What happened?

Once again today I am doomed to spend 7 hours doing mindless repetitive tasks that a computer can do in 30 seconds, if of course the computer knew how. It used to, but it had some kind of brain fart which IT calls “fixing things” and now it has forgotten. I know I have no right to bitch, after all Wall Street is having what my friend in investments calls a “meltdown”. He doesn't say it quite that calmly however. I mean, he's not a man who yells, but I imagine him sitting with a day's growth of beard in his $500 suit, tie loose, shaking his incredulous head back and forth. It does indeed look like the end of the world from up close so I'm trying to find prospective today. As I told him, “We've been through some crappy times before, some much worse than this.” I hope that's true, but I'm really not certain the US economy has even been in deeper do-do. Good thing I never put my sights on getting rich. 

Sunday Musings

My daughter is in Denver for two weeks to do training and I am feeling like the old fire horse stuck in the barn listening to the sound of the alarm. I'm proud of her because she is successful, better than me, but with my promotion I am needed at home this trip. Still, the yearning to be there with her is overwhelming. We have had frequent communication, emails, calls and texts.  We have hilarious conversations and commiserate about the shared frustrations of our job, all of which end with “miss you, love you” from us both. She has a cold this week and I do too, my first in a good ten years, perhaps in sympathy but more likely shared germs from work. She has two trainees assigned, one Russian by the name of (wait for it) Igor. Imagine his surprise on finding out she speaks Russian and has been to his hometown.  So Saturday on the way back from the grocery I text her:

Mom says: My fever broke this AM and I am feeling better. You?

Eva says: A bit better today. I had to get here at 6:45.  I worked until 9:45 last night. I'm tired.  I'm also hungry and Igor is stuck on a language line call!

Mom says: What language?

Eva says: Spanish. Pray for me. 

Mom says: Any Particular God?

Eva says: Surprise me.

Mom says: Any God I prayed to would be surprised. We just left Whole foods. Maybe I should pray to them?

     Fifteen minutes later my phone rings. It's the girl bursting with news that takes too much time to text.

     “After work last night I went to the gym and ran for a half hour, came back to my room and woke up this morning on the sofa, still in my gym clothes. I had to be at work and there was no time for breakfast, so I just jumped in the shower, got dressed and ran over here. I'm exhausted and on my way to whole foods for something to eat. Oh, the fucking language line hung up on us! Can you believe that?” 

Yes I can actually and I advise her to email her manager with the time of the call so we can pull it and get the translator in trouble. It's hard enough to sell the program third hand without that annoyance and lord knows we pay these people big bucks to talk for us. In my mind's eye I see her footsteps as she heads out the door of the office and faces west toward the mountains, pushes the crossing button, walks across the busy street and into grocery store heaven. “Have you called Carol?” I remind her of our rich relation who lives in Denver and wants to meet her while she is there. “Not yet,” I hear the edge of exhaustion in her voice. “Well, make sure you do. You really will have fun meeting her. Maybe tomorrow?”

     This morning she called me early, exhausted of course, with news about her evening out. “ I put the do not disturb sign on the door and the maid came in a 8 anyway.  and I am so hungover.” she starts in the middle of a sentence, ends it, and starts another, “They all wanted to stop at f'ing McDonalds at three in the morning!” 

     “Wait darlin', first tell me where you went and with whom.” I already know. You may recall the similar experience I had with some of these same folks. Of course she is talking about our coworkers, only this time they took a taxi to Vinyl, a multi floor dance club, where they whined and complained the entire evening while she danced, made new friends, and ran into someone she knew, of course.  The crew insisted on stopping the taxi for fast food, but more confident than I, she put her foot down after a long wait in line with the meter ticking.

      “I told them I was not paying for this taxi because this stop was not my choice.” They went home annoyed with her because they didn't get any big macs and french fries. “God mom, I wish you were here,” she laments once again. 

      “Call Carol,” I advise. “

     “But I don't have any transportation. How will I get there?” 

     “Baby, she'll pick you up in her beamer convertible. She'll take you to brunch. You can have bloody Mary's. It will be good, promise.” Now she's excited because it sounds exactly like the hangover cure her mother would recommend. 

     “What's the number again?” she asks.

I just got a call. Carol is wonderful and they had a fabulous time. I was right again. “I'm so glad you insisted I call. The food was delicious and that really was the best Bloody Mary I ever had.”

     “You went to Pearl Street grill, right?” I can always fill in the blanks in her conversation. I bet Carol can too. What I didn't tell her is that Carol and I are born 2 days apart. We share a lot of qualities, youthful attitude and appearance being among them. Of course Eva felt immediately comfortable with her. 

     “Okay Mom, love you, gotta go and get a manicure and pedicure. Miss you.” She does too, but not as much as she did this morning. Thanks Carol.

   

America (expletive deleted)

I started to make an obscene gesture to the young white male sitting in the cab of the truck. I first saw the two young black men huddled in the back shivering, no longer making an effort to stay dry. I tried to find a reason why the company whose name was on the truck had no choice but to put them in the back with the equipment. Ah, I thought, the cab is already packed and they drew the short straw. Coming side by side with them I glanced over into the front and saw the young man, no coat, all alone on the seat. I passed him fuming and then slowed, having decided that however clueless he was I was going to express my opinion. About that time I was almost run down by a giant hummer that whizzed by my Prius aggressively. Glancing at his license plate I forgot how angry I was at the conspicious racism. It said X4NUOIL  I was laughing like a manic as he pulled appropriately into the funeral home. 

Fried Rice for Breakfast

My husband dislikes our daughter's new boyfriend. She knew he would, just as she knew I would like him. He's arrogant, outspoken, over confident, and incidentally, really cute. She's head over heels in love and wants to marry him and have his babies. I'm giving it six months, tops. He was here when we got home from Seattle. I surprised him by hugging him when we first met. I don't think my husband even shook his hand. What he can't see is the pain beneath that boastful exterior, a lonely soul with an unknown father and an indifferent alcoholic mother. The fact that he has supported and protected his two younger half siblings since he was 16 and that he is brilliant, educated, and multi-lingual pale for my husband beside his egotism.

The next morning the boy is up at dawn, an insomniac and self admitted vampire, making eggs florentine without garlic for my daughter's breakfast. That night he made us all dinner, leaving the eggplant out of his vegetable and brown rice concoction for my husband's benefit. The fish was done to perfection and sauced with tomatoes, basil, and some imported cheese. We drank a lot of wine, but I noticed he had only one glass. I rode with them as he drove my car into town in order to get a signal on his phone. In his job he finds the birth parents of children adopted from Russia. We listened to an animated conversation in Russian for almost an hour and arrived back home past midnight. My husband was not pleased.

Friday I almost fell asleep at work several times, but rallied when we went out dancing that night at our regular place. I was seat dancing when a man came up to me and pulled me onto the floor. We entertained the audience alone, spinning, dipping, whirling. I almost fell once as I was not exactly sober, but other than that I was brilliant, I swear. He kept telling me what he was about to do, but the band was so loud I could not hear him so I was constantly startled by his moves. When he took me back to the table I was breathless and I wanted to do it again and again. I wanted to dance for the rest of my life in exactly that way, never knowing what was coming next. The next dance my husband accompanied me to the floor, but right in front of me stood the man I had danced with. I really didn't mean to, but thoughtlessly I ignored my husband and danced with the man again for a few minutes. When I turned to join my husband he had left angry and hurt. It was not one of my best moments. We had a silent ride home and some quiet intense words before bed. He held me anyway and sometime in the night we made love, me only half awake.

This morning I was up at 7 writing. Around 11 I realized I had drank a whole pot of coffee and had not eaten. I searched through the fridge for food and found a bit of the rice dish the boyfriend made. I grabbed the remainder of the eggplant, plus peppers, sugar snaps, asparagus, spinach, cheese, eggs and yes, garlic. It was wonderful and I consumed it while I read my horoscope, as follows:

Just make sure that you do whatever you can to restore the connection between you and your closest friends today. Be sure that you make the people you care about the center of your world today, and try to put your own ego aside for the time being. This should be able to help you undo any recent damage that you may have been responsible for in any of your relationships lately. You might not be able to turn things around instantly, but you should be able to make some major progress right now.

Of course I put no credence in this sort of thing, but I suppose good advice is where you find it. So, what have you done to embarrass yourself in public lately?

Vagina Anemone

The Emerald City

Probably the smartest thing I did Thursday morning was not to pick out something black to wear. I almost did without thinking, black being the dominant color of my closet, but instead I picked the green dress I bought in Denver for St Patrick's Day. Kelly green, skirt barely covering my ass, and almost impervious to cat hair. That's a good thing when you have made an idiotic decision to put your son's cat in a sack and take it with you on the plane to Seattle. Of all the thousands of miles I have under my seat belt on US Air I have been extremely lucky to never have been stuck on the tarmac, until now. The AC seems to be busted and we're waiting for someone to sign off that it's safe to fly without it. I pull off the sweater I added as an after thought and checked to see if the cat was still alive. Tucked under the seat in front of me she sleeps soundly, even without the advantage of tuna flavored tranquilizers that she spit back into my hand after I tried to shove them down her throat.

I am not a woman to sit by and let life happen to me. Our flight from Charlotte leaves at 5:45. It is already 4:50 and the flight takes 38 minutes. I scoot down the narrow aisle to speak to the two blond flight attendants. They are sweet and gracious but they offer no solution. “Well ,” says blond number one, “we might get there in time.” I can almost see her shaking her head no as she says it. Blond number two directs me to the man standing outside the door. “He's the manager”, she says deferentially. I put on my sad face and go speak to him softly. “What can I do? Is there anyway we can get to Seattle tonight?” He says positively there is no way to get me there. A tear rolls down my face and I put that same tear in my voice as I explain that I have a cat in a sack and a grandson waiting in Seattle, my first. “Stephen,” I say, reading the tag on his shirt as touch his arm and implore, “ Are you sure there are no flights to the west coast tonight?” I look into the eyes of this kind young Southern gentleman and I know the answer.

Two hours later I am sitting on a United Air flight to Chicago, one that was overbooked and only had room for one person. I have my cat, my computer and no promise of ever seeing my husband or my baggage again. I called my son to let him know about the sorry turn of events, but even as we spoke the lady beside me who had over heard my tale of woe tapped my shoulder. I looked up and my husband was coming down the aisle. The nice man beside him switches places with me and we sit together with congenial cat lovers all around us. I chat with a cute engineer from Winchester and a very young looking woman in front of me who has a grandchild due in March. We pet the cat and the two hour flight is over in record time. In Chicago she leads the way to the gate and all of us, engineer, husband, myself and the cat in the sack on my back.

On the long flight to Seattle we are not so lucky. My husband draws a drunken man eating pizza in 8E and I am seated in 20 E between a sexually ambiguous tattooed person in a baseball cap and an enormously fat man who cannot fit between the arm rests. I graciously offer to raise the one between us and fortunately he takes the offer in the spirit it was given, but still spills over onto more than a quarter of my space. The tattooed person never speaks a word for the 5 hour flight but John, my girth challenged seat-mate, entertains me with musical snoring. The cat, terrified beyond noise sits quietly at my feet, occasionally nudging me with her head through the mesh zippered front.

An hour later my two bottles of water and three cups of coffee catch up with me. I wake John and apologize that I must answer natures call. When I return John is still gone so I run to the front to see my husband briefly. He is siting in first class with an empty seat beside him. Brief joy, then I find that he was moved so the man beside him didn't heave on him and I cannot sit there without paying 40 dollars. I race back to John and make a quick deal. Soon he is sitting in the roomy chair in front of the plane and I am sitting in my now roomy seat beside my husband. I pull the cat up in my lap and reassure her that all is well. I sleep for a bit and soon the city flows out beneath the plane wing, the lights more copper colored than emerald, a beautiful sight to behold.

It took another 45 minutes to explain the bag situation to the nice lady at the United counter and tell her where to deliver them the next day. Then the new dad is waiting at the curb to take us all away. I give Diana the traveling cat a final scratch as my son drops us off at what he describes as a sketchy part of town. I'm thinking it would have been nice if he had told me that when he recommended the hotel, but the room is clean if dated and they have wifi. This morning my room phone rang with the news that the bags were here. All is sorted, hung and tucked away now and I am off to find coffee while my husband snores. I figure it's Seattle so I won't have to go far.

Sonshine from Seattle

Mom and Dad and Sagen right after he arrived. They just got out of the pool so the baby is the only one who bothered to get dressed. Really, they had him in a big pool that was set up in the living room.

Sagen Foltz Haley 11:30 PM PST September 6, 2008

AMEN

I wrote my father in law’s obituary this week. A lady from the Richmond Times Dispatch called us asking if they could do a feature article on him. I listened to my husband speak on the phone about how dedicated his Dad was to the church. “Sometimes we would go for a week with out seeing him for dinner except on Sunday.” I wonder if the woman on the phone heard between the lines as clearly as I did? My husband loved and admired his father but he knew always that he came in second to the family business. It’s hard for a child to compete with God for his Dad's attention.

I must give my husband credit for reinventing fatherhood. With no example to go from he managed to let the children know that they were the most important people in his life. I turned through pictures on Thursday trying to find ones to show at my father-in-law’s memorial. As I scanned through the children’s birthdays, holidays, concerts, special awards at scouts and school, I note that their grandfather appears in only the Christmas photos and a few random shots when they stopped by, usually unannounced, and scooped the children up to have their picture taken together. I found a few where the children visited him at his birthday, but mostly the pictures are ones of him and other preachers.

My daughter and I were talking in the car earlier in the week and she stumbled around for a description of her grandparents. “They just never look at themselves,” she says definitively. I give her the quote from Socrates, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and we talk about Thoreau and living deliberately. She asks again if she had to come to the memorial service and I tell her again, yes, you need to be there. She went to Pittsburgh on Wednesday to visit a new friend. She called me Friday morning when we were halfway to Roanoke and told me that I was going to be mad at her, but she couldn't make it to the funeral. She told me a long complicated story about why her alarm didn't go off but well, it's her choice.

My middle son, the peacemaker, flew in from Seattle to attend the memorial. The preacher from Pop's church asked me if one of the grandchildren would read something at the service. I should have said no, my children are all agnostics and atheists so they wouldn't feel comfortable standing in the pulpit, but instead I volunteered the flesh of my flesh without his consent. As we drove over Afton mountain for the third time this week, my son sat in the front with his Dad studying the piece from Romans he will read. He was dressed in the new clothes I bought for him the day before, black blazer, soft blue shirt, gray pants with a subtle stripe, and a tie borrowed from his father. When he stood up in the church he was so handsome and he spoke in a clear strong masculine voice, like a prophet crying in the wilderness. Even knowing all that I do, I believe him for a few seconds. In the face of all the amazing men who speak today, godly and intelligent men, men who have spent their lives believing something I was taught but cannot accept, I stumble briefly over my incredulity. It is all so comforting. I smile as I imagine Pop's ghostly presence standing in the pulpit smiling down like Luke's father from Star Wars.

Each of us on the front row have our own private grief. The widow cries for a lifelong companion, but the rest of us, son, grandson, and myself, we mourn for a relationship that could have been. The important man in the pulpit talks about how children loved Carl and flocked to him for hugs. I think back through my children's life and cannot recall even one time when they went spontaneously to their grandfather for a hug. The man they talk about is not the man my family knew. The man we knew could never divide himself from the role he played. As I watch my son interact so patiently with the grandmother he drew in this flawed family, I realize that he gave his grandparents the unconditional love they could not give him. I know he is able to do that because he got that same kind of love from us, an exasperating love evidently. He explains it to me in the kitchen last night. “Why do you always tell me everything is fine? Why don't you just tell me I fucked up sometimes? Why do you always blame yourself?” Of course, I immediately accept the blame for that and apologize, and the boy shakes his head in dismay. Laughing now, I promise I will try to be more critical, but I know I'm lying.

My failure is in seeing my children as they will be, as they have the potential to be, but not giving them the constructive criticism they may need to achieve that potential. Perhaps because I was reared without praise of any kind, I have erred in the opposite direction. The boy will be 30 this year and I'm thinking he may just have to learn to accept the fact that I'm the mother he got. My daughter tells me always that I'm the perfect mom, but then, she knows what sells. My oldest forgives me all my sins just as I forgive his and he always holds part of my soul within his own. I love them all with a primal animal instinct that would send me rushing into the path of an oncoming tornado to protect them, however that is something that is rarely required of parents.

What they need and what I give them does not always coincide, but if I learned one lesson from the life and death of their grandfather it should be to listen. On one rare occasion my father in law touched my heart and made me love him in spite of all his flaws. It was when my mother died and he wrote me a letter from his real heart, the heart of a man who cherished his mother. In it he said, “The loss of one's mother is the most wracking experiences life can bring us. All the nerve ends of the soul are centered there.” It's strange to me that although I know how gigantic a figure my mother was in my life that I cannot see myself being the same in my children's eyes. I suppose I won't really understand until they have my funeral, and damn, I hate that I'm going to miss that.