Wise words; take it leave it but don't forget it

Sunday, March 28, 2010

“If at first you don’t succeed, if at second you still aren’t getting it, if at third you want to throw your arms up and run away, just give it a week or so and try again.” – Me, myself, and I

“Women hold up half the sky.” – Chinese proverb

“Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth.” – Sheryl Louise Moller

“Your job is you. Unless you fill yourself up first, you have nothing to give anybody.” - Anonymous

“Remember, when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” - Neil Gaiman

“Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.” – Robert A. Heinlein

“The person without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder.” – Thomas Carlyle

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing—that’s why we recommend it daily.” - Zig Ziglar

“A person is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.” - Michel de Montaigne

“Great ideas need landing gear as well as wings.” - C.D. Jackson

“We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.” – Peter De Vries

“There’s nothing wrong with today’s teenager that twenty years won’t cure.” - Edith Stirwell

“The mathematical probability of a cat doing exactly what it wants is the one scientific absolute in the world. – Lynn M. Osband

“To think too long about doing a thing, often becomes its undoing.” - Eva Young

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” - Thomas A. Edison

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” –Leslie Poles Hartley.

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” – William A. Ward

“You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated of it.” –Henry Ward Beecher

“If you are going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill

“If you don’t find opportunity knocking, find another door.” - Anonymous

“In doing anything, the first step is the most difficult.” – Chinese proverb

“Fear is the little dark room where negatives are developed.” – Michael Pritchard

“You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E.L. Doctorow

“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.” - Sophia Loren

“There is only one day left, always starting over: It is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.” - Jean Paul Sartre

“For fast acting relief, try slowing down.” - Lily Tomlin

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid.” - Mark Twain

“Good fathers are the ones who make the women in their lives feel like good mothers.” – Unknown

“Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal.” - E. Joseph Cossman

“The parents exist to teach the child, but also they must learn what the child has to teach them; and the child has a very great deal to teach them.” – Arnold Bennett

“Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.” –Alan Alda

“You shouldn’t be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.” – Unknown

"Do not kiss your children so they will kiss you back but so they will kiss their children, and their children's children." -- Noah benShea

“Find spaces of stillness if you want to get to the spaces where the answers are.” – Eckhart Tolle

“Anything is possible.” - Bruce Caldwell

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” – Unknown

Laughing at life through the looking glass

Sunday, March 21, 2010

If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that laughing at the stupid things I do and think about, is good medicine for me.

For starters, it would seem that I quite simply have forgotten that two plus two equals four.

Early one morning I went to the local car wash and put a twenty-dollar bill in the change machine in order to get loonies for the automatic car wash bay.

I wanted an eight-dollar wash package and with four loonies in my hand, shoved them into the coin slot.

“Two, four, six, eight,” I said out loud and then spent at least five minutes trying to figure out why the door to the wash bay wouldn’t open.

“What do you #@$%! mean ‘enter more coins!’” I shouted at the coin machine, as dark clouds began to form over my head.

I got back in my truck and called the carwash hotline on my cell phone to inform somebody that the coin operation system wasn’t working. I was cold and I was crabby.

“We’ll have to come over,” said a polite voice on the other end. While I waited for the manager to arrive, I opened my wallet in a huff to count my loonies, muttering that I’d probably put more than eight bucks into that stupid machine already.

16 of the original 20 loonies still remained in my possession.

Uh huh, maybe I shouldn’t have dropped out of math class in Grade 10 after all.

And while I may not have mastered my math tables, I do know that it only takes one stinky diaper in the kitchen garbage to make the house smell like the barn used to, especially when another toddler is found playing with the swinging lid and fanning the aroma of his little sister’s poop into the surrounding atmosphere.

“Granny Daycare” mirrors a game of sports. There is no ending you can write beforehand.

It’s a new adventure every time—including the one that gets you down on the floor playing “Pop-Up Pirate” and gingerly sticking plastic swords into the sides of a toy barrel in anticipation of the pirate jumping straight out the top.

When the game is all over I almost always want someone to take me to the hospital for anti-anxiety medicine and to the chiropractor to get me out of the seized-up cross-legged position I am stuck in.

I’ve also learned that if I’m going to play “Pop-Up Pirate” I must not do so before baking peanut butter cookies. I was so frazzled I forgot to add the peanut butter in the mix and didn’t figure it out until all the kids were stumped by what was missing in the taste test when the cookies came out of the oven.

Hide and Seek—the ultimate outdoor game for all ages.

And where does Granny decide to hide when it’s her turn? Usually it’s my husband who’s in the dog house but . . .

Getting inside the doggie doorway by the count of 20 is not easy when the width of the thing is much less than that of my bum.

In a desperate effort to disappear I’m sure I dislocated my pelvis as a shot of adrenaline pushed me inside the doghouse, where I don’t think a canine has slept in months.

I know this because as I scuffled around in the cramped space to sit down I came face to face with a pile of sunflower seeds and a red squirrel.

Startled by our sudden face off we both screamed—me in my girly voice, and “Red” in a bucktoothed, high-pitched “chee” identical to the squirrel in the “Bridgestone” TV commercial from the 2008 Super Bowl.

And there wasn’t room for both of us.

In the moment of terror that I saw in the beady eyes of my nemesis, I envisioned that if I tried to escape, “Red” would launch himself into my long hair and have to be cut out with scissors.

I didn’t have a chance.

In a swift plan of reaction—and torn right out of a movie clip from “The Matrix,”—as the squirrel leapt toward me I veered to the side, and he shot straight out the doggy door.

“Fiction is a bunch of little lies making up a big truth.” – W.O. Mitchell.

I felt like Alice in the rabbit’s house. I shuffled around and sat on my bum and processed what had just happened in the last 30 seconds.

I could hear “Dot” who undoubtedly now had the little monster treed and under quarantine. Or did the barking and “chee-cheeing” sound like animal laughter? I couldn’t quite tell.

Just then a spider the size of my thumb crawled out of the straw in front of me, rolled over on its back and appeared to hold its stomach with four of its eight legs and giggle before it disappeared down a crack in the floor.

I just sat there half expecting “Ozzie” the cat to appear in the doghouse doorway with a Cheshire grin.

“How’re you enjoying the game?” he would ask.

“They don’t play fair,” I’d retort, of the jokes the dog and the squirrel had conjured up for the Alpha.

“No one does if they think they can get away with it. That’s a lesson you’ll have to learn,” Ozzie would advise.

But instead, a grandchild peeked into the small space where a 49-year-old would-be contortionist sat composing herself.

“Granny! I found you Granny! How did you fit in there?”

There are some things money can’t buy.

The very moment—when I started to laugh—was one of them.

The first rule is to write about what matters most

Sunday, March 14, 2010

This is one of those weeks when I’ve had to apply “Rule 21.”

It’s a directive I invented and one that I have to fall back on now and then when it appears I have nothing to write about.

It is a flexible rule that varies in regulation and content depending on what I’m looking for as a catalyst to my creative block.

“Rule 21” is meant to put me on a slope, where I am at the top looking down upon the thing I must write about.

If I have to deploy “Rule 21” it means the incline to the thing is going to involve a twisty and slow cross-country ski to the finish line and will not be a speedy downhill slalom.

However, it has not been a week in which the Universe has conspired against me in terms of writing. That never happens. There always is something to write about. Sometimes I just have trouble seeing the story between the everyday ordinary pages of my life.

For me, “Rule 21” is sort of like what a dog does when it comes upon an area where it wants to lie down. Around and around in circles the dog kneads the spot in customary fashion to improve the place where it will spend considerable time.

Or what author Sarah Ban Breathnach believes about exercise and spirit. “I walk regularly for my soul and my body tags along.”

I am a better thinker and creator when my body is busy doing something else.

So when the write tank appears empty, I clean house, wash dishes, vacuum, fold laundry, bake, eat and take the long way home.

And today, my house is very tidy, there’s not a dirty spoon in sight, all my clothes are clean, the cookie tin is brimming, I’ve seen the countryside from here to the west end of the district twice in the last 12 hours, and I’ve consumed enough chocolate almonds to sustain me until June.

And I shake my head because it’s not like the door to my imagination ever closes. There’s “applied” Beth who carries around a little brown book of scribbled thoughts, and there’s “radio frequency” Beth, with a storage cloud of ideas in the recesses of her brain.

But sometimes all those notes don’t add up to much of anything I can use to make this column longer than the 407 word count in which I have just blathered.

Maybe it’s a slump thing. Maybe it’s a “missing my husband very much” thing.

On the cusp of the coming spring, I am a bit self-absorbed in the fact that in that last 365 days I have seen Peter for none but 30 of them. Oh, the hard facts of my soul mate having to work away from home.

I am one of the strongest, most independent woman creatures I know. Hands down. But I sure could use a hug and a kiss and some long lost company from the man I love.

I read somewhere—and I believe—that souls attract to those who are on the same frequency, have similar lessons and needs, and who often reflect their own issues to help them understand and cope. They say souls need to be with those of like mind or like frequency and that when you move out of frequency or out of sync, life becomes static and does not flow.

Today this is the headspace I’m in. Tomorrow it will be another story.

Best selling author Neil Gaiman penned good advice. “Write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.”

This is my first rule.

The road to Hollywood starts right here

Sunday, March 7, 2010

I think I was 11 years old when my parents bought their first television. When it came to my childhood neck of the woods, it smacked of possibilities and I was drawn to it like Carol Anne was in ‘Poltergeist.’

Thankfully I didn’t end up inside the tube waiting for my mother to rescue me, but I definitely dreamed big dreams of being in the movies.

From then on I wanted to be actress and live in Hollywood.

So it goes without saying that the annual Oscar Awards always has been a television favorite with me. That Sunday night extravaganza each year is as important to me as the Olympic Games. I pull out all the stops, eat chips and dip, and ignore the telephone if it rings.

This very minute, as I write in this space, I have exactly 1 hour and 22 minutes left before the curtain goes up for ‘The Oscars 2010.’ The chip dip is marinating and the ink is dried on my official ballot where I have marked out my favorite nominees.

And while I have long since come to grips with the reality that I will not make it in Hollywood, I remain a big dreamer in my own starring role with a cast right here in my lovely little life, with many moments worth a golden boy statue in hand.

Actress in a Leading Role: My two-year-old granddaughter who by her contortioned gestures, writhing, and sorrowful tears, would like me to believe the world will end if she is not allowed to have that second cookie.

Actor/Actress in a Supporting Role: The canine capers of ‘Dot’ and ‘Cash’ poised wagging as they too make a play for a second cookie, having just eaten the first one dropped on the floor by the one-year old granddaughter in the highchair.

Documentary Short: The one written by Mr. Fantastic that argues men do not see dust. Ever.

Documentary Feature: The long-winded comeback by Mrs. Fantastic who thought that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard.

Visual Effects: From the 1990 archives—the drop jaw expression on my face in the bathroom mirror as I was busy applying lipstick when my five-year-old, fresh home from the school grounds, proudly said to me, “Mommy I learned a new “F” word at school today,” to which I hurriedly asked, “Oh good, and what was that?”

Best Director: “Mommy, did Beth say you could clean the oven?” (serious yet-oh-so-comical question recently posed by a three-year-old to her mother, at their house where I am the housekeeper.)

Original Score: The real reason Peter married me—because I won the bet that I could beat him at a game of pool. Border Bar. Summer 1997.

Short Film Live Action: When my grandson turned the corner in aisle three at the local grocery store last summer and saw a white-bearded man pondering over his list and shouted, “SANTA!” to which the jolly man turned to face the small believer and replied, “Ho, Ho, Ho!” Priceless.

Animated Feature: Me at the crack of dawn on a recent and very cold Friday morning when I took the ‘Expedition’ to the big city to rescue Daughter #3. I’d pulled over to check that all the truck doors would open easily for the inspecting officers at the U.S. Customs border crossing after intuition told me that the green beast was likely iced up after going through the car wash the previous night.

The passenger’s side back door was frozen shut and refused me entry from the outside. I came back around to the driver’s side passenger door and got in and heaved on the frozen door from the inside. That didn’t work either, and as luck would have it I then found myself trapped in the back seat because the child security devices had locked me in.

There was no option but to climb back into the driver’s seat over the middle console, at which point I lost my footing between the two front seats and fell head over heels into the floor of the front passenger side smashing the bag of peanut butter and banana sandwiches I’d made for the long day ahead.

Foreign Language Film: What I muttered under my breath in 1991, composed while biting my tongue, five months postpartum when a woman looked at me and asked when the baby was due.

Costume Design: Hands down my idea. My brother, age 7, in 1971, in a red velvet dress walking down the road to my grandparents’ house.

Makeup: The ante that Mr. Fantastic can draw from for the next 12 months after saying to me: “I hate to just call you ‘my wife.’ It is such a generic word for someone so splendid.”

Original Screenplay: Wilbur—the wonderful story of the little pot- bellied piglet I envisioned buying and bringing home next week, so cute and cuddly all wrapped up in a little pig blanket.

Adapted Screenplay: $%#@!—the flash forward nightmare when the 150-pound pig pet helps itself to the contents of the refrigerator and then roots into the leather cushions of my new couch.

Best Picture: Status quo—two dogs, one cat, a 19-year old live-in, and no pig.