Miss Know-It-All learns a lesson

Monday, January 31, 2011

I fell in love with snowshoeing in the early 1970s, when I was about 12 years old. I loved the sport most because it was something we always did together as a family.

The wooden “Beavertail” snowshoes with leather belted bindings were too big and my winter boots often got stuck in the toe hole because I didn’t push my foot far enough to the bar. My snowshoes were too long for my height and I couldn’t do the 180-degree turn around like my dad could. And when I tried, I invariably ended up in a contorted heap in the snow, like a long-legged newborn giraffe, unable to untangle myself and get up.

I still loved the whole experience.

Those long winter walks over the frozen creek bed, across the field and into the thick forest behind my childhood home remain crystal clear recalls for me, as if they happened yesterday. We had the same destination every time in that forest. We negotiated up and over the snow-covered rocks and the barbed wire fence that kept my grandfather’s cattle in check, before arriving in the big pines where we’d build a little fire from sticks and pieces of wood lying around.

The canvas pack sack my dad carried on his back would come off and be opened to the eagerness of both of us kids, as the hot dogs went on roasting sticks and the buns, ketchup, and a thermos of hot chocolate made the picnic around the warm fire.

The family dog always came along, and I imagine the hot dog or two it would be passed from the outstretched hand of a child were more than enough reward for the work it took the dog to get there with us through the deep snow.

In all the years since those good old days my love for snowshoeing has never waivered.

But here’s the thing—I haven’t had that pair of snowshoes on nor any other pair of snowshoes on since 1977.

Thus hatched the circus in my neck of the woods on Saturday when, for the first time in 38 years, I decided to try my luck at snowshoeing.

The snowshoes I wore in the 1970s still hang in my parents’ garage. That pair would probably fit me perfectly today, but of course I opted to buy a modern pair with aluminum frames as a graduation present to myself.

I brought them home three weeks ago and hung them on a hook in my kitchen and never once did I think to practice getting to know how they worked.

They were snowshoes. How different could they be?

By the time I’d dressed in multiple layers on Saturday morning, I couldn’t bend over to jimmy my feet into the plastic bindings, let alone figure out how the system worked, and had to take most of my clothes off while standing in the outside doorway in order to figure it out.

I couldn’t put the snowshoes on inside the house because of the crampons, or steel teeth underneath that helped with traction and I didn’t need a set of giant teeth tracks across my kitchen floor.

All I know for sure is that I had an attack of the “cramp-ons” from all the work it took to get the stupid things on.

Then, all at once I was off on my solo quest, chest puffed out, my Olympic-sized ego in tow, headed for the bush line far across the creek with no pack sack, no food or matches, and no note left behind to tell loved ones where to come looking for me should I go missing.

I hadn’t walked more than 30 ft into the deep snow when my butt muscles started to spasm and my legs turned to cement.

I had two canine capers that followed close behind me, refusing to blaze their own trail for fear that I would eat the dog treats they could smell in my coat pocket. In fact, so close did they follow, that they stepped on my snowshoes, hurling me face first into a snowdrift.

The dogs just sat there behind me like ice statues, waiting for me to get up and blaze on.

And I hadn’t even made it out of my own yard at that point.

By the time I made it down to the creek, I’d fallen three times, lost one mitt, and dropped my camera in the snow.

The dogs then bolted off down the creek bed with their noses to the ground fast on the scent of creatures unseen. They disappeared around the bend leaving me standing there listening to the sound of my heart pounding “can I go home now,” as my thigh muscles burned holes in my long underwear from acute overuse.

I was standing there motionless and cold when the dogs came roaring back in my direction, followed closely by what I thought was a wolf—and they were leading it straight to me in the wake of their own terror.

My first thought was to release myself from my snowshoes and use them as shields but I didn’t even know how to get them off.

My heart was in need of a defibrillator by the time I realized it was not a wolf, but a much larger neighborhood dog.

All three canines arrived at my feet with tails wagging for those treats I still had in my pocket.

I threw in the towel.

I looked back at the house 150 ft. away and thought how nice it would be if Isaiah Mustafa suddenly arrived on a white snowmobile and offered me a ride home.

Unfortunately that’s not what happened.

The script for the next half-century

Monday, January 17, 2011

I’ve just come from the doctor’s office and the first “Well Woman” checkup of my 50’s, having reached that inaugural aging mountain last October.

And while I don’t believe “it’s all downhill from here,” it would appear that if I want the grass to stay green on this side of the fence, the days of casual indifference to health issues must take leave on the night train bound for the past.

Medical statistics dictate that once you hit the half-century mark, your reasons for “kicking the bucket “depend more on the diseases in the bucket than you tripping over the bucket and meeting with an untimely end due to the accidental fall.

This tidbit of information was a huge eye opener for someone like me, who has no intention on cutting short her earth visit over the next 50 years.

Well Woman changes are then a must—including to my usual after supper menu of three cups of bold “Caldwell” coffee, four chocolates, and three slices of the blackened carcinogens of over-cooked pork roast that I’d forgotten to take out of the oven because I was slouched over the Internet.

In other words, now I really should be drinking green tea and plenty of water, eating more blueberries, wild Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds, and walnuts.

And exercising more than the effort it takes to lift my tired carcass onto the couch after a long day at my office desk.

Yes, body mass index reducing exercise.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the Well Woman doctor visit was learning that for the last 35 years I’ve been living the lie of being taller than I actually am.

The jig is up. Somebody turn off the sirens and warning lights.

The reality check of being even shorter than I thought I was, means my height/weight ratio has catapulted me into the red zone on the BMI scale.

Suddenly “Buddha” is no longer the unsung hero of my childbearing days, but the target for every shape-shifting exercise and weight loss plan I can find.

The question remains, will I put myself to the task? I am the one student who in high school waited until the night before to study for exams—and it wasn’t because I was gifted with scorching intelligence.

I’ll readily admit that I could be a poster child for procrastination. In a former life I’m sure I was the Greek goddess “Akrasia,” who knew what she ought to do and didn’t do it.

I continue to be challenged by self-regulation failure and when it comes to balancing my love of food and the “Despicable Me” who rears her ugly head at the thought of exercising on purpose, my inability to avoid or stop undesirable behavior needs to go to rehab.

Yet, while I may drag my feet too much in some areas of my life, I do not do that with my desire to lead an honest living, and yet as I have come to realize, even honesty doesn’t always pay.

Or at least it doesn’t pay me.

Like a good citizen I wrote the taxman to advise of my marital status change to “separated” and they acknowledged my truthfulness with a bill for $465. Go figure.

My honesty also dictates that I ask the burning question that faces me as I pull a homemade pizza out of the oven.

If I live alone does that mean I can eat the whole pizza by myself without feeling guilty?

Bon appétit!

The cat rules get tested

Monday, January 10, 2011

There are a few things I’ve had just about enough of; snow banks that block the view of oncoming traffic, my frozen fingers in cheap winter mitts, the dog’s back leg, and persnickety old oil furnaces.

And oh yes, the cat hairs on my bed pillow aren’t winning an award just now either. I love cats. I loathe cat hair—that same loathe of cat hair that I had during the weak and brainwashed moment last fall when I was convinced another house pet would complete me.

As I sit here writing this column, “Oliver’s” beady little cat eyes are staring back at me from the flop of my bed blankets that he has stirred up in the pandemonium to locate the small bell toy he is constantly fetching and carrying around in his mouth.

The number two cat rule around here goes something like this; “Cats are not allowed on my bed.”

Oliver knows this. He is a smart cat. Any cat that can drink water out of the toilet must be smart, right?

Yet there he rolls in the no-cat zone of my unmade bed flicking cat hair all over my pillow—and as I thoroughly enjoy the morning entertainment.

I hate to admit it, but cats could teach us a thing or two about being in the moment and enjoying it—even if it means facing a total body shaving or wrap in duct tape when we are through.

I contemplate these radical fixes for the “shed” dilemma several times each day, including when I find cat hair protruding from my right nostril when I wake up in the morning, or when a cat hair gets stuck to my contact lens as I am putting it in at 6 a.m., causing me to flail about as if a fire poker has just been inserted in my cornea.

Cats are not allowed on my bed.

And it never fails that at 11 p.m. as I lay supine under the weight of a snuggly bedspread, drained of energy from a busy day and drifting off into my fantasies—I will be attacked by a flying cat.

Just five minutes prior to this mayhem he will have been passed out on the chair he is not supposed to sleep on in the kitchen.

The ruckus begins with what sounds like the distant rumble of horse hooves and as my drowsy mind pictures Isaiah Mustafa from the “Old Spice” commercial riding in to rescue me from my troubles, a small feline terror leaps diagonally across my bed, meets with the opposing corner and falls straight down the crack between the bed and the wall to floor.

With my dashed dreams of a beautiful black man on a white stallion, I drag my skeleton from bed and coax kitty to the kitchen with a treat and lock the door behind him as he bolts off to entertain the barn cat, on winter sojourn in the basement.

This “nuttier than squirrel turds” scenario happens at least three times a week and, it would appear, only on the nights when I dream of Mustafa. The remaining nights when I’m lying in bed thinking about the reasoning in buying a 16-oz bottle of “Le Chien et le Chat” laundry detergent for $16 and a $600 vacuum cleaner meant just for animal hair, all is quiet on the feline front.

And then there is the dog’s back leg; with a mind and performance all its own during Cash’s ear scratching episodes as it flails and jigs about in referred delight.

Inadvertently, the back leg of the canine becomes a door knocker at 3 a.m. when this human is in the deepest dungeon of sleep and wherein I am suddenly impaled on the bedroom ceiling out of instant panic at the rapping that also sends “Dot” into a bark and warn frenzy.

Morning arrives and I sit up groggy, rubbing my face, chanting, and “I feel wonderful I feel wonderful,” mimicking a scene from the movie “What about Bob.”

And then I wonder why I drop face first into my chicken soup at lunchtime in a wave of narcolepsy.

Sherri Ziff Lester, a Hollywood life coach, says we should find a quiet space and ask: What do I want for my life? How do I want it to be different? And rather than seeing the new year as the time to radically shift gears overnight, to make a six-month plan with small, doable action steps. Then, on the first day of each month, we’re supposed to treat ourselves and reflect on our progress.

As I look over at my bed Oliver is rubbing his face all over the “J’Adore” perfume sample page in my “Elle” magazine and scratching at the image of Natalie Portman on the magazine cover after which he dove into the space between my blankets and bedspread and fell asleep.

I think one small, doable action step for 2011 would be to give up on the number two cat rule.

Here's to new chapters

Sunday, January 2, 2011

I haven’t written in this space for three months but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about it. 90 days of “noggin notes” disguised as monkeys swinging from limb to limb. The ideas for this space dangle and sway in my brain and accumulate as loads of unfolded head laundry.

And when opportunity presents itself I’ve released the writing wash onto whatever scraps of paper are at hand including gum wrappers and old grocery receipts and stacked them in a pile on my computer desk for “later.”

Well “later” has arrived—either that or I will have to get a bigger desk.

So here’s to new chapters that begin with my agreement in the common narrative that comes ‘round in more ways than one this time of year.

“I ate too much over the holidays.”

This I admit while picking potato chip crumbs out of my computer keyboard and grazing on another five of those delicious “Ferrero Rocher” chocolates, three “Cadbury” fingers, and the left over crab wontons from the New Year’s Eve menu as I suck in the evidence otherwise known as “Buddha.”

But as I have admitted in the past, I’ve given up trying to fix that area of my Roman goddess figure I blame squarely on the childbearing years of my youth. I expect that even after a year’s confinement to a tummy and butt spa in California, I’d have buns of steel but I’d still be able to grab a handful of baby fat below my belly button.
And pushing back that number on the weigh scale has been dragged through the mud, stepped on, run over by a truck, and raked through the coals a million times over. I’ve tried every trick in the book including hanging on to the wall naked with one foot off the scale while holding my breath.

So here’s to new chapters that include self-acceptance first, healthy choices—and chocolate on any day ending in “y” as long as it’s more than two hours before bedtime.

Meanwhile, a new kitten roams the halls in this neck of the woods, sacked with the name and persistently hungry personality plucked straight from the Charles Dickens novel, ‘Oliver Twist.’

Every morning since Daughter #3 convinced me—in a moment of weakness—that one more cat would complete me, “Oliver” has met me at the fridge at 6 a.m., where he performs jumping jacks and pirouettes in a bid for kitty treats.

“Please Mum, I want more,” he begs in relentless feline speech. I give in to his cuteness daily.

However, his favor faded briefly at one sunrise during the holidays when I found Christmas tree ornaments from the living room scattered across my bedroom floor—and no cat in sight.

Upon investigation of Oliver’s whereabouts, while returning the ornaments to their rightful place, I found him staring at me wide-eyed through the branches in the middle of the Christmas tree with that classic wild look that precedes the pounce.

I had a flash of anticipatory terror. It was a scene from the movie “Alien,” when that seed pod thing jumped onto the face of the innocent astronaut.

The cat-a-pult from the tree onto the front of my housecoat happened so fast that I was sure I would never recover from the shock. In fact it took me most of the morning not only to calm my nerves, but also my frightful “Don King” hairdo!

Hence, asterisks have been added in the holiday notebook reminder for next year. Leading up to next Christmas, a certain feline will spend his nights in the basement—under the autonomy of the canine capers.

And last but not least, as I kick off a fresh curve in column writing in 2011 I must reiterate a ‘Thank You’ to the Universal Plan that waits patiently for those of us who choose to see the absolute grace and empowerment in stepping outside the box and accepting life change.

Here’s to new chapters.