Mouths of Babes

The other day I was watching my daughter watch a bowl of powdered chemicals turn into mashed potatoes when it occurred to me the contents of the bowl wasn't the only thing that was a hot mess.

From the mouths of babes. Or what goes into the mouths of babes, whatever.

Back in the day -- when phones were still attached to buildings by umbilical cords and being wired meant you'd just eaten some mushrooms and disappeared into the wallpaper -- one of my former friends gave me a coffee mug for my fortieth birthday, note the word "former." The mug is black, and features a rickety old man and a message:

Father Time
Can Really Kick
The Shit Out
Of You

I was forty. I didn't know the half of it. I was a total fetus.

Fast forward a millenium or so to my current situation: not only did the old dickwad kick the shit out of me, he kicked all the rest of it out, too. It's all gone, everything. I'm an empty vessel, a haunted house, a ghost ship.

The other morning I got out of bed (so far, so good!) and from his side of the bed, my husband spoke his first words of the day:

"What's that sound?"

"It's the wind careening through my skeletal structure, Bubba," I hissed, "gotta problem with that?"

As I clattered into the bathroom and turned on the light, I accidentally looked in the mirror and had my first TIA* of the day. Usually I try to leave the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall routine until after my face has had a chance to wake up, usually around 9 in the evening following my first magnum of pinot.

"OMG!" I screamed. Literally. I screamed those letters. In italics.

"UOK?" That was my husband from the bedroom. We like to think of ourselves as bilingual.

"NM!" I called out. "NBD! ILY!"

Telling him that my face had finally fallen right off my head and was now gathered around my neck like the waddle of a turkey would've been TMI. The poor man's suffered enough these past few decades having to watch me morph into some odd ectoplasmic lifeform right before his eyes.

This was it, my wakeup call. Something had to be done. But what?

Legend has it that in an effort to pull back the years, as it were, Marlene Dietrich would pull back strands of her hair into a tight underlying knot at the top of her head, thereby raising her scalp and effecting a sort of poor man's temporary facelift. Not that she was poor, or a man, for that matter, although rumor has it the "man" part's up for discussion in some circles.

Trust me, I've tried this. On several occasions. I had to pull my hair so tight to get my face to budge even a centimeter that I yanked out handfuls of the stuff. And believe me, there's not much where that came from. Now I have another problem: trying to cover up the two bald spots hovering above my ears. Forget Kafka's dung beetle, the evidence shows it: there's definitely a turkey lurking in my mirror.

So there I sat, watching my daughter spoon "mashed potatoes" into her lovely but dangerous mouth, when it occurred to me I needed a new face cream. And not just any face cream, one with a nuclear option. I wondered aloud whether the ectoplasmic foodform in my daughter's bowl might not suffice, after all, hadn't we just watched it morph from a mound of dry powder into a fluffy cloud of softness (Just Add Water!) right before our eyes?

My daughter raised her eyelashes, lowered her spoon, exhaled. All of this very slowly. I could sense words forming inside that lovely but dangerous head in about the same length of time it took for the "potatoes" to form.

"Mom," said the mouth, "please tell me you're still seeing that shrink."

"LOL!" I chortled. "JK! JT!" I pride myself on my hipness as a parent.

Another pregnant pause, then the mouth spoke again:

"Mom," it said, "does the word 'Mr. Potato Head' mean anything to you?"

"Ha! Ha!" I guffawed. "That's three words," I chuckled. "And I'm a Ms.!" I snorted.

There's just no end to my witty repartee.

My daughter sighed heavily and turned back to her astronaut food, which had the same soft and fluffy consistency as her not-quite-sixteen-year-old face. I reminded myself that I used-to-be-not-quite-sixteen.

"TWTTIN!" I editorialized, and grabbed the magnum of pinot and repaired to my belfry.

Where I spent the next seven hours surfing the web for a nuclear option, marveling at the plethora of outrageous shit available to steep one's face in. At around 9 o'clock I clattered into the bathroom, turned on the light, looked in the mirror. A handful of faces stared blurrily back at me.

And here's the best part: I'm happy to report that not one of those faces resembled a large gallinaceous bird. That lurking turkey had disappeared from that mirror (Just Add Wine!) right before my eyes. Who needs a $500 collagen recovery system?

"WTF!" I called out giddily. "JAW!"

And that's just what I did.




*For the technically-challenged:

TIA — Transient Ischemic Attack (a.k.a. mini stroke)
OMG — Oh My God
UOK — You Okay?
NM — Never Mind
NBD — No Big Deal
ILY — I Love You
TMI — Too Much Information
LOL — Laugh Out Loud
JK — Just Kidding
JT — Just Teasing
TWTTIN — That Was Then This Is Now
WTF — What The Fuck
JAW — Just Add Wine

Paean

How do you follow Death? You don't. Opening act, no problem, it's everyone's lifelong audition. But Death is the ultimate main-liner, no one follows Death. When someone you love dies, it's over. Curtain comes down, stage goes dark, silence. No one expects the show to go on. Not for awhile.

Except when it's a cat.

When my mother died, nobody asked me, "When are you going to get another one?"

At my father's funeral, nobody said, "I just don't get fathers. I'm a mother person, myself."

Even when my dog died, I had goombahs from Waste Management commiserating. Dogs are the great equalizers.

Not so cats. A cat is a dog of a different color.

My husband says cats are like peers. Well, maybe. If you're living in a monastery under a vow of silence in a level eight trance 24/7. Which describes my life about as accurately as a Magic Eight Ball.

Come to think of it, cats are like Magic Eight Balls. Each time they blink, the message changes:

Takeout Chinese sounds good...

Crank up the sauna, my ancestors were desert-dwellers...

Are you even remotely aware of the idiocy of that remark?

Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating...

These messages are sporadic at best, as studies have shown cats can go three days without blinking. During which time they appear to be deep in thought, raising the ultimate question, "Do cats actually think, or do they just appear to be thinking?"

The jury is out on this one. The jury -- which is made up of dogs -- will be out for some time, as a matter of fact, while they exhaust themselves debating the same points, ad nauseum, over and over, endlessly, forever and ever, just one more time, amen.

* * *

My first cat entered my life on my seventh birthday.

Being the middle of three girls, I'd determined early on that I was a candidate for drugs. Cats seemed a close enough substitute until the real deal came along. So on a sunny and miraculously snowless day in April, my father knelt beside me, opened his Mackinaw jacket, and a tiny black furball with white paws and a white forehead star stared out at me in abject horror.

I was addicted from the get-go.

You must understand I grew up on the Iron Range, where, as they say, men are men and so are half the women. Everybody had a dog, nobody had a cat, and if you had a cat, you kept a very low profile, much like a cat.

On the Iron Range in the Fifties (Sixties Seventies Eighties, etc.) human society -- in particular, the male component of human society -- hadn't evolved much beyond the Stone Age (not to be confused with that other era of the same name known as the Seventies), and it was Open Season on anything female. Dogs were considered male, cats female, end of story.

Archie was the first. Then came Ditto, Crazy Horse, Sammy. Nine lives passed in the blink of a dog's eye up on The Range. Then came Mimi, though by this time I'd managed to escape Duh Rainche without being stuffed and mounted on a wall and was well-ensconced in my life down in The City, where I managed to finish college, discover drugs, grow my body hair, get married and divorced, and start collecting, in order of importance: guitars, calluses from playing guitars, complicated little brass hash pipes from India, empty Mateus bottles, footwear from the Forties, and lovers.

Eventually my husband appeared, and the rest is his story.

In the meantime...Bonnie overlapped Mimi, Rita overlapped Bonnie, Miranda overlapped them all, while three dogs, one daughter and a currently-20-year-old plecostomus struggled to get a word in edgewise.

Not that cats are particularly verbal. Rather they're masters of mesmerism, having perfected the art of the staredown, and are capable of reducing lesser creatures to stunned and drooling stupefaction in the time it takes to order out Chinese.

* * *

Thy dog and thy cat, they comfort me.

With a dog, it's all there in front of you, WYSIWYG. With a cat, it's a blind experiment. Make that double-blind.

With a cat, you're just a hapless pawn caught in some unfathomable universe, unfathomably ignorant of reality, but unfathomably grateful to be there.

With a cat, you go blindly forth, lying down in green pastures, daydreaming beside the still waters, pussyfooting up the paths of righteousness, for the cat's sake.

Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of Death, with a cat, you're just tripping. It's all just one big hallucination, like that corner of the living room ceiling the cat's been fixated on for 10-1/2 years.

Your head may be filled with Canola oil, your cup of pinot may runneth over, but when a cat prepares a table before you of headless mice in the presence of the dog -- goodness!

Then mercy shall follow you all the way to the litter box, and you shall dwell in the house of furballs and purring, forever and ever, or at least nine times, whichever comes first, amen.




"Dude! It's those goombahs from Waste Management!"

"Don't bother me, I'm hallucinating..."