Give Me the Suburbs! Part 2

I think my least favorite thing about living in the country was the close proximity to wildlife, or, as the country folk say, varmints.

One day I woke up to a very bad smell. After a quick sniffing-sweep of the house, I realized it was coming from our bedroom closet. Using a set of kitchen tongs (I never claimed to be brave) I removed one shoe at a time from the bottom of the closet. There, among the last couple of shoes, I found a dead mouse. I had no idea the smell of one mouse corpse could fill an entire house. I had so much to learn. Rubber gloves and a snow shovel later, the mouse was removed. If I had owned a haz-mat suit and goggles, I would have put those on, too. I sat on the bed feeling pretty good that I had handled the situation myself and not resorted to a frantic phone call to my husband. Then, I heard a sound...


It was coming from the pile of shoes. My first reaction was to stand on the bed and scream, and the second was to look around for a weapon. The muffled sound continued, and I realized the pile of shoes was between me and the door, so there was no escaping. I had to face whatever it was. As I got closer, it became apparent that the sound was coming from one of my boots. I decided that it might be another mouse mourning the loss of their friend. I turned the boot upside down and shook. A large ball of fluffy boot-lining fell to the floor. Inside the ball were half a dozen tiny mouse babies.


My first instinct was now I have to raise them as my own. I was thinking mouse milk, an eyedropper, maybe a heat lamp…I realized that was unrealistic, so I had to find another alternative. I couldn’t stand the thought of watching them slip away one by one. I knew I should have put them outside to be food for some other animal, you know, circle of life and all, but I just couldn’t do it. It may sound cruel, and I still have nightmares about it, but I flushed them. As I was putting shoes back in the closet, our cat showed up looking curious. I glared at her, and asked her what-the-heck kind of cat was she, who couldn’t even do basic cat things like keep our house free of mice. I made a mental note to cut back on her cat chow.


So, after three months of living in the middle-of-nowhere, isolated, varmint-riddled, prone-to-flooding country, we put our house up for sale. One very interested buyer came back to see it a second time. It was a father with his two year old daughter. He wanted to walk the backyard to see where the property lines were, and he talked about what a great yard it was for kids. We stood talking  for quite awhile, the man holding his daughter, and me trying not to look too anxious. I wanted out! We told the man how much we loved living there, and how we would really miss the peace and quiet. My eyes drifted around (which happens when I lie) and I caught some movement in the grass behind the man.


There, coming in our direction, was a five foot long black snake, which I instantly nicknamed “the deal-killer.” Now, I like to think that if the man had chosen to put his little girl down, I would have stopped him and pointed out the snake. I’m almost sure of it. Thankfully, my scruples were not to be tested, because the man and my husband started walking towards the house. I followed behind, trying to look nonchalant.


Eventually, the house sold, I kissed the country goodbye and headed back to the suburbs. Ah, the sound of barking dogs and bickering families, the sight of trash cans all lined up on the curb, the smell of burning burgers on a grill. I was home.

Give Me the Suburbs!!! Part 1

I have been obsessed lately with the idea of living in a refurbished farmhouse on a couple of acres, and raising chickens and pygmy goats. That way, our grandchildren (of which we have none) would love to visit us. The catch is I don’t want to live out in the country. I’m afraid of the country. I tried it. Sure, I like nature as much as the next person. I just don’t want it in my backyard, uninvited.

When I was in my early twenties and a newlywed, my husband and I decided to buy a home out in the country. We had tired of living in the city where we went to sleep every night to the sound of police sirens. I couldn’t wait for some peace and quiet, and the feeling of being safe. It was about a week after we moved in, when I started to question our decision. My husband left for work, and I was going to wash the dishes before showering and heading to work myself. One of the features I loved about our new house was the large window above the kitchen sink. I could look out past our yard, across a gully, and all the way to a new housing development about a quarter of a mile away. On this particular morning, my eyes didn’t go past our yard. It was filled with cows. They were just milling about, you know, the way cows do. Now, I’m from the suburbs, and I only know very basic things about cows. My husband grew up in a semi-rural area, so I called him.

“We have cows…what should I do?” I was very disappointed, because he knew nothing about cows. "I thought you grew up in the country?" I said accusingly, suddenly wondering how well I really knew this man.  "Maybe you can just shoo them away.” Great, I was on my own. I went out on the deck with a saucepan and a spaghetti pot and banged them loudly together. I kid you not; I don’t think I got a blink of an eye from any of them. Not only were they lost, but they were hard of hearing, too. I refused to get any closer to them because I kept seeing this scene in my mind of being trampled to death in my own backyard. Our dog was barking in the house, and I thought about letting her out, but I knew she couldn't help.  She was a sled dog.  Why the heck did I move to the country with a sled dog, when what I really needed was a herder?  I had so much to learn.

It was time for plan B. I grabbed my car keys, with the brilliant idea of finding the farm where they belong. And, how would I know which farm it was? Easy, it was the one without cows. I smiled at my genius. After an hour of searching, I finally had to give up and drive home. Hmm…I didn’t even have a plan C. Then, it came to me. I just had to figure out which of them was the leader, and if I could coax that one out of the yard, the others would follow. Yes, that was an extremely lame plan, but it turns out, I didn’t have to use it. The backyard was cow-less. I strutted back and forth on the deck with a new air of confidence. Next time, I told myself, I would bravely leave the safety of the deck, and slap their rumps with loud instructions to vacate my yard. Looking back, it was probably a good thing that the cows never appeared again.

Coming soon—Give Me The Suburbs!!! Part 2

Someday, You’ll Pay!

I guess if you made up a job description for children, high on the list would be embarrassing Mom and Dad. Though, I’m quite certain I never embarrassed my parents. I think it skips generations like twins. The first time my son discovered how much fun it was, we were visiting my parents the summer he was three. We were all seated around the dining room table, passing serving bowls, and chatting away. Once our plates were full, and the room was silent as we started to eat, my darling little cherub of a son said “This tastes like sh--.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at him as if they were seeing him for the first time. He looked very pleased with himself. I glared at my husband, knowing full well where he had heard that word. I  had to break the silence, so I told them he had never said that word before, which was the truth. Even my mother, who desperately wanted to believe me, looked skeptical. Well, I thought, always the proud mom, at least he used it properly in a sentence.

My daughter would never have embarrassed me on purpose. She just had a habit of blurting out the truth. You can’t get mad at a child for that. But, you can die from it. She was three, we were at the grocery store, and just as we came out of the bakery aisle, a man weighing about four hundred pounds walked by us. I tried hard to distract her, but her eyes locked on him, and lit up like headlights. Please, I pleaded silently to the universe, please keep my child from saying the man is fat. Two seconds before he would have been out of earshot, she looked at me all excited, and said louder and clearer than any toddler in the world, “Mama, that man has REALLY BIG PANTS!”

As my son got older, he learned exactly what embarrassed me the most, and used that knowledge like a gleaming sharp sword. When I was in my thirties, I had rhinoplasty, otherwise known as a “nose job.” My son thought the whole thing was hysterical and would bring it up at the worst possible moments. “Hey Mom, did you get to bring your old nose home in a jar?” he would blurt out in front of friends and neighbors. “Hey Mom, did you get to pick your own nose, or did the doctor pick it for you?” he would yell, and then collapse into a fit of laughter.

Even as adults, I never completely relax around them. Recently, we were out to dinner with a large group which included my daughter and her boyfriend. I was just sitting there enjoying my salad, and I heard my daughter say from the other end of the table, “Hey Mom, he doesn’t believe that isn’t your real nose” while pointing to her boyfriend. Every eye was on me as they waited for my response. My son told me his wife didn't believe I wasn't a real blonde, "So could you send her photos of you as a brunette. Maybe something with your old nose, too."

What they don’t know is that the older I get the less I care about being embarrassed. And, eventually the tables will turn. I will dedicate the last years I have on this planet to being a complete embarrassment to them. I will dye my hair bright red, wear lipstick smeared from ear to ear, and leave the house with my bra on the outside of my shirt. I’ll teach their children every swear word I know. Yes, I have it all planned….

East Meets South...I Mean North!

What do you get when a woman from New Jersey and a man from South Dakota meet and fall in love? Two people who do NOT want to visit each other’s home state. But, of course, we did. “I grew up in a small town” I told him on our first date. He grew up in the capital of his state. Imagine my surprise when I discovered my small town had a bigger population than his capital!

But, I visited his overly large, desolate, bleak, godforsaken state with an open mind. We chose to drive, since flying there consists of many stops, the last of which involves boarding a crop-dusting plane. Halfway across Nebraska, we decided to eat the roast beef sandwiches I had packed. The last bite was still in my mouth when we passed what he called a feed lot. A nice term for several hundred cows corralled into a twenty by twenty foot space. I called it the worst stench I had ever experienced in my life. I could not swallow my last bite of sandwich for at least two hundred miles. Perhaps, those cows would have gotten a giggle that I had gagged on roast beef.

The landscape became more and more barren, and I could see nothing for fifty miles in each direction. He told me we would be driving through an Indian reservation once we crossed the state line. I thought that might add some excitement to our trip. Now, I knew better than to expect teepees, but apparently the Indians now have these expansive structures called ca-si-nos. I learned a lot.

We were on a winding road, and I couldn’t help but notice there were no trees, no houses, or buildings of any kind, and I hadn’t seen another car in twenty minutes. I turned to him and said “Remember when we were driving through the New Jersey wilderness” (I had to stop here and wait for him to stop laughing) “and you still felt claustrophobic? Well, I’m having an anxiety attack. What if our car broke down or one of us had a heart attack, or even worse, what if I needed a restroom? Where are all the rest areas?” “We don’t get enough traffic” was his reply. Well, build them, and they will come, I thought to myself.

Then I started spotting pheasants by the road. Believe me, when there is nothing else to look at, a beautifully colored bird is a welcome sight. We had probably passed our thirtieth pheasant, and I had shouted “Look, another pheasant!” thirty times, when he mentioned that they are the state bird, and pheasant hunting was big in this area. I sat there stunned, my mouth dropped open. I looked at him incredulously “You eat your state bird?” “Of course, they’re delicious. They taste like chicken except a little stringier.”

When we checked into our hotel, I noticed a painting of pheasants behind the desk. “You eat your state bird!” I said accusingly at the desk clerk. Without skipping a beat, he said “My grandmother makes the best pheasant gravy. Pheasant tastes like chicken except a little--” I know, a little stringier, I thought. “--gamier.” he finished. Gamey? That’s gross. I turned to grab my suitcase, mumbling to myself “New Jersey might not be the greatest place in the world, but you don’t see us eating our goldfinches.”

I have been to South Dakota five times now. We have actually talked about getting a cabin in the Black Hills, the beautiful part of the state. He has made the trip to New Jersey exactly once. Perhaps I should mention to him that we have salt water taffy…it tastes nothing like chicken.

Branded For Life!

If you walked through my house right now you would see a Sony television, GE appliances, a Dell computer, Gap jeans, Kellogg's Rice Krispies, and Reynolds aluminum foil. What do these items have in common? They are all name brands everyone has heard of. And that is not a coincidence.

I grew up with a father who did not believe in buying name brands. I’m still not sure whether he was making a statement about commercialism or he was just looking for bargains. I’m guessing it was a little of both.

No Magnavox, Zenith or Motorola TV set for us. He always seemed to come home with some off brand, with names close to well-known names, like instead of RCA, the brand would be ACR. Or, they would have some hokey name like a dishwasher brand called Scrub-o-Matic. Every once in awhile, he would bring something home that had no visible name at all—as if the company was embarrassed by their own product.

I happened to be at a friend’s house when her father came home with their first color television. Word got out quickly and all the neighbors on the block were lined up to check it out. A far stretch from when my father came home from work one day declaring that we would be joining those with color TVs. He unrolled a sheet of clear plastic with rainbow stripes, and taped it to our TV screen. I’m not sure on what planet that would be considered color TV, but my dad sat back in his chair and beamed.

My siblings and I suffered the ultimate humiliation when he came home one day driving a pea-green German car manufactured by (you guessed it) a company no one had ever heard of. It took us a long time to get over the embarrassment that our father wore bow-ties in an age when all the other men were wearing regular ties, but now when he dropped us off at school, his attire was the least of our worries. Thankfully, on our first trip in the new car to our grandparent’s house, the car decided to launch it’s windshield wipers into the air onto the rainy interstate. We had to pull over while my dad ran back half a mile in the rain to fetch them. It wasn’t long after, that the car disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

So, as soon as I became an adult consumer, it was brand names or nothing. My father? Right now, he’s probably grumbling about the slowness of his Byte-o-matic computer.

I'm Just Glad It Wasn't MY Birthday!

Over the weekend, I went into our basement storage room to look for a three-pronged plug. I never find what I’m looking for in there, but sometimes what I find instead is even better. I found two type-written sheets of paper containing a post for Elaine’s Wonderful World. This would have to be my very first post, because I wrote it twenty-one years ago!

Yesterday was my husband’s birthday. It started out like most days, with little warning as to what was ahead. After the daily mad rush to get the children out the door to catch the bus, my morning chores began. After making beds and cleaning the kitchen, I tackled the bathrooms. Little did I know, this would be the high point of my day.

Shortly before noon, my five-year-old walked in the door with a huge welt on her face and a reminder that school pictures were the next day. She had been bitten or stung, and as the day went on, my daughter’s cheek got bigger and bigger. Last year when she was due to have her picture taken at preschool, she developed a bad case of pink-eye. The day before we had our annual Christmas family portrait taken, she walked into a counter at a department store and got a fat lip. I think if we really love her, we should stop having her picture taken, and ensure her of a trouble-free life.

Things got worse when my nine-year-old came home. He had a schoolbag full of workbooks which needed to be finished before school the next day. When I questioned him about it, he blew up at me saying that he wasn’t ever going back to school and he wanted to run away. I told him that if there was a place where you never had to work, I would gladly run away with him. He gave me one of those “But, don't moms love to scrub toilets?” looks. We talked things over, and after much anger and tears (some his, some mine) I agreed to go in and talk with his teacher the next day.

Then, the birthday boy came home. He was in a good mood when he left that morning, after our daughter guessed his age to be sixteen. Wanting in on the fun, I asked her how old she thought I was. She said sixty-four. I didn’t even know she knew numbers that high. Daddy’s mood had deteriorated considerably. He had just heard that an airline had gone bankrupt and was cancelling all flights. This was the same airline which was supposed to fly us to Disney World in three weeks. In our twelve years of marriage, every vacation had been a disaster. I started feeling like this bankruptcy was our fault. Thousands of employees were losing their jobs because we booked our vacation with them.

My husband decided to go to the gym and work out, which was his only normal reaction to a birthday. He came home an hour later swearing off sweets, just as I finished icing his cake. So, in one day, my husband became a year older, our Florida trip was ruined before it began, my daughter looked like a hamster storing food in her cheek (soon to be immortalized on film) and my son gave me a chance to do something I rate right up there with going to the dentist—a parent-teacher conference. Add the fact that my kitchen sink got clogged because I wanted to make my husband…..

Hmm...I don’t know what I was making for my husband, because the third page was missing. Or maybe there never was one, because I had to get ready to go to my son’s school. We’ll never know. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post from the past!

It's Only Hair...

I am obsessed with hair. I know, it’s frivolous, superficial, shallow, and all those other words created to make me feel bad. But, I didn’t choose this, I was born with it. I was giving my Thumbelina a trim (which wasn’t easy with those safety scissors) at age six. I could braid before I was allowed to cross the street by myself. All of my Barbies were naked, but had killer hairdos. In high school I was convinced an ex-boyfriend came back to me because I had put blonde streaks in my hair. Hair was power.

Thanks to Dorothy Hamill and Farrah Fawcett, the nation finally sat up and took notice of hair. Dorothy’s cut was not an option for me, because I was convinced that with short hair, I would be mistaken for a boy. Plus, if I kept my hair long I could trim it myself. To say I didn’t trust anyone with my hair would be an understatement.

But, I fell in love with Rene Russo’s hair in The Thomas Crown Affair. I quickly made an appointment to get my hair cut before I chickened out. I showed up with my little photo ripped from a magazine, ready to believe that magic was going to happen. And, it would have to be magic because Rene Russo had thick, naturally curly, auburn-colored hair. My hair was blonde, stick-straight, and super fine. When I refer to my New Jersey roots, I am referring to my hair. I had to work hard to get my hair big enough for the standards of my state. It took time, and many appliances, and many products. The woman who cut my hair swore I would have the right volume to pull the look off.

When she was finished, and I saw the final cut, my heart hit the floor. In my mind I looked more like Pierce Brosnan than Renee Russo. That’s when my chant was born. It’s only hair, it's only hair. I managed to get home, where I shut myself in my bedroom. That was the beginning of three straight days of crying. You would have thought I had my limbs cut off the way I was acting. I know my wiring isn’t right, but changing my blood type would be easier than changing my obsession with my hair. It was only after I tried a dozen times to get my hair big again, that I felt it was enough like me to go back to work. My friends were great, giving me pep talks about how quickly it would grow back. And, it did.

And, like childbirth, the memory of the experience faded, and many, many years later I got another haircut-- this week. I’m not sure how the communication between me and the hair stylist broke down, because I have replayed it in my mind over and over again. Somehow, "I don’t want the sides cut because I am growing them out to match the back length" means cut the back to match the sides. Well, my hair is now shorter than it’s ever been. No amount of time or product can make it look big. I am trying to be mature. I am trying to make peace with this drowned-rat look. And now the chant, which hasn’t been necessary in a very long time--it’s only hair, it’s only hair. I wonder if Samson used the same chant…