Food for thought ends with butter

Monday, February 1, 2010

It was 3:45 on Sunday afternoon, and if there’s one thing I knew for sure at that moment—turning to food as a source of writing inspiration was stupid.

And of course I professed this as I wolfed down two and three more handfuls of chocolate mini-kisses, because by then I needed something sweet to balance out the rest of the fridge I’d just eaten.

Crackers and cream cheese, a slice of bread with tuna and mayo, half a grapefruit, and a small bowl of peanuts, had spawned nothing more than the need to loosen the top button of my jeans due to gas.

And because this writing jag was a good occasion to have two things going on at the same time, I’d gotten up and wet my nose and applied a ‘Biore´’ deep cleansing pore strip.

Not thoroughly reading the instructions on the box meant that 20 minutes into a 10-minute window I needed a crow bar to peel the paper mache´off my nostrils.

I took one look at the underside of the hardened strip and ran for my magnifying glass, and spent 15 minutes in awe of all the stalagmites pulled out of the top of my nose.

The result is still lying on top of my dresser as a potential science project.

My nose pores were spectacularly clean, but I still had no idea what to write about.

90 minutes into the creative process, I peeled my blank slate off this chair and stood at the kitchen window for 20 minutes trying to decide if a walk outdoors in minus 18C would motivate me.

Red plaid lumberjack coat, scarf, dark sunglasses, a big black tundra hat with ear flaps and under-the-chin drawstring, along with my husband’s oversized leather mitts, and his steel-toed, knee-high, safety Kodiaks.

I looked like Elmer Fudd.

It was no fashion show and thank Heaven I wasn’t expecting company.

I opened the door to the brisk outdoors, expecting to find two canine capers bursting at the seams with excitement to see their Alpha.

No such luck, as I heard them off in the distance howling blindly at nothing but the open space of the field behind the barn.

Instead I was greeted by a dead mole lying face up with his arms tucked snuggly under his head like a sun worshipper frozen solid to the bale of straw that Cash uses as a lookout post while I'm away in town.

No sooner had I stepped down off the stairs at the back door in Pete’s 50lb-each winter boots did I feel a sudden kinship with the late (yet-to-be-found) Mr. Jimmy Hoffa, whom I now suspect met his maker wearing the same cement footwear.

My dogs possess only one keen sense and it isn’t brainpower. They heard me squeak across the snow-packed yard, and came bounding around the corner by the outbuilding, stopped solid in their tracks and mistaking me for an unknown intruder, began barking.

I motioned and moved towards them and they ran away, reassuring me the day I really need them to save my life, will not be realized.

However, Dot may remember that she owes me one.

Early last winter before the ice on the creek was thick enough for the annual skating rink, Dot had had a “run-in” with potential for disaster.

I’d come home from work and parked my truck in the garage and coming out noticed a clan of deer standing together unusually close to the edge of the water on the opposite side of creek—and staring in my direction.

I started walking towards the creek and talking to the deer, asking them why were they so curiously intrepid? All the while Cash was barking up a storm running to me and back down the hill to the water and I thought nothing of it until I got closer and saw the frantic pawing of my Dot, who had fallen through the thin ice in the middle of the creek.

She dogpaddled in the icy water hole and couldn't get a grip to pull herself out. It was surreal moment, as she was too far out for me to go after her.

If I learned anything from the ensuing event, it was not to quit my day job to become a rodeo cowgirl.

Despite the race to get some rope with the gallons of adrenaline pumping through me, I couldn't make or throw a lasso around my dog's neck to save her life—literally.

A cell phone call for help brought rescuers, including one with a long pike pole to latch onto the collar that my dog was not wearing.

More than 15 minutes had passed before we broke enough ice with the pole to get her closer to shore. She was cold and wet and the joke of the ruminant mammal community.

After she was safe and sound, I had to laugh as I imagined the deer all standing there snickering at the smarty pants dog paddling in place in the icy hole, as they chastised her with their stares for stepping out to bark incessantly at them.

Back to the task at hand.

I took my cement shoe walk on the snowy creek, forgetting once again to listen to my dad’s advice and delay gratification by heading into the wind as I trekked away to clear my creative block.

It was frozen solid when I got back to the house and required three cups of hot chocolate and buttered toast to thaw it out.

Don't blink or you will miss out

Sunday, January 24, 2010

If I had recorded the track of life inside this old farmhouse over the last month or so and then ran outside to the barn, turned around and looked at the house and hit replay, this is what I would have seen;

The dried up old siding would heave and chuckle trying to hold itself together as it shook with amusement, and the old crooked porch that regularly pulls itself away from the main house body in the cold, would sit straight and proper as it leaned in to listen to all the fun we’d had.

The roof would raise its eyebrows once or twice and blush—and oh yes, the eaves troughs would droop just slightly for that one—maybe two—spats in the face of autonomy when Pete and I sweated too much over the small stuff.

30 days have come and gone and this neck of the woods is back to relying on ‘Skype’ video chats and emails to keep in touch with the One.

And despite what some may think about computer technology, its connectivity is priceless—even when you look like a drowned rat at 6 a.m. as your husband’s face appears on the computer screen from half way around the world and smiles at your disheveled bed head.

20 years ago, I distinctly remember a vow I made never to own or be seen on a “videophone.” Today, I can’t imagine life without the advancements of visual communication accessibility to the world beyond my back door.

It’s taken a few days to clean up the leftover livelihood of this place—wonderfully amuck with the discarded lifestyle that is my husband.

And at the risk of writing about something that blurs the lines of what is too personal to account for; when I walked back in the door after seeing him off at the airport at 8:15 a.m., the scent of his Old Spice body wash still lingered in the humid house air from his morning shower and it smelled wonderful.

Who wants to clean up the chaotic clutter of the last 30 days at that juncture?

Not me.

But now, the little heaps of dirty socks, that if left too long in the corners of the bedroom would surely become condominiums for mice families, are in the laundry basket and the dint in the couch where a man camped out for hours watching countless episodes of ‘Stargate Atlantis’ and ‘Dr. Who’ has all but disappeared.

I put off washing the dirty dishes until I’d used up all the spoons and coffee cups and then, while putting away the drinking glasses from our last dinner together I had to chuckle.

Earlier this month Pete and I had been watching “The Dr. Oz” show wherein the medical guru had pushed the concept of cupping therapy—which uses vacuum pressure on the skin to create better “chi” energy flow and release toxins.

If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that if my husband hears about something he thinks is a rad idea, make sure you aren’t the only guinea pig in the room.

And if you are the only chump, as I was for the first-ever cupping therapy test, chant, “This too shall pass.”

Trust issues came to the forefront of our relationship as I watched him ignite my ‘Bic’ candle lighter to flame the inside of a wine goblet as big around as a small dog, and then convince me to let him place six such apparatuses on my back.

Was not my “chi” already charged? What toxins? “I’m a vegetarian for gosh sakes!” I had argued.

With as much hesitation as I could muster in the face of such a wild and crazy guy, I conceded to the cupping therapy for all of about 25 seconds, and we laughed in stitches for most of it.

The only evidence that the procedure had worked were the six, raised, three inch round, red welts the wine goblets left behind on my back for a couple of hours.

Thankfully that did not happen same day prior to the pantyhose scare. The visual combination would have cost him his sight for sure.

30 days came and went.

Alone or not, I try very hard not to be somebody who spends all her time thinking about tomorrow.

I try very hard to live for right now so that I am not cheated of it, for it truly is all I that I am sure of.

Sometimes it is a most difficult task, but right now is the best and only place there is, despite what we wish for.

May I continue to remind myself of this over the next 14 weeks or so.

Confessions of a pantyhose diva

Sunday, January 17, 2010

There ought to be a law, or at the very least a warning label on packages of ‘Tummy and Thigh Slimmer’ pantyhose.

Cautionary advice in bold red print should flag the wearer against being seen by her spouse while stuffing herself into this nylon contraption—or for that matter—being seen with them on at any time by anyone other than her own reflection staring back at her in the mirror.

In my neck of the woods, that brief encounter with oneself in the mirror—torso buckled into a two-legged form of shrink-wrap that always seems two sizes too small—is probable grounds for an adjustment reaction counseling session.

And I can’t fathom the mathematical rationale of the pantyhose scientists of the world, whom I highly suspect are male, when sizing guidelines on these diva devices are established.

No matter how much weight is lost beforehand I never choose the correct size and never once have I managed to get them on without emulating the comedic contortionist routine of Jim Carrey.

I’ve known for years that I should be in an isolation booth when putting on pantyhose, and yet I can’t seem to take my own recommendations to fruition.

On Christmas Day I thought I did.

I waited until Pete was in the shower. I opened my dresser drawer and rummaged for the unopened package of pantyhose purchased a month earlier, ripped them open to reveal a scant what looked like “ten-inch in length pair of nothing.”

I sat on the edge of the bed with the toes of my right foot drawn in and pointed like a veteran ballerina as I slid them into the end of the nylon legging.

Pete was still in the shower belting out the only line he knows from a Bryan Adams tune. “I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can, so I can, keep track of visions in my mind,” he cried out.

I rolled my eyes and repeated the process for my left foot. No sooner did I have both feet in the pantyhose, did the waistband slam shut around my calves toppling me over as if my feet were bound with duct tape.

I crashed onto the bed to avoid falling on the bedroom floor and writhed like a dying snake as I pulled and jostled with the pantyhose, cursing the scientist for his mis-measurement of ‘Size D.’

10 minutes later I was in. I lay there gasping for breath, holding it once to listen for the sound of running water.

Thank Heaven, Pete was still in the shower.

I jumped up and exited the bedroom and was just in front of the bathroom door on my way to the spare room when my worst fears were realized.

“BETH!” the one bellowed from the shower, in the typical loud and annoying fashion of someone who obviously forgot we live in a 950 sq. ft. house pervious to even the slightest whisper.

“Yes honey?” I answered in my mouse voice, as I opened the bathroom door a sliver letting out a burst of hot bath steam that flattened the curls in my hair.

“Could you put some toothpaste on my toothbrush and hand it to me?” he asked.

What the heck. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to calculate that I could slip him the pasty toothbrush passed the edge of the shower curtain without revealing my not-so-nifty thigh huggers.

But I didn’t factor in that Pete would whip open the shower curtain and look out at me standing there vacuum-sealed in my pantyhose while loading the Colgate.

It was a “deer in the headlights” moment for both of us as I turned round to face him eyes wide open and dropped his toothbrush in the toilet as he shrieked out in high octaves.

I’d like to believe he was crying out over the toothbrush floating in the toilet water, but I tend to think it was a painful reaction to the retina scarring that came from seeing me in my hosiery.

If he wishes to remain healthy he will not however—in one million light years—ever admit to this theory.

It matters, it matters not

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

All I want for Christmas just came home.

On December 21^st, I had stood outside looking up at the night sky watching for the plane to appear in the night sky; first a star-sized light and on into a bigger and brighter drone that signaled a long wait over, as love landed safely in this neck of the woods.

I thought of poet James Wright and his description of anticipation.

“Suddenly I realize that if I stepped out of my body I would break into blossom.”

Seeing Pete get off the plane was as glorious as I had dreamed and being consumed in his arms out there on the airport tarmac was like a scene from a movie.

I thought of American writer Dave Barry who said “Magnetism is one of the six fundamental forces of the Universe, with the other five being gravity, duct tape, whining, remote control, and the force that pulls dogs toward the groins of strangers.”

Magnetism is that man I hadn’t seen in 291 days.

It was all I could do to share him with my surroundings and even for a wordsmith like me, I can not describe how right all things were with the world in that moment.

And then the adjustment reaction period set in and I was reminded of what I had been like for the last nine months and 12 days.

I plan, I read the instructions, I play it safe, I like to spend time alone, and I almost always know where everything is around here.

I think first (sometimes for days) then act, focus on one thing at a time, trust my gut, and think about future implications.

I am convinced by rational arguments, prefer to finish projects, and find comfort in schedules.

And as I have said before, I suppose that's why the Universe teamed me up with Pete, who has the fearless, adventure-driven, all-over-the-place essence of 'Yukon Cornelius' from the movie classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."

So, when all work and no play makes Beth a dull girl, life sends her husband home to muss up her hair, make absurd spontaneous decisions that involve money, stir the pot by using my tools and then not return them to their original location, and make our neck of the woods an unpredictable land mine series of events.

Sure, we have oodles in common--the least of which include the fact that we share the same inseam measurement, enjoy tea and chocolate, and dig 'Alien' movies. We love pigging out on chips and doughnuts, though not at the same time and we are technology hounds.

However, we continue to make a remarkable and magnificent case for the law of attraction between persistent opposites.

As I write this, some three weeks into into a month-long honeymoon I look out into the hallway from my writing place at the entrails of three days’ worth of “man clothing” strewn about just inside the doorway to the bedroom. Enough pocket change to buy coffee for six of my closest friends has spilled out of Peter’s jeans by his side of the bed and is ripe for pick up by the laundry woman who recently surfaced after a hiatus of more than half a year.

The kitchen table, which until a short time ago looked like a “photo op” for ‘House and Home’ magazine, is one-quarter covered with all the small stuff that was at the bottom of Peter’s suitcase—dumped there in an effort to find

one thing when he arrived home.

Once again the cheese has a dark dry edge on it from being left uncovered in the fridge which has been repeatedly raided at three o’clock a.m. by the guy still recovering from jet lag and leaving the grocery clerk with another 10 items to add to her list.

Dirty dishes in the kitchen sink have tripled in size and nearly all my shaving cream has been used up on man whiskers that once again can be found sprinkled in the small space behind the bathroom sink taps after his razor session.

And lately when I wake up in the morning, all the blankets I have so generously enjoyed all to myself are missing off my wintery cold skeleton and have gravitated to the other side of the bed where Pete lies rolled up in them, snoring like an old snow blower from 1971.

Speaking of which, I haven’t been able to get near our new John Deere snow blower since Pete got home, as he is always outside creating labyrinths around the farmyard with it.

All manner of guitar instruction booklets, picks, microphones, cords, stands, and gargantuan amplifier systems have appeared in the middle of our tiny living room, amassed there for his late night, early morning and afternoon jamming sessions.

Plans abound in this spontaneous construction technician that I am married to, who would love to build a house addition, raise the roof and the house all at the same time and all before the end of January.

This house, my life, my heart--all are very full.

And today, even if just for this moment, everything—even the mess on his side of the bed--is right in the world.

The long wait is over

Monday, December 21, 2009

It’s December 21^st, the shortest day of the year and today is going to be great day.

I know this to be true for many reasons, the least of which is the fact that it’s Monday and I don’t have to go to work.

I get up extra early to the sound of big dog ears flopping and shaking in the kitchen—the telltale alarm clock that informs me it’s time to pee.

“Cash” greets me with snarly smiles and vociferous grunts. His long wagging tail bends the dry house air, causing instant static and levitating all the tinsel on the Charlie Brown tree I have near the back door of my kitchen which then jumps onto my housecoat as I brush by on the way to open the back door.

My wish for a new, thick blanket of snow overnight is not met, but what the heck. It’s enough for another practice session with my new snow blower, which I have affectionately named “Little John,” kin to my bruiser lawn tractor, “Big John.”

Me and my boys—all year long we can accomplish great things together.

And oh, yes. It’s the first day of winter and it’s not a gazillion degrees below zero. I can stand outside in my tinsel-covered housecoat and slippers and not freeze solid on the spot. Perfect.

The coffee pot has brewed me up a bold morning beverage and today I can not make it past the fridge without burping the lid on my Christmas baking container and sneaking out a piece of fudge and two peanut butter kisses. Perfect.

Today is going to be a great day.

I am however not completely ready for Christmas just yet. I have gifts to buy for parent-folk who already have everything, including a new kitchen sink.

I consider the sneak art of re-gifting to my mom the “Neti Pot” my sister-in-law gave me last Christmas. It’s up in the cupboard with my collection of un-displayed antiques, where I expect it will become one after 30 or 40 more years of shelf life, unopened.

I consider buying my dad a heater for his workshop or trace lights so that he can find his way from the door to the bench through all the Christmas decoration boxes covering the floor space in there.

On second thought, maybe not.

I have most of the gifts to my children and grandchildren wrapped and ready for delivery in Granny’s little orange Sport Ranger sleigh. At the moment, the brightly colored presents spill out from a corner of my kitchen, just far enough into the room so that I can trip over them on the way to change the TV channel in the living room.

And thankfully the dogs have not yet discovered that some of them contain food.

I’ve mailed out three-dozen Christmas cards—far more than I receive, but who’s counting. The five I have gotten this year are taped prominently to the wall in my kitchen and after I put up the other 25 I’ve received over the last six years—well, I’ll have quite the display. But who’s counting.

I check my holiday “to-do” list, copied 13 times to different slips of paper scattered across the kitchen table. No doubt about it, I am a first-born list maker.

I check the pocket of my wallet for the one scrap of note paper that lists grocery items and stocking stuffer ideas. I decide to re-do those lists, separating the two categories so that somebody doesn’t end up with a head of lettuce in their stocking on Christmas morning instead of a orange.

There’s one opened gift under my tree, exchanged with a gal pal over coffee and lunch at the local donut shop last week. I was supposed to wait just a little longer to open it, but who can resist such things?

Resistance: “the ability to say no to temptation.”

I manage to uphold that law most of the time, except where chocolate is concerned.

And likely tonight at 8:30 p.m. resistance will be futile as well, when I am tempted to bolt through a set of security doors and out onto the tarmac screaming for joy as Peter departs the airplane from the last leg of a 16-plus hour flight from Afghanistan where he has been working.

The moment I lay eyes on his beautiful face is ultimately why December 21^st, 2009 will be a great day, because I haven’t seen him since March 9^th—nine months and 12 days ago.

All I want for Christmas just came home.

On the day that nothing happened

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Each time I think my life is a direct download of nothingness made famous by the ‘Seinfeld’ TV show, the forces of nature step in and stir up my neck of the woods just enough to give me a solid word count for my newspaper column.

The rainy morning has preempted my plans for gardening and set me to keyboard plunking. My collaborative colleague—iTunes—contributes songs from Neko Case, Maino, Shiny Toy Guns, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Kings of Leon and whomever else happens to be in line to inspire me as I write about the day nothing happened.

In an emergency on a nothing day, I could just open my fridge and write a story about what I see inside—wilted old lettuce, a partly-devoured tub of sour cream with a green, crusty topping and a due date back on February 10^th, and an unopened bottle of Marguerita mix from New Year’s Eve. The grim scenario would not qualify for an episode of ‘MTV Cribs’, but then neither would this ordinary, little, old farmhouse and that’s just fine with me.

On this nothing day it is not even noon yet and I’m not sure what rates first in the excitement category; the trailer-full of black dirt delivered by Cohort #1 on Friday evening, or the black bear who was headed to my back door on Sunday morning.

Truth be told--gardeners and landscapers preserve me--I really was as elated to get the dirt, as I am to find a roll of duct tape in my Christmas stocking.

It’s mine and you can’t have any. Oh, the endless possibilities.

I dream bigger dreams for myself than I think God does for me sometimes, and that includes the host of one-woman dirt projects I think I can master.

And as Cohort #1 and his reluctant kin now realize—‘Mrs. Incredible’ can make short work of a trailer-load of dirt long before they decide to get up at noon on a Saturday and come over and help me.

(Wink, chuckle, thanks anyway).

Mr. Bear, who in hindsight appeared rather dejected and lost on his trek through my yard on Sunday morning, was not nearly as excited to see me as I was to see him.

I was edging ever closer to get a picture of him with my camera, and jumping up and down like a two-year old who’d just spotted Santa in Safeway.

The bear stopped, turned, and flat-stared me as I stood there in my housecoat, gum rubbers, and braided Pippi Longstocking coif before shaking his head in disbelief at the country hick paparazzi and sauntering off. 

I shrugged off the snubbing and headed in to quiet the dogs that’d got whiff of the intruder on the outside breeze that blows through the receptacles in this old house.

It was only 9:30 a.m. and too early to allow the canine capers to clock in under their SAEWS collar (Security Assistance Early Warning System) due to the current ‘Quantum of Silence’ proclamation made by cohorts and pundits that restricts all outside noise until noon on Sunday, and includes moaning lawnmowers and barking dogs.

Despite this, I rewarded Dot and Cash for their awareness and handed out treats, most recently found to be old gingerbread man cookies left over from Christmas that I discovered in a container on top of my fridge.

The cookies were so hard that on the way to the dog’s mouths they bounce off the floor, hit and chipped the newly-painted wall in my kitchen, ricocheted off a chair and still not break, leaving the duo occupied with protracted chewings.

Now, here’s the kicker in this entire melee over the day that nothing happened.

If you are not already aware, my husband is in Afghanistan and at the moment he is in the central part of the country in an isolated area of the mountains helping to build facilities at a military forward operating base.

His environment is dusty, dirty, and very, very hot not to mention there’s a war going on.

I thank God for the military troops who do their job so well to protect him and the countless others.

Keep safe all of you. 

So when I think my day is a nothing, I will remember my trepidation and uncertainty that crept in during the online chat with my husband this morning at the same moment when there was gunfire in the background of the world he’s in.

He assures me the barriers that protect the base are taller than he is. Yet I worry for my electrician.

I cannot imagine the worry of a soldier’s wife.

However, Pete was more concerned about the big, hairy live spider that was in his tent—one he called the “daddy” of the camel spider encased in acrylic that he had sent home to me to give to the J.W. Walker students.

Peter had left his luggage open and full of clothes on the floor of his tent (which sounds remarkably like his side of the bed when he’s here at home) and said he was too freaked out to get anything out of it.

Beware the man with aerosol foot deodorant.

“I’m gonna spray inside the suitcase with ‘Tough-Actin Tinactin’ and see what happens,” he wrote.

God help the spider. 

Thoughts on the person I want to be

Monday, May 19, 2009

 

“Four little words just to get me along . . .” 

That’s the first line of a song called ‘That’s Not My Name’ sung by British craze duo ‘The Ting Tings.’ ‘That’s Not My Name’ is a fun, upbeat tune that drives me to grab my pseudo-microphone hairbrush and karaoke my way back and forth across my kitchen floor, pretending to be a pop star.

“They call me Stacey, Mary, Jo, Lisa. They call me Her, they call me Jane, always the same. That’s not my name. That’s not my name. That’s not my name,” I croon.

The dogs, which are my ever-adoring and only audience, shudder and shuffle off to hide under my bed.

I’ve heard myself referred to as ‘she’ on more than one occasion in passing conversations. If my grandson, Adam, is talking to someone else about me and refers to me as ‘she,’ instead of ‘Granny,’ I am quick to remind him, “That’s not my name.”

It’s a throwback to something I was taught in childhood by my mother, who’d also grown up learning to acknowledge people in conversation by their names and not by ‘he’ or ‘she.’ 

It makes perfect sense.

Pay attention to conversations and see how many times it happens to you and to the people you are talking about. You’d be surprised how many of us lose our identities in ‘he’ and ‘she.’ 

I also can think of a handful of other times in my life when “That’s not my name” was central to a conversation—including when I tried to use it in a last ditch effort to avoid punishment from my school principal, the late great Ernie Buchan, when I was in fourth grade in Sixth Street School. 

Mr. Buchan figured out that it was me who had made several alterations to the daily attendance sheet in my fourth grade classroom. 

While waiting for the school bus after school, I had started rubbing out the ‘P-for-Present’ beside every other student’s name but my own, and penciled all of them in as ‘A-for-Absent.’ This went on for a few days, at least. How smart was that?

At the moment when I realized I was ‘toast,’ and as Mr. Buchan addressed me as ‘Beth,’ I wanted to stand on the teacher’s desk and profess, “That’s not my name.” 

Thankfully the reprimand amounted to nothing more than a stern warning and reminder about right and wrong, and yet for a few years after that, I was convinced that the reason I was short in stature was the result of being mortified by the whole affair. 

And then there was life in Grade Seven in Robert Moore School when school pictures were taken. I’d worn a purple t-shirt, had flecks of budding acne on my face, and a wispy scruffy haircut.

We all had our allotted bunch of photos to trade out to our friends. 

Remember how a measure of your “coolness” was how many copies of ‘you’ you had left over? I always had leftovers. Oh well, that’s another story. 

Anyway, the father of one of my friends to whom I’d given a photo of myself took one look at my school picture and determined I was a boy.

“Bert?” That’s not my name. 

After that I started to stuff my training bra, bleach my upper lip hair, and pluck my eyebrows. In public school I also carried the nickname ‘Cuds’—awarded to me I suppose because I lived beside a farm. I couldn’t have had a regular nickname like ‘Shorty’ or ‘Bitsy’ that reflected the fact that I was shorter than everyone else in my class. Nope.

Instead I got nicknamed after the contents in one of four digestive compartments of the ruminant animal better known as the cow. 

And although I am still stunned by the fact that the cow’s rumen can hold 50 gallons of partly digested food or “cud,” I echo -- “That is not my name.”

Another misnomer incident wherein I again thought about denying my true identity was in 1980 when I was working as a course counselor for a driving school in Thunder Bay.

I was in the office listening to a psychic on the radio profess his abilities and who was encouraging listeners to call in, give their name, and wait to hear a future prediction. 

I called in (on company time) and was lucky—or so I thought-- to get in line for a one-on-one with ‘Mr. Clairvoyant.’ “What’s your name?” he asked. (Now remember folks this is live radio.) “Beth,” I said, anxiously awaiting his prediction that would see me running out and buying my lucky million-dollar lottery ticket.

“Well, first of all, I’d tie a big rock around your name Beth and throw it into Lake Superior. It will always bring you bad luck,” he said rather matter-of-fact.

“Oops, silly me,” I wanted to shout out to the doofus forecaster. “What was I thinking? That’s not my name, it belongs to a friend of mine.”

Instead I mumbled, “Okay then. Thanks,” and hung up. 

And while there were stories from my youth that indicated my parents had considered calling me Helen--with all due respect to the Helens of the world--thankfully that’s not my name either. 

On the other hand, a beautiful little soul named Sam once mistook me for ‘Oprah.’ That was my 15 minutes of fame.

And in 1985, a very, very good friend of mine, the late Norrie Godin who was ill and in hospital shortly before he passed away, mistook me for his first love ‘Victoria.’ 

That’s not my name either, but it was one of the warmest mistaken identities I’ve ever had the pleasure of being.

We all work hard in life to build ourselves and being recognized for who we are--or are not—is part of the journey. 

The new website ‘Wolfram Alpha’ predicts that 1 in 8000 women are named Beth and that there are approximately 144,142 women named Beth who are alive today. With a world population of some 6.53 billion people, it does make sense that one wouldn’t hear or see the name very often.

I guess I’ll just have to shout it out a bit more often. 

And while I don’t mind being mistaken for a talk show host once in a while, about a month ago the tipping point came when I suddenly aged about 25 years and was renamed Marie. While I, too, remain on this side of 60, might I remind you—that’s not my name.              

The Tipping Point in Gift Giving

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

I had my first video chat with my husband at noon on Sunday.

It cost me 50 bucks to get set up for the premier event with the purchase of a camera the size of a doughnut hole, embedded with a microphone.

Due to the procrastination virus, I had a small window of about eight minutes from the time I installed the gizmo’s hardware in my computer and the moment of truth when Pete and I would see each other for the first time in 43 days.

All this amid chewing large pieces of my chocolate bar in Olympic record time, washed down with a glass of cold milk.

I smiled and shifted my gaze back and forth between looking into the camera lens and checking out my own reflected image in the little window in the bottom left hand corner of the computer screen, smoothing out the beginnings of the chicken neck that I see has sprouted at Year 48 under my chin.

Startled, I also wiped away the white milk moustache that stared back at me.

And then suddenly, ‘ding,’ and there he was.

I haven’t seen Pete since March 9^th, and he looked like a million bucks smiling at me through that little webcam from halfway around the world.

Gone are the scraggly and wiry dreadlocks of a northern backcountry miner. Pete now sports a wonderfully buzzed head of peach fuzz.

He has a golden tan that also looks like a million bucks right about now, given that Mother Nature is having technical trouble keeping the temperature above cold around here.

But the best treat of all wasn’t the eye candy. It was the first three words that came out of his mouth when he saw me staring at him through the camera lens like a google-eyed deer as I hoped to high heaven the video connection hadn’t been made until after I’d picked my nose.

And no, the three wonderful words he said were not “I love you.”

It was even better than that.

“You’ve lost weight,” he said. “I can see it in your face. It looks skinnier.”

I swallowed the last chunk of ‘Twix’ chocolate bar I’d been hauling on and choked out a "really" and then coughed and laughed almost hysterically as I realized how thankful I was that he couldn’t see anything below my neck, because that’s where everything had gravitated, sagged, and settled when I sat down at the computer and was undoubtedly the reason why my face appeared thin.

“Thanks honey!” I replied, sucking in my Buddha, as the ceiling opened up and poured sunshine on the moment. “You made my day!”

We had 29 minutes before the system at his end would shut us down--and thus, time flew. We are never guaranteed a good Internet connection or one at all so we made the most of it.

I moved the webcam to pan around the kitchen (sweeping over the carcasses of two resting inmates in military dog school) to show off the big box ready for the mail, of the items Pete forgot to pack for his seven-month stint in Afghanistan that included his housecoat, leather slippers, a gym towel, and another blanket.

He then proceeded to tell me about the box of presents he had just put in the mail for me, purchased from an Afghan marketplace. I smiled at the thought of perhaps a beaded hair comb and maybe a necklace or two.

Nope.

How about a camel spider encased in acrylic and a fake scorpion that hisses and jumps out the box when you open it?

And he seriously thought this was cool.

Didn’t this sort of thing happen before? Pete’s genuine and enthusiastic announcement of “I have a present for you!” followed by me expecting gifts of shining trinkets.

I’d tagged along, following him with a curious eye to the back of his truck (at long last, I’d thought to myself, he finally bought me a jewellery box). My anticipation had been high as a kite.

He’d heaved on the door hatch and there it was . . . a buffalo skull?
It just lay there with empty eye sockets looking at me, still in the process of being “cleaned” by the bugs. One molar, embedded with brown stuff, had popped out, leaving a gross cavern in the jaw.
And it smelled bad.

“Well, what do you think?” he’d said, clearly proud.

 I didn’t have it in me to turn him to stone.

And now, here I was with a strange sense of déjà vu and a tracking number for a box being mailed to me with spiders and scorpions in it and oh yes, a tablecloth, a ball cap for my dad, and a package of cheap cigarettes for Cohort #1.

I looked straight into the webcam with my poker face, fetched a big smile from my reserves and said “I love you too, honey” all the while thinking about the box I was about to re-pack for him as soon as the Internet connection was turned off.

Yep, my pink bathrobe, my pink towel, my bunny slippers, and my pink blanket.

 

Something is better than nothing

April 15, 2009

Here’s the thing.

I could tell you that the fact that I don’t write a column anymore is because I’ve been so busy with other things that I have no time for plunking out my chronicles on a keyboard.

But if I took that stance, my nose would grow like Pinocchio’s.

Truth be told, I have loads of time to write and more ideas and dreams and aspirations to write about than anyone can imagine.

Yet, I admit that on a daily basis I readily find countless other things to fill my time so that there is none left in which to write.

I’m a chronic procrastinator who blatantly denies and fights a clear-cut opportunity.

Why is that?

The last time I put one of these columns out was nearly three months ago. How can I expect anyone to rely on that kind of hiccupped continuity?

In the January 18^th column I was professing my belief and confidence in the Universal plan.

And here’s the kicker. I could be a poster child for it these days. I can’t tell you how thick as thieves the Universal plan is around here, waving its green flag and leaving the days wide open for me the writer, even as I continue to put up roadblocks at nearly every turn.

Why is that?

Heaven knows there remains enough comedy and drama in my neck of the woods to fill the word count even though the main catalyst for my creativity, my husband, is working in Kandahar, Afghanistan for the next seven months.

Yet maybe that is the very reason why my writing in stooped in a vat of literary molasses. Yet again, this faltering began long before Pete took up his next big career adventure.

No matter how I look at, I am my own worst enemy, second-guessing my ability and believing the dream-stealing ego that resides in me, while everyone else around me knows better.

For some reason I am convinced by the misconception that everything I write about has to be funny and roundabout romantic. There goes the pathologically positive me again, cutting my own throat to save myself.

Neil Young, Bruce Cockburn, and Tom Russell wouldn’t be the songwriters and musicians they are if they thought like that. Any good author in the entire world wouldn’t be one if they thought and wrote like that all the time. 

Quite honestly, of late I am sad. Among other reasons, I feel a tad misplaced, unsure of this recessed future on the horizon, and where I fit in. I thought I knew.

In the song “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” Elton John sings about whether there are people out there like you. I know there are and I’m with them. Here I sit two shots shy of 50, and my chance at retirement is a trash can dream too.

And then, the other me snaps back in place. I am grateful for many things. I have love in my life though it be long distance love these days.

And albeit old and in desperate need of a facelift yesterday, I have the home of my dreams. And I have my people.

I go back and re-read what I’ve typed here so far and roll my eyes. Ridiculous, poppycock.

And yet, something is better than nothing and this is the chapter of thought that, so far, has been on my mind.

Perhaps all this mind muddle is a product of the infinite winter slump that’s had us under a grip of relentless cold and snow, now thankfully, replaced daily by the glimmer of green grass and temperatures above zero.

Though the smell is never friendly, the job of cleaning up a winter’s worth of dog poop is looking pretty good to me. It means there’s hope for summer after all.

And then there’s the new military school for dogs now being attended daily by Dot and Cash, who unbeknownst to me had done enough barking while I was away from the yard to make their debut on the “Most Wanted” list of area neighbors.

My apologies to all parties.

On my “Most Wanted” list are the magpies currently building their summer homes in the cedar and evergreen trees surrounding my yard. I am reminded at this very moment--by the piece of an old alternator belt the dogs had been playing with that just flew by the front window in the beak of a magpie for the family nest—my slingshot lesson is at sunset.

It is my hope that the days to come will bring me back to this place where I plunk out my chronicles on a keyboard. My life is different than it was even three months ago, and not without some very serious challenges and changes to come, but it’s never boring.

If nothing else, I can write about the strange dreams I have at night, like in the one that played out in my mind a couple of sleeps ago.

 

Copious amounts of honey ham and smoked turkey breast lunchmeat were being passed around from out of my fridge to people sitting outside of my house.

NDP leader Jack Layton, clean-shaven with a bit of 24-hour shadow, was sitting on a lawn tractor in my yard talking to me and eating his campaign office memos and then listening to what the election campaign office had to say through the food. 

 

Fortunately, I usually have more interesting and stirring dreams and most of them include my husband in a bath towel, but those details are best left to the imagination.

 

 

 

 

Write here, right now

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

So goes the Universe, ebbing and flowing over our lives, swirling experiences produced of free will mixed with an unfolding set plan we often do not understand.

Or so I believe, anyway.

For some who are dear to us, the weeks following the first light of 2009 have been cheerless and dark and full of heartache not soon to find healing. Potential and hope are elusive possibilities just yet.

For others of us, the job market has waned. Plan B and Plan C and plans for making Plan D are frank realities. Not yet lured to our backdoor, the whisper of the howling wolf lingers off in the distance. He paces back and forth, but nevertheless knows the way here ever so well.

And for many of us, despite thick talk of the world's dollars and sense, there's plenty of promise in this New Year, especially in Washington, D.C.

For some of us, the New Year resolutions are sticking and we’re losing weight, winning the war against cigarettes, and writing in our diaries every night instead of once or twice in 365 days.

For others of us, we are stuck in old ways that aren’t working for us, and yet we are unwilling to change the one thing that would change everything. We question what our heart tells us and keep doing what we’ve always done because it is grossly familiar and the unknown is a scary place.

Pay attention to your intuition. Follow it. It speaks the truth.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Of particular interest to me, of late, are the little people around us who live in the "now." Many grownups could take a lesson or two from that primary school of thought, me included.

As long as Adam, three, can jump off the bottom step of the staircase, then he can fly and everything is right in his world and if one-year-old, Ben, can make that rocking horse pitch then he’s happy as a lark.

Little children aren’t consumed by worries of what might happen tomorrow, or next week, and they certainly don’t let the overloaded soul get in the way of what’s right in front of them.

Whether it’s the little morsels of toast they have in their fingers at breakfast or the play doh squeezing through the small holes on the top of the hair mold––all matters are in the moment.

If little children are happy, the moment is lived in joy and there is nothing else but that. If they’re angry or sad, the moment is lived thoroughly with tears and screaming and then they leave it behind and move on to the next now.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I too am trying to learn something here.

I do my best to pay attention to living in the present moment, and to listen to my intuition when it whispers to me but I fall through the cracks with the best of them all the time. 

So when that little voice spoke softly to me the other day amidst the chaos of my mind, when I was lost in the losing game of perpetual worry about the impossibilities of tomorrow, I really didn’t want anything to do with it.

I was busy.

“Whas tha?” it murmured.

“Whas tha?” the little voice said again, accompanied by a button-eyed look as the words tumbled sloppily over eight tiny baby teeth and out of the mouth of my ten-month-old granddaughter, Julie.

She was sitting on the floor in the middle of my kitchen playing with cans of tomato soup and boxes of Kraft Dinner, clearly a more interesting pastime than all the toys I’d piled in a heap on the other side of the room.

Her realization that she’d caught my attention drew a big smile beamed up to me as she rocked in place, shaking the macaroni box to the beat of her world.

My universe nagged at me to find solutions, fix errors, challenge already-made decisions, pay bills, play catch-up, lament next week, and kick myself for yesterday.

Julie just kept shaking that macaroni box, swaying, and smiling.

Captured by her spell, I climbed down the ladder from my overloaded soul and lay down on my stomach in front of her, rested my hands under my chin, and my world in hers.

The late Martha Graham, one of the pioneers of modern dance, believed that we learn by practice.

“Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit.”

No doubt little children have much to learn, but they already are wise beyond measure.

They are a holiday for the adult mind, a window and a door back to that present place that many of us lost touch with when we started projecting ourselves into some future moment that promises greater fulfillment.

Or so I believe, anyway.

Now, if only I could fit on the rocking horse.

 

The game of wait and see

Tuesday, December 1, 2008

The house is quiet and cold. I've been a very good temperature monitor these last couple of months, trying to do my part to conserve energy and heating costs by turning my thermostat down to 16C every night before I go to bed and during the day if I'm not home.
That little stint will be shelved this week when the man of the house comes home. The warm climate of Italy runs through his veins and he can't stand to be chilly even to save a few liters of heating oil.
Still, he will go outside in minus 40 C deep freeze morning winter weather and smoke a cigarette on the front porch, dressed only in his housecoat and winter boots.
Go figure.
At any rate, Pete is making his way home after three months. I can hardly wait.
I'm running around the house making sure everything is just right, knowing full well that in a few short days the place will lose its organized sheen and gain the lived-in look again.
The dogs have no idea what's coming. They've been sleeping on the floor on Pete's side of the bed on comfy little fuzzy blankets every night for three months.
I tried to ease them into the transition by putting their blankets out in the kitchen one night last week. I thought they took it pretty well until I got up in the night to pee and found Cash splayed out on my new leather couch in the living room.
The time before that I had put their blankets on the floor in the spare bedroom to get them used to being "on their own." A few days later after what I thought was an easy transition, I found enough dog hair on the spare bed to make a sweater for the Incredible Hulk.
And I am sprawled across my bed trying to soak up the last few hours of having it all to myself, free to roll from side to side without interference from those big shoulders and chunky muscles taking up more than his share of space—though I won’t complain when he does.
I could use a little hip check right about now.
I have a small list of "to-do's" on the kitchen counter of things I want to get done before Pete gets here--as if I haven't had enough time to complete those tasks in the last 90 days.
I guess I could put the lingering tasks on Pete's "honey-do" list for over the Christmas holidays, but I don't think he'd be too impressed with having to pay back the $20 U.S. to himself that I scoffed out of his piggy bank back in October.
I'd better do that one.
And I'd best call the "hair ambulance" ahead of time and see if they can meet us at the airport terminal.
It would seem Pete ran out of "product" some 40 days ago and let his long curly locks go dread.
Then, in a fit of frustration, he picked up a pair of scissors and cut off six inches of matted hair.
Yesterday he turned the camera on himself, took a picture and emailed it to me with the caption "look for this guy at the airport in the next few days."
When it came through my Inbox, I ran screaming from the room, convinced that aliens had just landed and taken over my husband's body.
The last time the "hair thing" happened to Pete, he didn't cut it. The wooly mammoth look came home with him and he'd yet to be introduced to all my friends.
They still talk about that unforgettable first meeting.
That brings to mind the undeniable fact that even after 10 years of marriage to this colorful man, we still have unforgettable first meetings, thanks to the kind of work he does that takes him far away and brings him back to me.
It gives a whole new meaning to a fresh start and a first kiss--even if his hair is disaster material.
(And if you call and we don’t answer the phone for the next seven days, just leave a message.)

Life keeps me on my toes

Sunday, November 16, 2008

It's been 11 weeks since I've seen my husband and I've probably got three weeks more to go before he gets home for the holidays.
I daydream about seeing him get off the airplane, though I'm not sure what I'll think about the dreadlocks he writes home about these days.
I daydream about Peter spotting me in the crowd of two people who'll be waiting for loved ones inside the airport terminal building here, and wonder if he'll recognize me up close now that he's lost his glasses.
He always claimed he could pick me out a crowd of women with his eyes shut. For the longest time I thought that was such a romantic gesture on his part, until I realized he'd have to use his hands to figure out which one was me.
In early September I’d anticipated my impending alone time would take some getting used to. In fact, it only took about three days.
And I still can't believe how fast the time has gone.
I decided back then to go full bore into my 'INTJ' mode. (That's introvert- intuitive- thinker-judger mode from www.personalitytype.com for those of you who haven't been reading my column in the last few months.)
I thought first (sometimes for days) then acted, focused on one thing at a time, trusted my gut, and thought about future implications.
Surprisingly enough, the days dripped slowly on the page only about 90 minutes total during the last 11 weeks, and when the "slo-mo's" hit, I soaked them up researching my family history and re-arranging the furniture and wall art in my living room.
Unfortunately I could not be convinced by rational arguments because I had no one to argue with, save a dog or two, and they were not remotely interested in anything sensible.
But I did finish my projects and found much comfort in schedules.
On two occasions I went to the big city and fell in love with shopping by myself for myself.
I also learned that when you think something is too good to be true it probably is and it comes with a $300 parking ticket if you assume it's your lucky day to get the parking spot right outside the restaurant door in downtown Thunder Bay.
Yes, I checked for signs and no, I didn't see the little sign hidden behind the lunch crowd mulling in front of it that said, "Handicapped Parking Only."
However, thanks to the power of deduction and a parking authority employee who was in a very good mood, I managed to get my fine knocked down to $100 for my stupidity that afternoon.
And back here at home when I needed a break from myself, all I had to do was invite some of my little grandchildren to come and stay with me.
Now there's a surefire cure for a magnificent case of the Dwindles!
As I have reiterated before, there’s something to be said for spontaneity—for just letting go and letting life have its way with you.
And when life alone makes Beth a dull girl, that's where the grandchildren are the kicker. They are possessed with the all-over-the-place essence of ‘Yukon Cornelius' from the movie classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," just like their Grampa Peter is.
Though I must admit defeat nowadays.
I can't believe I survived raising three kids of my own! Where did I find the energy and the coordination to feed them, wash them, dress them, and not lose them?
These superpowers are a challenge to find today in Granny's magic bag.
As recently as Saturday, during a cookie-making event with my grandson Adam, I forgot to add the peanut butter to the peanut butter cookie dough recipe because I was preoccupied with trying to name each kitchen utensil Adam was pulling out of the utensil drawer while at the same time answering his 20 questions that included where I’d bought each one.
"What is this called Granny? Where did you buy this Granny? Why are you doing that Granny? Why Granny, Why Granny, Why?"
Never answer a three year old's 'Why' question with "Because."
"Why because?" just starts the whole process over again.
And the taste of baby food has not changed in over 20 years. It's still gross.
I'd accidentally ripped off the food label from a jar of the stuff before feeding Adam’s eight-month-old sister Julie, who was poised like a baby bird with her mouth open and at the ready, and had to do a taste test of my own to figure out if it was pureed beef or fruit.
I'm still not sure what it was, but she ate it.
Adam was in the living room at the time and I thought was absorbed in watching ‘The Adventures of Toopy and Binoo.’ When I looked in on him, sure enough there he was watching television--and jamming pieces of Kleenex up his nose.
As I was picking out Adam's nostrils with one hand and feeding Julie with the other, I was suddenly reminded of my brother Jay, who as a little boy shoved pussy willows up his nose and which went undiscovered for some days until they started to ferment.
My other grandson, Ben, who is just shy of being a one year old and who can crawl across a football field in 20 seconds flat was, to my relief, still at home with his parents.
And thankfully Adam waited until he got home to his own house before he decided to shove a big wad of pink bubblegum up his nose and drink food coloring.

You, me, and the family tree

November 3, 2008

It's Sunday afternoon and in a fit of some kind, I've eaten way too many jelly beans.
Awaiting the sore tummy, I shrug off the fact that my teeth are now impacted with gobs of sugar.
I shrug, because despite the challenge for my toothpick, eating jelly beans always makes me feel good.
And when I feel good, then anything is possible.
I sit staring into my laptop screen, ears on the voice of Enya and the violins of Itzhak Perlman.
I toggle between my OneNote chicken-scratch column and email messages from my husband.
He's lost his eyeglasses again and his spelling is atrocious. But blind as a bat, he can type 'I love you' and that's really all I need to see in my inbox.
The dogs are snoring on the floor on Pete's side of the bed, where they will continue to make themselves comfortable every chance they get until the man of the house comes home.
I'm not keen on the windy, fall day.
It's Day one of the many to come that spell shorter daylight hours.
Ho hum.
The dark tan lines are fast fading from the tops of my feet and it's not fair. It's cold in here and it's like summer never happened.
All that hard work outside on those hot summer days . . . . I'd better eat more jelly beans.
Alas, my mind is not on my work.
Instead I'm dreaming about jolly old England, the moors of Scotland, Pinchard's Island in Newfoundland and a visit I've had recently with a woman I'd never met before.
She is 75 years old, her name is Dorothy, and I could hardly wait to lay eyes on her and hear what she had to say.
She is a piece of the puzzle and a part of the story of where I've come from.
My opportunity to meet her could have happened a long time ago-- but as they say, "how quickly not now becomes forever"--a common by-product of the life that happens when you're busy making other plans.
But not that day. That day, the plan was to connect.
Expectations soared and my intuition told me Dorothy was going to play a key role in my discovery of what was behind door number one and the story of a woman named Pearl.
I did not go unrewarded.
I came home one step closer to filling in the blanks about the history behind a beautiful woman who passed away 74 years ago.
She is captured in photographs taken in the early 1900's and into the 1930's; youthful and demure in sepia, serene and blissfully happy.
A young spinster in 1917 whose soul mate would be John in 1923. Then on to become a mother gentle and caring of five little peppers.
Yet, as the Universe would have it, other plans than those who adored Pearl would have hoped for, unfolded in 1934 when at the age of 35 she died.
Her husband and five children would move forward without her.
I grew up knowing it was a love story to dream upon; captured in letters, stories, memories, and photographs.
For as long as I can remember and because she was loved, the woman who was Pearl has been inked in the books of my mind.
How could she not be? Her brief life created one who gave me my existence.
Yet, I miss that I never really knew her.
I always have looked for a resemblance in her photograph and always have believed she believed, as I believe, that anything is possible.
Today I am the caregiver of so many chicken-scratch notes stuffed in file folders by another late great woman named Barbara, who was driven to complete the family tree of her ancestors. An auntie of grandeur and big heart often touted an odd sock among us and chided for her eccentric ways.
Yet, she too is missed.
Truth be told, and though I didn't know it at the time, I think my auntie and I were joined at the hip as genealogy sleuths.
Me and you, Auntie.
You and me and the family tree.
You also confirmed my suspicions that it was you from whom I inherited the first-born trait of the note maker.
Today, you walk in greener pastures with a young mother who waits for her children in fields of daisies. Yet how I wish you were still here to see what leaps I have made in the story of Pearl.
Thanks to Dorothy who nudged the seed to grow, and to all those little notes you left me, Pearl's light is shining back 360 years to a little seaport village in England, where who we used to be lived in an old house with warm light and a little picket fence and where children played and Thomas dreamed that anything was possible.

If a tree falls in the forest . . .

September 29, 2008

Does anybody hear?

"TIMBURRR!"
And down it came, crashing like the clod of earth thrown into the sea by legendary Irish giant, Finn McCool.
My silent concentration was splayed like a bolt from the blue.
"For the love of Pete!," I spluttered aloud, spewing out eight tiny nails I'd been holding in my mouth. They landed, pointy side up I'm sure, in the long grass at my feet, where they instantly disappeared.
I'll find them next summer when I'm running around without my shoes on.
The piece of window screen I'd had in my hand went flying like a frisbee, yanking the dogs’ attention to retrieve. I paused, listening for expletives born of a tree headed straight for the roof. None came.
Another tree had just bit the dust in the name of "The Glen."
Slightly cranky, I picked up the skin I had jumped out of.
My canine follies woofed incessantly in the general direction of the commotion and glanced back at me for reward, garnering only a flat stare.
"You think?" I said snidely.
As it was, Dot and Cash were in the bad books for remuneration of their patrolling duties. That exclusive contract had gone right out with them when they'd jumped through the screen door window during a recent hot pursuit of Ozzie the cat.
I still can't fathom how two dogs, one of which is the size of a small car, had managed to explode through a rectangular space 22-inches wide by 11-inches high without losing a limb or something.
Maybe they were magicians in a former life.
When I'd arrived home to find the screen door massacre, I'd wanted to test their magic skills by hanging the mutts upside down from a four-storey roof like illusionist David Blaine did of himself during a stunt last week in New York.
Of course, I wouldn't do that, and it went out of my head as fast as the dogs' legs that carried them around the back side of the barn when they realized their screen debut wasn't getting rave reviews.
Ozzie, in his own vanishing act, was AWOL for the rest of the day.
In fact, I found him the next morning at dawn-- after considerable investigations based on the feline drawl "MOWW, MOWW"-- locked in the garage with my truck.
I'm not even sure why I spent half my Saturday afternoon replacing the screen in the stupid door. The entire structure was begging to be torn down. The door's 17 coats of white paint were peeling off in curly layers. Next to it, another ginormous section of screened window was flopping loose in the fall winds.
One of many cats that had boarded here over the summer had rubbed against the screen long enough to lift it from the slats, making a convenient entry way for small animals to come and go as they pleased.
Oh, brother. Where's Pete when all these jobs need doing?
He emails me every night. "I miss you, I love you. How was your day?"
I flat stare the computer screen and type.
“Same as usual. I sat around all day eating chocolates and painting my toenails. The dogs did the vacuuming, cleaned the bathroom and retrieved the mail. The cat folded laundry and mowed the grass and then all three did yard repairs while I had a nap.”
Pete replies, “Sounds great honey . . . I can barely make out your email because somebody stepped on my reading glasses . . . "
I pumped out another email that said, “Thanks so much for the go ahead on hiring a contractor honey, you’re a gem.”
Can you hear me now?

Note to Self: Make a List

September 22, 2008

This is not news.
I am methodical, organized, and multi-tasked. And like women everywhere, I too can begin by washing the dishes, leave the room to get another dish towel, and while I’m gone for 30 seconds-- finish folding the laundry, vacuum the bedroom floors, and clean the bathroom.
I am first born, and I am a list maker.
I make lists for the day and for weekend chores I want to finish. I have a pad of paper at my computer desk and one on my dresser just in case I think of something I should do and can't get to the mother list. I invariably, at any given time, have a list sitting on the front passenger seat of my truck of things I need to do in town and one for the things I must take on my next trip to my little village of solitude.
As back up, I have a file in my laptop's Office OneNote where I keep a computerized catalog of "to-dos," just in case.
Of note is that, thanks to Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, I've joined the ranks of tomorrow's overzealous onlookers who've started compiling a Bucket List of must do’s for this lifetime, before I'm reincarnated as a tree.
So far, I have eight things on my list including popular destinations like seeing the Grand Canyon.
But I left 'parachuting out of an airplane' off my list.
Now way am I going to purposely propel myself towards anything at a speed of 190 km/hr just to be able to say "I did that."
Anyway, knowing me I'd deploy the chute, make a wrong turn, and end up in Dryden.
Come to think of it, there's one instance where I will propel myself at high speed and that's at my husband when he steps off the plane at the airport in three months.
Unlike the movie's own list, I don't desire to see Rome or drive a Shelby Mustang. But Ireland and a Hummer would do just fine.
And of late, I've developed a palate for deliciously bold coffee and I'd love to sample some of the world's very best roasts as part of my Bucket List.
However, I am not inclined to try ‘Kopi Luwak,’ the coffee made from the pooped-out beans eaten by civets.
If I want to get that close to nature, I can do it in my own backyard where as recently as yesterday I forgot to wash my hands before eating lunch and in licking my fingers, thereafter remembered the toad I'd rescued from the canine brigade that had peed all over my hand.
As I await the frog flu, I shake my head at the oblivious child who wanted to be an animal doctor and thought she could raise the occasional stunned bird that hit the living room window of the house, by giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Bird flu anyone?
And if there is a coffee made from bear scatter or deer droppings, I just might be able to find enough ingredients around here to be a local supplier of that brand.
I worked on my Bucket List a few days ago, while on a hiatus to my little village of solitude, a place that at this very moment seems like overkill, given that I am in the presence of myself nearly all the time here at home.
No need to go away to do that, but anyway . . .
I was sitting outside enjoying a bonfire, when I put the half-cooked list down to tend to it and got too close to the flames while jamming another log in the brew.
A whiff of burning hair singed my nostrils and I dashed from the patio into the trailer flailing my arms at the smoldering patch I was sure to find when I looked at my head in the mirror.
Much to my relief, the only hair missing was what had been growing heartily on my fingers between the knuckles.
In my moment of relief, I was drawn to heed nature’s call and when I stood up and turned on a dime to flush, with it went the last 10 of Uncle Sam’s dollars I’d had in my back pocket. I dove to retrieve the cash as it dropped down with everything else into the loo’s holding tank.
I stopped short when I realized that if my arm got stuck in there, being alone, it would be days before someone would come looking for me.
I washed my hands and went back outside to the fire and my Bucket List, ripped off a corner of paper and wrote ‘Note to Self.’
On it I added ‘buy a lottery ticket and a wallet.’
On my Bucket List, on the chicken scratch side reserved for selfish desires I wrote ‘buy RV with bigger bathroom.’
I put the list down again and trotted off to rake up some old leaves, hoping to find more sophisticated ideas lurking under all the fodder.
All I stirred up was an angry nest of fire ants, which I flat-stared and continued to rake havoc on, all the while oblivious to “Sid Vicious” and his gang that had crawled up inside my pant legs.
Suddenly, I felt bursts of tiny, pinpoint pain going on where I couldn't see. I ran into the trailer contorting uncontrollably and jumped out of my pants to find three little ants clinging and biting maliciously to the skin around my kneecaps.
My Bucket List has ‘saving a species from extinction’ on it.
That’s doesn’t include ants, right?

. . . and then there were none

September 15, 2008

Let me begin with a big round of applause to a certain 17-year old the possibilities for whom have only just begun.
Proud of you? Nothing this talented writer can come up could convey how my rewarded heart pounds for you.
However, I doubt you will empathize with anything I'm writing about in the next few paragraphs and most likely, if I know anything, you won't even read this column until 15 years from now, when stuff your mother did back then, seems cool to you now.
That's okay.
It's a mom-thing.
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"Hey Beth! Write a story about me! Something really exciting!" shouted Dan the H20 man—and the world's most excellent conversationalist--as he zoomed past hanging his head out the driver's window and gesturing to me. His work van swerved slightly in his excitement and nearly ran over the writer's foot as she stepped out onto the street from the sidewalk.
When I talk to (or mostly listen to) the H20 man, I’m always sure to come away with a new perspective on things, be it outer space or the cost of gas.
Come to think of it; gas prices are headed to outer space, but anyway . . .
The H20 man always is in good spirits and it tends to rub off on you.
As far as I know he and the Mrs. have an empty nest. Maybe I should talk to them about what to do next.
Maybe they have some alternatives to the path I'm beating around the house as I pace the cage.
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Me. MmmmMe. That's mmme. Uh huh, me.
I am among the lyrics in a Bruce Cockburn song and the one for whom the website flownthenest.com was written.
My final shift --Daughter #3-- headed to the big city two weeks ago for University.
Alas, my house is very quiet. Remarkably clean, but very quiet.
Maybe, like something from a Van Morrison song, I'll find some 'Enlightenment' in this empty nest.
“This must be what paradise is like. It is so quiet in here, so peaceful in here.”
I have proven myself so many times as a mom since 1985. Parenthood is all I have known, all I still know about, it's who I've been, and where almost all of my emotional and intellectual skills have resided for 23 years.
23 years.
I'm like an old debit card. A mother whose magnetic strip has worn thin. Time for a replacement card that includes free space, time, and all that.
Now I have to live with myself. Can I do it?
In fact, I never have really done that-- really had the opportunity in my lifetime to do that.
Even before I was done College I had met the first guy I would marry, so I never really had time to get to know myself. By the time I was separated and divorced I had very young children to raise.
Motherhood took notes and Beth was 82nd on the dictation list.
I never got past 81.
Then I met Peter. Thank God for Peter.
Yet, I was still a mother with young kids and now a wife again. Roles rolled on.
Last Friday, the dogs heard the school bus coming down the country road and they stopped and waited for Daughter #3 to get off.
The bus passed the driveway. They still sat and waited.
I expect they'll do that for weeks.
I miss my kid. A lot.
It's brand new desert, a new dawn, the high road, the road less travelled, blah, blah, blah.
I can run around buck naked if I want to, not worry about picking a certain someone up from work at 10:30 p.m. six out of seven nights a week, cook a meal or not, and be done with arguments about whose turn it is to do dishes.
No more head-banging rap music to roll my eyes at, no 'how was your day at school?' repertoires at the supper table.
My house is very quiet.
My husband, who was unexpectedly put on hydro tunnel duty on the Pacific Rim is gone until Christmas.
I miss my husband. A lot.
Now I really, really do have to live with myself.
And Heaven help his side of the bed!
The days do indeed drip slowly on the page Mr. Cockburn.
And I pace the cage.
I quit drinking alcohol in January. It changed my life, my health, my weight, my destiny. But I sure could use a drink right now.
Company for one. I will not go there.
Life without kids at home will take some getting used to. I’m trying that on for size every day. Looking forward not backwards at all the possibilities that lay ahead for me, too.
Forward instead of backwards—that’s the view I should have taken when I returned to Fort Frances from the big city after hauling Daughter #3 and all of her stuff to University.
Instead, I got lost.
The Lone Ranger had warned me before I left the big city heading east, to watch for the sign or I'd end up in Dryden.
So what happened?
In my faked anticipation of life without kids--driving like the rear view mirror was torn off and ‘I ain’t never looking back’ attitude-- I thought I'd overshot the junction.
I kept driving until I found a long stretch of abandoned highway, just outside of Dryden I was sure, and did a U-eey and took the first left on a road I was sure would lead me back home.
I drove on into a town I had no recollection of on the way into Winnipeg and suddenly feeling even more alone than I already was, with emotions of a dejected mother brimming at my eyelids, I started to cry.
It was the city of Kenora and I still didn't know how to get home.
The guy pumping gas at the Kenora gas station must have thought I was a dork, when I stopped to ask directions to Fort Frances, especially when I blathered on about living there nearly all my life and how I couldn’t find my way home.
He just started to laugh and pointed ‘that way, keeping going around until you get to the highway, hang a right and then watch for the sign (or you'll end up in Dryden) and then hang another right.’
This alone time will take some getting used to.
Days drip slowly on the page.
What is my story? It’s going to be fun to find out.
As Jonathan Galassi said, “Eyes ahead companions, life is now.”