It's A Real Fear, I Tell Ya

Forgive me, friends, for I haven't blogged in ... uh ... more days than I dare confirm, lest guilt descend upon me like rotten tomatoes at a Hanson concert. (I can't actually confirm Hanson concert thing, either. Let's call it an educated guess.)

I say we ignore it, like an ill-timed passing of gas among classy folk, and move on.

Wait. Maybe not.

I have a confession: I'm just not sure what to blog about. That's not to say I am at a loss for words. That happens so rarely there is an actual statuette given to anyone causing such an occurance. They're expected to give a speech. There are snooty desserts on tiny plates. It's a production, really.

Speaking of productions, I am becoming frequently more and more tempted to stop updating Facebook and start doing the full version of my tiny, compacted to however few words F'book demands one limits one's post to here instead. But that would involve mobile blogging and I have a VERY real fear about mobile blogging.

It's not that I may accidentally curse (HA! Yeah ... THAT'S something I worry about ), unwittingly expose a major political scandal (Dick, anyone?) or even mistakenly upload a photo of Laverne and Shirley looking particularly good in a new brassiere (that's NEVER a mistake).

No. Those aren't the reasons at all.

Now, before I divulge the fear, I need you to understand the sheer force of this thing. It makes my heart race. I involuntarily grind my teeth. My left eye twitches as though I'm being forced to listen to screamo. I want to hurl. Things tighten in my body's effort to not lose control. It's TERRIBLE.

Here's the thing, people: mobile blogging in the form I have available given the technology in my hands ... oh, lawsy, this may kill me even saying it. IT DOESN'T HAVE SPELL CHECK!

I know, I know, that's not a big deal to a lot of folks. But for some God-forsaken reason, all of my domestic control issues I clung to when the BoyRD was a wee child have migrated to this issue.

I no longer clean things in my bathrooms with a cotton swab. I no longer sweep my kitchen after every meal. I no longer do much of anything domestic in the cleaning, maintenance and organization department. Ask my husband. He'll tell ya.

I do, however, compulsively spell check. In the grocery store, I'm the jackwagon telling the customer service counter they have something spelled wrong. I'll email people I've never met to point out an oopsie. I curl my lip and try not to cry when I see their, they're and there used incorrectly.

Not that things don't eak by. They do. I am, after all, only human. And don't ya know I've decided punctuation is something I can use in my own style.

But I try. Holy crap on a cracker, do I try. No kidding, I spell check stuff THREE times before hitting publish.

And yet things happen all day long that I find amusing. They're short. Maybe four or five sentences. All things I'd love to tell you about and invariably forget before I next have a moment.

So that's that. In a nutshell, I've not been blogging because I am a horrendous control freak.

Forgive me, friends, for it's been weeks since I've last blogged.

The Boiling Point

If you've not been there yet, it's high time you meet my friend, Lou.

So we've not actually met in person. It doesn't matter. I don't need to hug her in person to know she's a good and true person. To know she's a dedicated mother, devoted wife, loving daughter, doting sister and all-around great gal.

Tonight, however, Miss Lou reached the boiling point. (Similar to Mr. Gladwell's point, but a little to the right. Or maybe the left. I dunno. I'm directionally challenged. If you ever ask me for directions, QUESTION EVERYTHING I TELL YOU. I live in North Fargo and--I'm not making this up--once inadvertently sent someone to Canada whilst directing them to South Fargo High School. Mea culpa. But I digress.)

Back to the Lou-ster. (Surprise, Leah -- a new nickname!)

She's had it. Had it with the hurtful, nosy and just plain rude interactions that often arise in human relationships.

Had it with knowing the "right" thing to say twenty minutes after the right moment has passed. Had it with people over-stepping their bounds, much less even seeing those boundaries to begin with.

We've not talked details, but I like to think she has also had it with the idiots in this town who politely STOP at the top of the on-ramp merging onto the interstate rather than adjusting their speed LIKE DRIVER'S EDUCATION TAUGHT THEM TO DO AND COMMON SENSE WOULD DICTATE. Then again, she lives in South Dakota, so maybe not. I like to think I'm not alone on that one, though.

So she wrote a rant. A gorgeous, from the gut, fingernail-splitting from pounding the ever-lovin'-snot out of the keyboard, the cat was probably hiding, still used her nice words, still acted like an adult and didn't name-call rant. And I thought, "YEAH. Good for you, honey. Let 'er rip!"

It's such a rare occurrence for Lou to flip her lid on her blog, that it triggered a memory of a story.

It must have been the late 80's to mid-90's.

My girlfriend's Mom was a flight attendant for an airline with a hub in a Southern state sporting an unusually large population of good ol' boys. You know the ones. Car dealership ownin', snakeskin boot-wearin', cigar-chompin', scotch-soaked, butt-slappin', rump-pinchers in ten-gallon hats. But because they were paying, regular customers, any antics in which they partook where endured.

So it's the same flight this aircrew makes most of the week: the Southern city to Chicago and back. Twice a day. It's the flight-of-choice for the good ol' boys to get their game on in the Windy City.

On this crew is my friend's Mom, (we'll call her Mom) Mom's friend, who we'll call Janie, and another attendant or two in addition to the crew in the cockpit.

Mom and Janie were working the same section of the cabin, with the same group of passengers they'd been hauling on this route for over a year. Just as scotch-soaked and rump-pinchin' as ever, these ol' boys were clearly not going to be behaving any better than they had on any past flight. They, in fact, had decided in the last weeks to add, "lewd comment-makin'" to their repertoires.

As Janie checked seatbelts and overheard compartments, she endured slaps, pinches, squeezes and swats ... now liberally peppered with salacious comments, suggestions and requests.

And then, all of a sudden, she didn't.

One swat, or maybe one suggestion too many, and Janie reached her boiling point.

She whipped around, slapped that man in the face, told him he needed to sharpen it, carve spikes into it, stick it where the State of Texas would never find it and give it a 360-degree turn. Twice.

Janie then proceeded to stride the aisle like a catwalk, thrusting her finger in the faces of stunned but guilty passengers who had spent the last year contributing to this Mt. Vesuvius-like explosion.

Peppering each of these digit-to-the-visage encounters was one simple phrase:

"F. You."

Except, of course, she didn't abbreviate that first word.

Up the aisle, one passenger at a time.

"And F you, and F you, and F YOU, and F .... "

You get the picture. I like to think that with each step, a wisp of smooth hair came out of her chignon, her eyes grew a little wilder, and somehow--magically--her fingernails became longer and longer until they resembled blood-red talons.

Then she reached the cabin where she threw open the door with a vicious twist of the in-door knob thingy.

One giant step in, and a pointer-finger in the face of the pilot: "F you."

To the first officer: "F YOU."

And then, utilizing TWO fingers to execute the oft-ignored "multiple destination point", to the other two crew members in the cabin, "AND F THE TWO OF YOU!!"

I hear it took three crew members to restrain her.

I heard they had to strap her into a jump seat until they got to the closest airport.

I hear she lost her job.

I heard she'll never work in the airline industry again.

But DAMN, I bet she felt better.

The Reason I Believe

It must have been about four of five years ago or so.

A favorite little person and I were having an "Auntie Laura and Peanut" date.

At the time, Peanut was at that stage between toddler and little dude, small enough for a full-on carseat, but big enough to speak broken English fluently. (I know at first glance this seems like an oxymoron, but spend some time with a human being of this age and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.)

So we're west-bound on I94 through Fargo. P'nut is strapped into the driver's side backseat, feet a-kickin' away, singing "Lime In The Coconut" at the top of his little lungs. Every time the song would end, he would holler, "AGAIN!". Naturally, I would oblige.

About two and a half plays into the song that is clearly the only song in the world worth listening to, he says, "Hey, Auntie Laura?"

"Yes, sir?" I dutifully reply, pressing the mute button and angling the rear-view mirror to get a better view of him.

"Auntie Laura," he continues in one giant breath, little feet still bopping up and down in tandem, "do you 'member that time I was big and you were big and we were friends and I had a big blue truck and you had a kinda blue but not blue car and we would stop on the road and say hi and I love you and we were friends?"

Laughing at the magnificence of his imagination and sheer length of this sentence, I snorted out a, "No, Peanut, I sure don't."

The feet stopped moving. His jaw set. Our eyes locked in the mirror.

"Uh, yes, you do."

"Uh, no, I DON'T." (I'd like to tell you he was the first to take it up a notch. Sadly, that would be a lie.)

"YES. YOU. DO."

"OK, let me think," (I'm not dumb. I caught the tone in his voice, and it completely belied the size of his body. This boy meant BIDNESS.) "Uh ... no. I'm sorry, buddy, I just don't remember."

A sigh issues from the back seat.

"Yes, you do," and then a short pause before, "LIME IN THE COCONUT!"

And that was that.

Puzzling, but it faded away as many things do.

Six months later, in the middle of telling a my son a story, it hit me.

"... and your Dad drove a big ol' Bubba truck he named 'Baby'. She was, I think, an '84 Ford F150, blue with huge tires ...." my voice trailed off.

A lump in my throat the size of Missouri suddenly discluded breathing, much less speaking, from possibility in that moment.

Swallowing hard, I continued, "... and I drove a gun-metal gray LeBaron," (blue, but not, but kinda; 'sound familar?) "he would be coming home from work as I would be leaving, and we would stop in the middle of the street to talk for a minute and tell each other, "I love you."

Turning to my son and throwing the last of the memorial flowers for the year into the river, I went on.

"Your Dad and I would always say, "I love you" to one another. Even after we broke up. Even up until the last time we talked before he died. Every time. Even if we fought, we still said it."

It was the anniversary of Kevin's death and each year, the Boy and I had our ritual of remembrance.

I shared the Peanut conversation with him a few days later.

And the next year we stopped doing our annual ritual. It was the BoyRD's idea. He said it had been long enough and that we needed to move on.

And so we started in a new direction.

Peanut hasn't given me another glimpse into his soul in the quite the same manner since that late winter day so many years ago.

But he always tells me loves me.

No Thanksgiving Thursday

We have something more important than Thanksgiving to observe today.

There will be no turkey. No stuffing. No sweet potatoes or corn soufflé. Zero pumpkin pie.

Instead, we'll be having a meal from my mother's recipe stash: goulash, coleslaw, garlic bread and our friend Mama I's brownies.

I know what you're thinking. And no, we're not Communists.

We are celebrating something much, much more important than Thanksgiving, my friends.

The BoyRD's birthday.

Specifically, his EIGHTEENTH birthday.

Eighteen. Adult. (see: makes his own decisions like "I want goulash and coleslaw for my birthday)

Eighteen. My baby. (see: towers over me by an entire foot)

Eighteen. Kill me. ('Knife to the heart sounds about right.)

The child who can make my heart soar and break. Simultaneously.

The child who taught me what it means to love someone more than myself, and simply to love myself.

The boy whose wavelength is more often than not the only one perfectly attuned to my own.

—————————————————

Eighteen years and some months ago, I was surprised to discover that my decidedly directionless life now had marching orders.

It was, in a word, tumultuous. It was physically the worst thing I can still imagine. Emotionally, I was debrided daily.

When I discovered I was pregnant, his father and I were already broken up. Drama, and lots of it, exacerbated by youth and ignorance, ensued.

I was living with my mother. Before the child made his appearance, I would also live with my Dad and a family friend, then back again to Mom.

During that time, my body was subjected to tortures never expected. Hyperemesis for the duration of the pregnancy meant I couldn't go two hours without barfing. So much barfing, in fact, that I tore the lining of my throat repeatedly. Stretch marks from mid-thigh to armpits that itched so badly, I scratched until they bled. Raging girl-infections made appearances more weeks than they didn't. Physically, it was hell. And I was all of eighteen years old. I knew everything and nothing.

I heard about a family in Phoenix who wanted to adopt a baby. My parents and the RD's father all agreed that this was a good idea.

I met the perspective family. I spent time with them. They were lovely people. Heck, I wanted them to adopt ME. I told them okay, they could have him.

And then I just couldn't do it.

I spent Halloween weekend of 1992 on my grandmother's back porch just outside of Las Vegas. She kept bringing me iced tea and let me alternately sleep, pee and just sit ... always refilling my glass. And then, on the last day, she brought me a photo album I'd never seen. These were the generations I had never met. Those who had "come over". Great grandparents, great uncles, great-great aunts. All people. Real people.

Hour after hour I spent sitting in a chair looking out at Nanny's beautifully kept backyard, desperately straining to see into the future. As it turns out, I couldn't see a future without this child I carried.

I did what was, at the time, the hardest thing I had ever done. I told those beautiful, intelligent, wealthy people, "no".

I can still feel the pain in that woman's voice. I can still hear her pleading with me to come to my senses. I can still, eighteen years later, feel the carpet on my legs as I sank to the floor—my swollen, aching, miserable body quaking with guilt, fear and the most intense feeling of relief I'd ever felt.

I have never once regretted that decision—not for even a sliver of a nanosecond.

Sometimes now in the early morning when he's still sleeping, I crack open his bedroom door. I just want a moment of listening to him breath. I try to go back in time and remember when he used to sleep next to me, his tiny body curled into the curve of mine. I want to remember every instance he chose hanging out with me over doing anything else. I want to go back to the time we made eye contact and he smiled and laughed at his Mama for the very first time.

But those things don't come back. Instead, I watch him snoring and send up a silent prayer of thanks for this child.

I pray for wisdom for him, and then some for me.

I pray for patience for him, with a healthy dose for me.

I pray for compassion for him, everyone he comes in contact with, and remind myself of what that means.

I pray for joy.

For strength.

For perseverence.

'Funny how these things work. Deciding how to go about telling you all of this brings to the forefront all of the things I've learned because of him, from him, about him and about myself.

And here I was thinking I'm the one who gave him life. Silly me.

Son, I love you bigger than the sky AND the comet. Thank you for being mine. Thank you for being you.

  

A Thanksgiving Miracle

I fell on an iced-over puddle in the garage.

Dropping in obligatory slow motion, I thought to myself, "Self," I thought, "You are going to pee upon impact. Chances are good you'll also break something. No physicist is required to conclude that your broken, unconscious body will be found adhered to the garage floor by a sad, frozen slurry of your own urine and tears."

I don't know what happened then. I don't know if the laws of physics ceased to apply, if an invisible hand cushioned the impact, or if my long-dormant cat-like reflexes sprang into action, but I realized I was on the floor with no perceivable broken-ness...save my dignity.

Clearly, a miracle.

May your week be full of mind-blowing ninja moves, unseen forces coming to your rescue and, as always, dry pants.

The Call

I got the call tonight. The one every parent dreads:

BoyRD: Hey Mama. Whereya at?

Me: I'm at the house. What's up?

BoyRD: Well, first, let me just say, everybody is o--

Me: Holy balls of bat shit, Monkey. You got in an accident? You're okay? (grabbing keys, finding shoes, turning off appliances) You sure you're okay? Positive? Who's the President? When's your birthday? Everybody is okay? Who else is there? Where are you?

BoyRD: I'm at Main and 4th. Yes everything is definitely okay. I was pulling out of the parking lot and she clipped me. She says she's okay. She's really nice. I told her I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I am. She's calling the police. We're okay.

Me: I hear TheBestFriend in the background. Was he with you?

BoyRD: No, but he came back.

(Have I mentioned I love TheBestFriend like he's my own?)

By now four blocks down the street, heading to the scene, admonishments of, "get her information, give her your information, don't leave the scene, be polite or I'll hurt you, and you sure you're okay?" administered, I started to breathe.

I could tell from his voice that while riddled with historic amounts of adrenaline, he was really and truly fine. This knowledge was underscored by TheBestFriend's voice in the background at it's usual calm, cool and collected pitch. I heard no one screaming and no sirens wailing. All I could do now was not get into my own accident.

It got me to thinking. How many times had I done this to my parents as a teenager? How many calls had they gotten? How many times had they heard my name over the scanner before even getting a call? How many nights were they wondering where on God's green Earth I was in the days before tracking devices and cell phones?

I did what any cop's kid would do.

I called my Dad. And I apologized. (Mom? I'll be calling you tomorrow. I knew you were at church.)

When I got there, introductions were made, hands were shaken and vehicles inspected.

Then we spent the next hour standing outside in 45 degree weather, visiting and laughing with the nice lady the BoyRD met by accident. This is Fargo after all, it's how we roll.

And yes, he really, truly and honestly is okay. Humbler, I think, but definitely okay.

Well, Hello to You!

I'm not sure how long it's been there, but apparently Blogger.com has some pretty spanky tools. One of them is the "stats" tab. It was there I discovered some visitors I wasn't aware of:

I'm going to dismiss the US as a given. I mean, heck ... I LIVE IN NORTH DAKOTA.

Canada? Slovenia? Germany? Brazil? Russia? Denmark? UK? India? South Korea? I'm so pleased to have you. Please, know you're welcome and come again. Maybe next time I'll clean up first. Oh, who are we kidding? I'll do no such thing. We're friends, after all ... my dirty clothes are your dirty clothes! No, wait ... my dust is your dust! No, no ... wait. Uh ... yeah. I need to go clean something.