Certified

I just renewed my teaching certificate for the eighth time, which means I've had nine certificates, with this newest one being good through 2016, for a total of 45 years of teaching certification. In the state of Georgia, you must be certified in order to teach in all public schools and most of the private ones. A certificate is good for five years and, at the end of every five years, you have to renew it. The requirements for re-certification usually include evidence of staff development and that you haven’t done anything dastardly to a kid.

But this story isn’t so much about my teaching. It’s about my life. My nine certificates, so far, have spanned 40 years, my entire adult life, and thinking about each one takes me back.

My first certificate arrived in 1971, along with my 21st birthday, my college diploma, and my marriage license. I thought I would teach for a few years until my children came along, and then I would morph into a full-time mom, baking and ironing and donning high heels when hubby came home from work. I remember my mother telling me that I needed to have a college degree in case my husband died and I had to support myself. For that first year after we married, Gary was finishing up Pharmacy School at the University of Georgia and I taught first grade in Barrow County.

In 1976, I renewed my certificate for the first time. By then, Gary and I had moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where we'd had our first born, Melissa, and had then moved back to his home town of Warner Robins, Georgia because his father wasn’t doing well and his mother had just died. We couldn’t sell our house in Greenville, so we lived with Gary’s daddy for about six months. It was during that time that I became pregnant with Billy, which I remember as being a big surprise.  Now, I'm also a little surprised that I bothered to renew my certificate at all,  since what I was intent on at the time was birthing babies and decorating nurseries.  I do remember Gary looking at me in the grocery line one day and saying he didn't know how we were going to make it financially if I didn't go back to teaching.  That's about the time I realized the rules for women had changed from when my mother had given me her college-degree advice, and so I began to re-think my life plan.

My first day teaching after having kids.  Notice the open window.  It was late August with no air conditioning in the schools.

In 1981, during the time of my next renewal, I was teaching full time, I’d just finished my Master’s Degree, and I could tell that something had shifted in me. I was no longer a mother who happened to be a teacher. I was a professional woman who also happened to be a mother. That was also about the time I decided I wanted to go to law school, so I took the LSAT and did quite well, leading me to apply to law school at Mercer University. I was accepted but ultimately decided not to go. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer; I just wanted to have the opportunity to keep on going to school.

 This pretty much sums up my educational philosophy both then and now.

My son, Billy, was in this kindergarten class.

Five years later in 1986, I received my fourth certificate in the midst of working on my Specialist’s Degree and just before my third child’s second birthday. Molly had been a bit of a surprise when she'd arrived, but, although I was certainly happy to have her and loved her just as dearly as I loved the first two, her wonderfulness didn't stop me from my commitment to moving up within my profession.  She probably wouldn't have survived if Barbara, our neighbor, hadn't stepped in to be my much better suited stand-in.  Then, in 1987, I was offered my first out-of-classroom assignment, a job that had me traveling all over the state, training teachers in an early childhood program.  I was pretty full of myself by then and it was wearing on my marriage.

The professional woman juggling work, kids, Molly's blanket, and a cat.

By 1991 when  my fifth certificate arrived in the mail, I was in the midst of a divorce and a doctoral program.  I wasn't traveling as much with my job, but my degree quest had me engaging in a 240 mile round trip to the University of Georgia at least one evening a week.  In 1993, I became an elementary principal, a position I kept for five years.

In 1997, one year after I received my sixth certificate, I finished my Doctorate in Educational Leadership and started my quest to see what my next job would be.  The Dean of Education at Georgia Southwestern State University called and asked if I wanted to join the faculty there.  I did,  and so I left a job paying $80,000 a year for one paying about $52,000.  Although my life as a college professor was much less grueling than my life as a principal, the pay sucked and at some point I realized I'd educated myself into a much lower paying job.

Year 2001 brought an attack on America and my seventh certificate.  I was still at the college and enjoying it, but I worried that my relatively low salary would affect my retirement benefits, so I checked around to see if I could find a job with better pay.  That came with the Department of Education and a move to Atlanta in 2005.  I loved Atlanta but wasn't crazy about the job and what I really wanted was to teach children again before I hung up my professional hat..

By 2006, I had a new job teaching second graders in a wonderful school in Buckhead, which brought renewed meaning to my seventh renewal and my eighth certificate.  I'd come full circle and was back doing what I'd set out to do back in 1971.

So, here I am to now, with my ninth certificate, which came to me the same week as my 61st birthday.  For the first time, it wasn't mailed.  Instead, I had to download it from the Professional Standards Commission website before I could print it.  One of my young teacher friends seemed perplexed as to why I needed to print it at all since it was safely stored on the PSC website.  She didn't know about the other eight, safely kept in a drawer in my living room, evidence of a well-lived (or at least well-intended) life.

I've been contemplating retirement of late, but I'm now thinking I  might stay on a while longer since I still enjoy my job (most days). 

After all, I'm certified for five more years.

How could you not love working with people this size all day?

Why I Can’t Get Any Blogging Done

Today is a school holiday, a free Friday, and while my young teacher friends have taken off to exciting places like New Orleans or the beach, I thought that I could at least get my blog posting done. One I’ve been working on for over a week. This isn’t it.

My current (other) post is about my adult life based on my nine teaching certificates. It’s relatively boring but that won’t stop me from putting it out there as soon as I finish. I did decide that including some photos of me during those times might at least offer some levity. That’s what got in my way today and began my long list of things I’ve done so far that have kept me from finishing that posting. They include:

•  Thinking about the pictures led me to go through my old photo albums on the floor in my hall.
• The floor in my hall reminded me what a mess my house is, which led me, not to cleaning it, but to remembering the stinky wet towels I have in my broken washing machine,
•  Which led to my taking the stinky towels out of my broken washing machine and schlepping them drippingly into my bathroom and washing them in my tub,
• Which led me to taking off my slippers and rolling up my pajama legs and washing my towels the same way people in Italy (and Lucy) make wine
•  Which led me to thinking about my feet and how, if I put on shoes, I could at least take out the trash and then go down into the basement to look for additional family photos I haven’t seen in years,
•  Which led me to deciding to clean out my freezer and refrigerator so that I could gather the old (and I mean really old) food that has been languishing in both and take it down to the garbage cans when I deliver my trash to the recycling bins,
•  Which led me to deciding to gather up all the old pictures from the basement and bring them up and go through them while watching Regis and Kelly on TV,
•  Which led me to noticing a Macy’s coupon left for me on the steps by my friend Susan who lives downstairs,
• Which led me to think about the Old Lady's Macy's, my favorite Macy's, and the fact that I have some birthday money left in my pocket book,
• Which led me out the door and into my car and on my way to North Dekalb Mall.

Note:  I did change out of my pajamas and put on my bra before I left.

Felicity and the Birthday Cheese

I love teaching second graders, at least in part because they are still cute and sweet with their snaggly teeth belying the beauties they will become. They are also quite funny, primarily because they are just making that big step from childish misconceptions to grown-up logical thinking. These little folks are real rule followers,  black-and-white understanders with little interest in or grasp of the nuances of everyday life and personal interactions. It’s this combination of gapped-toothed countenance and developmental stage-stepping that makes them so much fun to teach.

I have quite a few funny second-grade stories but I’m going to relate just a few here. I’m also changing the names to protect the truly innocent.

Jackson is one of my all-time favorite kids, a truly unique human who will use his great intelligence and quirky ways one day to show the world a thing or two.  One afternoon the year I taught him, I’d stayed late to help a mother who was hosting her son’s birthday party on our school playground. Most of the partiers were little boys in my class and when I arrived on the field, they were busy playing a faux football game that primarily consisted of tripping and knocking each other down. I quickly decided that the best thing I could do to help the mom who was busy putting the hotdog picnic together was to keep the kids from killing each other. So I intervened in typical teacher fashion, reminding them of the rules of the playground. At that point, Jackson ran up, looked me straight in the eye and said with perfect deadpan delivery, “This was a whole lot funner before you got here.”

Another great Jackson story happened some time toward the end of that same year.  I was having my students do some basic research using an old-fashioned but still important source of information, that being the good old encyclopedia. I'd counseled them to choose a topic before going to the stack of Britannica Jrs I'd imported from the school library. In fact, I’d told them to come to my desk to run their topic by me before choosing a book to use. Most of the kids were somewhat patiently standing in line, waiting to tell me their topic, but Jackson, being the bottom-line guy he is, was nosing around the A volume, which, of course, was the first book in the set. When I realized he’d skipped a step, I called out to him and told him that I wanted him to have a topic in mind and not just to pick the first thing he came to. He assured me he’d thought hard and had made a good decision and wasn’t just choosing the first thing he saw. A few minutes later when I asked what his topic was, he informed me, with absolute seriousness and commitment to the task at hand, that “aardvark” was what he'd decided to research.

I also have a couple Samantha stories. Samantha, who was in Jackson's class, is bright and creative and already her own person. She’s also quite mature and outspoken, intent on figuring things out and then articulating her thoughts to us all.

One morning near Valentine’s Day, our sharing time somehow turned to how the kids’ parents had met. Some had encountered each other in college, others on blind dates, a couple while traveling in Europe. Samantha told us her parents had met at AA.

A while later, we were talking about the Trail of Tears and what a sad time that was in American history.  I was trying to get the kids involved by asking them how they would've felt if they’d had to pack up and leave home and walk such a long distance. I asked, “What if, while you were walking, your mother got sick and wasn’t able to go on and your father had to carry her?” Samantha responded with, “Well, my parents are divorced so I don’t think my father would carry my mother. Plus, she’s a lesbian.”

During yet another sharing session, one of my boys was telling about the trip his family had recently taken to Florida.  Martha, definitely a developing thinker, then asked the boy, "When you were in Florida, did you see a woman named Helen?" When he said no, she added, "Well, if you go again and if you see someone named Helen, that's my grandmother."

Just a couple of weeks ago, Mrs. Fleckner, one of my colleagues, came into my classroom to tell me something. Her classroom is just a couple of doors down from mine, but because of our schedules, my students don’t see her very often. Mrs. Fleckner is also quite pregnant, and I could tell by the kids' faces and open mouths that they were surprised to see her in this particular state.   So, just after she left the room, I said, “Yes, Mrs. Fleckner is going to have a baby.”   After a moment's silence, one of my sweet angels asked, “Does she know it?”

Which brings me to Felicity and the birthday cheese. My birthday is this coming up this next week and the kids all seem to know, although I swear I didn’t tell them. Anyway, during our break times, there’s been a good bit of whispering and picture drawing from the girls (but not the boys who lean more toward building tall block towers and then knocking them down). Last Tuesday, Felicity, who is a gorgeous and very quiet little girl came up to me during break and wanted to ask me some questions about my favorite things. It went something like this:

 What's your favorite color?

Green

What's your favorite breakfast?

Muffins (I was trying to give her answers she could relate to)

Dinner?

Spaghetti

Dessert?

Cupcakes

I could tell this wasn't going quite the way she wanted, so she started narrowing down her questions, which, by the way, is a good research strategy,  and one that I'm sure Jackson used when he was learning all about aardvarks.

What's your favorite cheese?

Cheddar

What's your favorite sucker?

What are those suckers with the bubble gum in the middle?  I like those.

Blow Pops

Yes, Blow Pops are my favorite sucker.

The next morning, before school, Felicity stopped to ask me if I also like orange cheese.  I didn't mention that I thought cheddar was orange.  I just said yes.

At break that day, when I returned to my desk, I found a piece of drawing paper with "I love you Dr. Mayo" on it.  Under it was a slice of cellophane-wrapped orange cheese and a cherry Blow Pop.  That piece of cheese just might go down in my personal history as one of my all-time favorite birthday gifts ever.

One last story.  This one is about Frank and it will lead me to my ending.  I was watching Frank the other day while I was teaching math.  Frank appeared to be in great agony as if my boring lesson was causing him real physical pain.  He started out by laying his head back on his desk after turning  around so he could at least pretend to look at the board.  Once his head was on his desk, he let it sort of loll there, kind of rolling around like a big old marble.  As I was busy helping my students understand the differences between centimeters and inches, I thought to myself:  Frank is getting ready to roll his head right off his desk and fall out of his chair.  One minute later, there he went, landing on the floor in an embarrassing heap and then jumping back up, pretending, like a cat, that he'd meant to do it.

All of the above serves not only to help me remember what a great and entertaining job I have.  It also reminds me that elementary school teaching is the only profession, other than bartending, where people fall out of their seats on a daily basis.

My Name is Marcia and I’m an Internet Addict

The other morning I got up at my usual time of 4:15 and shuffled to my computer, ready to greet the day. It was dark and cold and dank and a little bit creepy, but that didn’t matter because I had my internet, my world that never sleeps.  Facebook, email, gmail, my newspapers, my favorite blogs. All was well.

That’s until I got that uh-oh feeling. There was a rather nasty message on my screen, something about "can’t find website, please try again.” Oh God, it couldn’t possibly be true. My internet couldn’t possibly be down. After all, I’m a good person.

I sat for a few seconds in disbelief and then I restarted my computer, praying the good old off-on application would do the trick. When that didn’t work, I started plugging and unplugging cables and looking at the little blinking lights on the receiver thingy. I went from Firefox to Explorer, hoping one of them would be at fault. They weren’t. Next, I turned on the TV to see if my cable was working.  It was. For a while, I just sat sadly at the computer, pushing my mouse and fingering the keys, pretending to surf the net, similar to the way little boys pretend to drive while sitting in their daddies’ inert cars. I thought to call my son, Billy, on the west coast because he can usually talk me through these things, but thought better of that stupid idea as it was just after midnight there.

I decided to go ahead and get my bath, hoping to calm myself and find comfort with warm water and a supine position. But alas, calm and comfort were not what descended upon me. As I lay there naked in my tub, I worried about my kids who, although they were all sound asleep, might wake up and post something on Facebook and when I didn’t comment might think I was dead or worse, that I hadn’t paid my cable bill. And in thinking about my cable bill, I began to worry about my bank account, which, because I couldn’t check my balance, might have been infiltrated by someone who stole my identity (after shutting down my internet) and I’d end up in debtors' prison or pushing a grocery cart down Ponce de Leon Avenue and having to use the public library to get online. And then there was the weather. How would I know what to wear to work if I couldn’t check the weather on weather.com. Just looking and sticking my arm out the window certainly wasn’t going to do the trick.  OMG!  It might be somebody's birthday!  How was I to know without Facebook?

Come to think if it, we might have had the end of the world while I was sleeping.  That's probably what caused my internet to be out.  The fact that my cable was working was no indicator because the station my television was set on was HGTV and I doubt if they have anyone on staff in charge of Armageddon, not like I'm sure The Huffington Post has.

I finally pulled my saturated self out of the suds and despondently dragged my wet body back to my forlorn computer, thinking maybe I could at least write something on a Word document, perhaps a sad poem.

Hello World! My internet was back up, right there on my computer where it was supposed to be, proving I really am a good person.

No Eye Deer

I don’t think I know one single woman who can tell a joke. Most men can’t tell them either but they don’t seem to realize it. In my earlier days, I remember standing mute, drink in hand, while some fool monopolized the conversation with a long drawn out story beginning with “Did you hear the one about…?” That doesn’t seem to happen to me any more, but I don’t think it’s because men have stopped telling jokes.  Instead, it seems to be based on a confluence of two things: one, I no longer frequent cocktail parties, and two, I no longer hang out with all that many men.

To me, the funniest stories are the true ones about real people doing stupid things, especially when I know the people doing the stupid things. For example, I love the story about my friend, Cindy, who, when she saw an errant shopping cart heading down the street toward her car, she honked at it. Or the one my ex tells about visiting a small-town doctor’s office as a pharmaceutical rep and sitting for quite a while in the waiting room, being eyed by the patients as they all viewed Jerry Springer via their peripheral vision on the mounted TV in the corner. That was until one of the patients asked the other patient sitting next to him on the naugahyde couch, “Hey Myrtle, didn’t this used to be a doctor’s office before we moved in here?”

I also like the stories where I’m the one doing the stupid things. For example, there was the time my daughter, Melissa, who was about eight, talked me into taking her to the only movie Rick Springfield ever made. As we were walking down the aisle of the theater, I spotted the cute little blond who was our dental hygienist. Since I was a busy multi-tasking mom with little time to spare, I dragged poor Melissa down to the cute little blond dental hygienist and then stuck my fingers into poor Melissa’s mouth so I could show the hygienist the weird things Melissa’s teeth were doing. It turned out the cute blond dental hygienist was, instead, the cute blond lifeguard at our neighborhood pool, a girl who knew nothing about teeth and wasn’t all that interested in looking in my daughter's mouth. She was, instead, quite interested in backing up as I came honed in on her, dragging my slobbering child teeth first with my soggy fingers.

Back to jokes, which I generally don't like and can't remember.  I do, however, recall a few jokes and they are all dirty.  The first joke I remember was from Junior High.  I won't relate the joke itself as it's enough to know that the main character was someone named Johnny F^*kerfaster.

Then there's the joke my father-in-law told me just after I married  his son.  My father-in-law was a small-town doctor, esteemed, no, I should say beloved, by all who knew him.  So it would have to be said that he was a stand up guy in all ways, but that didn't stop him from telling me this joke about the female Hell's Angel who was being interviewed by a newscaster.  The joke goes like this:

Newscaster: Have you ever been picked up by the fuzz?

Hell's Angel woman:  No, but I've been thrown around by the tits a few times.

And then there's this one about when Tarzan first met Jane.

Tarzan:  What name?

Jane: Name Jane

Tarzan:  What whole name?

Jane:  Hole name Pussy.

And here's my last joke.  No, don't walk away to refill your glass.  This one is really good.

What do you call a blind deer?  No eye deer.

What do you call a paralyzed blind deer?  Still no eye deer.

What do you call a paralyzed blind deer with no sexual organs?  Still no f^*king eye deer.

Get it?

The Electrocution of the Bookworm

The bookworm has been electrocuted, but don't be sad. There's a happy ending.

At my request, my brother gave me a Kindle for Christmas and I have to say I like it better than I thought I would. I was intrigued with the notion of an electric book but withheld judgment, waiting to see if it would do the reading trick for me, and so far, it has.

My only problem centers on heft. The Kindle is pretty light weight, which is good. The heft problem has to do with the fact that I apparently gauge the length of a book by its weight and girth, not to mention the number of pages. My Kindle doesn’t give me page numbers and it weighs the same, whether I’m reading War and Peace or a memoir by someone who hasn’t yet lived very long. It does give me the percentage of what I’ve read. For example, my Kindle will have something like 38% written at the bottom of the screen. But percentage of what? Thirty-eight percent of 200 pages or 1000? So, what happens is I’ll be barreling along, happy as that legendary worm eating its way through a real paper and ink book, when all of a sudden, I’m at the end. Okay, the climax was there and the ending was satisfactory and the little percentage sign did say 98, but I’m still nonplussed and undone, and that’s because I couldn’t count the number of pages I had left as I was moving along.

Who would have thought, when I was a little girl, that I would someday read an electric book? I remember hearing about how, one day, we would be able to see the people we talk to on the phone.  This has obviously already happened with Skype and that latest IPhoney thing. I also remember laughing about the notion of smellivision, technology which would enable us to actually smell what Mrs. Cleaver and Aunt Bee were baking in their cozy kitchens.

But an electric book! Who could have envisioned such a thing and why would anyone want one?

I've been a reader almost as far back as I can remember. I recall sitting in the back seat of my parents' car, book in lap, knowing I could read. I like to think I was somewhere around four, but it may have been later. I do remember it was after second grade  when I finished one of my brother's Hardy Boys books, which was too hard for me to fully enjoy, but I still took great pride in my feat.  And then there was the great joy I had as a child, which emanated from my being able to eat the occasional sandwich meal, not with my family around the dining table, but while lying in my bed with a book as my dinner companion.

Other reading memories as a child include:

• 365 Bedtime Stories.  I read this book for years, even when I was too old for it.  My kids have tried to find it to give me as a gift, but, so far, no luck.
• The Secret Garden.
• Those biographies of famous people with the silhouettes on the front cover.  I only read the girl ones: Martha Washington, Clara Barton, Juliette Low.
• Trixie Belden.  I loved Trixie and Honey and the Gang and so wanted something exciting like that to happen in my life.
• The Diary of Anne Frank. Whatever goodness I have in me was bolstered by reading this book at a relatively young age.
• Lost Horizon.  I don't remember how old I was when I read this one but I knew it was one of my mother's favorite books and it became one of mine too.
• Born Free.  My mother actually read this book to me when I was about ten and we spent the summer at my grandparents' house in Phoenix.

In fact, many of of my childhood memories have to do with reading, coming back from the old Savannah Public Library on Bull Street with a load of books, picking through them, deciding which one I would read first.  I was a child who lived a dual reality, one of my own making and the other based on whatever book I was reading.  I could say the same about my adult life, a life made richer by the books I've read. 

And so, I think I'll juice up the Kindle and browse my digital stacks to figure out what I'll read next.  It's nice not to have to make my way to the bookstore or the public library.

But wait, I just found my mother's copy of Lost Horizon, all dusty and forlorn on a bookshelf.  I think I'll pick it up, and read it again.  It feels good in my hands; not too light, not too heavy and it has just a right number of pages. 

Make-Do Manor: The Land of Misfit Crafts

The other day, Molly and I were talking and, as is often the case, the TV show, Hoarders, came up. Now, Molly and I spend a good bit of time assuring ourselves that, despite our poor housekeeping, we are not hoarders. In this particular conversation, we agreed that we couldn’t possibly be hoarders because we don’t like to shop.

However, as I was talking, I looked around my living room and, in doing so, I had to  remind myself  that I can’t seem to get rid of anything that I have glued, snipped, sewn, or thrown. And the worst news is that I give away or sell the good stuff. It’s the failures that I keep and use in my home décor.

Some examples:

On my kitchen floor sit two bowls I made when I was part of a pottery class. One of the bowls was so ugly, I went back and tried gluing small ceramic tiles to it. The bowls are on the floor because I use them for my cat’s water. My cat has been dead for two years.

Hanging on my living room wall are two purses I created during my obsessive purse-making stage. Apparently they are hanging next to my front entry in case I need an ugly purse in a hurry on my way out the door.

Speaking of purses, I have two that I knitted (in my knitting era) hanging next to my computer desk in case I want to put my computer in a knitted purse, I guess.

Just recently, I’ve discovered the craft of making flowers out of organza circles. The best thing about them is that you burn the edges of the circles with a candle, which gives them somewhat of a last year's prom corsage look. I gave a few away to the very tolerant people with whom I work, but, alas, the others are now adorning a couple of my lamps and one ceiling light fixture.

Oh dear, I almost forgot my pillow-making phase.  About ten years ago, I made pillows out of reclaimed tea towels and table cloths.  I'm proud to say that I sold quite a few of them.  However, the leftovers are with me to this day, still attached to their little tags, in case somebody stops by and wants to buy one.

Finally, there's the wire angel on a shelf near me and the three pound pitcher I made out of clay sitting on my desk.  I remember my pot-throwing instructor telling me that you can tell the worth of pottery by how light it is.  Speaking of the worth of pottery, I also remember offering Molly one of my creations as a gift.  I told her she could choose and she did.  She chose the one piece not made by me.

And so, I make do with what's left, fashioning my own unique style and living in the luxury of my own creation.

Snow Day!

Today is a snow day for many of the Georgia schools and the hocus pocus that led up to this wonderful occurrence was almost epidemic, what with the flushing of ice cubes down toilets and wearing PJs inside out and backwards for good blizzard karma. Some prayed to the snow gods and others promised the Real God better behavior if they could just have this One Day.

And if you think I’m talking about kids here, you're wrong. I’m talking about the teachers.

Teaching school isn’t a glamorous job. After all, we work with children and working with children, while often fun and entertaining, isn’t something that you hear about on E!. I can’t imagine Lindsey Lohan doing it or even George Clooney (although I wish he would and that he would do it at my school). The pay is okay and the holidays are a bonus, but the days are pretty grueling, starting out early and ending just when you think you are going to pass out.

But every once in a while we get a Snow Day and a Snow Day trumps martini lunches and expense account dinners every time.  But we teachers must do some work first to earn our Snow Day.  The afternoon before, as the weather prognosticators are wooing us with their predictions, we must high five each other and say things like, "Hope I don't see you tomorrow!" and "Call me when you find out for sure even if we are three feet deep in snow."  Then, as afternoon moves toward evening, we have to get on Facebook and do some minor bitching about our system and our superintendent and how we are always the last to have school called off.  My favorite post from last night was this by an unnamed teacher who happens to teach across the hall from me:

"2 bits, 4 bits, 6 bits a bucket..... If we don't get a snow day, APS can suck it!!!!"  

We finally heard the good news around nine pm and the raucous rejoicing could be heard all over greater Atlanta, some of which actually emanated from the kids.

And so, I haven't changed out of my pajamas today, although they are now on right-side-out and frontwards.  I slept late and took a nap and, so far, my electricity and cable are intact (knock wood).  There's a chance we will have to make up this day some time in the future, but I'll worry about that later.  

Wait! The news people are starting to to announce closures for tomorrow so I need to get back to Facebook.

On a sad note, I did get an email from a retired teacher friend, who said that, although she enjoys not having to work anymore, she sure does miss having a Snow Day.

Stopping by the Sky Mall at 40,000 Feet

My daughter, Molly, and I fly together at least once a year to see our far-flung family in Portland, Oregon. The trip takes forever, especially since I tend to buy cheap tickets that require layovers in places like Phoenix, Denver, or, more often than not, Vegas Baby. So, with the extra two hours for security clearance and then the run from Gate A to Gate Z at any of the aforementioned airports, what should be a five-hour trip often takes nine or more.

By hour eight, we’re full of our complimentary soft drinks, pretzels, and Biscoff cookies; we’ve watched our little television sets and read our little books and we’ve snickered at the other flying weirdos making their way up and down the aisle. In addition, we’ve tried to eavesdrop on the couple in front of us who are fighting like the Sunnis and the Shiites, and we’ve poured over the electronic movable map, wondering why the front end of the little fake plane is in California while the back end is still in Arizona.

Hour eight is when we finally become miserable and punch drunk enough to pull the Sky Mall catalog from the seat pocket in front of us, all the while wondering just what type of people would actually purchase items they couldn't possibly need or even get any time soon, many of them quite expensive, while careening through the stratosphere.  We then rank our favorites from the merely sublime to the outrageously ridiculous.

Below you will find my rankings from our last flight (with Molly's input), employing David Letterman’s reverse scale to indicate people's mile-high decision-making, veering headlong from bad to worse, or more likely, from drunk to drunker.

10. The Lord Byron Wooden Side Table (made of faux books) for $249.  In addition , you can purchase a William Shakespeare Resin Sculptural Bust to go on top for $24.95.  Who needs real books when you can have a side table made of giant fake ones,?

9. The Thomas Kinkade Pop-Up 6 Foot Christmas Tree for $199.96.  Six foot tree pops up instantly and is pre-decorated with original artwork by Thomas Kinkade - This item manages to be easy to use and tacky at the very same time.

 

8. Bigfoot, the Garden Yeti Statue, captured in designer quality resin and hand-painted for startling realism. $98.95.  This one is Molly's favorite.  Startling realism in a Yeti?  Seriously?

7. You Don’t Have to Hide this Litter Box - Our Hidden Litter Box looks like a real clay pot, complete with an attractive Artificial decorator Plant for $129.95.  From the picture, it'd say the looking like a real clay pot isn't actually true.  It looks more like one of those rubber things outside restaurant doors where last-minute smokers park their cigarette butts.

6. The Hollywood Cookie Diet for $19.99. “I am in the Marine Corps and I lost 10 pounds and 2 jacket sizes in 2 days.” Walter M., Beaufort, NC. The personal testimony says it all.

5. Electronic Feng Shui Compass for $199.99  Working with electromagnetic fields,this hand-held feng shui compass helps you find favorable energetic conditions at home or anywhere needed.  Energetic conditions? What does that mean?  I thought if I placed the head of my bed opposite my door, I'd be okay.

4. Your Names in the Sand for $39.99. Personalize your passion for the beach with one of these unique prints.  This is a fake picture of fake people's feet in fake sand and you can add your own fake words in the middle of it .  Why would you take a real photo of yourself and your loved ones on vacation when you can pay these people for a fake one?  Plus, the feet are white.  I guess if you are a person of color or if you tan well, you can pull out your crayons and fix that.

3. One Dozen Roses, Hand-dipped in 24 K Gold for $598.99 (Save $120).  John Gotti is the only person I can think of who might actually buy these and I think he's in prison.

2. King Tutankhamen's Egyptian Throne Chair for $950.  I don't think I need to add anything to this, other than assuring you it's not an original.

1. Potty Train Your Cat Faster than most People Can Potty Train their Kids – Three Step Cat Toilet Training System for $59.99.  I ranked this number 1, not because it has to do with  urination,  and not because I don't like cats. In fact, as a cat lover, I understand the problem of the truly smelly sand box.  I even understand deciding to buy something as stupid as this.  What I can't understand is deciding to buy something as stupid as this while hurtling through space in a giant human-filled winged thermos on your way from Daytona to Dubuque.

Okay, you've seen my list. You now know how I feel about shopping at the Sky Mall.  I do have to say, however, that on my last trip, I did find a cute step ladder than folds into a chair.  It was only $149.99 and it's based on a really famous library chair belonging to Benjamin Franklin.  If I can't have King Tut's chair, maybe I can have Ben Franklin's step ladder.  

But I think I'll wait until the next time I fly to Portland to buy the really cute real replica of a Ben Franklin step ladder.  It just seems to be the easiest way to do it.  But I wonder: Will the flight attendant bring my chair/step ladder to me in mid-flight or will I have to wait until we land?  I do hope it's mid-flight so I can use it to get my luggage out of the overhead bin as we taxi toward the terminal.

Looking for the Awesome

The other day, my daughter, Melissa, and I were heading to the local outlet mall with her two kids, who also happen to be my grandkids. Miles and Georgia were in the backseat, legally secured in their newfangled, regulation, impossible-for-Grammy-to-buckle-without-cursing, car seats. Georgia was asleep, holding best stuffed bud, Beary Manilow, in a death grip, and Miles was complaining because it was taking too long to arrive at the restaurant where he was going to get the juice we had promised him.  This delay was based on the scenic route we'd embarked upon, out of Portland, through Troutdale, where Melissa and Trevor had celebrated their wedding, then down by the Sandy River, and up the side of a small mountain.

“Juice! I want juice!” Miles reiterated the iteration he’d iterated quite a few times during our journey. Truth be told, he would have been much happier at home riding his Christmas bike, but, at three, he doesn’t really have much of a say about how he spends his days, other than belting out “Juice!” every few minutes.

In an effort to hold our squirmer off for while longer, either Melissa or I had promised, at some point, that we were going to see something really awesome at the top of the mountain, yes indeed, employing the overused term that’s become such a cliché. What that awesome thing was we had no idea, but what we wanted was for him to stop fussing long enough for us all to be able to take in the beauty of that mountain and that river and the time we were spending together, just the four of us snugly snapped into our warm seats in Melissa’s mom-mobile on a wet and cold Oregon December day.

A bit more time went by and we discerned that the complaint department had apparently closed down in the back and we thought Miles, thumb in mouth and Gankie tucked under arm, had dozed off to snore in unison with Georgia by his side.  With new confidence, we drove a little higher up the mountain, enjoying the quiet and the companionship, mother and daughter all grown up. 

However, just as we were lulled into a faux serenity and some entry-level contemplation, a little voice emerged from the back seat.

“But where’s the awesome?”

After a chuckle at Miles’ cuteness with his childish but point-on question, I stopped to consider the fact that we often spend so much time overusing a term based on a dearth of a more varied and thoughtful vocabulary and  attempting to make the mundane noteworthy, that we overlook the minor miracles, the real awesomeness we happen upon, but often fail to note, in the hurry up of our everyday lives.

So, with that in mind, I challenged myself to notice and document the truly awesome for the rest of that day.  And I did.  

It included:

• the deli lunch with the promised juice and hot dogs and lots of crackers, many on the floor, while the kids, in turn, sat on the table.
• shopping for light-up shoes and packages of socks and finding one-year-old Georgia sitting, legs straight out, on the floor at the front of the store trying on a Norwegian knit hat from the sale bin.
• fifty-cent rides with a serious Spidey and mirthful Big Bird.
• driving back over Portland's gorgeous bridges with both kids asleep (and quiet) in the back.
• walking in the rain to Pattie's Home Plate later in the day with son Billy and granddaughter Cami for a most unusual dinner.
• coming back home, wet and happy, to listen to Cami's two-year-old patter about her day and her papa and her mama named Mary.

 

Cami after our walk in the rain

I know there was more to that day that I could have commemorated, but I'm still new at looking for the awesome.  I'm hoping this Omar Khayyam treasure, recently shared by a friend, might help me to stop and ponder the wonderful.

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

Awesome.

Henry and the Runaway Christmas Tree

Henry was our early marriage dog. As with many newlywed couples, anxious to nurture something but knowing it was too soon for that thing to be a baby, Gary and I adopted Henry. Gary was doing his pharmacy residency at McCook’s Pharmacy in South Macon, an area known as the Rutland Community. Being a good old boy, Gary fit right in at McCook’s, a place where patrons brought in cooked-to-perfection turnip greens and warm-from-the-garden tomatoes to share with the people who worked there. At some point, someone mentioned that a lady had some pure-bred beagle puppies she was going to sell for next to nothing, so we went and picked one out .

I have lots of stories about Henry, about our moves with him to South Carolina and back, about the fence we bought to keep him in, about all the flowers he pulled up in that fenced-in yard, about the many times I had to bail him out of the pound when he dug under that fence. But the story I’m going to tell now is one that’s appropriate for the season and one that exemplifies what typically seems to happen to my best laid and made holiday plans.  And that story is the one about Henry and the runaway Christmas tree.

Henry was a sweet dog, but stupid. When the human babies started arriving, he accepted those annoying hiccups in his life plan pretty well as little ones grabbed his hairy nose and black dog lips and tried to ride on his speckled back. However, I do believe that all this mayhem did serve to make poor Henry a little nervous. If he’d been a person, he might have developed a nervous tic or perhaps a smoking habit. In addition, the more crowded the house became, the less attention Henry received from the people who had promised to cherish him just a few years earlier. Whereas, before the kids came along, he could depend on a bowl of clean water and fresh gruel each morning and evening, that expectation eroded as changing diapers and spooning baby food took energy and focus away from caring for the dog.

But, in spite of his less than stellar cerebral cortex, Henry adapted.  He took to eating off the floor, taking advantage of the messes the children made, the milk-engorged Cheerios, the dust-covered cracker crumbs, a tasty bit of pre-chewed weenie.  As for water, he got it wherever he could find it, from mud puddles, toilets, the occasionally-mopped kitchen floor.

As the holidays approached one Christmas and preparations were underway, Henry was in dog heaven with actual baking going on and butter and chocolate dropping in giant glorious globs upon the floor.  And then there was the real tree, adorned with candy canes, chewy and delicious despite their cellophane wrappings, and the tree itself sitting in its very own reservoir of water.  Not stopping to reflect on the unfairness of a newly-arrived stalk of future pine straw getting preferential treatment over the family dog, Henry, pragmatic soul that he was, decided to feast upon the waters that sustained that Christmas tree.

This water poaching went on for quite a while with my knowledge until ultimately the irresistible force met the immovable object when Gary happened upon Henry in mid drink on none other than Christmas Eve, its divine self.  A chase quickly ensued as Henry's collar, striving as we all do to make a some kind of connection to another entity, linked itself to one of the strings of Christmas lights that gave the tree its shine.

All I saw as I arrived from the kitchen, covered in sugar and sweat and wondering just what this particular ruckus could have possibly been about, was Henry and the Christmas tree rounding the corner and careening down the hall in an attempt to find refuge under a bed. 

At that point, if he could have, if he'd just had the words and the cultural history and a brain large enough for rote memory skills, Henry might have had the courage and the abandon to render the following from Clement Moore:

But I heard him exclaim, ‘ere he drove out of sight,

"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

And although he didn't, I do have all those things and, since I'm not hiding under a bed with a Christmas tree ruefully attached to my collar, that's exactly what I offer to you.