Part-time Role Model... Keep Your Normal Job

We have a standing tutoring appointment. He is 151 months old and not quite half as many inches tall. Hands that correspond to a pair of bare but promisingly sturdy puppy-feet knock on my door at least once a week, usually with homework in tow. This week it is a literature project – read the story, symbolize each character with a shape and color, and create a corresponding poster. Piece of cake. I kick into cool-grown-up mode and reach for the “role-model” hat.

The first snag comes with his need for color printing and my inability to provide. There would be more of these. There is nothing quite like the presence of a minor to pull ambient questionable morality out of the air itself and highlight it in fluorescent pink. Suddenly, at the pause of a 12-year-old, the word “crap” becomes edgy, Stevie Wonder is risqué, and I am painfully aware that the only piece of brown paper in my house is being cut by a young Muslim boy from the whiskey ad in a wine periodical. Meanwhile, where did I put that hat…?

The book is The Outsiders, of which I know nothing except that overall, the story is purple. This is less than useful, so during all the color-snipping and “Part-Time Lover” listening, I hunt for a synopsis to maximize my contribution for my young friend who is beginning to waver and cutting his poster in half to start over. I now know it as a coming-of-age novel written by an insightful young woman whose reflection on preteen boys in her town dispenses wisdom beyond her years. This does not change the fact, however, that I cannot hear the teacher’s instructions, see the classmates’ posters, or crawl into this 12-year-old brain to cure his swelling indecision or undo my corruption. I am a helpless outsider with no construction paper, and my scraps will have to do.

In hour two, we begin to turn a corner. Decisions are made and rubber cement comes on the scene, followed shortly by little brother from downstairs. His mission is the usual, I assume – convey his mother’s undue concern that my friend has outstayed his welcome and recruit him home – but I will never know. He swings the door open just long enough to catch two words in English on our TV, parrot them and exit, stage right.

“Jackass! Jackass!” Oh boy.

The project continues for quite some time, and though the work station moves downstairs, I remain on call for the remainder of the evening throughout several complete overhauls. While I assume the project is long over and graded, I have yet to hear a verdict, to spite my hankerings for closure. It is nice to believe you are a role-model – good, useful, and given an hour or two on Saturdays, able to turn out a fine product every couple years. Grade or no grade, though I am starting to wonder about my role-model cap. I don’t know if this is standard issue, but I think mine might be tall, thin and pointy with a big letter D on it.

Oh well, at least I now know where my good scissors have been.

Technology fail

So, here’s one. Apparently the predict-a-word function for text messaging on my ancient Motorola Razor, iTAP, was not familiar with the word “texting.”

Just thought I would share.

Body hair and slow grief...

I miss her, but at the strangest times.

I miss her when I am putting on my makeup and notice that I have a chin hair. I think of Mom, taking a pink Bic razor to the hospital to shave her chin, because how else can you give your mother a shred of dignity when she's had a stroke the morning her husband was coming home from the hospital?

Then, I look at the way the one remaining light bulb above our pink, fifties-era bathroom treats my two gray hairs like tinsel, and I think of her purple, fifties-era bathroom. I think of all the home-perm kits and shed tears in that bathroom and wonder, will I get the old-woman perm when my hair goes all gray or will it stay dark and thick like hers?

I look at my brown eyes and, at the thought that seventy five years might gain them the easy wisdom indigenous to hers, I finally like them.

Every time I go home lately, someone tells me, "your hair is getting darker." I pretend it's true, and that I am looking more like her, even though I know it's just greasy. (I use her baby powder trick so I don't have to wash it.)

I miss her when I'm cooking and singe my arm hairs. I may not have gotten the genes to burn my chest on the stove through two layers of polyester blend, but as for klutz and arm hair, I got 'em honest.

And I miss her at the end of this post, when by now all these stories of family and hair would have evoked the recounting of some Pennsylvania Dutch prank on the Evendale homestead involving the attachment of some part of a newly-slaughtered animal to some part of an unsuspecting uncle or sibling. I wonder what our kids will think of stories about her.

At the end of the day, what can you do but smile at the stories that somehow close the circuit of where you came from and where you're headed? Funny, how these things work.

Thrift and closure...

Fresh Tilapia: post-swimming-in-asian-market, pre-tasty-stock




Tasty Stock: post-crockpot, pre-delicious-curry




Delicious Curry: post-tasty-stock, pre-belly



Well, there you have it. I bought the freshest thing around at the cheapest price around, and produced one of the healthiest, tastiest meals around. It had a start. It had a finish. Then, I ate it.

Can anyone explain why this makes me so disproportionately happy?

Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go...

I have nothing against the Ramones. Listening to them on a sunny-day road trip is the perfect way to feel happily innocent and kinda cool at the same time, like you're hanging out with the missing link between the Beach Boys and Green Day.

Of course their lyrical depth is not the main draw, but hey, sometimes the phrase "rock 'n roll high school" repeated nine consecutive times just hits the spot.

And then, last week at my in-laws', I came across this video which managed to unleash something of noteworthy depth.

"Oh how adorable!"

We laughed our guts out.

But wait a minute. These are not first-graders putting on a nativity pageant, tripping around in pastel robes and twine, making a weighty message cute and inane by their lack of understanding.

Somehow, this is the opposite -- here are some of the most seasoned humans around, infusing something as trite as a Ramones song with loads of substance, just by virtue of their life stage.

Hmmm...

When the Goose Bites, When the Bee Stings...

The little one is afraid of geese, he confides, finally settling to a simmer after I lead my company in push-ups and jacks.

"What do you do when you are afraid?" I press, now that I am conversing with a boy instead of a forty-five pound sugar high.

For me, it was jack-in-the-boxes. Jack-in-the-boxes and eighteen wheelers. And kickball.

The older brother -- Impatience Incarnate -- interjects. "Run away," he squawks, and coaches some martial arts moves which may or may not intimidate the Canadian geese in question. Which of those helpful tactics did he enlist today, I wonder, when David Perez the sixth grade bully put fingers across his face?

"I'm scared of geese," the "baby" reminds me with an outside voice an inch from my face.

"Can you tell God you are scared, and ask him to help you?" Tiny brown fingers cup briefly in front of folded knees in the shape of a five-year-old-Muslim prayer before the conversation escalates in a brother-on-brother stage competition. Geese fly in and out of the dueling monologues, as do Sponge Bob and future career options.

The future is a string of presents, and I wonder how many I will share with these two man-sprouts, and what kind of fruit I am stringing into these characters.

"Be nice to your Mom tomorrow, okay?" Maybe if I put these words out into the air around his effervescent little being, he will bounce into them and consent without voicing the ever-present "Why." Or maybe he will ask, and I will have to fight the urge to say, "because geese bite boys that are mean to mamas," and produce a worthy reason.

Now, acute and accidental prayers for these hearers of our footsteps swoop in to invade my Beloved Solitude, and I cannot help but fear that the One I petition is occupied now, working on our parents' own request that their selfish daughter would be soon ready to be a mom...

joy comes

I am a mourning person.

Isn’t there something about the day as it
Shatters again, slowly
Like the crazing of an ancient teacup

Fragile and stately,
Sturdy as the Word,
Tinkling
Like shards of expectation?

Jingling, through the chimney
To rewrap the dead strewn under the tree?

Fast broken, first breaking --
Still, promise churns in the wake of morning.