If You’re Lost You Can Look and You Will Find Me

I’ve mentioned that I was alive during the Apex of Civilization, as depicted here.

This is a pale shadow, of course, of what the 1980’s really were.  The ’80s were a singular time and place, when rising in the morning to the sounds of Tiffany and climbing into a pair of fluorescent-flecked Keds was considered an acceptable way of life.  An awesome way of life.

I’m not exaggerating when I tell you this was the apex of Western Civilization.  Booming economy, singing Ewoks on the movie screen, Planter’s Cheez Balls on the table,  space shuttle in the sky, Clearly Canadian in the fridge, glitter on the eyelid, Smurfs on the television,  MicroMagic in the freezer, and actual talent required for a career as a country-western musician.  And, according to the  historical document The Cosby Show, racial tension was at an all-time low.

When I grade papers, I stream sitcoms from the era.  They have a soothing effect, the plastic hair clips and belted sweaters banishing the comma splices and heartfelt analysis of “the notorious ancient author, Robert Frost.”  Over the course of about two and a half weeks, I experienced the entire seven-year run of Kate and Allie, which I missed the first time around, for the timelessly artistic reason that it aired after my bedtime.   And at one point I looked up from a run-on sentence and saw the following:

MY SWEATSHIRT.  From 1987.  On my computer screen.

Note the velor!  The scrunchability of the sleeves!  This particular model is red with gold piping, which were my school colors, but I failed to execute quite the accessory puffiness exhibited here without an assist from a plastic headband.  It’s inspiring, but there are still better glories to be found on Newhart, on which I once saw a sweatshirt with shoulder pads.

I saw a lot of little girls and boys dressed in ’80’s garb this Halloween, which, while initially a delightful revisiting of painter’s caps and plastic chunks of earrings, gradually became a source of a horrifying revelation.   So… the ’80’s are now merely a long-ago old-timey decade of costumization occurring sometime between hoop skirts and last week.  It is now like a short fringed skirt or a wide riverboat brim:  An era distilled to a trinket or two purchasable at Claire’s.

The shoulder pads may yet revisit us.

banana clip at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

I Got a Rock

I now have more nephews than arms, and that’s okay:

As you can see, Sam The Newborn Nephew is kind of smushed and lumpy, but as his brothers started out the same way, I’m sure he’ll unfurl at some point.

Here you can see part of his bib collection, and also his chic Tiny Flannel Mittens look.  It is fierce.

One of Julie The NephewMama’s neighbors captured this on the security cam:

When I was asked to help with Halloween, I initially thought this was a sop to a pathetically incompetent aunt, one who still cannot discern Annie from Clarabel on sight.  But Jim and Will were hitting the neighborhood with their cousin Max, and as soon as they reached the end of the sidewalk, they immediately dispersed in three different directions.  Jim tried to cross the street, Max trundled down the hill, and Will, still not clear on this whole trick or treating concept, headed for his own garage.  Clearly, a man to man defense was required.  I took Thomas the Tank Engine in hand.

The first house was the one next door, the very one Julie and Country The Brother-In-Law used to inhabit when they were first married.  (This is how we do things, on the West Side.)  Jim and Max performed admirably and came away with M&M’s.  Will made it halfway down the driveway and stopped dead.

I encouraged him forward a step. “Come on, Will!”

Another step.  He stopped dead.

I moved forward another inch so that he could understand that all of a sudden it was all right to leave the house after dark and go to a strange person’s house in search of food he’s normally told he isn’t allowed to have.  “See what James is doing!  Come on!   It’s okay!”

I got maybe another millimeter out of him, and then the neighbor took pity on both of us and  hurled the candy in his general direction.  “Oh, Will, wow!  Look at that!” I said in tones normally reserved for a lunar landing.  “What do you say?”

Will stooped down, collected the M&M’s and ran in the opposite direction.  Perhaps he knew that I was about to have my first sighting of a Snuggie in the wild.

Country The Brother-In-Law, meanwhile, was collecting beer.  (This, also, is how we do things on the West Side.)  He started out with Miller Lite, then graduated when another family down the street saw the Miller Lite, scoffed, and insisted that he take a can of Yuengling.  I was vastly disappointed in this.  First of all, aunts weren’t offered beer.  Second of all, in my day, the Greek Orthodox family who lived at the top of the cul de sac used to distribute shots.  (This escaped my notice until I was told about it after I reached my thirties.  I suppose I was too busy somehow managing not to burst into flames in my plastic Cowgirl Barbie mask and matching vinyl smock.)

The stunning differences between an in MY day Halloween and what currently passes for Work for Candy didn’t stop there.  It was obvious that a Sam’s Club was part of the local landscape; several homes offered full size candy bars, formerly only rare, a set-aside treat for cul-de-sac kids.  Do you know how many Bit-O-Honeys, Mary Janes, and generic Pez I had to sift through to get to the occasional mini-York’s Peppermint Patties?  DO YOU?!

One house offered an array of Hershey’s delights and Butterfingers; when Will was encouraged to choose, he announced, “I want the yellow one.”  Thus Mommy had a full bar of one of her favorites before bedtime went down.  James, meanwhile, fully conscious of his peanut allergy, chose Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, Paydays, and Reese’s Pieces.

If you’ve never been to Cincinnati, allow me to clue you in that in addition to featuring alcohol-based neighborhoods, it’s also really, really hilly.  Will enjoyed going down a hill well enough; in the picture you see above, he was just starting to run, prompting the group behind us to observe that I had a runaway train to manage.  Going up the hill?  Not so much.  On the Thomas the Tank Engine DVD’s, the engines are forever breaking things, smashing cars, hurting feelings, and in general creating an OSHA nightmare, but on this night, Thomas went on strike.

“I don’t like the hill,” Will announced.

When we returned home, he burst in the house with the news that “I did it!”  What he did not mention was that Aunt Beth carried him the rest of the way, and that Daddy had used Jim’s plastic pumpkin as a beer courier so as to share the yeast wealth with Poppy Ron.

The division of candy involved removing everything peanut-based, but as Jim was left with a bounty of Ring Pops, he was pleased with life.  Will carried a piece of candy to his grandmother, along with the happy news that he now had chocolate in his posession.

It was a Milky Way, and it did not please him.  He abandoned half of it on the kitchen table, and went hunting for Skittles.  Blasphemer.

been tipped worse at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Gee, Thanks

I was waiting for Happy Mr. Pharmacy Supplier to fill a Happy Pill prescription recently, and, as though I had another reason to be thankful at that moment, I came upon a gift book ordering me to experience gratitude for 500 other things.

That’s the whole book.  It’s a list of five hundred thanks-inspiring items, and I failed to show full gratitude by paying $10.99 for it.  I did, however, stand there in the pharmacy and read it cover to cover, to judge the full extent of my apparent ungratefulness.

For starters, I am thankful that there was no one author listed on the jacket, because now I feel comfortable with letting everyone know how much it sucks.  This was a book by committee.

Not surprisingly, it also reads like the Bible of Things Guilty White People Are Supposed to Like.  YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE THANKFUL FOR THESE, DAMMIT:

• soy milk
• Oprah’s Book Club
• farmers’ markets
• brown rice
• recycling
• Bob Dylan
• trail mix
• natural food stores
• Anne Lamott books
• hyper allergenic soap
• Maya Angelous’ poetry
• NPR
• Bono
• bran

The remaining items of 500 Things To Be Thankful For were generated by hurling a dictionary against a wall and typing the first word to strike the ground:  “Guacamole!”  “Party hats!”  “Cuckoo clocks!”  “Sports mascots!” What, tubas don’t get any love?  The U.S. Government Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry?

Once that well’s drawn dry, however, there’s nothing for it but to fill out the 500 with repetition.  Man, why is gratitude so haaaaaaaaard?  Probably because TV’s on a hiatus until November sweeps, and it really, really sucks, you know?

• hiking in the woods
• hiking
• a beckoning mountain trail

And:

• home gyms
• exercise DVD’s
• “There’s a lot of cool exercise equipment for the home.”

And:

• songs around a campfire
• stories around a campfire
• ghost stores around a campfire

And:

• the armed forces
• our brave men and women in the military

This last one, I can’t get to pissed about, because if anything deserves a double mention, it’s the military.  But The Firm?  Not so much.

I grabbed my Smile Drugs and ran.  I’d need a double dose today, having realized that we living in a society in which someone decided that we needed to be reminded for all we have… and then couldn’t think of enough of them.

grateful for The Readers, and will say so FOUR times at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Les Freres Heureux

So here’s what’s been happening in the home of Julie The Nephews Mama:

Oh sure, it looks cute.  But you’ll note that nothin’ ain’t gettin’ by Sam The Newborn Nephew. He’s got one eye on each older brother, and has probably wrapped his knuckles in foil beneath his fuzzy suit.  He’ll need it.

“It’s a baby!” Will The Smaller Child Nephew announced when Sam was first carried into the house, as though this were the first he’d heard about it.  Jim The Child Nephew, meanwhile, no fool he, is wondering just how long this is going to go on:  “Sam’s still here,” he said in dubious tones when his mother handed him the phone last week.  I tried to speak to Sam as well, but he was not receiving callers.  Will, however, was:  “HI AUNT BETH!”  he shouted into the handset.

“That’s the first time I heard him do that,” his mother reported.  “Usually he just stands there and looks at the receiver and then hands it back.”  Not a phone man, the middle child.  Probably because it’s a security risk.  He must keep his plans secret until the proper time.  I’m thinking middle school.

looming at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Padded

En route to the launchpad last week, the space shuttle Atlantis passed a gap in the pipes which line the rocky path. That space, I was told when I worked at the Kennedy Space Center, represents a phantom Mars launch complex, one planned but never built.  The closest we got was the emptiness.

I hated that gap.  But I liked knowing that it had at least been made.

Then again, there was once another place I didn’t like to look at, drive by, or even think about.  Sometimes I passed the hurriedly constructed, unmarked building where the shattered remains of Columbia were deposited:  the sturdy hoop of the airlock, singed bits of wire known only to the techs and God. Shoving our faces up against the stars—these feats of bending the great steel laws of gravity—can end this way sometimes.

Those techs are some of the very few permitted to see the orbiters with their bras off and their airframes showing.  Don’t tell Atlantis I said this, but upon close inspection, the shuttles are beaters.  Carbon scoring, replacement parts, tiny dings in the white tiles—these are the marks of working women, orbiters who have been there and seen that and really don’t need to appear on Dancing With the Stars in order to validate their existence.  Filmed from a distance of four miles away at the press stands on launch day, they are young and pristine.

And then they spit fire.  Back off.

Some tried to inch closer recently, when NASA ruined everybody’s Twitterday by hurling a bomb into the Moon, an experiment in search of water.  This was a great disappointment:  The debris plume wasn’t plumey enough.  The fire didn’t burn brightly enough.  Jon Gosselin’s face was in the way.  Booooooooo, Moonbomb.  Sometimes space travel is nasty, dirty– we have the dusty suits to prove it, the lunar soil scrubbed into the white folds of the fabric.

But the Ares I-X rocket is scheduled to launch later this month, tiny toes in the ocean of lunar exploration, and then, maybe, Mars.  It’s right next to Atlantis now, there on the launchpad.  I wonder what they talk about at night.

Perhaps it’s this national gumbo of great expectations and low self-esteem, easy government money and hard choices.  In any case, I like to think of Atlantis and Ares, present and future, side by side at their gantries, speaking of a nation– maybe bored, maybe scared, maybe weary or plain old distracted—which can’t help but hold its space program at arm’s length.

launching at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

The Third

Meet Sam The Newborn Nephew:

You will note his fashionable hat.  Note it well. It’s pretty much the closest we’ll come to playing dress-up with him for the rest of his life.  “I knew it was a Sam,” Uncle Josh The Pilot announced when I told him he had a fourth–fourth–nephew.  Mommy had a long pregnancy and an even longer labor.  She sits gingerly, and Sam, over an inch longer than either of his brothers when they were born, raises furor only when he becomes unswaddled.  That’s his biggest problem in life.  We are blessed.

I walked past the Pink Aisle today– you know the one– dress-up clothes, Barbie dolls.  The boy aisle contained things like owl puke kits and battery operated rats.  This is the aisle I was forced to stand in to find So Long To Everyone’s Attention gifts for Sam’s big brothers.

Now that Julie The Nephews Mama has hung a “closed” sign on her uterus, the only way I’ll see a descendant of ours share the girl’s high school we attended is to produce one of my own, and we all know that ain’t happening.  In the meantime, my Alumnae Endorsed Application to The Womb grows dusty.

If Sam were a girl, she was to have been named Hannah.  The little face and hair I thought she would have–her mother’s– evaporated the second Sam emerged with the ability to pee standing up.  Missing Hannah, and the appointment we were to have for a Princess Makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, doesn’t mean I love Sam any less.  It just means that I sort through the trucks and cars and perhaps book a Pirate League Experience instead.

I almost took home a car track which hurls a Hot Wheels into the air, through a stream of water, and into a small plastic pool, at which point the car changes color.  This was completely awesome and horribly messy; my sister would have haaaaaaaaaaaaated it, and because I like being in her house, I left it on the shelf.

But I recognized it as fully nephew-focused, which means I might be able to maintain Christmas without plastic Dream Homes.  Just might.

“Let’s keep Sam.  I like him,” Jim The Child Nephew said as Will The Smaller Child Nephew announced, “I hug and kiss Baby Sam.”  We’re all getting used to the idea.

has his Mommy’s hair anyway at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

It’s a Colt

RACE 3
October 16, 2009
Maiden Special Weight

3 Samuel Alexander
Owners: Julie The Nephews Mama and Country The Brother-In-Law
Blonde coat, 4 hours 19 minutes old
Sire: Gregory Britton (Gregory Gerald)
Dam: Julie Ann (Melvin Ronald)
Breeder: Roman Catholic Church
Trainer In All Things Destructive and Fun: Aunt Beth
Pitocin, 9 lbs, 2 oz
Forced start;out of gate before medical assistance, hung up at the wire
Bullet Work: 3:48 PM

Truck Full of Babies

As I type this, I am suffering some cramps that pinged their way past the Advil and my post-op knee twinges every so often.  Then again, my sister is in hard labor. Back labor.   (But the knee!  It twinges!  When I climb steps!)

Will The Smaller Child Nephew, as of last night, was processing his pending big brotherdom by hurling every doll baby he could find into a big plastic dump truck, then shoving the cargo around, announcing, “Truck full of babies!”  Because that’s where they come from.  The Big Yellow Dump Truck of Doom pulls up in front of the house, dispatches a baby, and suddenly you aren’t the center of attention anymore.

As for me, I went to a doctor’s appointment, ran to the grocery, and entered the gym while my sister lay in a stiff hospital bed, desperately awaiting the epidural.  I wished I had a tee shirt:  “ASK ME ABOUT MY IN-LABOR SISTER.”

This is the last time we’ll go through this, for Baby The Third is the end of the road.  I must enjoy the vicariousness whilst I can.  So I’m off to drink.

pink Champagne or blue curacao? at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Beer Saves

It took about three and a half hours to get my flu shot yesterday, which would make me a disgruntled health care client indeed were thirty minutes of that not spent attempting to turn around on a highway after I overshot the sole pharmacy in town that hadn’t run out of the vaccine.  There are no shots for Failure At Life.

I signed in as thirteenth on the waiting list, and was left to sit on the floor beneath the dandruff shampoo and try to read amidst the wails of the persecuted, vaccinated children– or, I could wander the aisles worrying about my turkey.  There was a third-pound of shaved deli meat in my car, purchased three pharmacies ago, and it was quickly becoming angry at me, angry at the rising temperatures within its little bag.

As I uncovered my eyes after passing through the pressing wave of foreboding in the form of a Christmas cards display, I found myself face to face with a set of refrigerator cases.  Five dollar flavored water, and string cheese– and beer, which I was particularly glad to see, and not just for the usual reason.  This beer was in the form of cases, not bottles, and it was about to do me an enormous favor.

I left the store, merely eighth in line to be shot, and retrieved my bag o’ poultry.  It passed the remainder of the forty-five minutes  snugly tucked behind a twenty-four pack, cool and content.  As opposed to me, on the floor and awaiting a freaking shot.

the things I do for my dependents at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com

Dear WalMart:

The next time you want to advertise your nasty-ass store brand roller rink pizzas, you might not want to depict it in the hands of a person walking down a hallway dressed as the Grim Reaper.

7.99 at:  mbe@drinktothelasses.com