didaink

Chicken or Beef?

 

 

 “Are you sure? They’re yellow… some people call them banana peppers... Can you just check in the back again, please?!?”

There I stood in front of the glass case that April afternoon tired, edgy and hungry, looking longingly at the roast beef behind the glass – it was that time of the month. I held strong, though, my eyes imagining the prize. If only they had the right peppers, it would all come true. I was just moments away from receiving the best roast beef sandwich a girl with raging hormones could ask for when an older gentleman saddled up next to me at the Kroger deli counter wearing a straw hat and suspenders. My mind drifted away for a bit from my roast beef sandwich and my puffy, yet growling, stomach. This gentleman was not eyeing the rare roast beef inside the case like I was… no, his eyes were fixed on a pair of golden wings.

Him: tall, dark and handsome. Me: short, white and hormonal.

But there was no denying it… I had to ask him. Maybe it was because I always wanted a father like Jim in Huckleberry Finn who might tell me stories about himself as a boy and a father or maybe it’s because I fell deeply in love with Sidney Poitier when I was nine, the first time I saw him in To Sir, With Love. So, maybe this was my chance, right here at Krogers, in front of all the Hillshire Farm cold cuts. Maybe he’d even tell me a story or two if I asked him to share half of my dream sandwich: rare roast beef stacked high atop mayo and cream cheese, slices of pepperoncini strewn everywhere, finished off with thinly shaved red onion on a crunchy French roll. But, alas… he seemed to be already smitten with a spring chicken.

“How much you want for your wings today?” he asked the woman behind the counter.

“99 cents a wing,” she replied, her face blank.

“What in Darnation?! A dollar a wing?” his forehead rumpling from years of hard work.

I couldn’t believe my ears either. My stacked roast beef sandwich was estimated to come in at around $3.99 when they finally finished assembling it with pepperoncini, but there was hardly any meat on those little wings he wanted.

“I agree!” I said. “That doesn’t seem right at all. But, um… well… did… uh… you see the roast beef?”

“Well, now, I try and eat healthy, I do.” taking off his hat, “But, now and again, I like them wings they roast… and the gravy and such,“ standing with his hat over his heart, his blue work shirt buttoned all the way up to his chin.

“Oh, okay then, sorry,“ I said, feeling like a lonely, middle-aged glutton. “I must say, though, Sir… you are in terrific shape. You must eat very healthy.”

“Well, now, that I do… but, you... you still holding yourself up pretty good. That young man a-yours sure did buy you some nice engagement ring.”

I wanted to scoop him up right there on the spot and have lunch with him forever and ever, roasting him chicken and beef on an open spit. There we’d sit, rocking back and forth on our big wide front porch, while my husband and children jumped up and down, trying to get our attention from inside the house.  But, we… well, we were busy… we had cream cheese to carefully spread across long crunchy rolls… we had purple onions to shave down real thin, using that old tortoise shell knife of his, and pepperoncini to lovingly toss to our sandwiches… all the while, me listening to his stories about growing up along the Mississippi.

“Ma’am!” the woman snapped from behind the counter. “Your sandwich is ready,” attempting to lift a brown package the size of a toddler.

“Well, your fiancé, he sure is a lucky man, you bringing him his lunch at work,” he said before he shuffled away with two chicken wings and a little container of mash potatoes and gravy.

“Oh, he’s one lucky man, all right…” the woman behind the counter muttered to her co-worker who had just spent 10 minutes looking for some damn thing called, “pepper-RON-cheeky” for some PMSing, middle-aged nutcake.

As I headed to my car I couldn’t help but wonder where he was going to eat his lunch and with whom. Then I strapped my roast beef sandwich and myself into our seatbelts and drove away, holding myself up pretty good, bloated but renewed and feeling like a spring chicken.

Remembering Erma via Kyran

 

"No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick." -- Erma Bombeck

I was so happy to see that Kyran Pittman, blogger and author of Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life wrote this week about finding Erma Bombeck in the foreign land of picket fences and domesticity. She was an American icon, that woman… and, well...

I admit it. There were many days that I secretly wished that Erma Bombeck was my mother. She was just so down-to-earth and accessible (something my mother wasn’t able to do easily) and regularly at my fingertips in my hometown newspaper.

I started reading her column when I was around 11 or 12 (I don’t believe my mother ever read her column or books) and I got so excited when I could hear her voice and see her face when I was in my teens, eating breakfast before school started with her and “Good Morning America.” I guess you could say she might have mothered me in ways that my own mother never could.

When she died so relatively young I was heartbroken, but I didn’t quite understand why I took it so hard. Then when I began writing again as a coping mechanism for becoming a mother at forty, it finally hit home. She spoke to the future writer in me… and the future mother in me. She was everyone’s friend and mother and comrade in housework and parenting with humor, and I loved her for it.

Kyran Pittman possesses so many of the same qualities in her voice as a writer and a mother that Erma Bombeck had. And Kyran, if you're reading this post, rest assured... there is a child out there who is reading your blog or even your book on days when his or her own mother isn’t accessible.

 

Size 47

It’s official, my old number has gone belly-up... Here, now, sits its replacement:  47.

47 – 47 – 47

There, I said it. Then, upon saying it, wrote it down on this blank white page, by last count... 4 times, like it's no big woop. Maybe it's not. 

Now that I see it there in print it doesn’t look so bad; the 4 sitting almost elegantly next to the seven, crossing its long leg the way a flamingo might just before taking a relaxing nap… and the 7, well, it’s not as curvy as the 6 that used to sit there, nudging the four with its wide derrierre, but it too looks somewhat chic… its flat head wearing a sleek sou'wester that curves ever-so slightly, providing some shade and shelter from the sunny and rainy days up ahead.

Does anyone really care how old I am? Probably not. Can’t imagine why they would. I’m not even sure that I care that much about what number I have become overnight. Maybe that’s why I find it actually liberating to reveal my new number to the world. I’m somehow coping better this year than I was last year, my brand new 47 shoes ready for me to break them in during the next school year of life that awaits me, hopefully without too many blisters.

Maybe they’ll be like a pair of funky boots that help me to stand taller, sturdier, with a new perspective on the “forty-something” number that most women hope and pray no one will ever attempt to guess. But, I’m so much better this year about aging than I was a short year ago on my birthday, and ~ if I do say-so myself ~ my skin is looking a whole lot better than it did seven years ago.

I was, at 40, hitting puberty all over again with a terrific crop of junior-high acne that showed up when my hormones went berserk after the birth of my daughter. Then, at 42, these same 8th grade pranksters vandalized my pores once more when my son arrived on the scene, my graffitied forehead and cheeks spray-painted with a new patch of red bumps that would require heavy coats of zinc oxide diaper rash cream. Luckily, I had a vat of it from Costco for my baby boy's matching buttocks.

Atleast motherhood sits more comfortably on my shoulders now then it did when I had a drooling six-month old perched there, who then morphed into a territorial, screaming toddler demanding to climb back up, my pregnant belly about to burst with screaming baby number two.  At 47, I am still coping with two demanding children under the age of nine, but I don’t feel like a teenage-buzzing alarm clock anymore handling it.  I'd rather think of myself today as a regal grandfather clock, my big hand pointing towards the half-century mark with pride, my little hand reaching for another glass of wine.

It feels good to reveal the truth about my new number. I think I'll stand upon it proudly now, taller from the thought, enjoying the view from here. There will come a day when I cannot stand for long periods of time because my knees don’t work so good, and I will think back and remember the color of those funkadelic boots. Lucky girl. Size 47.

Cheguei... I arrived, wrinkled and happy

Middle age regret can be a man’s worst enemy… a woman’s too, if she lets it, wondering where the years went and if she made good decisions. I made too many mistakes in my youth to begin apologizing for them now, though. They are the concrete stairs that led me to see lands of gold from the lighthouse of dreams I've found, a place I am so very proud to be at forty-six.

But, when I was twenty-two, I never thought I’d get here. I had fallen in love with a gentleman, or so I believed, a man with a British accent. I’d long forgotten him until three days ago when I saw his name in my email Inbox. I had trusted him with my heart because he was my friend, someone I never thought would hurt me. When you fall in love for the first time, though, you want to believe only the good. You never see the other side, the truth, until it’s too late and the hook is deep inside your cheek.

Yet, without all those mistakes and the poor choices I made, I could never have met the woman I would later become, and I like her… much more than the “young” woman I was… a girl who once drove four hours to “surprise” a man that was in love with someone else. 

I revel in my middle-age flaws now. They’re real. They’re undemanding. They aren’t pretentious or misleading. In fact, each “flaw” has become my new best feature. I’ve earned each and every pleat and stripe, every single laugh line that was chiseled and paved by the salty tears of lessons won. 

I grew into a woman, a person who still smiles in the mirror, free of self-doubt and second-guesses. Of course, I still find lots of things to criticize, plenty of things that bug me about me closing in on the half-century mark, like, Why did I have to lose what’s left of my memory and my car keys on the same day? Or If I have to put on my glasses to see the numbers on the scale then, dammit, I’m deducting five pounds.

But, I don’t doubt my choices now… At this stage of life, my decisions are made with honesty and experience, not from fright or angst. My childhood and youth were carelessly riddled with fear and insecurity and daily doses of deceit… Honesty wasn’t exactly the soup du jour on the adult menu with men either. I had my first taste of romantic deception on my twentieth birthday; two years after I thought I had became an “adult.”  

My forty year-old Corsican boyfriend at the time, Jean-Luc, a handsome and arrogant chef, served me up course after course of pretty lies during my birthday dinner. Then he met up with his other girlfriend the next day at his favorite restaurant in San Francisco. Each time he would take me there I could feel the waitresses' eyes on me and a big question mark hanging over my head. “Which one is she?” I heard them whisper.

I had a slippery attraction to foreign men, a weakness, you might say. That is until I met the one who changed the menu and the main course of my life. I was twenty-three. He was twenty-three… the first honest man to ever hold my hand.

The first man to open up about his own insecurities instead of hiding them. The first man to trust me with his secrets, and the first to openly declare his love without doubting that he had given himself over to it too fast or too young. I married him six months later, after the night he taught me to Samba. That was twenty-three years ago. 

To the boy who stood before him, the middle-aged man now apologizing for things he did almost twenty-five years ago, “Googling” and daydreaming about long drives across The Golden Gate, I have something to tell you after all this time.

If you had not turned your back on me to be with another woman, whose name I never knew, my children would not be here today... If you hadn’t been the person you once were, I would never have met the most loving and loyal man I have ever known. 

And if you didn’t have that quirky British tongue that could make me laugh uproariously, I would never have missed the rhythm of a foreign accent… only it came in the form of a softer, kinder, truthful one.  Brazilian.

But before you fade away again into the memory of days long forgotten, I’d like to say, thank you… for everything you didn’t do for me. I probably owe my middle-age good fortune to you.

 

 

May the F in fertility be with you

I'm schmerzing. Nope, not schmoozing, although I did have a gab session with my girlfriend earlier about "schmerzing" and the pros and cons of taking four ibuprofin if you're considering getting pregnant again after two kids and going for "the third."  Then we ended with, "I'll have my people call your people," which basically meant, My kids will do lunch with your kids, and we'll make that playdate deal happen.

So, technically, Yes, I was schmerzing and schmoozing simultaneously.  If you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about, you can press PLAY now on your DVR and see what Casey Abrams did to make the only interesting American Idol judge do this:  Steven Tyler Drops F-Bomb on American Idol.  I only wish I could get away with using the bacronym while experiencing some of the worst pelvic pain known to woman-kind outside of childbirth.

For the rest of you ladies who have experienced "the schmerz," the Germans really did a bang-up job when they selected the word, didn't they?  Their no-nonsense approach to language makes the sugar-coated French pronunciation of the same thing seem so romantic and all smoke and mirror-like, "L-ovulation." Luh-oh-voo-lah-see-ohn... What kind of French trickery is that? No, the Germans tell it like it is. 

Mittelschmerz bluntly means, middle pain.  Pain in the middle, middle of the pain, pain during the middle, pain at the middle, pain UP the middle.... schmerzzzzzz.

Yep, the mittel forties are so "F'in" full of fertility, I might just go for the third... slice of pizza, as I fill the hot water bottle again and watch Casey Abrams make television worth something on a schmerzin' Wednesday night.

A load of success: confessions from a middle-age mom

Much like my Catholic mother who had eight children by the time she was forty, I started my day today as I do most every day -- I prayed. Unlike my mother, however, I am 6 and ½ children short, haven't been to church in over five years and my prayers these days are mostly about bacon. Please, God, please don’t let me run out. I also pray that the clock will say 7:00am and not 6:00am by the time I hear Elmo Potato Head’s, high-pitched demands.

“Elmo needs a nose. Elmo needs a mouth!”

Please, God, please don’t let her find it in the toy box so fast. And God? Is it a sin to throw out your child’s favorite toy?

I don’t mean to trivialize the power of prayer or talking with God on a regular basis. On the contrary, I am a firm believer in it. I would certainly be lost without it. The reality is, though, that when you’re forty-one, raising a two and a half year-old full time and pregnant with your second child, your ideals change dramatically. 

Take “success” for instance. Success this morning meant a ten-minute, hot shower instead of a lukewarm, two-minute rinse. Thanks to my husband, who was kind enough to gift me his shower. A few more long, hot showers and he’s totally off the hook for Christmas and my birthday. Valentine’s is still in negotiation.

Success today would also entail finding one last pair of clean underwear in my dresser. The chance of that happening, however, is not so good given that I can hear the Mt. Everest pile of laundry cackling at me from across the hall. My morning would radiantly glow with success if the dog completes both ‘little potty and big potty’ outside instead of inside, as Elmo's goofy pal, Mr. Noodle, shows my daughter how not to put on her clothes, while I fry up my contraband of bacon.

 Yep, you heard me, Elmo:  B A C O N.  In case you and Big Bird haven’t heard yet, it’s in the Revised Webster’s New World Dictionary under, “Success After Forty.”

 “Juice ME!” she shouts from the den. I better hustle in there before Barney starts up.

“You mean, ‘Juice, please, Mama.’  Here you go… Okay! So! Sesame Street is almost over and now it’s time for us to eat breakfast at… the table! Yay!”

My reasonably well-thought out, cheerful explanation is greeted with an operatically lilting, "No! Elmo LOVES me! Bye, Bye,” followed by the door-slam crescendo and mezzo-soprano cadenza, “BEE-YEE-EYE!"

It’s right about now that I wish for Elmo’s World to crumble and disintegrate into dust and for all of Sesame Street to hear what I hear -- glass shattering screams coming from our den. Hopefully, Hooper’s Store has lost all of its fine china by now, too. Let this be a lesson to the furry red guru who, in my humble opinion, uses the “L word” a little too often.

“Mama loves you more, my Tickle-Marie, so let’s eat breakfast. Mama’s got bacon…” I sing back to her through the door in my, I’ll be your best friend voice.

 And then the tide starts to turn my way again as the doorknob gently moves counter-clockwise. Somehow, I never pictured myself bribing my little bundle of joy with greasy, center-cut bacon when I was fantasizing about motherhood in my twenties and thirties. The truth is, success after forty is no longer measured by the size of my bank account or my wardrobe or by how good my voice sounds or even how good my hair looks. It doesn’t seem to matter if I’ve got the right moisturizer on or if I’m wearing designer shoes or flip flops, or that I never sang on Broadway by the time I turned twenty-five.

As I remember it now, my goal of starring in a hit-musical was actually replaced by my goal of having a roof over my head and having something other than pasta “al-burro” to eat. I never did spend any rainy summer nights playing Ronnie Scott’s in London in my thirties, did I?  But I did spend many foggy nights in San Francisco singing for close to free in no-name cafés where my scat solo was usually up-staged by the frother on the espresso machine. 

In the old version of success, my forties were going to be my glory years, touring Europe, performing for sold-out amphitheaters and reveling in the applause of my adoring French fans who just could not get enough of me and my avant garde, five-minute solos. Success before motherhood, Freud might have even agreed, was a lot like a gigantic, unreachable carrot, and I, a short, hungry bunny with an enormous appetite for ego soufflé.

Luckily, today’s version of success doesn’t seem to have much to do with me at all. As a beginner-mom facing her “glory-forties,” success now feels exactly like two-hour naps under soft fuzzy blankets. It tastes like a fresh cup of coffee from a clean cup. It smells like an oven filled with warm peanut butter cookies and oozing, glazed cinnamon rolls. And it sounds like a two-minute tantrum instead of twenty-minute meltdown. On most days, it smiles at me from ear to ear like a blue-eyed angel with sticky fingers and purple Popsicle lips. It might even occasionally peek through a streak-free window and land on a dust-free dresser, stacked high with clean underwear. And you can almost bet on it to cry out at midnight while you’re trying to eek out time to write about success. But, by midnight and a half, it calms back down in your arms, butterfly lashes fluttering then landing over closing, peaceful eyes.

One of my decade-younger friends surprised me recently by telling me that I am one of the few moms she knows that actually enjoys being at home all day. I have to admit that I never would have described myself this way. That sounds more like my own mother during the Fifties. That notion disturbed me, in fact, but is it true? Have I abandoned feminism and all the things I worked so hard to prove in my twenties and thirties? Was I more like my mother than I realized? I do like to wear red lipstick in the mornings just in case the UPS guy stops by... and I am always talking to God and/or Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost socks. But I've never even owned an apron, except for the one I botched in seventh grade Home Ec. class. 

Now I am anxious to find out the truth. Have I become a Betty Crocker wannabe? Do I secretly want to cook and care for an army of children like my mother did? Am I actually happier now, at mid-life, being a Stay-at-Home Mom? Is it more fulfilling than I had ever expected it to be? Or am I now part of an exciting new breed of mother – rediscovering and redefining success after forty? God? Are you still listening? Oh, please let there be more bacon in the freezer. And God? Have you seen Saint Anthony today? Can you ask him if he knows where I put that avocado-green apron from seventh grade? I'd search the garage, but I've got a snickering summit of laundry to fold.