Minivan Chronicles

Tube Story (Intermission)

2011-08-26T12:16:00.001-04:00

The boy at the center of the case had been eight years old when he first sought asylum in the UK. His uncle and his uncle's wife, a childless couple, arranged for the boy to come live with them after the Taliban killed his parents in Afghanistan. Immigration officials felt his story was not quite right. Instead of allowing him to wiggle his roots down into safe British soil as a permanent resident, they granted him temporary status until he reached the age of seventeen and a half. He could live with his uncle for nine and a half years.

Something was not quite right, wrote the immigration agent sitting below me on the Tube. Standing above her, I swayed back and forth with the other upright passengers as we rode from Heathrow to King's Cross station in London. She wrote in a looping longhand style with a yellow pencil, then erased heartily, with the conviction of a first grader. Bits of pink erasure dandruff clung to the hips of her black suit skirt.

When she felt called to make notes on the legal documents in the files stacked up on her lap, it interrupted my reading. She bent so far forward over her work, the label on her skirt poked out like a tongue. She blocked my view of her confidential notes. Fortunately, she spent more time reading than writing. We were underground now, somewhere east of Kew, and I had already read all of the advertisements around the top edge of this train. None were as interesting as watching the rejection of an immigration case in a country not my own. She leaned back to appraise her own scrawl, and I continued my visual eavesdropping.

What was "not right," as the British government discovered, was that the uncle was actually the boy's father. The uncle/father left Afghanistan, left the boy's mother there, pregnant, ducking behind sand colored cinderblock walls for safety, and he moved into Europe, to England, to a walk-up flat in Tottenham with a damp foyer that smelled of curried eggs. The papers did not document this. The papers acknowledged the DNA connection between boy and uncle/father. I imagined the rest.

The immigration agent wrote with passion and energy; she rocked her feet up on her toes when she bore down on the paper. She scrawled something on one page, then sat back and held the pages up to face what she'd written at eye level. These deceptions by the uncle/father not only jeopardized the safety of the boy, but also put the uncle/father's wife's status at risk. Currently in the UK with temporary status, the wife also wanted to stay, despite the three flights of stairs she had to walk up carrying reusable Tesla bags full of rice and onions; despite the curried egg smell in the foyer. She wanted to stay.

Did the uncle/father's wife know the truth of the relationship between the boy and the uncle/father? Did she know the dead mother back in Afghanistan? The British government could not determine how much the woman knew; their uncertainty about her role in the drama tipped the case against her. We clacked back and forth on our passage. The man next to the immigration agent slept with his head tilted forward, his arms crossed against his chest as if to lock himself into a polite space on the row of seats.

The British government also failed to determine the exact age of the boy. His mother dead, his uncle/father a liar, they wanted to believe the boy when he showed up at the border and held up eight fingers. That was seven years ago; now other evidence (not specified) indicated he may have been nine, or even ten. He was so thin, so drawn, when he held up his fingers at the border. The circles under his eyes were caves. The papers did not document this, either.

He could not stay. His father/uncle had lied. There were holes in the story. There were undocumented elements of the case. The immigration agent held the end of the pencil to her lips as if to shush someone. Because the boy could stay in this safer country until he turned seventeen and a half, the British government had to give him an age, but he would still be eventually returned to Afghanistan. They decided to call him fifteen. He could live with his uncle/father, a permanent resident, for two and a half more years. As for the uncle/father's wife, she would have her papers revoked. She would be deported immediately for her connection to such tenuous and uncertain ties.

The immigration agent bent over her papers to scrawl something in the block of white space across the bottom of the last page of neat legal type. As the automated Tube voice announced King's Cross as the next station, the man next to her woke up and rubbed his fists into his eyes. She slid her stack of papers into a worn, black briefcase with tape on the clasp. She had written: What a pity.

The Tate Modern

2011-08-06T16:20:00.005-04:00

“When objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused; and the mind is, in a great measure, incapable of pronouncing concerning their merits or defects.” –David Hume, Of the Standard of Taste, 1757

I stood in front of an enormous pile of porcelain chips painted to look like sunflower seeds while the guard at the door slowly nodded off in the afternoon quiet. Husband walked up and stopped behind me. “Hmph,” he said. I could feel his breath on my neck. “Yeah,” I agreed.

We’d been having this same conversation all over the Tate Modern. After a brief tea in the outside courtyard (museum tours should always begin with scones), we climbed to the top of the gutted power station and started working our way down, winding through white-walled rooms of inexplicable images. A giant wooded plug hung down from the ceiling in one room. In the next space, the walls glowed with a rosy hue as the lights filtered through gauzy red silk draped to recreate a reverse staircase spanning the entire ceiling.

I know, I know…. It’s hard to describe. Modern Art is hard to describe and often harder to appreciate. There were the usual rows of blank canvases, white canvases with a single black line, canvases rent or burned or shot at or spit on by the artist; all of the images that prompt the small-minded “my kindergartener could do that” responses from museum-goers overly proud of their “obscure and confused” sentiments.

Although we made it to the Tate late in the day, we happened to be there the one night of the week they kept the doors open until 10:00 p.m. We could afford the time to try to come up with some way to measure the merits or defects of the rooms and rooms of post-1900 art. We paused in a few dark hallways to watch video installations. I slid down the wall and sat with my knees drawn up in front of me to watch fifteen minutes of a young black man kicking a bucket around the 1970s streets of New York City. The bucket rattled and clanged in the video; it also rattled and clanged through the otherwise empty museum rooms. Walking out of one room of photographs of Russians wearing red, both of us in that sort of museum daze, we found Rodin’s The Kiss scooched off to the side of a connecting room. We first saw a version of this piece when it visited the High Museum in Atlanta for the Olympics as part of the Rings exhibit. “Oo!” I squealed. Husband kissed me.

On one floor, we found a temporary exhibit of Miró’s work; we split into different paths around the wing. I watched the art progress from almost naïve pastorals of Miró’s childhood farm life to the vast canvases of primary colors swirled with angry strokes of his later work, and I thought about seeing Guernica in Spain. Two hours later, Husband and I found each other in a room of canvases calculatingly scorched and charred.

We agreed that we had developed enough taste for one evening, and we could now pronounce the merits or defects of Modern Art with considerably less befuddlement. Now, on to find some pop culture, alá Harry Potter’s last gasps.

On the way out of the Tate, we passed a tall Tate guide with his pants a bit bunched and his long, black hair a bit mussed. He had the air of a young Museum docent—trying to maintain a look of disdain for the tawdriness of the general population while desperately seeking some affirmation of his existence. “Excuse me,” I stopped and said, “can I ask you a non-Tate-related question?”

He took a step back. He looked like he had expected us to think him on exhibit, and he had suddenly been recognized as animate.

I reached into my purse and pulled out a ripped newspaper page with listings for Harry Potter. We wanted his opinion on the closest cinema (not “theatre,” never “theatre” in England.) Every cinema was named Odean something or other—Odean being the AMC of London.

“Oh, they’ve got Odeans all over the place. You practically trip over them,” he assured us.

If there’s one thing we had not tripped over while hiking through London’s main arteries, it was a movie theatre. I pushed a little harder for specifics, and he guided us to the nearest one; then he seemed to enjoy this unexpected moment of human interaction. He asked where in the States we called home. “Georgia,” we replied.

His eyes lit up. “REM!” Tate Guide/REM fan confessed his love of the band and proceeded to tell us all about the trajectory of the band’s career and his own disappointment with some of their artistic decisions. Husband teased the poor guy with stories of band interaction from his teen years in Athens. Since I already knew the stories, I stood quietly and watched people milling about the café. Images of art flitted through my mind, which previously obscure and confused, had now found a way to appreciate Modern Art through the process of appreciating Modern Art. I felt the weight of Miró’s political anguish; the sound of that metaphor-rich bucket still clanged in my head.

A Japanese man sitting upright in one of the café chairs suddenly dropped his chin onto his chest, fully asleep. Feeling the fullness of our day hit me, I agreed with his sentiment.

The Broken Wall, the Burning Roof and Tower

2011-08-04T12:41:00.003-04:00

About the London tourist’s visit to the Tower, Rick Steves nails it. Go straight for the jewels.

In a sleepy drizzle on Saturday morning, we headed from Old Street Station on the Tube down to Tower, then dodged between slow moving families down the ramp to the park entrance. Following Rick’s advice, we aimed straight for the building in the center of the complex that houses all of the HRH’s finest playpretties. While those other jokers fumbled around with their soggy park pamphlets, we toggled through the empty cordons of red velvet roping and slipped into the jewel vault while guarding Beefeaters watched the storm. It all felt very Thomas Crowne Affair.

The attraction of brilliant jewels lies in their stories of intrigue, curses, and heist. If I was to steal anything from the Crown Jewel exhibit, it would not be the enormous fist of a diamond; instead, I’d take the taffeta coronation robe woven with threads of pure gold. Especially on a cold, rainy London morning. Husband and I strolled through the exhibit, the gold punch bowls and knick-knacks knotted with rubies and sapphires, and wondered at the role of the monarchy today. Of course, we also imagined that most visitors wandering through the Jewel Hall at any given point in its history had wondered about the role of the monarchy today, whenever “today” happened to be. Especially in that place, in this center, sparkling, heart of the Tower complex, one wonders whether all the murders, executions, decrees, uprisings, upheaval, all of the monarch’s long and sordid history—did all of it eventually collapse into a neat assessment of Kate Middleton’s spiffy style? It is nearly impossible to mentally connect the historical goings-on with contemporary morale-boosting media snippets about the family living down the lane.

We backtracked to the first gates in a steady downpour. Monkeys caught in poses of aggravation, reclining lions, and a chained polar bear with a supplicant expression perch around the parapets and rooftops of the Tower complex. All of these are made of chicken wire; they recreate the exotic menagerie that once prowled the grounds. The Royals’ subjects could poke at the creatures; some foreign dignitary once presented the Crown with gifts of live ostriches. These presents kept dying because common wisdom held the odd birds needed a steady diet of iron to hold up their improbable necks. Visitors fed them nails. In the second it took to step from wet to dry space as we entered the wing that once held the beasts, I caught of a whiff of caged lion; it smelled exactly like the old lion house at Zoo Atlanta. With the next step, that note evaporated, and the room reeked of wet plastic parkas.

The animals’ captivity in this stone trap subdued me more than any of the famous prisoners’ stories. And what of their stories? Filing through the series of rooms and narrow hallways, we read about the various famous prisoners and victims whose stories fascinate the visiting public—a few famous wives, a revolutionary or two, a pair of toe-headed young princes who may or may not have been murdered, their bodies walled up under the stairwell. At the same time, the park dilutes these macabre details with a thin message suggesting that the Tower “was really more exclusive” than your average prison. Tell that to the family of Sir Walter Raleigh. The white walls of the Tower rooms are chinked with 400+ year old graffiti, the names, symbols, prayers, and calendars used to scratch away the days of confinement. At knee level on one wall, Husband and I admired an entire astrological calendar carved into the stone by a captive Englishman accused of being a sorcerer. We traced the smooth outlines of the moons, planets, and stars. “Sorcerer,” we agreed. No mortal could chisel those perfect spheres.

City Animals

2011-07-30T15:38:00.002-04:00

“There was a great hurry in the streets, of people speeding away to get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a footstep was there. ‘A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!’ said Darney, when they had listened for a while.”

--Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“I think I know why Americans got so fat,” Husband said as we nudged our way through the crowd on Oxford Street. I walked in front of him with my head tilted back as if admiring the gothic architecture. Really, I was trying to breathe air not tainted by the cigarette smoke wafting around us.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“We all quit smoking,” he coughed.

Today we planned to spend exploring the city, perhaps taking in a museum or two. We started in Trafalgar Square, watching kids grab bronze handfuls of the famous lion’s mane to pull themselves up and perch on his back for a picture. I loved cities; I love the movement toward entropy, the collective decision-making (we shall all cross this street against the light—now), the blur of faces like a pointillist mural, and the sudden shock of singling out one point, one face, to focus on and absorb. I also like recognizable smell of big cities—New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Madrid—and now, I confirmed, London as well. Stale beer, hot pavement, warm fruit, and a fluttering of various perfume notes with each passing woman.

In Trafalgar Square, we got sucked into a busker’s act. A young man with a concave chest and curly, long, brown hair hollered at passers-by who wondered into his “performance space,” a rectangle pressed against one wall of the National Gallery and bordered by 20 foot lengths of metal chains. “Clap! Scream for me!” He directed the baffled crowd. He called for volunteers, and no one answered. Finally, Husband stepped up with an air of “do I have to come over here and do everything for this country?” The kid’s name was Aj—our son’s nickname. I believe that may have been the factor in Husband’s decision to step forward and subject himself to ten minutes of routine/predictable/overwrought street performer jokes and tricks. He and a guy named Paul from Belfast wrapped Aj up in the chains, and Aj pretended to struggle against them for a few minutes before “breaking free” with all the conviction of a bored circus ape. One little boy yelled out above the noise of the city, and Aj asked him where he was from. “Scotland!” shouted the kid. “No wonder,” said Aj. Tourists on the balcony of the National Gallery emerged from walking through the halls of Picassos and Vermeers, blinking in the bright sunlight. “Hey! You up there! Look at me!” Aj shrieked at them. Husband’s performance over, we picked up lunch and then made our way down Charring Cross to the Millennium Bridge.

At the Southbank Centre on the south side of the city (Shakespeare’s side, the Globe’s side), we confronted the deep hazel eyes of an urban fox. The massive straw fox sat on the top of the Royal Festival Hall with his head slightly bowed as if apologizing for showing up unexpectedly. Whereas the north side of London seemed all befuddled tourists and needy buskers on a Friday afternoon in July, the south side seemed thrilled with warm sun, blue sky, sunglasses to shade the shards of light reflecting off the Thames, and public art. Passing under the straw bits at the end of the giant fox’s tail, we found a row of tiny beach houses, each with different themes on the history and culture of London’s shores, lining the embankment walkway. Above the beach house walkway, an installment on the poetry of children seeking asylum in the UK rattled and whipped like seagulls’ wings. The young poets’ words had been printed on large sheets of white canvas and woven into metal tension wires in the shape of a boat, and the entire display sang and fluttered in the breeze off the river.

We heard the low hum of skateboarders’ wheels. Teenage boys popped and tricked, their crashes echoing through the concrete bunker, while younger kids sat around the top edge and pretended not to notice. One little girl in a purple skirt puttered along on her scooter, singing to herself, as the teens whizzed around her.

A horrible, out-of-tune, out-of-date guitar player with nothing important to say, except that he planned to say it loud, and continuously, set up his stand and hat along the Embankment and howled his deepest darkest fears about humanity. “Aw, go on then, shut up whydontcha,” someone shouted back.

I felt like it might be time to eat again. I found Husband near the river, watching an old guy with a long bamboo pole and a spark plug as a weight on his line. He asked the fisherman what he liked from the Thames. “Oh, evertin,” said the red faced man with a bouncing Cockney lilt. He allowed as how he mostly caught eels, some bootlaces, but some good sized for eating. He sat down his tall can of Guinness to pull a worn photo out of a waterproof case. It showed him standing in the same spot, holding up a shiny black tube. “That’s me biggest,” he said. We made the universal noises of admiration. “Yea,” he said, “do this all day, go home and feed me cat, then go to the pub.” We watched him cast again, the line like a spider’s filament reaching for the opposite bank. “Not a bad life,” he sighed.

Ungrounded

2011-07-29T18:53:00.005-04:00

"London is a city of eight million separate dreams, inhabiting a place that tolerates and encourages them….The city, which has long attracted tourists, seems perpetually at your service, with an impressive slate of sights, entertainment, and eateries, linked by a great transportation system."

--Rick Steves' London 2011

Husband and I landed on a Thursday afternoon after flying overnight from Atlanta. "Landed" is not the right word. We drifted through the industrial grey, dark halls of Heathrow, hovered between countries at the customs counters, and bobbed along with the other eight million some-odd (and some very odd) minding the gap along the Piccadilly line of the Tube. Since last Christmas, when my often amazing parents had given us this trip, we had each daydreamed our destination like any traveler does: while fulfilling menial tasks—washing dishes, driving to work, folding laundry—we wondered, what will it be like?

Any new city seems somewhat surreal for the first few hours, but add anticipatory excitement plus only a handful of hours of sleep and it becomes a collection of hypnagogic hallucinations. The Tube map posted on the wall at Heathrow looked like a colorful tangle of kitten yarn. We stood in front of the board staring, and I think we both forgot our purpose for a minute to watch the chromatic lines weave and twist upon themselves. "Let's ask," I finally decided.

We found our way to the Hoxton Hotel in Shoreditch, checked in, and turned back to London via the #55 bus down Old Street to Oxford Circus. Rick mentions that one should check in with the tourism office there first, but by the time we reached them they had closed for the day. The next day, when we tried again and still found them closed, I started doubting Rick's love of a tourism office. I'm not sure why one needs to visit such an office, anyway. Is it an attempt to own one's temporary title? A place to reclaim the "tourist" label? I suspect it has more to do with supporting the glossy brochure industry.

We turned down to St. James Park, nodding at a statue of Admiral Nelson on the way, and made our way around the lake to Buckingham Palace. Still wobbly, I felt maybe checking in with the Queen would help me feel more grounded than registering our gullibility with the tourism barkers. Besides, it seemed the proper thing to do, since she had been lovely enough to allow us into her kingdom. We meandered through families sitting on the grass; one little boy dropped his pants and watered a tree while his mother and her girlfriends gossiped. We passed the old birdkeeper's cottage, tucked into the park like a mottled brown egg in the reeds. At the Palace, I tried to figure out which window HRH might be nearest based on curtain movement (employing skills I picked up from watching too many episodes of MI-5 on Netflix), and Husband watched the Palace security detail sweep down a car that wanted entrance. We wandered down Diana's walkway (there are so many of these named for her around England—the Lady must have enjoyed a nice stroll. We saw no Diana bikepaths.) I slipped off my Eccos for a minute to feel England beneath my feet. Still not quite—I still felt like I was drifting above the experience of it, unconnected, unblending, like a little bubble of oil skimming the surface of a pool of water.

"Let's eat," I finally decided.

We took another bus back to Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf's old stomping grounds and location for some of the more collegiate pubs (collegiate = cheaper, but still hospitable). We had no idea what time it was. We had no idea there was such a thing as Time anymore, we only knew frayed edges of sunset draped the edges of the city bed, and the air held an expectant weight of impending rain. One pub told us the kitchen was closed, so we walked to the next stop.

Pub culture figures so prominently in the England mystique; we had high expectations for some type of experience—we did not know exactly what kind. Still suspended, I squealed to find linguini with fresh prawns on the menu. Husband liked the idea of a nice chicken tortellini. Not pub food, I know, but we figured part of the London experience incorporates worldly eating. And no food grounds me (in emotional state and physical weight) more than pasta.

Husband stepped up to the bar to order. With his back to me, he couldn't see the very drunk, very tall Englishman land heavily on the leather bench next to me.

"Cheers," said Tall Drunk Guy. Only it sounded more like "churrs." I smiled.

"Hey, hey, hey…" he stammered, "guess where I work?" I thought to myself, oh fun—trivia night.

"You work at a local gym selling memberships to chubby business types and housewives," I answered. I could have said anything; Tall Drunk Guy was not going to follow more than the first few words, anyway.

"Heeeey. That's right!" Only it sounded like "thas rye."

He wasn't even looking at me now—his eyes wandered in middle space like he was tracking a neurotic bat. As Husband turned to come back, Tall Drunk Guy got up to follow the bat. He knocked a glass vase off the table next to ours. Crash.

A put-upon waitress in jeans and a pink t-shirt stretched across her chest came over to sweep up the glass at our feet. She rolled her eyes at us, as if to apologize for her countryman's antics. Not three minutes later, we heard another glass shatter. Crash. Tall Drunk Guy dropped his pint. The waitress appeared again with her broom and dustpan, again with the look toward our table.

Our first pub experience seemed as disconnected and estranged from reality as our long, transatlantic day. The two dropped glasses signaled some sort of break with gravity at that point, and people of all shapes and sizes suddenly began to fall down. First, predictably, Tall Drunk Guy did a flopping pirouette in front of the bar, landing on his side. A bouncer appeared from somewhere and held him, gently walking him out. Then, a young woman in a black dress suit and heels performed a half split in front of us. Her companion reached down to scoop her up, one-armed, like an ice dancer. A man in fitted trousers slipped and yelped. Everyone laughed. Glasses crashed, the waitress appeared, tables yelled for more wine, more wine.

We finished our pasta (another story, explained in the food blog, here). I tested putting weight on my feet to see if I could connect, if gravity was indeed still a law even in this pub where everyone seemed to be sloshing from side to side like deckhands on a careening ship. It seemed secure. After feeling suspended, unconnected, flight/y all day, Husband and I were obviously the most stable places on this strange pub moon. We held hands and walked back out into the soft London rain.

Reflections on Work Dad

2011-02-25T11:29:00.003-05:00

Having a father who worked for the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution offered decent perks for a girl in elementary school. My teachers always had a source for those coveted, mostly-used tubes of industrial newsprint paper for the seemingly infinite varieties of "mural" or "full body tracing" class projects. If my friends' parents did not take the paper—the Journal because it was too conservative, the Constitution because it wasn't liberal enough (this was Decatur, after all)—they could call me to read the movie times over the phone. And on a few special occasions every year, Dad would invite me to lunch at the Blimpie in Woodruff Park and to visit the papers' headquarters on Marietta Street.

I loved those visits. My impression of the newspaper business consisted of one part Dad's work, one part 1930's era newspaper boys yelling on the corner, and one part J. Jonah Jamison from the Spider Man series (but not the comic book version—the Electric Company version. PBS, baby!). Where Dad saw logging my name into the visitors' register in the lobby as a minor hassle, I saw carefully printing out my full name as a significant act of accountability. Now I was officially registered. And in front of a security guard!

We would take the elevator up to the Advertising Department, him nodding at me to push the button on the panel, me pressing my finger against the cold metal with intense concentration. Sometimes other people would step on with us—people in suits. Important people, I would think to myself. My father knew everyone's name, politely and formally introducing me from where I stood slightly behind him.

When the doors slid open into the bright chaos of the ad floor, he would shoot forward out of the elevator like a pinball knocked from its holding pen. Dad never walks anywhere—he strides at top speed. Body slightly bent forward as if against a strong wind, he started out under the glare of florescent lights with me almost jogging in my Keds sandals to keep up. He cut through the cubicle maze, shaking hands with colleagues on left and right, as if paddling through in a sleek canoe to the other side of a choppy lake. I never saw any face long enough to remember it now, decades later, but I remember their sense of humor, the masses of toys and gizmos they had sitting around their desks, the collections of sketches they had pinned to the walls. This seemed like a fun place to work, and my Dad was part of that. This is my daughter, Jessica, Dad would announce as we strode by. Hello Jessica, they would holler at our backs, Are you keeping up? When I looked back over my shoulder at them, they would laugh and wink at me, including me in their circle of knowledge.

Years later, after the two papers folded into one, someone cooked up this crazy idea called the internet, and Dad moved up to Cox Corporate, my interaction with Work Dad moved mostly to email. In his role as a manager-to-managers, he understands how people work, in the literal sense. From time to time I need some help getting people to work the way that most benefits me, and for that, I go to Dad.

My siblings go to Dad as well. In fact, when we each email with some headache or quibble, challenge or conundrum, we expect that what we'll get is a reply from "Work Dad." When together, we'll tease him about whether we're talking to Work Dad or Dad Dad. "Work Dad" speaks a different dialect than Dad Dad. Work Dad negotiates challenges, identifies potential conflicts, and aims to resolve failures of communication. Work Dad speaks in mission statements. Work Dad cuts through the murky waters of human interaction, which is marshy, boggy, sodden stuff, and paddles us to the clear, open, honest waters as efficiently as he can.

It isn't enough to thank one's father, if you have one like mine, for his years of work in general. You must thank him specifically, for the day by day, for the hours that make up a lifelong career, for presenting a spectrum of work life—from the boring afternoons to the weary, long days to the valued contributions to the exhilarating accomplishments that should rightly comprise a successful career. Thanks for wearing the cheapest polyester suits possible during the early years. Thanks for riding Marta, walking in the rain with a newspaper over your head. Thanks for pushing Rich's to buy more ad space. Thanks for the annual employee days at Six Flags. Thanks for enduring the long commute. Thanks for pushing people to work better, to do better, to be better. Thanks for the lessons on work and work ethics, the long email answers to what I thought was an easy question, and the invaluable way you've shown me that individual happiness is intrinsically linked to personal productivity.

Work Dad and Dad Dad are the same man, but today his environment changes. Today Dad retires. Today I'll put on my nice clothes and go meet him at his office, along with the rest of my family, where I'll stand slightly behind him and be introduced to the colleagues. This is my daughter, he'll say. Hello, Jessica, they'll say. But if they ask me if I'm keeping up, I can only answer, I'm still trying.

Snowbook

2011-01-10T21:10:00.002-05:00

The status postings started around 10 p.m. last night. "Snow!" posted one friend. "A blizzard!" added another. The Southern end of Facebook has been hyperventilating with a frenzy of weather-related activity. From Mississippi to the Carolinas, friends and friends-of-friends dash outside to roll about in it, and then warm their frigid fingers just enough to type out new status update. Friend X "just made a snowmonkey!" Friend Y "made snow angels and had a snowball fight and ate snow cream!" Friend Z "wiped out riding on a strip of aluminum siding from the neighbor's trailer." Friend Z resides in Alabama.

Of course, minivan passengers and drivers participated as well. We tried to make it to the creek from the top of the yard, rifling through the shed for anything that looked remotely slippery and provided a barrier between butt and snow. Deflated pool rafts, beat-up old kayaks, removable canoe seats, cardboard. We wadded up knots of snow with bits of twigs and leaf parts sticking out and lobbed them at each other. One of us dropped and flailed around in the deep snow, making not so much a snow angel as a snow possum with a bad case of the shakes.

I drew the line at "snow cream." I would no more add sugar and vanilla to this snow and call it snow cream than I would add lemon and sugar to a cup of summer rain and call it lemonade. I'm sure it's fine, if your favorite ice cream flavor is Temple Inland Cardboard.

Remember sliding plastic newspaper bags between layers of socks and snapping around a rubber band to keep your feet snow proof? Remember sneaking out your mother's cookie sheets and using them to rocket down the big hill? That's one element I love about a snow day in Georgia—the ingenuity factor. Did they even sell thick warm winter socks in the Davidson's in Atlanta back in the day? Or snow boots? Yes, we get goofy on snow days—humor us, dear friends from colder climates. Having a virtual community outlet for all this goofiness just adds to the fun—almost like meeting up with all the neighborhood kids you know and some you don't because they attend private school or just have weird parents. You dive head-first down an icy roller coaster of a road, tumble over each other in puffy winter coats, or pelt each other with rock-hard snow balls. Some bonding occurs, even if it doesn't last past the first day of brown mush on the sidewalk edges and the early morning chaos of school resuming.

In the late afternoon, Husband and I mushed through the crunchy, icing-over snow to the end of the street and back, playing CSI with all the fishtailed tire tracks and washouts. We hypothesized about who tried to go where and how they failed. "Who thinks they're that important?" Husband asked about whoever tried to pray their way down our winding, undulating, unsalted road today. We paused and looked around, taking deep breaths as the snow-smell in the air returned. The flat pasture snow soaked up the purple of dusk. A chimney exhaled a chubby puff of smoke, and driveway lamps started to flicker their faint yellow light. "Who thinks they've got something better to do than stay home and enjoy this?" We shuffled home without speaking, listening to our own steps, our rooster telling the hens to go to sleep and maybe the ground would magically reappear by morning. From Husband's pocket sounded the occasional muffled ping of his smartphone, announcing another Facebook friend's good day in the snow.

The Pack

2011-01-06T12:20:00.002-05:00

Remember when you were a kid, and there was always that one house on the block where everyone met to play? For my neighborhood gang, it was the only house with a nice lawn, a green shag rug devoid of the pebble cairns, exposed roots and fire ant mounds of our own ignored yards. An elderly couple lived there; I have a vague recollection of a grandchild or niece who visited once during one summer, thereby providing all-time-forever-for keeps access to the verdant patch.

Our house is that house now. For dogs.

Murphy, the old black lab with the tennis ball fetish, lumbered over with a slobbery orb for us to lob as a method of greeting when we first moved here. Sylvia, our standoffish mutt, took his tennis ball and quickly determined he warranted very little attention due to his dawdling gait. He was too slow to be any fun for her; Murphy's like the chubby kid who brings the equipment to the game but still gets picked last for teams.

A year or so later, Murphy's family decided he needed a companion more fitting to their young daughters' size (and perhaps less covered in viscous goo). Murphy brought Bo over like a penance rather than an introduction—his lumbering posture apologizing, "Sorry, guys. This new kid's kind of a jerk. Can I still play?" Bo, indeed, is kind of a jerk. He runs like a rabbit and slams his fluffy little body into your ankles like a fur-covered slinky. Sylvia turns her ears back and refuses to look at him, doing the dog equivalent of rolling her eyes. His over-eager presence diminishes her entire species.

Recently, shoes started vanishing from our garage. We'd find stray pairs dotting the front yard, as if the wearers had evaporated mid-stroll. The shoes we recovered, for the most part, were not our missing footwear. Soon, cans and bottles we'd added to the recycling joined the front yard arrangements, along with someone's serving bowl and a nice box of new sidewalk chalk. Someone was taking our old stuff and replacing it with new stuff.

Finally, we caught Pete. Pete, a white pit mix with a dapper eye patch, spent a few days sitting on the periphery of the yard and avoiding eye contact, showing all the submissiveness of the new kid on the block. The boys broke the ice with him first, and soon he was rolling around in the fall grass with the rest of the pack. Sylvia finds him too large for her tastes, but she likes being able to outrun him. Pete won over Husband after day three or four of a missing boot; Husband kept instructing "Pete, bring me back my boot." On the way out to the mailbox one morning, he found the boot sitting on the front mat like an overnight package, and Pete sitting on the edge of the driveway watching. "Good dog, Pete." He had been exchanging items between three or four houses on the street, the Robin Hood of pit bulls.

I believed our house would be the neighborhood house for the boys. I daydreamed friends of the boys showing up with a whiffle ball and bat; I imagined settling petty arguments over the rules and procedures of Kick the Can and keeping a mega-pack of popsicles in the freezer for hot summer evenings. We live too far out for that to be the case, but I kind of don't mind the dogs. It makes me smile to look out and see Pete sitting on our lawn, at the edge of the driveway, with Bo flopped next to him in the sunspot. There's something affirming about being the preferred spot for a bunch of playmates, even if they do tend to poop on the grass.

As long as you don't start making them all popsicles, Sylvia groans.

Year of the Rooster

2010-12-21T11:17:00.002-05:00

The Chinese Zodiac labeled 2010 the Year of the Tiger. Tell that to Hammer, our smallest, loudest male and the Rooster Most Likely to Take Out Your Kneecaps if you stroll too close to his favorite hen. We kept Hammer and his fourteen subjects in a kiddie pool sprinkled with pine shavings from April to May, and then moved them to their new coop one at a time. One of my favorite memories of this year: the four of us each carting one or two chickens at a time, cradled like babies, across the yard, down the hill, and into their country estate with the hens craning their necks and gabbling about the hugeness of the world like old women on a car trip—"look at this—oh my!---look at that---heavens! Have you ever seen such a---o for goodness sakes!"

According to the interwebs, the Year of the Tiger produced a generation of sensitive types prone to deep thinking. In rooster years, we get eccentric, emotional types who like to argue. Think of Obama as a tiger and Glen Beck as a cock.

2010 turned out to be rather a lame act, to be honest. For our little family, sometime around the Chinese New Year in February it shifted from the Year We Hoped Would Be Better Than 2009 to the Year Of Unbe-effing-lievable. We struggled through shoddy tenants destroying our "investment property" (i.e. the house that couldn't sell), to no tenants but major repairs, to a wonderful, responsible tenant and suddenly no more house. Enjoy choking down that toxic asset, Fannie Mae.

Meanwhile, Hammer found his crowing voice and liked it so much he decided to voice it often.

For me, 2010 shifted to become the Year of Really, This Again? Uninspired by my routine of part-time work and housewifery, I decided to lock myself back in the Ivory Tower. On a random trip to Helen, Georgia, we parked in a lot with a sign that read: "Parking spaces is reserved for visitors." While carving the "s" off the noun with a plastic spork from the car, I thought "I'd like to spend more time with educated people." I sent a text to a former professor about getting back into grad school. By the time we returned to Rome, I was a Ph.D. candidate in the Lit Studies program at GSU, facing three more years of commuting to Atlanta for the joy of using the word "heterotopia" with a group of people who love it as much as I do.

Meanwhile, Hammer chased off one of his competitors and learned how to jump the fence. "Jump" works—to call that flight would embarrass any airborne creature.

Husband's 2010 could have been called the Year of Learning So Much More Than You Wanted to Know About the Construction Industry. Rome's ECO Center required major diplomatic efforts between architect and contractor, contractor and employees, employees and taxpayers in the park--who voted to add a penny to their sales taxes to pay for the building only if it meant they could use the restrooms or pilfer the construction supplies whenever they stopped by Ridge Ferry for a family reunion picnic. Husband enjoyed loads of support for the project in theory, stacks of mostly politically-motivated suggestions for how to run the project in practice, and several gifts of free I didn't know they would get this big turtles/fish/snakes when the building finally opened.

Meanwhile, Hammer declared Noah Enemy #1. The bird attacks by dancing at his target first, a fancy little flamenco stutter-step designed to woo his victim into submission before he jabs his talons at kneecap height. It's hilarious and surprisingly painful.

Noah's pet rabbit friend Martin died this year. No apparently cause. It was a tough lesson in sometimes pets just die. As his namesake, Noah kept gathering creatures, and at the end of the year we end two on the plus side after taking in a friend's gerbil and establishing a permanent home for a lizard who was already living in his room anyway. Noah and seventh grade jabbed each other in the ribs a few times, but fewer class bullies means easier days. Noah might call this the Year of the Ukelele. He can play "Take on Me" by a-ha. What more do you want?

Meanwhile, Hammer trained all of the neighborhood dogs to stay the hell away from our backyard.

The year one starts high school becomes Freshman Year, regardless of what else happens in life. Three members of our family watched Aj go through that transition process into ninth grade with calm strength and admirable confidence. Never in a million years would I have been able to pull that off, dear reader. He credits Berry for his self-assuredness, his ability to make friends easily and his suckiness in math. I credit Rome for giving him a space to jump into a Shakespeare play and the wrestling team all in the first term.

Meanwhile, all of Hammer's ladies began laying, and I learned how to make a soufflé.

Maybe I'll call the Year of Small Blessings.

In Science, Everything is Automatic

2010-08-26T11:38:00.001-04:00

During my first consignment to Georgia State University as an M.F.A. student three years ago, my stroll from parking garage to class provided a scenic tour of two empty lots strewn with skull-sized chunks of broken concrete. From one of these has since evolved a ginormous glass-and-metal structure called the Science Building. I’m sure it has a prettier name than than, but as an aside, I’m amused by students commonly referring to campus buildings by their disciplines without the definitive article—as in “Where are you going next?” “Oh, I’m headed to Science,” or “I’m on my way to Law.” I most envy the ones who get to say “I have a class in Recreation.”

The designers of the science building conceptualized their work in the contemporary style, where all the insides are visible from the outside. Glass and metal, sharp angles and inverted shapes, all emphasize the nasty bits like foil-wrapped duct work and gray industrial boxes with blinky lights on them. It’s like seeing the black lines and garter straps of a hard-edged German streetwalker. I see London, I see France, I see Science’s underpants.

I followed a group of students into the ground-floor lobby, which looks like something out of a Bruce Willis movie. A young black kid sat at a big desk watching a bazillion security camera scenes and munching on a chicken biscuit—completely unaware that by scene two he’d be trying to shoot his way out of a broken elevator. One set of elevators sat behind a heavily guarded cardkey swipe entrance; elevators for Real Scientists, I imagine. These lifts must lead to the floor where they are decoding the gene marker for Lady Gaga appreciation.

Because I am turning into my mother, the first thing I thought when I entered this place I’d never been before was “oh, I have to pee.” I followed a student onto one of the commoners’ elevators. She looked at me and said “Three?” I said “yes,” like of course three—who wouldn’t be going to the third floor? All the cool kids go to Three. We stepped off on what was apparently the Chemistry floor (failed it in high school, even failed at cheating at it in high school) and I wandered around looking for a spot to mark.

The bathrooms in Science offer water-saving, energy-saving, automatic everything. This means the toilets automatically and repeatedly flush with the motion-sensitivity skills of a trained ninja. The soap dispensers automatically ignore you. The sinks automatically start to dribble a weak stream when you have finally given up waving your hands around in the invisible water like a crazy person. The dryers automatically shoot out a blast of air so violent it’s like drying your hands under the hot end of a shuttle launch.

Campus rumors hint at a construction of a Waffle House on the ground floor of this new building. Interesting, if true. In the meantime, Science continues to be a friend of a friend for me—we’re not entirely comfortable around each other. I’ll nod as I stroll by on my way to Literature.

The Lawyers Get Free Pizza

2010-08-24T12:30:00.001-04:00

Overheard in the law building on the first day of classes:

--Where'd you park?

--Over by that building with the gold dome.

--You mean the Capitol building?

--Dude, we have a Capitol building?

--Not GSU. It's like for the state.

--Cool.

--What class've you got next?

--Wrongful Convictions.

--Man, isn't that sad?

--Yeah, I might drop.

In the basement floor of the law school building, all the classroom doors are wood-paneled. Gold bars function as doorknobs, and students reach and yank the doors back with the same motion as starting a lawnmower. They must be heavy. All the halls are carpeted, muffling the click and clack of young women's heels. The students are in what we used to call "church clothes," although for them I guess it would be "I might have a job in a law office someday" clothes. They're still learning, clearly. The patent leather pumps show scuff marks; one man's pair of faded khakis sports a broken belt loop in the back.

Why do they get pizza? The future of our legal set stands around in the lobby, greeting each other with faux-formal handshakes and comparing schedules. One haggard looking administrative type person carts in stacks of pizza boxes, sets them on a folding table. The legal set is learning to be served by a staff of ignorable underlings. The room reeks of projected confidence and pepperoni.

Oldest Living Graduate Student Tells All

2010-08-24T12:16:00.001-04:00

It only took three years of regular student loan payments and career instability to get me back on I-75 twice a week. That's right—I'm back in HotLanta, making that three block trek up the littered sidewalk from the parking garage to the old General Classroom Building that sits on the corner of Decatur and Central Ave with as much grace as a street worn and city wise homeless woman. It's Ph.D time, people.

You know I love school, dear reader; I love notebooks and colored pens and good handwriting days and class discussions so captivating that you leave as a group and move down the hall jammering on with some idea before any one of you realizes you're not all going the same direction, and there's an awkward laugh, and a "okay, see you next week." I love the deep, dark stacks of the back worlds of the library; books you have to tug at a little harder because they've been left on the shelf so long. I love undergraduates, with their student activities and impromptu games and confusion over how to "make it print" in the computer center.

I also love poking fun of all these things. So here we go.

For my first day, I decided to embark on this new investigation of the campus. Starting with the law school, I plan to hang out in each division of the university while I kill time between my own classes. I never got to know the rest of the campus last time I was at GSU, and I'm curious. Separation of the disciplines is a relatively new phenomenon; back in the day you just learned everything—science, math, Latin and Greek, etc. I'm curious about scienceland and businessworld—what other beings inhabit the halls of these strange planets? What separates them from my familiar literature geeks? Can I blend into these other environments, or is there some outward expression of my own literature-ness of which I am unaware?

I come back to these halls more jaded, with more to lose, and more dedicated than before. And my somewhat playful trek among other colleges only strengthens my commitment to my own discipline. Literature is the only discipline to study all disciplines—straightforward math abstracted in a poem, real science explored in a fictional world, the plot of history and the characters of law.

Speaking of characters…well, just keep checking back in.

Meet Walt

2010-08-24T09:42:00.006-04:00

Check out this joker.

He’s got his brown corduroy jeans that for him qualify as “skinny jeans,” only a closer investigation reveals that they are only skin tight on him because they are at least two sizes too small —a thin crease line of a former hem circles his lower calf. Sitting in the classic angst pose of an elderly woman with severe spine curvature, his undersized gray shirt occasionally rides up three or four notches on his back; vertebrae punch his unsunned skin like childs’ fists. Under his wool driving cap we can imagine hair smooshed with product, made to look unwashed and carefully unconcerned. He aims for his look to project some state of maturation beyond the false Western notions of appearance and conformist society. Instead, he looks like a boy sent out by himself to the library, whose mom tousled his hair and teased him just this morning as he slurped at his bowl of cereal.

And wouldn’t his mom be so disappointed to catch him smoking? His Swisher Sweet cigarillo smoke wafts back towards his face and his eyes water. It could be grape flavored (they sell those), but grape may be too mainstream for our dear individualist. I bet it’s peach—his homage to a local industry and not a flavor commonly found in bubble gum. Peach smacks of more mature tastes.

And what of the book? I bet you can guess.

That’s right. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Democratic ideals, rebellion from the core of stifling society’s expectations, flirtation with homoeroticism and some lines about nature and shit, all wrapped up in a paperback edition with waterstains and a missing front cover, pointedly demonstrating the owner’s commitment to used book stores over fascist chains.

While he uses his props, the book and the little cigar, other undergrads migrate around the GSU courtyard in downtown Atlanta with their own sets of props: cell phones, laptops, plastic bottles of Coke or Dasani (never Pepsi—we’re within a mile of World of Coke). Girls with the thinnest of straps on tank tops or flip flops catch our boy’s eye and he takes a long drag, then returns to the same page he’s been reading for ten minutes. Overhead, on the building across the street, a crew of window washers works their pulley system of buckets and brushes up and down, yelling back and forth to the crew on the ground, working men sounding their own barbaric yawps.

The Order

2009-11-21T19:42:00.000-05:00

Scroll down to "The Beads" to begin from the beginning of the NoLa trip.

The Band

2009-11-21T19:40:00.004-05:00

I grew up knowing about Preservation Hall. My grandfather, Percy Smith, owned a bazillion records, then a bazillion cds, of rare jazz, blues, swing and big band tunes from every generation. His people, my people, are from Mississippi, and he felt connected to the music on an almost compulsive level. I knew “Dream a Little Dream” before I knew “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

So of course, we stopped by Preservation Hall. Right off Bourbon, this small square, wooden bench setting acts as a one room schoolhouse for those about to be taught some real music. On our way to line up for entrance, the rust colored sky broke open, and soaked us with a cold November rain. It was the first sign of weather since our arrival. We ducked under an awning and watched water shoot out of gullies and downspouts, silently imagining what had been. By the time we found our spot on the floor of Preservation Hall, the room smelled like damp basement, cold metal, and German tourists.

We stayed as long as our cold jeans allowed. They played “Petit Fleur” and “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and “St. James Infirmary.” The drummer spent the 60’s and 70’s in Ray Charles’s band, the trombonist kept pretending to knock the front row squatters in the head, and the bassist worked with his eyes closed. The clarinet player’s cheeks puffed like a puffer fish, then flattened out, showing layers of intricate muscles. The lead for the night, a kid named Mark somebody, spoke with reverence and humility, and played trumpet with power and speed.

It whet our appetites enough that the next night we decided to go track down the next generation of New Orleans musicians. On a tip, we headed out to Frenchman Street, behind the French Market. We found a little dive called the Spotted Cat, and walked into the year 1928. A slender brunette and her loose tie wearing partner waved and swung and kicked and swirled around a tiny little space on the concrete floor, while a five piece band played fast and loose with swing tunes. The lead singer snapped her suspenders on her slim frame; when she threw her head back to belt out a note, you could see tattoos covering her torso. More and more souls wandered in the open bar door. A jaded bartender flung beers at patrons while hiking up her strapless bra. “These things are a bitch,” she said. No one in the room (minus us) appeared over 30 years old.

When my grandfather lived, he loved to buy me music. One of his favorite gifts to me was a copy of the first Squirrel Nut Zippers cd. Because I was in this town, and because I miss Percy, I asked Husband to go over to the trombonist and request a song from that album. He looked at me with those “don’t get sappy on me” eyes, and walked over to the edge of the platform. I saw the trombonist lean close to listen, then lean back and laugh. I saw him come in to Husband and say something, and then Husband leaned back and laughed.

“Wisconsin Trade Federation?” I asked when Husband returned.
“He won’t play that song,” said my love. “He said he only plays that song with his other band.”
Okay, I said “What’s his other band?”
“The Squirrel Nut Zippers,” he said.

Oh, Percy, I thought. Glad you could join us.

The Eye

2009-11-21T19:39:00.002-05:00

Our hotel in the Quarter meant we spent a fair amount of time walking up and down Bourbon Street. Barkers yell beer prices for something called a “Big Ass Beer,” goosepimply underage girls saunter back and forth in front of the nudie clubs, and tattooed women encourage you to share what I called “swine flu shots.” They have these little test tubes of neon colored liquids that are supposed to be liquor shots. A shot girl will find a willing victim, usually an underage and wide-eyed boy, and stick the closed end of the tube in her mouth. He’ll suck on the other end, drinking the shot, until their lips touch. For this pleasure he pays $3, and she pays in future years of regret and self-loathing.

The guy who ran into me probably had a few swine flu shots. As I stepped down off the sidewalk, a much taller individual in the usual frat-boy uniform of untucked button-down shirt with jeans lost his equilibrium. Several things happened at once. The full weight of his shoulder cracked into my eye cavity. I yelled and covered my face. Husband grabbed dude’s elbow and held him up with a death grip, and the two cops standing not two feet away yelled “Hey!” and took their hands out of their jacket pockets.

When I looked up, I looked directly into dude’s face. His eyes wandered around in his head, completely unable to focus. The only thing holding him upright was Husband’s death grip, but he held dude out the side a little bit, like you’d hold an unwanted varmit, while he focused his attention on my poor little eye. Dude was a lost cause—he didn’t know what he’d done and might not remember it until several days later, when he was brushed with a faint sense of guilt and he couldn’t identify the five dots of deep bruising on his right elbow. I pulled Husband away and left Dude to mumble at the cops.

For the rest of our visit, my eye continued to bloom with various shades of red and purples, a crescent-shaped smudge matching the crescent of the Mississippi that so bruised New Orleans. I felt kinda like a bad ass, really, and we made up a few stories whenever anyone asked. On the levee one morning, eating beignets and drinking café au lait from Café du Monde, a trio of polyester pantsuits asked us to take their picture, which Husband did. “And can we return the favor for you two?” asked one of the women. Then she looked at me again, double-take on the eye. “No thanks,” I said, “we don’t want any evidence out there.” They hurried on while Husband giggled at my outright lying meanness.

The Rose

2009-11-21T19:35:00.004-05:00

Without industrial waste sites festering all around Rome like underground bowls of fermenting fruit, Husband and I would not have been sitting in the oldest bar in the nation on Monday, sipping on Class 5 Hurricanes and acting as counsel to a young, Matt Damon-esque bartender with personal issues.

(This year, New Orleans hosted the government-sponsored Brownfields conference. For him, this annual gig means several workshops over several days on how to clean up and move on after someone knocks over a big glass of crap on your city. For me, it means a petite getaway with the man of my dreams, plus a few hours to myself during daylight hours. For the kids, it means a chance to spend some quality time with their grandparents.)

The pirate bar, as we call it, is actually a former Blacksmith shop run by the in/famous pirate/politician Jean Lafitte. When I say “former,” I mean like as in 1770’s “former.” On the corner of Bourbon past the “gay block,” as one local put it, the place looks as low and sagging as a round Hobbit house. The copper-topped bar covers dark, oil shined wood. All around the walls behind the bar, nooks and niches hold bottles of Jameson or Bombay Sapphire, Cuervo varieties and gazillons of flavors of Vodka. The original blacksmith fire pit makes a little sitting spot in the center of the bar, and on this night, a group of couples leaned in around the pit and yelled at each other over the din of music and bar chatter. A baby slept in a stroller next to one of the women, who kept one hand draped over the baby’s stocking foot.

Husband used to tend bar. He watched Matt Damon try to tuck a bottle of Dewar’s back into its place in a triple-stacked line along one wall of the tiny bar. “That’s got to get old,” he said to Matt. “Yeah,” says Matt. “You should see how we have to get the kegs back here. I told my uncle every one of us has back problems now, but the old man won’t spring for a longer line or a handtruck.”

Turns out Matt’s uncle owns the bar. Matt’s sister is the sole cocktail waitress, and their best friend/roommate also tends there. They live across the river, near Gretna. When we asked them where they went to school, they said “Gretna High.” That seems to be as much school as school gets. We dropped the subject. Husband asked about another drink, and Matt cocked his head at us. “Have you had a Hurricane yet? Let me make you a real one. I’m going to take care of you, sir. I’m going to take care of you.”

Rather than tip in the cheap well brand of rum, Matt loaded up Husband’s glass with Bacardi 151, a faint dash of sweet red mix, crushed ice and sliced oranges and cherries. He set it on the bar in front of us. “That’s done right,” he said. (Apparently it was done right, because later that night Husband got the idea that he could move people off the sidewalk and out of our way using telepathy.)

Matt’s little sister made her rounds between tables inside and out in the little courtyard, then back to a dim piano bar in the hull of the place. (About the piano bar, there was a moment with a biker dude and singing priest, but I’ll save that story for later). The sister and Matt spoke in hand gestures and nods, most of which seemed to center around the theme that she did not do her fair share of work around the place. At one point Matt asked her to go get a bucket of ice, and she stuck out her lower lip at him. Just then, an old black man appeared at Matt’s sister’s side holding a red garden rose. She smiled and crinkled her nose at Matt, and Matt rolled his eyes. “Hey Smooth,” he said.

“Whatchu need fuh me to do?” said Smooth. Matt’s sister asked him to get the bucket of ice, and he handed her the rose and shuffled off to do it. “That’s Smooth,” smiled the sister, before turning to take a tray of beers to the couples at the pit. “He brings me a red rose every night.”

Smooth looked like a sixty year old man living in the body of an eighty year old. Deep gullies ran down both cheeks, and he leaned to one side like he’d been thrown into a wall and never quite straightened up. Matt told us he served many years in the state pen. They don’t know what he did—he won’t talk about it. Because he was so good at showing up at the most advantageous times, he earned his nickname. After release, he went to work as a bodyguard for one of the sheriff’s deputies, and if you have to ask why a lawman needs a bodyguard you’ve never been to the Big Easy.

I looked up from my own drink to see Smooth nod at me, then turn and walk away. I forgot about it until we were almost ready to leave. I turned on my creaky, rusted barstool to find myself face to face with Smooth holding a pale white garden rose. The stem curved, with two long thorns, and an unopened bud branched away from the full bloom of the fragrant flower. “I brung you one, too,” said Smooth. “But I brung you a white one, cause you’s married.” I kissed his wrinkled cheek, and he chuckled and shuffled away.

“Yeah,” said Matt. “That’s why they call him Smooth.”

The Beads

2009-11-21T19:33:00.002-05:00

She looks good, the old girl. We cross the Pontchartrain Causeway into Canal Street, fretting a bit, feeling like kids come to visit an old aunt in the nursing home—will she look unwell? Will she be unkempt or confused? Will she remember us? But by the end of our visit, Husband and I settled on the belief that on the surface, New Orleans seems okay. No fresh wounds, and she’s done well to cover her scars. Below the shiny plastic surface, however, is a whole ‘nuther story.

On the balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, we ate oyster po’boys at Johnny White’s and watched the second half of the UGA game. Husband watched the TV. I peeked over the edge of the wrought-iron balcony, ogling the clusters strollers below. If you visited even before Katrina, you know Bourbon Street long ago shifted away from the historic jazz-and-blues nightclub format that made it famous. Now it has all the charm of a frat house bathroom: drunk blondes, cheap porn and lots sticky fluids.

Still, I love to watch people. Even on a Saturday night in the middle of November, middle aged women seemed willing to forgo dignity in favor of a set of plastic beads. I sipped my beer and watched an older woman in stiletto boots wobble along the center of the street, gripping her beau’s arm. He wore a mullet and white jeans. They walked with their heads tilted back, scanning the balconies for permission for what they seemed to come here determined to do anyway. As soon as someone hollered at her, as if calling on an eager pupil, she popped up her top to reveal her goodies. After some modest yelling, someone tossed down some beads. The couple continued their evening stroll, and I turned to Husband. “I don’t want any beads the whole time we are here, okay?” I said to the side of his face. “Mm,” he said.

Boo.

2009-10-31T09:13:00.000-04:00

A Legacy of Bailing

2009-10-26T13:15:00.002-04:00

We met in a bar named after one of the snarkiest authors still occasionally banned by marauding groups of public library picketers. Twains, in downtown Decatur, hosted the first night of our class’s twentieth year recognition that despite our occasional efforts to the contrary, we did, in fact, graduate from high school. We left Decatur High School, but as you know, dear reader, reunions find a way to remind that some of high school still hasn’t left us. Over the weekend, I found myself visiting with various ghosts of myself: the girl with the weird conversation topics, the girl who takes advantage of her parents, the girl with no curfew, and the girl who picks the cute guy on the couch rather than a night out with friends.

Since conversational stall-outs comprise my special brand of social ineptitude, I brought along a bag of tricks to Twain’s bar and brew pub to rev chatter whenever needed. Anything to avoid the “so…um…how have you been,” routine. I dragged out my senior yearbook from a box in the attic. Husband had to come, of course, because he generally excels at banter and has been known to keep it going, single-handedly, for hours. Just in case, I also decided to drag out both sons as some of my favorite conversational props. And, for insurance, I invited my parents. Plus my sister. And her husband.

This worked well. We took up a table for eight, creating our own party no matter who else turned up. My family dispersed through the crowd like kindly deflector shields, absorbing most of my awkwardness and spinning it off into the dark corners of the bar. The night progressed, sister and her husband took the boys home for bed, and Mom and Dad offered to be our designated driving team. I no longer depended on my human props, as copious microbrews convinced me of my wit and grace.

We told all your high school stories, dear reader. You know, the one about the accident, or when the party got busted by the cops, or when she dated him or he dumped her. We told the one about the cheating incident, or when Mr. so-and-so got fresh, or when you drove your parent’s car as fast as you could up and down that cut-through street in order to destroy the senior float and now you feel a stab of guilt whenever you pass drifts of white paper trash along the side of the road. Okay, maybe we didn’t tell that one.

At some point someone ordered shots in flavors circa 1987. My dad passed along the message that he’d be asleep in the car. It was time to go home, but hey—I really enjoyed the evening.

Which made the next day that much harder. I woke up feeling thick-tongued and dizzy—that was to be expected. But I also woke up feeling like in general, I was done; I felt even more alienated and distant from my high school persona, like a picture of yourself you don’t remember being taken.

Another event loomed for that night—another night in a bar in downtown Decatur, this one formerly owned by a perverse, obese restaurant owner who chastised me for wearing loose jeans while serving his lonely, perverse customers back in the 90's. It all seemed like too much—too much of me, too many different me’s, all in one place, vying for my limited attention.

Curled up on the couch under an old family quilt, I polled the family for guidance. To stay in, comfortable in my 38-year-old skin, wearing my sweats and comfy bra? Or to go, try another night of social skills, and put on the push-up deal? They tried various angles. My sister, always the belle of the ball, thought I should go early and do the just-staying-a-minute routine. My mother thought I might should go later so I could enjoy dinner with the family first. Dad, ever the realist, pointed out that no matter which option I choose I would regret my decision. So helpful.

“Well, what would you have done in high school?” asked my astute brother-in-law. “If this is to be a true reunion experience, you should act now as you did then.”

Of course. Perfect, I thought. I pulled the warm quilt up over my shoulders and snuggled in closer to Husband on the couch.

Tired of Waiting?

2009-08-17T21:00:00.002-04:00

Wander over to the food blog. Think of it as hold music, while you wait for me to get my thoughts together.

Driving, this would be the part where you fall asleep for half the state of Tennessee and I keep myself alert by singing songs from The Muppet Show. In my head.

You'll wake up soon. Then we'll talk.

Bitch One and Bitch Two

2009-08-10T12:53:00.004-04:00

Joey started by asking his passengers if we had kayaking experience. Mary and I raised our hands. So did Bitch One and Bitch Two. He asked about kayaking at night. The two blonde college girls raised their hands again. We did not. Joey nodded, issuing a little warning about how different this might be, kayaking at night, in the ocean, through mangrove channels, in a tandem kayak. “The most important part is to listen to your partner,” he warned. “Paddle right. Paddle left. Listen.”

The tour van shuddered and twitched along the road from San Juan to Fajardo, where our crew would meet up with tour guides for a night kayaking trip to a lagoon filled with bioluminescent creatures. Mary and I talked about this possibility before we left Rome, and we caught the only available tour on the spur of the moment and with about ten minutes to spare. Spontaneity is the soul of good travel.

In Fajardo, we all climbed out of the van. Bitch One and Bitch Two, two sisters from Jacksonville, Florida, came to experience the glowing plankton with their little brother, a high school kid, and their father, Chuck. Mom stayed back at the hotel to rest up. Apparently she still felt woozy from leaving her iPhone in the back of a cab on their first day of the trip. “We called her number over and over, but the guy never answered to bring it back!” lamented Chuck. Imagine. Along with the Jacksonvillians, we met a pair of spunky older women from Houston, one named Peggy and one named Sue. I could not keep them straight. I called them Peggy Sue. Who wouldn’t?

Joey described the drop-off point at the beach in Fajardo as a national park area, restricted to public use in order to protect the little dinoflagellates spinning and shining in the water. The beach looked the same as any other beach: same fried food vendors, same groups of families, same deteriorating public bathrooms. Along the rocks by the shoreline, rows of tandem kayaks rocked in the surf. We let ourselves be strapped into life vests, and a guide named Kevin called everyone together for instructions.

He paired us up, making sure everyone had a partner. He looked at Peggy Sue. “Are you both okay going as a team, or would you each prefer your own guide?” he asked. Kevin looked maybe twenty, eager, sweet, but perhaps a little naive as to the attitudes of Texan women in their sixties. “What is THAT supposed to mean?!” Peggy/Sue retorted, one hand gripping her kayak paddle. “Do you think we are LESS CAPABLE, Kevin? Do you think we can’t do it because of our age? Huh? Why don’t you ask some of them if they want to go with a guide? Huh? Huh?” The crowd laughed nervous ha-ha-ha’s. Kevin started saying “No no no nononono” with Puerto Rican speed. Another guide said to Peggy/Sue “You’ve got the paddle, ma’am, whack him!” I momentarily pictured our kayaking trip being delayed by a riot of tourists in life vests pummeling a young Puerto Rican biologist for his ageist comments. Instead Peggy/Sue held her paddle aloft and screamed “Girl Power!!” Tension: diffused.

Bitch One and Bitch Two rolled their eyes and checked their fingernails.

Once in the kayak, Mary and I took about two minutes to figure out that game. Perhaps on some level, as travel partners, we had already formed some sort of telepathic bond when it came to Paddle Left, Paddle Right. Regardless, we were silent and swift and probably ready for Olympic kayaking competition. Other boats spun in circles across the ocean waves, smacking into docked boats or each other. Dusk turned sky and sea a milky blue.

As we made our way into the mangroves, the sound of the surf faded like someone had closed the door to the sea. Over the swish of paddles moving water and the startled squeaks and crunches from some other boat running into the mangroves (never ours--okay, maybe ours once or twice), we heard Bitch One and Bitch Two.

“Oh my GOD! Quit paddling! What the hell are you doing?! That guy ran into me! What an ASSHOLE! Oh my GOD, sir, YOU are an ASSHOLE! Oh my GOD! I can’t believe you just called that guy an ASSHOLE! Oh my GOD, I SO don’t care! This trip is SO LAME! Why are you paddling on the LEFT?! Paddle on the RIGHT, you IDIOT! Don’t CALL me NAMES, it’s NOT my FAULT, it’s that ASSHOLE! AND it’s DARK! I CAN’T SEE!!”

Without ceasing.

And these are the two who raised their hands regarding kayaking experience. Meanwhile, Mary and I paddled as fast as we could to get away from the girls, the asshole, the screaming, whatever cloud hovering back there turning the experience murky and dark.

Have you ever seen moonlight through a mangrove landscape? Imagine Picasso’s blue period, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and a midnight voodoo ceremony with stark white bones. Mangrove arms draped down to brush the top of the black water; the moon sat on the top of the trees, except where it spilled in rings around the curve of the paddle. Every shift of the channel felt like farther into some Conradian heart of darkness, our eyes adjusted to this new shade of night, and then....everything opened up. We reached the lagoon.

My only reference for lagoons is the 1980’s movie with that effeminate looking guy who made most preteen girls envy Brook Shields for being the one to teach him how to talk. Blue Lagoon.

We saw no sign of Brooke. The water shimmered with surface light from the moon and a lighthouse in the distance, but this was supposed to be the bioluminescent bay. The water was supposed to shimmer with light from below.

One stroke later, it did. Our fellow kayakers discovered this almost simultaneously, and a soft chorus of “ooo’s” and “aahs” rippled across the water. With one stroke, a million bazillion little pinpoints of blue light vibrated underwater. Mary and I dipped in our hands, wiggled our fingers, stroked back and forth. The blue lights shivered and danced underwater. These are living creatures, little bitty plankton, and generally what kayakers do is annoy the heck out of them. Our fascinated strokes and splashes set them aglow with aggravation. It was delightful. It made us giggle. It made everyone giggle, except you know who.

In the van on the way back to San Juan, Joey asked everyone about their trip. He asked if we had trouble maneuvering, if we had listened to each other and figured out a rhythm for paddling. Immediately, Bitch One and Bitch Two set in. “It was TOO HOT! BUGS kept BITING me! It was TOO SHORT! We couldn’t stay with the glowy stuff as long as we WANTED! It was TOO EXPENSIVE!” These two were like Goldilocks if she never found any of the “just right.”

Mary and I smiled at each other in the back seat of the van. “Well,” said Mary, “I thought it was FABULOUS! I would GO AGAIN!” I said “SO would I. It was AMAZING.”

The girls took out their iPhones and started texting away. They weren’t listening.

Advice for Going Out at Night in Puerto Rico

2009-08-10T10:39:00.001-04:00

—Check your bank balance first. This will be expensive.

—If you head towards Old San Juan, wear flats. Seeing other women jam their spiked heels into the old cobblestone streets is quite entertaining, but not something you want to try yourself.

—Order mixed drinks with caution. Some bars get a bit too creative with the “mixed” and toss in some extra stuff just to stretch the bottle.

—Watch out for the guy with the parrots.

—Plan on music selections from the Allman Brothers to Justin Timberlake. Do not expect anything remotely Puerto Rican. Or even Spanish. Or even Latin.

—If you want to run with “La Gente Linda,” the beautiful people, head for the strip of bars and restaurants in Condado.

—But wear a scarf. Tall buildings=wind tunnel.

—If the mayor of San Juan bumps your table, don’t expect him to apologize. Don’t look at his security detail with a look of disgust that says ‘did you see that guy?’ They saw him. They’re watching you, too, buddy.

—Let go of the concept of a jigger or shot glass as a measuring device for alcohol. Bartenders go more by color. If the drink is slightly clear (tequila) with a bare hint of green, it counts as a margarita.

--Take an escort, just in case you have more than one margarita.

La Comida

2009-08-08T12:10:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I crave an ambience more than a cuisine. When someone asks me what I want to eat, I have trouble naming a particular food but I can describe perfectly the setting I want to surround it. On the rare occasions when Husband and I decide to venture out of our own house for a date night, he’ll ask me what I want for dinner. “I don’t know,” I’ll answer, “but I know I want it on a white tablecloth that blows slightly in the breeze of an outdoor café with hanging baskets of pink flowers and a view overlooking a cottage garden.” He’ll respond with “I’m in the mood for Chinese.”

Every meal we ate in Puerto Rico satisfied my hunger for aesthetics as well as nourishment. After Uncle picked us up from the airport and shuffled through traffic to home, he sat us at the kitchen counter and served us bowls of silky white bean soup, habichuelas. We needed that simple dish to help settle us in while we simmered with excitement and plans for the week.

Language also plays a big part of our food experience; I love the way some dishes have the perfect names for what they are. Think “steak.” Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated, utilitarian. Steak. This follows in other languages, and one of my all-time favorite dishes prepared by our Puerto Rican family epitomizes this trait: Papas a la Huancaina. Say it with me. Papas. A. La. Wan—ki—EEE—na. Now say it fast: papasalawankieena. It sounds like fun, right? Something based in comfort, yet playful, full of unexpected ingredients or little surprises, right? Exactly. Originally a Peruvian dish, my Puerto Rican family introduced us to this potatoes and cheese sauce creation years ago. Pillowy lumps of mashed potatoes sit on a bright bed of Romaine lettuce leaves. A turmeric-rich, golden cheese sauce coats the dumplings and whole olives get tucked into niches and edges. That hit of vinegar and salt deepens the richness of the sauce.

Uncle made this for us, as we begged him too, as we always do. He halved hard-boiled eggs and placed them like students in neat rows. Dairy, protein, carbohydrate, vegetable. Done. And once the name gets stuck in your head, you’ll hear it like a music lyric all day long: PapasalaHuancaIna, papasalahuancaina, papas, papas, papasalahuancaIna.

My cousin Cynthia cooks like I do: gladly. We both enjoy eating, but we love the cooking part just slightly more. With young children still at home, Cynthia measures out her day according to meals. Mary and I reaped the benefit of this, spending time watching her fry tostones and bake chicken and hold the baby and answer our questions in English while answering her daughter’s questions in Spanish and wipe up the water on the floor with one foot on a paper towel all while looking beautiful. You know: motherhood. She pan-fried pork chops marinated in ginger with limes, picked from the tree in their yard. On the day we went kayaking (story comes later), she fixed us canoes—baked whole plantains stuffed with a rich beef filling and topped with melty cheese. Mary and I returned salty and sticky, bug-bitten and exhilarated, and stood at the counter telling our stories and eating canoes.

The day we made it to Naguabo, we ate lunch at a little stand on the side of the road. They call it a boardwalk, but it isn’t really that. It’s more of a hodgepodge of scraps of wood and metal, layers of plastic sheeting, bungee cords and two of the most important elements: a bar and a deep fat fryer. These pop up along most of the beach areas—the one in Luquillo beach stretches for a quarter mile and offers coco frio. (Green coconuts kept in a fridge, then brought out to have their ends chopped off with a machete. Stick a straw in to sip out the rich milk then use the straw to carve out soft tubes of white coconut meat. I watched the machete part and missed Husband).

As we pulled into the strip in Naguabo the sky started to turn a shade of lavender, and the stray dogs moved from their spots in the middle of the street to flop under tables and benches lining the beach. The snack stand/bar smelled of fried things, seawater, beer, cigarettes, hot sauce, old wood, hot metal, aftershave. Perfect. Uncle ordered us plates of fried whole red grouper, beans and rice, doughy pockets of crab and shrimp, sweet strips of fried ripe plantains, and cold beers. As we picked apart our fish, pulling out flaky sheets of white meat, the sky opened up and tucked us into that cozy atmosphere of being dry when the world is wet.

Back home, Mary and I call each other with frantic questions. “What was in that sauce again, do you remember?” “I think it was….bay? Was it bay or oregano?” We know we can both turn to the internet for help, Googling various dish names and sight-reading recipes like music—does it have enough garlic? Does it seem too heavy with the tomato? Finding the recipe, the nuts and bolts, the basic instructions for how to season and fry a fish like the red grouper we ate in Naguabo—that I can do. Where are the instructions for conjuring up rain hammering a tin roof awning, the worn wood of a picnic bench, a puppy curled up sleeping under a barstool? I want the recipe for a white skiff anchored offshore, nodding to the ocean as it rocks in the surf.

(Brief Interlude)

2009-08-07T06:53:00.003-04:00

Happy Anniversary Husband!

Hill? Check. Coyotes? Check.

Just waiting on the time.

Where Did They Put That Road?

2009-08-06T23:16:00.003-04:00

My uncle fell in love with a Puerto Rican woman. After shuffling around the globe with his missionary parents for eighteen or so years, he dug his feet into Puerto Rican sand and committed his life to her. He calls himself a gringo still, but I can’t tell what singles him out among Puerto Rican men his age. He has the same olive skin, the same gentle weathering of his features, the same penchant for hyperbole in his stories, pronouncements and warnings.

One day he took us driving. Locals call this ‘going to the island,’ as the city of San Juan feels too metropolitan and global to be of the same geography. We began with a stitch through the right half of the island, wrapping around the central mountain range toward Juncos. Flamboyan trees waved us along with their spiky red and orange feathery boas. Some sort of purply-pink flower competed for attention. Uncle knew exactly where he wanted to take us, but he could not remember exactly which way to go to get there. Mary and I shared a thrilled look that said “oh goody, we might get lost!”

We dropped down from the mountains and skimmed through little towns. As the asphalt curved and dipped, we tunneled through a tree canopy and caught only brief glimpses of pasture on the other side. Humble country houses in pinks and greens sat along the edge of the road reminded me of old women in housedresses waiting for a bus into town. I sat in the back seat snapping pictures, trying to catch that sense of motion and privilege that comes from letting someone else drive. My eyes blurred; I watched the greens, pinks, reds, yellows flash by the open window like an old movie backdrop replaying the same footage over and over, trying to make it look like the actors were headed somewhere.

We planned to stop in Naguabo for lunch. Naguabo, the town, pulls itself up the edge of the hillside like a girl trying not to get her skirt wet. One side drops down, however, and lands right in the surf. This means they have good fried seafoody things. We were on a hunt for good fried things to eat. Uncle turned right and left trying to pick up the right thread of a road; I watched more scenery, Mary told stories of family back in the States. We passed through the sweet kiss of an afternoon downpour, and rolled up the windows. The rain stopped and we rolled them back down. The air smelled like lime popsicles as the tree canopy disappeared and we reached the peak of the mountain. Below, the surf.

Back in the car, we found Naguabo the same way one comes into Summerville: suddenly, and without fanfare. It’s an “Oh. Here we are.” Not an “Yeah! We made it!” The town looked like a cluster of painted cinderblocks piled at precarious angles, and chickens jutted back and forth across the road. We were in Naguabo, but we had not found the beach. Uncle pulled over to ask directions from a guy walking down center of the street. In his lilting, perfect Spanish he asked the guy if there were still places to get fried things on the beach. “Yes, yes,” said the guy, “just go down here, take a right….” etc. All in English. Even in this tiny town, where chickens own the streets, a native speaker recognized a Gringo and decided to test out his own half-decent English, even after that Gringo had given the island most of his meaty years and it had taken the love of his life. He knew he would never be seen as Puertorriqueño; others knew it, but his nieces just could not see it. He just seems to belong.

Uncle found the spot with the fried things. I can’t wait to tell you about it, dear reader, but that gets into a discussion about food, which deserves its own entry. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow I’ll tell about food.

From the Enchanted Land to La Isla del Encanto

2009-08-06T23:13:00.001-04:00

On the ride from the airport in San Juan to my uncle’s house in Condado, Puerto Rico, cars swirled around us on the highway like determined gnats. I noticed a lack of license tags promoting one cause or another. I found that refreshing; the stateside fascination with promoting love of cats or dolphins or the teacher’s union via an additional two bucks on the tag fee really has gotten out of hand. On the island, the majority of license tags offer identical dingy white backgrounds, identifying numbers, and the pertinent information: Puerto Rico, Isla Del Encanto. Puerto Rico. Island of Enchantment.

I live in Floyd County, I thought, as a taxi swerved across three lanes of traffic to turn left in front of us. Floyd County calls itself “The Enchanted Land.” I do not bring this up for the purpose of comparison; one does not compare tropical island vs. Northwest Georgia. But the coincidence flashed through my mind, along with brief snippets of my childhood, as we whizzed through another risky intersection. My cousin Mary and I, both currently residing in the land of seven hills, three rivers, two sushi restaurants and a host of loose cannons, flew down for a week-long vacation at the home of our very generous cousins. We went without an agenda, other than to spend some time on the beach cooking from light biscuit to golden pie crust. We wanted to spend some time getting to know our cousins’ lives and loves. We wanted to explore, get lost, drink something cold and eat spicy food. I loosened my grip on the car door, leaned my head back on the seat and got ready to be enchanted.

It did not take long.

Just Because You Can....

2009-07-16T17:25:00.001-04:00

Name the last time you used the word “alacrity” in conversation, dear reader.
How about “supercilious”?
“Hassock”?
What about “staycation”? “Frenemy?”

As I type these last two, a little red worm burrows under the neat Times font on my computer screen. Little does my outdated laptop know, staycation and frenemy were both recently added to the Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, and I did spell them correctly. The Collegiate Dictionary used to separate itself from Webster’s Regular Dictionary by being chock full of words you needed to know to get into college. Now it is chock full of words college kids made up.

Of course, language adapts. Especially in our electronic society, word meanings shift and change with all the fluidity of a bumper car ride; I have explained “gay,” aka homosexual, to my grandparents, and “gay,” happy, delighted, bright, to my kids. Our tendency in recent years has been to imbue our language first with made-up words or phrases, use them for a while, then remake them with a sense of bitter irony or distain. “OMG” may have been clever text when first used; now it represents a self-deprecating, false or sarcastic enthusiasm.

This makes me doubt the staying power of “staycation.”

The head honcho guy at Webster’s, or at least the guy speaking to news outlets, claimed that certain words gained such widespread use in recent years they could not be ignored. Crocs sandals gained widespread use in recent years, too, and a dedicated band of us continue to ignore them. I bet you even money dear reader that within a few years Crocs will be synonymous with the Termites sandals craze of the 1980’s. Good riddance. (Even though Termites were very sexy for a 6th grader who wasn’t even allowed to wear lip gloss).

Words are not shoes. My question runs thusly: If we’re going to be making up words and tossing them into bona-fide dictionaries, can we come up with something a little less lazy than “staycation”? Most of the new words added consist of two perfectly fine if somewhat ordinary words brutally torn asunder, then jammed back together and sent out into the world like a soulless monstrosity. Words like “vlog” and “webisode” demonstrate our disturbing lack of collective creativity. Rather than digging a little deeper for some royal nugget of English’s French or Spanish roots, some buried gem of Latin syllable to polish up and refine to say exactly what we mean it to say, we pick up a few stray easy bits right off the top of our language. We’re cannibalizing what little vocabulary we use.

For a few months, the words wander through popular culture, showing up on “The Colbert Report,” in status updates for Facebook, and then, eventually, making their way into “real” media like “even the New York Times,” according to the eager Webster’s guy. If their plan is to continue to rate that paper as a pinnacle of proper language use, perhaps they should stop feeding it zombie-like versions of hybridized words. Some may say I’m too sensitive on the subject; that in fact, this is just part of the “green collar” culture (another added term) and does a fair job of reusing and recycling; words are renewable resources.

No. I prefer to see this doctoring of our words as short-sighted. Call it “Frankencabulary.”

2009-07-12T11:58:00.001-04:00

Remember family vacations of your youth? They began at an hour so early it could not be defined by clock time; it was still-dark, still-cool, damp-grass early. Dad paced in the driveway waiting for everyone to climb into the packed car so he could fly out of the city before a horde of other vacationers flocked like Nazgul to the highways. In our Dodge station wagon, the “way back” could be a place of privilege or exile, depending on the mood of driver. We used the open trunk bed as a bunk or a fort, a picnic spot for our Happy Meals, and a control tower for any trucker in our sight line on the highway, pumping our arms for a honk or pretending to talk on cb radios to warn the Bandit away from Smokey. All the while, Dad drove.

Twenty years later, seatbelts, i-pods and cup holders for each passenger ease some of the risks and boredom of long car trips. But the anticipation, the general discontent, the leg cramps and the group phenomenon of spontaneous punchiness remain. One other difference between the past and our recent trip up to Maryland for a cousin’s wedding: this time, the kids did most of the driving.

Husband and I, my sister and brother-in-law took turns shuffling between cars and zoning out behind the wheel while counting mile markers up and then back down I-85. Of course the wedding was beautiful, the bride delightful, the weather pleasant, yada yada yada. We met up with extending family and dominated the lobby of a Hampton Inn, playing Settlers of Catan and various card games under the blue glow of a perpetual lobby TV. At some point someone said “Oh, Sarah Palin just quit.” Then it was someone else’s turn to deal. We were in the family vacation bubble. News of the world just seemed far away, and minor. Making sure everyone had the right wedding clothes (one of mine forgot his, of course, good grief, kids these days, etc.) seemed much more pressing than the whims of Our Lady of Wasilla.

On the way home, driving again, the rest of the minivan napped as I tried to make time through North Carolina. As one gets older, I’ve noticed, one begins to appreciate sleep. Sleep becomes an event. One even reminiscences on great naps of the past (that one time on the back porch) or plans how to maximize a sleep experience in the future (I’m going to try tonight with some white noise in the background). As a kid, sleep was just something that happened to you, uncontrollably, and not fully with your consent.

But naps in the car while Dad drove were some of the best naps ever. That little bubble of safety, your family all within arm’s length, your sister’s head nodding gently on your shoulder. Leaning on a pillow propped on the vibrating car door, each exhale made a little cone of haze on the window. On this trip, I checked the rear view mirror more than a few times, keeping an eye out for Smokey and watching my parents sleep as I drove them home.

More Pictures (but back to regular posts soon!)

2009-07-01T11:27:00.001-04:00

Tom McKenzie has some great pictures! Thanks, Tom.

Bits & Pieces

2009-06-27T13:43:00.003-04:00

If you are new to the blog: Welcome! Scroll down for the first days of the trip, or use the navigation bar on river right.

Check back throughout the week for more pictures! And, if you paddled, send a comment with what you'd do different next year. I want to compile a list. For example, I'd pack more sunscreen, ziploc bags and my own jar of sunbutter for lunches.

Working River: Day After

2009-06-27T13:42:00.000-04:00

One week ago 300 people settled their bums down into kayaks and canoes, shoved off from our put-in point in Ellijay, and tossed and bumped along the smooth rocks of the Coosawattee at the beginning of our 92+ mile journey. New paddlers, experienced river rats, lean bodies and chubby buddies, teachers, mechanics, fishermen—people of all sizes, shapes and personal hygiene standards spun out onto the water with the common goal of communing with the rivers. This morning I write from my usual spot in my sunroom, overlooking a very crispy flower bed. My garden and I both miss the water.

The personality of the rivers change from Ellijay to Rome, just as the personalities of our companions changed over the course of the week. The first day found people focused, fast, with a tinge of wariness. The Class II rapids along that section demand attention, and since this was our first day together people were concerned about embarrassing themselves or holding up the group. I know I felt that way. By the end of the run, paddlers leaned back a little in their boats, relaxed with the fast day behind them and miles of beautiful water ahead. We passed palatial spreads and vacation rental property, decks with hanging baskets overlooking the cool, quick water.

The Oostanala River coming into Rome works hard. As the bed widens, the banks grow steep and muddy. Cows blink lazy eyes and the sight of sunburned paddlers munching on potato chips. Blonde fronds of corn silk wave from just beyond the tree line along the river, and farmers run belching generators to pipe the Oostanaula up onto their crops. No more cedar decks cantilever out over the water for summer cocktail parties; instead, bare patches in the river cane offer spots for cinderblocks, a rusty pole, and an orange line down into the water. After a day of splashing, picnicking, Father’s Day fun on Carters Lake, the river gets to work.

This delineation between vacation river and working river surprised me the most on this trip. (Besides the condition of the girls’ locker rooms at Armuchee High School. Poor girls! Where is Title 9 when you need it? Any girl playing any sport for the Indians deserves extra cheers for where she has to rinse off after practice.) I overheard complaints about the rivers from others in our brigade; paddlers unfamiliar with the Rome area. Why can’t you see the bottom of the river, one paddler asked Husband, and does it ever clear up? No, Husband replied. But sometimes it gets worse.

For all her muddy waters, the Oostanaula is still a beautiful river. I think of her as possessing great character, and when you do take a dip (because it is perfectly safe to do so, fellow Romans), you come out sparkling with bits of mica and quartz silt like you’ve been dipped in gold. Gar still flop along the mouth of Armuchee Creek, and turtles stack like pancakes along the smooth limbs of driftwood logs. The river could be cleaner, yes, but generally she’s a healthy old girl. And as Husband and I sat on the bank in Heritage Park last night, our fingers greasy with fried catfish and our shoulders warm with late afternoon sun, we watched her flow by without her 300 recent fans. As good as it feels to be home, I think I could get back in the boat today and paddle a little farther, just to see what’s around the next bend of the Coosa. Leader Joe always says you never step in the same river twice. And isn’t that the best part?

Off River: Day the Last

2009-06-26T20:57:00.002-04:00

Fried catfish. Hot sun. Long week. Now I'm home, and you or your loved ones may be home as well.

Look for a wrap-up Paddle Georgia blog coming after I've got my boys back and a cup of coffee at my home computer in the morning. I will miss our coffee guy, though. And will I still wake up at 5:30 am, do you think?

In the meantime, listen to a quick snippet of Husband & I giggling like kids from our day at Armuchee High School. Go to about minute 16 or so.

Pictures by Joe Cook

2009-06-24T22:32:00.001-04:00

Scroll down for more.

Pictures

2009-06-24T22:29:00.002-04:00

Scroll down for today's words.

Next Generation Paddlers: Day 28 or so

2009-06-24T22:12:00.003-04:00

Housekeeping: Dear Reader, I wanted to give you an entire slide show of pictures but Husband's computer won't let me. Here are a few, a taste, a tease. I'll send more on Saturday morning, from the air-conditioned comfort of my own home!

Here at summer camp for grown-ups, certain times of the day find the residents a bit edgy and irritable, a bit tough and tired, and generally difficult to be around. This time of day usually correlates with our disembarking from the bus, damp, dirty and slightly dehydrated, to find the showers completely full and a line at the coffee guy’s iced mocha station. Only one person in this entire camp seems to hold a permanent smile, an enduring grin and full-faced welcome to any passing paddler. Little Odessa, the youngest camper and the new baby daughter of a Paddle Georgia coordinator, wins the prize for the cutest, smiling-est, cooing-est baby I did not birth. It warms one to the core to see her laughing eyes and fluffy black hair, to see her being passed around and clearly enjoying every lap she happens to grace.

Watching Odessa this afternoon, for the first time I had the thought “I could do this again next year.” Can you believe that, dear reader? What would possess me to live with 300 other people, in June, without decent shower facilities, ever again in my life? Curiosity, I guess. I want to check in with Odessa at a year and four months. She also reminds me of another little girl I’ve watched for a number of years: Ramsey Cook, the vivacious and lithe daughter of our patient Leader Joe. Between the two of them, these young ladies turn my thoughts to the kids of Paddle Georgia. What’s this whole thing like from their eyes?

I miss my boys, so in general, I’ve avoided the children participating here. I am not one of those meet-and-greet-every-child type adults who likes to carry on conversations and find out the favorite ice cream flavor of the boy on the bus next to me. I think kids appreciate me more for not taking up their time, anyway. The kids here seem especially busy and clever at figuring out ways to entertain themselves. For example, today I walked into the gym and found a group of about six of them taking turns spinning each other down the halls in a rolling, commercial sized trash can with a fresh black liner. (When Husband saw that, he said “oh, yeah. That’s what I would have done, too.) They play tag, ducking behind vending machines and crouching below the bleachers. They hula’ed with Hula Girl’s hoops, until they got bored with it.

On the river, the kids play pirates. Sometimes we’ve come upon a canoe of them tucked into a tributary or under an overhanging rock, ready with their pumps to ambush some other boat. We paddled for a while today behind a canoe with three boys in the age range of six to ten. They dipped their paddles in the water here and there, but mostly the conversation tended towards establishing the rules and order of the canoe domain. Farther down river, as the sun burned our skin a light pink and the cows came down the bank to blink their slow eyes and all the paddlers, a boy hollered for his dad. With panic in his voice, he yelled “Dad, Dad! There’s a spider in my boat!” The father responded with a concern as slow and lazy as the river, asking “Is it bigger than your hand?” His son ignored him, claiming “I told you there were bugs in my boat.”

Listening to this, watching the kids find their places and establish a comfortable domain in the midst of all these wacky strangers, one thinks of the next generation of paddlers. What confidence they will have; what comfort with their surroundings and the outside world, as comfortable as little Odessa is now with any fawning adult who springs into her line of vision. They may not remember all of this experience (come to think of it, I hope I don’t remember all of this experience), but it shapes them. I’ll certainly remember one image from the day, even if I don’t know any of the kids’ names. Stopped at a testing site for water monitoring, Husband and I found ourselves alone on the river. From around the bend came a little girl, one of our group, standing on her kayak like a raft. She looked to be about six or seven. Her blonde hair wisped behind her like spider webs; she kept her eyes focused straight ahead, standing with one foot on either side of her blue kayak. Her paddle dipped first on one side, then the other, making tiny whirlpools in the water behind her. We watched her pass us, a tanned sprite, a Huck Finn concentrating on her own private journey. Then she was gone.

Fish Out of Water: Day…I Lost Count

2009-06-23T20:54:00.001-04:00

Quick housekeeping: Tomorrow night I'll post pictures!

From here on into Rome, the river scenery stays just about the same from day to day. Between last night’s margaritas, a heavy rain shower around midnight, and some guy in our campsite with the most obnoxious, thundering, pass me a defibulator type snore, it seemed like a good day for me to check out the other side of Paddle Georgia. After the paddlers load the school buses in the mornings, toting their full Gatorade containers and shiny with sunscreen, what happens back at camp? How does a sudden influx of 300 or so people camping out at the high school affect the town? If Paddle Georgia aims to raise awareness about the rivers, how does our immediate presence impact those directly in contact with this bunch?

The most convenient place to start seemed to be the nearby Laundr-o-rama. Right around the corner here from the high school sits a low brick building about as big as a minute, humid and thick with lint in the air. I took my bag of wet things, some quarters I changed with our coffee vendor at camp, and a good James Lee Burke novel to pass the time. As soon as I had loaded my laundry and settled down on a bench in front of the building, an older black man came and sat down beside me. He wore beat-up old Pumas and a worn baseball cap advertising some auto mechanic. “Hey,” he leaned over to me, “Hey, you know anybody’s got it made?” “Excuse me?” I responded. “You know anybody’s got it made,” he repeated, like a statement of fact. I thought about it a minute, and then said no, I did not personally know anyone who has it made. I know of such people, but none of them are personal acquaintances. I asked him if he had it made. He said no, he didn’t, but he knew a guy who had a nice truck, and that guy probably had it made. Then the old man started to ask me about various people, did I know so-and-so or this guy or that guy. I kept repeating that I was not from Calhoun and didn’t know anybody he was asking about, nor was I likely to even if he kept asking. Finally, he cocked his head at me and said “You one a them people over at the high school, right? I seen them tents. You going out on the river or something? Why you wanna do that?”

A similar conversation occurred after I tucked my clean and folded clothes back into my dirty, odorous and now baking tent. We set up our spot right in a breezeway of the school; from the creative nametags around the doors it looks like we sleep right outside of the art classroom. As I gathered my things to walk into town, the teacher showed up with her cup of coffee and set of keys. She seemed nervous, as if she were invading my space. I tried to communicate deference, since I was so obviously invading hers. Finally she set down her mug and a deep look of concern crossed her face. “I’m happy to have you here,” she started, “but I really don’t think this is a good idea.” I assumed she meant taking over her school campus and tracking river mud through her hallways gave her some consternation, but that wasn’t her issue. “I worry about so many people in that river,” she admitted. “What about all those toxins they found last year? What if you all get sick?”

I walked up the street, past the refurbished train depot that sits like a guardhouse on the edge of downtown, and found a cute little place to eat called JD’s. A sign taped to the window of the restaurant read “Welcome Paddler Georgia Participants.” Inside, a few locals enjoyed French fries and hamburgers, hot dogs and homemade desserts. I watched them, eavesdropping some, as I ate my cheeseburger (so amazingly delicious after a week of slightly warm and damp turkey salad sandwiches). I heard a conversation about a woman losing her job at a local plant. Another table talked about a mutual friend who might be sick. As I paid my bill, I told the waitress I wanted to bring people back that evening for some of the homemade desserts. “That’s fine, hon,” she said. “We’d be happy to have you.” Window-shopping my way back to the campsite, I noticed the welcome paddlers sign taped to many of the doors and windows. I was the only paddler left in town to shop.

People worry these days. They worry about illness, money, jobs, things they can control, and things nobody can. Some in our group operate from an education perspective; they shift into little lectures with the custodial staff or the local Chamber of Commerce ladies about the good this trip does for river awareness. That’s just not ever going to be me. I want the rivers cleaner, too. I guess it just doesn’t feel like my place to come into their town and give them something new to worry about. All I can do is be a polite guest, toss a little money into the local economy, and hope to generate some interest in what goes on between the muddy banks. Because I don’t know anybody who’s got it made, do you?

Moving Day: Day 4

2009-06-22T22:23:00.000-04:00

Tonight’s blog may be a little sketchy, dear reader, as your reliable narrator did find a lovely margarita in the local Mexican restaurant (within walking distance) of the high school in Calhoun, Georgia. After eight hours of sun a shot or two of tequila will do wonders for your sunburn.

We moved camp today. Starting at a red sky early morning (sailor take warning), clanking aluminum tent poles and zipping Gore-Tex echoed across the dewy grass of the Gilmer County High School practice field. On our way down to the one coffee station, we dropped our three tons of stuff off at the semi trailer truck hired to scoot belongings from Point A to Point B while the group spent the day shuffling down the Coosawattee (pronounced Coosa-Wah-TEE if you are a cool kid).

Ah, the group. I mentioned on GPB that this entire experience reminds me of a grunge version of a pleasure cruise. We’re all stuck together, and even though there are different activities on different decks (or gym rooms) for your continued entertainment, we are all stuck together. That means sharing showers, breaking bread at the same time, and facing difficult and unexpected conversations at inopportune moments (such as, “Hey, do you know where they keep the plunger?” while I’m finishing my peach cobbler). This level of intimacy sets my teeth on edge, generally. But it has been interesting to watch certain characters bloom in this environment, kinda like bacteria in a Petri dish.

For example, there’s Locker Room Lady. Locker Room Lady hangs out in the showers, naked, with all her wobbly bits exposed for heavens and paddlers to see. She puts on sunscreen while naked; she discusses her menopausal characteristics while naked; she looks for her lost contact on the floor while naked. She’s earned it, she claims. Like others of her ilk, she believes in a correlation between hard work during the day and loss of modesty at night. “Who would be modest after all we’ve been through together,” she asks, while digging through her mesh bag for a spare travel bottle of shampoo. Sorry, lady, but drifting down a river in a canoe does not count as “all we’ve been through,” in my book. I’m showering in my swimsuit.

Another personality I’ve enjoyed on this trip is Hula Girl. Hula girl brought hula hoops to Camp Paddle Georgia. She’s probably in her 40’s. A forty year old woman brought hula hoops. I know. I thought the same thing. Anyway, hula girl represents that ultra-fun strain of persona who cheerleads every minor accomplishment (“hey, we’re getting on the bus, yea!”) and spontaneously burst into song while paddling across the lake. Most of the time she picks especially annoying songs, like anything by the Beach Boys. Nothing makes you want to flip your canoe like hearing Hula Girl sing “Ba-bra-An-a-an.”

Today I spent the day with the Adopt-a-Geeks, aka Adopt-a-Stream testers. These guys work their way through Paddle Georgia, conducting water tests and chemical analysis tests at various spots along the river. Wise boaters watch the nerds to see if it’s safe to take a dip and wash off the extra sunscreen; if the water testers are dry, stay out of the river.

Big props to the city of Ellijay for taking in all of these characters, and good luck to Calhoun. So far, Calhoun High School rocks. Someone has music playing in the bathroom all the time, which is great for erasing the memory of Hula Girl’s singing, and they even sprung for shower curtains. And if you find yourself in Calhoun, I highly recommend El Pueblito for margaritas on Monday night. Day on the river or not, a drink on the rocks is a great investment, and could really help one get along with all the characters.

Father's Day at the Lake: Day 3

2009-06-21T21:33:00.000-04:00

My dad taught me how to canoe. His older brother, a master carpenter, built his own canoe many years ago, and I think Dad marveled at it so much Uncle Dave finally just said here, take it. I remember sitting in the bottom of that cedar boat, my 1970’s style orange life vest bumping up around my chin, trailing my fingers in the water. Dad appreciates cold mountain streams and smooth river stones and a bump down the rapids, but he also likes a good lake. On a camping trip up to Lake Santeetlah many years ago we loaded my whole family in the canoe, five of us, and set out on an afternoon expedition across the wide expanse of water. About halfway across, we saw the water start to shimmer and vibrate in a straight line from shoreline to shoreline, as a sudden downpour advanced towards us. We kids screamed and pointed, but it was one of those moments where children glimpse the truth of their parents’ utter helplessness. Dad’s rowing power seemed to know no limits; the man could row for hours just tooling around the lake until my siblings and I started picking at each other and wiggling in the boat for lack of other activities. But Dad couldn’t stop the rain.

No rain on Carters Lake today as the Paddle Georgia brigade made our way across this nine mile stretch. This morning, in line for the yellow school bus with the ex-Nascar driver who shuttles us back and forth (and clearly does not get paid by the hour), a fellow paddler commented that lake miles count like dog years: for every one mile on a lake it feels like you’ve paddled about seven. My shoulders attest to that tonight.

Of course, Husband and I like to stretch our dollars as much as possible and really get our money’s worth out of this trip, so we took off from our launch site going the wrong direction. We paddled an extra two miles or so back towards yesterday’s rapids before he finally caved into the readings on his GPS and turned us around. By that time, the thirty or so other paddlers also drifting upstream like salmon returning to spawn figured out this mistake as well. A sense of misgiving followed by sudden epiphany wrinkled through the group at once. Lots of yelling and whistling ensued. We all eventually found the right channel, thanks also to our very patient Leader Joe. (If you read this blog to keep up with the daily exploits of another paddler on the trip, be warned. If you ask your paddler about the lake day and he or she responds with a shuffle and mutter, he or she probably spent the morning in our same situation. It is not an easy thing to get lost on a big open body of water. It takes special talent.)

Some fathers spent today on the lake, pulling their kids around in circles behind a motor boat and yelling critiques of the kids’ skiing techniques. Some fathers spent today on the lake hiding in a shadowed cove, trying to coax a fish onto a hook. (These fathers appeared most content with their choice of the day’s activities). Husband spent his Father’s Day drifting from island to island, curve to cove, as we took our time just studying the lake from a canoe’s perspective. Just like Dad taught me to do.

As we crawled alongside a red clay bank stacked with layers of jagged shale, I caught a glimpse of one father with a skinny blonde boy who looked to be about ten. They were breaking down a campsite together. As they started to tote the last of their gear up towards the road, the boy turned and gave the lake a last look before trotting to catch up to his dad. It made me miss my boys. It made my breath catch with how much I love my dad, and how much I love theirs.

Of Rapids and Chutes: Day 2

2009-06-20T19:20:00.002-04:00

(*Quick note: Tonight's blog comes to you faster thanks to Larry and Kathy Robinson, owners of Cartecay River Trading Company in downtown Ellijay. If you get a chance, stop by and they'll take care of you.)

Today I discovered how appropriate it is that the temporary name of this blog is “Canoe Chronicles,” replacing (for a week) the usual moniker “Minivan Chronicles.” Canoes are the minivans of river travel. Big and bulky, kind of slow, and usually overfilled with all kinds of odds and ends one does not need on the river any more than one needs all that crap in the van while driving from home to work. Canoes carry sets of people, usually two big people on the ends and sometimes a little person in the middle. They serve their function on the river, and what they lack in snaziness they make up for in reliability. If only canoes came with more cupholders.

Kayaks, on the other hand, are the speedy little hybrids of the waterways. Kayak “drivers” dash in and out of the current, paddles flashing silver as they catch the light. I remember an insect we saw today on the river, a cute little bug called a whirligig who spins in quick circles and seems to know his purpose in life. Kayaks move like whirligigs. The perfunctory nods that pass between kayakers and canoers communicate each boater’s understanding of his purpose: I win on speed and finesse, nods the kayaker. Yes, but I’ve got enough stuff in here to make it to the Gulf of Mexico, returns the canoer.

After an oh-so-tasty breakfast of soft scrambled eggs and crunchy orange juice, the navy set out for the first leg of the Coosawattee River. This section challenged most participants; a warning of class II rapids and a hearty sprinkling of sharp-cornered rocky shoals infused our helmeted argosy with a healthy dose of nerves. Between the mandatory helmets, the mandatory life jackets, and the thirty minute safety talk the night before, I think most of the paddlers woke up this morning fairly freaked out. Meanwhile, for all the Paddle Georgia protectionism flung like a net over our brigade, other non-PG river goers showed up on the river in nothing but their skivvies and flip flops—to their eventual detriment. We watched a couple of Gilmer County residents tube down the same chute we bounced through, and I appreciated not having my backside quite so exposed.

Husband and I make a good team in a canoe. We did not flip once, and we managed to avoid the deep raspberry sunburn that some of our Paddle Georgia brigade achieved today. Along the route we watched a Green Heron dart from bank to bank, as if policing the entire brigade. At one point, the river to ourselves, we startled a gaggle of Canada geese who could not have been more offended by the presence of our canoe on their waterway. My favorite bird, a Kingfisher, swooped alongside of us towards the end of our river journey. We navigated a few tight spaces; not so much a part of the river as a part of our marriage. Rocky spots, poor communication—I’ll leave you to carry on with your own metaphors, dear reader. Tomorrow he promises to quit with the mental telepathy he believes I can hear, and I promise to try to learn my right from my left.

Tonight the group shuttles into Ellijay for a Gilmer County hootenanny. The city pulled out all the stops, I am told, and plans to treat us to dinner and a festival atmosphere while all of us who spent the day navigating splashy water wander around in a bleary-eyed stupor. Tomorrow’s agenda puts us on Carters Lake all day, with stops for swimming and perhaps some ice cream at the marina. Lake paddling works like interstate driving: tedious, a little dull, but could be fun if you pick interesting stops along the way. And of course, for interstate travel, nothing beats the family minivan.

Camp for Grown-Ups: The Check-In

2009-06-19T21:56:00.001-04:00

Remember that first day of summer camp? Cool kids, camp veterans, hang out in the drop-off parking lot and play 4-square. They eyeball this year’s crop of newbies. The first-timers try to pull off calm confidence while their eyes dart around, trying to figure out where they are supposed to be. They hold tight to their duffle bags and backpacks.

I’m into hour five of Paddle Georgia 2009, and so far it feels like the first day of camp. Camp for Grown-Ups, with a few adjustments. For example, I don’t think my bunk-mate, Husband, brought any Snickers bars or SweetTarts to sneak after lights out. That works out, however, because I don’t have to go through all the trouble of flirting with the lifeguard, getting burned when he dates my best friend, and then finding the “nice guy” who brings me a bouquet of allergy flowers from the nearby meadow. I skipped ahead to the nice guy part.

That first all-camp dinner brims with bland announcements and safety talks, punctuated by a few well worn camp jokes that the director starts to tell and the camp veterans finish from the audience. We sit on the bleachers of the Gilmer County High School gym tonight while Joe Cook, Paddle Georgia leader, mumbles a few words of welcome and occasionally jumps up and down as if to communicate excitement. Around me sit paddlers from Florida and North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Joe warns one couple from Minnesota “not to come down here and tell us how to canoe.” He fills the role of the genial yet slightly disheveled camp director, quick with a hug or a joke for everyone while most of the time forgetting what he was about to do. Over dinner, BBQ plates and slightly mucilaginous banana pudding, I look out over the crowd and try to guess other paddlers’ stories. Who will turn out to be the camp jokester? The camp flirt? The camper who gets sick/sprains an ankle/gets sunburned so bad he has to go home?

Tomorrow morning starts early, dear reader. Your faithful chronicler will be up at six, count them, six thirty in the morning for breakfast in the cafeteria of the Gilmer County High School. Mmm-yum. Then we hop into our canoes, dive into the Coosawattee, and see who flips their canoe into that white, cold water first. When we return here tomorrow night there will be stories to share and more familiarity and instant comfort between people than each of us has had since summer camp as kids. I only wish there were s’mores.

Good Guys vs. Bad Guys: Prequel

2009-06-19T10:03:00.003-04:00

Tonight Husband and I spend our first night in the tent in Ellijay, official members of the Paddle Georgia brigade. I wish I had bought a pirate flag to sail on our canoe.

Anyone want to meet me at Heritage Park with a pirate flag?

Something about this trip makes me want to be a pirate. Paddle Georgia raises money to save the rivers in this state; Georgia River Network works to raise awareness and educate and lots of other things that good guys generally do. I assume most of the people going on this trip, my co-canoers, will also be the good guys. Good guys recycle and participate in volunteer clean-ups and shop local organic food stores and appreciate hemp. We should all be such good guys.

Why does this make me want to fly a Jolly Roger and be a bad guy?

The environmental movement suffers from a distinct holier-than-thou snobbery. Intellectually, one can sit through Al Gore’s little film and appreciate the wisdom and research, but goodness sakes—wouldn’t we all rather sneak into Transformers in the theater next door? They sound like they are having a ton more fun. Sometimes the refrain of environmentalists’ ballads chime in my head like a mother’s nagging: Styrofoam? What are you thinking? I don’t care if it costs $5 for one cup of coffee, it’s shade-grown! Don’t you flush that toilet, little lady—do you think this world is made of water? Think about the dehydrating giraffes in Africa!

This week I join the good guy navy. I already know I love with the gentle gliding of the canoe, the sound of water over rock, the brief glimpse of a heron leading around the next curve. Perhaps all this, experienced en masse, will also translate into a greater appreciation of the Green Dream. Perhaps I’ll figure out some way to appreciate the good guys without all my personal, non-Green guilt getting in the way.

If not, someone send a jet ski out to a little island on Carter’s Lake. I’ll be the sunburned one with a bandana around my head, yelling “Why is all the rum gone?!”

Bathing Suit Shopping for Paddle Georgia

2009-06-17T20:05:00.002-04:00

Modern society gives us beautiful and surprising gifts; things like tub butter, HOV lanes, and little plastic balls of lemony freshness one can drop down the garbage disposal to get rid of that off odor. Surely someone could also devise a better way for women to shop for bathing suits.

Of course, once a woman passes the age of 35 or bears her first child she no longer sets aside time to shop for the season’s bathing suit. Shopping for that season’s bathing suit only happens when it absolutely must, which makes the whole event more like the peak scene from a Bond film: cut the wrong wire, buy the wrong suit, and the whole mess will blow up in your face.

Many major department stores moved their seasonal swimwear displays down to the lower levels of the store, the levels that dump out into underground parking decks. They do this to eliminate the shopper’s contact with the outside world. Cell phones drop bars midway down the escalator; they’ll be no calling your husband or your sister or your momma to cry desperately about your physique, or lack thereof. You are entirely on your own.

If it is crying you want, the bathing suit section of most major department stores provide some background wailing for your shopping enhancement. A newborn baby or a toddler on a people leash usually comes with a mother who is perpetually “at the END of her ROPE.” Sometimes she her own mother joins her and you can witness generations of poor parenting skills while you browse through MiracleSuits and GodCouldYouBeFatterKinis.

No fitting rooms are ever available in the actual swimsuit section of the basement. For trying on, you must gather your bundle of mesh and lycra and truck over to the “Intimates” section, where Sylvia Sidney guards each room and growls at you if you don’t return the suits to their proper hangers. A hospital-like florescence lights each dingy cubicle, coating your body with a greenish tinge as appealing as the skin on a cafeteria pudding. The last thing in the world it makes sense to do in this room is take off your clothing.

But take it off you do, expect for the bare minimum, so as to save your tender parts from coming in contact with anything that might have touched anyone else’s tender parts. Even the sexiest, most petite model tries on suits designed to cling to her body with stray bits of underwear puckering out of the top and a security tag the size of a cordless drill dragging the whole suit slowly down her leg.

When one finally leaves with the trophy swimsuit, one has no idea what the suit actually looks like in the light of day, on her own body, where she will wear it in front of her friends and family and/or a flotilla of Georgia canoers. Except, of course, she won’t. Because one of the other most clever trends of our modern society stylishly saves her: the tent-like, floor length, bathing suit cover-up. I wonder if I could still paddle in one of those?

Start of the Canoe Chronicles

2009-06-16T14:24:00.003-04:00

Yes, faithful readers, the rumors are true. For the next week or so Minivan Chronicles tries out a greener mode of transportation and becomes Canoe Chronicles. Starting Friday, Husband and I attempt to spend six days together in a small boat as part of the Paddle Georgia argosy.

Let’s parse this a bit, shall we?

What possessed me?

I could spend the week sprawled in a rusty aluminum lawn chair in my backyard, sipping on Bacardi & Cokes and re-reading old Robert Parker novels. Instead, I chose to join the crew of Teva-shod paddlers who will float the 92 miles from Elijay to Rome down the Coosawattee and Oostanaula rivers. There will be group camping, and sweating, and bugs, most likely some questionable food choices, and sixty -year old women who glare at me if I look like I don’t recycle as much as I should. Why?

Two words, dear reader:

Michelle’s. Arms.

I am assuming that to get from there to here at some point along the way I will be encouraged to pick up a paddle and row. In the past, our marital canoe trips consisted of Husband sweating it out in the back of the canoe while I held my parasol aloft and gave villagers on the riverbanks my best Lady Di wave. Wrist, wrist, elbow, elbow, pearls, lap.

But my upper arm region could use a little change, and it doesn’t hurt my motivation to know this fall brings a major high school reunion year for me. To spend a week reconnecting with my best beloved and working on my triceps and my tan seemed too much to forgo.

So stick close, dear reader. It promises to be an interesting trip.

@38!

2009-06-10T10:16:00.002-04:00

Today is my birthday.

Birthdays don’t scare me. Any holiday worth celebrating is worth celebrating with utmost gusto, and birthdays count as personal holidays. Streamers, balloons, big fun food, marching bands, airplane banners, it’s all on the table when there’s someone to celebrate.

And none of my excitement about my own birthday belies a false bravado about aging—the aging part of birthdays pretty much sucks. I learned recently, for example, that when one stays up all night chatting with good people around a campfire, it takes several days to revitalize all one’s 38 year old brain cells. Also, my hands are starting to look kind of beat up, and my knees pop when I jump up too fast.

None of this disturbs me.

The only dark cloud over my birthday today will be the nagging edge of self-doubt, the pesky awareness that perhaps, at 38, I have reached some sort of blank and uninspiring plateau. The five years from 34 to 39 seem like the long, dull stretch of I-75 from Middle Georgia down to Florida; there’s just not that much to see. The major milestones of my youth fall behind me like rest stops: kids? Done. College? Done. Career choice? Done. Grad school? Done. Until I hit the next major milestone of living on this earth for 40 years, it’s all just going along to get along. I’m not gearing up for much of anything.

Well, that’s not true. Tonight the males in my household are making me dinner, cake and homemade ice cream. I’m geared up for that.

The Day I Went to Alabama

2009-05-27T13:41:00.001-04:00

Have you ever been driving down country road, perhaps through the middle of a little country town, and seen a shirtless old guy, leathery brown skin all puckered around his belly, riding an inappropriately small kids’ dirt bike? His knees bow out to the sides to keep them from hitting his wrists while he pedals, and every so often he spits out to the side as if to mark his way, like Hansel and Gretel did with the gingerbread crumbs. Have you ever wondered about this guy’s life, and how he got to a mental place of feeling comfortable weaving all over the country road, sucking on a plastic Sprite bottle and riding an uncomfortably small kids’ dirt bike? Well, over in Alabama this guy works for the Department of Transportation. He’s their road engineer.

Because I love cheap junk and odd people, a student who knows a bit about both suggested we head over to Collinsville and check it out sometime. Collinsville is not that hard to find—just start out toward Centre, Alabama, find a truck with a bed full of puppies, chickens, or rusty farm equipment and then follow that truck. You’ll wind up in Collinsville, along with a good number of tough-looking country folks who look like they could kick the swine flu’s ass. Along with the livestock, farm equipment and grown things, trade day in Collinsville also offers a variety of “things that fell off the back of the truck.” Rows of white socks stacked like marshmallows, industrial size rolls of commercial toilet paper, and poorly shrink-wrapped DVDs and video games cover aged plywood tables. Husband and I talked our trusting son out of a few “bargains,” but we did spend $4 on used books. Books. How elitist are we?

After Collinsville, we got back in the van and headed towards Lake Guntersville to meet some friends. According to the shiny, only moderately grammatically correct brochure on fishing in Alabama, Lake Guntersville is the largest lake in the state. I wonder, then, why the heck it is so hard to find? At the largest lake in the state, one would think we’d just keep driving that direction and eventually fall in the damn thing. Apparently the old guy on the dirt bike had other plans, and his roads took us every direction except toward the lake.

After giving up on GoogleMaps and our 1998 state map of Georgia with a tiny sliver of Alabama on the side, we stopped somewhere on 227 and asked a couple of guys working on the side of the road if they were familiar with the largest lake in the state, and whereabouts it might be located. They were extremely helpful tanned gentlemen who I guess also work for the Department of Transportation—they seemed to be working hard to take down every road sign at the intersections along 227. One of them gave simple directions like “go up a hill and then down a hill and turn where the car dealership used to be,” while the other preferred an alternate route. He suggested we backtrack some, then look for the signs to some other town, then go through that town until we came to a road that could be 431 or 441 or 414, he couldn’t remember quite which, and then turn one way or the other on that. Again, he couldn’t recall, but he was pretty sure it was a left turn.

After a few more turns and several up-and-down hills, we came up to an intersection with a traffic jam the likes of which we hadn’t seen since the Collinsville Trade Day parking lot. Three or four cars in each direction, and all we could see were red lights flashing. I assumed an accident had occurred, as I think most drivers would, and I slowed down out of concern. In fact, it wasn’t an accident at all. With two fire trucks parked on the embankments, the local VFD had stopped traffic in all directions to ask each car for donations to their cause. Worse than Shriners! I pulled up and started to get out some money, because even though I resent this type of fundraising, when you are lost in Alabama the last people you want to offend are the firefighters. Since we seemed to be paying for it anyway, I asked the woman firefighter holding her boot for further directions to the Lake. “Lake?” she said. She had a fluff of gauze hanging out of her right ear, and a trail of what looked like yellow betadine solution dripping down her neck. “LAKE GUNTERSVILLE?” I repeated.

After some back-and-forth, with several lines repeated due to her compromised hearing and the honking of cars behind me, we headed on to the lake based on her revised directions, which involved “heading over to the four way stop and then turning left.” I like it when people say things like “four way stop” when giving directions. It clears up any confusion that might come with phrases like “major intersection,” or “the corner where Pappy used to sell his vegetables before he died back in ’93.”

We finally did make it to the largest lake in Alabama, and once there enjoyed several other adventures which I will share at a later date. My fingers grow weary, dear reader. Of course, once there, we had to make it back. Since we did not have any real clear idea of how we got there to begin with, we decided to go home a different way. We asked a camper in the park for suggestions. That camper asked her neighbor, who consulted with a friend, who suggested another map, which lead us to a ranger station, then a Sheriff’s deputy, then, at dusk, on our way on 227 with directions to “stay straight.” Whatever we did, we were supposed to stay on 227 going straight back to Collinsville.

Who ever heard of a guy on a kids’ dirt bike heading straight? There is no straight. Straight isn’t even an option.

Eventually we gave up, ate dinner in Gadsden, and followed a federal highway up to a familiar road. The feds can’t do much right—we all know that. But when it comes to roads, they’re doing a lot better than the guy on the bike.

Don’t Put Your Trash in My Garden, and I Won’t Grow Food in Your Garbage

2009-05-12T18:57:00.002-04:00

I am on my way to ObamaArms. Michelle Obama, that is.

A friend of ours, a very dear friend, the kind of friend who can also be very useful, dumped a truckload of mulch in our driveway. Due to recent events in our household, the task of carting, shifting and spreading the rich black stuff landed on my list. Husband and I figured the pile to be about five tons. Maybe ten. Okay, let’s call it 50 tons—my job to spread over the little seedlings and sprouts who want to grow and become our food.

A bit about me, for those of you who don’t know me: One might describe me as a willowy blonde, if by willowy one means reminiscent of a willow tree, i.e. arms hang limply by sides and do not appear to have lifted anything heavier than the remote for several decades.

50 tons of free mulch. All me.

That Saturday morning I selected my weapon of choice, a slightly rusty pitchfork, and began to shovel from pile to wheelbarrow (and by wheelbarrow, I mean the back of Husband’s truck). I shoveled for hours or maybe minutes, gritting my teeth against the burn, GI Jane-like, when my pitchfork struck metal.

Dear Reader, are you missing a CD of harmonic tunes? How about a flattened can of Pabst Blue Ribbon? Your empty can of wintergreen dip?

Someone concerned enough about the appearance of their yard decided to rake up their leaves in the fall. Perhaps it was a clear October day, one of those sharp and cool afternoons when the sky is as blue as the default Windows desktop. The unknown raker recognized the need for neatness and order in the yard, yet midway through task he decided to toss his 16 oz Mountain Dew plastic bottle into the leaf pile punctuating the edge of his property. WTH, our unknown raker thought. The city will pick it up, they’ll put it through the big grinder, and it’ll become compost.

Not so, Mr. Raker. The big grinder is no match for your Mountain Dew bottle. Nor can it masticate orange twine for those bales of hay that have somehow become part of the requisite yardscape for autumnal decorations. It does not destroy Dollar General sunglasses, spoons, spare burners from an electric stove, or those extra-long plastic red straws that flare out into a spoon on the end—like sporks but with a straw component replacing the fork. Spraws.

So, Mr. Raker, even if you toss your job-well-done can of Bud into the leaf pile you spent all day raking this fall, you are still a litterbug. (Which reminds me, did we not already have this discussion about how “litterbug” is much too cute a term for the filthy, self-centered, ignorant act of presuming one’s trash belongs anywhere other than a proper waste receptacle? Instead of “litterbug,” how about “Mr. NastyAss”?)

I took care of that mulch pile, and sorted through all the unwanted detritus of your life, Mr. NastyAss. If you need your spoon back, check the county dump.

What My Mother Can Do Like Nobody's Business

2009-05-11T10:42:00.003-04:00

Dominate a game of Scrabble.

Befriend any child, instantly, anywhere.

Grow green things.

Make a Beef Bourguignon that turns your knees weak.

Turn a sterile, impersonal hospital room into a cozy safe nest.

Put any employee of the hospitality industry into a trancelike state where they believe they exist to give her the very best deal on the exact room she wants in their hotel, and they want to bring her cookies and treats throughout her stay.

Make any guest in her home feel like long lost relations who should really take a seat on the screen porch swing and visit for six or seven days.

Get teenagers to talk.

Work magic with travel reservations.

Program not only the VCR, but also the DVR, her iPhone, her computer, and any other technological gadget that may intimidate others of her generation.

Navigate every Target in the land. Probably blindfolded.

Intuit a better arrangement for the living room, and if there is at least one person in the room who looks like they might could budge a couch, that couch is moving.

Navigate a city with almost Jason Bourne-like accuracy within 24 hours of arriving.

Be at home in a city as busy and fast as New York, New York.

Be at home in a city as sleepy and slow as Greenwood, Mississippi.

Remember interesting stories. Or make them up. Who cares? They’re still interesting stories.

Talk me into it. Whatever it is.

Talk you into it, too, probably.

Hug.

Laugh.

The One with the Machete

2009-05-01T12:01:00.001-04:00

The men in my life find some amazing ways to injure their hands. On a camping trip, my father once tried to pull down a dead limb by hooking it with some kind of handsaw and jerking it down—you can imagine how that ended. Stitches, hand surgery, scar tied like a pink ribbon around his pinkie finger. My son used his pocketknife to jab at the force field of plastic packaging around a GI Joe figure. Stitches, blood trail, scar like half-moon in the soft flesh from thumb to index finger. My brother manages to get himself hurt in a wide variety of ways; he could write an entire book of “Drama in Real Life” articles for Reader’s Digest. Recently he skipped a meal and thought he could make one last cut on his table saw. Stitches, hand surgery, scar turning his thumb into a cloven paw.

Eric joined the list last month.

We expanded the garden this year, and keeping out the deer and dogs requires some sort of fencing. He knew where to get some bamboo, so he took a machete and his truck on a Saturday morning and drove out to hunt and gather. I knew where he was going, and I knew that vacant lot also had an abandoned well on the overgrown property. I worried some about the potential headlines: City Employee Stuck in Old Well; City Employee Accidentally Hacks Up Squatter on Abandoned Property with Machete, Then Falls in Old Well.

People with active imaginations sometimes get stuck in a loop of fantastical worries.

But nothing happened, at least not then. He brought me a healthy stack of clean, whispering bamboo stalks. We finished the garden work; I went inside to wash off and left him outside to finish up one last task.

He was splitting some of the thinner bamboo stalks with the machete. It was starting towards dusk—that kind of purple light right before a rainstorm. When I heard him come in, I grumbled about him coming in the front door when I knew his shoes must be covered in dirt, so I went to fuss at him good and proper. Found him in the bathroom, standing over a sinkful of pink water, looking a mite pale.

He’d sliced his right hand to the bone, just below the thumb joint.

The cut looked clean, so we pulled it together with a butterfly closure and wrapped it up. As the week went by, the pain subsided but he became more bothered by it. I suggested he go have somebody look at it. He said “I will if I need to.” He said it he couldn’t move his thumb. I said “Why don’t you have somebody look at it?” He said “I will if I need to.” He complained about it feeling funny. I suggested perhaps somebody could take a look at it. He said “I guess.”

A week after the injury someone besides his wife suggested that he have somebody take a look at it. He went to see the hand surgeon that hour.

Now we know he severed three tendons. Surgery, stitches, cast, physical therapy, and a frown shaped scar staring up at him from his hand, as if his own appendage refuses to forgive him.
For each hand injury, the wives and mothers add to their supply of hand injury stories. My mother drove like a demon out of the woods and into the local Podunk medical center, where she watched inexperienced nurses and doctors poke and prod her husband till he finally passed out. I tell the story of the Battle of Packaging whenever Aj needs reminding about using good judgment. My sister-in-law could make a mint on a comedy tour titled “Guess What My Husband Did Next?”; she spins good yarns and my brother’s insistent corrections for accuracy only make them more hilarious.

I dragged my feet on submitting this blog, on telling this story. While my dad was still recovering from his hand surgery years ago, my mom wouldn’t even stay in the room when he explained the injury to curious friends and neighbors. Now she can unravel the entire episode in riotous detail. She knows he’s safe now, the crisis over. Meanwhile, Dad is the one who turns away from the scene now—wincing at his own momentary stupidity and the risks he took in his youth.

It took a while to feel inspired to write about this one. Even that tiny little bit of my husband being not quite right makes me edgy and worried—he feels so solid and healthy and invincible to me. I needed my crazy mind to stop spinning up horrific tales of possible ways this could go wrong; I needed some normalcy before I could face it in my own way—writing.

Yesterday Eric came home from work and announced he was sick of talking about his damn hand. Just tired of fooling with the whole business. He popped opened a beer and went to see about grilling something, one-handed, for dinner. He seemed fine, just tired of the burden of telling about his own split-second accident. He seems fine.

Now it can be my turn to tell the story.

All done, Twit

2009-04-28T17:34:00.001-04:00

Okay, so...not so much with the twittering. Twitter seems to be nothing more than a group of people announcing that at some point during their day, a thought has occurred to them. Rather than turn to the person next to them and share said contemplation, they picked up their phones and tweeted. After my exhaustive research with the platform I stopped texting in tweets, primarily because I grew weary of my own reductive thoughts. We spend an inordinate amount of time alone, us independent Americans, and all this alone time occasionally produces a thought or idea that seems worthy of sharing. However, flying solo in the minivan from here to there means there is not a soul in passenger’s seat, no one to turn to and share that insightful reflection. It is helpful to have someone sitting next to me because more than just tuning the radio station, my passenger can also turn to me when I share some flashy quip and correct me by saying “yeah, that’s one of the less brilliant things you’ve said.”

Also, one of my favorite writers is Henry James. Henry would have hated Twitter. Why use one word when you can use eight?

“The West Wing” Redux: Blow the Man Down

2009-04-15T16:50:00.002-04:00

After a few reruns of “The West Wing” on Bravo, I starting thinking about recent news events. From pirates to Portuguese Water Dogs, I’m not sure even Aaron Sorkin could write a script this good for our hip president. But what if he did?
Imagine the scene: West wing, soft white walls, lots of dark wood and glass interior doors. Various rooms of people looking busy and important. Our statuesque president walks at a fast clip with his assistant three paces behind. The assistant is a white version of Charlie, the character played by Dulé Hill on the original show. Let’s say Shia Leboeuf.

White Charlie: Good Morning Mr. President.

POTUS: Lights and candles, Charlie!

W.C.: ‘Scuse me, sir?

POTUS: These modern day pirates, Charlie. Scallywags. No code, Charlie.

W.C.: Yes, sir.

POTUS: Lights and candles. The dread pirate Black Bart and his crew overtook a brigandine off the coast of Guiana in 1720.

W.C.: Yes, sir.

POTUS: They wrote a code, Charlie. A code!

W.C.: A code, sir.

POTUS: Article Four of the pirate code states “The lights and candles should be put out at eight at night, and if any of the crew desire to drink after that hour they shall sit upon the open deck without lights.”

W.C.: Without lights, sir.

POTUS: Mrs. O wants me to take Kennedy’s dog, Charlie.

W.C.: Is this the code, still, Mr. President, or are we on to something else, now?

POTUS: Not that I don’t want the dog, mind you. I could care less about the dog. I’m tired of answering questions about the dog. The country is falling apart, I’ve got an economy as rusted out as the Impala my grandma gave me when I turned 16, and all I get from the press are questions about the damn dog!

W.C.: I can see how that would be frustrating, Mr. President.

POTUS: And pirates!

W.C.: Yes, sir.

POTUS: Mrs. O says dogs are like breath mints, Charlie.

W.C.: I’m having a hard time with that connection, Mr. President. You’re going to have to have to walk me through that one, sir.

POTUS: Breath mints, Charlie. You never turn down a breath mint. If someone offers you a breath mint, you take it. They may be offering because your breath stinks.

W.C.: Kennedy offered you the dog because your breath stinks, Mr. President?

POTUS: Does it? Did I brush my teeth this morning, Charlie?

W.C.: I wouldn’t know, sir. I didn’t mean you, sir. I mean….

POTUS: Kennedy may be offering the dog because he knows I need to put this thing to rest. Get on with the business of running the country. You know. Deal with the pirates and all of it.

W.C.: Yes, sir—

POTUS: Here’s the thing, Charlie. It’s a pansy-assed dog. It’s fluffy and curly and looks like a poodle. This is not a presidential dog. This is not the canine representing the Leader of the Free World.

W.C.: I thought it was the girls’ dog, sir?

POTUS: It’s the people’s dog, Charlie. It’s the people’s dog, and the people need a good manly dog. We need a strong dog, now Charlie. We need a Boxer, or a Rottweiler. We need something with teeth, something that looks like it could tear the back seat off any mangy, humanitarian-aid-stealing pirate.

W.C.: And that’s not Senator Kennedy’s dog, sir?

POTUS: Senator Kennedy’s dog couldn’t tear the back seat off a Kardashian, Charlie.

W.C.: That would be a mouthful, Mr. President.

POTUS: Article 12, Charlie: If a member of the crew were to abduct a woman he would be put to death or be marooned. A code, Charlie—even the blackest pirate in the darkest days of piracy had a code.

W.C.: A code, sir.

POTUS: That’s all I’m saying, Charlie.

W.C.: Did they allow dogs on board, sir? In the code?

POTUS: Don’t get smart with me, Charlie.

W.C.: Yes, sir.

POTUS: Where’s my Blackberry? Text Mrs. O. and tell her we’ll take the damn dog.

More High-Tech Gift Suggestions for the Obamas

2009-04-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

So far he’s given a box set of classic American DVDs to Gordon Brown and an i-pod to the Queen. It seems the President and his lovely wife are fans of the practical, take-it-out-of-the-box-and-use-it gift, more than the “lovely gesture” set-it-on-the-shelf category of giving. (Brown grumbled a bit when he went home and discovered he could not play the DVDs in his home player, due to the difference in technology across the pond. Forget about it, Gordie—you can watch most of those movies on Hulu.com anyway.)

I haven’t decided how I feel about our chosen leader giving the Queen an I-pod with a video of Camelot. What do you think, dear reader? See the new poll.

Meanwhile, if this is the route the Obamas plan to go with their giving, perhaps they would appreciate a few further suggestions:

For the president of France, Nicholas Sarkozy: Remember, he married model Carla Bruni. Obviously an admirer of high fashion and healthy physiques, the Obamas could present him with a digital picture frame featuring rolling footage of Michelle & Barack on their Hawaii trip, strolling the beaches in their extremely buff manner.

For President Hu Jintao of China: Radio Shack offers a great deal on a metal detector, which he could wave like a magic wand over shipments of toys and knick-knacks to the US. It would be a nice symbolic gesture of help and hope for the future coming from the Obamas. It sends the message: we know your toys have enough lead to poison a Roman emperor, but we’re still friends. Sorta.

The most popular car in China for all those bazillions of new drivers is a black Buick. We can assume a similar trend will hit India as that country muscles its way into global economics. What a perfect opportunity for the Obamas to present India’s leaders with a Tom Tom. This nifty directional device takes care of the practical needs of navigating through all the cows and crowds, as well as the larger metaphorical aspect of sending the message: We all get lost sometimes, and now you can get directions and not look like a sissy for stopping to ask at the next BP.

For Russian President Dmitry Medvedev: A pair of spy-quality high-tech binoculars, maybe with some Matrix-like night vision feature. He can use them to keep an eye on his neighbors across the way, those pesky Palins.

Before You Get Your Dander Up

2009-03-29T21:41:00.001-04:00

A city commission meeting offers as much in the way of cheap entertainment as a cost-cutting couple out on a date night could want. Comfy seats? Check. Comedy? Check. Drama? Check. Interesting people watching? You betcha. If the city put in a coat check room and a bar, the room at the top of the stairs in city hall would be packed every month.

Even without liquid refreshment, these meetings should be full to bursting. With the threats to end curbside recycling, the backtracking on red light cameras and the various nicks and dings in public safety budgets, one would assume every meeting would be packed with as much dander as a herd of feral cats. Instead, each meeting draws citizens with specific items on the agenda and maybe a few other spectators.

No one expects to drop into the middle of American Idol or Top Chef or any other reality show and have any connection to the contestants. A dedicated viewer watches from the beginning, getting to know all the characters: who is this season’s guy-next-door? Who will be the new airhead? Who has a future, who has plans, who looks like they could really do something and who looks like they are just in it for show? There’s an unspoken agreement among reality show junkies that detailed knowledge of show trivia buys credibility in the obsessive fan circles.

Imagine if local citizens followed the city or county commission meetings with the deranged enthusiasm of online Idol forum members with names like “vot4jus10.” Commissioners like Milton Slack or Bill Fricks may be taken aback, but I think it could work well for some of their colleagues. Someone could print shirts with slogans like “Team Kim” or “Team Evie,” or “Garry’s Driving Club.” Someone could print translations guides for some of the more mumbly or inarticulate commissioners. There would be that nerd in the room who knows more about Robert’s Rules of Order than any self-sufficient member of society should, the citizen who raises his hand and tries to correct the commission when one of them misstates a notion or a second. Area news organizations could shift their focus from straight news to performance reviews of each contestant, I mean, commissioner. The public broadcast ratings on Channel 4 would go through the roof.

Recently, the city commission meetings enjoyed a bit of a ratings uptick over the Etowah Terrace skirmish. The government arm of South Rome would like to build a big brick rectangle over that way for some poor and/or old people; the neighbors would rather they not. The entire picture involves lots more acronyms, name-calling and a catalogue of past wrongs. It is quality drama.

Of course, for the citizens involved it does not feel like must-see-TV. It involves serious issues like property values and quality of life and other big platitudes that make for a good letter to the editor. Watching some of these dandered-up speakers at a recent meeting, I realized that much of their anger has roots in coming to the game late. For some, this is their first dust up with their local elected officials, and they are incensed, outraged, livid, at the audacity of the government to even consider a proposal that would be so outside the wishes of the local citizens. They want copies of letters, meeting minutes, emails, birth certificates, Kroger cards; they want documentation that would help explain and illuminate the puzzling behavior of their leaders. In short, they want to understand just what the hell is going on here.

But it isn’t puzzling behavior. Anyone who follows local government on a regular basis understands that these men and women are not out to get one group or another; they aren’t vindictive or even particularly sneaky. One can trust a government body like the commissions to be exactly what they are: a group of regular folks elected to do the best they can. On occasion, we can trust them to be sleepy or confused, kinda like Paula Abdul but without all the dancing. We can trust them to screw it all up and we can trust them to try to fix it and we can certainly trust them to get it very, very right almost as often as they get it very, very wrong.

Beyond the Etowah Terrace brouhaha, there will be another local melee about something or other; perhaps next it will be the pillage of the land across from Ridge Ferry park by the Vikingesque Ledbetters. Put a commission meeting on the calendar; tune in now when the season starts, rather than trying to pick up the storyline in the middle. It really is the best cheap date night in town.

Best. Musuem. Ever.

2009-03-19T11:35:00.004-04:00

Confession: I love a big truck. Perhaps this buried facet of my essentially hippie personality stems from the boys’ childhood, when we read The Truck Book a million times a night, and rides in the car came were punctuated with cries of either “Look! Cow! Moo!” or “Look! Big truck! Vroom!” Of all the trucks we marveled at, the giant tortoise of them all, the most massive and inspiring is the Off-Highway Dump Truck.

On Spring Break this week, the boys and I drove over to Cartersville to check out the recently re-opened former Weiman Mineral Museum, now the Tellus Science Museum (Tellus is a cool name for a science museum until you learn that it means “Earth Goddess,” which turns the name just a tidge towards the cheesy side). As we drove up the winding drive, I caught a bit of bright yellow hardware gleaming in the sun. Then I heard angels break into song, for lo, before us, parked in all its construction site golden glory: “Look! Boys! Big truck!”

I have been to the Prado in Spain. I’ve spent hours wandering through the High in downtown Atlanta. One weekend in college, we drove over to the Art Institute in downtown Chicago and hustled our way in. I know all the Smithsonians. I saw the Museum of Natural History in New York the same way you did—in that movie with Nicholas Cage and Owen Wilson.

But when Tellus decided to gird their parking lot with this colossal yellow beast, that was a stroke of museum genius.

The rest of the museum makes for a great afternoon with two boys who did not get to go on a Disney cruise or to New York or to Florida like all the “cool kids” for their spring break and who need to get out of the house. In addition to the awesomeness gracing the sidewalk of the museum, they also have one of these:

And a Periodic Table of the Elements wall, with examples. Poor Francium:

And most ridiculous of all, they have one of these:

Which I think is a dinosaur called Puffballus Ferocious Gigantus. I think I read it killed prey by walking up behind it and nibbling toes. When the T-Rex looked down to see what it was (What the…?) it invariably tripped over the lumpy beast and cracked its big T-Rex head. I think that’s what the sign said.

Of course, the museum kept all the good minerals and gems associated with the original museum. They also added a planetarium and seem very proud of the digital status of said planetarium “There are only two digital planetariums in the whole state of Georgia! And this is the only one in Northwest Georgia!” Not that it matters to the average museum goer, because once they turn out the lights and show all the sparkly stars on the ceiling I’m still going to get dizzy, digital fanciness or not.

We stopped by the off-highway dump truck again before leaving. The boys, suddenly full of all the things they needed to “take care of” at home (mostly Wii related), encouraged me to leave. “Come on, mom—say goodbye to the big truck. Bye bye big truck! We can come see it again another day….” Sigh.

With Apologies to Joyce Kilmer

2009-03-11T15:45:00.004-04:00

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree
And in the spring, nothing compares
To the horrid stench of the Bradford pears.

A friend wrote a note to me on this subject:

“I took a horticulture class in high school where we learned how they developed and planted the Bradford Pear trees all over the campus of the University of Maryland, only to watch prospective students choose to go elsewhere because of the stench.”

For every home run hit this season, the Rome Braves will plant a tree on the trail circling the stadium. Last year they knocked about 150 out of the park, so expect quite a few saplings lining the path by the river. This is a great service, a clever way to support the boys’ hitting efforts as well as doing something to green up the tumbleweed badlands out there now.

Just please, Romey—don’t plant any stinkin’ Bradford pears. Imagine visiting the park to gawk at practice, or catching one of the early season games, only to be affronted by the dull reek of a frat house dumpster on a Sunday morning.

These “Frankenstein” trees, as the Sierra Club calls them, don’t even offer a real fruit. The marble-sized nuggets they produce attract birds with low gustatory expectations—like people who eat gas station burritos just because they are there. Since the trees are hybrids, once the birds poop out the seeds Bradford pears mature in their native state: a deadly-thorned thicket of dense shrubbery choking out native species. The trees also grow too fast and top-heavy, like corn-fed country girls.

This town offers enough in the way of olfactory experiences: the sulfur tinge of river on low water days, the wafting odor of various plants and factories, and the pervasive smell of rank frying fat all the way down Shorter Avenue. When we’re really lucky, some areas of town are treated to the pungent odor of a hydrochloric acid bloom from the folks at Berkaert.

If this year’s tree program goes well, perhaps next year we could bump it up a notch. For every home run hit at State Mutual Stadium, the Braves could plant a tree and the city could cut down one of the horrid Bradford Pears standing single file in the bypass median. Then they could replace them with something appropriate to our hometown baseball sluggers—maybe a nice line of ash trees?

Look Behind You

2009-03-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

For a close-knit family, the days before and after a funeral can feel like a black hat filled with little scraps of unpredictable emotions, events and circumstances. We all pass the hat around, pulling out pieces at random, none of us knowing what will be our fortune for the day. You might be the one to pull the “call the funeral home” scrap. Maybe Uncle will get the “confront hidden anxieties” card. Mother usually gets stuck with the “deal with everyone else’s crap” card at the same time everyone else pulls the “stop making good decisions” card, and we all takes turns with the “cry one minute, laugh the next” card.

Yesterday I pulled the “find a deep well of patience” card. Or maybe I should call it the “10 boxes of fruit, Enterprise Rent-a-Car and For Better or For Worse” card.

Back up—remember, dear reader, that the Berry ½ Marathon, 5K & 10K is this weekend? Right, this weekend. Same day as Grandpa’s funeral. My commitment for the marathon is to get a bazillion bananas, oranges, apples, and bagels over to the race. I had to pick up tons of fruit on Thursday—Thursday’s been the day on my calendar this week to Get Stuff Done.

Ha! Says the Grand Scheme of Things.

After Husband and the kids walked out the back door on their way to school and work in the morning, I picked up my coffee and started mentally listing where to start. My parents, who had spent the night with us that night, had to make it up to Cleveland, Tennessee that day to start making arrangements for the funeral on Saturday. There was a service to plan, people to talk to—the usual funeral related details. I planned to make them breakfast, see them off, and then go tend to my fruit, bagels, and finding something in this town for me to wear to a funeral on Saturday. It looked like a jam-packed day.

The night before, my parents had parked their Toyota Highlander behind Husband’s truck. About five minutes after leaving, Husband walked back inside and leaned against the doorway looking at me. “Yes?” I said, thinking he had forgotten something.

“I just wrecked your parents’ car.”

And by wrecked, he means wrecked. The car is probably totaled. Sometimes I think he thinks his truck is a space shuttle, and he needs to slam down the gas pedal to make it take off at enough speed to clear the atmosphere. This is apparently what he did on Thursday morning, Day of Too Much to Deal with Already. I didn’t know a truck could go from 0 to 40 in three feet, but that’s what their car looked like. He bashed the Highlander’s face all in—the front bumper hung off the car and the white Styrofoam padding exposed underneath looked like the dazed, toothy grin of a cartoon boxer. If we lived in cartoons, the Highlander would have had little stars circling over the hood.

As I pointed out to him later, if he had hit a complete stranger he would have stayed to relate insurance information, help them out, do what needed to be done. He’s a stand up guy that way. But since it was me and my parents, he decided the best thing to do would be to take off. He went to work.

He left me to go downstairs, wake up my tired and emotionally drained parents, and tell them their son-in-law had just wrecked their car.

Have you ever had the experience of talking to someone who does not speak your language? You talk, and they look at you with this blank look of incomprehension. That’s the expression Dad’s face held when I told him. Mom, on the other hand, burst into laughter. Hilarious. Laughed and laughed. Dad’s head turned from me to her, still with the blank look. He said “I’m not sure I understand your reaction.” This only made her laugh harder, but now she pressed both hands over her mouth trying to hold it in, which made her eyes water. “It’s…just….a…car…” she said between bouts of giggles.

She’s right, of course. In the Grand Scheme of Things.

But damn, what a headache.

Insurance companies were called, family members were alerted as to the change in the day’s plans. The wrecker service came to pick up the Highlander from our driveway, with the guy tossing out his wrecker-service wisdom: “I guess your son-in-law don’t want his mother-in-law coming around anymore. He hit you hard.”

They still had to get to Cleveland and I still had to get my fruit, but Dad had to go down to the Renaissance Marquis and help his brothers get Grandma ready for the journey. Mom stayed home to wait for Enterprise Rental in Rome to get a car for them to take to Cleveland. Kroger’s on the way home from the Marquis, so I stopped and picked up my 10 boxes of fruit. Now the van smells like warm fruit salad.

I called Mom to see if Enterprise had called. Yes, she said. They’ll have a car for us by 1:00.

Good, I thought. I’ll go try and find some funeral clothes for me, white undershirts for the boys, and all those little odds and ends we usually don’t think to buy. I tried TJ Maxx, but no go.

I called Mom to check in. Enterprise now says 3:00. Maybe.

I went over to Kmart. Nothing there. I called Mom again, told her I was on my way home. The smell of warm apples in the car was starting to make me dizzy.

By the time I got home, Enterprise had completely flaked out and now admitted they did not have a car and probably would not have a car for some time and they had been stringing us along all day. Mom and Dad decided to call my little sister to come pick them up. She drove up from Atlanta, loaded them into her car, and took them up to Cleveland last night.

(Let me just warn others: Enterprise in Rome is terrible. Avoid them. Horrid customer service.)

Periodically throughout the day, I called Husband just to fuss at him. He expertly responded with phrases like “You’re absolutely right, dear” and “whatever you say, whatever you need, dear.” I forgive him; he’s going to get enough ribbing this weekend when everyone is together. (I learned in the course of the day that several cousins and uncles have backed into other’s cars, or backed into garage doors, or generally caused a ruckus in the driveway of their in-laws in years past.)

It’s hard to stay mad--and why bother, when the family gathering of a funeral provides so many other emotions to pick from?

Grandpa Died

2009-03-04T08:15:00.002-05:00

13 April 1914--3 March 2009

Arms of Steel Still Need a Nice Drape Every Once in a While

2009-02-25T21:21:00.002-05:00

Okay, let’s be honest. If we had been in the car this morning driving to work together, we might spend two seconds talking about Obama’s pretend-State-of-the-Union-Address (it was actually an Address to the Joint Session of Congress, which sounds, if possible, even more boring than the SotUA.). The rest of the time we would talk about Michelle’s arms.

We aren’t the only ones. Google “Michelle’s arms” and see how many hits you get. Being a person of amble jiggle in my upper arm region, I am not too excited to see her going this route. I fully agree with the NYT blogger who disapproved of her going sleeveless to what is essentially a business meeting (with the entire country on the conference line). Plus, it’s February. Sleeveless in February is never comfortable to watch, I don’t care if you’ve got the arm chiseling of G.I. Jane (which Michelle kinda does). Double plus—the thing took place at night. Girlfriend. Have you not heard of pashmina? Get the woman a wrap.

If this is February, people, it’s going to be a long fashion season. I’ll give her credit for her good choices so far (expect for the crepe paper thing on inauguration night that made her look like she escaped from a homecoming parade float) but really, I do not want to start bare-arming it in the winter months. If this keeps up, she’ll be setting fashion trends that have us all in our skivvies by May! My skivvies aren’t ready for that—are yours?

Grandpa Update

2009-02-25T21:19:00.003-05:00

Thanks for the support & love, people. Grandpa remains at FMC. Not much has changed. His color looks good--which is one of those things people say, I guess, to offer a distraction from all the awful-looking stuff. Kind of like "she has a pretty face" or "she has a great personality."

I'll keep you posted.

Grandpa’s in the Hospital

2009-02-23T11:51:00.001-05:00

Last week, Grandpa fell. He hit his head. He’s 94 years old. An ambulance rushed to the Renaissance Marquis, where the two of them have lived for a year, scooped him up and whisked him back to Floyd Medical Center. Things progressed from there as I am sure they do in most families; relatives called other relatives, retold news, shared all the current information and frustration at all the unanswerable questions. Schedules were rearranged, plans were made, and family members started to trickle into town.

Hospitals operate in a different time zone. In a room like Grandpa’s, where no one’s life is in imminent danger, where what we are all doing is really just waiting for him to wake up, time moves in fits and spurts. The time between nurses arriving for blood pressure checks can seem like moments, while the empty space between one breath he takes and the next can seem like an eternity. Hospital vigils are one of the few instances where just sitting, unproductive for hours, is not only acceptable, it is expected. Nursing shifts rotate, visitors roam the halls, the rectangle of sky visible from the window changes from gray to black to the washed-out yellow of dawn. Outside the door there is activity; inside the room there is only the labored breathing of an old man and the steady hum of his assorted machines.

If you have spent the night sitting with someone in the hospital—hovering over them, squirming in the reclining chair and trying not to let your thoughts wander towards your own inevitable end—then you understand that feeling of walking out of the double doors in the morning. This is more true if you’ve been the one needing care. No mornings are so bright, so clean, so welcoming as that morning when you leave the stale, medical air of the building. This is another effect of hospital time; it feels like the rest of the world paused while you were in that room, and as soon as the sliding glass doors open to the parking lot, it is as if someone pushed a button to start it all going again. The dark night passes; life resumes.

I hope Grandpa gets another chance to have that morning.

Loving the Boulevard

2009-02-20T08:46:00.000-05:00

About a year ago a local developer floated an idea for a convention hotel near the Braves stadium. A local newspaper published sketches of the building on the front page, below the fold, exactly where I happened to put down my mug of morning coffee. When I picked up my cup, a neat little caramel-colored ring circled what had to be the most uninspired, uninteresting structure since mid-fifties Moscow. A glass and concrete block set down next to the river. The most apt way to describe it? Blah. I dashed off a disgruntled letter to the editor, offended even that the paper would choose to publish such an offensive picture, much less that any company would consider building it. I don’t know what happened with that proposal but I will of course take full credit for saving you, dear reader, from such a horrid architectural destiny.

Now the developing duo of Doc & Dee plan to erect “timeless architecture” out by State Mutual Stadium. Their plans for The Boulevard, a fancy name for a string of nicer-than-average strip mall stores, certainly out-design anything we’ve seen put up recently by other local developers. Doc & Dee’s architects never miss the chance to toss in a gabled roof or a dramatic awning. I wonder if part of their design strategy is to toss a handful of materials into a bucket and pull them out at random to determine what part of the building that chunk of wood or stone or metal might be assigned to cover. There is an aspect of design-by-committee to their projects. Why have one type of siding covering your exterior walls when you can have eight?

I am fully qualified to tease them, of course, because of my excellent architectural design qualifications. I once built a Tee Pee out of popsicle sticks, you know. That takes skill.

Teasing aside (what am I saying—never will I put aside the teasing), I love the interesting jumble of structures they have planned for the big scraggly field out by the Braves stadium. Their enthusiasm and determination that it be absolutely the most super-fantastic awesome-est best string of strip mall buildings ever is also pretty cute. And nice to see, in these dreary, drained days. Best of luck, Doc & Dee. I look forward to strolling along the Boardwalk.

Snark & Malarkey

2009-02-17T18:58:00.003-05:00

On the way into work this morning, my favorite leftist lunatic fringe radio station, NPR, interviewed a movie reviewer with sensitive skin. David Denby wants bloggers to quit being so mean all the time. He feels that snark is ruining the world. Denby feels so committed to the idea that snark is taking the fun out of everything that he wrote an entire book about it, which he would like for you to buy. This would make David Denby feel better about the world.

The OED defines “snark,” noun, as an imaginary animal, which shows how much David Denby knows. “To snark,” as a verb, means either to nag or to snore, depending on your context in 19^th century England. One can be “snarky,” adjective, which means to scrunch up one’s face like an imaginary animal and nag someone who happens to be snoring.

In his rush to write his own book so other movie reviewers will quit calling him a wuss, David Denby assumed definitions not in evidence. I can only assume that he intends us to quit being snarky in the modern sense of the word. The modern connotation, leaving off the animals and the snoring, means “funny, witty, biting, sardonic, sarcastic, ironic, clever and only the slightest bit mean, but only towards those who really deserve it, like fancy movie reviewers who try to push their books on public airwaves.

David Denby feels offended by snark because he feels that snarky attitudes distance us from the reality of the events of our times. According to him, snarky blogs and fake news shows make us hard and uncaring, rather than all hugs and love like his people were back in the 60’s. On the contrary, a snarky blog is just the thing I need to help me feel the motivations of certain popular ~~characters~~ figures. For example, when reading a news story on Bristol Palin stating her opinions on abstinence, a snarky blog is just the thing I need to help me know whether to laugh or cry.

If the OED is right, and snark is an imaginary animal, let’s not let the David Denbys of the world force the poor thing into extinction. Snark deserves at least as much space on the planet as any other animal. Perhaps we could round up all the snarks for David Denby and send them up to the North Pole. They’ll be plenty of space for them up there once we’ve finished killing off all the polar bears and baby seals.

Life is a Highway

2009-02-16T19:45:00.002-05:00

Welcome.

Making the transition from weekly columns in the print version of RNW to this intermittent virtual forum feels like…well, it kinda feels like buying a new minivan. The old model worked just fine. It got us from place to place, right dear reader? We had a few laughs, gasped at a few near misses, and meandered around town (and around the point) more than once in that old reliable format. Now we’re upgrading. Trading in. We’re looking for something that can take us all the way up to the mountains and back while we pass a bag of Doritos back and forth and sing along to the radio.

Regarding this new vehicle, the Minivan Chronicles blog…let’s kick the tires a bit, shall we?

To review: we started driving around together via the RNW column about a year ago. During that year, we’ve chatted (you and I) about public art, recreation departments, hedgehogs and hamsters, Thai restaurants, neighborhood schools, scary movies, movie theaters, community theater, standardized testing, Kroger, date night, bridges, budgets, banks and mothers.

If you just discovered the minivan—hop on in. Carpooling in the minivan should be as easy and fuss-free as a box of Rice-a-Roni. There are only two things you should know up front, lest you be caught by surprise and feel bamboozled: 1) I detest Wal-Mart and mushrooms and I make reference to those two dislikes with some regularity, and 2) I love Rome and Floyd County. Any subject that promotes & enhances the second two while corrosively eradicating the first will eventually find its way into a Minivan Chronicles column.

I think this little baby’s got enough get up and go to get us on our way. Let’s crank her up.

Oh, and I’ve exhausted my supply of car puns, you’ll be relieved to know. No more from here on out. And probably no more Rascal Flatts references, either.