Wednesday, August 8, 2007

There should be a higher law

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

When I go to bed at night, there’s at least one thing that I’m very good at.
The other is being able to empty my mind of the woebegone happenings of the day.
A long time ago I learned how, at shut-eye time, to pack a mental suitcase with any worries, fretting, and negative thoughts I might have and give them up to God for safe-keeping until the next day.
I’m a firm believer that on any given night, we all deserve a restful sleep free of the dark, regurgitated materials that might have crossed our daily path.
I also love to get up really early in the morning, especially during the summer months when, at 5 a.m., I can catch a glimpse of the sunrise not yet written upon by the events of the coming day.
And I can achieve the wake-up call without the mechanical warning system of an alarm clock.
These night and day rituals renew my trump hand on positive thinking, which aside from my appreciation for small wonders, is the currency of my endurance and my existence.
My beef thus lies with the media powers-that-be—who for reasons beyond my comprehension—believe that bad news is the way to jump-start the coming day.
In my view, it’s a sucker punch and something’s gotta change when it comes to the morning news.
I woke up at 5 a.m. yesterday morning pulled to consciousness by the rare use of my alarm clock—set because with Pete being home and putting me in my happy place, I usually sleep in.
The very first words that came out of the national newsman’s voice at the top of the early hour were that “The head of the State Food and Drug Administration in China had been executed.”
Though I am smart enough to know at least some of the harsh realities of the world we live in, visions of a bullet to the head or death by firing squad are not the first conscious thoughts I want planted in my soul at the start of a new day.
What happened to good news first?
If you do an Internet search on this subject, it’s all about the art of sensationalism, what sells, and the public’s thirst for the negative. Sorry, bucko. I’m an optimist.
And while I’ll admit I’ve still a lot to learn in this Earth school and that I may be a small fleck of influence in the argument for the positive, I’m not alone.
The fate of Mr. Zheng Xiaoyu of China, who was convicted in May of taking bribes worth $850,000 to approve the manufacture of an antibiotic blamed for 10 deaths, and other substandard medicines, no doubt is news.
Yet, the poet Pindar wrote, “Unsung, the noblest deed will die.”
Some 14,000 firearms were melted down in Colombia to highlight the danger of illegal arms proliferation, and the molten metal was used to make school chairs and build a monument in memory of victims of violence and kidnapping in Colombia.
That’s hope.
It’s also what my old wicker couch is for on the banks of Frog Creek. It is as Wendell Berry penned, in “The Peace of Wild Things”
"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

The foundation needs a change

August 1, 2007

My flat stare has come full circle and squarely back at me.
At 46 I should already have learned the following lessons; makeup doesn’t work in 33 degrees celsius weather, gin on the rocks doesn’t mix, and that even though I am a multi-tasking, female entity I should wave a white flag sometimes.
I also should have come to know that even though the humid weather makes my fingers swell to the size of small sausages, it is not the culprit behind my “Buddha.”
But let’s get back to the makeup thing.
Sometimes when I look in the mirror all I see are crow’s feet, grey hair, and crevices deep enough in my forehead to plant seeds in. I’ve thought about standing back a bit to the point where everything is blurry, but if I did that I wouldn’t know where I was, as my eyesight, too, is on a racetrack to reading glasses.
My laugh lines are not funny, the bags under my eyes aren’t welcome and double chins should have been left on the list of things that happen to women as we age (not to mention the host of dark hairs that sprout there after the age of 40.)
If women could pocket the monies spent on makeup foundation since the beginning of our time slapping on the stuff, we’d be richer than Oprah Winfrey.
It purports to blend like magic or last until the cows come home.
While most of us “know-it-alls” have found at least one ounce of a brand that works half the time, I’m still waiting for a company to use their breakthrough hocus pocus to “moo-ove” me with a foundation that also doesn’t slide off my face and into my lap in hot weather, ever.
This undoubtedly happened with incredible coincidence when, after years of not seeing a high school girl pal, I bumped into her at an outdoor concert in the hot July sun.
Before I could throw down a black circle from the cartoons and jump in, the jolt caused my otherwise youthful and lifted visage--courtesy of the latest technology—to slip off and down straight past my breasts already in south-mode and ricochet off my “Buddha,” (which was in competition with my spandex underwear) and land in the “gin on the rocks” I was holding in a plastic cup.
Stupidly, I took a drink from my glass hoping by some miracle I might regain my composure and that even though it looked like iced cappuccino, it wouldn’t taste like natural beige.
In the end though, losing face wasn’t as traumatic as I anticipated when as I took one horrible gulp, I realized that unlike the woman standing in front of me, at least my moustache was bleached and not black.
And thankfully I was still wearing a tried and true lipstick (tested innumerable times by the kisses of my Superman) that has allowed us both to leap tall buildings without losing its color.
Meanwhile, the psychologists and psychiatrists of the world tell us that we teach people how to treat us. This is true in many aspects of our lives, the least of which exists in mine when I am headlong into DIY projects.
Peter leaves me to my hive of industrious behavior because I’ve taught him that I can be a bit of a control freak in the departments of housecleaning and gardening.
His life is simpler and safer if he just lets me “bee.”
Case in point.
Eight willow tree trunks in my front yard have been eye-sores to me since I moved here with Pete last August. I mowed around them in frustration and left the weeds to grow around them purely out of spite.
I had always wished the trees had never been cut down and burned out all those years ago, but then I wasn’t living here and wasn’t the one who had to clean up the mess of broken branches which willows are notoriously known for dropping, even at the slightest breeze.
I had briefly envisioned making the old trunks into planters but the already overworked weed maintainer and flower garden technician in me said, “Whoa!”
Instead, I hired the local #1 tree-trunk-mulcher-guy, who then devoted hours of his time meticulously grinding up what was left of the “old girls.”
Unbeknownst to me, he also was going to neaten up the sawdust into heaps, easier for my hauling, before the mulching was done.
In the days that followed, as Pete and I sat outside admiring the great job done by the #1 tree-mulcher guy, I couldn’t figure out why there was only three small heaps of sawdust and what seemed like 18 million piles more waiting to be raked up.
“Oh, I told him he didn’t need to do it--that my wife would take care of it,” Pete replied.
Oh, white flag were art thou?

In the heat of the moment

August 8, 2007

First of all, I have to set the information straight from my July 2nd column.
My laugh lines are not funny, the bags under my eyes aren’t welcome and double chins should have been left OFF the list of things that happen to women as we age (not to mention the host of dark hairs that sprout there after the age of 40.)
And while we’re back on that score again, I’d like to add hot flushes to the series of unfortunate events that I’d like to see gone from this menopausal galaxy.
As if the female species didn’t already have enough to deal with, having stopped doing laundry and vacuuming long enough to bear children, carried the “Buddha” reminder ever after, survived on three hours sleep for the next 18 years while raising said children through brat-hood, the immature teenage years, and on into “adulthood” wherein mom’s pocketbook still carried no money because the $20 bill that was in there was perpetually loaned to offspring.
And then – after all the little chickens have flown the nest and we overworked and underpaid mothers find ourselves again, everything suddenly heats up at the wrong time and in the wrong place.
The internal barbecue ignites at the most inconvenient time of day when we are standing in the vegetable aisle amongst strangers in the grocery store and are possessed with an overpowering urge to rip off all our clothes and run naked into the lake.
And why do hot flushes also have to burst out of you like on the movie “Alien” during that one night a month when you are deep into sawing logs and lying there on your side of the bed in a Tutankhamen-like sleeping position?
And to our poor husbands, who awaken to the sight of us ripping off our pajamas and taking fast shallow breaths – and then realize this is not going to be the night of their dreams – we apologize.
Or not.
To head off hot flushes at the pass I gave up pajamas before I hit the pillow, jumping into bed in my birthday suit until I realized that my husband thought my new look was carte blanche on a seven-night-a-week love boat.
To make matters worse, when I told Pete that I thought this was it and that “the big menopause was inevitable,” he started bringing a roll of duct tape to bed with him. When I asked him what it was for--expecting that perhaps it meant we were going to embark on a new love adventure on the one night a month I was in the mood, he shook his head.
The duct tape was there in case menopause struck at the full moon and he needed to secure me to the basement wall so that I would hurt him.
But he won’t have to worry about doing that, I reported. Before he knows it, the lunar lander-- with Pete duct taped to one of its jet engines--will have delivered him to the moon.
Hot flushes would be gratefully accepted by moi, if all that heat would burn off the little roll around my middle and the calorie intake from the cold beers thoroughly enjoyed over the last two weeks of warm weather.
And like clockwork, the tops of my ears turn beet-red at 2 p.m. every day thanks to Mother Nature’s little play on my evolving womanhood. I don’t even need to wear a watch anymore. As soon as my ears light up, I know it’s time to the put the coffee on for the afternoon break in the work day.
Maybe I could harness these internal heat blasts into energy capsules and use them to run my truck or keep my house warm over the winter. Heaven knows I can heat up the bed to the boiling point in the time it takes to flick on a light switch.
And if I could just figure out how to channel it, I’d also have-- at a moment’s notice-- my own fuel source for the space ship.