Sometimes Coffeecake

My husband is working on the house, his tools litter the deck. I keep thinking someone is pounding at the door. Who could it be? The knocking is insistent. Desperate even. Like they were being chased by bandits.

Are there bandits anymore? Hoodlums? Greasers? How about Dreamsicles? Nesbitt's sodas? Bolo Bouncers? Do kids still play Ante-I-Over? Captain-May-I? Jacks? Marbles?

Puries, clearies, cats-eyes, shooters.

Sorting marbles, counting marbles, hoarding marbles, dreaming marbles. Circle in the dirt, flick of the thumb. The feel of marbles in a cloth pouch. The sound of marbles rolling down a bread board into a muffin tin. The hard-shine lightful improbable opulence of marbles.

Drive-ins, roller skate keys, double-dutch, hula hoops.

On Wednesdays busloads of school kids were transported to church for Religious Instruction. In high school girls weren't allowed to wear slacks, boys swam naked in the olympic-size pool. If their hems didn't touch the floor when they knelt, girls were sent home to lower them. Boys swam naked, girls knelt and hemmed.

Who gets to squeeze the dot of red dye into the margarine packet? Who gets to separate the halves of the Popsicle? Who gets to skim the cream off the top of the milk?

Are there milkmen anymore?

Roy delivered four bottles to the wooden milk crate on our back porch twice a week. Twice a week our mother put on lipstick and met him at the door with coffee, sometimes coffeecake. Sometimes they were still there when my sister and I wandered into the kitchen to put away the bread board and the muffin tin, looking for something sweet.

Clad-Easies, Kickerinos, Buster Browns, Petti-Pants.

Our mother's lipstick was bright red, it matched her nails. She wore housedresses and penny-loafers and ironed the sheets. Once I snuck up on her while she was bent over the sewing machine, she never forgot it. Neither did I.

Where have you gone, Fuller Brush man?

I have a dress I sometimes wear at home, 100% cotton, made in India. My husband calls it my housedress. It isn't. It's my between-dress, worn between my out-in-the-world clothes and my robe. I have a rule about my robe, it cannot be donned before the sun goes down.

Are there any Roys left out there?

My between-dress was originally ankle-length, but I raised it eight inches. I cut off the leftover and threw it away. Sometimes I wish I hadn't. Sometimes there's no going back. If I had thought ahead, I would've saved the excess in a wider hem. Just in case.

The pounding suddenly stops. (Did they escape? Did the bandits get them?) My husband calls up at the open window. He wants to take a coffeebreak, he's asking for something sweet. He'd never expect anything homemade, but yesterday I stopped by the bakery, just in case.

Bears and Mice and the Moon

My husband has gone to the cabin. My daughter and I are having a slumber party. To celebrate she buys potato chips.

I'm thinking about 1968. I'm graduating from high school, going to the prom, working on my tan. These are my memories of that iconic time. I was blind to anything going on outside my own aura. Which changed color on a regular basis, like an oil spill.

It's 1968 and my head is stuck up my ass. I'm in the dark about it all.

Forty years later I've filled in some of the blanks. I had to learn my own history after the fact. These days I pay more attention up front.

My daughter rolls her eyes when I say slumber party. She calls it sleepover. I say 'potato' chip and you say 'potawtoe' chip, I sing, and she rolls them again. She doesn't want to hear about the earthquake, it'll ruin her text messaging. Who am I to judge. I didn't want to hear about the war, it would ruin my prom night.

My daughter sees the photos on the front page of the newspaper. I saw the films each night at six. Black-and-white, we didn't have color. Not until I'd left home. By then it was too late. By then it was starting to dawn on me.

Now we're trying to have a reunion, the Class of '68. My daughter doesn't understand time. In between chips, she asks if I was alive when the Titanic went down. I'm thinking every generation has its Titanic.

I'll need cosmetic surgery, if I go to this reunion. I'll need highlights three weeks before, low lights when I arrive, Crest White Strips in between. I'll need Mitch Ryder and a cash bar. I'm thinking nothing has changed.

Only it has, my tattoo is just the tip of the iceberg. The polar bears are dying, there's another war, the President has given up golf to honor the war dead. It's 2008 and the President's head is stuck up his ass. It's been there for forty years. At least I managed to extricate mine.

My husband emails that the bear took the feeder down. She does this every year, it's how we know it's spring. Once we watched her through the window, extricating seeds with her long translucent claws, careful not to break anything.

I'll need to get my nails done, if I go to this reunion.

The moon is full. I watch it from the third floor window. It hovers above the neighbor's roofline like a word balloon. Across the room my daughter shifts in her sleep on my husband's side of the bed, her foot pushes free of the covers. She has painted her toenails black, they shine like ellipses in the moonlight.

My husband emails that the mice are running roughshod. We named the first mouse Roughshod one midnight long ago, after watching her haul a half dozen babies systematically from one corner of the cabin to the other. Meanwhile we sat at the table in the light of the oil lamp and played poker and drank whiskey like there was no tomorrow.

We couldn't decide what to do about Roughshod, so we anted up and took another shot.

I'm thinking that's pretty much been the story since 1968.

Les Sons du Silence

I lost my voice. It happened last week. One morning I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nobody seemed to think this was a problem.

When you lose your voice, your life passes before your eyes. All the words you ever uttered, all the hours and months and years of useless information that has spewed forth into the universe from your throat, come back to haunt you. Suddenly that void inside your head is...unavoidable. Filled now with the word ghosts of your long wordy life, your skull is a vacuum. Silent as a coffin.

It got me thinking.

Maybe I should just shut up. Shut the fuck up! For good. For the good of all. For instance, this blahg. Nobody reads it. Well, seven people do. And they're all nobodies. I can't remember why I started this literary (ad)venture in the first place. Oh yeah. To add something, er, on the positive side to my long list of addictions. Well. I've proven I can be as addicted to spewing forth in cyberspace as I am to guzzling cheap Italian wine or running until my skeletal structure disintegrates.

Mission accomplished. Now what?

Speaking of running, it's not that I'm running out of things to say. Trust me, that will never be an issue. For instance, here's a sampling from my "Future Stuff to Spew Forth About" list, off the scores of Post-Its which adorn the walls and surfaces of my cozy belfry cubby:

1. My daughter is addicted to her cellphone.
2. My daughter is addicted to "American Idol."
3. My daughter wants to audition for "American Idol."
4. "American Idol" sucks.
5. Carly Simon (& Schuster) sucks.
6. I've had it with nepotism.
7. I've had it with creativity.
8. I've had it with procreators.
9. What's the deal with The Rapture?

Previews of coming attractions. If, in fact, there will be any attractions coming. My husband says I should ask the seven nobodies to declare themselves. Not their actual identities, Sacre Dieu!, but the fact of their existence. Ma raison d'etre, s'il vous plait. If no declarations are forthcoming, I should cork it. Zip it. Give it a rest. I should go on vacation, he says.

"You should go on vacation," says my husband.

Actually, I am going on vacation. To the South of France. The South of Fucking France! Can you fucking believe it? My husband is taking me to the Fucking South of Fucking France! I hear that the French like older women. That they drink alot of wine. That it's hot there in summer, the way god intended it to be, as opposed to 37-and-cloudy-with-a-wind-off-the-lake. I think the S of F is going to suit me to a T. I might even run into BB, one of my heroes. If you can't imagine why BB is one of my heroes, Google it and learn something.

So, no. It's not that I'm running out of things to say, merci beaucoup. It's that I'm sick of the sound of my own voice. The old "Be careful what you ask for..." routine.

When I lost my voice, I was struck dumb. Literally. I've never felt so dumb. Not since High School. But this was different. This time, unlike High School, I knew I was dumb. I was painfully aware of just how dumb I was. Am. Not only did I lose the words in my mouth, I lost the words in my head. The idea of words. The raison for words. All lines went dead. The computer that is me crashed, baby.

That's all she wrote. Spoke. Thought.

The preschoolers I work with can't write, can't read, can barely listen. So what is it I "teach" them exactement? Good question. But, I digress.

To get the preschoolers' attention during my laryngitic event, I shook a tambourine, then followed that up with hand gestures and facial expressions. Like I said, the S of F is going to suit me to a T. To get my attention, the preschoolers whispered. They sidled up and pulled on the hem of my shirt and started whispering. So-and-so farted! So-and-so said "chicken butt!" So-and-so didn't flush number two! I considered having the maintenance guy sit in for me at Circle Time, but instead substituted three days of frozen tag with the little shit-whisperers out on the playground. Whenever I got tagged and had to freeze, I felt at one with the universe, in harmony with all things.

Frozen. Silenced. Novocained. KO'ed.

My family considered my silence a sudden windfall. Like a bank mistake, or a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Beds remained unmade, dishes unbussed, homework undone. The old "If you can't hear it, it ain't broken" routine. It's humbling to realize I am not so much a wife/mother/friend/confidante, as a disembodied voice barking commands. Make that a no-body. At one point I called my daughter on her cellphone to find out where she was, i.e., somewhere in our house or in someone else's (I hadn't seen her for two days). The folly of this didn't register until she answered, and I, of course, couldn't. Tant mieux!

Most people thought I was deaf as well as dumb. They either spoke loudly and carefully, exaggerating vowel sounds, or, like the preschoolers, whispered. When I finally began regaining the power of speech, I sounded like a bullfrog in early spring, croaking spasmodically from a winter's worth of unused vocal apparatus. Store clerks gaped in disgust and looked away. Mothers pulled their children closer. Dogs tried to hump me.

I'm still recovering. I sound like I've been awake for a week, drinking whiskey and smoking stogies. I sound like Hillary Clinton. Speaking of running (off at the mouth! for dear life! out of ideas!), how do you know when to stop? When enough is enough? Does it take an act of god, like laryngitis, to finally hear that still small voice in your ear? You have to silence yourself. Lose the words. Bite your tongue. There!

"Ferme la bush!"

(Did you hear it? There it goes again!)

"FERME LA BUSH!!!"

Mitchikaboola or A Couple of Buddhists Walk Into a Bar

I've placed a framed photo of the Dalai Lama in the breakfast room. Let's call it the breakfast room, shall we? One of these days I expect to come home and find the Housekeeper passed out in a dead faint on the wall-to-wall below the photo, vacuum in hand. One of these every-other-Thursdays, that is, which is when the Housekeeper shows up to clean our den of iniquity. The Housekeeper is a Fundamentalist Christian. She can Swiffer the downstairs bathroom and pray at the same time. She scares the bejesus out of me.

Not since my glow-in-the-dark cross which smelled like rotten eggs and was vaguely radioactive have I been moved to create such a shrine. Let's call it a shrine, shall we? When I was a kid, I used to keep the cross in the light of the clown lamp by day and spin it through the dark of my bedroom by night, spelling out swear words for my little sister in the next bed. Hell! Damn! Poop! Sometimes I spelled out names. I thought if I could spell my name fast enough, get the entire thing to appear all at once, one letter after the other before the first letter faded, a miracle would occur.

I'm not sure what I expected to happen. Something along the lines of dolls coming to life, or the ability to turn invisible or make Miss Seranno's clothes catch fire during multiplication.

I've included the Dalai Lama in the collection of family photos on the sideboard, not just for his compassionate knowing expression, but because he looks Finnish. Maybe everyone thinks this. Not that he looks Finnish, but that he looks somehow familiar. When I glance at the photo, I expect the mouth to start moving, curling up at the edges in that ironic way. I expect the eyes to crinkle behind the ubiquitous glasses, the shoulders to shift and settle beneath the gold and scarlet robe.

The DL speaks to me. Not in person obviously. Maybe everyone thinks this.

I keep a vase of flowers beside the photo. I've kept flowers in that particular spot for years. Not the same flowers obviously. I've only recently added the photo. It joins a jumble of other shrine-y stuff, including a cheap resin statue of a garden fairy, a conch shell from California which belonged to my mother, a tiny picture of my dog and my daughter taken on my daughter's first day of Second Grade.

When she was younger, I used to hold the conch shell up to my daughter's ear. She never heard the ocean, although once she heard Cinderella.



I'm a Kindergartener when it comes to Buddhism. His Holiness* seems to know this. When I pass by and catch his eye, I could swear (Hell! Damn!) there's a twinkle there. As if he had a really great joke to tell me and was practicing the punchline in his head. I'd like to think we share the same sense of humor. I'm sure we don't. I'd just like to think so, is what I said.

I'm pretty sure the Housekeeper doesn't have a sense of humor. Or if she does, it's different than mine. She's had a rough life, Jesus is her Savior. I can dig it. Only, who would you rather hang with? Jesus was a flash in the pan and then he hightailed it ("Feets don't fail me now!"). In spite of this, the faithful have been awaiting his return for two thousand years. Talk about faith. Meanwhile, the DL has reappeared at least fourteen times, no matter things have gotten even crazier since his last incarnation. This speaks volumes. Next to the DL, Jesus is a no-show. The date that stood you up.

As usual, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm just reacting. That's me, a walking reactor. Maybe I should learn to chant at the same time.

All I know is that it gives me a little rush every time I see the Dalai Lama in the breakfast room, I have to catch my breath. Something having to do with connectedness. I feel reassured. Of what, I don't know, but it doesn't matter. The feeling itself is enough. Which, given my slip-slide-y perspective on such things, borders on the miraculous. Let's call it miraculous, shall we?

Once or twice I've paused at the sideboard and put the conch shell to my ear. An echo-y tubular sort of sound, featuring our aquarium burbling in the background. I'm not sure what I expect to hear. Something along the lines of "A couple of Buddhists walk into a bar..." spoken in an ironic male voice. Or maybe the ocean. Or my mother. Or, for that matter, Cinderella. Whose life, when you think about it, was one miracle after another.





(*We'll address the issue of a "Her Holiness" at our next meeting.)