Three Pages and Namesake Babies

Amazon sent me an email that I was about to lose a $5.00 credit toward buying a book if I didn’t use it soon. I wouldn’t throw a five dollar bill away and I buy a lot of books, so I went to their listings and bought The Artist's Way. It’s a book that’s been around for twenty-five years and I’ve been meaning to read it for the past ten. Its synopsis says author “Julia Cameron takes readers on an amazing twelve-week journey to discover the inextricable link between their spiritual and creative selves.” Below is my first attempt at following her ‘three pages’ rule. It involves getting up every morning and writing three pages off the top of your head. No excuses, nothing is off limits. Just write with no forethought.

Already I’m breaking the rules of writing the three pages because they're supposed to be written in longhand. But writing in longhand doesn’t work well with my dyslexia because I know I’d get caught up in stumbling over spelling and transposed syllables and that would break the stream of consciousness the exercise is supposed to free up. There’s no one here to tattle on me---so my house, my rules.

I woke up with a weird but pleasant dream still hanging around inside my head. I dreamed I put a squash in a baby bed and was petting as it ‘slept’ peacefully and the baby bed was in the middle of a bunch of women doing yoga in a sunny meadow. Then the dream had me in a pickup truck with my husband and a stranger and we were running the country roads looking for roadside grave markers near the lake where my family’s cottage is located. I woke up wondering why on earth I’d be treating a squash like it was a live baby and if this were a blog post I’m writing I’d google ‘squash’ in the dream dictionary to find out what it signifies. Oh, what the heck, my house my rules and I’m looking anyway.

Just as I suspected there was no listing for ‘squash’ but the dream dictionary did have a listing for seeing vegetables in our dreams. It supposedly can signify “a need for spiritual nourishment…” Is it creepy or serendipitous that I just bought The Artist’s Way and the book claims to nourish spiritual growth? While I was looking in the dream dictionary I wondered if the squash had something to do with the diet I always start with a new year. I know I need to eat more vegetables and the yoga class is easy to figure out how that fit in the dream since I recently wrote a blog about a woman in tight yoga pants. It also just occurred to me that the last thing I read on Facebook before going to bed was an announcement that the newest member of our family was just born and named after my father.  

I have mixed feelings about naming children after others in the family. It’s an honor to be sure. One of my nephew’s granddaughters is named after her great-grandmother. A pretty name but won’t people who knew my brother’s first wife tend to look for character traits in the baby that belonged to her grandmother as she grows up or look for similarities in the newest baby to his namesake? What if these two babies grow up to be awful human beings, disgracing their namesakes? I doubt that will happen...but still with so many outside influences parents have to deal with in this day and age you never know. They say kids grow into their names and I suppose that’s true. Well, except for ‘Mabel’. My neighbor’s ten year old girl is a Mabel and I still can’t get used to addressing a child with a frumpy old lady’s name. My dad was nearly a saint in my eyes and in the eyes of the new baby’s grandmother’s, so will he get special attention? A special kind of love? The brand new baby in the family is obviously the squash in my dream but am I sad because I probably won’t be around to see him grow up? Is the stranger in the truck this baby all grown up and I'm introducing him to his namesake and other ancestors? Is this why I dreamed of roadside grave markers?

Well, don’t I know how to bring myself down. On a brighter note, I got a long, hand-written letter in the mail from a person on my Christmas card list. He and his sister and my brother and I spent a lot of time together growing up because our parents were good friends. We even had summer cottages on the same lake. He wrote about seeing Black Board Jungle, the movie, together in 1955 and how he knew the song, Rock Around the Clock was going to be the start of something big. He wrote the letter  before Christmas and said he wasn’t looking forward to the holiday “because of all the people who are now in heaven.” I wrote him a letter back saying that I’m a firm believer in the notion that as long as we remember and still talk about the people we’ve help bury, then they are still with us. I got that from my dad who defined heaven and hell this way: if after we die we are remembered with love then we’re in heaven but if we’re quickly forgotten or scorned then we’re in hell. “It’s the living,” he said, “who are the final judges on where we reside.” Wow, I think I just figured out why people name babies after relatives who’ve passed on. The little Melanie’s and Pete’s of the world are helping to keep their great-grandparents in heaven. ©

e-Bay, Diaries, Babies, and Alexa the Bitchy Virtual Assistant

I have my dining room table back! Since the end of August it’s been e-Bay Central and since I don’t like listing in the winter when the roads are iffy and unpredictable, the last of my auctions for 2018 ended this week. No more running to the post office. Ya, I know I could arrange for pickups but I’m a control freak when it comes to e-Bay. I have a 100% feedback rating and I want to see with my own eyes that packages I put in the system get scanned---proof that can keep an e-Bayer out of the weeds. In just under three months I sold nearly $3,000 worth of mostly lighters and tobacco related advertising pieces. My husband had weird collections and of all the things I’ve sold since he died, this batch was the hardest and least fun to list. Why? Because tobacciana collecting has dropped off significantly here in America but it’s really hot in the Orient so I was getting a lot of messages written in broken English that had me scratching my head. I will start do some more e-Baying next summer---I have a box of transportation advertising under my bed that needs to go next---but for now, I’m free to tackle other projects.

One of those projects I’m tackling this winter is to go through decades’ worth of old diaries that I think I’m finally ready to dispose of but I’m thinking about picking out a few passages here and there to put all in one book along with some old photos. One or two pages with an iconic passage from each year of diary keeping. I could start from a point in the 1950s when I saw Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis at a live concert. I’m pretty sure I can make a book like that work (just for myself, not for mass marketing) and it sounds scary fun to try. Scary because once I commit to a project like that there’s no turning back, no restoring pages and diaries that I’ve read and shredded.

I’ve often wondered if the fact that I’ve never been a mother plays into my obsession about wanting to create something that will last longer than I will. It must be nice to look at a child that came from your womb, that you’ve mentored and influenced and think, “I made that, that’s my legacy to the world.” A fellow blogger who has cancer and is near the end of her life gave a baby up for adoption 50+ years ago and through a popular DNA test she was recently re-connected to that child. Reading her story and her bio-son's loving post about his adoptive mom---he’s a blogger too---was amazing. I don’t have a secret child out there but it was not uncommon in my generation for unwed mothers to go away to have and give up their babies in secret. And secrets like that revealed later in life come with unpredictable results.

I remember a day when I teased my husband that someday he’d answer the door and there on the steps would be a stranger with a suitcase who’d say, “Hi Dad!” It never happened but that day he and a neighbor went around and around about whether or not he’d feel instant, fatherly bonds with a child he never knew about. She said he would, he disagreed. She was a parent. Don never was. Recently, I was reminded of our ‘hi dad’ conversation when a random guy was being interviewed on TV and was asked if he had any children. He replied, “God, I hope not!” Cracked me right up. A woman might answer a door someday to hear “Hi Mom” from a stranger but at least she’d know with 100% certainty that the ‘hi mom’ scenario was in the realm of possibilities. Guys who might have sown a few wild oats in their youth could never be sure that it couldn’t happen to them.

Change of topic to my fur baby: Levi my mighty schnauzer had to go back to the vet’s office this week to get a follow up test on his Lyme disease. It’s been six months since his diagnosis and treatment, and I haven’t noticed any difference in him. He’s still doing the chicken-on-a-hot-plate dance that’s an early symptom of the disease, but he's as spunky as ever. I won’t know the test results until Monday but before leaving the place we’d run up a $350 bill that included the blood work, a winter’s worth of flea, tick and heartworm prevention meds, two ear cleansings, two weeks’ worth of antibiotics for something on his lip and a tissue analysis of the junk that came out of his lip. We have to get the infection cleared up first before the vet can see if there’s an underlying issue causing the lump that apparently bothers Levi because he's always digging at it.

And while writing this I learned that Alexa won’t spell ‘pussy’ as in pussy infection. She just told me, “I’d rather not answer that.” Okay, turning ‘pus’ into an adjective probably isn’t a real word which is why I wanted confirmation on how to spell it in the first place, But come on, she didn’t have to cop an attitude about it! I tried to ask a couple of times, enunciating clearer each time, but the bitch wouldn’t spell what she wrongly thought I was asking. And how does Alexa know I wasn’t writing an article for Cat Fancy Magazine and really wanted to spell 'pussy' as in pussy cat? Instead, she probably put me on a list of people who sexually harass virtual voice assistants! ©

Two Restaurants and a Baby

I made a quick trip to see my new best friend---the nurse practitioner at my doctor’s office. My Popeye’s elbow didn’t go down with the round of antibiotics---the one that came with a guarantee I’d get diarrhea. (It was not a fun week.) She repeatedly called me ‘sweetie’ and I didn’t even care because she kept a running dialogue going on what she was doing and her voice is like liquid sunshine. She took out a large hypodermic needle and drew 11 C.C. of thick grayish-red pus out of my bursa and put 7 C.C. of steroids back in it. My elbow looked smaller for a half day but now you can’t tell she even touched it except for the black and blue marks I didn’t have before. I’ve got such a busy couple of weeks coming up that I’m not sure when I can get back in but I suppose I should try. She mentioned they might have to schedule me with a specialist for minor surgery if the procedure she did doesn’t work. She also said the stuff she drew out usually looks different than mine did. Good grief, I hate being “special” when we’re talking random medical crap!

On the way home from the doctor’s office I took myself out to the Breakfast Only Café where I love the food and they offer the best opportunities for eavesdropping on my end of town. I hit the jackpot and got to hear a smug, twenty-something girl talk about the baby she’s expecting. She’s doing a home birth with a mid-wife. “I don’t see why I need a hospital or drugs. Women have been having babies for thousands of years.” If I had been her dining companion I would have said, “Hey, Chickie-poo, women have been dying in childbirth for thousands of years, too!” But her companion was a good little listener and she didn’t even laugh out loud like I did when the mother-to-be said her friends with babies tell her she needs to buy a rocking chair but she thinks rockers are “too unstable to trust.” She’s not afraid of having a baby without drugs but she’s scared of rocking chairs? That still cracks me up. 

She also said the baby will absolutely not sleep in the room with her and her husband like her friends with babies did in the first few weeks. Her companion said, “You can use a baby monitor” to which Ms. Mother-to-Be cut her off with, “Not in my house! I’m a light sleeper and I need my sleep.” She’s not going to raise a spoiled child! Yadda, yadda, yadda. One of her friends, she said, even had her baby hooked up to an alarm and the parents took turns sleeping on a futon in the baby’s room. “That’s just crazy,” she said and I’m thinking, Hey wait minute! There must have been a medical need for that alarm. Usually, when I eavesdrop I have no trouble acted disinterested and involved in my own little writing world but this time I was tempted to jump over the pony wall and give her the aunt Jean/Socrates treatment. Would you listen to me, the childless woman who used to say I won’t babysit anyone who can’t say, “My stomach hurts and I need to go the hospital.”

The next day I went downtown with two of my Gathering Girls friends and a bus load of others from the senior hall to the culinary college’s fancy-schmancy restaurant. It’s the 3^rd year I’ve signed up and it was just as fun this time as the others. I ordered the “Salvadoran Style Pork and Cheese Pupusa Chismol, rice, platanos maduros, salsa roja, corn relish, curtido and lime crema” not knowing what half those words meant. I still don’t but it was wonderful. It came with a small salad that included steamed sweet potato slices, baby spinach and quinoa with a white salsa plus a three ounce sized bowl of pureed black bean soup and a bread basket to die for. If I were a panda bear I would have used the bread to anoint myself. If you’ve watched a panda cam you’ll know all about how they roll around on the enrichment treats they love better than sex. And for dessert I got a yummy, dark chocolate fix---a wedge of heaven topped with raspberry sauce and chocolate ‘candy paper squares’ and served with a dab of chocolate ice cream and a chocolate whoopie pie with raspberry filling. The five star style service makes you feel great but for half the cost you’d pay at a ritzy restaurant.

The culinary college outings always come with a mystery tour and this year our senior hall director took us to a 75,000 square feet warehouse called ‘The Store’ that is run by a mega church. They get shipments from World Mission of school supplies, hygiene products, diapers, cleaning supplies and overstock goods that could be anything from chairs to vacuums to boots. All brand new. The church opens the warehouse to people on a fixed income including college students, charity groups and school teachers who all pay a $50 fee for a year’s membership and members can go to ‘The Store’ twice a month and take whatever they need for free. Our tour guide told us a lot of stories about how they’d pray over a large shipment of say pillows and the next day someone would come in who was setting up a shelter. What a HUGE and curious place it was! ©