Uncategorized

Freddie Mercury is about to learn something, we think, maybe.

It seems like a lot of people have moved on from Game of Thrones*, so having a direwolf is not as chic as I thought it was going to be when I first started wanting one, and dying my hair blonde and eating stallions’ hearts.

But our Freddie is 95 pounds of fur and love. She’s a little bit of a biter, if you count her feisty on-leash behavior, and both Tom and I have some sweet little teeth marks to show where she loved on us harder than she meant to when we couldn’t let her cross the street to lick a Yorkipoo.

It’s emotional for me to be away from her for a couple of weeks while she’s at obedience camp, since our souls are linked for eternity, and every morning I find myself going over to her bowl and filling it with water out of habit, and every night I find myself instinctively hunting down my siblings’ enemies, since she’s not here to do that sort of thing. I think it’s good that we’re sending her though, even if it changes her personality a little bit, which is Tom’s big fear. If she comes back in a couple of weeks able to control her impulses on a grade school level, and still able to relish ripping the squeaker out of her monthly shipment of plush flamingos and then flop over for a belly scratch, I will call it a success.


*another casualty of the global pandemic

Happy Birthday, David Loomis! Thank you for bringing me yogurt after school. I don’t like yogurt anymore, but I do like Scotch.

Today is my dad’s birthday, and it’s always hard to find the right gift for him. He likes (the?) great books, and some of the better pain medications, and products sold at Costco, but I’m never sure which of any of those things he already has. Some years I have opted for an assortment of farmy cheeses, to pair with any of the above. 

For my birthday parties, he used to make hats –at least, he made hats for one of my birthday parties, and there is a picture to prove it, so it became, in my mind, a tradition. My friends and I—or cousins, or neighbors, or anyone who could be rounded up for a summer birthday–would pose in our homemade hats, and then we would sing, and eat my grandmother’s buoyantly named Happy Day Cake. My birthday parties tended to end in hat-disfiguring tantrums when the cake part was over and everyone stopped focusing on me, but that is not his fault.

At the beginning of our current pandemic, my own children were sufficiently deprived of stimulation to allow themselves to be conscripted for several elaborate birthday projects for my friends. How my father, whose ingenuity inspires us all to be creative when we would rather play Smurf Atari [personal note: ask one of the children to update this reference] would love one of these birthday signs! We are still in negotiations with his condominium association about where such a sign would be allowed. In the meantime, I wonder if my mother would print this page and fold into a birthday hat.

Mother Insists They’re Called Power Animals

Adieu, Garp. We thought you and Freddie Mercury might overlap, but God didn’t want to give me more than I could handle. Or maybe God didn’t want the children to have to feel conflicted when Freddie ate you. If you are inside her now, thank goodness it is only in spirit. We have placed your ashes out of reach.

I am no cat apologist. Particularly before my children became blindingly allergic to them, Helen and Garp were two of my favorite members of the family. My motherly instinct to forgive destructive behaviors extended to them, and I replaced sofas and tolerated cat litter as if I never expected to live in a grown-up’s house. The cats were even allowed to pace around at dinner parties, inevitably jumping into laps or onto broad shoulders, until at last a hairball in a pool of beurre blanc convinced me cats should be heard and not seen.

Freddie’s arrival has, in a different way, returned the house to a nursery scene, with squeaky toys underfoot and a play yard in the family room. She is learning not to bite except when she is feeling playful or greeting a stranger, and if I offer her a very smelly treat, she comes when I call her name.

My daughter told me I have been even happier since she got here, which confirms for me that she (and not Lagavulin, which is what I think I told Facebook,) is my spirit animal*. I’m definitely happy I didn’t have to glue her ears to get them to stand up. Beyond that I don’t think it’s a very good idea to reflect on one’s happiness. That will only give your puppy more time to chew up your Fendi pumps.

*My mother’s spirit animal is a giraffe, but she never got to live with one, so I’m still going to assume hers is a liturgical clown.

Squishy Mice, ‪Van Morrison‬, The Third Eye, WWtBD?

I’m not a Buddhist, but Enlightenment was my favorite Van Morrison album for a little while, and I always rescue spiders in a jar and free them outside instead of squishing them with a paper towel. I rescued mice this way too until my cats were old and blind and the mouse that lived underneath my bed started chewing on my mattress. Still, I never squished a mouse with a paper towel. I lured them into traps with natural, GMO-free peanut butter, which is exactly what I hope to have stuck to the roof of my mouth when I am inevitably snapped in two by a swift metal clip.

That’s why I don’t get why my left leg is still bothering me so much when I run. I’m not saying I skipped the part of the Buddhism TED Talk about the inevitability of suffering, but there’s also supposedly an end to suffering, and–more to the point—there’s karma, so it was definitely my understanding that being kind to spiders plus wishing the best for all living beings would result in pain-free running and overall wellness. I also keep trying yoga, and when I look with my third eye, I believe what I feel for the people who are able to stick with a yoga practice is admiration, and not jealousy about their not having the same inner ear thing that causes me to be cynical and bored in class.

Van Morrison said he didn’t know what enlightenment meant, which was honest. I have always trusted him, even though I don’t think fantabulous is a real word. The Words of Enlightenment on my GT’s Kombucha bottle the other day were: “You already know what it is you desire, next you must focus on allowing yourself to receive.” Damn it, GT. I am still processing the news that kombucha doesn’t have any real health benefits. I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to have desires if you want enlightenment. It’s not actually clear to me that you’re allowed to want enlightenment for yourself unless you can simultaneously want it for all the mice under the bed with equal wholeheartedness.

That’s why I don’t care in any particular, stand-out way, how the marathon I’m planning to run this weekend goes for me. I hope there won’t be suffering for any creatures on the planet that day, and if, by Sunday, around 7am PST I haven’t been snapped in two by a metal clip while eating GMO-free peanut butter, maybe I will be among the non-sufferers for a few hours.

Late Ambitions

When I turned forty, my friend Sharon told me it would be a good idea to stop acting like Chris Farley. I don’t know if those were her exact words, but I know what she meant. It was time to act less fratty, and to join a local cover band so I wouldn’t have so much time for shenanigans.

Chris Farley died when he was thirty-three, but I would like to think if he were alive today, that like me, he would be working on his mise en place, so that dinner guests wouldn’t have to watch him stumble around in tipsy confusion trying to reestablish the Sonos connection while they waited for a burned crab cake at 10:45.

Sharon’s dinner parties always begin on time, without a hint of chaos, and if they sometimes end in debauchery, I can only say I’ve seen that sort of thing happen at The French Laundry, where the food is less refined.

Sharon does not approve of this blog.

Happy Birthday Julia Dorsey (it’s a double first name–so there are four all together)!

My mother is 71 today. She can do the yoga thing where you stand all the way up, without support, from what used to be called Indian Style–I can say that because I’m Old Order of Chanco. She may also be able to bend a spoon with her mind, but most of the time she uses her powers for good, at least if you agree with her politics. 

I can’t help it, she has made me feel sorry for leftover food and used plastic bags, but I still throw a lot of things away because I’m young and that’s part of our culture. 

In turn, I’ve tried to teach her how to use, say, an iPhone, but she doesn’t want to believe she can understand even its most intuitive features, and she seems to think she has something on it called “minutes.” She signed a contract and she keeps her paperwork on file. 

Everything in her drawers is neatly folded and smells faintly of the bottles of Jean Naté she has saved since 1982, in case one of the grandchildren ever happens to ask what was for sale at the Woolworth store. I admire her intact clothing and I wonder if I will one day want my Ann Taylor sweater back from my first year of college. I always thought it made me look like Ali McGraw. She still looks a lot like Julie Andrews from the Sound of Music era, and, appropriately, she was up in a tree today–wearing curtains or salvaging something. 

Happy Birthday, Mother!

P.S. Please edit as you wish. 

Role models, Smut, The Rebel Army

I watched Gone With the Wind some embarrassing number of times around the year of its 50th anniversary release, and then I read the book twice. I wouldn’t say I identified with Scarlett O’Hara though. I would never have married Charles Hamilton. Her self-preservation instinct was just so much stronger than I can ever imagine mine being, probably because I grew up with air conditioning and very little exposure to war.

When I was 14, we moved to Connecticut where I had two friends, some whole wheat croissants, and a copy of Vivien Leigh’s biography, which turned out to be mildly smutty. There was a fun role model! I don’t have it anymore, so I can’t go back and check on these things, but this is my impression of that book: Vivien Leigh hated to leave a party early but got up early to make everyone breakfast and never had or at least never complained of a hangover. At some point, she married Lawrence Olivier, who was a virgin until age 24. I wonder if he was insecure about that. Vivien didn’t like her hands. Maybe they commiserated. Actors.

When I took a film class in college, I was surprised to learn Blaxploitation had nothing to do with Butterfly McQueen. I guess I was less surprised my film professor didn’t share my enthusiasm for Gone With the Wind. I think that was exactly how he put it, though he let me get away with one of those papers that must be so tedious to read, where every casual detail is meaningful. I remember, for instance, making something of the one black and one white puppy (or was there also a kitten?—interspecies would have been even better) spooning on the front porch while the Tarleton twins explained why they needed to join the Rebel Army. That paper was so boring, I think it cured me.

I Advise, Bitters, Spritz Optional

A recipe: Take all the citrus you have leftover from the holidays—lemons, limes, and darlin’ clementines that would otherwise get lost under something in your crisper while you were “cooking” apologetic non-meals on the coattails of your holiday labors—and add them to the leftover tart cherry juice you bought because you read it would help you sleep, or run faster, or remember things. Then pour those things into a much larger vessel and add as much bourbon as you have left after eggnog season, and/or fill the vessel to capacity. Serve over crushed ice. Add a spritzer, if you have the energy. Oh! Bitters would also be good. Add these to the mix before you stir, and certainly before you spritz. Did I say to stir it? For this preparation, I’m sure it won’t matter what kind of bitters you use, but if anyone is watching, do use the sort that come in a mysterious-looking bottle.