Temper, Temper

Years ago, I had a horrific temper.  My kids used to run in fear sometimes, and I swear that there were moments where I sort of stepped outside my body, and watched this mad harpie screaming and spitting and turning beet red.  It wasn't too fun....

Then, something catastrophic happened in my life and my temper seemed to melt out of me, replaced by a melancholy and hopelessness that was easier (I think) for everyone else to deal with, but it weighed more and never really subsided.  It was, however, easier to cover up.  That temper stuff jumps and dances around, and you can't really throw a blanket on it and pretend it isn't there; the other, though, is sedate and morose, and it will never try very hard to fight out from under whatever you toss over it.  It doesn't have to, because it knows that it has an indefatigable grip on you and it'll never give up.  In the case of depression, slow and steady wins its race.

Today, a drop of liquid set me into a rage.  One drop.  Now, granted, it was a drop of pee on the toilet seat, and so it was annoying, unnerving, wet, freaked me out, you name it.  I found myself in the bathroom shouting, "F*%kin' A!" at the top of my lungs, wiped off the damn seat, finished my bathroom business, and then left the house.  I was frightened.  I haven't felt that kind of anger in years, and it scared the hell outta me.  So, I did what any self-respecting post-menopausal almost-50-year-old woman would do: I went to a craft store.  Now, a couple hours and $32 later (everything was on sale!), I am back at home, calmed down, and trying to accept the fact that this may not be the last time.  Maybe the beast is back.  Then again, maybe that also means that all those other jumping, shouting, hard-to-contain emotions are back as well.  Maybe even joy?

Well, well, well...welcome home...

Visibility

One of my sister's highest criteria for rating a new car is the visibility.  If she cannot see properly (for her) out the back window, side windows, mirrors, or windshield, she simply will not drive it.  As I get older, I more and more agree with her.  I currently own a convertible Toyota Solara and, even though I love the car, I am getting crankier and crankier about its lack of visibility.

I think that I also, as I get older, am more intolerant of my lack of life visibility.  When I was younger, it was just fine that I couldn't quite see well enough out of the vehicle that is my life.  Don't know what's ahead?  No problem - I'm sure we won't crash.  Can't see behind me, in case I want to back up?  Who cares!  But now....well, now I just want to have a clear windshield and be surrounded by life's windows. 

Even if what I see isn't perfect, at least I'd have time to steer around it, or decide how to navigate.  But seeing nothing?  It's scaring the hell out of me.  I am in some sort of armed vehicle with nothing but a crack in front of me to peer through, and even that is often obscured by the dust of the road ahead (or perhaps battles just fought).  I am finally at a place where I need to SEE, dammit!  If not, perhaps it's time to pull over, pile out of this car, and go get a new one. Maybe the paint won't be as shiny; maybe it'll be a cheaper car (or perhaps the payments will be so high that I'll find myself really just scraping by).  But I'll know what's coming, and when I get into the garage at night, I'll sleep more soundly and be prepared for the next day, and the one after that.

Just sayin'...

Talkin' Bout My Generation (and the one after)

I had breakfast this morning with my daughter and son-in-law.  We talked about Sara's job, how best she could voice some concerns she has at work, how the kids' honeymoon went, and then somehow got on the subject of education (or lack thereof).

Sara recently had the pleasure of attending an event where the speaker was Madeline Levine, who does extensive research on why teenagers from affluent families are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems.  This prompted a lengthy discussion about over-achieving students, parental pressure to do more, to be perfect, and the tendency of parents, beginning with my generation of parenting, to fill a child's every waking moment with educational and extra-curricular activities.  At one point, Sara asked me if I am "ok" with the notion that Alec (my son) may never graduate from college.  I thought about it for a moment and said, truthfully, that if he is happy, I'm fine with it.  He has a very responsible, stressful, low-paying job, and he excels at it.  My 21-year-old man-child has, in one month, taken a retail store in a rural area to a point where he has increased their phone sales by about 700%  Yes, I did the math right; I may be just a dumb high-school graduate, but I can do the math.  Seven.  Hundred.  Percent.

I told Sara that, in days of yore, I had two pieces of great advice for first-time parents:  

1) Never buy your child a blankie that you cannot easily replace at WalMart or Target.  Otherwise, you'll end up with a 2-year-old who is walking around with a dirty, ragged, disgusting, smelly blanket that you can't even wrestle away from him/her to throw in the washing machine.  Always have a lot of backups.  Wash them all equally, so the silly kid can't tell the difference.

2) Someday, you will feel like taking your adorable infant to Macy's, going to the top floor, and throwing the squalling bundle of flesh down the elevator shaft.  It WILL happen.  When it does, remember that feelings are OK - it's actions that are crimes.  So, it's alright to want to do the tossing; it's NOT quite so OK to actually toss.

Now, I add a third piece of advice:

3)  At any given point in time, allow your child to be involved in ONE extracurricular activity - soccer OR piano OR Gymboree OR jujitsu OR junior Einstein science camp.

On the whole, my generation has raised a passle of kids who cannot decide how to do one damned thing for themselves.  They have been fed, showered, entertained, scheduled, mollycoddled, driven to school, driven to practice, driven to piano lessons, until we as parents are driven to tears.  When I was a child, I spent probably three solid weeks of afternoons and weekends in Felicia Morrow's backyard, the two of us (sometimes four, if joined by Markie and Carla Morrow) with spoons determined to dig far enough to get to China.  We entertained ourselves!  I cannot once remember trudging into my mom's kitchen and whining that I was "bored" if she didn't fill every waking moment of my time with some planned activity.

Now, there are students whose parents call to drop their kids' college courses for them; parents who decide via phone photo texts which pair of shoes their kid should buy; parents who call or text their 20-something children multiple times a day and expect an immediate response.  HELLOOOOOOOO...you are raising a generation of adults who cannot wipe their own noses (or, probably, arses).  But they have first-rate expensive educations that also somehow never taught them how to write out a rent check.

So yeah, I am fine with Alec never going to college.  In fact, I am finally fine with *my* never graduating from college.  I look at my kids - one married, one not; one college educated, one not; one living in a big city, one not - and I realize that they couldn't be more equal in my eyes.  And, joy of joys, I couldn't possibly love either of them one iota more.

So please, please, people - give your children a break.  Teach them to have fun, teach them how to tie their shoes, encourage them to be all they can be, then support them every step of the way when they don't take the exact path you may have chosen for them.

Oh yeah, and stop calling them every day - they need some time to learn to fend for themselves!  They will still call when they need you, but at least it will be for work advice and possibly a food preparation question, rather than to ask you to send them money for rent because they spent all theirs on WOW server memberships.




 

Remembering a Success Story

A cowoker of mine has been struggling with the way her manager defines success. Apparently, it has to do with being worth billions at age 35.  My friend feels as though she is missing the beat, somehow, and doesn't fit it.  I had to tell her a story about Roy....

Roy moved to California to marry me (lucky dude). So, he had to find a whole new job. Here he is, 44 years old and partially disabled, looking for a job as a receptionist, competing with 20-year-old waifs wearing butt-high skirts. So, he goes into a recruiting office who advertised for a receptionist for an interview, and one of the partners, who was younger than Roy, says, "Why would I hire you? You are older than I am and all you want to do in life is be a receptionist?"

Roy said, "Scott, I don't know how you measure success. For me, when I lie down each night to go to bed, I ask myself whether I acted nicely that day, whether my relationships are in good order, and whether I made people and myself happy. Did I treat people right? Did I make my wife and kids smile? THAT is success. Money is NOT success. So yes, I want to be a receptionist. And if I do a good job for you and your firm, then it will add to my success each day. The salary is not how I measure myself."

They hired him on the spot.

And now you know one more piece to the puzzle of, "What makes Janine tick?" It's all the Gospel According to Roy, baby.....

Oh yeah, and he worked there until he finally had to go out on permanent disability. Scott happily and graciously paid for ALL the flowers for Roy's funeral, and called me weekly for a while afterwards to make sure I was OK. He cried like a baby when Roy died. I think Roy made Scott a little more successful, too.

(Roy also got away with once telling Scott over the PA that 'Howie' was on the phone for him. Scott barked back, "Howie who? I've told you a million times, I WANT A LAST NAME!" Roy said softly, "Lichtenfelter. Howie Lichtenfelter." Silence in the office from every room, then raucous laughter from every direction. That man knew how to break tension.)

My Dad

My father passed away Tuesday afternoon, after a 15-year battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 81 years old.

Many of my friends either never met my dad, or met him after the disease had already robbed him of his mental faculties. Since most people will never know my real dad, I want to just introduce him to you briefly.

My father was intelligent, eloquent, hilarious, and had an infinite capacity to love. He wrote poetry for my mother frequently, throughout their marriage, and would delight in sneaking a paper with a little verse onto her plate before we sat down to eat, so she'd find it there and read it while we all watched. Most of these poems were about her upper arms, which he said were amazing and better than anyone else's in the entire world. OK, he was quirky, but he wrote great upper arm poems. He allayed my sister's childhood fears by telling her that everything she was afraid of had been sent to Bakersfield. This was a brilliant ruse, but proved a bit sketchy in later years when a detour on the way back to the bay area from southern California resulted in passing through Bakersfield. That must have been an interesting car ride (I was too small to remember, or perhaps not yet born). Dad turned a mostly blind eye when the neighbors tattled to him about my brother's poker parties (held in my parents' absences) and, in fact, didn't even lose it completely when it turned out that the ringleader behind a football betting pool at my dad's high school was (you guessed it) my brother. And, when my complete horse-craziness took me beyond rides around a ring on a pony, my dad learned how to ride a horse so that I could go trail riding. He also started emulating my way of dressing at the time and began a years-long habit of wearing cowboy boots and singing Merle Haggard songs.

He let me come down to his school in the summers and hang out with him, where he taught me Pedro (a great card game) and always let me play with him and the other administrators, even though I think I was probably only ten or twelve when he taught me to play. He taught me how to pluck a chicken, candle pinfeathers off a duck, bait a hook, shoot a gun (he earned a letter at Cal for marksmanship), read the TV Guide (remember those?) and reload shotgun shells. Every evening when he came home from work (school) at about 4:00, he and I would sit downstairs, watch Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas, and have a drink together. Yeah, you heard it right. He would have Jack Daniels or Jim Beam whiskey on the rocks, and he'd mix me a highball with a bit of whiskey (cheaper stuff) and a lot of 7-Up. I have known since I was eight years old that you NEVER mix Jack Daniels; it's sacrilegious.

Dad told me once that my mother was much more generous than he was, but he never really refused us anything we needed. And his generosity came through in other ways. I remember once asking him, while we were watching an old movie, if Sophia Loren was pretty. He said yes, she was. I asked if she was prettier than Mommy, and he said that NOBODY was prettier than Mommy. I asked him some tough questions. I remember I asked him once if he loved us more than he loved God. (Jeez, what a creepy kid I must have been). Rather than pop my bubble, he simply said that it was a really unfair question to ask ANY Catholic, so he wasn't going to answer it. He never complained that I collected pet frogs who would croak at night in the family room and force him to turn up the TV to be able to hear it properly. And he saved up his "mad money", a few dollars at a time, for years until he could buy my mother a huge console stereo one year. She still has it, and always will.

On weekend mornings, he and I would get up early and go to the bakery, and then when we came home he'd make eggs - the best. The only person who can cook eggs as well as my dad did is my son. At night, if we were sitting downstairs watching TV, and one of us simply gave him the puppy-dog eyes and professed a hankering for a fried egg sandwich, he'd get up and go upstairs and cook one up. My dad loved popsicles, and squid, and pickled pigs' feet, and pineapple upside-down cake, and anything my mom cooked. He could grill a steak like nobody's business, but his BBQd chicken was always blackened (hey, nobody's perfect!). He hated casseroles, and would never eat macaroni and cheese. Once in a blue moon when he would have a meeting that took him away at dinnertime, we would have mac 'n cheese or TV dinners (which he also eschewed). He drank his evening coffee from a glass (sometimes with a bit of brandy,sometimes not), but the morning coffee from a mug (sans brandy).

He would send us upstairs to get properly dressed before dinner if we had no shoes on or if my brother had on a white t-shirt (Dad said that was underwear). Going barefoot, ever, for any reason, was against the rules, as was wearing flip-flops or most sandals. No makeup was allowed until about age 16, and I got in trouble once for wearing nail polish. The only thing that saved me from serious trouble when I got my ears pierced at 15 was that my mom got hers done, too. My curfew was midnight until I got married.

Dad worked for years at a job that he ended up hating because of the political bullshit and dealing with parents and students who no longer had respect for the school system or the teachers. He retired at 55, as soon as he could, and spent the rest of his life with my mom in their house at
Clearlake, at one point writing the fishing column for the local paper there. He taught Spanish at a junior college nearby for as long as he was able to remember how, and he tutored people in Italian. He spoke a few languages, and it was very common to have a dinnertime conversation that revolved around the etymology of some word or other. He learned English as a child, when he started kindergarten; Italian was his first language. In the end, he spoke Italian more easily than English.

My dad used to call me "motor mouth," "machine gun mouth," and "The New York Times." He told me that, ultimately, my mouth would get me into trouble throughout my life (and he was right). He used to say to me often, "Come le fai lunga," which means (or would mean, if I knew how to spell it all correctly), "How you make it long," a constant reminder that brevity was NOT one of my strong suits. Clearly, he was right again, since this has gotten way too long....so I will stop here. Thanks for reading.

Black Friday

I am spending the Thanksgiving holiday with my mother in Clearlake. For those of you who aren't familiar with the area, it's north of the Napa Valley and there isn't a whole lot here. But there is a huge lake (the largest in California, actually) and some interesting folks.

For some insane reason, I decided to go to the WalMart Black Friday sale this morning. At 5 am. My mom was going to go with me, but her heart clearly wasn't in it, and I sent her back to bed. Off I went, driving in the fog, and I arrived at the closest WalMart (about 20 minutes away) at 4:47 to find a huge line of people already standing outside the store. As I had left the house, my mother admonished me that "there are people around here who aren't from trailers" (my mom is an example of one of them) but I didn't WANT to stand in line with a bunch of classy people. If I get out of bed at 4 am to go to a WalMart, I want to be entertained by some hicks, dammit!

As I trudged along the line to get to the end, the first thing I heard was a woman saying, "You're lighting your damn jacket on fire!" and I looked over to see a guy batting at his jacket while a lit cigarette dangled from his mouth and a match fluttered to the ground. My wish had been granted.

So, I stood in line for about 15 minutes and learned some cool stuff. If you are "a total broke SOB" you are lucky because people do not ask to borrow money from you. It pays to bring your entire family to a sale like this, give each person a cart, and then plan a strategy of "divide and conquer" so as to get as many great sale items as possible. Somebody's Aunt Irene is going to really get her "come-upance" soon because Uncle Jack isn't going to stand for her drama any more.

Damn, just as I was really getting into the story about Aunt Irene, the line moved because the doors were opening. And then I realized some other cool stuff. The line was really organized, and almost nobody tried to line jump. A really nice woman who was about six feet tall and I joined forces at the huge bin of sheet sets: I found her a king set in every color, and she used her long arms to grab me the one set of full sheets there was because I just couldn't reach it (might I say this was for my mother, who didn't want to come with me! Hah!) A lady who rolled by with a BlueRay player in her cart gave me really good directions on where to find them (I got the very last one). Nobody pushed or shoved, everyone was in a decent mood, and I was out of the store by 5:23 am with everything I had gone there for.

The only thing that I wish I had now is the rest of that story about Aunt Irene....

How??

Today, one day after our elections, I am completely proud to be an American and totally ashamed of my fellow Californians.

HOW can people in this state forget that our constitution is not a religious instrument?

HOW can we inject our religious beliefs into dictating other people's lifestyles and freedoms (or lack thereof)?

HOW could churches, who are there to support and uphold people, give so much money to taking away the rights of people who are doing them NO wrongs?

HOW can I ever set foot in a roman catholic church again, knowing that those people's money was instrumental (along with mormons, fundamentalist christians [I can't even bring myself to use capital letters here], and other churches), in negating my sisters' marriage, a union that is strong, and beautiful, and a glorious celebration of their love for each other?

HOW can I ever, ever apologize enough to Paula, Julie, Jacqueline, Melissa, Jill, Barb, and scores of others for the absolute close-minded pig-headedness born of some unnamed and stupid (yes, stupid!) fear held by people who profess love and acceptance every Sunday and then go home to promote hatred and discrimination?

God help us, people, because my God, a God who is merciful, and loving, and giving, and perfect, wasn't behind this campaign of moronic hatred.

Shame on us.