Woman in a circle

Judy was in Spain with her husband and two teenage sons. It was her first trip to the country of her ancestors. About time, she thought, seeing as how her five brothers had already visited there and returned to bore her with their photo albums and stories of the shrewd bargains they’d made on touristy junk in tiny Spanish towns. A talent for haggling must be in their blood, each one of them had bragged. After saving for a few years, Judy and her husband Jerry had managed to secure two weeks in a small pension near Spain’s northern coast. They’d also found a decent rate on a nonstop flight from JFK for the four of them, though it was still an appalling sum. Yes, it was Judy’s turn now, and here she was, sunning on the beach while Jerry and the boys rode bikes in the small beach town.

Before he’d left with his father and brother, her younger son Will had drawn a rough circle around her chair in the sand, intoning mock-seriously, “Stay within this ring, fair lady, while I search for golden treasure in the land of our ancestors. Do not leave the protection of this circle or you will surely perish.” Judy laughed and waved him off, glad of a few moments to herself in the midst of the tumbling togetherness of their vacation. She loved her husband, her chivalrous Tolkien-besotted son and his quieter, less demonstrative older brother, but she wasn’t used to spending this much time with all of them.

Judy gazed out at the harbor. Gleaming white yachts floated serenely at anchor. She imagined their owners, suntanned and clad in white, the women with gold earrings and bangle bracelets, the men with ascots and double-breasted blazers, their faced hidden behind designer sunglasses, stepping off their dinghies into waiting town cars, being carried off to three-star restaurants where they would be attended by obsequious yet punctual wait staff at intimate meals designed by world-famous chefs. She envied them, these yacht people. Their wealth cushioned life’s sharp edges, their passages made smooth by factotums and drivers and maitre’ds, all anxious to please. As she watched the shadows lengthen at her feet, she mentally added up what they’d spent on food so far and began scheming a way to get dinner into her hungry boys for as little as possible. Eating meals in restaurants was so expensive, and their travel funds were dwindling fast. She contemplated what it would be like to walk into the finest bistro in town and let her boys order anything they wanted, never even glancing at the prices on the menu, insouciantly dropping a wad of Euros on the table at the end of the meal and then strolling back to the hotel, slightly tipsy on champagne and overfull of rich foods. No use wasting time lamenting what you cannot have, she thought. Better to be grateful, to make the most of this brief interval in the sun.

Around her, children played in the sand. Their parents—mothers, mostly—stole glances at magazines or paperbacks they’d stashed in beach bags in hopes of reading a few sentences in a row while their young charges busied themselves in the shallow water. Judy remembered the years when her boys were little, when she would have given a large sum, if she’d had it, for a few moments alone on a beach, or even in her own back yard. She knew that she was supposed to look back fondly on that time, and regret that her babies had grown into awkward, pimply, fractious teenagers, but she didn’t. Honestly, she hadn’t enjoyed taking care of tiny, helpless people who made messes, failed to take regular naps, and sucked her dry with their demands for attention every moment they were awake. She watched the young mothers, who sighed as they left their books to chase errant toddlers, and felt, mainly, relief that that stage of her life was over.

She thought about Will, how he’d spent all of his free time in the past year reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings, watching and re-watching the Peter Jackson films, writing about Middle Earth and debating with other fans on his blog, which he’d sweetly titled “My Precious.” Of course he also played video games and chatted with several friends at a time on MySpace, but at least he usually did his homework before he logged on. Will was 15, and hadn’t yet shown any interest in dating. Judy admired his energy and focus, and wished she could write 500 words a day on anything she cared about. Maybe she should start her own blog. What would she call it? Life in the Middle Ages? It Sucks to Be 40? She wasn’t sure she could think of enough things to write about to keep a blog going, anyway. Not that she really had time for writing, between work and family and everything.

Judy mentally smacked herself on the forehead. Here she was, sitting on a gorgeous beach in Spain, nothing to do but relax in the sun, and she was worrying about money and complaining to herself about not having enough time to take up a hobby. Worrying and complaining, those were her hobbies. They were portable, at least. She could do them during those wakeful hours in the middle of the night, during her commute, even on a sunny beach. She sighed and looked down at the imaginary moat that Will had drawn for her. Will was such an easygoing son, demanding less and less of her time as he grew into young adulthood. Her other son, Walt, was another story. Walt was, well, difficult.

Walt had been born too soon, in more ways than one. She’d become pregnant with Walt on their honeymoon. What a cliché, she thought. They had waited until their wedding night to have sex. They had used birth control. And yet, Walt had arrived less than nine months later. He’d been born at 36 weeks. Really. Not like the kids in high school who had had to get married, and who told their elderly aunts that their babies were premature. No, she and Jerry had done things in the proper order, yet on their first anniversary they already had a four-month-old squalling son. They hadn’t been ready for an infant, as if anyone ever was.

He was colicky, crying for hours every day during that first year. No amount of rocking comforted him. Judy discovered that if she turned on the faucet, the sound of running water would sometimes calm him. So she spent a lot of time in their small apartment bathroom, watching her own tired face in the mirror as she paced the floor with her son. She and Jerry had just learned to cope with this stage when Walt left behind colic and started throwing screaming purple tantrums whenever anything around him changed. Walt, it seemed, was exquisitely, overly sensitive to his environment. They learned that they had to move slowly with Walt, talking soothingly and trying desperately to avoid startling him.

As he grew into a toddler, the allergies and asthma had started. Walt’s early school years had been fraught with the difficulty of finding foods he could eat and preventing him from taking foods that might kill him. He couldn’t eat the home-made cupcakes other kids’ moms brought to school on their birthdays. He couldn’t eat most of what passed for food in the school lunches. Judy packed him safe lunches every day and dreaded phone calls from the school nurse. Walt was now in high school, and still had difficulty adjusting to changes. He hadn’t outgrown that or the allergies. He was finicky and unattractive, possessing not a lot of brains or particular gifts or talents to counterbalance his lack of good looks. He was the kind of kid that other kids teased and avoided. A loser, in short. What a thought for a mother to have about her own flesh and blood, Judy chided herself. But it was true.

To-Do List for the 2nd Half of Life

1. Let go of grudges. Especially, those against people who don’t even know I’m holding them.
2. Make something, alone or with other people, as often as possible.
3. Climb every mountain. Well, not every mountain. Maybe just one mountain.
4. Don’t just sit there, do something about something important.
5. Write. Often. Get better at it.
6. Discover and appreciate great art.
7. Learn new stuff, and then share it or teach it so it sticks.
8. Forgive myself, every day.
9. Breathe.
10. Choose to be peaceful, kind, and loving. Repeat as necessary.

Keeping Chickens

It seemed like a good idea when Mike and Diane brought home the seven baby chicks: there would be one for each of them and the two boys, plus a few spares. There was plenty of room for a coop and ranging yard on their property. Mike planned to build a hen house and put up a fence. The chickens would have freedom to roam—more than the so-called free-range chickens you could buy at the co-op grocery stores that abounded in their town. The family would enjoy cheap, fresh eggs, and maybe once in a while they would dine on a chicken they’d raised themselves. The boys each named their chicken: Shane called his Tree, and Matthew named his Zorgon. But things didn’t go quite according to plan. Do they ever, when animals and small children are involved?

Kona, the family dog, is part border collie. He never sits still if there’s someone around to throw him a Frisbee. Herding the five goats on Mike and Diane’s two-acre property is his main doggie job. It turns out he’s also a pretty good hunter. He must have assumed that the new chicks were just one of the perks of his job. He caught and ate two of them before Mike could get the henhouse built. Kona is smart, though, and once Mike and Diane convinced him that the chickens were off limits and indeed were his new charges, he left them alone.

That didn’t stop the coyotes, however. Two more chicks disappeared within a week, even after the coop was in place. Mike figured that the chicks would bed down there and be safe at night, but that’s not how it worked out. Either the coyotes were smart enough to open the henhouse doors, or the chicks were caught wandering in the yard. So Mike started locking the chickens into their coops at night. During the day, Kona guarded the yard from predators looking for a tender, free snack.

Three hens survived to gorgeous, buff-and-gold-feathered adulthood and began laying. Most days you could open their coops and find one or two freshly laid golden brown eggs. Since there is no rooster, the unfertilized eggs would simply rot if left in the coop, so the boys gathered the eggs every day. Farm-fresh eggs—how fine! And they were, until the boys caught sight of what the chickens ate: they saw one of the chickens walking across the yard, a garter snake wriggling in its beak. In a few seconds the snake was gone, consumed in a few squirmy bites by the omnivorous chick. Now the only person who would touch the eggs was Mike: Diane and the boys were not interested in eating snakes, bugs, and worms, even if only by proxy.

Zorgon, Tree, and the nameless spare chicken now roost in the clematis vines under Shane and Matthew’s bedroom window and enjoy a fine life as family pets, protected by the loyal Kona and assured of a long life and, probably, death of old age. This family would rather eat a block of tofu than one of their free-range friends.

Wiener Wraps

School Lunches, Take 2 May 21, 2008

The best school lunch at Lakewood Elementary was wiener wraps. On wiener wrap days, you begged your mom for 50 cents to buy a hot lunch instead of the usual lunch box packed with some variation on the sandwich, fruit, and dessert theme. On wiener wrap days you began to notice the aroma of baking bread around math time, maybe 10 am. By the time Miss Gackle stood at the classroom door and ordered the 5th grade class to line up for lunch, the smell filled every cranny of the old school building, overpowering the smell of chalk dust, dirty tennis shoes, and unwashed pre-teens, and everyone was crazy with anticipation. Instead of the usual shoving and goofing off, everyone behaved perfectly, marching in a straight line all the way down the hall to the cafetorium, not wanting to risk any infraction that would impede the trip to the lunch line. With the possible exception of Mike, who never had lunch money anyway and knew he wouldn’t succeed at cadging anyone else’s today. Mike was his usual off-kilter self, zigzagging down the hall six feet or so behind the rest of us, arms outspread, zooming, whooshing, and buzzing his way along.

The cafeteria ladies made these amazing things from scratch. Fresh white bread dough spiraled around plump, juicy hot dogs and was allowed to rise until the dogs were all but hidden, enfolded in their yeasty bread wrappers. Hot from the oven, they were served, two to a tray, steaming and golden brown. In the round indent next to them on the fiberglass tray a cafeteria lady plopped a glob of bright yellow mustard. After another cafeteria lady plunked a carton of milk in the square indentation on the tray, you now possessed a complete meal, Lakewood’s finest cuisine. No hamburger gravy on mashed potatoes or Salisbury steak with tater tots or, god help us, fish sticks, today!

You had to savor them, not gobble them in a couple of bites. First, you dipped the end—a bit of pink hot dog peeking out of the golden bread—in the mustard. Then, you took a bite, making sure you got a cross section of the concoction in your mouth—a chunk of hot dog surrounded by its cocoon of bread. In a properly configured bite, you first tasted the tangy mustard, then you bit down on savory meat, its juices bursting on your molars, then you chewed the slightly crunchy, warm bread and finished with a swig of milk. You repeated this until you’d finished both the wraps, using just enough of the mustard with each bite so that there was some left to mop up with the last bit of hot dog and bread. Then, you regretted that there was no more. You would ask around, and see if maybe any of your friends weren’t going to finish theirs. This was highly unlikely, but worth a try. You had to gently but firmly brush Mike off if he pestered you for some of yours.

Character exercise 5

From "The Fiction Writer's Workshop"

Robert Downey Jr.
His face is thin but not gaunt, and it’s punctuated with sets of vertical lines like brackets or exclamation points. Two extend from his long, straight nose up into his forehead, especially when he grimaces. A pair of lines bridges the gap between his nose and upper lip. Another pair on either side of his nose provides definition and depth to his otherwise flat cheeks. His jaw is another sharp line: a bracket running from ears to chin, intersecting with a vein that runs from beneath his ear straight down his neck. All that straightness makes those round, dark brown, heavy lidded eyes that much more arresting.
He is full of stops and starts: stillness, then a cut of the eyes, wrinkle of the nose, arch of the eyebrows, quick flash of that dazzling boyish smile followed by a snarl, a smirk, a grimace. Then, more stillness, as if to emphasize the brilliant range of movement that preceded it. His movements seem casual, offhand, yet never random. He releases his energy gracefully, generously, purposefully. He is taut, nimble, playful, elegant.

Val Kilmer
Everything about this man’s face is smooth and rounded. His teeth are like a row of white pebbles, a string of ivory beads between full, padded lips. His forehead is high and broad. His cheeks are like two apricots, warm and fleshy and smooth. Between the apricot cheeks is a wide nose. The chin below his upturned mouth is an echo of that smiling curve.
This man hoards movement like a miser on a hill of gold. Every motion is precise, controlled. His face and body are quiet, calm, with tension just beneath the surface like a cat poised to spring. He moves like a well-oiled machine. No nervous tics or fidgeting, just smooth, tight economy of gesture. He seems to gather and absorb the energy of those around him, like padded walls in an asylum, never diverted from his purposeful stillness.