Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
What Do You See?
We walk past their room on the way to ours up the stairs. He is eating grapefruit and she is sorting photographs. They are very old. He is thin and tall and wears a white dress shirt, rumpled and soft as if he’d saved it from his long days at the bank. She is wearing a knit top with a tropical print. When she stands up, it’s only partly. She is hunched over and must look at the floor when she walks.
I imagine for them a wedding 60 years ago, I give them children who are new grandparents. I decide that he has been eating his grapefruit just that way from the first one. But that’s my fiction.
Maybe they just met in Miami or have been planning their tryst for decades behind the backs of trusting partners. Maybe the photos she is sorting were the last things she managed to grab before she made it out the door to her lover’s waiting cab. Maybe it’s his first grapefruit. Maybe he’s eating it because of how she cut it. Perfectly. Like no one else.
Who could know?
I think it’s a mistake to assume we know things about people, to decide what their lives are like or were like just by looking. I want people to be a surprise sometimes, be a mystery.
Everyone ought to stay a mystery in some way for as long as they live.
I’m hoping our downstairs neighbors are plotting right now, figuring out how to catch a boat to Cuba, disappear deep in Central America where they can lounge about for long steamy days with their grapefruit and photos forever.
They could be talking about that this very minute. We have no way of knowing.
Bury Me Floating
On a night when what’s going on in the world seems like an episode of 24, I am sitting at the small round table in our second floor room at the 1950’s era motel in the Florida Keys where we’ve stayed more than twenty times in the thirty years we’ve been married and where my husband came with his family for all the years he was growing up. When he was a kid, he broke his arm falling off the roof of one of the units. That’s deep.
We used to tell this to the clerk when we checked in, thinking maybe that it would give us a special aura. We felt aura’d and still do. So much of our family history is here. In my mind’s eye, I see our older son as a 10-year old standing at the end of the dock for hours. He stood just slightly askew, his spine bending, a weak S from his slight scoliosis, the comma of his heart surgery scar more prominent as he became more tanned. He would stand and cast for hours, the sun on his curved, comma’d back, concentrating so intently on the fish below the dock that it sometimes seemed like Ahab in search of his whale. His back would burn standing on the dock but telling him to come in would make him angry, convinced he’d been singled out for unfair treatment. His face would go dark as if he had lost the one thing that was important to him. So it was easy to let him stand there and cast. He was happy there. That was more important to me then than anything else. To suspend my need to mother him constantly and just let him be.
It was from this quirky little motel on the Florida Bay that we launched our ridiculous inflatable raft, the one that took an hour to blow up using a air compressor loud enough to bring all the bay’s parrot fish to the top of the water to shake their heads and screech at us. Undeterred, we put the raft in the water with its two small oars and an outboard motor that ran on a battery which started smoking within minutes. I saw the raft in a magazine, an inflatable way to go duck hunting. What could be better, I thought, than a boat we could put in the trunk for our two-day drive from Wisconsin to the end of Florida and then just magically blow it up and go boating. Be on the ocean in our boat.
The raft was stressful. In addition to the cable from the motor to the battery smoking constantly, there was the ever-present suspicion of a leak. Once in a smaller raft, one of my sons had secretly pulled the plug just to see what would happen and even though he was older now and more mature, I worried constantly that he might revert. Just for fun. We would forgive him, of course. He could do no wrong, don’t you know, a very loved boy he was.
The people on real boats, big white boats with rows of fishing rods and coolers full of bait and beer, would wave at us with indulgent smiles. We were the rubes from Wisconsin. We might as well have been wearing Badger sweatshirts and matching hats, us, the unseaworthy people from up north. Our choice was between being mortified or being proud of our derring-do. We wavered. I wavered. My husband kept busy with the flaming battery, my kids covered their faces or looked for plugs to pull.
And then the dolphins came.
They swam and arched around us, the sun sparkling on their silver backs while we sat in our smoking raft just being lucky.
This morning I saw this plaque on a bench in a wildlife refuge. It was on a bench that someone’s husband or children had donated to commemorate their loved person.
That could be my plaque, I thought, but it would need to be in a different place.
I know exactly where to put it.
Dew I Know You?
A blog post from a LONG time ago about my older son who’s a dad now and works two full-time jobs. And still drinks MD. A friend reminded me of this one today so I’m re-posting just for the heck of it.
Hard to Please
Apologizing in advance for what one has cooked for dinner is so feeble. I hate it. Never apologize! Take no prisoners! Bring me echoes of every man I have known, on a platter, with parsley.
I explained to my husband who usually cooks on Saturday night but acceded the pot roast to me since it had so few ingredients, none exotic or requiring long trips to dusty grocery stores in weird parts of town, no Indian spice available only in a 20 lb. bag or husks from plants not seen on this continent in 200 years, a boring endeavor not worthy of his skill, that the pot roast needed more time which I’d lost track of drinking too much white wine and watching funny cat videos with my eight-year old granddaughter in the kitchen.
I often find the job of being a role model dull and without reward.
While drinking and watching cat videos, I tended the pot roast, thinking all the while to myself that I ought to blog about my recent air travel. My mind is a vast cross-stitch nightmare much of the time. When I finally do get Alzheimer’s, it will mean that everyone else sees the disaster in my head. To me, it will be just the same as always. The public revelation, however, is bound to be embarrassing.
Whatever.
Boarding the plane, the boarding pass scanning lady asked me something like “You’re in an exit row……blah, blah, blah.” I kept walking after she scanned the boarding pass until she yelled at me. “Do you agree? You have to agree!” Sure, I nodded, I agree. To what? So much of spoken life is a mystery to me. My ability as a hearing-impaired person to maneuver communication situations with strangers depends on their STICKING TO THE SCRIPT. Don’t mess me up with needless gratuitous conversation like asking me if I accept all the responsibilities of sitting in the exit row. Oh fine, whatever that means, I thought, exit row, bring it.
Oh crap, as I inched on to the plane and looked at the infamous exit row. Swell, I just said sure to saving everyone if the plane crashes. To leaping out of my seat and twisting the door off so all the other passengers can live. I sat down in my seat in Row 9, finally getting it about the exit row.
I sat down and considered my options for thirty seconds before waving at the flight attendant. She asked me again if I was willing to accept responsibility for springing into action. I wanted to tell her, “Hell no! Who asks a 66-year-old woman to muscle the exit door?” Oh, but we wouldn’t want to assume or profile someone because they’re an older adult, right? In the dialogue that goes on in my extensive and sometimes very florid interior life, another voice boomed. “It is my intellect that is ageless and timeless. Make no mistake, my brain towers over everyone on this plane.”
“Yeah, well, I’d really rather not sit here,” I said. “Let’s find someone to trade with.”
She started asking every guy coming on the plane if they were travelling alone. Presumably someone travelling alone wouldn’t mind being trampled as the other passengers pounded toward the exit door. Each one shook their heads. Then I spotted a guy in a plaid shirt and suspenders. We communicated NON-VERBALLY and he immediately became my best friend and someone I would date if my husband died.
Plaid shirt man had the middle seat behind the exit row and we wordlessly switched, each of us beaming at our silent simpatico.
The flight attendant came back to inspect this off-the-books switch. She looked at me sternly. “You’re still technically in an exit row area. Do you accept the responsibilities associated with being near the exit row?” I turned to the very nice, hefty fellow next to me and asked, “So, hey, if the plane crashes, do you promise to leap over me and open the exit door?”
“Sure,” he said, not hesitating for a single second. I loved him for this, now having two guys on the list of men I could date if my husband died.
The flight attendant studied me for a minute. “That’s not a good enough answer.”
Indeed.
____________
Originally published in 2015
In My Daughter’s Kitchen
The toaster goes back in the cupboard under the counter when it’s not being used. The spices are in a drawer, everything visible right away. No lost time searching for the right one.
On the window ledge and on the wall are the people and things important to her. It’s my daughter’s kitchen. A small set of praying hands is hung by the kitchen window near the Mother’s Day gifts from her own daughter. Orchids that will bloom again are waiting their turn on the ledge. It’s my daughter’s kitchen.
I’ve been in my daughter’s kitchen enough to know where most things are stored. I know how her stove works and can set the timer on the oven. I know dishes need to be pretty washed before they go in the dishwasher and to use Windex on everything.
I’ve sat on a stool and watched her cooking often enough to know that she may break into song at any moment. If she is especially inspired, she will dance with great exaggerated arm waving, making her twin toddlers laugh and laugh and laugh. Enough already, I think, until I remember that she’s teaching her boys about having a kitchen, that it’s a place of function and entertainment, a place that if handled right is the joyful center of a family.
Where did she learn that, I wonder, as if everything an adult child does has to have been learned somewhere, taught to them by their parents. Was our kitchen like that when she was growing up? Maybe, some of the time, most of the time. I don’t know. Life gets lived so fast, it’s hard to evaluate things. You remember the times that really stand out and not all of those are so joyful.
I remember our kitchen as a child as a functional place. My mother always wore an apron. Dinner, or supper as we called it, was served in the dining room. This makes it sound fancy but it was only because the kitchen was too small and had no table and chairs. After supper, the great dishwashing war, paused since the day before, would resume with my brother and sister snapping words and towels at each other. Being little and in the middle was lethal so I stayed out of the way.
As a single mother, my kitchen was our dining room. We ate, the two of us, sitting down at the table which was next to a window overlooking the garage and the alley. I remember taking Alice Brock’s (Alice’s Restaurant) advice and putting an easy chair in the kitchen. I wasn’t a hippie but could have been had I had more nerve.
The longer I watch my daughter in her kitchen, I realize that the place and space and family that she has created have slivers of many things in their construction and I am but one of them. If I had worried that what she would take from the kitchen of her childhood was my impatience and distraction, I think I can rest easy. She found a better piece to use.
And I’m very grateful for that, sitting here in my daughter’s kitchen.
A Limerick for Pie
Refocused, realigned, I love pie
Wandering, rootless, I know why
A fine show it makes
Of life’s second takes
A sweet reminder that we try
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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