Shopping Cart Gangsta

Let me tell you of a horrifying experience I had on Friday while grocery shopping with my brother.  I have NEVER seen this before in my life, not EVER!!!! And I hope I never do again. This has potential nightmare imagery for years to come.

I rounded the corner with my cart after looking for Lily's Whisker Lickin's (Really, Purina????  Do you REALLY want an apostrophe there???  I just may have to call them.....) and headed for the meat aisle to check out their reduced meat section. And there she was.

There was this young girl shopping with another girl.  I'd put them in their late teens or early 20's.  And the girl pushing the cart had on a pair of sweatpants.  The sweatpants were pink.  I knew this because emblazoned across the ass of the material was the word PINK, printed in huge white letters.  Otherwise, DUH, how would I know? The word PINK, though, wasn't located across her ass, but rather was considerably further south of its intended target.    

Yes, this woman had yanked her sweatpants down, gansta style, and you've seen the look many times. You wonder how in the hell the pants stay up to begin with, because the waist of the pants are down at the kneecaps and there's a bunch of poofy boxer shorts hanging out at the top.  Attractive, huh?  I always get the urge to scream, "PULL UP YOUR FREAKIN' PANTS, YOU RUM-DUM!!"   So far, I've managed to keep my thoughts to myself and my lips zipped, a task which seems to get more and more difficult for me as I steadily march with the assistance of my artificial hips toward my Golden Years.   

But in the case of this particular woman, there was a problem, Houston.  She wasn't wearing any underwear.  And there, right before me, was about six looooong inches of butt crack.  Seriously.  No exaggeration.  And when she bent to take a closer look at the chicken legs, I got a wonderful view of all KINDS of physiology.   Now I can honestly say that I've seen Death Valley.  

Happy Mother's Day: Ode to Ma.

So this is Helen, my mother.  She was a character and a half.  It's hard to imagine that she has been gone over five years.  Just doesn't seem possible, plain and simple.  Was it yesterday when I held her hand, gently told her that it was okay to say goodbye to me?  I squeezed her fingers and held on for my dear life as I listened to her take her last breath.  Most of the time, though, it seems like an eternity since she's been gone.  This woman could drive me sheer off the berserk-o scale, but the bottom line is that I would give just about anything to have one more day with this woman.  Heck, I'd settle for anything I could get, one more minute, one more opportunity to say the words "I love you."

As a kid growing up, Ma was my best friend.  She was CRAZY and above all, liked to have fun. I used to think that my girlfriends wanted to come over and spend the night at my house so that they could hang with HER.  Decades of bad health would take some of that fun-loving spirit away from her but not all of it.  Even at the nursing home where she spent her final four years of her life, she was Belle of the Ball and she was loved there by everyone. 

I haven't been writing my blog very much these days.  My father arrived home from Florida last week and my time is better spent with this aging man instead of sitting at the computer.  Right now, he's off running errands and I thought that I would take the time to pay tribute to my mom on Mother's Day.

The following are excepts from words that I spoke at her funeral.  Only six people were able to attend the service as there was a MASSIVE snowstorm.  I called everyone I could think of that morning, asking them to please stay safe at home rather than risk an accident or worse.  Too bad, as they missed a pretty good time, as much as one can say that about a funeral.  Ma would have wanted us to smile rather than to wail and cry, and that's exactly what we tried to do as we watched the inches of snow pile up into feet. These words will help you to get to know my mother.  As I said, she was a character.

                                                     SOME HELEN DESCRIPTORS

• The neighborhood party planner.  I still don't know everything that took place at these events and it's probably a good thing.
• One tough cookie.  She held very high expectations for everyone around her.
• A lover of cigarettes, a three-pack-a-day woman, who later substituted three bags a day of candy and popcorn.   
• The most stubborn German ever born.  But under it all, she really had a wonderful sense of humor.  We had great fun, most of it being legal.  Oh, there was that one time.  I remember we found ourselves out in the country in the middle of the night.  I was standing on my cousin's shoulders, dismantling a Cattle Crossing sign, with my dear sweet mother crouched down in the trunk of the car, playing lookout.  
• A Mitch Miller Affecianato.  She'd go downstairs with a can or two of Genesee Mule Swill and belt out The Whippenpoof Song on our cranky old player piano.  A self-taught musician, I'd lay in bed in the middle of the night and listen to "We are poor little lambs who have lost our way, baa, baa, baa, blah, blah, blah," wafting through the hot air registers.  To this day, I  personally hold her responsible for our entire family being chronic insomniacs.
• A lover of reading and the educational process.  She may have been short on money, her family being dirt poor.  But she wasn't short on brains.  She was the valedictorian of her class at a large suburban high school.  I will always remember with great affection our weekly trips to the grocery store, where she would stuff me like a little pork sausage into the kiddy chair in the grocery cart.  No matter how tight the grocery money was on any given week, I was allowed to pick out a new Little Golden Book.  She read to me every evening, sometimes even when I was a teenager. 
• A lover of game shows.  Summers at noon, my mother, my brother and I would eat lunch to Jeopardy.  She'd sit there in the living room, wearing her napkin as a bib, suckling on her pickled pigs feet and nibbling on liverwurst.  Sometimes, I think she revolved her three marriages based on the show Let's Make A Deal.  She didn't like what she got behind curtain one (my father) and two (a REAL disaster), so she wheeled and dealed and finally got it right when she selected the man behind curtain number three, who ended up being the keeper.  Ed really loved her and treated her like royalty.  Speaking of which, she was:
• Queen.  Helen and I invented a place called Queenie Land.  Here was a place where there was no pain, where she didn't have to waitress with her back in a sling, where there was no vacuuming; a place where men fed us grapes and waited on us hand and foot.   

Enjoy your Queenie Land, Ma.  And know that on Mother's Day and every day, I love and miss you.

Zoom Zoom

Didn't I just mention this crazy world of ours and how it just ZOOMS by, zoom, zoom, zoom.  Blink, lookie here, already it's the merry, merry month of May, and that means it's time for the snowbird to come home to roost.  Cock-a-doodle-doo. 

Yesterday, I drove my hubby to the airport.  Destination: Tampa and points north to New Port Richie. His job is to fly down and then drive my father back home to the prairie.  My husband won't let me do this for him, although I have offered many times.  I think that (a) he really likes to fly; (b) he is a kind, considerate man and knows that he has more stamina than I; and (c) he has told me pretty much that if I were to spend that amount of time cooped up in a vehicle with my father, the end result wouldn't be pretty.  So every October, Hubby drives Pops to Florida and then flies home, and in May, the process is reversed.  For this, I am thankful.  I'm thankful that at the ripe old age of 86, my dad is still well enough to make this journey, to take care of and enjoy himself in the Sunshine State.  I am fortunate indeed.

They have been on the road already for two hours this morning, and they will arrive home tomorrow in time to hear the dinner bell, barring anything unforeseen. This means that I have been and will be alone, unattended and unchaperoned, for many hours.  Yesterday, I made the decision that as long as I had to take hubby to the airport, I might as well have my own adventure.  I made plans to stay in the big city and hook up with a friend of mine who lives close to the airport.

I spent the morning yacking it up with my friend, taking time off momentarily to take breaths and to suck down coffee.  Eventually, off we went on a shopping spree.

First stop, a restaurant supply company, where I purchased a case of XTRA Hot Sauce for hubby's pizza business.  Taking advantage of the situation, I bought some grocery items, too, at rock-bottom prices.  I LOVE this store, especially their produce and dairy, where prices seem to be especially low. Mother's Day is quickly approaching and my mother-in-law adores their frozen pecan pie so that made its way into my cart also.

Gee, look at that.  Right next door is the Rescue Mission.  There, I found a nice pair of dress slacks and a pair of shorts to see me through the next few pounds of weight loss, provided that I'm able to shut my mouth long enough to shed another ten pounds. Both looked great and the price tag came to ten bucks. More important, they were purchased in the ladies rather than in the plus size section.  Sixty pounds gone will do that. 

Down the road we went to Michael's, an arts/craft store.  I needed three round watercolor brushes and I just happened to have a 25% off coupon.  Across the parking lot from there stands a Christmas Tree Shop, where I bought art mats and other assorted stuff.  That store is good for stuff.

Eventually, down the road I had to go, back to the prairie.  I was on a little bit of a time frame.  The Fed Ex man was scheduled to drop off a delivery: ten thousand mealworms.  I kid you not.  Those baby bluebirds out in that nest are plenty hungry.  And I very well couldn't have ten thousand mealworms sitting out there, baking in the sun.  They needed to get to our cool basement, into their nice bedding of wheat bran.  Sure enough, when I pulled into the driveway, there sat the carton by the front of the house.  My grand adventure was officially over.

Maybe to you, the day didn't seem like much.  But for me, a person who doesn't get off the farm very much or who rarely travels much beyond a ten or fifteen mile radius, this was a real treat.  It really takes little to make me happy.  Today, it's back to business as usual: feeding those baby birds, the laundry basket is overflowing, there's a house to clean.  If time, there's onions to plant that really should get into the ground today.  Hopefully, I'll get that last bulb planted in the ground and it's time for yet another friend and another adventure: a local fire department is having their annual chicken barbeque and in my opinion, it's the best in the land.  I just go WILD when my husband's not home.  Zoom.

Hotel Sex

It's the final days of April here on the prairie and before I know it, I'll be turning the page over to a new month on the calendar.  Remember how slowly time seemed to pass when we were all kids?  December especially used to be this giant death march, each minute tick-tock-tick-tocking slowly until Santa finally arrived.  But as I age, it seems that each year swirls by faster and faster.  Right now I've been hurled into the eye of a hurricane that's called Spring.  The pea and the spinach seeds were planted two weeks ago and the forecast is looking warm enough for me to consider adding beets, onions and leaf lettuce to the mix.  Oh, I can taste them already.    

Here's the blue sky and that gorgeous sunset which I snapped yesterday.   You can't HELP but feel good when Mother Nature is knocking at your door with such beauty.  There's so much to love during this time of year.  There's the garden, getting my hands in the dirt and watching things grow.  I love watching the spring weather swirl around me and feeling hope for days where I can go outside in my shirtsleeves.  I love all of the birds that show up here.  Naturally, this includes the eternal font of geese. 

Here on the prairie, we have thirty-five acres and two ponds.  When a Canada goose and his mate fly overhead, I'm convinced that he sees a giant flashing "Ramada Inn" sign.  He is, after all, FRENCH-Canadian and right below him lies the possibility for some great hotel sex.  With one eye glued to the pond, Pierre looks over at Monique and before you can say, "Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?", he honks out the suggestion, "Oh, LOOK, Sweetheart, they have water beds!!!"   And down they swoop down into the pond and here they stay.  
  

Yup, sex is pretty much rampant here on the prairie in April.  To your left is Exhibit #1: four of the cutest little yellow puffballs that you shall ever see.  And to the right, four beautiful bluebird eggs that hopefully will hatch, any day now.  If we're really, really lucky, in a few short weeks, we will have trained those baby bluebirds to come up to our front porch and feast on mealworms, which we raise in our basement.  We set the worms out in a little terra cotta dish and from our living room, we watch Mommy and Daddy bluebird feed their young.  It's a sight to behold here, all unfolding as another month of the calendar is about to embark upon us, swirling at the speed of light.  From the looks of things around here, it's time to switch on the sign that says "No Vacancy." We're full up at the inn.

Fairy Tale Friend

I am a passionate person.  There is so much in my life that has the ability to make my heart feel as if it's going to literally burst out of its cavity from within my chest.  It can be something that seems so simple, like the flower that I studied last Tuesday in watercolor class.  The picture was of an iris, my mother's favorite flower, and I was so taken aback by its absolute loveliness.  That flower didn't have a clue of the beauty it possessed, the power which it held over me.  Before the brush even touched the paper, my painting didn't stand a chance; it was doomed.  I was too busy thinking of my mother, of the unblemished miracle in each petal of the flower.

Oh, and the music!!!!!  Music, with melodies so gorgeous that tears can come to my eyes.  Truth be known, there have been times when one solitary note can choke me up.  My passion can lie within the wonder of watching a clutch of bird eggs, or the sight of a baby as he turns his lips up to smile. And there's my favorite heart-swell, the sound of my husband telling me that he loves me.  Yes, that is the best.

One of my most cherished passions is friendship.  I know so very many people, hundreds and probably even thousands. As a retired teacher, each school year opened its door to allow even more people to enter my life.  Every student that I taught had siblings and parents and even grandparents who came to concerts and watched their child as I waved my baton up on stage, more people to recognize me on the streets or in the grocery store.  My husband used to joke that we couldn't go anywhere, out of town or out of state, without someone calling out my name.  Add to that the neighbors past and present, other multitudes of community members, all of the groups and organizations to which I belong.  It adds up.  Still, out of those throngs of people that I know as acquaintances, there are few that are considered close, trusted friends. The value that I place upon them is immeasurable, as precious and miraculous to me as the petals of that iris.   

I've lost friends before.  One of my dearest died after a short bout with cancer.  Enough time has passed that whenever I think of my Evelyn, it can bring a smile to my face because I realize that I was and am blessed to have had her in my life at all.  Not everyone was fortunate enough to have known her.  Another friend is not lost; our friendship has simply transformed.  Kim lives clear across the country now but our hearts remain bonded and we never have to search for that unity that joins us.  We may have lost that day-to-day contact but our love for each other is still easily found.

No, this isn't about either of those people.  The loss of this particular friendship is confusing and has me befuddled, in a center stage funk.  It's the reason why I'm not sleeping very well, why I've been prone over the past few weeks to fluctuating moods.  You certainly don't need to worry about me, it's nothing at all like that.  But it all just leaves me feeling hurt.  Hurt and sad and tired.  Losing a friend is like having your hormones being thrown back into a time warp machine, back to the roller coaster ride of being thirteen.  High, low, forward, back, friend, gone.

My husband and close friends tell me to accept the parting, to let the bottle that contains the message, "I don't value you anymore" to go over the waves and out to the sea of blue.  After a couple of months of anguishing over the loss, I will take the advice of those people who care for me the most; I will try harder to let go.  I need to look at this through different eyes, to dust off the fairy tale that began so long ago, Once Upon A Time, and to finally allow myself to reach the last page where it says The End.  Close the book gently.  Friendships come and friendships go, but this one; this was a really, really good story.  

     

 

Washing Windows: Ode to Lil

   So earlier this week I was washing the windows of our home, a semi-annual event here on the prairie that brings about as much excitement to me as does flossing my teeth.  And while on a break from the drudgery, I received a dare from one of my Facebook pals: to write a blog about window washing.  I thinked and I thanked and I thunked and the only thing that I could sputter out of this feeble little brain of mine was to write about my grandmother, Lillian, Her Royal Highness of Vinegar.

I loved my grandmother very, very much.  My childhood years were turbulent and there were periods of time while I was growing up when I temporarily lived with her, my grandfather and my aunt.  My other aunt, uncle and cousin lived downstairs.  There are so many things that remind me of Grandma to this day, besides seeing a bottle of vinegar: 

• The Lawrence Welk Show.  I believe that she must have carried a secret torch for one of the performers, or maybe even for Larry himself, because heaven help the person or event that kept her from watching this show.  
• Thunderstorms.  Oh, how Lil hated thunder and lightning.  At the very first rumble, she would grab her purse and then wait it out in the stairwell of her home.  This wasn't a one-shot deal.  This occurred every single time.  If she was going to become a crispy critter in any electrical storm, she wanted to have her identification handy.     
• Bat Wings.  Gosh, when I think about what I put that poor woman through.  As a child, I would sneak up behind her, grab her bat wings and flap them.  I would then run away as fast as my pudgy little legs could go, screaming "Pudding arms!" at the top of my lungs.       
• Hair Nets.  As essential to the total ensemble package as her pair of shoes. 
• Doilies.  Lordie, that woman LOVED to tat.  I still have my mother's pillowcases with the tatted edges that Grandma made for her as a wedding present. 
• The Dupa.  I don't even know if this is a real word; I couldn't find it in the dictionary, but this is what the family called it.  I DO know that come Thanksgiving Day, no one dared to touch the turkey until after the dupa was ceremonially placed on the dinner plate in front of Lil.  The dupa is that little fatty triangular-shaped thing that's down there.  You know where- down THERE, at the end of the tailbone.

See those deep set eyes and that devilish little smirk?  Meet Lillian, on her wedding day.  Many people have told me that I look like her.  Ya think?  In the way I act, in my expressions, in my work ethic which just doesn't seem to want to quit, the deadpan sense of humor; it would seem that I scream of her.  God knows I have her ultra-thick naturally-wavy hair, the same bone structure that resembles a football linebacker, and yes, I was given her bat wings as payback for when I traumatized her with my childhood antics. When connections are made between my grandmother and me, I take that as a huge compliment.  She was, and still is, sky-high up there on my most sacred of pedestals. 

Lil's folks were fresh off the boat from Germany, and if there's one country that appreciates a good bottle of vinegar, it's Deutschland.  My grandmother's house smelled of the stuff, but in a good way. Her place oozed clean.  I still don't understand how she could take a bottle of vinegar and make her sinks and toilet sparkle like diamonds, and then turn around and with the same bottle, cook the most FANTASTIC sauerbraten and red cabbage that I have ever tasted.  I have tried many a time to replicate that recipe. I even inherited the bowl that she used for serving up her sauerbraten, but my gravy just never comes out quite as good as hers.  No, let's be honest; it's not even close.  I can't imagine why, what with her recipe calling for a 'chunk of beef or venison', 'some peppercorns' and to make the gravy, you take 'not too much flour'.  To this day, she remains the most fantastic cook that I have known.     

I would find little pudding cups, filled to the brim with vinegar, hidden in nooks and crannies throughout her house.   She said that the vinegar kept the place from smelling like smoke from my grandpa's cigarettes.  Ha, did my grandmother think I was born yesterday?  She was a closet smoker.  I saw the pack once, inside of her purse.  My aunt later told me that she allowed herself one cigarette a day.

She threw a cup of vinegar in with the laundry (always done on Mondays because duh, Tuesday was ironing day).  She said that it helped everything come out cleaner and kept Pa's socks smelling fresh as a daisy rather than the cow poop that was out in the garden. Grandma was a stickler for schedules.  You could set your watch to her meal times: the main meal of the day was served as the noon whistle blew, and your butt had better be at the table at 5:00 for supper.  Don't be late. 

Grandma also used vinegar to promote good health.  She would dole out spoonfuls whenever I had hiccups. I think a spoonful of sugar would have tasted better, personally.  Nothing beat the feeling of one of her homemade tatted washcloths rubbing my back down with vinegar after I found myself with a bad sunburn from the beach. Plus, she kept a bottle on the shelf in her tub, next to the Prell shampoo and the Zest soap.  She used it as a hair rinse to make her hair shine.


Pa, her husband, was a farmer and thus my grandmother became a master at the art of canning.  She taught everything that she knew about food preservation to my aunt, and in turn, my aunt taught me.  Grandma's root cellar was full of pickled beets, bread and butter pickles, dill pickles, chili sauce, sweet dilly beans, pickled relish, pickled watermelon rind and other jars of things swimming in vinegar.  She had four huge canners, a stove in the kitchen and one in the basement for those years when the crops were especially generous.  Crocks of homemade sauerkraut were down there, too.  To this day, I carry on her tradition. I  do the canning of our garden bounty, and I always think of my grandmother whenever I hear the little "ping" when the lid on the jar tells me that it has sealed properly.

Oh, and in case you haven't guessed by now: Lil also washed her windows with vinegar.  Her recipe: "Just pour some vinegar in some water.  NO, I don't know how much.  Just some.  That's how you do it.  No streaks."  And that's just how I did it, Grandma, that's just how I did it.    





   

The Price of Gas

This is getting exciting.  I just looked at my Super Man blog that I posted yesterday and I see that I've had 996 visitors.  Gosh, I wish, I wish, I wish (insert red ruby slippers, heels madly clicking), I wish I had something great that I could give away to the one-thousandth person, like a brand new car that has a giant pink ribbon on the top of the hood.  Or an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii.  Plus have a whole bunch of confetti fall down from the sky.  I like confetti.  But alas, if you are the lucky one who looks at this blog as counter trips over into Four Digit Land, you'll have to find your rewards from deep within yourself.  I suppose if I could find out who you were, I could send you a five dollar gift certificate to McDonald's and you could buy a Happy Meal. Maybe the toy in the meal box would be a really, really good one.   

Speaking of McDonald's, I've been trying to lose weight, lots of it.  And last week, I hit the sixty pound loss column.  I was ecstatic!!!!  So imagine my dismay when I stood on the scale this morning and saw that the number that popped up on the screen was THREE pounds higher than last week's scale reading.  Uh-ohhhhhhhh.

Let's discuss a calorie, shall we?   A calorie is the amount of heat that it takes to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius.  I gotta say, for the average Joe America, this is a pretty worthless piece of information.  Gram?  Celsius?  I stunk in science when I was a kid, and besides, I didn't gain a kilogram; I gained a pound.  So it takes roughly 3,500 calories to make one pound.  That, I can understand.  And that means that somehow or another, I consumed an extra 10,500 calories this week, and THAT, my friends,  means that during the past six days, I somehow or another ate an extra SEVENTY-FIVE pieces of bread.

Maybe what I need to do is go to the bathroom.

Right now, my friend Ginnie is howling, "TMI! TMI! TMI!"  If you listen closely, you can hear her.  She lives on top of a hill and her voice is echoing through the entire countryside.  The last time I got constipated and wrote about it, she emailed me back these three little alphabet letters (complete with smiley face), and I had to look it up on Google.  I didn't know what it stood for.  Out here on the prairie, it's easy to get out of the loop.  But I found out that it stands for Too Much Information.  I don't want to upset Ginnie, so I won't type the word 'poop' today.

I don't have a stinking clue how I get this constipated.  Since dieting, I eat a barrel full of fiber each and every day- oatmeal, fruit, high fiber breads, salads.  Plus, I drink buckets of coffee, and not that foo-foo stuff, either. Black coffee.  But it seems as if, once again, I shall have to depend upon my trusty Fiber One Bars that I keep stashed in the back of my pantry.  Or, as one of my facebook friends calls them, Fart Bars.  I wonder if Ginnie gets upset if I say the word 'fart'?  

All I know is that by the time I officially weigh in tomorrow at Fat Ass Club, I need to dump ten thousand five hundred calories and then let the Tidy Bowl Man deal with the consequences of my actions.

So today, Chocolate Mocha gets the nod.  Stand back.