Glamour Girl

For my son’s fifth birthday, my mom came all the way from Maryland to be part of the birthday festivities. Of course, in typical kindergarten fashion, Ara got sick and generously shared his cold germs with me. My mother, a newly converted herbalist, took charge of our healing program. She administered hot and cold compresses, echinachea, charcoal tablets and endless garlic cloves of garlic on buttered toast to head the bad guys off at the pass, or at least give them a dinner break. As a staunch granola head, I accepted all forms of natural healing and vigorously cleared my chi, neti potted my nasal cavities, and took hot and cold showers to help the healing cause.

The night before the big birthday party, Ara kept coughing himself awake, crying, drifting off, then coughing himself awake again. Of course that meant that the entire household followed suit. Finally, at about 3:00 am I broke down. I crept into the guest bedroom and whispered my mother awake, then grabbed a jacket and ran out for children's Tylenol. 

King Sooper’s was surprisingly busy for three in the morning, bustling with customers and stock boys alike. I kind of liked the weird middle of the night vibe. Cheerily I greeted everyone I encountered, and asked a cashier for assistance in finding the medicine aisle. For some reason though, not many people smiled back. I was puzzled to find many of them skitter off with sideways eyes. I breathed into my palm and sniffed. Well, it wasn’t a basket of roses but certainly not so horrible as to provoke that reaction. Subdued, I selected three bottles and paid for them.

When I got home, my mother had turned on the living room light and was walking my fretful child, who was draped pitifully over her shoulder like a boneless chicken. “Got them!” I stage whispered triumphantly, waving the bag open. My mother took one look at me and started laughing. 

“What?” I demanded, but she couldn’t speak. “Just go look in the mirror,” she finally managed, and I did.

So. This is why women check themselves in the mirror before leaving the house. My face was amply festooned with trails of charcoal. There was a ring around my mouth, a smudge on my nose, and my horrified shriek revealed that yes, even my teeth were completely black. 

But there was a silver lining, believe it or not. Ara’s cough almost completely went away and the birthday party was a big success. And I have stopped eating charcoal.

Except for every once in a while, on special occasions. Like the flu.

At the Dominion of Kings

When my brother Ras was just a little dumpling, around seven or eight, my parents bought into the American dream and took us all to King’s Dominion, the closest amusement park.

As we raced away with dollar bills stuffed into our pockets, my mother bleated after us: “Watch Ras!” Of course. Our job.

I thought it would be best if my brother stuck to rides like the Cups and Saucers and the Ferris Wheel, and due to his lack of life experience I figured he’d be an easy sell.

But no. I didn’t factor in my brother’s innate love for danger, which had up till then only surfaced once, when he accidentally walked all the way up Carroll avenue to Sligo Church hoping to catch up with my mom after she’d fetched us from school. When we spied him, sniveling under his pageboy cut at the intersection, we dragged him into the car and all three chastised him so thoroughly that I thought he’d wear a bike helmet and shin guards just to go to the bathroom forever more.

He observed the cotton candy smudged babies looping vacantly on the Ferris Wheel, with all the enthusiasm of someone waiting for an elevator, but just as I thought he was about to get in line he spied a group of bigger kids racing toward the Rebel Yell, and off he went. Reason, logic and mild threats were ineffective. He stubbornly ignored me and inched forward with the rest of the lemmings.  

Finally we reached the front of the line. My brother, scrawny and screaming, leaped in and excitedly yelled at me to join. I gingerly stepped in next to him, and the “safety” bar descended over our laps and hung there, a good six inches away. No seatbelts, no harness. Just one thin stainless steer bar keeping us from launching into orbit like two curry scented satellites. I ordered my brother to hang on, but at the first apex, the people in the car before us threw their hands up in the air and yelled. My foolish brother followed suit, and as we began the first drop, I saw his sixty pound body start to float off the seat.

“Grab the bar!” I screamed, illustrating by clutching the bar. He pretended not to hear me, waving his toothpick arms around and yelling with the big kids. He continued to rise. Terror pinned me to the seat but with a superhuman effort I managed to lift one leg and throw it over his lap, tethering him to the seat. He didn’t appear to notice and kept waving his arms above his head. 

As we sped up and down, I felt my leg starting to go numb, but I feared losing my leg less than I feared facing my parents if I lost my brother.

When we finally stopped, I grabbed my leg and hoisted it off of him. Without a backward glance he leaped off the train and ran to brag to my mother as I limped along behind him. “What’s wrong with your leg?” my mom asked. 

This is the part where you expect me to say, “nothing,” and be a silent and brave heroine, but nope! I told the whole story to my family, and everyone was duly impressed. I might have even gotten a cotton candy as a reward, or maybe a little toy. All I know is that my good deed was somehow rewarded, and so this story has a happy ending in more ways than one. 

Flatula

His super power was flatulence, and he wasn’t afraid to use it. On the nine thirty seven train, particularly, he used it to cut a wide swath of space round him, leaving him free to rest his dirty sneakers on the opposite seat, or to lie down with his long legs stretched across the aisle, hogging several benches. His record was seven rows cleared in three minutes and seventeen seconds, but he believed that with diligence and a good, fiber free diet rich in fried cheese and food truck curry he could bring that number down to under two. 

The trick to improving his number was that it had to be made clear, and fast, that this was not a one time thing. Most people sitting nasally adjacent would tolerate one blast, but would quickly relocate when it became apparent that he was some sort of human Glade mister who spritzed the air approximately every fifty one seconds or so. 

He loved the recognition in their eyes best. First the delicate sniff, and the surreptitious glance round the room, then the relief as the initial assault dissipated. He loved watching the glaze return to their eyes as their gazes fell back to their phones. How quickly they forgot. Well, they would not forget him. And he would fire again. 

Fate stepped in one fateful morning in July. He had mixed orange juice with his glass of milk that morning, a surefire cocktail that never failed to get the ball rolling. He was seated on his favorite bench when the woman who would change his life boarded the train. Her name was Eunice and she normally took the nine oh five, but had binge watched “Breaking Bad” the previous night, which had resulted in a poor night of sleep compounded by her chronic sinus condition. Now she nervously took the seat opposite him and checked her texts. Two messages already from her pimply faced boss, demanding to know why she was late for her shift at the toll booth. 

He was instantly enchanted. There was just something about the way her eyes squinched up as she searched the tiny keyboard, the way she bit her lip. The boxy cut of her uniform promised hidden delights (although Eunice was built like a tank and the polyester shirt accurately outlined her figure). He was just imagining unbuttoning that top button, the one that made her third chin dimple so fetchingly, when in his stomach the orange juice rolled over and start talking to the milk. Frantically he clenched his cheeks and managed to reabsorb the threat somehow. Whew. He took a deep breath of the clear, unsullied train air and at that moment Eunice glanced up. 

As their eyes met he felt a shiver of some ancient awakening. He was not a spiritual man, but Eunice, who had read every metaphysical book on soul mates available at her library, thought she recognized in him her mate of several lifetimes, including the Cleopatra one, the Spongebob one (he was Patrick) and a parallel lifetime, seventeen lightyears away, where they ate mostly beans and grubs. Not one to waste time, she delicately opened the lines of communication.

“Hey,” she said gruffly in her adenoidal tones, and her voice ran its fingers through every fiber of his fiber-depleted being. He shivered, and again, suddenly felt his colon preparing to unkink. By neglecting to answer her and squeezing every muscle south of Taos, again he managed to stave off disaster. He’d have to wait till he got off at his stop. He couldn’t burn the crops before this angel of mercy. When he opened his eyes and sighed with relief he noticed her looking at him weirdly and he realized he hadn't responded to her. 

“Uh, hi,” he said, and then it was as though a dam broke. Their small talk rivaled the great ramblings of a Will Shakespeare or a Ben Jonson, covering everything from current Facebook memes to the changing of the fish stick batter at the local pub.

As his stop grew near, so did his apprehension. How could he ensure that he see her again? For this was clearly The One. At the same time, the fart baby burgeoning in his lower colon was demanding birthing, and any second now. He was preparing to ask for her number when he realized she was gathering her belongings and was getting off at the same stop. If he could just hold it in for a few seconds more, they could exchange digits, she’d be on her way and he could unleash his farty fury in a safe, secluded area.

He clenched his bum and minced off the train as she lumbered off behind him. “Oh, crap,” she bellowed daintily, as, juggling her cigarette and lighter, she lost her grip on her phone. It skittered past him and came to a stop. 

“Allow me,” he said gallantly, and forgetting that the release valve was unfortunately positioned in direct nasal range, he bent to retrieve it. In that fateful moment he felt his muscles give way and a mighty stream rushed from his nether region, accompanied by a haunting butt trumpet solo. Several passersby, catching a surprised whiff, collapsed in heaps on the ground, thus ensuring their physical safety by falling below the line of fire, which erupted in a blinding flash as the simultaneous flare from her lighter ignited the jet stream, and that was the last thing either of them knew.

Epilogue

Seventeen light years away, in a parallel universe on the planet Girth, a square shaped woman with three chins is sitting down to supper with her man.

“Anyway, my horoscope said that I need to makes some serious changes, or face some extremely negative consequences,” she says, lighting up a Lucky.

“Uh huh,” he says, absentmindedly, eyes on the neckline of her muumuu where her third chin swung delicately over the lace. 

She leans over to uncover a dish when suddenly she feels a ripple in the force, as would be caused by a massive explosion far, far away. As the matrix realigns itself and her mind clears, she sees him reaching for the dish.

“NO!” she screams, and lunging forward, she knocks the plate of beans from his surprised hand. “I think we should switch to kale,” she explains apologetically, kicking the spilled beans under the table and handing him a plate of greens. 

Birthday Cakes and My Mistakes

Many years ago, for some childhood birthday, my mother threw me a little shindig. In those days the most intimate circle of friends for me was comprised of cousins, and they duly arrived, bearing gifts and big smiles. One of the families, however, had clearly forgotten the party and arrived a little out of breath. Their gift had been obviously purchased at a gas station on the way over. They assured me that it was only PART of my gift and that the second and BIGGER portion was yet to come.

It took me several months of springing at them hopefully whenever they swam into view (might I add, bearing NO gift) to realize that in fact, the promised second part of my present was not coming. In fact, the second part DID NOT EXIST. It was a white lie. A red herring. A carrot at the end of a stick wrapped up in twenty seven nesting boxes and tied all around with pink ribbons and caught in some inaccessible dimension.

I accidentally revisited this lesson at school just the other day. Last semester a wonderful writing professor who loved my work asked to keep my final paper, without his comments added, to read to future classes. He promised to send me an email with his thoughts separately.

Every day for the next month I hopefully checked my email, and even nebbishly sent him notes a couple of times, false cheer and exclamation marks spread thickly over my words. 

“Hi, Dr. Simpson! I hope you are having a WONDERFUL summer!! I’ve been enjoying it, especially with all the rain!! It’s like we’re Seattle, huh?! Haha!! So, I’m sure you’ve been enjoying your time off but I was wondering if you’d had a chance to …” 

Blah blah blah. You get my drift. I’m ashamed to admit that I crafted two or three of these odiously lighthearted missives before I gave up, at least for the summer. But about thirty seconds after the fall semester began I jumped right back on the cart and started smacking the horse. 

Still no response. I was positive something was wrong with the email system. Come on, it's  Microsoft Outlook. You'd be suspicious too.

A couple of days ago as I was sitting in the King Center courtyard morosely chewing a burrito flavored power bar and pretending it was good, I spied him rocketing past me. “Dr. Simpson!” I bellowed, leaping up and startling the guy who was enjoying his actual real life burrito across from me. (Oh, another thing I’ve learned at school: just because someone shares your table in the courtyard at school, it doesn’t mean they want to talk to you. It’s like sharing an elevator. Seriously. Behave like everyone else and act like your phone is the most interesting thing in the world.)

He turned with a hunted look. “Oh, hi,” he stammered. “Uh, I’m really really late for a class so I can’t talk but I got your emails and I am sending you my comments later tonight! I swear. Sorry it’s taken so long but your paper got buried in a big stack of other paperwork and I’ve just been … I swear … tonight … I haven’t forgotten … “ the last few words were lost as he barreled away from me.

Pleased, I threw the rest of my healthy snack away and celebrated with a Snickers bar. 

The next morning, I checked and re-checked. Still no email. At the end of the day, still nothing. A week later, still nothing. It was then that the memory popped into my head. This was my gas station gift! There is no part two. I shared this epiphany with a friend who listened kindly and then gave me his keen, insightful advice. “Just get over it.”

Okay, fine. Thanks, man. But I kind of can’t. 

So, what is the acceptable time to wait until you check something off your list as a bad debt? I still don’t know. But then I’m the kid still waiting for the second half of her birthday present over here. 

The Lesson

My friend Rachel came from Maryland to visit many years ago. Rachel is a pretty girl and one of her favorite things is to go out at night and chat up all the boys. It’s her Olympics. 

One evening, after poring over my pathetic wardrobe of yoga tops and thrift shop skirts, we finally found a dress that met with her approval, and to ensure success she shared a tactic with me. She instructed me to enter the room, walk past a guy I found cute, then turn and smile coyly over my shoulder at him. 

“But why don’t I just smile at him when I see him?” I asked, reasonably. “I could wave, too.” I illustrated by grinning like a baboon and flailing my arm wildly, taking out a small picture frame and upsetting the cat. 

“You just don’t!” she said. “It’s called flirting! Come on—there must be someone you like right now.”

Unenthusiastically I sorted through my most recent feelings. Hm. Euphoria over a good parking space? New LOTR movie coming out? Nope, those couldn’t possibly—hello, what’s this? Somewhere in that tangle of emotions I recalled a funny feeling in my tummy after I’d encountered a cute sushi chef. I had attributed it to a bad shrimp, but could I have been wrong? Were love and salmonella so close in texture that they could in fact be mistaken for one another? Since it was the closest thing I had at the moment, I shrugged and offered up Cute Chef.

Rachel was pleased. She outlined our strategy (which was basically going to Sushi Planet), and reminded me to walk PAST him then turn and smile.

I suggested a couple of practice runs in the living room, slightly concerned about walking in one direction and looking another, but she nixed that, although she did offer to illustrate at the restaurant by going first. 

At the hostess station I nervously chomped seven after dinner mints while the girl perused the seating chart. “We’ll sit at the bar,” Rachel said. “Maybe at the end?” I stuffed a second fistful of mints in my mouth then spied Cute Chef, who glanced up and smiled. I stopped chewing and scowled back, in a clever attempt to throw him off the track and save the good stuff for later. 

“What ARE you doing?” Rachel asked, but before I could explain, she swanned off. Gracefully she followed the hostess the length of the bar, smiling at the many approving glances tossed her way. HER feet obediently walked straight although she glanced over her shoulder several times.

The long white floor unfolded before me like a horrid slippery plank, and the fashionable tile and concrete room was bright with noise. I took a step and didn’t fall down, so I took a couple more. Still all good. Encouraged, I galloped three steps forward then remembered the protocol. Oops. I stopped, rebooted, then slinked forward. No one was looking at me, so that was good. (But wait! They’re supposed to look.) I cleared my throat loudly, to catch a few eyes, but no one looked up. Coughing loudly worked, however, in fact so successfully that a pimpled busboy, apparently concerned for his health, took a long cut to the kitchen by actually leaving the restaurant and going through the alley. Several diners shielded their food.

A couple more steps and I’d be past the hostess station, the bowl of mints and squarely in open water. My self confidence, usually tucked in a corner with a good book, sat up, ears pricked. I was getting the hang of this! Every molecule in my body was dancing; my arms and legs were as synchronized as a swimmer’s limbs. For the first time in my life all systems appeared to be on line and functioning smoothly, rather than fighting for individuation. This is what it meant to be completely and utterly alive!

Third step. I saw Rachel giving me the sign: Now! Like a carelessly blossoming flower, I took my eyes off my feet, half turned and flashed Cute Chef a forced and toothy grin. He smiled back at me just as my left foot, drunk with power and newly unsupervised, caught the stack of metal and wood chairs behind the hostess station and sent them crashing to the floor. Some fell straight down and stayed politely there, but several of them took the opportunity to scrape, screeching loudly, to a halt several feet away. I glanced furtively around. Well, Rachel’s tutelage was successful on one level. I definitely had everyone’s attention. Out of the corner of my sheepish eyes I saw Rachel sidling out the back.

Later, as we were in line at the grocery store—I mean, that incident called for SERIOUS cookie therapy—we caught sight of a big magazine display: GQ, Men’s Fitness, Vogue, and more. “Oh my god,” I said, spying an especially appealing cover. We both rushed forward and snatched a magazine from the rack. I thumbed excitedly through my copy, and Rachel hers, when she had an epiphany. She looked up from her shirtless Johnny Depp, and pushed up the cover of my magazine to reveal a hot and steamy full color completely nude picture of a bowl of beef noodle pho. I don’t know if it’s possible to sprain one’s eyeballs from rolling them too hard, but Rachel was in serious danger of that for a moment. Needless to say, the flirting lessons were deemed useless and stopped after that night. 

I Gotta Be Me! I Just Gotta Be Me!

A long time ago in Guitar Center (yes, I shopped there, wipe that horrified expression off your face) I heard on the overheads what sounded like a Paul Simon tune. It was so far back in my consciousness as I plinked keyboards and examined cables and hefted mic stands that by the time it had picked its way to the front row of my brain the song was nearly over. “Hey,” I thought aloud to the bored cashier.  “Is this Paul Simon?”  

I liked it too. It’s not exactly what he brought to the table with his Simon and Garfunkel stuff, and certainly not what he brought with Graceland or Rhythm of the Saints, but there was something, some flavor, some clearness that caught me.

Lately my struggle has been with understanding my place in the musical universe.  What am I really saying? Does it matter? Is anyone listening? I’d started thinking that real music was wrung out of bearded young guitar players pouring out their spirits into tin cups on dirty sidewalks. Struggle equals depth. Starving equals raw beauty.

As I listened to Mr. Simon explain the differences in the way a life is lived, based on choices--so beautiful, or so what--I began to understand what this life of music has made of me. There have been times when music has held the place of honor at the table, and others when it’s been relegated to the junk drawer, tarnishing slowly until unearthed once more in a random spring clean. Always present though. Always percolating somewhere, doing something, growing perhaps sideways, in dimensions I couldn’t see or feel until I actually pulled a song out and sang it, cold after so many years, yet possessing a new layer that I didn’t remember adding.

Those young musical creatures. Geniuses, and something like pasta primavera. They sing with a pop and a sizzle that comes from the very young. It isn’t something you hold onto forever. You don’t really want or need to. It’s just a thing that comes with youth, like the ability to get drunk and pop up out of bed next day, fully refreshed, after only two hours of sleep. It’s fine while it’s there, it adds a flavor, and then something else comes along to replace it.  

Me, I sing from years of just plain singing. From feeling the river of sound travel through my body. From the feel of my hands moving across the keys while floating my voice over it.  From getting my ass kicked musically by life. From forcing myself to be brave enough to sing in front of people who weren’t listening, and, sometimes worse, those who were.  Going from that hot flushed feeling when you hit a bad note to more of a “huh. sour note. now it’s gone” feeling. From raising a child while simultaneously trying to keep all my other channels open. I try to write the stories that come from what I have learned, from the other side of each decade as it comes, unbidden and unwanted, but now at least not feared. They have a different flavor than the songs of my spring chicken fevered youthiness. They’re just ... different. Not better. Not worse. Trying to tell the truth, rather than be cute. So many more things to think about than broken hearts.  Trying to see what really is there. It parallels what is happening in my life. An acceptance of myself, of the world, of music. Less self rebuke.  

In energy class there were three ways of running energy: pull, push, and allow. That’s self explanatory, right? Allowing seemed to be the most used, and perhaps the most important. Just standing there. Allowing. Breathing. Not reaching or forcing, but just being.    

Perhaps that’s the biggest lesson I have learned, and somehow have to re-learn on nearly a daily basis. Just stand. Just be. Open your mouth and let the song fall out. There’s no other you, and no matter how hard you try you can’t be someone else. It just doesn’t work.

Martha Graham said it so beautifully: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.”

And so I keep learning the lesson. Be me. Be me. Just inhabit my skin, and be me. It’s how we all came in, as babies, until we learn manners and social acceptance and how to conform. That’s fine, until the day we reach the point where we just can’t do it anymore and our true fiery selves come bursting out of the protective covering we’ve so carefully constructed. Yeah. That day. That’s a really good day.

The Maryland Metamorphosis

Growing up in Maryland, we were plagued by big black water bugs. Shiny and slow, they ambled away from sudden light and scurried under refrigerators and stoves. They were so gross. One year they got so bad that all the neighbors were taking extreme measures to eliminate them. This including spraying, wrangling, roping, and of course the cheapest but crunchiest method, foot stamping. This sometimes happened inadvertently at night while stumbling, barefoot and blind, to the bathroom. The resulting skid and accompanying scream successfully woke the community for blocks around and led my father to join the fight and buy a bug bomb.

We all went to Hechinger where my sister and I were delighted to receive a chunk of 2x4 each. This is before home improvement stores got smart and installed candy aisles. (I'm not kidding. We got chunks of wood and nails and we were ECSTATIC.) While my father set the bomb, guaranteed to kill any insect within hailing distance, we industriously hammered the nails to our bits of lumber. Once the fogger was going full blast we were all herded out of the house. But when we returned home after the prescribed four hours the smell still loitered, and seemed worse in the bedrooms. It was so strong that we couldn’t sleep, so my father dragged our mattresses out into the living room, opened all the windows and set up a fan.

This seemed like an adventure to us. (Before you judge our pathetic joy, remember, this is before God invented the internet, cell phones, and cable. All he’d given us at this point was electricity and the wheel. A lucky few also received scraps of wood and nails.) We excitedly climbed under the covers, the scent of bug fog still drifting lightly around like some Arabian Nights dream. Gentle sleep descended.

The summer sun woke us, as usual, at the crack of daybreak. I rubbed my eyes and yawned as my sister threw off her covers. There was a short, electric pause and then her screams yanked me out of my sleepy bliss. Her entire small body was outlined in bugs, who’d crawled into the warmth of her bed to die. I pulled off my sheet to discover my own fan club, cuddled right up next to me. Lying on their backs, legs in the air, some still feebly kicking. I added a high soprano harmony part to my sister’s screeches. 

My dad was, of course, the first responder. He came blasting into the room (my mother a close second), assessed the situation and grabbed us each by the front of the shirts then airlifted us straight up out of the beds. I can’t even remember what happened next. My memory, clearly so good at recounting the hideous details, somehow stops short of recalling the extra ice cream, chocolate bars and perhaps even trip to the toy store with which we were most likely comforted. At least that’s how I’m going to remember it.