My mom called me a week before we left for Phoenix to remind me not to take our luggage into my grandmother’s house.
“If there is anything black on your luggage, or if it’s dirty, or if it could leave a black mark, just leave it in the garage and carry your stuff into the house. She has a lot of drawers in the guest bedroom.”
I’m surprised she didn’t just tell me to leave my suitcases in the trunk and pack in each item into the house separately. You could eat off my grandma’s garage floor. It’s just as clean as the white and cream carpet and furnishings inside and neither should be soiled by my black marks.
“You know, she can’t see that well anymore, so she won’t notice the black marks,” my mom continued. This was where I was thinking my mom would say not to worry about it, but I should have known better. “So I just get a wet rag and wipe them up if I see one.” Uh huh.
My mother’s warning says a lot about me and my grandmother. She knows that I am a.) an incurable slob who doesn’t mind leaving my bed unmade for the day; b.) incapable of living in a white house and not leaving a mark. It’s just one of those things that goes with my DNA.
She knows that my grandmother, despite being blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, would mind if I left a mark.
At age 87, with only the help of a walker to get around, my grandmother’s home is cleaner and better organized than mine. I admit, this is a little embarrassing. In comparison to most people I would call myself clean, but not neat. I never iron, and the last time I dusted might have been months ago, but I always hand scrub my floors. In comparison to my grandmother, I’m living in a demolition zone.
My grandmother is also an incredible cook. Despite her physical limitations, she baked oatmeal cookies, pecan pie, coconut cream pie, two coffee cakes, and cinnamon rolls (all by scratch) before we even arrived. No wonder I came back a few pounds heavier! Her kitchen and freezers are perfectly arranged so that she can reach everything, and labeled (case in point, all of her tea bags are in glass jars with an empty tea packet taped to the top so that you can tell what you’re getting). It was easy to clean up after dinner.
I thought about storing our clothes in her dresser drawers, but I seemed to be constitutionally unable. Instead I used the closet to my advantage, piling stuff up on the floor, rifling through clothing as I needed it. She never said anything, but I’m pretty sure she knew what was going on. You can’t hide anything from my grandmother — that’s why I love her.
I used to say things like, “I could never live anywhere that didn’t have the four seasons.” Meaning snow, of course. The older I get, the more I hope to never say never, because right now I feel like I could live somewhere without the four seasons, very easily.
Yes, I ski. Yes, I get out during the winter. Yes, I do think snow is pretty, especially on the mountains on a clear day. But I have to say, the dark that comes with the cold around here makes me irritable, and the cold can be painful for someone with as poor of circulation as I apparently have. My hands double as ice cubes for most of the winter. I don’t even need to get an ice pack for an injury. I just put my hands on my neck or my knee, and get immediate relief. I wonder if that’s what they call a healer?
Unfortunately for Doug, I sometimes try and warm my hands or feet on his body, and he yelps like an animal in pain every time. I just don’t know why. Huh.
As I’ve noted before, amnesia sets in around here once the weather starts to warm up a bit, and you forget that you ever had thoughts about living in the South Pacific because summers are so perfect. But right now I wish I was a snow bird, and could fly until I felt the sun on my face and heard waves crashing from an ocean nearby. Wouldn’t that be lovely?
I can’t even type the word “tradition” now without hearing the song from Fiddler on the Roof and wanting to follow the first with another, louder, “Tradition!”
Last weekend I traveled to Canada for the second annual mother-daughter get-together over the Martin Luther King Jr. long weekend. This year’s entertainment highlight was an Off-Broadway production of Fiddler in Calgary. I’ve been humming, “Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match! Find me a find!” ever since. It’s really hard to get those songs out of your head and I’m not kidding.
In the vein of traditions, Doug and I stopped at my parent’s ranch before heading north. A night at the ranch means a.) the early morning wakeup call from the rooster and chickens; b.) the real wakeup call from KSEN, the local radio station my parents listen to over breakfast. I woke up during the middle of the Swap-n-Bulletin board.
“This is Sharon, and we’d like to sell our dishwasher. It runs pretty good, but it has a little problem with the soap tray staying open — shouldn’t be too hard to fix. We’re asking $50 or your best offer.”
I put my pillow over my head. I’m not a morning person.
KSEN has always had an entertaining morning radio show, complete with a police report, a discussion with the local used car dealer, and a daily polka that my mother delighted dancing to just as the school bus pulled up in front of our picture window. Talk about embarrassing!
Anyway, it woke me up in time for us to cross the border at a little border station manned by my least favorite border guard. This guard loves to come up with paranoid theories. Even though he has seen me a thousand times (okay, maybe not a thousand, but a lot) in past crossings he has rerouted me to a different border because he thought that my nephew wasn’t really my nephew, but a man I had married to help me declare Canadian citizenship after crossing the border (Real Story: My nephew was going home from college with a lot of stuff and I was going to a conference). He also detained Doug and I because he thought he had kidnapped me because our last names are not the same. He took Doug inside to interrogate him and asked, “Who’s the girl?” in a threatening voice. Real Story: Doug and I were just married, without passports (no need for them yet) and on our way to a Bob Dylan concert.
Once we reached Cochrane, Alberta (our final destination) we melted off our border anxieties with a trip to the salon for a mother-daughter pedicure/manicure.
I was good and relaxed before the all-female let’s-help-our-friend-get-through-her-divorce party where we sampled (I’m not kidding) drinks called Sour Pusses. Did you know they have napkins for this kind of party? Awesome!
Canadian women are lovely, but I spent a good chunk of the party either getting attacked by the hostess’s cat (I thought the cat was purring when I petted it because I couldn’t hear over all the loud female voices, but it was actually growling at me), or trying to avoid talking to a Birther conspiracist about Barack Obama (this was my sole contribution to MLK day).
Between the early morning chickens, KSEN, the Birther theories, and the Sour Pusses I ended up so exhausted that I had to lie down on the hostess’s couch to put my feet up, hoping that I could either fall asleep or convince the rest of my party that 10:00 wasn’t too early to go home.
On Sunday, Laura and I headed to Hot Yoga for a sweaty session of stretching (if you’re curious, hot yoga is like going to a yoga session conducted at a military boot camp in Florida in August but somehow relaxing). Then we all took quick showers before Fiddler, which was awesome (thank you Mom!), and finished the day up with a fried turkey dinner cooked up by the men in our life (and no, I’m not kidding about this either).
Peaches is currently unhappy with me. I’ve been traveling a lot. Out of town for a wedding, for work, and now for a family get-together, she’s been lucky to get any quality time out of me this month. Doug has had to fill in, waving cat toys in front of her and Cocoa uselessly, getting the grooming brush swatted out of his hand, and opening the door for the special meow that means, “I want out! Now!”
After two nights away she starts to wander far afield from our house, looking for me. I feel guilty, especially when I get back and I get the old “Do I know you?” routine from her. Cocoa is more forgiving. She purrs and purrs and during the night she’ll lie on my chest as if to say, “Don’t ever leave again, ok?” It takes a few days for Peaches to come around. When we left today she was wrapped in a ball in a corner, obviously upset at the thought of prolonged absence from her two favorite slaves. But, we have a great cat sitter, and she can sleep all day in the clothes hamper if she wants. And a few days after we arrive home she’ll decide that I’m back in her good graces and will climb on my side while I’m sleeping and stretch out like the Sphinx to make sure I know that I was missed.
Word to the Wise: Don’t drink rum, then champagne, and then beer unless you want to end up singing both the Doxology and every lyric of Jon Bon Jovi’s greatest hits in one night. Not that the singing wasn’t enjoyable, but the morning after hurt me bad. I think it was the champagne.
The day of my friend Kayb’s wedding could be summed up by Billy Crystal’s famous Fernando character (think Spanish accent). “It is better to look good than to feel good.”
Whereas, my impromptu birthday bash in front of the Jon Bon Jovi cover band was all about feeling good. Too good.
But, back to looking good. I used to think that men had no idea the torture women put themselves through to look beautiful.
But then after the wedding, when we were complaining about how our feet hurt, a friend of a bridesmaid told us that he could see our pain and we did look a little like, “cripples with severe hemorrhoid problems” walking up the aisle.
I certainly felt crippled after a day in heels and a dress that seemed to dig into me in all the most uncomfortable places on my body.
The pain began with the curling, ratting, twisting, and pinning of the hair. Then there was the underwear – which included itchy cheap pantyhose since none of us got the memo to bring black instead of nude hose and thus Kayb’s brother-in-law had to save the day (bless the man, buying ten pairs of pantyhose at a Walgreen’s is not exactly on the list of things to do to boost your male ego. Hopefully the store clerk didn’t think he was a pantyhose-obsessed tranny).
There were also the boobs — which in strapless outfits can be painfully smushed in several different torturous ways. Two bridesmaids managed to breastfeed while wearing it so I guess strapless had some advantages. Between the squeezing of my rib cage and the screams coming from the balls of my feet I think I felt more pain getting ready for that wedding than I did while running a half marathon.
Fortunately, the pain was for a good cause. The bride and groom are genuinely besotted with each other, and perfect for each other in every semi-strange way. Kayb’s quite petite (5′3″?) and he’s not much bigger (in fact, she said he’s only one inch taller). They looked like little wedding cake toppers together.
The clincher for me was his allergies. Kayb has an allergy to gluten, and has had friends (including me) and others in her life with many food sensitivies. So, she took it completely in stride that Will is deathly allergic to all foods derived from a cow (dairy and beef) and committed herself to a near-vegan-wheat-free existence for their marriage. Think a lifetime supply of chicken stir fry. Now that is love!
The gorgeous rehearsal dinner
Ocia, Kayb’s sister, made a delectable-looking gluten-free, dairy-free cake for the two of them to eat at the reception. Will couldn’t eat his Star Wars-themed groom’s cake (which actually looked like it could have doubled as a Lord of the Rings Mordor cake). I’m just hoping they survive their Italian honeymoon. So much butter and cheese to avoid!
Cassie, one of the bridesmaids who actually is a southern belle, saved the day in so many ways. She made the stressed bride laugh with a throaty rendition of “Delta Dawn” and when she found out it was my birthday she came up with a plan to celebrate. She asked her friend Jimmy to make a stop at the liquor store and buy some rum shooters for us before the reception. We tossed them back behind the Christmas tree and it eased all of the pain and stress of the day away instantly.
After “buffeting it” — as they say in the South, at the reception, Cassie and Jimmy took me out to see the best Jon Bon Jovi cover band in Chattanooga (well, maybe all of the U.S. – who knows – I’ve never seen another Jon Bon Jovi cover band). The lead singer had had reconstructive surgery to look just like Jon so it only took a few beers for me to get my clogs a dancing while still in my bridesmaid’s dress (I shed the high heels) — playing air guitar and singing “Living on a Prayer” at the top of my voice. All I can say is, those southerners sure know how to show a girl a good time on her birthday.
P.S. I didn’t take photos of the actual wedding, because I was in it, so y’all will have to wait for Kayb to return from the honeymoon for the wedding photos to appear.
I’m leaving for Tennessee tomorrow for what may be my final appearance ever as a bridesmaid or bridesmatron (I know, you’re drying your eyes right now, aren’t you?). I expect to experience both culture and culture shock in the South, and hope I don’t get lost (I’m getting a handy GPS unit for my car just in case).
Doug is not traveling with me this time, which makes me both sad and relieved for him that he won’t have to experience any of the new airline security measures (including a ban on bathrooms and anything in your lap). Hopefully I won’t have to experience them either since I’m only traveling domestic flights.
I’m planning to stay calm, cool, and collected while flying, even if I have to grab the stranger’s hand sitting next to me upon takeoff. Keeping the bride calm is also one of my duties (as noted in the final instructions sent by the bride last eve). I plan to keep on reminding her that fortunately I’m not helping her prep for a spinal tap or a terrorist attack. It’s only a wedding!
Meanwhile, I’m going to summon my inner Southern Belle and my inner Buddha (is it possible for both to reside in the same body?) and try to keep calm as I deliver a toast, wear a dress that is slightly too tight for breathing, and wear heels while nursing a knee injury from my Christmas ski (don’t ask, it’s too embarrassing to tell you that it happened right after I got off the lift – before any real skiing had even begun). Oh, and I’m taking notes, lots of notes. While keeping calm.
About 10 years ago I sent an e-mail to a group of friends from college asking them all for a list of the best books they had read that year. I did it to reconnect with friends who share a common interest (most of us were English Majors) and because I have trouble finding new authors and I figured they might have some great suggestions. For several weeks we swapped e-mails, sharing our favorites, and making must-read book lists for the coming year. Over time, it’s become a tradition, and after most of us joined Facebook, I created a group to make it even easier for participants to share. From my friends’ recommendations I’ve discovered some of my now-favorite authors: David Sedaris, Jeannette Walls, and Elizabeth Gilbert.
You can check out everyone’s picks for 2009 by clicking on this facebook link. I’d love to hear your suggestions – either on the facebook page or at this blog in the comments section.
My suggestions for this year included:
1. Memoir – “Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia” by Elizabeth Gilbert. I like to include at least one book that someone recommended from last year’s list, so my thanks go to Liz Salan for recommending this great travelogue. After a nasty divorce, Elizabeth Gilbert embarks on a spiritual and physical discovery across continents that is funny and inspiring. She also wrote the article that was the basis for the movie Coyote Ugly (which I have yet to see, but is on my list this year).
2. Fiction – “People of the Book” by Geraldine Brooks: This book is both well-written and has a gripping plot, a combo that is nearly impossible for me to find these days. I’m increasingly becoming impatient, skimming through books, but this tale of a rare Jewish book and the people who either make it or try to save it made me read every word. Geraldine Brooks won a Pulitzer for her book “March” in 2006.
3. Fiction – “One Shot” by Lee Child: Stuck in an airport over the holidays and out of reading material? Pick up a Lee Child book. His mystery/thriller books will keep you from going crazy while on standby. They are all told from the point-of-view of Jack Reacher, an ex-military man who has no home, but always ends up in a place or position to solve a crime (and then moves on). He’s smart and brutal, but I’m never disappointed in the ending, and I read every word.
4. Memoir – “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life” by Steve Martin: I really enjoyed this tale about Steve’s start in comedy at Disney, his spare family life, and why he ended his stand-up career. A lot of great stories about other famous comedians come up in the book. It’s not really a funny memoir, but very illuminating.
5. Fiction – “The Other Boleyn Girl” by Phillipa Gregory: I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t compare it to that, but I can say that I normally don’t like historical fiction (or fiction that is based on someone else’s sense of history) but this book brought Henry VIII alive in a new way to me, and what it must have been like to vie for his attention. Plus, it was just a good old-fashioned romance.
Sleighbells Ring. Are you listening? In the Lane. Snow is glistening.
Personally, my favorite Christmas Carol is “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” It just says so much about a child’s mental anguish, doesn’t it? No toys, just my teeth please. Plus, you get to sing with a lisp, and who doesn’t want to try that at least once in her lifetime?
It’s hard to write about Christmas without sounding like a cross between Dickens, a southern Baptist preacher and a hedonist on a binge. On the one hand, I’m supposed to write, “Eat, drink, be merry!” on the other I should write, “Eat, Drink, Go to Church, and give some money to the man holding the cardboard sign outside of Costco!”
I would give some money to the man holding the cardboard sign outside of Costco except for the fact that I saw that same man get out of a new Ford pickup truck at the local park. It makes one kind of cynical, especially since I know there are people who aren’t scamming others who need a break.
But anyway, back to the truffle recipe I’m planning to try and make tonight. At the Holden/Blaine household we have established a tradition of skiing on Christmas day, and eating like we’re planning to ski every day for the rest of our lives. We’re planning to watch Young Frankenstein, play some mean games of Scrabble, entertain Cocoa and Peaches, and possibly sing a few tunes together. We will not be exchanging presents, as every day together is a gift (that was a joke, all right?). Let me try that again. We will not exchange gifts because that’s part of our tradition. No gifts, just skiing, some rest and relaxation, a few good laughs, and as little traveling as possible. In sum, we sort of opt out of holiday-stress. If you sent me a card, thank you, I’ll be sending you a card sometime in the New Year (it’s a surprise). The closest I get to stressed this time of year is anticipating holiday parties. The introvert inside of me screams, “No more small talk!” And then when I get stressed, I just turn to chocolate.
My mother had three cures for all of my childhood illnesses. I either opened up for antibiotics, downed pepto bismol, or rubbed Vick’s vaporub (otherwise known as mentholatum ointment) on my chest if I was sick. If those didn’t work, the threat of washing massive amounts of dishes seemed to do the trick.
At the first sign of a sore throat, she’d make me gargle with salt water, then wrangle a wool sock around my neck, clasping it with a heavy safety pin, to keep the Vick’s from drying out. I can’t say that I was a devotee of these methods as a child, but it’s funny, I abide by them now, and they do seem to help.
Doug’s family’s version of the wool-sock-around-the-neck trick includes a cold wet sock underneath a larger wool sock, and no Vick’s VapoRub. I thought this was shocking until I read in my gym’s newsletter that naturopaths recommend you wear cold wet wool socks to bed if you have a sore throat. I mean, who comes up with these ideas? I can just hear some guy saying, “Yeah, I passed out drunk and my socks were all wet and I woke up and my sore throat was gone! It must have been the socks.”
When I came back from Vegas, I caught a bad cold, which quickly turned into a nagging, hacking cough. When I shared my frustration with eau de VapoRub on facebook, a few people wrote in about the magic of garlic (chop up raw garlic and take 3-5 times a day for 5 days), and ginger infusions. My cousin has often recommended a boiled lemon ginger reduction for colds. Then, there are other people who promise complete recovery with vitamins and herbs. Echinacea, goldenseal, D3, tinctures, elderberry, Vitamin C, Zinc, you name it, it’s a cure for someone.
I’ve come to believe that all of our cures have at least some element of the placebo effect. We need something, anything, even if it’s swallowing the most unbelievable gross tasting tincture, to believe that we’re receiving the medicine we need. But I could be wrong, so share your dead-fire-sure cure for the common cold in the comments section. Maybe I’ll try it next time.
As for my cold/cough? I ended up at the doctor’s office this week wondering why my cough wouldn’t disappear, and she sent me home with the real cure for my upper respiratory tract infection: antibiotics and codeine. My mom was right once again.
I’m not an early morning runner. If I had my druthers, I’d run mid-morning every day. I’d get up about 8:30, run about 9:00, shower and be to work about 10:30. But this is not my life, so I usually run over my lunch break or after work, or on weekends.
So, believe me when I say that getting up after four hours of sleep to run a half marathon was painful. Laura and Terry knocked on our door about 5:40 a.m. and I wasn’t sure whether I’d find them in running clothes or not. The last thing that happened before bed was Terry left a big tip at the front of the hotel for the shuttle driver who was supposed to return the carry-on with all of the running clothes. They had also had a “situation” with the hotel with the room, so by the time that was all figured out it was well past midnight.
But there they were, dressed like runners, ready and energetic. They had gotten up at 4:00 to order room service and eat before the run (the thought of which makes me semi-nauseous).
5:45 a.m.
The Vegas Strip was closed to traffic by 4:30 a.m. and since we were over 2 miles from the start of the race, we took a cab the “back way” via the interstate, and when we finally entered the traffic jam over the overpass the cab driver told us this was it, it was the furthest he could take us. People were getting out of cars and running toward the start line so we joined the crowd of runners, and tried to warm up. It was 34 degrees and I was freezing. I knew that once I started running I’d get hot quickly and there was no place to drop clothes before the race started, so we all collectively shivered our way to the start of the race.
6:15 a.m.
The four of us split off to go to our respective “corrals” a term that I only associate with livestock, so I wish they wouldn’t have called them that, but I guess when you have 27,000 people in a race they start to seem like penned livestock. A 1,000 people were jam-packed into each corral, which would be released in waves across the start line, and we slid into position next to a group of running Elvis’s in red and black on the left, and another group in white on the right. Behind us a woman with a white running outfit and a wedding veil stood next to her running bridesmaids and groom. They were going to go through the run-through wedding ceremony. We didn’t have room to stretch or warm up and we were too far away to hear Cher sing the national anthem, so we just huddled together and watched the fireworks overhead, moving forward inch by inch, waiting for our start time.
6:45 a.m.
Finally, our run started! We each were given a chip to put through our shoelaces so that they could electronically record our individual start and finish times when we crossed the rubber mats at the beginning and end. I was cold, so we ran slow at the beginning, trying to get warm, listening to the sounds of the rock bands that lined the street and the Elvis’s next to us who were running with a baby jogger filled with beer and a stereo system playing both Elvis tunes and the Beatles. They took turns running with the stroller.
There was a lot to look at as we ran. Between the Vegas casinos, the mountains in the distance, and the costumed runners, the race zipped by like an entertaining movie. The only annoying thing was that there were so many people to zig zag around that I actually added on several tenths of a mile to the race distance (13.1 miles). If you want to see a slide show and video of the race, check out this link to the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s slide show. Crystal and I split up around the three mile marker, and Laura and Terry were somewhere ahead of us so I ran most of it “alone” trying to stay between a 9 and 10 mile-per-minute pace. The longest training run I had completed (based on the plan) was 10 miles so after the 10th mile I was in new territory. The swelling in my feet started to catch up with me about mile twelve so I had to slow down toward the finish line, but I was really happy with my time: 2 hours 12 min and 37 seconds. I had wanted to finish in under 2 hours 15 minutes.
9:00 a.m.
Reunited, and it feels so cold
Terry and Laura
Me and Crystal
I was so hot at the end that I stupidly refused the free space blanket to wrap around my sweaty, rapidly cooling body.We reunited at the letter Q, told race stories, drank some water, took some photos, and then went to look for a cab back to the hotel. The Strip hadn’t opened back up to traffic, so we stood in an endless line at a casino for a taxi, and kept getting colder so we decided to hoof it to the next casino. The shade and wind combined to make me so chilled that I was feeling desperate for warmth. When we finally hailed a cab, it took 45 minutes to get back to the hotel, and it cost $21 (normally $7), but I didn’t care, I just wanted a warm car.
Afterwards
First, we checked in with the hubbys and our respective football teams (Steelers and Patriots) who were both losing, then we soaked at the spa and Crystal tried her first Eucalyptus steam room, and then we napped, and then we went for all-you-can-eat sushi, and I got to wear my little red dress at the roulette table, where I lost $40. All in all, it was a marathon of a day, and a marathon of a trip, and the best introduction to Vegas a woman could get. Thanks for hanging in there for the blow-by-blow!
