Cheers!

One summer when my kids were young I wanted to get season passes to White Water for the three of us but it was one of those times that we were closer to poor than rich and the $60  that they would cost was not in the budget.

I began searching for a way to come up with the money. Nobody was buying gold jewelry back then, even if I had had any.  If I got some kind of job for the summer it would defeat the purpose, when would we use the passes?  And I was afraid to go to the parts of town where I could sell my blood, though I did think about it.  (What can I say, I have a fertile imagination.)

Then, in the newspaper, I saw the answer to my prayers.  Oklahoma University Health Sciences Center was conducting a study and they would pay you if you participated!  Weird, maybe but not as gory as selling blood.  I called them and they accepted me.  It was a study of the effects of alcohol on the brain. I assured  them I did have a brain. It did not have alcohol on it.  I would be in the control group. (I know what you're thinking but the possibility of being in the other group didn't even come up!  I don't like the taste of it, anyway.)

Now, doing something weird, like being a guinea pig, and looking like you are going to do something weird are two different things.  I was going to a university campus. I would look the part. When I was in college we wore plaid skirts, white  shirts and knee socks. (Stop smirking! We were the good guys during the sixties)  That probably wouldn't work even if I could fit into one of those skirts anymore. I decided to go for the college professor look. Blazer, plaid skirt (I used the rubber band trick) white blouse and panty hose. (So, maybe I hadn't seen a college professor in a few years.  I had seen plenty of black and white college movies on TV)  I ditched my contacts for my glasses.  Tried a pencil behind my ear but it may have been a bit much.  I looked very intelligent.

They should have given points just for locating the place in the maze of buildings there at OU Health Center and finding a place to park, but after walking thirteen and a half miles or so, looking like a lost, absent-minded professor, I finally located the building I was searching for.  I approached a white-coated lady sitting at a desk.  She looked over her college professor glasses at me.  She didn't seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague. "Please fill out this form," she whispered. "Dr. Basin will come to get you when you are finished."

I took the ream of paper from her and sat down to fill in the blanks. They wanted information going back beyond my childhood clear into the womb.  They wanted to know my genealogy.  They wanted to know my lifestyle and habits.  They wanted to know what I had for breakfast. They wanted to know the last time I had a drink containing alcohol--in weeks. Math! There went the Intelligent card. I was about to flunk the test and it hadn't even started. There were no calculators in sight.  Okay, I can do this. There are fifty-two weeks in a year. Josh is eleven, but his birthday was a month or two ago.  I was pregnant nine months.  But he was ten days late.  But I didn't know I was pregnant at first. But I didn't like the taste anyway. I wrote down 626 weeks.

Dr. Basin came to get me.  She wore a long white coat.  She didn't  seem to think I was an Intelligent Colleague either. Why hadn't I thought about the white coat bit? She said, "My, my.  Six hundred and twenty six weeks!" There was a long written test, the "if train A leaves the station at 5:42 a.m. and train B leaves LaGuardia airport on Tuesday, what will be the overtime collected by the conductors on board?" type of test.  I was hopeless at those when I was in school and twenty years later, things did not look any more promising.  I thought of water slides and the Lazy River ride and persevered. I had no more than half a page finished when a bell rang.  "Pencil down, please." No one met my eyes when they took me to the next cubicle.

The next twenty-eight, okay, maybe two, hours were filled with flash cards, matching pictures, sorting the flash cards into groups, matching more pictures.  Dr. Basin had the voice of a computerized recording. "Which is the same?  Which is different?  Is this better?  Or this?"  I thought nodding off might make them question which group I was supposed to be in. I fought it off. Three days, okay maybe two hours later, someone said  "Next cubicle, please."

The next cubicle was a darkened room where an attendant fitted my head with a flexible salad colander. Or something like it. They attached electrodes all over my head, but first squirted the holes of the colander with something squishy. I answered the same questions, but this time sitting in sort of a flight simulator. "Push the red button when the light flashes." I managed not to nod off one more time.

Finally I stumbled down the hall, picked up an envelope with my hard-earned $60 and went out to search for my car,  KY jelly glistening all over my head.  Several white-coated people passed me.  I nodded in my professorial way but they didn't nod back.

About a week later, while floating down the Lazy River at White Water, it dawned on me.  If they didn't succeed in driving me to drink that day, I must have passed the test.

Searching for Kevin

Sometimes you search all your life for that Perfect One; it seems that you are destined to spend your life seeking but never finding.  I had almost given up trying, after having many short relationships with a variety of people but then, in the Autumn of my life, against all odds, I found Kevin. Kevin set me free. He freed me from blow dryers, he freed me from hot rollers, he freed me from helmet hair. He is the hairdresser I always wanted but never found. Till now.

 "Start with a  good haircut", all the magazines and TV shows say. Yeah, right. They don't tell you how to find one, short of spending $14,000 to fly to New York and getting an appointment, if any are available before June 17, 2024, with the Hairdresser du Jour.  If you pass the stare test and are admitted to the inner sanctum, he is likely to take a fist full of your hair, roll his eyes and turn you over to the assistant to his assistant who will slice and dice and send you out the door looking like a cockatoo. In molt.

My first hairdresser was my mom, Esther Scissorhands.  She  decided she needed to cut my bangs. They weren't quite even. They were a little short on the left.  No, now it's the right. Now, the left, now the right.   Cut, repeat, cut, repeat.   By the time she gave up I had a tiny fringe sticking out from my hairline closely resembling the bristles on a toothbrush. When that finally grew out she did it again. And you wondered what was the trauma that shaped my young life to this weird skew.

Here is a handy hint: If you feel you must cut the bangs of a child, take Scotch tape, position it at the bottom of where you want to cut, then cut along the top edge of the tape.  The line will be straight and the hair will fall off in one piece, stuck to the tape, not the child's face.

Through the years I have had lots of haircuts/styles.  How did I wear thee? Let me count the ways: the Artichoke, the Beehive, the French Twist, the Wedge, the Page Boy, the Flip, the Shag, the Feather, the Farrah, Too Short, Too Long.  I've used juice cans (yes, empty ones, smart alec!) to get big curls and the ironing board and iron to get straight hair, but was saved from the Mullet since my brother once said "Your ears make you look like a taxi going down the street with both doors open".

Best of all, there was the Toni Home Permanent. My mom or her friend took hours twisting my hair onto pink plastic permanent rods that looked like tiny medieval torture instruments, then a noxious liquid was poured over my head and left to dry for, I don't know, a day and a half.  Even after the ordeal was over the acrid smell would linger. My mom said "Just sit in the back at church so nobody can smell you.", thus the origin of the term "Back Seat Baptist."  That was easy because nobody wanted to sit next to me. My friends waved from across the room and said "Oh, you got a perm." For some reason their noses were wrinkled but they didn't come any closer. And, oh, yes. I looked like I had stuck my finger in a light socket and my hair was trying to fight it's way off my head.  Think Albert Einstein with spiral curls.

When I began working and could afford to go to a real hairdresser I went all the way. I had a Standing Appointment.  This meant that every Wednesday after work I went to the salon, had my hair washed and set on bristly curlers, then I sat under a big hooded hair dryer where I shared intimate secrets with the other Standings in the shop WITH A VOICE LIKE THIS until the hairdresser deemed my hair dry enough to tease to the volume of a hot air balloon.  From Wednesday night till the next Wednesday morning I slept with a silk headscarf tied under my chin.  Had there been a hurricane evacuation, I was ready to go.  This was supposed to keep my curls in place along with a can and a half of hairspray every morning.

Over the years  hairstyles became a tiny bit more relaxed.  We saved a lot of money on hairspray and I mostly did my hair myself.  It still had to be cut occasionally, though, and I continued my lifelong search for A Good Haircut.  When styles changed, I went from hood dryers to blow dryers, from bristle rollers to hot rollers, from salon to salon seeking the Holy Grail of haircuts. Sometimes it was a little scary, like when I went into a new salon in Oklahoma City and every hairdresser at every station was sporting some version of a Mohawk, or a spike. Blue was the dominant color, and we're not talking that little old lady blue rinse. "Please," I begged. I'm fortyish. I'm a mom. Take pity on me." Somebody in there remembered how to do mom hair and I escaped relatively unscathed.
 
By the time we moved to Tulsa I had almost given up.  And then one day I went to Reasor's for groceries. I saw a lady with great looking hair. I stalked her through the produce department to the dairy to the frozen foods, gathering up my courage to approach her.  Finally, I casually parked my grocery cart in front of hers penning her up against the pizza freezer and popped the question.  "Do you mind telling me where you get your hair done?"

"Kevin", she said.  "The Cutting Room. It's at 81st and Memorial.  I think you would like him."  And a dream became reality.

Once a month for eight years Kevin has been the other man in my life . I have found out he is so much more than a hairdresser.  He's not just a stylist, he is a Renaissance Man.  He has walked me through renovations on my house, he knows tiling, painting, gardening, sheet rock, plumbing and more than once offered to come help me get through the mess I had gotten myself into in my DIY remodeling. He knows where all the good buys in town are and who the good doctors and carpenters are.  Most of the them are his clients along with judges, lawyers and little old ladies like me.  When it looked like I might have chemo treatments that would make my hair fall out he reached out to me.  He said "If that happens, I will come to you wherever you are and I will be the one to shave your head. You won't go through that without me." That is not just a hairdresser, it is a true friend.

So Jody cut my hair a couple of weeks ago. They had called from his salon and told me Kevin had had a serious medical emergency. I is in the hospital.  I took her a picture of  the way Kevin cuts it and begged her to try to do the same thing.  She did a pretty good job and said she just followed the lines that Kevin had cut.  I'm hoping Kevin will be back to work by the next time I go but I don't know. I'll wait for him, though, I waited all these years, I can wait a little longer.

Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment

In honor of our 45th anniversary on September 3rd, I give you Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment.

First, you must come with us to our teeny-tiny Smurf-sized apartment in Married Students' Housing at Truman State University.  We had the corner unit: living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath.  The whole apartment would comfortably fit into a two-car garage with room for a patio and cute front yard to spare, neither of which we had.

It was furnished, in a way.  There was a small sofa bed, an arm chair, a kitchen table so small it could hold a Monopoly board but not the money, two kitchen chairs, a dresser and a bed, and a box we used for a nightstand.  The double bed filled the room almost wall to wall.  To get in and out you had to scoot sideways between the bed and the wall. The bedroom had no overhead light but we had one lamp with a broken switch whose cord we plugged in and out of the wall to turn it off and on and it sat on the box.  They didn't have RVs back then but if they had they would have been considered luxury apartments compared to #3 Fair Apartments.

You can see why I sat in the floor and cried the first time I saw it when my mom, my sister and I drove to Kirksville, Missouri to check it out  the week before our wedding.  I really, really cried when I was sweeping up and found the clippings from a man's toenails on the floor in the bedroom.  My mom said "At least you know the people who lived here before you had clean feet."  Thanks, Mom, that helped a lot.

Young love conquers all, though, and we moved in and started college, Dennis's senior year and my freshman. It was blissful. We settled into "Married People" routine.

Back in the olden days,---some of you may find this totally unbelievable but it is true---colleges had mens' and womens' dorms and the women had a curfew after which the doors were locked and the dorm mother had to be awakened to let a girl in if her roommates had not loosened a window screen so she could sneak in.  There were penalties for missing curfew, like having to go three days without washing your hair or having to shave your legs in public or something. (I don't know! I never lived in a dorm. I got married too young) At any rate, about fifteen minutes before dorm hours there was a great gathering in front of the womens' dorm like the swallows returning to Capistrano, with couples billing and cooing and pledging their undying love until tomorrow night or their eight a.m. classes whichever they woke up for first.

Our bedroom window faced the girls dorm with The Green, like a wide lawn, between us.  People also seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time walking up and down the sidewalk outside our window just before curfew and had I known anything about walk-up windows I could have made a tidy sum of money selling breath freshener and/or lip gloss to them.

The evening in question Dennis and I had already gone to bed, being old married people and not having to try to stay awake to keep dorm hours, but because of the gathering outside our window we were not yet asleep, in fact had not yet unplugged our lamp. The interior decorators who had furnished our lovely apartment had failed to see the need for anything frou-frou like curtains in the bedroom but we did have window shades, the pull down kind on a spring which never seemed to pull quite to the level you wanted, always either too long or too short.

We were lying in bed and I noticed that the shade was about three inches above the windowsill.  Had someone squatted down they could have peered in since the windowsill was right at the level of the bed, about knee height. In fact, I could see people's knees as they walked by. This would not do!  Ever gallant, my new husband took charge, scooting sideways down the wall to the end of the bed, then sideways up the other side of the bed to reach the window.

Now, how should I put this delicately? Umm...His night attire was, shall I say?...non-existant. (The term "naked as a jay-bird" comes to mind, but I don't know what a jay-bird is) He reached for the window shade.  He grasped it in his hand.  He almost had it.  SPROING!!!  The window shade flew up, spinning itself around and around the dowels and springs at the top and Dennis was highlighted in the window for all to see.  They even quit kissing each other to have a better view.

He stood there for a moment, stunned. He tried to scoot back down the length of the bed to a point where he could move. He scooted, then twisted, then scooted. The more he  scooted, the more he was stuck, and the more he twisted, the better the show for his impromptu audience.  I dove across the bed, knocking over the lamp, desperately trying to find the cord to unplug it, and finally plunged the room into darkness.  There was a moment of silence, then thunderous applause. The Embarrassing Moment of the Century was born for Dennis. 

Silver Hair at the Golden Arches

Is it a bad thing when the girl who works at McDonald's knows what you are going to order and has your large Coke cup and a senior coffee with two creams, four Splenda already on the tray by the time you get from the parking lot to the door? It's not like we go there every single day for breakfast. Well, maybe every other day.

We are not the only ones who do this. We see lots of the same people when we are there. They nod, we nod and some of us chat like old friends. There is one gentleman, Everett, who---I am not making this up---eats every meal of every day at McDonald's and has been doing it for years.  He was there when the snow was twelve inches deep this winter.  He was there when the temperature was 112 degrees this summer.  Eva, his wife, said that even if there is a family BBQ or birthday dinner, he will go to the celebration but he won't eat there. He goes later to McDonald's. One would worry about his health except for one little detail.  He is 84 years old and appears to be as fit as a kid of fifty.

I don't think I could quite do that. There was a time when the grandkids were younger that I was so sick of McDonald's cheeseburgers that I never wanted to ever see one again, much less eat it.  I wouldn't say we ate there a lot but Miranda did collect every one of the thirty-two Build-a-Bears when they were in the Happy Meals. And now we have almost all the Smurfs on the list. In the past if I was keeping multiple grandkids for the day I may have been known to go early in the morning to the Playground McDonald's, get them breakfast and let them play till they started serving the Happy Meals for lunch.   It beats being outside in the heat or cold.  They thought it was a great treat and I read a book while they played. Sadly, they are one by one, getting too big for the playground.

If you are in a hurry and running between school and ball games and dance class and trying to get everything done at once you may have to resort to going through  the drive-through, here is tip: when you are planning errands and have both the drive-through and filling up your car with gas on the same list, it is always a good idea to do the fill-up thing first.  It may be a little embarrassing to run out of gas right in front of the pick-up window and cars are piling up behind you and people start to get really impatient and then they start to honk and the McDonald's people finally take some teen-age boys off flipping burger duty to come out and push your car past the window and everybody gives you a dirty look as they drive by because they had to wait and you have to walk along a busy street to the gas station holding onto your three-year-old's hand and carrying your one-year-old and not drop the Happy Meals. Just sayin'.

Sometimes it is a little frazzling to try to give your order to the disembodied voice coming through the microphone when all you hear from it is static and every kid in the car is telling you at once which kind of Happy Meal he wants and be sure to tell them a boy toy this time and not one of those stupid Hello Kitty things and you are saying "We don't say 'Stupid' in this family, young man!" just as the voice in the box chirps "mumble, mumble, mumble Mango Pineapple Smoothie with Yogurt with that today?"  I have never, though, gone so far as my sister did once when she ordered "Two Big Macs, a medium fries and two large Diet Cokes, please" into the chute of the trash can that is along the side of the drive-through lane. You have to wait a really long time to get your food if you do that.

Ordering at the counter has it's own perils, however.  Like the time I was distractedly waiting for my hamburger minus the pickles and onions (it always takes longer for a "special order") and mindlessly eating french fries while I stood there, which I often do.  I should order extra fries to tide me over.  Except this time when I looked down to reach for more I noticed I was eating french fries from someone else's tray.  I didn't have a tray yet. The owner of the fries was just standing there watching me eat his food and didn't seem to want to wait for me replace them for him when my own fries came, although I did offer.

Unless we have the grandkids with us we tend to stick to breakfast at McDonald's these days.  Their biscuits and gravy are better than I make, and you can refill your Coke and coffee (senior coffee: 38 cents, what a deal!) as much as you want.  Besides, they know us there.

Sophisticated Lady

Back in the eighties, (no, not the eighteen-eighties, smart alec!) when men were men and women wore shoulder pads, I went to work, after fifteen years as a stay-at-home mom, as a salesperson at a high-end furniture and design store in Northwest Oklahoma City. "High-end" meant that most of the furniture was expensive and the customers who came in to buy it were on the expensive side too. And sophisticated.

 My mom-clothes were a little less than sophisticated though, so my  friend, Fran came to my rescue once again. We went through her closet and she gave me a lot of her things and I adapted some of my clothes in various ways.  Did you know you can buy shoulder pads separately and move them in and out of different clothes for a sophisticated look?

My boss, I later learned, had hired me not only because of my---ahem---great sales ability but because he was impressed by my obvious sophistication:  I had worn a business suit to the interview (Fran's). It had shoulder pads.  I later found out that he almost always hired anyone who came to an interview wearing a business suit. There was, however, one little detail I neglected to mention to him at the time.  I barely knew the difference between a lounge chair and a lawn chair.

 My first day, my first customer: " I'm interested in seeing some wing chairs with cabriole legs." Me, sophisticatedly: "Certainly, right this way."  I let her go first. When she stopped at a chair with curvy legs I figured maybe that was it so I showed her all the other chairs with curvy legs and when she found one she liked I sold it to her. Hey, I might not have known furniture but I did know how to sell!

One key factor in selling is to establish rapport with your customer and maintain eye contact.  In a furniture store that means when they sit on a sofa or chair you sit down also, when they stand you stand. You do so in an elegant fashion  There are a lot of ups and downs.  The exception to this is mattresses.  Of course they have to lie down on the mattress to try it out  but this is not the time to lie down with them and take a nap. That is not sophisticated. To keep myself awake when the customer was lying there I would hop up onto the mattress in a sophisticated manner (Stop rolling your eyes!. It was twenty years and forty pounds ago. I could hop back then) and walk elegantly back and forth.  Mrs. Jones did not roll over toward me or bounce up and down.  She could imagine that portly ol' Mr. Jones could flop back and forth trying to get his nose to drain on both sides all night long and maybe she could still get a decent night sleep.  Sold!   After the first time I did this I decided to ditch the business suit with skirt and make sophisticated pants suits my everyday uniform. With shoulder pads.

I was particularly grateful to be wearing pants the day my customer stopped in Children's Furniture to look at bunk beds.  Bunk beds don't have box springs. They have something called a Bunkie board and if someone, like the kid whose job it is to move furniture around, neglects to put the Bunkie board under the mattress and someone sits down on that mattress, CRASH! the mattress will tip and that someone will be down inside the bed frame with both her legs sticking up and her arms twisted under her and her rear end stuck between the slats. The sophistication meter would be decidedly low. It would take both the customer and the kid who moved furniture around to pull me, I mean, that someone, out. I don't think that customer bought the bunk beds.  I kind of think he was exhausted after that and said he'd send his wife back in.

In spite of my bed hopping--does that sound right?--I always maintained a professional image.  Sophisticated customers expect and appreciate that. Imagine my surprise, then, when I was writing a sales ticket one day and felt something sliding down my arm. I looked down just as my shoulder pad fell out of my sleeve onto the counter coming to a stop right in front of the customer.  I didn't recall anything in The Sophisticate's Guide to the Universe handbook for this particular situation.  It was past the point of pretending not to see it.  It lay there looking like a gelatinous lump of mashed potatoes in a satin case. What else was there to do?  I  picked it up, pinkie finger extended in an elegant manner and slid it into my pocket. Then I hunched my shoulder up to compensate for the loss on that side and said "What day would you like this delivered?"

Sophistication just comes naturally so some people, I guess. With or without shoulder pads.

Dine At Your Own Risk

There was some discussion on Facebook the other day about people letting their children run wild in restaurants, which is dangerous for the kids who might be tripped over by big people carrying trays of hot food, and so annoying to other diners that they may be secretly hoping for those trays of hot food to crash down on the little darlings' heads.

I want to go on record that I have never let my children or grandchildren run around and terrorize the waiters or diners in a restaurant.  We did it sitting down.

Remember Furr's Cafeteria?  It was one of our favorites when my boys were growing up.  You know you will probably not find starched tablecloths on the tables when there are high chairs on wheels at the entrance, so it would seem to be an appropriate place to take children.  But high chairs don't contain everything, now do they?  Like the time two-year-old Jake, having finished eating his ear of corn, and wanting a neat tray, of course, tossed the cob over his shoulder (No, that's not the way we did it at home!) and it landed in the plate of the lady sitting three booths over.  (He was always an athletic kid) Or when he spotted Dennis leaving the restroom there and yelled at the top of his lungs across the room, "Did you go potty, Daddy?"  But he wasn't running around endangering wait staff when he did those things.

Of course, McDonalds is the quintessential kids' place to eat, but in the past they did not have playgrounds in them.  Once when the kids were a little older and we were visiting friends in California, we stopped at a McDonalds and let them sit at a booth by themselves while we talked.  It's possible that  my friend, Darlene and I were enjoying ourselves a little too long and were too absorbed with catching up on each other's lives. And it's possible that when we heard some ladies in another booth speaking in the authoritative tone of the childless everywhere, "If I ever have children they will never act like brats in a restaurant, you can be sure of that!", it may have been directed specifically at us even though they were the ones not using their indoor voices.  The kids were being quiet, which should have been the clue, of course.

We looked toward the booth where are children were ensconced only to be amazed at the sight of a giant replica of the St. Louis Gateway Arch fashioned from soda straws rising toward the ceiling, reaching from their booth to the soft drink dispenser on the other side of the room. It was actually quite a marvelous feat of engineering  and though our hearts swelled with pride it was obviously time to take our burgeoning architects out of there.

We waited till the busybodies, excuse me, concerned citizens, left and then we tried to sneak, unnoticed, out to our car. We thought that the kids seemed to be suitably chastised.  That is until we were walking behind them in the parking lot and noticed that the back pockets of each of their jeans sported a wad of straws  the size of a Duraflame log.  I don't know what else they were planning to build but we made them take them back.

We've never actually been so annoying that other people got up and left. Okay, there was that one time we were all on one of our road trips to St. Louis. The children were totally grown!  You would think you wouldn't have that much to worry about. However, someone in the group, I believe it was Dennis, in fact, the patriarch who should have been setting the example, who was stacking those little cream containers one on top of the other, higher and higher, the kids all cheering him on, to a height never before achieved.  All of a sudden someone, who it was remains a mystery, flipped the bottom carton and one sailed up, up, up into the air and plopped into the plate of some innocent travelers who were trying to enjoy their lunch across the room.  I don't think it was even the flying missile that made them get up and change tables.  It was more likely the ear-splitting, falling out of the chair laughter, so loud that it precluded conversation by anyone within close proximity, that did the deed.  We didn't ask.

Jake's children, of course, are much better behaved than he was.  Except for the things he himself is teaching them.  He didn't learn it from me but he can shoot the paper off a straw quite a distance.  That athleticism, you know.  Like the time we were sitting in Braum's----we only do these things in kid-friendly places----when his daughter shot a straw paper like an arrow and it landed on the head of the man who was sitting behind us. And stayed. Black hair, white straw, lots of hairspray. We held our breath. We waited and waited for it to fall off. Should we mention it or not? Should we, and by we, I mean Jake, go over and apologize? The man was eating alone so there was no one to point it out to him. It stayed on his head.  We watched it stay on his head. He finished his food.  It was still on his head.  Ah, but for the Oklahoma wind as he got up to leave, it may have still been on his head when he laid it on his pillow that night.

I'm beginning to think the drive-through window may be the best option for our  family. We could have a whole meal with everyone buckled into their seats for safety.  The safety of other diners, that is.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

It was dark as we drove down the lane toward our house one Sunday evening after church. An eerie stillness filled the air, strange for Oklahoma, where the wind usually comes sweeping down the plain. There was something---not quite right about things.

Wait, there it was!  The door, the garage door, stood open like a great, gaping maw ready to swallow anything that came near. The light, the friendly overhead light that normally accompanied the door when it was open, was shuttered and cold.  It did not greet us with it's warm glow.  Hmmm.....I was sure I had closed that door when I left. Could it be that the door had betrayed us and opened for someone other than it's little family?

I stopped the car in the driveway, unwilling to enter that black hole. And yet, it was my home. I should not be afraid. I should be bold. I should go forth. I should be brave, as an example for my offspring still in the waiting vehicle. "Stay here, children." I said. "I shall go and try the door.  Be brave for me, my loves. If I should not return, remember I will always love you."

My feet were leaden as I trod up the long, long drive.  My hand reached out toward the doorknob.  My fingers trembled but I forced them to turn the cold, hard handle.  And then, and then---.nothing!  Our trustworthy hound, Bucky, who always greeted us joyously whenever we returned from even the shortest jaunt, was not on the doorstep.  She had not come running at the sound of my presence. This was the final straw upon the laden camel's back.  I could bear it no longer but turned and fled back down the drive.

"Let us go and take refuge at the neighbors, my sons." I said. "I believe we should summon the local constables." Our neighbors gladly took us in, made us welcome and comforted us while we made the necessary call. And so we waited.

They came, those protectors of the peace, those warriors for the woe begotten.  I  ran out to greet them. "Ma'am, what's the trouble, ma'am?" asked one.

"Oh, Officer, please help us," I said, holding my lace handkerchief to my moist eyelids.  "My husband has gone away on a business trip and we are all alone."

"Stay back," he exclaimed, bravely. "We shall search the house for intruders and report back to you."

We stood in the lonely cul de sac watching the stalwart defenders of the city move through the quiet house. We could see the glow of their flashlights as they moved from room to room to room.  At the top of the stairs the light froze, then finally moved on again. Then the fearless officers emerged slowly from the now lit garage, trailed by a sleepy looking dog

"Well, ma'am, sometimes when a jet flies over, the radio frequencies will cause a garage door opener to malfunction. We went through the whole house and we are pretty sure no one has been in there. We're especially sure there was no one in the upstairs bedroom before we got there because when Officer Baker, here, opened the door a whole box of confetti fell down on his head from the top of the door. You almost got a hole blown in your wall.

"Oh, yeah," said Jake.  "I was setting a trap for my brother so that when he opened the door to my room he'd get hit on the head with the confetti. I wanted to use water but I couldn't find a bucket.  I guess the confetti worked, huh?"

And so our little family went safely back to our home, to sleep, perchance to dream.  And Jake was confined to his room the next day, his only companion the stalwart vacuum cleaner.

Comparison Shopping.

They're messing with my mind at the grocery store again.  I just got finished figuring out which is the better deal, one 2 litre bottle of  Diet Coke for a dollar or a 12 pack of cans for $2.50. (It was a sale) Now they have gone and brought out a 1.25 litre bottle of Coke and are trying to confuse me more. It's ninety-eight cents and the litre is back to $1.25. and there is more than half of the two- litre in the new bottle and the ounces are on there and there are fractions of them and who the heck knows what a litre is anyway??!! This isn't Canada, people!---Oh, sorry.  Math makes me cranky.

The kids' clothes are right next to the soft drinks. My granddaughter wears a 6.  I think.  Or is it 6X?  What does that mean anyway?  And what, pray tell, is the difference between size 3 and 3T in kids' clothes? Does T stand for Toddler?  Size 3 kids aren't toddlers.  Maybe the X is for extra smart (she is my granddaughter, after all) or extra energetic. That would fit too. I think they are all the same and they are just trying to confuse me

They are doing this on purpose. Take toilet paper.  They have rolls, double rolls that are the equivalent of two rolls, and mega-rolls which hold the same as the amount in a bushel basket should you unroll it, which my dog has done before, and yet somehow there will still be an empty cardboard tube on the holder after the grandkids have been here.  They are in four, nine, maybe sixteen to the packages, equal to eight, thirty-two or, I don't know, five hundred and forty of the other guy's toilet paper. So how do you know which package is  the best bargain? And here's what disturbs me: If Target has a sale on a twelve-pack of  toilet paper, Wal-Mart will match the price. However, Wal-Mart doesn't carry  a twelve-pack, only a nine or sixteen.

I NEED to compare things.  It's in my blood.  If lettuce is priced by the head instead of by the pound I will stand there balancing one in each  hand to see which is heavier before I choose one to be sure I'm getting the most for my money.  I know there's a scale in the produce department somewhere, but have you ever found it?  And don't get me started on watermelons. Seedless are smaller but they are the same price as the seeded ones.  Is it worth the money to pick the seeds out?  And how much do those seeds weigh anyway?

Which is cheaper?  To pay sixty-nine cents for fifteen ounces of sauerkraut and throw half of it out because who in their right minds besides Dennis wants to even smell the stuff let alone eat it, or sixty-nine cents for an eight ounce can?  Mushrooms shrink-wrapped in a nice package of eight ounces for $2.98 or 3 mushrooms you put into a bag yourself for $5.98 a pound?  You know you might not even use all three but it's twice as much per pound!

Aldi's sells their plums, peaches and other fruit by the piece: 25 cents each when there's a good sale.  I'm supposed to weigh out a pound, (where IS that scale?) which is how they are priced at the other store, count how many kumquats there are and divide it into the price (or is it divide price per pound into the number of kumquats?)  I don't think so.

Yes, I'm the annoying woman in the check-out line with all the "comp prices" so the checker has to re-price seven or so of my items to match the competitions ads. From three different stores. That lady behind me with the cart full of groceries and melting ice cream who is seems to have something in her throat can just go get in another line. She doesn't need to be in the "Twenty Items or Less" line anyway. Honey, I can compare the number of things in your cart to mine with just a glance.

I'm pretty sure it's a myth but I've heard you can work out stress by exercising so I'm stopping on the way home from the store to go ride the exercise bike.  It has a great electronic screen on it to tell you all kinds of facts about your workout like your heart rate and how few calories you are burning.  If I want to know how far I have ridden it says "miles or kilometers used".

Somebody help me!!!

What's For Dinner?

I'm not sure if other churches  have "Wednesday Night Dinners" like Baptists do, or if many Baptists even still have them  Since we don't drive at night it has been a long time since we have gone to the dinner at our church. Probably things are a little different than they were when we had them at our church in Oklahoma City back in the eighties. It could be a little more professional these days, with caterers or professional cooks, maybe.

At first, different people at our church back then took turns cooking the meal for about eighty people every Wednesday. This was no easy feat using the church kitchen.  Except for a few extra-large  pots and a couple of steamers, the kitchen was no bigger, and probably smaller, than a lot of our home kitchens were.  And no dishwasher.  It probably was because of the no dishwasher situation that I volunteered to cook on a regular basis.  If you cooked nobody expected you to clean up.  For much of the time I "volunteered" my friend, Fran, to help also.

It should have been simple. We reasoned that we would just take the recipes and menus that we used for Fran's family of five or my family of four and multiply them by, oh, twenty or so.  Piece of cake.  Or make that cakes.  It was a little difficult to calculate sometimes.  People still talk, I hear, about the miracle of the Loaves and the Soup we served one night.  Somehow I miscalculated how much homemade bread (Okay, frozen homemade. You still had to let it rise and bake it!) people would take when going through a buffet line.  There was bread enough left over for everyone to take home and share with the neighbors. And the postman. And the crossing guard. And the birds. It was a lesson in giving.

Really, everything we cooked during that time was memorable.  I've even had requests to tell you about a particularly fine meal we made: Beef Stroganoff. It is yummy, Dennis's favorite, in fact, and I still cook it, though in smaller quantities of course.

To avoid our Smurf-sized church kitchen we often did a lot of the preparation at home and transported it in the back of our station wagons, but for this we opted to do most of it the cooking at church.  We had  chopped the beef into cubes, sliced the mushrooms, stirred in the sour cream (I'm getting hungry as we sit here) and had it simmering on the four-burner stove.  There were pans of dump cake set out on the counters (What, you never heard of dump cake? You dump in a can of fruit, you dump in a box of yellow cake mix, you dump in melted butter? Easy as.....cake.) The Cool Whip was in the fridge,  Fran's colicky newborn daughter was in her swing.  The rest of our children ran in and out of the kitchen and the gym right outside the kitchen. We had to have more space. And then it came to us. We could pre-cook the noodles, put them into the big steamers to keep warm and plug them in somewhere out of our way till we had everything else finished

Soon we were ready with Fran and Pat's Gourmet Dinner for Eighty. We had the lettuce cut up in big bowls for the salads, eighty pieces of cake sliced and set out artfully at the end of the folding tables we used for our buffet line.  We unplugged the steamers and set them on the tables with the Stroganoff mixture next to them.  It would be simple, for once.  People could put the noodles on their plates, balancing them carefully---those foam plates can be killers---top them with the Stroganoff, and enjoy the delights of our labor.

As the diners milled around, tantalized by the luscious aromas, the pastor said grace and they began to file down both sides of the tables. To make it easier for them to serve themselves, I took the lid off the first steamer of noodles.  Or, perhaps I should say Noodle. It was one solid, 18" by 30"x 6" Noodle. The second steamer was the same. Who knew that if you let pasta sit in a steamy environment for an hour or so it would congeal into one big mass?  So we cut the Noodle into squares and topped it with the Stroganoff and ate it anyway.

Baptists will  always eat.  And they have good memories.  I rarely see someone from back then who doesn't remind me of The Noodle. They haven't seen anything like it since.

Small Craft Warnings

I've never really been a crafty person.  I did cover toilet paper rolls with contact paper to match my kitchen once and stuffed the cords from the toaster and coffee maker into them, but that was more a décor thing than a craft thing and I never gave any of them away as Christmas presents. And I made those potholders with stretchy pieces of yarn when I was a kid, just like you did, but nobody ever bought any from me when I went door to door trying to sell them. It's a good thing Hobby Lobby isn't depending on me to keep their billion dollar business going.

Well, all right, long, long ago I did kind of get into making candles.  Not like the candles you can buy for $30 a pop at a candle party these days but at the time they were kind of unique.  You took an empty half gallon milk carton, tied some wick to a fishing weight, then you dangled the wick into the  carton by tying it to a stick or something laid across the top and----here comes the unique part----you filled the carton with crushed ice. Then you melted paraffin in a five-pound coffee can and poured it on top of the ice. While the wax set up the ice melted leaving a lacy pattern.Tear off the cardboard carton and voila! A candle! I don't know how you could do that today because coffee doesn't even come in metal cans. Or even five-pound containers for that matter.

The end of that project came one night when I accidentally dropped the can full of melted paraffin onto the kitchen floor. The floor was kind of a black swirly linoleum. The wax was red. It did not make a pretty color. No problem, you say: wait for the wax to dry and peel it off the floor.  That would have been the way to go except for one little detail. We had radiant heat in the floor and it was winter. Toasty on the toes in the morning, but the warmth wouldn't allow the wax to harden enough to peel, yet it would not stay liquid enough to just mop up. My last remembrance of my candle making hobby is of Dennis on the floor with a blow torch, holding it above the wax enough to melt it so we could wipe it up with a rag. Lots of rags. For a very long time.  It may have been his idea for me to think about another craft.

After that  I found a craft project that seemed right up my alley.  No Sew Pants. I swear I am not making this up! You could make palazzo pants---and you know how I love palazzo pants---out of one multi-yard length of fabric. It was quite ingenious. You wrapped the ends around your waist, bent over double at the middle, flung the other end between your legs, quickly grabbed the top in the air, wrapped that part around your waist, tied, and presto! Palazzo pants!  It required NO sewing!

 It was amazing; it really looked like pants when you were done. Unfortunately, sometimes it was difficult to remember what you were supposed to wrap first, which direction to fling the fabric or which end was up.  And then you had to untangle yourself and start all over after resting awhile to get the blood to flow from your head back down to your legs.  Once you had it together you were good to go, though.  A vision of loveliness, out for the evening. Until you had to use the bathroom.

So, you're standing in the stall with the whole ball of fabric in your hands. You try to remember which end to wrap around your waist first. You bend your  head between your legs. You fling. The blood is rushing to your head. Nothing comes up for you to catch at the top. You look around to see where the errant fabric has gone, and.--Oh! There it is. Thank the Lord they did not have automatic flushing back then is all I have to say.

Today we have pretty much a craft-free zone around here. When the grandkids come over with paint or glue or glitter I say "Oh, sweetie.  Your mama is such a good crafter.  I know she would want to do this with you at your house."  I don't think Hobby Lobby is going to go broke without me.

Weighty Matters

I just got into a pair of my Fatter jeans! No, that's good a good thing. My clothes are divided into Fat, Fatter, and Fattest, so that means I am moving down. Actually, they are probably a pair of the bigger ones of my Fatter ones. It might have been one of the smaller ones of the Fattest ones but I couldn't wear it a few weeks ago and now I can.  The really good thing is that the Fattest ones are getting a little baggy. Soon I hope to be in all the Fatter ones. Are you keeping up?

As long as my Fattest clothes were still fitting okay I just stayed the course. After all, the last two times in my life I was really skinny I got pregnant, so I decided to quit that. Then finally a couple of years ago, being in my sixties now, I decided that there was probably no danger of pregnancy, so I went on a diet and lost 30 pounds. Guess what.  Breast cancer! Now, there may not be any actual statistics supporting this connection, but you've got to wonder.  I mean, all the literature, all the medical staff, everybody at the Breast Clinic kept saying.  "Don't diet now."  Maybe they know something they aren't telling.

When faced with having to spend actual money to replace all the Fattest clothes, however, since the washer seemed to be shrinking every one,  ("tight" in my case doesn't always refer to how my clothes fit) and thinking, "It's been over a year now, maybe it's safe," we started working on that weight thing again.  By we I mean Dennis and me. You can only do this if everybody you cook for is on the same page, so you girls with young children, nobody blames you.

I have been in groups before and young things who look like they could still buy their clothes at Children's Place will sigh dramatically and say, "Oh, if I could just lose these five pounds."  After  the initial urge to slap them silly (if I put all my weight into it they might be gone till next Tuesday) I stop and realize they are right. There was a time when all I wanted to lose was five pounds.  If I had done it then, it wouldn't be such a long haul now. Think about it. You slip out of your skinny wedding dress, you gain even just two pounds a year, then all of a sudden you've been married forty-five years--you do the math-- and Children's Place for clothes shopping has turned into Big Mama's.

Can you believe there was actually a store in Oklahoma City for plus-sized ladies called Big Mama's?  Like I wanted to walk around with a shopping bag with my own mean-spirited slur on it!  It didn't last long, no surprise. And what does "Plus Size" mean, anyway?  Are all the other sizes "Minus Sizes"?

I don't really want to get down to my pre-pregnancy weight.  After more than 35 years I don't remember much of anything pre-pregnancy anyway. Besides, if I lost that much weight there would be so much extra skin left over we'd be able to tan it and make a set of luggage.  And "fluffy" is more grandma-ish anyway. More for hugging.

When Josh and Jake were little a family joined our church whose mother, the likes of whom they had obviously never seen before, was elegant, glamorous and model slim, wearing a dress size less than the number of wheels on a trike. Josh and Jake seemed to look at her for a long time, then I heard the discussion. Jake: "Is that their mom?" Josh: "Naw, she's too skinny to be a mom."  Man, I love those boys!

I'm not in too big a hurry.  I'm going slowly, leaving room for chocolate once a day so we don't get desperate and give up. So, here's a Household Hint:  If you are newly pregnant or just moving in between sizes, take a rubber band, slide it through the buttonhole on your pants, then loop both ends over the button and give yourself more breathing room.

If I'm into my Fat clothes by Christmas it will be like I have a whole new wardrobe.

The Gift of Hospitality

Long ago in the olden days, before cell phones and internet and fast food restaurants, churches used to hold revival meetings at least two times a year. There was none of this Wednesday to Sunday nonsense, either. Real revival meetings lasted two weeks, with preaching every evening till 9 p.m., if not later. and sometimes there were meetings around lunch time too. During the afternoon the pastor and the evangelist "visited", going to peoples homes to invite them to the revival and to share the Gospel. And the evangelist didn't stay in some cushy motel as happens these days, with time to rest, and a bathroom all to himself. No Siree!

The evangelist would stay in someone's home, in their guest room or in little Albert's room and Albert bunked in with his brother and whined about it the whole time.  This was probably for one week, then he packed up and stayed in another house for the second week.  Evening meals were in still other church members' homes each day and the ladies all vied to see who had the best fried chicken so the preacher had chicken at least five times each week.  At every dining room table he told jokes and exclaimed "This is the best fried chicken I've had in I don't remember how long!"  You thought preacher's never wear watches so they don't have to quit preaching on time but it is really so they can make statements like that without actually lying.

Shortly after Dennis and I bought our first house, four rooms with no garage, no attic, and no basement, our church was having a revival meeting and Dr. Jimmy Draper, then the pastor of a large church in the Kansas City area, was going to preach. I don't know what we were thinking since along with no garage, no attic and no basement we also had almost no furniture, but we asked to have the preacher stay at our house and we won!  He would stay one night, Saturday.  I guess the family where he had been staying had other plans for that night

We set about getting our tiny house ready.  The cardboard boxes that we were using for night stands were draped with pillowcases that almost matched our bedding.  I cut orange and yellow flowers out of contact paper and applied them, with much sticking to my arms and peeling and re-sticking, to the fronts of the metal kitchen cabinets and we rearranged the avocado green and harvest gold couch, ( Danish modern with the end tables built in, such a deal,) and  matching chair and the TV on it's metal rolling stand around and around the living room till they were just right. I cleaned the only bathroom, a very efficient place in which you could take care of all of your needs without moving more than a foot from the same spot. Dennis handled the linoleum floors.  He may have missed the part about sweeping when he agreed to sweep, mop and wax them because I found a penny waxed down to the floor in the kitchen, but, hey, he was doing his share.

The only thing missing was a bed for Dr. Draper to sleep on. Not to worry. We had the classified ads and a friend with a truck. Dennis and our friend got the small sleeper sofa that we found---$15 dollars!---into our second bedroom, which was the size of a walk-in closet, although we didn't even know what a walk-in closet was back then, just in time.  It barely fit but it looked like there would just be room to open it up. The doorbell rang. Time to impress the visiting preacher!

This was going to be a rare day of rest for him, so Dennis got him as comfortable as possible on the couch, comfortable being a relative term since there were no arms, only end tables. We got him a Pepsi and set out our gourmet snacks, a chip bowl with dip bowl attached by a metal rack that matched the faux brass TV stand, filled with potato chips and dip that I made from sour cream and onion soup mix. Dennis, man of the house, turned on the 13" black and white TV and they watched football.  I made an apple pie while the men were watching the game. I wore a dainty apron. Pre-food processor days, just slicing the apples occupied me through more than the third quarter.  The house smelled of cinnamon and apples.  It was very homey.

Now, you think this is going to be another culinary catastrophe, for which I've become somewhat famous, but it's not. The pastor picked Dr. Draper up when the game was over so he could eat a chicken dinner at a church member's home, we all went to the revival meeting and we saved the pie for after church. It was delicious, thank you very much.

No, the excitement came as we were preparing for bed.  Dr. Draper, always the gentleman, insisted on helping me get the sofa bed ready.  I brought in some wedding gift sheets and a wedding gift blanket. I brought in the fluffy pillow, not quite down, but the best $3.99 pillow TG&Y had in stock.  We took the cushions off the sleeper sofa.  Dr. Draper pulled open the mattress---And out ran a roach!  I don't know where it ran to.  I don't know how Dr. Draper managed to keep the horror from showing on his face and I don't know how he was able to sleep all night with the thought of that roach crawling across him in the dark, but it seemed as though he did.

As I understand it, Jimmy Draper stopped preaching at revivals after that and was president of Lifeway Christian Ministries till his retirement. I think they always put him up in motels when he traveled.

Down Home In Oklahoma

This will probably come as a surprise to those of you who have heard my accent but I was not born and raised in Oklahoma. I love Oklahoma and have lived here more years than I have lived anywhere else and even though we moved away for three years awhile ago, when we moved back and crossed the state line I wanted to get out and kiss the red dirt, I had missed it so much. That being said, it has come to my attention that there are a few things that are still lacking in my Okie-ness.

First, and this is entirely my mother's fault---I just saw a study that said what mom's eat while pregnant influences what their kids will like and my mom's idea of  exotic food was any vegetable other than green beans or corn---I do not like Mexican food.

I know, I'm probably the only person you have ever met, or cyber-met, who doesn't like Mexican food, but there it is.  I mean, look at it logically.  Take refried beans. You can't tell me you have never looked at them and thought they looked like maybe the dog had eaten them first.  And chili rellenos?  This is one of Dennis's favorites (he wasn't born here either but he pretends). I never see this culinary delight on a plate without thinking it looks like they have baked a rat, covered it with sauce and cheese, and served it to him, tail and all.  I believe all you people who choose a Mexican restaurant every Sunday after church and especially on your birthday, and take your picante sauce the spicier the better, have in reality just had your taste buds burned to numbness and are not really tasting what you are eating. Or looking at it. I'm pretty sure this is every Oklahoman I have ever met.

Come to think of it, that is probably why you drink so much iced tea.  But you'll never believe this.  I do not like iced tea. Give me Diet Coke or plain old water, but not tea. Not iced.  Do you know there are parts of the country where they don't even have iced tea on the menu except in the summer?  And they certainly don't come to your table with full pitchers of it to refill you glass all during a meal.  Don't be afraid here: Some places don't have iced tea available at all.  If you go there, take your own.

Then there is the issue of Country and Western Music. I'm sorry, I guess I was born this way but if you wanted to torture me into giving up military secrets, betraying my country and all that is dear to me, forget water boarding or sleep deprivation.  You could probably accomplish it by locking me in a room with somebody twanging about their lost loves or trucks or dogs or you name it, for---I don't know---24 hours or so and I would give up every secret I ever knew like a blithering idiot just to get it to stop. Didn't they break down Noriega that way?

There are people who have attempted to take advantage of this failing and almost succeeded, like when Jake and Robyn were not yet married and I wound up riding in a car with them all the way from St. Louis to Oklahoma City. They found a Country Music station on the radio and played it for 500 miles. I believe it was a test to see what kind of mother-in-law I was going to be. I had to plug my ears, cover my eyes and go to my Happy Place but I think I fooled Robyn enough that she did not call off the wedding. We had pizza for lunch though, since I was buying.

And  it was Josh, when he was a teen-ager, who got in my car while I wasn't looking, and set every one of the radio buttons on a different Country Music station and turned the volume up full blast, knowing full well that when I turned the car on it would blare loud enough for all the neighbors to hear and that I didn't know how to re-set the buttons. I'll get him back someday.

I don't think Dennis cares much either way, but since our house is a Country Music-free zone, he just hasn't been exposed to it much, so he is not that familiar with the genre. We figured this out a few years ago when he was selling real estate and sold some property in Yukon, OK, to a guy named Troyal Brooks. Mr. Brooks was purchasing a ranch there for his mom and dad, and seemed like a really nice young man. After he and Dennis had spent several hours together looking at the land and then signing paperwork, Dennis met with the other broker  and said. "Boy, that buyer sure seemed familiar but I can't quite place him."  To which, the other realtor replied. "Oh, that's Garth Brooks.  Troyal is his real first name but he goes by his middle name." Hey, if Dennis gets to stay in Oklahoma, I get to stay, too!

And, oh, gosh!  I almost forgot that I don't like football, red or orange.  I think I may be in trouble.

I confess my failings.  Please don't ask me to leave.  How can you not love a state that has towns with names like Bug Tussle and Bushyhead

My boys weren't born here but they have lived here most of their lives and I think a little of the red dirt runs in their veins. Josh says I need to be nice to him since he's the one who will pick my nursing home some day. I'll likely be deaf by then and eating a soft diet so I guess as long as it is in Oklahoma, it will be okay. 

Hang Ups

Back in the olden days, when cell phones had just come out, a man came into the furniture store where I worked, pulled out this thing that looked like a brick with a stick on it, and called his wife to describe a curio cabinet he was looking at. I couldn't believe it. How ostentatious! Then Dennis insisted I get one.  It stayed in my purse most of the time, although it made my purse weigh about the same as a small child when I carried it, because I was embarrassed by it, except Dennis would call me every once in awhile to say "Can you hear me?  How about now?" and then I had to bring it out in public.

Flash forward to now and if I don't have my cell phone in my pocket I get kind of panicky, especially if I'm away from home. What if I get lost? What if someone gets sick?  What if there's a sale going on and I don't hear about it? 

Because of that I'm very careful not to lose it.  I keep it in my pocket at all times except when it is on the charger right on my bed table. OK, sometimes I do  have to search for it: Down the inside of my chair. On the floor of the car. In the window-well of the car. On the dog food bin. But it always turns up. And if it doesn't, you just dial the number and follow the ringing.

Well, there was that one time when  I had come back in from the car to look  for it on the charger by my bed,---not there---so I simply called it.  I could hear it ringing, tantalizingly near, somewhere close. Not in the pillow case, not under the blankets, not anywhere!  I kept calling it from the house phone and could hear it ringing, taunting me, but could not find it. I was just about to lay down on the floor to look under the bed, which would have necessitated a call from SOME kind of phone for help to get me back up, when I happened to feel in the back pocket of my jeans.  Who puts their phone in the BACK pocket of their jeans???

It turned up in a flower pot once, down among the geraniums that I had just watered.  I don't know! I think I had it in my shirt pocket for some reason and it slipped out.  And why did I go back out there to look? Who knows. I pray a lot about my phone, that's all I think it could be. I'm glad God cares about the little things in our lives and not just emergencies. Well, sometimes it seems like an emergency to me when I'm looking for it.

Here is one of my famous household hints: If you are working out in the yard and you come in through the laundry room and the washer is going, don't just take your muddy jeans off right there and throw them in the washer. First take your cell phone out of your pocket.  Even a bag of rice won't rescue a cell phone once it has been agitated, rinsed and spun.

I know about the rice (if your cell phone gets wet, take it completely apart, battery, Sim card and all and seal everything up inside a Ziploc bag of dry rice and leave it for 24 hours or so. Thank you, Google) because I may have dropped my phone in the toilet once. Or twice.  What?? I'm not the first person to have done it or how would Google have known what to tell me to do?  I saw a TV commercial for a toilet that is so powerful it can flush down golf balls and tools and things. I'm glad I didn't spring for that one when we put in a new toilet last year. But, anyway, the rice only works sometimes.

The guy at the AT&T store doesn't want you to know about the rice.  He just wants to sell you another phone.  So if you have an extra phone because the rice actually finally worked the second time you tried but you didn't trust it and went and bought a new phone, you'll be ready for anything.  It would be wise, however, to take the phone out of your pocket when you go into the bathroom and leave it on the counter till you are finished in there. But don't drop it in the water while washing your hands. I have my rice still in the bag, just in case.

All around me I see people using their smart phones.  My kids have every App known to man.  They even have every translation of the Bible ever written on their smart phones; they are ready for a Sword Drill at any moment. There are games, fish swimming, lips that make you look like you are a goober when you hold them up to your mouth, and much more, and they even talk to each other face to face from 100 miles apart.

 I don't think I want a phone that is smarter than me though.  Not until they make one smart enough to stay out of trouble and find it's way home when it gets lost.

Piece of Cake

My friend, Pam, reminded me of a story I told her years ago about one of my early culinary efforts and she wants me to relate it to you.  I honestly had forgotten all about it but some people obviously have memories like elephants and I probably need to learn to blab a little less if I want things to stay in the past. If I was crafty I think I would needlepoint a sign: "What Happens in Pat's Kitchen Stays in Pat's Kitchen" but I suppose if I don't tell you someone else will.

Bear in mind that these things happened long ago when I was first learning to cook.  I have been cooking a very lo-o-ong time since then so you are safe to eat here now. Usually. (Some daughters-in-law are the exceptions to the rule)

It was actually a few years after the first meal I cooked for Dennis when I used all the milk in the mashed potatoes and there wasn't enough left to thin the gravy and he put the potatoes on top of the gravy instead of the other way around. And it was a few years before the time I tried a new recipe and when we finally gave up on it and decided to go out for pizza and I put it on the floor for the dog and she only ate the broccoli next to it. Now that I think of it, once we could afford it we did eat out a lot but I thought it was just because Dennis likes to socialize.

I don't remember who was coming to dinner that night but it was someone I wanted to impress so I decided an angel food cake would be good and low calorie too. The recipe called for lots of eggs whites without the yolks, whatever that was about, and after a few futile attempts at that trick I finally figured out that you can break the egg into a little funnel and the white goes through but the yellow stays in the top.  Then you had to beat all those egg whites and "fold" them into the rest of the batter.  Remember that Rachel Ray had not been born yet, so I had never heard of folding in regard to anything but laundry---and maybe money. I decided that it probably meant "gently".  So I gently layered the egg whites and all the other ingredients together, poured them into my wedding gift tube pan and put it into the oven.

I was a little disappointed when I took it out of the oven and it seemed to be about the same height as when it went in but I kept on following the directions. They said you should invert the tube pan onto a large funnel to let the cake cool, but since the only funnel we had was the tiny one I had used to separate the eggs I set it over a Coke bottle, same concept it seemed to me, and went on fixing whatever else we had planned for the meal. The exact menu has mercifully escaped me.

When Dennis came into the kitchen I looked for sympathy. "Look at the cake. It hardly rose at all!" I said.  And he said "You mean this cake wrapped around the Coke bottle?" The 2 inch high cake had fallen from the tube pan and impaled itself on the Coke bottle and there was no sliding it off, no how, no way. I didn't want to cut slices of it before our guest came, presentation being everything in entertaining, you know, but eventually that is what we had to do. And right there were all the ingredients: egg whites here, baking powder there, flour next to that, all in their individual tunnels. For some reason I think we had ice cream for dessert.

I have made lots of cakes since then, I can even separate eggs with only my hands, but rarely do I fold in ingredients of any kind. And here's a household tip: if you want to leave water outside for the dog but he knocks the bowl over as soon as you are out of sight, you can put the water in a tube pan, drive a stick down into the ground through the hole in the middle and the pan will stay in one place. You don't really want it for angel food cake. That comes from the bakery, if it all.  I found out Dennis doesn't like it anyway.

And if I remember anything else about the food that particular evening, I'm not going to tell anybody. Especially Pam.

Back Up Plan

My neighbor just got a new car that has a camera on the bumper or somewhere and she can see on the dashboard what is behind her before she backs up. This sounds like a swell idea because you never know what is behind you when you back out of your garage. 

I thought I had the newest thing because my mini-van has little lights at the back window that come on when you start to back up and it will beep if you get too close to something. It beeped last winter when all that was back there were big ruts of ice in the street left over from the blizzard, so I'm not sure how much I trust it's judgement, but it is a big improvement over what I've had for years: a mirror.

I'm always very careful when I back out of my driveway. I even use the mirror AND turn and look over my shoulder. Of course when you are looking over one shoulder things sometimes are lurking over the other shoulder, like the side of the garage. The basketball pole that used to be next to our driveway is the one that took the side mirror the rest of the way off, though. Twice. Dennis had me park on the other side of the garage after that.

You would think that I'm always backing into things the way they carry on around here. That dumpster at the furniture store in St. Louis where I worked was parked crooked or the corner of it would never have come through the back window like that, leaving all those glass pieces all over the back seat and the parking lot. (I never did tell them in the store where all that glass came from, so let's just keep it between ourselves.)

Here is some free advice: If you are visiting someone and have to park on the street, don't park across from the end of somebody's driveway! It is just common sense. Sometimes people might not see your car there even if it is red. And for heaven's sake, don't park there again a few months later. You'd think people would learn after the first time.

I have this great idea that I think Detroit should look into. Swivel seats! (I haven't figured out the steering wheel and pedal part yet, but they are pretty smart there; they can come up with something)  When you are going to back up, just swivel all the way around to the back and watch out the rear window. It would also come in handy when you have to keep saying "Don't make me come back there!" to the kids.

My dad had a unique way of backing up that he taught all us girls.  It worked best if you were on a country lane or had to back up a long way and there were no other cars coming. You open the driver's door, lean way out of the car with your right hand still on the steering wheel, then you kind of hang out the door as you go and you can see a long way and have a better view of everything you are backing toward. It was especially helpful when my sister lived on a farm because it was a pretty long drive and no way to turn around until you got to her house. There was one problem, though.  Her road was not paved and sometimes after a rain it was pretty muddy. Don't do that hanging out with the door open thing if it is really muddy. It takes a long time to clean out the car and you may not have brought along a change of clothes. Or shampoo.  

I try not to back up any more than I have to.  I learned my lesson on that when I was taking my mom to the airport in Los Angeles after she came out to help when Jake was born. Josh was two and a half at the time. They had this system straight from Satan in their parking lot to keep people from getting away without paying. There were huge spikes in the pavement right at the ticket machine. When you drove forward they would bend down and they were safe to drive over, but if you backed up, BAM! they got you, right in the tires. But the ticket machine didn't give me my ticket so I backed up just a tiny bit to try again. Well, Josh got a big kick out of seeing the tow truck.

When looking for a parking place at the store I try to get a space that has no other car in front of it, then I pull straight through to the place on the other side. Occasionally it is a big surprise to the person getting ready to pull into that spot, but it makes it possible to pull right out when you leave.  No backing up. You do want to be kind of careful doing that, though because sometimes one of those big concrete curb things is between the two spaces and you may not notice it until you get the front wheels over it and the rest of the car doesn't keep coming and then you are high-centered on it and your husband or somebody has to leave work and get you off of it. 

Someday when I win the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes or something, I won't even need any of that high-tech equipment like a back up camera. I'm only going to go to places that have valet parking. Let them back the car up.

Stage Presence

When our oldest son, Josh, was twelve years old he had been playing the double bass for a couple of years and the Music Director of our church asked him if he would play on Sunday mornings with the orchestra so he became the only kid playing with the group of adults. I had to drive him back and forth to rehearsals, of course, and sometimes they got a little late and at Christmas there were a lot of practices, but all in all it was a good experience for him and I didn't mind.

That Fall the Oklahoma Baptists were having their annual convention in Oklahoma City and our church orchestra was asked to play one evening. The Convention is a big deal in Oklahoma Baptist life. There are about 1700 Southern Baptist churches in Oklahoma, big and small, and a whole lot of them send "Messengers" to the convention. They were holding it at Council Road Baptist Church because they had a new facility, big enough to hold everybody, and the ability to televise programs.  At the convention they have meetings all day and preaching and music in the evening and it is kind of like a loop, something going on all the time.

The only problem with Josh going was that it was on a school night and their orchestra wasn't scheduled to even play until 8:00. And besides that, I had forgotten that he was supposed to go. So when he came out to the yard where I had been cleaning up leaves and dead flowers and such all day and said "Mom, I'm supposed to be there in 15 minutes," I just grabbed a coat and ran for the car.

Now, when we lived in St. Louis there was a lady in our neighborhood that we saw out watering her lawn quite frequently, who was completely dolled up, make-up and all, for working in her yard!  I think she even had on pearls.  This is not how I dress to work in the yard. I'm pretty sure I was wearing an old sweatshirt with the neck stretched out. I know I was wearing my oldest, most comfortable, semi-transparent-in-more-places-than-the-knees-jeans, and probably the tennis shoes that used to be white but by this time may have inspired the crayon color, Burnt Sienna, in several spots. With holes in them.

The closest coat was my comfy, old corduroy from the time that Dennis and I first got married and purchased---are you ready?---matching jackets.  (We were practically still teen-agers and really in love, so what can I say? Stop gagging!) We were married almost seven years when Josh was born and he was twelve, so you add it up. Here's a hint: at the time of purchase the fashionable color was Avocado Green. Mine may have faded a little. Or a lot. The term Monkey-Vomit Green comes to mind.

Now, when I work in the yard, I may sweat a little.  Excuse me, my mom always said "Ladies do not sweat. Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies 'glow'." I probably had "glowed" about a gallon's worth. And it may have affected my hair. When I "glow" my hair goes into Cheerleader Mode.  No, not slicked back, perky ponytail. More like "Lean to the left; lean to the right.  Stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!" But I ran my fingers through it a lot on the way, hoping to help it.

We made it the church with about a minute to spare, drove up to the back where the entrance to the choir room was, and Josh jumped out to unload his bass. "I'll park," I told him, "and then I'll go sit up in the balcony and after you play, when they're praying you can catch my eye and we'll leave. You can't stay for the whole thing on a school night."

I know. I probably should have waited in the car, but it was getting cold and I wanted to hear him play, and I had not been to this church since they built their new building, and I really wanted to see inside. Besides, the church was huge and I was sure the balcony would be about empty and probably kind of dark.

I found a parking place nearby, for which I was glad, because have you ever had to lug a bass violin any distance? The door Josh had gone in seemed the best bet so I went in that one. I could hear people singing and there was a stairway going up right there. That was great; I wouldn't have to ask for directions to the balcony.

I opened the door at the top of the stairs. There were a lot of empty chairs just as I expected. I went down and sat in the third row from the back on the aisle. I looked around to see the beautiful new sanctuary they had built.....and realized I was on the platform. In the empty choir loft. And Dr. Bob Agee, president of Oklahoma Baptist University was at the pulpit on the stage in front of me, preaching. He didn't see me, but, maybe 1,000 people in the congregation couldn't miss. And it was being televised.

At first I just stayed there. It seemed it might make more of a scene to get up and leave, but the longer I sat there the more I thought, "The choir Josh is playing for will come in soon. They may notice if there aren't enough seats for them."  Baptists usually don't wear choir robes for an evening service, but you never know. I didn't think my outfit would blend in. There was nothing to do but gather my Monkey-Vomit Green jacket around me, go back up the stairs and leave.

Six years later, when Oklahoma Baptist University gave Josh a full-ride scholarship, besides paying all academic expenses, they also paid for meals, books, parking, and all fees.  I'm sure it was because he was an excellent student.  If anybody thought he needed all of that extra stuff because his mother was a Bag Lady, no one said.

Big Brother is Watching

Sometimes I wonder if there aren't people somewhere writing bizarre directions for complicated networks and electronic devices and then laughing their heads off because we are blindly following them. Like the time we got our only brand-new car back in 2000. At the dealer they said in order to set the compass and the time to the proper time zone and attach to a certain GPS satellite we had to go to an open area, like an empty parking lot and, drive the car around in circles until it reached some set of numbers. Despite my best advice, Dennis HAD to follow directions and then there we were, going round and round the K-Mart parking lot and suddenly we were "linked in".  I'm thinking the GPS "linked in" to someplace at the manufacturer and they were sitting there taking bets on how many times we would go around in meaningless circles till we figured it out. Of course, now that I think of it, my sister sold us that car.....

Or when my other  sister got a new atomic clock the directions said we had to take the clock outside----I swear I am not making this up!----face Ft. Collins, Colorado, and let it sit there until it set itself.  I don't know!  It was either worshipping some false god in Ft. Collins or somebody somewhere was hysterically laughing at the thought of all the people who bought that clock making fools of themselves in their back yards.  Or front yards depending on where Ft. Collins was from your house.  And who knows which direction Ft. Collins is anyway?

Things don't have to be high-tech to be secretly evil. Back when baby wipes first came out they were sold in a canister similar to the ones today but the opening where you had to reach in and pull out the first one was where they got you. It was a plastic circle with teeth-like points all around and once you put your finger in, there was no coming out. It was like Chinese handcuffs; the harder you tried to get out the tighter it held. And it hurt! You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. The first time I got stuck in one I was working in Vacation Bible School at our church in California. The other workers in the nursery tried to help but it wasn't coming off. They actually were getting ready to call the Fire Department when someone said "Get a knife," and I don't remember after that.

I steered clear of baby wipes from then on.  Well, except for the day we brought Josh, our first child, home from the hospital. Dennis had to go to work and my mom was not due from the airport for several hours and the baby really needed to be changed and all of a sudden there I was, wearing that baby wipes canister on one hand and trying to hold a screaming baby with the other. I don't know exactly how I did it----I tend to block extreme pain from my mind----but I somehow freed myself before my mom got there and was met with a poopy baby and a frantic daughter. Somebody somewhere probably got a big kick out of that!

And there just may be a hidden camera in one of the rest stops on I-44 on the way to St. Louis.  The faucets there are made in such a way that you have to push down on the top for the water to come out, then hold your hands under the faucet but when you let go of the push button the water goes off.  So you push it down again, try to whip your hands under it,  and the water is gone! Again and again!! It is diabolical. When we were there I kept trying and trying and finally went out to get my daughter-in-law, Jerilyn, to come in and hold down the button so I could wash my hands. She thought it was very funny. When she finally got control of herself she said "Try holding the button down with one hand while washing the other, then switch."  She may have been in league with Them.

Now, I am very grateful for some of today's technology, like the bell that rings in my car if I leave the lights on, but a few years ago----okay, decades----that did not exist and if you left your lights on the battery was most likely dead when you came out of the store causing untold misery in hunting down jumper cables, finding someone to jump the battery, being late for work and frozen vegetables melting in the back seat.  People didn't lock their cars as much back then so if I was walking through a parking lot and saw that someone had left their car lights on I would reach in and turn them off for them. I am very helpful that way. There was that one time, though, when----it must have been a newer car with some innovations I was not aware of----I reached in the open window to turn off the headlights and the trunk popped up.  I looked for the hidden camera while I was briskly walking----okay, running----to my car but I wasn't able to catch them that time.

I'm pretty sure They are watching me all the time.  And laughing, for one reason or another.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Unless you are of "a certain age" you have missed out on one of the icons of the twentieth century:  the telephone with the long, long cord. Moms used to be able to talk on the phone while cooking dinner, stretching the phone cord clear across the kitchen, dragging it from the wall phone through the boiling spaghetti water, narrowly missing the cord while chopping vegetables but never missing a word of the latest news from the neighborhood.  Dads could have you hand it to them while they were in their recliners, stretching it from the kitchen wall to the living room and sometimes almost decapitating unsuspecting toddlers and dogs who came through without looking.

There was a little cushiony thing you could buy to put on the headset so you could lean your head over and hold the phone between your ear and your shoulder guaranteeing a crick in the neck that might last half a week, but it enabled you to then use both hands for other things. Some neatniks could even clean windows and bathrooms while chatting away. I wouldn't know from personal experience, of course, but I've heard it could be done.

Best of all, teen-agers could take the receiver, tugging the cord with them, and pull it into a nearby closet, laundry room or hallway, any place that had a door to close for privacy. At our house we had the stairwell to the basement close enough to drag the cord down at least three steps where we could sit for hours talking with kids we had just seen all day at school. Or boys.

Portables freed everyone from the long cord but they presented a new problem: Where, the heck, do they go? We have found them under the couch cushions, in the bathroom, on top of the refrigerator, in the garage, yes on the roof of the car, and in Dennis's pocket more than once. He got all the way to church one Sunday with the portable phone in his pocket. It didn't have coverage.

Dennis always kept the phone close by wherever he was in the house so when he fell asleep on the couch one evening and the phone rang he automatically reached out his hand for it, still a little asleep. Unfortunately, there was a glass of water where he expected the phone to be and he grabbed it, held it to his ear, shouted "Hello!  Hello!", held it away from his ear and looked at it and said "Hello!" again, frustrated that no one was answering him and the phone was still ringing.  I could see what he was doing but I was laughing too hard to get up and hand him the phone.  If that was you calling, call us back.

When the phone company offered Call Waiting I thought we didn't really need it. No one ever really stayed on the phone that long. Well, there was that one time before we had it, okay, two times, that Dennis called the neighbors and asked them to come over to our house and tell me to get off the phone so he could call me. 

It's not that I was on the phone enough to be neglecting my children after all. There was just that one time when Jake was about four that he kept bugging me while I was talking and next thing I knew Call Waiting beeped in and it was Jake. He had gone to the neighbor, Maureen, and asked to borrow her phone. Of course, she thought it was a serious emergency. He called to tell me he wanted a snack. After that Maureen seemed to watch him rather closely as though she wondered if he was a poor, neglected child who couldn't even get something to eat at home without going to extreme measures.

Jake was the one who was the phone addict at our house. He knew just what to do with it at an early age. Dennis traveled a lot when Jake was a baby but  he would call every night and Jake would "talk" to him on the phone. I think he was telling him jokes because he would jabber, jabber, jabber, wait a minute and then fall over laughing.

Once when Dennis and I were at dinner with some important clients in a classy restaurant in Oklahoma City,-- do you remember Junior's ?-- the maître d'  brought a phone to our table, set it on the starched white tablecloth and whispered to Dennis, "It seems to be an emergency, sir."  It was Jake calling to tattle on his brother. And, of course, the first day of first grade, he decided half a day was enough, walked into the office at lunchtime, picked up the telephone on the secretary's desk without asking and called me. "I'm ready to come home now. Come get me."

Today even the portable phone is disappearing from houses. At Jakes house he has no land line.  Everyone uses cell phones instead, the better to be instantly connected.   He always has the latest model, knows all the ins and outs, plans and particulars. And he always has his phone close at hand.  Recently, in fact, when he left one job that supplied him with his phone and the new employer's phone had not yet been issued, he didn't miss a beat---or is that beep?---he just walked around with Hayley's  phone to his ear. The pink one. With the jewels on it.

I don't think Dennis and I are as dependent as that. We still have our wall phone, it even has a curly cord, albeit a short one, but it rarely gets used.  In fact, Dennis is calling me on his cell right now.  From the kitchen.

Granddogs

We have only had two of our own dogs through the years. Bucky, a girl dog, so named because two-year old Josh said "ALL my life I've wanted a dog named Bucky."  And Roxie, a dog about whom Jake said "A dog is someone you can tell your secrets to and you know they won't tell."

They were great dogs, but just dogs, grown dogs when we got them.  Bucky had been a stray that our friends rescued but couldn't keep.  We got Roxie from the pound.  We chose her because she was the only short-haired dog in the place who was not actively giving birth at the time.

The year before Jake and Robyn got married Jake (not living at home at the time) acquired August, a pure-bred German Shepherd puppy.  Granddogs are a little like grandkids. You get to enjoy them but you send them home for potty training etc.  We knew August was very special because he liked to wear lip gloss but we don't spoil our grandkids and we didn't spoil him.  If their parents make rules we always follow them.

Well, Dennis was maybe a little indulgent.  Jake had said August had to stay in the garage at night so when I woke up in the middle of the night once when we were dog-sitting, and Dennis wasn't in the bedroom I went looking for him.  He was sitting in the car holding August. "He's afraid to stay in the garage by himself," he told me  And he did let August sit on his lap while he was cutting the grass with the riding lawn mower.  But that was all.  We really didn't spoil him.  Except for maybe giving him a teeny amount of table scraps.  And taking him to Doggy Day Care the week we kept him while Jake and Robyn were on their honeymoon.  What??  We couldn't let him stay at home all by himself all day while we were at work!

Now we have Gus, a Yorkie.  Hayley, our granddaughter, got him when he was a puppy but a little later they also got a Great Dane and while Ty, the Great Dane, stayed in the fenced backyard with no problems, Gus became an escape artist.  No matter how many times Jake fixed the fence Gus found a little place to squeeze through and went on an adventure.  He is so little that it would be very easy for a driver not to see him running down the street and finally Jake said Gus would have to find a new home.  Hayley, of course, was devastated so that is how we got permenant custody of Gus.

Gus is certainly not spoiled.  I mean, we have him all the time so we are very careful about that.  Just because he wants to sit on my lap even while I'm typing doesn't mean a thing.  Yorkies are bred to be Lap Dogs.  That's their job. And just because if he is sitting on my lap in the evening while we are watching television and I have to go to the bathroom so bad I almost wet my pants but I don't get up if he is comfortable doesn't mean he's spoiled.  He mainly only sits there when I have the down throw across my lap anyway...every evening. Gus loves down!

He doesn't really sleep with us either.  Well, not exactly.  I fold the comforter into thirds and make a really high, soft spot for him and he sleeps at the foot of the bed.  Until about 4 a.m. when he comes up and snuggles into the back of my knees.  I hardly notice him unless I want to turn over.  Then he just gets up and settles in on the other side of me.  I don't think he really even wakes up.  And he hardly snores at all.

Today I'm going to make home-made dog biscuits.  I've got varying sizes of dog-bone cookie cutters and I usually make some in each size for all the granddogs, Gus, CoCo, and Ty.  They would eat the kind you buy from the store but why should they have to?

                                                       Dog Bone Recipe

1/4 cup hot water                            1/2 cup margerine, melted
1/2 cup powered milk                      1 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten                                   2 teaspoons sugar
3 cups whole wheat flour                 1 tablespoon beef bouillon granules

Preheat oven to 325; stir bouillon into hot water;  
In large bowl, stir in bouillon, powdered milk, salt and egg
Add flour 1/2  cup at a time
Knead for 5 minutes to form a stiff dough, roll out to about 1/2 inch thick
Cut into shapes with cookie cutter (use a dog bone cutter if you have one, but the dog won't care if you don't)
Bake at 325 degrees for about 50 minutes. Turn off oven, prop open door and leave till oven cools off.
Store in  zip lock or plastic container.