backwards, and wading boots, a 40 something man with white socks and the ever popular plastic crocks in a hideous shade of green. A chubby girl comes in with a blue plaid wool hat, cropped jeans, brown leather clogs, and heavy black braids hanging behind her ears. I might as well wear a sign that says, “not from here”, with my tight jeans, satin shirt, black spike heel boots. I feel pale and fragile contrasted against the people who live in the harsh shadow of the front range. Everyone over thirty shows the mountain’s weathered look, a brown and slightly grim face that matches the environment. The oldest look like Sherpas, and everyone twenty and up who does not moisturize exhibits a trace of fine lines waiting to deepen with each sunny windy and dry day.

There is one more reality of living in the mile high city, the constant monitoring on the color of my urine. I know, gross, but critical, as I learned last week when I visited one of the local hospitals with a 103 degree temp. “But I’m never sick”, I protested to the nice man who was sticking needles in my right arm and the nice lady who was doing the same to my left. They were both astutely silent about the fact that never included now as I lay there in the blue cotton feed sack with randomly attached strings the hospital calls a gown. The story of my hospital adventure is tiresome, even to me. It involves cat scans, x-rays, blood cultures, zebras and other boring stuff. Actually the zebra thing was just tossed in there because that’s what the ever so thorough hospital staff thought when they heard hoof beats. I felt like I was in an episode of “House”, except with no brilliant arrogant doctor limping into my room yelling at the staff to check the color of my pee. It was all resolved four hours into my second visit when I needed to go to the bathroom, and knowing how hospitals treasure bodily fluids, I asked if they needed a specimen. I was handed a cup, and within a half hour the same nurse came back with an antibiotic capsule and a cup of water. “You have a kidney infection”, was the simple diagnosis. I didn’t ask why they hadn’t checked for that first instead of putting me through hours of testing. I just put on my clothes by slipping the bag of saline through the sleeve of my shirt and was in the process of removing the needles from my arms when they arrived to assist me.

Outside in the parking lot I was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my Saturday night. The nurse who had greeted me on intake was leaving for the day and asked me how I was. I told her and she immediately asked about the color of my urine, and then the conversation turned like lightning to sex. It’s me, I know. I mentioned I had quite a send off before leaving for Denver and had started with the fever on the Monday I arrived. She told me that I should get up and pee after sex and drink lots of liquids. I asked her about alcohol and she said fine, just balance it with water. I thanked her again as I savored the fabulous Bloody Mary on Pearl Street. Later when I was shopping at a nearby mall I stopped by the toilet. In the next stall I overheard this conversation between a mom and her 4 year old. “Sweetie, you need to drink some water when we get back to the car. Your pee is too yellow.”
A suitable contemplative period follows and the child protests, “I would like for my pee to be green”
Mom, in a horrified voice, “Oh sweetie, that would mean you were very sick. You don’t want that.”
The child’s view of the universe continues, “It would be nice if my pee was blue.”
Mom is exasperated by now, hands are washed and they are headed out the door. “Just drink your water when we get to the car Katie” comes the definitive, don’t push Mom any further answer. I see Katie being led away as I stop by the water fountain outside the door. She's wearing pink crocks, a purple plaid hat, and white socks.