The Crying Game

When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who couldn't cry. And as we all know, teenage girls spend half their time crying, and the other half writing about it in their diaries. At least that's the way it went in the Olden Days.

It's humbling to realize The Sixties are now considered the Olden Days. And as we all know, there was alot to cry about in The Sixties. So this girl I knew, her name was Bonnie, stood out like a sore thumb. And if she'd had a sore thumb, she wouldn't have shed any tears over it. Apparently she didn't have any tear ducts. Is that possible? At least that's the story she told.

I first learned about Bonnie when her boyfriend broke up with her. I spotted her at a kegger out at Side Lake and staggered over to offer my shoulder to cry on. Not. She stood there all dry-eyed and bushy-tailed, nary a teardrop in sight. At first I thought she might be a saint or something and was about to ask if she preferred a marble or bronze pedestal. But then she admitted to being ductless, and I was speechless. I was speechless anyway, it being a kegger and all. But still. I'd never met a girl with a broken heart whose face wasn't all puffed up like a pasty.

Raise your hand if you know what a pasty is. And that's a short "a," Bubba.

When my boyfriend told me he had a sprained ankle from track practice then went to a party two towns over and danced with a girl with six-inch bangs, I had my first heart attack. Heart break, heart attack, what's the difference. At sixteen, it's the same thing. This happened in April. I didn't stop crying until September. Ten years later.

Except for the tear duct thing, Bonnie and I had a lot in common. We both had broken hearts, we both had blue eyes, we both had the same last name. A name as common as dirt. We weren't related, though. My dad's dad just made up a new last name when he came through immigration, and that was that.

All this time I could've been someone else.

After I knew about Bonnie, I'd find myself staring at her in Study Hall, across the cafeteria, at a hockey game. I couldn't imagine what it would be like not to be able to cry. I wondered...with no outlet, did all those emotions just keep piling up inside, like snowbanks, or your aunt's mincemeat pies? Would you eventually get fat? grow a tumor? become a Mary Kay distributor? Or are tear ducts a dispensible part of one's anatomy, like tonsils or an appendix.

Her tearless state made Bonnie somewhat of a freak. At first I'd been intrigued, but after awhile I started avoiding her. There was something unnatural about such composure, something...zombie-like. I felt bad about dropping her, but I couldn't help myself. Our friendship had run its course. No use crying over spilt milk.

The last I heard, Bonnie was living somewhere Out West. In which state, I don't know. Myself, I remain in a state of flux. Hovering somewhere between the depths of despair and auto-delusional bliss. Sometimes it feels like I spend half my time trying not to cry, and the other half writing about it in this blog. It's the New Olden Days all over again.

Just like Jesus

This morning, after my husband and daughter left, I went back to bed. Raise your hand if you've ever done this/ever wanted to do this/do this all the time/any of the above but would never cop to it. So shoot me.

The thrill of closing the curtains, pulling up the covers, disappearing back down the rabbit hole. I think I'm finally hip to one of my mother's coping mechanisms: having gotten her family out the door each morning, she crawled back in the sack for a few more winks before donning her domestic dervish suit. My mother was from the last generation of women who were, for the most part, Housewives. Check it out: They were married to their houses.

I've been a contemporary version of that for several years, i.e., Stay-At-Home-Mom. Oh pass the barf bag, pull-ease. Which of those labels sounds less condescending? I prefer the former, but face it, they both suck. How's about, She-Who-Has-Temporarily-Lost-Her-Moccasins. Or maybe, Woman-on-the-Verge-of-Subdividing. Or better yet, Laid Off-Has Been-of-Certain Age-Treading-Water.

But, alert the media! All that's coming to a blinding halt, when I start my new job in September. As I said to a friend the other evening, "Can a person who basically hates kids find success as a preschool teacher?"

Clarification: It's other people's kids I basically hate. Besides, how many dentists really like looking into people's mouths?

For some reason unknown to man nor beast, I seem to have a way with children (with the exception of my own child). The neighborhood I grew up in was crawling with the things, it being the dawn of the Baby Boom, and they tended to follow yours truly around like I was the Pied Piper. No matter I was famous for knuckle-biting ghost stories which woke the little maniacs screaming in the night so that their mothers were forced to call my mother and demand a cease-and-desist. No matter my favorite backyard group games were Witch and Mental Man and Kidnap-and-Murder. No matter I regularly pretended to fall asleep and wake up as a zombie or a cannibal. The little darlings kept coming back for more, hanging on my every nuance, gathering around outside our door like demented woodticks.

Now I'm about to put this, er, gift to good use, providing it's still operational. Not to worry. I won't be locking any of my charges in the broom closet and Wooooo!-ing through the keyhole if they misbehave. I mean, I have evolved over the years. Into what, I'm not sure. Suffice to say my days of spiking KoolAid with Tabasco are over.

Last night, in the wee hours, I woke screaming with new-job-angst. Okay, not screaming exactly. But 3:15 became 5:07 became 6:33, and still I stared into the abyss. So this morning I indulged myself and got back on the Dreamland Express. And now I've risen again, just like Jesus, and am taking stock.

The house is quiet (its other human inhabitants having gone camping). There's that feeling of things seeming less overwhelming in the morning...okay, afternoon. And, I'm telling myself, with enough coffee it will all work out. My daughter will adjust to middle school, and so will the rest of the planet. My husband will adjust to the demise of golf season. I will adjust to the return of steady employment.

In regards to which, I've been brainstorming ideas for getting and keeping the younger set's attention. Raise your hand if you have any suggestions. Come to think of it, what would Jesus do? Rumor has it he also had a way with kids. Might be something there. I'll have to sleep on it.

Full Moon on The Gitch

I have an appointment with the moon.

That's what I told my husband as I crawled out of bed last Sunday noon and proceeded to water plants and write lists and pack up my cares and woes and hit the road, waving to the image of the two of them, my husband and daughter, growing smaller in the rearview mirror.

Six hours later I was ensconced at one of the 33 coolest places on the planet.

Full Moon on The Gitch with Citronella. Sounds like the title of a painting. Or the special-of-the-day at some tony restaurant in the warehouse district.

While the rest of the state withered in the heatwave, I sat between tiki torches on the beachhouse deck at The Cabin, with a glass of wine and a wind from the West and no mosquitoes and a full red moon rising up out of The Lake like the opening credits at some humongous drive-in movie. A cricket whistled and a treefrog sang descant and I realized I'd never been happier at any single moment in a long lifetime of moments.

I said it, aloud to the cricket and the moon and the universe in general, "This is as good as it gets."

That's how the cable guy described our forty acres out on the Wildwood Road ten years ago. He looked around at the wildflower meadow and the oldgrowth pine forest and the river rushing past and announced reverently that we'd just purchased "one of the 33 coolest places on the planet." He was dead serious, as if he'd undertaken an exhaustive study and was pleased to inform us of our inclusion on this exclusive list.

Soon after, the guns started.

A long ugly story. Suffice to say I'd amend the platitude that one can never be "too thin or too rich" by adding "or own too large a piece of land." Not if Nature, Privacy and Silence are what you're after.

Americans like to congratulate themselves on being the standardbearers for respecting the rights of others. What a crock. Not when it comes to noise, jack. And most assuredly not when it comes to exercising that most precious entitlement of all, the right to bear arms. And to fucking discharge them, no matter the sound can be heard in the next fucking county.

After only nine months (a poignant interval of time, n'est pas?), we packed up our cares and woes and left the Wildwood Road (formerly the Pig Farm Road, which should've been a clue) and slouched back toward town, tails between our legs. At least we had legs, and tails to tuck between them. Unlike those poor unfortunate pigs who'd once lived down the lane, not to mention their less domestic counterparts out in the woods. Like all of them, we'd been systematically dispatched to another world. Only our new world was, for better or worse, still part of the same planet. Just not one of the 33 coolest places. Although for townie-living, it might be in the top 500.

Sitting in front of the drive-in moon watching fireflies flit between the stars, it was hard to recall the rage and despair I felt after Wildwood. I could've been as happy sitting by that river as I am here by this Lake. Which suggests that the capacity for happiness lies within, another platitude. Still, the entire Northshore is a designated game refuge (hey don't get me started on that "game" thing, jack, we're just talkin here!), and Wildwood was dead center Deep North redneckville. Maybe place does play a part in the pursuit-of-happiness thing.

I should track down that cable guy and get his assessment of The Cabin. Which is, after all, situated on Lake Superior. Whereas Wildwood was on the Sucker River. Which should've been a clue.