Author: halfnutswilltravel

Alive

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c9db983b835068660fcf859b38727152-1.jpgToday I kidnapped my girly friend as soon as she got off work.  I had to drive her over to this beautiful little piece of property my realtor found this morning.  I can’t tell you where it is because you might win the lottery before I do and buy it.  I can tell her where it is because if she has such great fortune she will let me sleep on her front porch every night so I still get to enjoy the view.  Plus, the spring bulbs are in bloom, the trees are just about to burst open, and I figured this was far better than taking her a bouquet of flowers to celebrate some great news she got yesterday!

We walked the land and portioned off pieces for the garden and the chickens, then decided the pair of alpaca can be free-range.  We fraternized with the neighbor’s faithful guard dog, who might be chow / golden retriever mix, and is probably a girl on account of the way she squatted to pee.  She told me what the house I’d build ought to look like, because she’s good at those things.  Then I drove her back home.

Just seconds before turning onto her road, something hit me; not in the literal sense,  but may as well have been.

“What day is this?” I asked in the middle of jabbering about other things.

“Thursday.”

“I mean the number!  What number is this?” I was getting excited.

She told me today is the tenth.

March tenth!

Ya’ll, this is the twelfth anniversary of when I was supposed to die any minute!
And then it was going to be maybe in a few weeks.  And then during child birth.  And then, because doctors are sure about these things, sometime within the next 5 years, for certain.

And for the first time ever, I forgot the anniversary was approaching!

A dozen years ago I was put on a medication regimen that not only stabilized my (low) heart function, but exacerbated my ADD.  I think both effects can be credited with saving my life as I’ve clearly been too distracted to die.

I’m frequently humbled by the tribe of heart sisters I’ve made all over the world – women who’ve had the same diagnosis and handled it with far more grace than I could ever muster.  And last year I wandered into the wilderness of Montana only to bump into a heart brother, too.  This disease has given me far more than it took, so here’s a little toast to all the wonderful people cardiomyopathy has brought into my life, and a spill to all of the superfluous and poisonous things it has removed.  And may next year I forget the date all together.

Papa and Patron

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My home is tastefully decorated with the things death leaves behind.  This is a bleached tortoise shell found near my husband’s home.  And a margarita.  There is a margarita in this picture, too.

Tomorrow is my dad’s 80th birthday and he’s been gone just a hair over 9 years.  He shared his birthday with another notable man, George Washington and liked to say that George chopped down the cherry tree to make him a birthday pie.

Obviously, he had a misconception about how fruit is harvested, but he did love a cherry pie!  On the occasion that my mom would make him a cherry chocolate cake instead, he enjoyed that, too.

As it just so happens, tomorrow is also National Margarita Day and I’m here to help you celebrate both.

 

A toast to my dad

In a shaker, muddle 12 dark, sweet, pitted cherries* along with the juice from one sorry sized lime like you find in grocery stores this time of year.  Squeeze it good; you need every last drop!

Add 1.25 fl oz of tequila.  I used Patron reposado because that’s the only tequila I’m currently on speaking terms with.  Also, tomorrow is Monday and a full moon; go ahead and use a heavy hand.

Add .75 fl oz of dark agave nectar and .5 fl oz of triple sec.

Along with 12 fresh ice cubes, shake for a long minute.

Prepare any shaped glass you want by rimming it with another, un-muddled cherry and dipping in sugar.  Add fresh ice cubes.  Don’t let the haters tell you that you can’t drink a margarita out of a martini glass.

Sit back, enjoy your drink, and think about my dad.  Or your dad.  Or yourself.  And whether you’ll live to be 80 or not, and hope that you do because you’re already more than halfway there and you’ve not had enough time to figure out all the things you want to do yet.

Cheers!

 

Special alternate ending

Did you feel a stirring in your loins when I mentioned cherry chocolate cake?

Me, too.

Mix 1 tsp Hershey’s Special Dark, 100% Cocoa powder, 1 tsp vanilla sugar, and a pinch of salt. Wet your rim with an un-muddled cherry and dip in this delicious mixture.

*If you live in an alternate reality or hemisphere, maybe you get really good cherries in February.  Where I live, we don’t.  Frozen, but thawed cherries are perfect for muddling and drinking.  And they’re already pitted.  Just make sure they aren’t packaged with sugar.  Cherries should be the only ingredient in the bag.  Or box.  Or food capsule.  I don’t know how they come in your world.

Impara L’Italiano

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Italian flag2

Here’s a fun fact:  when I was in the Army I tested into the linguistics program.  To prove how very capable of making terrible decisions I am, I opted for a communication security program instead.  Why?  Because the language training took place over twelve months in Monterey, California.  Eighteen year old me couldn’t figure out who would want to spend a whole year in Monterey.  Twenty year old and beyond me knows the answer to this is, of course, me. 

Maybe, though, it ran deeper than that.  Maybe I knew that while I found it easy to learn languages on paper, I had a hard time speaking anything but English.  My tongue is stiff and dances like a white girl.  I dreaded having to read things aloud in French class in high school because I knew how terrible I sounded.  The Spanish I’d picked up along the way was zero help navigating the streets of Miami that time I had to shoe shop just hours before a cruise because I’d lost one half of every pair I packed.

Still, ever full of grand ideas, I set out to learn a little Italian before my upcoming trip. One of my local Facebook friends was hosting an exchange student from Italy who, as it turned out, also spoke French. That seemed like a logical place to start, so on a warm, November day I met Courtney and La-OO-ra* at Café Buongiorno. La-OO-ra brought her friend, Elisa, a German exchange student and classmate. Both girls were super-model-beautiful, but couldn’t have looked more different.

Elisa was smartly dressed in a pencil skirt and ironed blouse. With her porcelain complexion, round cheeks, brilliant blue eyes, and the only natural blonde hair in the whole 27614, she never stopped smiling. She looked like sunshine. I so hated that I had no good reason to learn German that I started questioning if I couldn’t, maybe, just work in a day trip by train from Paris to Frankfurt. A quick consultation of Google Maps ruled it out.

La-OO-ra had toasted skin, a long, brown, sun streaked mane, and petite, pointy facial features. Her style was casual and comfortable, yoga pants and a sweatshirt. In classic European teen fashion, she was adorned with golden bangle bracelets and hoop earrings. I made a mental note to grow my hair two more feet and start wearing jewelry.

I probably won’t start wearing jewelry.

I intended to set up a weekly study session in which La-OO-ra could help me dust off my decades old high school French and teach me some Italian, but she basically talked me out of it. She told me that Parisians are snobs and will look down on me for knowing only a little broken French just as they would look down on me for knowing no French at all. So to this I say, why even bother?

I did pick La-OO-ra’s brain for a few, key phrases in Italian. I felt bad that Elisa was being left out of the conversation. Even decades later, I too remember the special hell that is boredom to a teenager. So when La-OO-ra told me how to say have a good day (buona giornata), I asked Elisa how they would say that in Germany.

With her ever-joyful smile and twinkling eyes she quickly replied, “Oh, we would never say that to someone.”

This is hilarious – until you think about it. Except that thinking about it actually makes it funnier.

I continued with what would become my only Italian study session with La-OO-ra. I worried that it isn’t enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is, I wanted to be able to understand the directions; down the hall, second right, third door to your left, for example.

La-OO-ra raised an eyebrow and asked me, “How beeg you tink deese places are to be?”

Apparently, unless I plan only to pee in opera halls and museums, this will not be an issue. Besides, she told me, everybody in Italy speaks English and is enthusiastic to help Americans. I hope this is true.

Still wanting to learn some amount of Italian, I started using the DuoLingo app on my smart phone.  Equally, I attributed my early success to how naturally Italian seemed to feel rolling off of my tongue, and the app’s smart use of written, spoken, and speaking features.  Before long, I’d completed the Basics 1 program with no weak words.  I could say with great confidence, “Io sono una ragazza!”

This phrase means, I am a girl, and is said with the gesticulation that I intuitively know must accompany anything I ever say in Italian.  Let’s ignore for the time being that my gender is not ambiguous and that Italian men have a reputation for not needing to be told that someone is a girl.  And if we can, let’s also ignore that I technically should be saying, “Io sono una donna!” because I’m a woman who can no longer pass for a girl.

No sooner did I start feeling really good about learning Italian – and I mean, like, maybe-my-life’s-purpose-has-been-to-learn-Italian good about it – did I run across a New Yorker article titled Teach Yourself Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Read it; it’s great.  But not right now.  Right now, let me bring this home.  This article is about an Indian born New Yorker of Bengali decent who studies Italian.  For years.  After eight years of study and several lengthy trips to Italy, she still found herself unable to fluently converse.

This was all the encouragement I needed to give up trying to learn Italian for my trip in March.  If, after eight years this brilliant woman couldn’t do it, how on earth was I ever going to learn?  So I started ignoring my DuoLingo app everyday when it pushed me notifications that it was time to study.  I soon forgot whatever other words I’d learned.  But worse, I’d resigned myself to being the ugly American who expected the whole world to speak English because I was lazy and ignorant.

And then this week I learned that Jhumpa Lahiri just published her memoir Interpreter of Maladies, – are you ready for this? – in Italian!  I might or might not have know about this if I hadn’t stopped reading her New Yorker article when I realized my own plight was hopeless.

So maybe I won’t learn enough Italian to carry on deep and philosophical conversations – this time.  But I can order una birra, or un bicchiere di vino, and that’s not nothing.  Re-energized in my pursuit of a second, completely indulgent language, I went on Groupon to find discounts on things to do while in Rome.  I either bought a couples massage, or a blonde hooker; it’s hard to say because I couldn’t read a word of the advertisement and had to guess based on the photo, alone.  It was forty euro, so either way, great deal!  Then I opened my DuoLingo app for the first time in over a month and got reacquainted with my old friend, Italian; this time with  a new goal. One day I will return to Italy and inquire of all the great opera halls, “Dov’è il bagno?”

 

*  La-OO-ra is actually spelled L-A-U-R-A, and must be pronounced by lightly rolling the ‘r.’ It is the most beautiful name I’ve ever heard, when pronounced correctly, and I want to change all three of my children’s names now.

In Ordinary Time

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Catholics are going to hell.  I know this because the second Southern Baptist phase of my mother’s religious evolution coincided with my formative years, and she told me so.  Repeatedly.  This alone would have made catholic boys wildly attractive to me, had I known any in my small Appalachian town.  As fate would have it, I didn’t actually meet any until years and years later, after my mother transitioned into her Extra Terrestrials Created the Universe phase.  And wouldn’t you know it?  I married the first one I met.

While engaged, we sat before a vicar who unwittingly blew the starting whistle on what became, for me, a seventeen year wrestling match with Catholicism.  By that time, I didn’t believe in marriage or God, but since both were important to the man I intended to spend the rest of my life with, I thought, what the hell?  This was before I learned the important lesson that things you don’t believe in can still eat you right up.  Correction:  This was the beginning of that lesson, and another story for another time.

The vicar emphasized that the Catholic Church would never recognize my marriage to my catholic fiancé unless I had my first marriage annulled.  I had so many questions.

The first being, the church recognized my first marriage, the one where two non-Catholics got married outside of a catholic church?  Yes.  They did.

Secondly, but the church won’t recognize a Catholic’s marriage if it takes place outside of the Catholic Church?  That is correct.

Third, how does that make even a little bit of sense?  Cannon law.  But for the low, low price of some tens of hundreds of dollars, the Church can erase the first marriage, write the second one, and we could live holy ever after.  Happiness not guaranteed.  Installment plans available.  Must be over the age of reason.  Offer invalid outside of the continental U.S..

In the end, we hired a retired pastor who ran a wedding chapel beside a laundromat and imported him to the North Raleigh Hilton where we intended to have a non-religious ceremony.  Our plans were foiled when the father of the groom slipped the reverend a twenty to insert a reading of one of the Corinthians and the Lord’s Prayer.

Yea.  That’s where our plans went awry.

For the next decade I continued to butt heads with the Church through a botched conversion and then at every point along the arc of our marriage; birth, death, infidelity, divorce….  And then it was over.  When you’re not catholic and find yourself no longer married to someone who is, all of that just falls away.   But not quickly if you’re a Virgo that just doesn’t let shit go.

Almost another decade has passed and I find myself remarried, this time to a man who converted to Catholicism in order to marry his ex-wife.  He remains mum about how much he ever believed, but he stopped practicing when that marriage ended.  And like the beliefs of my mother before me, mine have also evolved.  I still don’t believe in marriage, but I believe in mine.  I do believe in God now, but not in an institutional kind of way.

Last year I began a pilgrimage to unravel the mysteries of passion, something my mother had, but that I lack.  It started with an itinerary to put myself in the way of passionate people in order to better understand them.  I’m still processing what I did and did not get from my trip to Graceland for Elvis’ birthday last month, and happily planning for my trip to St. Peter’s Basilica for Easter mass next month.  It has occurred to me that unlike my trip to Memphis, maybe I should prepare a little for my trip to Rome.  So in addition to meat and all beverages that are neither water nor alcoholic, this Lenten season I am giving up my long grapple with Catholicism.

On this Ash Wednesday morning I sat in St. Catherine of Sienna’s parking lot and silenced my cell phone to the best of my ability.  I ran through the mental checklist of rituals from all those years ago when we attended St. Raphael every time we visited my in-laws in Pittsburgh.  I remembered to cross myself, but forgot to genuflect.  For the first time ever, I did not feel like an imposture.  I wasn’t there out of some familial obligation.  I was there seeking understanding, just like everyone else; even if not understanding of the same thing.

The music was simple and the ritual of it all was quite moving.  The priest read the Gospel, then in the brief silence between the Blessing and the Distribution of Ashes, my phone received an e-mail – a sound that apparently does not turn off with any of the settings I adjusted in the car.  The perturbed look on the faces of the elders around me was no match for the horrified look of the little girl sitting immediately to my left as the four notes of the Mockingjay whistle rang out loud and true from my purse sitting between us on the pew.  I volunteered her as tribute and gave her a perturbed look of my own.  On the outside, it might have looked like a frown and wrinkled eyebrows, but what I was trying to convey on the inside was, Hey kid, thanks for taking this fall for me.  I owe you one.

If by any chance my mother was right about where these people are headed, I’m probably going to be spending an awful lot of time with them in the afterlife.

Book Review

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Writing, for me, is the biggest impetus in my life to get other things done.  When I sit down to write, I find myself compelled to clean my house, fold my laundry, landscape my whole back yard, or spend all day in the kitchen nourishing my family.  I can point to this fact alone as proof that even without producing an acclaimed piece of work, writing has made life better for my loved ones.

And while I’m doing all of these lovely, other things besides writing, I feel guilt.  No, that’s not true enough.  I feel shame.  Shame, because I am aware that I am only doing these things to procrastinate writing.  Because writing is hard, especially when it is so damn true.  And Truth is ugly, but it is also a splinter that needs to work its way out.  And I’m not making my house tidy, or my yard lovely, or my family fed out of deep and abiding love for those whom I share these things with.  I am doing it because I’d look ridiculous laying prone, all red faced, pounding and kicking the floor.  These things may not look like it, but they most certainly are my forty-something year old version of a tantrum.

Except reading.  I allow myself to read without guilt and shame.  I rationalize that reading makes a better writer.  I might, however, abuse this allowance.

Timagehe window ledge beside my bath tub has been collecting all of my books in progress; not the ones I’ve been meaning to read, but the ones I’ve already delved into.  Some people keep such stacks on their nightstands, but I can’t sleep with that kind of unfinished business breathing in my face.  It’s not that I lack proper shelving, I just can’t take a bubble bath in my study, and everybody knows books and bubbles are soul mates.

When the collection was only twelve strong, I made a New Years resolution not to buy any books until I was out of books.  When the number grew to 16 I made a more feasible February resolution not to buy any books until I’d finished half the pile.

By 7am on February 1st I’d contacted my local bookmonger to order a new one.  I picked it up yesterday at lunchtime with a realistic expectation of finishing it sometime in April, probably.  Unless I bought more books.  I surprised myself, and I imagine made some of those old friends on my window ledge a little jealous, when I finished it this morning.
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If you’re at all interested in writers, or why they write, I highly recommend Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature.  Most of the twenty also write fiction, so don’t mistake this as an interview with narcissism; it’s valuable insight into the process as a whole.  And clearly, it is immune to Attention Deficit Disorder.  It might even stop bullets, who can say?  I think you should get a copy from your local book store for good measure, and good reads.

 

Baby, mine

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madiYour parents and your children.  Those are the people who will always believe in you and your ability to do it, whatever it may be.  Your parents and your children.  The difference, though, is that your parents know that you can do it.  Because they showed you how.  And it’s the right thing.  And they didn’t raise you not to do it.  But your children?  They know you will do it.  Because you’re mom.  And you have to.  And not doing it isn’t even an option.

For 21 years, this fiery bundle of creativity and love has built me into the woman I am, and I am so very proud of the woman she is.  Happy Birthday, Angel Princess.

I’m a ring tailed dreamer

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lemur

If I learned anything from last week’s trip to Tennessee, it’s that when I’m home I  need to get out more.  Every person I passed on the street in both Nashville and Memphis could rattle off a dozen things I needed to see while I was in town.  I can’t do the same for Raleigh.   There are places and things that thrill me, but those have zero tourist value.

My friend, Jen is visiting for the week. She arrived Thursday night and we giggled until two a.m.  I let her sleep in on Friday morning while I consulted TripAdvisor for things to do in Raleigh-Durham.  Since it’s winter, fully 4/5th of their suggestions were off the table. Who knew we were so outdoorsy? One possibility leaped out at me, furry arms wide open.  There was no time to properly vet the idea before it was clinging to my neck and poking leaves in my mouth.

I quietly knocked on Jen’s door and invited myself into her room.  I bounced on the corner of her bed and said, “Hey, do you want to paint with lemurs?”

A typical response for someone waking up to this question might be,  huh?  But Jen’s not typical and that’s why I love her.   She said,  “Hell, yeah!”

And I really don’t want to tell anybody how to live their life, but maybe those ought to be the first words we all utter every morning that we are lucky enough to wake up.

We spent the few remaining minutes of the morning getting dressed and looking deeper into the offerings of the Duke Lemur Center. We met in the upstairs hallway, disappointed. Jen had envisioned some sort of human-lemur collaboration, producing a joint piece of art. I’d imagined I’d get to hold a lemur by the tail, dip him in paint, and smear him on my canvas. Either one of us could have been right, but no. For $95 each, Duke will let visitors pick what color paint a couple of Lemurs step in before running across a sheet. And you get to keep the sheet. It’s just this woman’s opinion, but that activity neither rises to the price tag, nor the legal definition of painting with lemurs.

By the next afternoon I’d taken my children to visit with their father for the holiday weekend and dropped my husband at the airport for a week of skiing and Sundance Film Festival-ing. We met up with some friends for books, drinks, and dinner. To the outside world, I looked fine. But on the inside, I was still really bummed about that whole lemur thing.  Then my brain turned on.

If ideas came in color, the one I had next would have been hot pink and orange.  I invited our friends over for Sunday night. We would go to Walmart and buy stuffed lemurs!  I have plenty of stretched and primed canvases, and paint, at home.

Looking back, I have no idea why I was so certain Walmart would have lemurs. Nor can I explain why, when Jen was just making a helpful suggestion, I replied with such “judgey indignation” that, Ptshh. Dollar General doesn’t have Lemurs!

By the time I’d driven to the Toys R Us side of town, I was starting to feel like my brain had thrown a party that I wasn’t invited to. There was sangria and lemur painting up in there. But out here, in the cold, harsh, real world, there were no lemurs and I’m pretty sure that is some kind of racist bullshit. After striking out at a craft store, I remembered World Market.

Jen stayed in the parking lot to call her family back in Dallas, so I entered World Market alone.  By nature, I am not a shopper.  I don’t have the focus to comb through aisles of things so I walked right up to Tracy, the nearest sales person.  She appeared to be about 30 and of at least average intelligence, so I begged for her help.  “Do you have anything in here that is a lemur, or has a lemur in it, or on it?  I just need a lemur and it doesn’t really matter in what form.”  My point is, I clearly said lemur several times. And obviously, I was already showing signs of willingness to settle.

Jackpot!  She nodded and walked me to a shelf filled with all sorts of animal-shaped ornaments.  Or toys.  I couldn’t really tell what use these things were, except that they were about to satisfy my acute fixation on lemurs.  Then she pointed to the only two llamas on the shelf.

Llamas.

I didn’t want to come off as judgey and indignant again so I picked up the llamas, one white, one brown, and carried them to the register.  The line was moving slowly, so I had time to name them.  This is where Jen found me, with both llamas standing in my outstretched palm, like they were freely roaming the countryside of Peru.

“Serena, what are you doing?”  Who sounded judgey and indignant now?

“Shhhhh.”  I didn’t want Tracy to hear this.

“But those aren’t lem-”

“Shhhhh!” I hushed her, louder, and kind-of jerked my head towards Tracy, who was now helping another customer.

“They’re not lem-”

I interrupted her again, with a staccato whisper and more head jerking.  “I.  Know.  They’re.  Not.  Lemurs.  But she thinks they are.”

Jen’s face showed nothing but confusion.  “But why are you buying them?”

I didn’t actually have an answer for her, so I moved my palm to the nearest shelf and set Jake and Elwood free, along with any hope of painting with lemurs.  I hesitated at the door, trying to convince myself that painting with llamas would totally be as fun as painting with lemurs, but my one-track brain would have none of that.  Besides, everybody knows Llamas are for raffling off, not for painting. I returned home, defeated.

We still had our party Sunday night, but it changed from a lemur painting party into a yoga pants party.  There was moonshine sangria; there is always sangria.  The next morning I nursed sore cheeks from laughing so hard the past few days and it was not lost on me that, yet again, things didn’t turn out the way I (hastily) planned; they turned out better.

My frantic search wasn’t a new one.  I’ve always been hunting lemurs in one form or another.  I have these ideas, sometimes silly, sometimes even sillier.  And you know what?  I have an awful lot of fun trying to catch them.  

Hell, yeah!

 

 

Tennescenes; addendum

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Jackson

8.

Have you ever heard somebody who isn’t Johnny Cash try to sing Johnny Cash?  You know how no matter how good they might be, it just sounds wrong?  Well, that was my meatloaf experience today.  I like mine better.  Because mine was my mom’s.  And however your mom made meatloaf growing up is how it’s supposed to be.  Other people can make your mom’s meatloaf; the recipe isn’t a secret.  They can use other recipes, too, but that’s where they go wrong.

But the company did not disappoint.  Very much like my real family dinners, I was the first one to the table at Monell’s.  I was soon joined by Tommy from San Francisco, and Tyrese who is a Memphibian.  They are classmates at a small evangelical Christian college in Los Angeles.  Tyrese has been showing Tommy the Big East over this winter break.  I’m really very, very bad at these things, but I suspect they have a secret that would get them expelled from their super conservative school.

Shortly after we got acquainted, we met AlGordemort.  I don’t recall his name, but he had Gore’s face and Voldemort’s pasty skin and bald head.  He wore a navy blazer and a red bowtie with small yellow daisies.  He obviously got his fashion sense from the Dork Lord.  His son, a freshman at a local university, was a younger, blonde haired version of his father.  He had one of those cute names; Tanner, or Cody, or Fluffy, something like that.  I can’t remember.

 

9.

I’m a big fan of the twenty dollar bill, so I spent my last day in Tennessee touring the home of Andrew Jackson, The Hermitage.  These were my five takeaways:

The tour guide told me most of his chairs were covered in horse hair.  It’s a whole new level of equestrian who lets his horses on the furniture.

Andrew Jackson was a ginger, a feature that was erased from history by every artist who ever painted him.

For a man who was pro-slavery and credited with the removal of a whole indigenous people, he sure didn’t have any compunction about letting those folks fight in his wars for him.

Andrew and Rachel Jackson were married for 54 years and by all accounts, deeply in love with and devoted to one another.  Because of all of his soldiering and politicking, Rachel figured they only spent one quarter of all of their years actually together.  The correlation between these two facts is solely mine.

Electronic interpreter devices that museums let you use for the self-guided portion of tours are not impervious to toilet water.  Woops.

 

10.

This really was a ridiculous amount of luggage for one human being to use, imagemuch less schlep for a week.

I’m sure I haven’t learned my lesson.

Tennescenes

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tennessee

1.

It’s almost lunch time and the lobby is full of frenzied parents.  My cell phone rings. It is Madison, calling me back.  Ten minutes ago she huffed and hung up on me because I didn’t have time to talk about her pancakes, which I can’t see or taste from eighty miles away.  She desperately needs my validation, except I tell her that she doesn’t, and that she should enjoy her pancakes if they are enjoyable, or make another batch if they are not.  That’s how pancakes work, even for me.  I answer her call not with, “Hello,” but, “I’ll call you back during lunch.”

The secretary has a phone to each ear; one she is on hold with, the other she is asking questions of while relaying information to the frightened parents in front of her.  Their children never made it to school.  She tells me my children never made it to school.

Where is the bus driver?  Drivers.  Multiple.  Four buses never picked up the children.

But Jack and Cate didn’t come back home.  They didn’t call.  Nobody’s kids did.

I hurriedly retrieve my purse, coat, books, and white pashmina from the detention classroom where I’ve been volunteering.  Those kids are fuck ups.  How did they manage to get to school?

I am nearly running down the hallway with my arms full and heavy when Jack’s ringtone plays from my cell phone.  I drop all of my belongings to answer it.  My mother is on the line, telling me that she has stopped by the school to have lunch with us.  Then I am not on the phone with her, I’m in front of her, explaining that she can eat at my house.  We have to go.  I don’t know where my children are.

The day is grey and the air is charged with a looming storm.  I am frustrated with her for showing up on this day.  I am frustrated that she isn’t moving fast enough.  I’m frustrated that she doesn’t know where she is going in the parking lot because she doesn’t recognize my rental car.  I’m frustrated that I have to help her buckle her seatbelt.

I’m finally ready to back out of my parking spot when I see it – a giant tornado off in the distance ahead.  But then I realize it is flanked by skinnier tornados; seven in all, in a row.  My mother hasn’t seen them, so I nudge her and point.  Just a tad bit closer to us, another row of seven columns of smoke and dirt grow out of the ground into the sky.  That’s when I know they are not tornados.  They are missiles.

Every few seconds, another row of missiles goes up, each marching closer to us, growling and grumbling louder and louder.  My mother asks if we are being bombed.  The bombs are being launched from here, our ground, I tell her.  Are we bombing us?

I try to calculate if the next row will miss us or erupt from directly underneath my car, but we don’t have to wait long to find out.  We feel the next explosion twenty feet behind us.  Our ears are ringing and the air is too smoky and dusty to see beyond the windshield.  And I don’t know where my children are.

Panic grabs for my chest, but I awake just out of its reach as it brushes me with its burning, icy fingers.  My chest is frozen, but it is not squeezed.  It’s been so long since my last nightmare, maybe weeks.  I lie awake dissecting what I know wasn’t real.  My bad dream is my insomnia’s chew toy and it wrestles with the detail of my mother.  Why was she there?

It is 2:38am.  Flashing blue lights dance on the wall I don’t recognize in front of me and a loud truck rumbles down Broadway.  It is my first night in Nashville.

 

2.

MonellsSusan Ann, with her curly brown hair piled on top of her head, told me that Nashville is known for their meatloaf so while I’m here, I have to eat at Monell’s.  It was almost one and I hadn’t even eaten breakfast, so that’s where I went next.

Monell’s is family style country cooking.  I worried a little bit about dining alone in a family style restaurant, but I needn’t have.  I was seated at the end of a very long table and left to occupy myself with big bowls of coleslaw and cucumber salad.  Then my waitress brought a basket of biscuits and cornbread; then she brought me some family.

To my left, she seated a husband and wife.  They met and married while stationed in Germany twenty three years ago.  To my right, she seated two paralegals; best friends who work at different law firms.  One of them recognized the couple to my left.  When she was a senior in high school she worked at a drycleaner they owned.

Further down the table to my left, the waitress seated a retired couple from Australia.  When asked where in Australia they were from, they only said, “the south.”  Across from them, a young couple was taking grandpa, or great grandpa, or the crypt keeper out for lunch.  He sat opposite me at the other end of the table, but I could not see him over the lemonade pitcher.  The young man with him also recognized the couple to my left.  The young man’s brother was a firefighter with him a few years ago.

I had to ask, “Is Nashville a small town?”

They all agreed heartily that it is.

Fried chicken, baked chicken, pork chops, green beans, mashed potatoes, cornbread stuffing, macaroni and cheese, and fresh preserves were all passed around the table.  Eventually I realized there was no meatloaf.  It was Wednesday.  They told me meatloaf day was Monday.

We ate, we talked, we laughed, and some of us even caught up on old times and how the kids have grown.  Nobody asked to borrow money or brought up politics.  There were no loud drunks or stoned hipsters.  Nobody judged me for having three husbands, or acted like I might as well have had eight.  I didn’t bite my tongue bloody or worse, let it fly.

It’s going to be pretty hard to top that family dinner.  I wonder who they were.

3.

There is a Fort Pillow.  I want so badly to believe there was a civil warfort pillow battle fought from behind overturned sofas, with war weary soldiers taking refuge in bunkers built from the couch cushions and blankets.  I want to believe it so much that I refuse to read this plaque.  I can infer from the picture that furniture doesn’t provide the best cover in a musket fight, and since I never plan to be in one, this information isn’t really relevant to me.

 

4.

Merle is a child of God with only two bad habits and perfectly straight teeth – the ones that are accounted for, anyway.  Two bad habits.  He smokes cigarettes and he drinks beer, but he’s not going to ask me to buy him any beer, he says.

I am fine as fuck; Merle said so.  Repeatedly.  I think he misread my lack of response and apologized for his language.  He didn’t want to offend me so he amended his compliment, “Girl you is fine as a sandcastle.”

It’s stupid, but it’s novel and I cannot help but laugh.  He misreads this and tells me again and again, I am fine as a sandcastle and can I please buy him a pack of cigarettes?  He just came back from Chicago and they’re $15 a pack there.  walk dont walkI’m in luck because they’re only $5 here.

I tell him he should either stay away from Chicago, or quit smoking.  I want to tell him to learn some manners and get a job.  I decide to jaywalk instead.

 

5.

I entered Arkansas on the old I-55 bridge, which afforded me no opportunity to see the mighty Mississippi overflowing his old banks.  I was going to West Memphis to look for Lucinda Williams’ Joy!

What I found instead was a rusted town that smelled like giving up and sewage.  If there was joy anywhere near that town it would stick out like a sore thumb.

I looked for her joy a few years back when I was in Slidell; all I found was alligators.  They look happy when you toss them marshmallows, and happy is close to joy.  I think she should focus her search there.

https://youtu.be/70Z_-w4CJXI

 

6.

It was nineteen-seventy-something on the eighty-something inch TVSweatyElvis3 screen in front of us.  There is no characteristic hip swivel or lip snarl; Elvis is sweating profusely, disproportionate even to the jumping and thrashing he’s doing on stage.  Here, in two thousand sixteen, a woman in her seventies is draped over the hand rail, chin in hand, weeping at the sight before her.

“That,” she pauses, “was the Elvis I loved.”  Her voice is scratchy.  Maybe she spent the morning wailing somewhere, or the last half century smoking Marlboros.  I can’t say.

After an appropriate number of silent beats, her slightly younger companion says to her very sincerely, “I’m so sorry.”

The mourner’s reply is not automatic.  Finally, she says, “It’s alright.”

 

7.

It’s very early and I roll over to hold Mike, but it’s not Mike.  It’s just the decorative bolster I pushed to the side last night.  Disappointed, I fall back to sleep.

I awake at 6 a.m. to a Celebrity Death Beeper notice.  It’s been blowing up since the holidays; a couple a week.  But I’m weary.  There have been no thrilling and earth shattering celebrity deaths in a long time;  Since Robin Williams, I bet.

It is David Bowie.  It is early and I am devoid of coffee.  I think about the rash of copycats we will soon experience as more baby boomers die of cancer.  And then I worry that we might stop even trying to cure cancer anymore because what’s the point?  It already got David Bowie.

I dress and hunt for coffee.  For reasons I can’t explain, A Case of You is stuck in my head the rest of the morning; Diana Krall’s rendition, not Joni’s.  I miss my husband.   My plane doesn’t leave until 9:30 tonight and guess what?  It’s meatloaf day at Monell’s.