Friends Today

My Aunt Susie, who is 95, has lived her entire life in Waycross, Georgia. She never married, working as a typesetter for the Waycross Journal Herald for forty years. Aunt Susie was, and is, a reticent soul, almost dysfunctional socially, but she was the only grownup I ever knew who had a pen pal, and Susie’s pen pal was from Holland! As a child, I couldn’t imagine having a friend who was from a place so far away. And get this, Susie actually traveled to the Netherlands one time to meet her friend in person! Keep in mind this was in the late 1950’s when people just didn’t travel like they do now, at least not people who lived in Waycross. After she got back, when asked about her trip, she said it was “nice.”

Fast forward 50 years. When I started blogging six months ago, it was mostly to entertain myself and my more tolerant friends with my views on life, and to have a place to store my memories for my kids and grandkids. Little did I know I would become the Aunt Susie of my generation as I began to interact with people all over the world. I submitted a couple of my stories to a site called The Elder Storytelling Place, and, before I knew it, I had a small gaggle of greathearted friends who supported my efforts at writing just as I began to do the same for them. I now have a friend who lives in England, another from Scotland, another who lives her life in Newfoundland, and one who spent many years in Israel. And I've gotten to know folks who live all over the good old USA, north, south, east, and west, all people whom I consider to be friends although we’ve never met face to face.

One of those friends is Mary B. Summerlin, who was my first blogging cyber buddy. We first conversed about one of her stories in which she told of growing up on a farm in South Carolina. She mentioned that her grandfather’s last name was McGee. I too have a passel of McGees hanging from my family tree so I wrote something in the comments section of the blog and soon heard back from her. We haven't figured out yet if we are related or not, but the point has became somewhat moot as we've turned into fast friends. Although Mary is from Poughkeepsie, New York, her family home is in Starr, South Carolina, a mere 100 miles from Atlanta. As we were getting to know each other, we also discovered that we are both divorced, and both teachers. We are also mothers and grandmothers, and we have similar perspectives on the ways of the world.

What has been even better for me is that Mary has a few years on me, so I get to see her as a mentor and guide as I feel my way forward in life. I think, deep down, I would like to be Mary one day, retired from full-time work, but still engaged and busy, full of energy and questions and plans and projects.

Just the other day, I was able to feel what Aunt Susie must have felt all those years ago as she made her way from Waycross to Amsterdam, although I had only to drive to Starr, South Carolina. That's where I had the chance to meet my new old friend, Mary B. Summerlin, when she was visiting her family farm, which is now run by her brother and his family.

I have to say my kids thought I was a little bit crazy when I told them I was going to meet my online friend in a place called Starr, South Carolina. I think they thought I'd accidentally happened upon an over-the-hill same-sex dating site. And I'm sure Mary's family was wondering why this total stranger from Atlanta was stopping by their house and generally getting in their way on a hot summer's morning when they had other things to do.

But Mary and I had very few qualms and it took no time at all for us to warm up to each other since we were already friends. We toured the house (much to her sister-in-law's tolerant dismay) and talked about writing and storytelling, as Mary is a powerful storyteller and I’m a fledgling writer. Mary told me about her childhood in that very house, and her memories brought back my own memories of my childhood home, very much like Mary's, where I lived until I was four and where my Aunt Susie grew up before she ever even thought about traveling to Holland.

Mary's childhood home in Starr, South Carolina

Marcia's childhood home in Waycross, Georgia
both were built by a man named McGee

The very best part of my visit was riding on the tailgate of Mary’s brother’s truck while we toured the farm. I felt just like a kid again, holding on for dear life to the back of that truck, as we retraced the steps she took as a child. I already knew a good bit about Mary's childhood through her writing and storytelling. I knew of the Big Gully and had an idea of where Laura Francis had lived, but on that very special day I was able to see those places in person with my friend, Mary, who, although she lives far away, has so much in common with me.

I know people are opining that the internet is making us all antisocial and isolated, but without exploring cyberspace I would have never met Mary or my other blogging friends around the world. So, I don't feel isolated at all. In fact, I feel as if my circle of friends has expanded exponentially and I've learned that people who are far away can feel quite close.

Maybe that's what Aunt Susie was trying to tell me when she said her trip was "nice."

Home

I flew home to Atlanta the other day from my home in Portland. This is the first time I felt Portland to be as much my hometown as Atlanta and leaving was difficult. I know I’m lucky to be able to spend so much time with my grandkids while still having a space for myself. I’m also lucky to be able to live in two incredibly beautiful cities and in two spaces I truly love.

Below are things I miss about each particular place when I'm not there.

Portland

1. my grandchildren
2. hanging out with my very own grown kids
3. toys underfoot
4. my tiny front yard that I don't have to maintain
5. wandering around St. Johns
6. Sauvie Island
7. the rivers and bridges
8. my big bathroom
9. the weather in summer
10. my gas fireplace (even in summer)
11. Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens
12. being able to walk to the grocery store
13. my new Portland friends
14. Trevor's cooking
15. dancing with the family
16. not working
17. family field trips
18. happy hour in Grammy’s Garden
19. a new state to explore
20. a new life
    

Atlanta

1. closer proximity to Molly
2. family furniture
3. my job
4. my car
5. Friday early bird dinners with Allison
6. my old Georgia friends
7. going to the movies with Allison
8. not having to walk to the grocery store
9. my sunroom
10. the old ladies' Macy's at North Dekalb Mall
11. my ottoman
12. Publix Supermarket
13. Piedmont Park
14. walking through Ansley Park and by the High Museum and Atlanta Symphony Hall
15. my view of the Atlanta skyline
    
16. movie star neighbors
17. not having to put the trashcan out each week
18. my purple bedroom
19. an old state with many memories
20. an old life
    

My experiences in each place and space are quite different. My Atlanta home is old and historic. My building was completed in 1917 and Margaret Mitchell once lived in it. My furniture is comprised of mostly old family pieces and my decor is shabby not-so-chic with lots of things (the good, the bad, and the ugly) I've created and collected throughout the years. My Portland home is new and "green", built in 2004 to improved standards. My furniture is all new (at least to me) and the decor is still sparse, although I'm working hard on adding my own personal tacky to it.

My Atlanta home is private. What I put down stays down and all dirt is mine. My Portland home is communal, with kids and grandkids in and out, the toilet seat up and down, the refrigerator opened and closed (and occasionally slammed), toys and kid paraphernalia everywhere, sometimes a dog named Lou.

And so, I get to live two lives, both of which embrace and reflect my loves, my interests, and my crazy quirks. On the west coast, I get to be up close and personal as I pretty much think of myself as a full-time Grammy. And then on the east coast, I get to find my solitude and pursue my other selves.

Okay, I know it’s difficult to feel too sorry for me, but I have to say that the transitions are tough, and I'm not just talking about time zones. I have a hard time figuring out which keys are which and I can’t remember if I have any toilet paper or where I keep it. I can’t recall which aisle my Diet Cokes are on in each of my two grocery stores or where are my favorite TV channels are under which remote-control buttons.

And then there's the letting go of the little ones. It was especially hard this time as they are getting old enough to realize I’m leaving. Miles had a meltdown when it came time to say goodbye, his outward falling apart mirroring what I was feeling inside. My heart felt broken in two, each half situated on opposite sides of the continent.

Because there are so many people without even one home, it does sound a bit self serving to be complaining about "oh what a burden" two are, but it's the straddling that's difficult, and I know it would be even more difficult if I didn't have the means to have comfortable surroundings at both ends of the straddle.

So, since I’m not ready yet to give up either life, I'm back to feeling lucky, and I guess I’ll just continue to try to appreciate each place and experience when I'm in the middle of it all and to remember that the transitions will be confusing and painful.

The Pirate across the Street

For ten months of the year, I live in Midtown Atlanta, in a building that, until recently, housed a person who is now an international fugitive, and where, each spring, I can look out of my window and watch men in various shades of lavender passing by for the Purple Dress Parade. For the other two months, I live in St. Johns, a community in the northern part of Portland, Oregon, which, I’m here to say, is even weirder than Midtown Atlanta.

St. Johns (note the lack of apostrophe which no one can seem to explain) was named after James John who, in 1865, laid out the original town on the tip of the peninsula created where the Columbia and Willamette Rivers converge. Most stories report that the Saint part of the name came to be because old Jimmie John, a recluse, was one of the few men who didn’t frequent the local brothel in those early days.

But enough about history and back to now. As I’ve already reported, St. Johns has its very own one-legged Elvis impersonator. In addition, there’s the local schizophrenic people call the Telephone Man, so named because he stops at each of the few remaining pay telephone booths in town to “talk” to Sharon Osborne about her Diet Coke needs. There’s also a guy who meanders up and down Smith Street each day, reading the very same very thick book, and another fellow who walks around town sporting a giant iguana that sits on the back of his neck. And then there’s the pirate who lives across the street from me.

I chose St. Johns for my second home because it's close to one of my children (and just about a 20 minute drive to my other) and because it’s a place where I can survive without a car. Lombard Street, which is St. Johns' main drag, is two blocks from me, two easy blocks, not Atlanta blocks. There’s a grocery store and pharmacy in town; there are several restaurants; there’s a library one block from me, and three playgrounds within a half block either way. There’s also an antique store where I bought my kitchen table and my bedroom dresser, and an Enterprise Rental place close enough for me to walk to in order to pick up a car should I decide to rent one.

I've related some of the good things about St. Johns and there are lots more, but it also has its seedy side. Two rocking chairs and my grandson’s bike were recently stolen from my daughter’s front porch and it seems that a drunken prostitute one time threw up in my son-in-law’s car, which was parked in front of their house. Of course, none of that sounds much different from Midtown Atlanta.

But nothing of the above, the good, the bad, and the ugly, compares to having my very own pirate living across the street. I know he’s a pirate because he flies a pirate flag from his home’s yardarm, and his pirate rowboat is moored on his front lawn.
He appears to be a very nice pirate, and hard working. He leaves each morning in his haphazardly painted truck and comes back each afternoon after doing what I imagine to be some kind of construction work. He grows roses in his garden and even offered a pretty red one to my son as he was going to his car one afternoon after visiting me. My pirate would most likely be found wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirt, rather than a tricorn hat and knee breeches, but, then again, he might save those for St. Johns’ very own Pirate Festival, which I will have to miss since it occurs in September.

Because St. Johns offers just about the last affordable housing in Portland proper, quite a few young families are deciding to make the move here. I have to say I admire these current-day pioneers, people who see this odd place as a good place, a place where they can raise their children and make an imprint and a difference. They could, instead, be living in planned communities where everyone looks the same, with the same thoughts and attitudes, with everything new and nothing different. I'm sure those places feel safer than the grittiness of St. Johns, a place that, at times, reminds us that life can be hard.

But the longer I live, the more I know that, while we don't want to go around looking for trouble, difficulties and despair can find us at most any time, in any place. We can't insulate ourselves from the cares of the world, and living a careful life won't keep hard times from coming our way. Bikes get stolen and hearts get broken, no matter how carefully we plan, no matter how hard we try to protect ourselves and those we love. So, we might as well spend some time in an interesting place like St. Johns where we can, at least, have someone like a pirate living across the street.

It's enough to make you say ARRRGH.

Invasion!

My legs are bruised from knee to ankle and my ice cream is missing. My home is littered with debris and my furniture is all askew. There are smears all over my windows and my blinds have been violated.

Was it a burglary? A hate crime? A hostage situation?

No, it was a tiny (not tater) tot convention, an invasion of the Grammy snatchers. It was my grandkids.

Although they try hard to maintain what's left of my sanity, the longer I’m in Portland, the more things my kids think up to do so that I can keep their kids. But I’m not complaining. The primary reason I make my twice-yearly trip to the West Coast is so my grandchildren can realize how wonderful I am.

And they have! They think I’m great! That’s because I let them eat chocolate and run rampant. I don’t make them go to bed and, one time, I let Miles watch South Park when I couldn’t find his mother-approved wussy cartoons on television.

My kids don’t dare complain because I’m free and available and I don’t do drugs or text my boyfriend while I’m babysitting. They do get a tad testy about the chocolate, especially when I give it to the little overstimulated urchins right before they come to pick them up.

And I do love those grandchildren of mine, their sticky sweetness, their hugs when I don’t even beg, their goofy smiles, and their childlike, yet discerning, retorts.

But, boy, do they wear me out. Just getting them in and out of their car seats is an exercise in fortitude. Back when my kids were small, we just threw them in the car and prayed for their safe arrival. Now you have to have big biceps, strong thumbs, and a tolerance for cursing just to shoehorn the little tykes in and buckle ‘em up.

And now, you can’t just send your kids out of the house and lock the door. You have to slather them with sunscreen having something called an SPF and make sure the Child Welfare people aren’t being called when they bang on the window when their protection wears off. They're like mini vampires, waiting for the sun to go down before they can venture out.

And then, there’s the park. They always want to go to the park. Even Georgia wants to go to the park, although she often falls asleep in her stroller on the way. Cami’s favorite thing to do is to go up (but not down) the slide. How can a kid who isn’t even two figure out what the rules are so she can break them? Miles’ favorite thing to do at the park is to strip and pee. Right there in front of God and derelicts. My job is to first tell him no he can’t pee at the park and then to shield him from perverts and the police as he carries on with his plan.

When I have all three of them over, it’s like inviting drunken sailors to a tea party. They lurch around and fall down; they fight over the smallest things, pretend to mourn their bad behavior, and then break out into furious tears over the slimmest slight, all the while swilling and spilling and spewing outrageous claims. The rules of war are followed as they adhere to a stringent pecking order: Miles takes advantage of Cami; Cami gets the best of Georgia; Georgia cries; and Miles gets back at Cami. There seems to be no real fear of retribution (at least while Grammy is there), and to put it bluntly, they act just like children.

Bath time is my favorite time, partly because the little imps are somewhat corralled. I've bathed two at a time; never all three. I have bathed Miles and Cami while Georgia tried to climb into the tub. They are so much fun when wet, although they can be slippery. They love to pour the dirty water into cups and suck on the washcloth. I’m pretty sure there’s some urinating going on in there but, so far, no number two.


Since my time with my grandkids is relegated to two weeks at Christmas and six weeks in the summer, I'm realizing that each West Coast visit I make becomes like a snapshot in time. Never again will these three look, act, or be like this, and when I have a moment or the energy to think about it, it feels so precious and makes me a bit melancholy.

But, although I would like to sit and mourn the sweet but sad passing of time and the delicate texture of experience, there's some dried spaghetti I need to scrape up off the living room floor and a diaper in the trash that's starting to stink.

Thank God.

Let It Roll

There are moments in life when you just feel lucky, when the confluence of time and place and experience and event bring you to an occasion that’s purely sublime. That's what happened to me last night.

The time was early evening; the place was the Portland Waterfront Blues Festival; the experience was time spent with two of my grown children; and the event was the chance to hear Little Feat for ten bucks and two canned goods (being Portland).

With me at my advanced age, it had to be early and it had to be easy. I no longer like to stay up late and I don’t look forward to much of anything enough to go to much trouble to take part in it. But the band was playing at 6 and I was in Portland anyway and the kids were willing to drive me and park me and help me navigate the crowd. In addition, the non-Grammy-related parental units were willing to solo cover grandkid bath and bedtime for the evening. And then there was Little Feat. Little Feat is part of my history.

I grew up in a family with much happiness and great humor but very little music. I remember my daddy playing church music on the radio on Sunday mornings, more to annoy us than anything else, and then there were my begrudgingly-taken piano lessons on Wednesday afternoons. I remember my mother introducing me to a recording of Flight of the Bumblebee and Daddy’s favorite song being Alley Cat, which he kept wanting me to practice so I could play it at his funeral. Sadly, or most likely fortunately, my daddy died and was memorialized without me at the keyboard just behind the preacher.

One of the things I truly loved about Gary Talbert, when I met him, was his passion for and understanding of music. He introduced me to Otis Redding, the Allman Brothers, Bonnie Rait, Ray Charles, Van Morrison, Rickie Lee Jones, and so many others. One of those others was Little Feat. I don’t have much of an ear for music and very little rhythm in my soul, but there was something about that particular band that spoke to me. I think it was the syncopation, rhythm so compelling I was able to get over myself and become lost in it.

And so, in a perfect storm of cosmic forces, there I was with two of the three people I love most on earth, caught up again in the magic of Little Feat. I cried with the first chord of Dixie Chicken and stood mesmerized through Fat Man in the Bathtub with the Blues. When they started up Let It Roll with that unforgettable hallmark frenetic whoosh, I screamed so loudly even the dancing dervishes stopped whirling to look at me. And then I remembered Jan Waybright playing leg guitar to that particular song on the road to Athens some time in the mid 80’s, and it seemed like yesterday.

There I was again, dancing and moving, dare I say grooving? Who cared that I was sixty and had arthritic knees and a throbbing toe? I certainly wasn’t the youngest person there, but I wasn’t the oldest either. After all, the band started up in 1969, just a year before I met Gary, so their emergence and my musical education and appreciation grew throughout the same decades.

It wasn’t until after I got home and saw my picture with my loose-skin-spot-speckled arms raised in Feat-struck appreciation that I remembered my age.

Rock 'n Roll Arm of Shame

I wonder if Stevie Nicks has this problem.
It could explain the shawls.

For a moment, I felt just a tad short of ashamed, thinking I shouldn’t have been there at my age, not acting my age with a little disorderly conduct in a public place. And then I thought: screw it. I was having fun and doing something I enjoyed with people I love in an absolutely gorgeous setting. It's a night I'll always remember and something I'll add to my Absolute Joy list.

What could have made it better? Having my youngest with us would have created my perfect kid triad, which tends to be when I'm happiest and most in the moment. Having the Big Kat there, in spite of his geezer know-it-all horse's-assed-ness, would have been fitting and even fun, since we all have him to thank for the music in our lives. Having the grandkids there? Probably not. It was a night for grownups and a chance for me to remember my youth and consider my many blessings.

Despite my loose skin, I am a lucky woman.

Making a Life

Over the last few days, I’ve run into some folks who have reminded me that people come in all sizes, shapes, colors, dispositions, disabilities, and talents.

The first example came to me because I had reserved a rental car to use when my friend, Allison, flew in from Atlanta for a short visit. As I was walking into the Enterprise office to pick it up, I noticed two older women talking in an animated fashion to the agent. One of the women was dressed in African attire while the other was in typical middle-aged western-hemisphere woman garb, AKA the pantsuit. I have to say I was a little annoyed because they were standing in the doorway and didn’t notice I was trying to get through. Pantsuit Woman was talking very loudly while African Lady was mostly looking on in relative docility.

Because I am a natural voyeur, I listened in as the ladies took their places in line ahead of me and talked at length with the rental agent. At that point, I noted that the loud talking Pantsuit Woman had a rather strong accent; one which, I was pretty sure, emanated from an African nation and not Waycross, Georgia. Docile African Lady was still letting Pantsuit Woman do all the loud accented talking. Then I noticed that Pantsuit Woman had a hearing aid and was also gesturing to African Lady in a way that helped me realize they both were deaf, or at least hard of hearing. So, with that information, my brain began cataloging those two human beings: female, old, African, and hearing disabled. At that point,I started thinking about how difficult it must be to live in another country, a country with a different language; furthermore, how difficult it must be to be deaf in another country, a country with a different language; and furthermost, how difficult it must be to be old and deaf in another country, a country with a different language.

It was only after more creepily voyeuristic, albeit flawlessly nonchalant, watching and listening to the ladies that I came to believe that they were a couple. It wasn’t just the clichéd notion of one of them in feminine attire and the other in a pantsuit so much as the way they interacted with each other, like any old married couple. I could be absolutely wrong about the type of relationship they had, but it was definitely close and familiar. So, then I thought: good for them! They had found each other and made a life and lived long enough and well enough to barge in front of me and annoy me at a rental car checkout counter as they hammered out the best deal they could so they could go on with their trip and their life together (whatever that life was).

The second example came a few days later. My daughter, Melissa, and I were walking back from dinner when an older man came tooling down the sidewalk in one of those motorized chair/cart things. Before long, he had engaged us in a conversation which pretty quickly led to the information that he was an Elvis impersonator. After a couple of songs (Hound Dog and Heartbreak Hotel) and more than a modicum of jokes, he offered us his business card, which we, of course, asked him to autograph. In the midst of writing his Elvis on the back of the card, attempting to use his knee as a portable desk, the man suddenly looked up in feigned horror, imploring, “Where’d my leg go?” At that point, we realized he was missing an appendage incredibly vital to anyone who wants or needs to emulate Elvis, the King of Pelvic Gyrations.

Melissa was acquainted with the man, whose real name was Les Small. Known around the neighborhood as Elv-Les, he'd been a general greeter/helper at the local Safeway Store, but she hadn’t seen him since he’d lost his leg. Using the information on his business card, we later looked him up online and read his bio, finding that he'd been an Elvis impersonator for years, even back in the days when he'd worked at his day job as a tree trimmer. His website showed a couple of photos of Elv-Les with what appeared to be a full set of extremities, but said nothing about his current lack of leg.

In thinking back about the two great examples of flourishing personhood I'd recently run into, I was reminded that most people do the best they can in this life with the cards they've been dealt, and that we not only get a life, in many ways, we make a life, which is something I need to remember as I go about making my life.

And so, the next time I don't want to take part in something fun because my feet hurt or my back aches, I'm going to think about Les Small, the one-legged Elvis impersonator, who doesn't let his disability keep him from doing what he loves in the life he's made. And when I want to complain when people mumble over the phone or bemoan the fact that I can no longer negotiate interstate highways like I used to, I'm going to remind myself of African Lady and Pantsuit Woman, who must navigate their lives in a world where they are most likely often misunderstood.

With that, I'm also going to try to remember that life's best lessons are often presented in unusual gift bags, packaging that, at first glance, might disguise the prize inside. Some, I've found, even come with a pretty good rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel."*

You can find out more about Les Small on http://elvisnostalgia.com/

Absolute Joy - My Top Twenty List

As I'm getting older and realizing my days here are numbered, I do try to seize the day, to be in the moment. Usually it doesn’t work, but occasionally it does. Being here in Portland with my grandchildren, holding them, and actually being able to feel their chubby feet and their very busy little vibes, make me want to stop time in order to frame the feeling, to be acutely present in the absolute joy I'm experiencing.

All of this thinking and feeling leads me to the notion of documenting, in some way, memories of great happiness I've felt throughout my life. I worked diligently to narrow them down; most are generic, a few specific. The majority are from recent years, but not all. And please know that I realize how self serving this is, how all about me it is, and why on earth would anyone else want to read it? If you decide to pass this one by, I won't blame you. However, I do wonder if my list will encourage you to contemplate your list.

Here is my Absolute Joy Top 20 List at this particular moment in no particular order:

1. Certain songs and singers - Fly Like a Bird by Boz Skaggs, Wayfaring Stranger by Johnny Cash, almost anything by Van Morrison or Lucinda Williams or Tracy Chapman ( I just added this one) or Neil Young (I've got to turn off KPIG)
   
2. Holding my babies and grandbabies for the first time
3. Sunrises and sunsets - I know this one is sappy and probably a cliche, but it's true
   
4. My birthday dinner at Tierra with Molly, when we talked about her dreams for her future and I drank too much wine and she drove me home
5. A Gospel Christmas each year at Atlanta Symphony Hall
6. Sitting at a tiny Italian restaurant in Athens, Georgia, eating lunch, while my dissertation was being printed
7. Watching my grandkids dance
8. Barack Obama winning the presidency
9. Finding my copy of Arizona Highways with the article I'd written in my mailbox
10. When Allison preached my mother’s funeral at the edge of Oak Creek
11. Many Christmas mornings, especially one at Tybee some time around 1995
    
12. The beach in winter
13. When someone likes my writing
14. Being with my kids
15. When I create something new and I'm happy with it
16. The first time I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk
17. The beginning of Lonesome Dove and the end of A Prayer for Owen Meany
18. Most cats
19. Christmas lights, especially the colored ones, especially when they are in bars
    
20. My solo weekend trip to Paris
    

I thought hard about this list and it feels right. People who know me well will say, "There's Marcia going on again about such and such," but that's a good thing because, if I blab about it to the point of embarrassing myself, then I probably love it, and what I love defines me.

In addition, with the exception of being with my family, almost everything on my list happened when I was by myself, and I don't know if that means I'm ultimately happiest with just me, or, if it could be that, without the distraction of others, I'm better able to stop and appreciate the wonderfulness of a particular moment.

So, I guess supreme happiness for me would be to meet up with a cat at a beach-side bar at sunset on Christmas with Van Morrison on the jukebox. I could show the cat pictures of my grandkids dancing and, perhaps, something I've written. I just hope he'd like it.

Proximity Worry

My kids call this syndrome “proximity bitching” but it’s really more about worrying than anything else. It seems the closer I am to my grown kids physically, the more I worry, which, I guess, factors into increased bitching (at least from their perspective).

Since, in any given year, I spend just eight weeks or so in Portland (two at Christmas, six in the summer), leaving forty-four weeks in Atlanta, poor Molly carries most of the burden of my anxiety. I worry about her school work, her health, her sleeping patterns, her money management, her cats, and her (lack of) cooking skills.

However, for the eight weeks I’m in Portland, Melissa and Billy are the lucky recipients of my hovering. Just recently, Billy had a series of severe headaches a doctor semi-diagnosed as cluster headaches. As you might guess, within twenty-four hours, I was an internet expert on the topic and the poor guy not only had the headaches to suffer through, he also had his mother texting him every few minutes with stupid messages like“how r u?” or "rate pain 1-10". In addition, after just a couple of days following Miles around, I’m already obsessing over him running out into the street, as if Melissa doesn’t handle Miles and the street all months other than Grammy months. Molly, on the other hand, is getting some time off as I have no idea what graduate projects she has due or what she’s burning for dinner.

I think proximity worry partially has to do with time zones. When I’m in a different time zone from my kids, I don’t fret as much. It’s almost like they aren’t living in real time. For example, when I wake up in Atlanta, it’s still the middle of night in Portland and I figure most people don't do anything really stupid just before dawn. Conversely, although Molly stays up too late and sleeps too late (in her mama’s opinion), it doesn’t bother me as much when I'm on west-coast time, since our personal clocks seem better synchronized from three time zones away.

When I was a young adult, having achieved the status of working woman, wife, and mother, I believed my parents were done with worrying about me, and they certainly didn’t seem to be overly interested in how I was doing, even though we shared a state and a time zone. They retired and traveled, had a cabin on a river in south Georgia, and finally built a retirement home on that same river. Of course, those were the days before cell phones, texting, Facebook, twitter, and Skyping brought immediate information on the good, the bad, and the ugly of us all into virtual proximity. As my parents were merrily puttering down the inter-coastal waterway, they weren't constantly checking their Blackberries for updates on my bad judgment.

I do remember my father being incredibly mad at me when Gary and I split up. Except for wanting his sympathy (which I didn’t get), I believed it really wasn’t my father's place to have an opinion on my screwed-up life. Boy, do I now see things differently. To continue with my somewhat wet analogy, Daddy thought his little girl was safely moored and battened down, and then, all of a sudden, she was back at sea, and unfettered at that. I now know his new worry probably caused his river putter to sputter a bit, knowing I was knee deep in life change.

Just recently, I was talking to Molly about my obsessive worrying and she pointed out that it probably has something to do with loss of control. When my kids were little, I drove them to school, took them to the doctor, and fed and bathed them. Although I did none of those things particularly well, I still accomplished them in my own way, in my own time. Now, my parental tasks involve mostly sitting and waiting - and worrying - and texting some.

I know mental health experts and well-meaning others would tell me to get out, to get a life, to volunteer, to get a turtle or a bird, to pray or meditate. I do use those stress-relieving and centering strategies (other than the turtle, the bird, or any real volunteering), but I have this weird philosophy, which pretty much says if I worry enough, nothing bad will happen. Take income taxes. If I obsess enough over how much I'm going to owe, the outcome will be good and I might even get some money back. Of course, an accounting course could also have a good outcome in that I would learn how to handle my taxes and what exactly to expect, but that accounting thing just sounds so boring.

Back to my kids. The one time I didn't worry about Molly and her health, she ended up in the hospital with emergency gall bladder surgery over Christmas vacation. Even when she showed up at my house with yellow skin and glowing eyes, I didn't worry, or at least I packed it away to be opened later with my winter coat and gifts for the grandkids. We boarded a plane for a cross continental flight with a Vegas layover and landed just in time for a breakneck trip to Good Samaritan and a family Christmas dinner in the hospital cafeteria.

And so, it seems I'll most likely continue to obsess and fret and do smart things and dumb things, worrying when I shouldn't and not focusing on real problems when I should. I'm pretty sure I won't be making any major changes as to how I navigate the world at this late date, so I'll just keep on putting one step in front of another as I stumble through life, figuring it out as I go along. It's not particularly pretty and it won't win any prizes, but so far, it's worked out pretty well.

Except for that layover in Vegas followed by emergency surgery in Portland part.

Don't Run this One by the ASPCA

Walking back from the Safeway Store a couple of days ago, I saw two squirrels having sex, which was a first for me. I have to report that they were doing it squirrelly style. When I was finished staring and giggling somewhat maniacally, I started thinking about all the crazy animal stories I have from when our kids were growing up and, come to think of it, even before they were born.

Gary (prior to attaining his Big Kat moniker) and I married in 1971 and lived in Athens while he finished his last year of Pharmacy School at UGA and I taught first grade at a rural school a county or so away. I somehow ended up with a cat (as I tend to do) and brought him home to our small college apartment. All I can say about that particular cat is he was given a name so politically incorrect I can’t write it here, and he turned out to be what I can only call a “pungent pooper”. His tenure in our new family in its tiny space was, therefore, short lived and, before long, I’d given him to one of my students who, hopefully, lived on a farm large enough for no one to notice how bad his @##$ smelled.

When Gary finished Pharmacy School, we moved back to his home town of Warner Robins and, of course, I got another cat. With our new apartment being a step up from our college home, we now had a small patio just past our back door, an area that afforded this new improved cat the luxury of relieving himself outdoors. In order to allow him self-scheduled ingress and egress, we left a window open above our washer and dryer in our small kitchen.

Not long after moving in, we invited Frank, one of Gary's college roommates and our local high school football coach, to bring his new girlfriend over to our apartment for a cookout. In preparation, Gary had opened the sale-priced steaks we'd purchased at the Big Apple supermarket and laid them out on top of the dryer to marinate. A few minutes later, I walked by and noticed one was missing. I'm not going to describe what happened next but I can report that Frank never knew the steak he so enjoyed later that evening had been extricated from the space between the dryer and the wall where the cat had apparently dropped it as he tried to climb out of the window with it, or that it had been washed off to remove any errant lint from its pristine raw beefiness and then re-marinated to its current perfection by the grill master himself.

And then there was Henry. Henry was a beagle we got from who knows where about the same time we purchased our first house. He later moved with us from Warner Robins to Greenville, SC and back again, all the while putting up with about a thousand cats, a bird, a rabbit, several hamsters, and countless fish. As with all free dogs, Henry, during his lifetime, cost us a small fortune in pound bailouts, vet bills, a fence we paid on for years after we’d moved from the house it graced, and the friendship of a couple of neighbors. If I’m remembering correctly, he lived to be around twelve or thirteen and, by the time he hit his twilight years, he was pretty worn out with milky eyes and the need to sleep 23 out of any given 24 hours.

The only exception to Henry's old-age slow-down was when "love came a calling". During the 70’s and 80’s, boy dogs didn’t get neutered like they do now, at least not by us. I guess we thought it was the girl dog owner's responsibility to cover canine birth control.

Henry's final fling wasn’t too long before he died. I remember I was very pregnant with Molly and, somehow, I got the word he was on the prowl yet again. I found him inside a neighbor's fenced-in yard, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to charm a dog in heat. Since the neighbor wasn't home and the gate was locked, I somehow managed to climb the fence in my advanced pregnant state, pick up the horny fool and throw him over the fence, and then climb back over myself.

Cats, during those years, were too numerous to count and I can’t remember most of their names. Skeeter was one of the early ones and, after him, Gary began calling all our cats Keeter, which must have been some kid-generated derivative of the original name. At one point, Billy had a parakeet named Jaws, who lived in the dirtiest cage known to birdkind. One day, Gary went up to Billy’s room and told him to clean the filthy cage. Just a few minutes later, Billy was found nonchalantly reading a Mad Magazine on his bed. The cage was, indeed, somewhat clean, but all the smelly bird excrement from the cage had simply been transferred to Billy’s trash can, which was just inches from his nose at the end of his supine body.

A dirty cage, however, wasn't Jaws' biggest problem. A few months later , our circuit panel went out in our house and it took several days for a new one to be installed. During that time, one of the Keeters must have become somewhat unglued, without electricity for opening his cat food cans, because he attacked Jaws in his cage and tore out all his tail feathers. Billy was much more distraught over his bird's posterior nakedness than he had ever been about his substandard living conditions. Poor Jaws was pretty pitiful himself as he couldn’t sit on his perch with his balance being all off. The most interesting part of this story is that Jaws grew new tail feathers within just a couple of days, leaving the the remorseless Keeter a bit confused and more than a little frustrated.

Next came Spunker, the rabbit. We won Spunker at the county fair and I was stupid enough to actually bring him home. Even though Spunker was supposed to live in a cage on the back porch, the mean little pervert spent a good bit of time in the house, holding us hostage, stealing dog food from the pantry, growling if we got too close, and hippity-hopping into the hall bathroom to watch Gary pee. When he eventually died, mostly of neglect, Gary told us he'd buried him in the woods behind the house, but the kids reported seeing him fling Spunker's stiff body by one of his rabbit ears, sort of like a boomerang, into the wild blue yonder. I guess the good news is that he didn't come back.

The final pet I'll tell about in this too long story was Herschel, the hamster who was named after the great running back for the University of Georgia. Herschel lived for quite a while, long enough for a cleaning lady to quit because he kept looking at her when she cleaned the bathroom. She said it was either the hamster or her and that one of them had to go. She went.

Herschel became lost in the house one time and we couldn’t figure out where he was. One night soon thereafter, I was awakened around 11:30 by God, who told me to go downstairs and watch the Johnny Carson Show. I swear this is how I remember the story. As I was sitting in the den, appreciating Johnny's monologue, I heard a scratching sound from behind the wood paneling. After just the slightest hesitation (remember God was in on this), I got a hammer and pried the paneling from the wall, and out came Herschel, who looked pretty happy for a hamster. He did, however, appear to be a paraplegic, which made sense having fallen through the wall from his upstairs habitat. Herschel lived a while longer after that in his bathroom kingdom, without his cleaning lady, but was never again able to emulate his namesake.

And then the marriage ended, and life changed as the kids, the menagerie, and I moved a couple of blocks away. Before I knew it, however, a whole new group of animals had dropped by to spend time with us.

But that story will be best saved for later.

A Place Called Grammyville

Grammyville is where I live, not just when I’m within physical proximity to my grandchildren, but all the time.

Grammyville is difficult to describe. It's a fine place, but its skyline is changeable and directions there are tricky. I can tell you it not only offers some sweet spaces and a few social graces, but also busy intersections and noisy neighborhoods.

I have to admit I didn't feel like a grandmother right away. It wasn't the same as when my own serial litter began arriving thirty-five years ago. Because it doesn’t involve hormonal changes or an alien body invasion, I think becoming a grandmother is more like being a father, or, perhaps, an adoptive mother. All of a sudden there is this new person in the world, a person you didn’t have nine months to get to know.

A blogger friend recently posted something about how, as soon as someone becomes a grandmother, that’s the way she’s defined. While that may be true for marketing directed at me and people like me, I don’t think I’m particularly bound by my grandparenthood. Besides being a Grammy, I am also a teacher and a reader and a writer and a friend and a Democrat and a lapsed Methodist and a Diet Coke drinker and all the other good and bad and so-so things I am. In addition, I don’t own any t-shirts with pictures of my grandkids on them and my internet username doesn’t include precious references to them. That said, I did iron their photos on my little hand-made wallet, but that’s obviously more about creativity than progeny.

I do know, as soon as the grandchildren started arriving(and kept arriving) in Portland, Oregon, my living in Atlanta, Georgia became more problematic. Having my two oldest children live on the west coast for almost a decade hadn’t affected me all that much until they started having children of their own. Until then, the twice yearly quick-trips seemed to suffice quite nicely as we all went on living our lives.

I was in the room when Miles was born and what a memory that is. But I have to say my joy was more for Melissa and Trevor and for our family as a whole than it was for me personally. I was certainly excited, but I hadn’t quite landed in Grammyville yet. I held the little critter and thought he was mighty cute, but, at that point, I was more focused on how Melissa, my own baby, was doing. The bonding began to happen the more I was around Miles, especially when I had him to myself. I remember when Melissa and Trevor came to Georgia to attend the Master’s Golf Tournament and I kept Miles overnight, letting him sleep with me for a little while when he woke up in the middle of the night. I still recall the feel of his baby skin and the rhythm of his heart as he slept next to me.

When Cami came along, I made it to Portland when she was just a couple of days old. Again, I was happy for Billy and Mary and for all of us, and she was an adorable little nugget too. But it was months later, when I took her for her first walk in her stroller with her little red sunhat and we stopped and looked at the flowers and listened to the birds, that I began to see the two of us as an item.

Georgia, my newest grandchild, while a cutie pie herself, still isn’t too sure about me. In fact, she tends to cry as soon as I walk into a room. However, I’m confident we will become friends as soon as we can get rid of her mama for a couple of hours. She already thinks I’m pretty funny when I make my stupid noises and that’s an important first step in learning to love me.

I believe good communities are based on mutual affection and shared experiences, and that's certainly true for Grammyville. When Miles grins and says "Hi Grammy" in his gravelly boy voice and then does his special burlesque act for me, my heart expands with real joy. When Cami lets me hold her hand as we take a walk and when she sits in my lap for a story, it feels like the old ticker is going to burst. And I'm thinking the first time Georgia picks me over everyone else in the room (and she will), I just might explode with happiness.

And so, if I had to pinpoint Grammyville's whereabouts, I'd have to say it's located somewhere near the center of my heart. I just hope that having it take up residence there doesn't cause me to go into cardiac arrest, or, worse yet, to change my email address to something like grammyspreciousangels@yahoo.com., or, worst-case scenario, to become so delusional as to believe there's a place called Grammyville.

All Fired Up

Who doesn’t love a good fire, either in a fireplace or in a pit in the backyard, or, in the case of my family, melting your brand new nylon carpet?

The Talbert/Mayo clan has always had a problem with making a flame, either employing too little fire power or too much. When the Big Kat and I were married, we coined the phrase the “Talbert Log”, which was what we called those fire starter logs you can buy at the grocery store. Our genius, if you want to call it that, was that we never got past the fake log, depending on it to sustain our fire in its entirety. Some cold evenings we would go through two or three of those suckers, with some shine but very little warmth.

As my three children grew into adolescence, I now believe our problems with fires had more to do with my weak parenting skills than with large emotional issues. I’m proud to say there’s not a pyromaniac anywhere in the group, just a passel of dumb-asses.

Melissa, my oldest, was the one who set the carpet on fire in the middle of our new house celebratory dinner as she decided that passing her paper napkin through a candle flame was actually a good idea. I guess she just wasn’t all that used to candlelit dinners. As soon as the napkin caught on fire, she then decided to try to make her way to the kitchen to drop it in the sink. It doesn’t take a great storyteller (or even me) to paint the picture of what happened next, with parts of the flaming paper landing in the little plastic carpet fibers. I guess I should have been happy the rug was made of cheap man-made products that melted instead of burning.

Billy, my most cautious child, had another problem with fire. He thought it was stupid. I remember being at my parents’ house down by the coast where my father was overseeing a weenie roast. At some point, Billy came into the house complaining because the fire had heated the coat hanger to the point that it had burned his fingers. However, his major complaint had to do with how ridiculous it was to have to stand outside and hold a coat hanger with a hot dog stuck on the end when you could just throw it in the microwave and be done with it.

Molly and her fourteen-year-old friends caused our most exciting scorch story, and the only one involving an actual fire truck. One Saturday night, she had some girls over to spend the night and, when I was ready to go to bed, I made them come in from the front yard where they were hanging out in that particularly irritating manner only fourteen-year-old girls can carry off. They, of course, skulked upstairs so my nose wouldn’t be in their business, but just as soon as I turned out my light in my downstairs bedroom, there was a loud banging on my front door. When I opened it, two young men were standing there yelling “fire!” and pointing at the bush next to my porch, which was, indeed, ablaze. After the young men, who, it turned out, rented a house across the street, extinguished the fire with my garden hose, they offered, “Well, the good news is we put it out. The bad news is we called the fire department before we ran over.”

As soon as the firemen, in a veritable aurora borealis of flashing lights on what had to be the county's biggest reddest truck, had given the newly truly sorry girls a stern sermon on the dangers of smoking, they drove away, leaving me with two extra kids to worry about, since the young men, whom I ended up calling The Puppies, somehow sort of adopted Molly and me. I think it was because they felt responsible for us after saving our lives.

I'm pretty confident my kids are going to demand that I come clean as to my own issues with spontaneous combustion, so here's my first story. One cold and rainy February night in 1996, I entered the dining/break room in the College of Education building at the University of Georgia, excited about the Chick-fil-A sandwich I’d picked up hours before as I’d driven into Athens for my Thursday night graduate class. Now, like all good Southerners, I not only know the Supreme Yumminess of a Chick-fil-A sandwich, I also know the bag, with its aluminum innards designed to keep the sandwich warm, should never be put in the microwave. But the class was long and the night was bitter, and my sandwich, in spite of itself, was cold.

The dining hall was crowded with graduate students and professors as I entered, so I had to wait in line to heat up my dinner. As soon as I queued up, dropped my bagged sandwich in the microwave, and started pushing buttons, I was horrified to see sparks and then flames. The only thing I could think to do was to put the fire out with my shoe but, alas, it was the mid nineties and zippered boots were in vogue.

I did manage to save the day that night and keep my enlightenment-seeking, and therefore hungry, colleagues from being evacuated into the February sleet by putting the fire out in the shoulder-high-situated government-issued-and-maintained microwave with my boot, which was, by the way, still zipped to my foot. In retrospect, the university should have gone ahead and given me my terminal degree that very evening just for the common good.

My second story has to do with The Puppies. Because they had adopted Molly and me and they were away from home serving our country in the Air Force and I was grateful they had saved our lives, I decided to invite them over for Christmas dinner. Because I'm a terrible cook, I have no idea why I thought this would be a good way to thank them but apparently I did. Being in a festive mood and probably trying to cover up something I'd most likely burned in the oven, I also made the decision to light some candles (especially since Melissa was twenty-five hundred miles away from my dining room carpet).

Lighting candles for Christmas dinner isn't that unusual, but, for some reason, I also decided to fire up some tapers in my bathroom, which was not a guest bathroom but my personal bathroom that no one other than me would be entering. In a continued quest to commit the unthinkably stupid, I placed the bare candles on a planked wooden table that not only held grooming tools but also offered a slatted roof for the wicker basket where I threw my dirty underwear.

Midway through our festive Christmas meal, one of The Puppies said he smelled something burning.

I just want to make sure to set the record straight. I was not wearing the underwear that caught on fire during the company dinner I hosted on Christmas Day 1999.