July 01, 2008 @ 22:00

I love presents for no reason.  They are my favorite kind.  Today a friend gave me a gift of a fabulous cookbook.  America’s Best Lost Recipes.  It has recipes like Mile High Bologna Pie, remember that scary moment in Sweet Home Alabama?  It’s far less scary than it sounds.  And Blueberry Boy Bait, Pagache, Indian Pudding, Kolaches, Wacky Cake, and more and more and more.  Recipes that I recognize and ones that are as foreign as if they were written in another language.  It’s a thoughtful collection that expresses that beautiful thing that is America.  Immigrant influences and home cooks of widely ranging styles, city, country, middle class and poor.  I was happy to see not a trace of pretense.  Just good honest lovely food.  I haven’t decided what to try first.  Trixie of course thinks we should try the Blueberry Boy Bait.  Puppy’s favorite breakfast is Kolaches.  And I’m intrigued by Cold Oven Pound Cake, Buttermilk Candy and Slipped Custard Pie, the crust and custard are completed in separate dishes and the the custard is slipped into the crust, avoiding that common sogginess that is probably the reason custard pie is so unfairly judged.  It is one of my favorites.  The photo illustration of the technique is just as brave as it sounds.  I can’t wait to try it.  Perhaps that will be the first.  Maybe I’ll make an afternoon Sunday of baking and take them all to work on Monday.  Cold Oven Pound Cake, add in my Meemaw’s Chocolate Pineapple Pound Cake and Fresh Apple Cake.  That will be a nice way to stay out of the heat.  And it will help me shake off my blues, too. 

June 30, 2008 @ 22:42

I attended a funeral of an old friend last Wednesday.  When I heard the news I was shocked.  A few days later I was told the story by a mutual friend, told what had happened.  What I knew was this, minor surgery, stopping breathing, the end.  Tonight I spoke with her daughter, a woman I’ve known since we were awkward ten year olds.  I cried again for her.  It’s shocking.  And sad.  I had mourned for her already.  We had not spoken in two years.  When my friendship with her was suspended.  It ended with a handwritten note, she was famous for those.  She had had to choose.  And she choose rightly.  She was a woman who spent countless hours every week tending her family.  Being a mentor to others.  And being a woman that few will ever equal.  What she had written me was a goodbye note.  She ended that note with encouragement and love.  I was heartbroken then.  One day last year, she left another note on my back door.  I didn’t tell anyone about that.  I cried for a long time.  At the funeral I cried for the rest of her family.  I had been missing her for so long that my grieving was less fresh, less sharp.  I wondered how her children were able to breathe.  I suppose you just do.  You just breathe.  This woman had mothered me in some of the worst times of my life.  During teenaged years particularly.  When the world spins off it’s axis and you can barely hold on.  I’m not sure where I’d be if it hadn’t been for her.  But then, life goes on and you do.  When she made that choice two years ago, it made sense.  It was to let me go.  It’s the kind of choice I wish my own mother had been able to make.  Not to let me go.  I’m not saying this right.  I’m not sure how to say it.  Like a band aid maybe . . .  I called my mother on the phone a few days ago.  A pair of friends and I have been talking about the future.  A pair of wonderful friends who are full of life and enthusiasm and faith in me, in us.  Not a combination I’m used to, frankly.  It’s intoxicating.  They believe we can make a real go of our talents, set them up in a pretty shop, turn it into the kind of thing that you toil over and love and someday wring out to provide futures for your children.  Something good and real and deserving of pride.  I wanted to talk to my mother about it.  I wanted to share it with her.  She asked me “Why are you telling me this?”  This rocked me, sucker punched me.  I don’t remember the rest of the conversation really.  I know I kept talking, but my head went far away and didn’t come back until Sunday on the rock with Trixie.  (When I delivered that cake for you on Saturday, Trixie, I couldn’t bear to be in the house full of family and ran like a dog.  You did not call me on it and I love you for it.)  She asked me why I was telling her about this thing, this exciting thing that might happen for me.  I just wanted to share it with her.  But I think all she heard was something that sounded like a sales pitch.  I think she thought that I was about to ask for start up money.  I stopped asking for help a long time ago.  Can’t afford the interest rates.  Guilt and shame hit too hard.  They’re bullies and they never go home.  They live in your head instead of the playground and you can’t run away from them. 

I get this little knot in the pit of my stomach sometimes when I witness other people’s intimate family moments.  In the row in front of me at the funeral was a family of four.  A father, mother, daughter and son.  They were four, but sitting in only three chairs.  None of them were weeping loudly or obviously falling apart.  But they had each linked their arms together or around one another and were so close that the breadth of them only filled three chairs.  I marveled at it.  I stared at the backs of their heads and wondered what they were like in real life.  As if a funeral wasn’t real enough for me.  I wondered if the brother and sister ever cried out “Moooooom! Make him stop it!”  “Dad!  She did it again!”  I wondered if the father ever cheated on the mother, if the mother had a secret credit card to fill up some inner void.  I wondered if when the boy and girl grew up,  and years and years passed, and the parents grew old and died, would they sit side by side in a church that day and comfort each other?  I do not know how people do this.  Spend whole lives together and go on and on and still love and be.  Is that too vague?  It is in my head, too.  I don’t know how to focus it, family in my head is just a thumbnail.  You can’t enlarge those.  (Puppy has just sighed in his sleep in the bed behind me.  There’s my answer.  Navel gazing is for the fat, right Trixie?) 

Two years ago I mourned a mother who wasn’t mine.  Last week I mourned her again in the more real way.  But I’ve been missing mine, too.  She’s still here, but I can’t have her.  Choices.  I’m the oldest of eleven and one of the loneliest women I know.  Our parents didn’t build us a rock solid foundation, they built us rickety separate rafts and it gets harder and harder to shout over the waves and hear each other.  We are all grown ups now and it is our choices now, but sometimes I wish to have been set down on an island instead.  I listen to other peoples stories that begin with “Oh, every year we . . .” with a combination of envy and enchantment.  I have caught myself telling handful of those stories.  I never tell anyone that none of my every-years was longer than two or three strung together.  It would make me feel like a fraud.  But in my heart, those are my little tin foil stars.  No obvious value to an outsider but that which I’ve placed on them.  They buckle under the weight.  It’s almost too much for them to bear.  So I don’t take them out too often.  There was one summer, the last summer that anyone on my father’s side remembered me as a child, during which I spent a week with my family, my sister.  A week I think.  The memory is fuzzy, but some of it . . .  I can still smell it.  I can feel the grass of the back yard and the concrete of the front steps under my feet.  I can remember the sound of the screen doors swinging on the back porch.  I can see her little face, the way the sweat turned her hair into little curls around it.  And I can remember how much I loved her that summer.  It was the last time I saw that part of my family as a child.  There was one stray Christmas in between, but it was stilted and strange.  I went back and found her ten years later.  Because I believe she may be the only person on this planet who might ever really understand me without my spilling my guts to explain it.  She’s the only raft I can still see without paddling hard.  She’s been one of my perfect bits of this lifetime.  But in truth, for every perfect bit that I’ve got, I have something to match it up with like . . .  oh hey, this is a good one . . .  Going in for surgery alone.  Going to the doctor, being told you can go home for a couple of hours but it’s so serious that you have to have the surgery tonight.  As they arrange last minute anethstetists and I guess whatever other team members are needed for sugery, I am sent home to get a change of clothes and to tell my people.  My people do not leave work for me.  I drive myself to the hospital, sit in preop alone.  I can still smell that room.  That funeral I attended, that family schedules it’s members’ hospital stays.  Not only will you not sit in preop alone, there are schedules and shifts.  They never leave you to endure alone.  Can you imagine?  That’s a family with lots of “Oh, every year we . . .  “  By the way, that was before the days of everybody having a cell phone and by the time I went home, I had managed to reach someone to drive my car back for me.  Can’t you guess?  Trixie.  And the daughter of the woman who passed away last week.  They took care of me after. 

So I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights in the last few days, thinking about all of this.  About how we raise our children, hopefully, to be better versions of ourselves.  How we surround ourselves with the family we are given if we can take it.  I was happy to learn that the old friend of mine had reconciled the past with her mother over the last two years.  They’d smoothed over their rocky past and become friends again.  I’m glad to know that.  I wonder when I’ll get there.  Sometimes we have to carve pieces of family away to survive.  And then we patch up the gaps with family that we choose for our lives, our friends.  Those friends who fill us up.  We love them and try to do the right things.  If we’re not too wounded, we teach our children to love better than we were loved.  And things get better. 

Don’t missunderstand me.  I love my mother desperately.  But I miss her, too.  When I was little, if I needed a drink, she got it for me.  When I was seventeen and I wanted a drink, I usually did without.  Now, I get my own water. 

Water is very likely you, if you’re reading this and know me in real life . . . as if this isn’t real enough for me.  Thanks for that . . . 

 June 29, 2008 @ 19:58

This was a long long week.  Wednesday I attended the funeral of an old friend.  Thursday I took one of my baby boys in for a minor sugery.  Friday I took our canine baby boy in for a minor and unexpected surgery.  Throughout all of this, I also delivered five requested cakes.  Saturday, I finished up an enormous wedding cake and a groom’s cake for Trixie’s boy.  Today, I woke up energized and needed to get out of the house.  It’s a mess and I might should have stayed home and cleaned.  But it was too beautiful outside and I needed to go to my favorite place on the planet with one of my favorite people.  Petite Jean Mountain is the place, Trixie is the girl.  We took books and green tea and hiked out the Seven Hollows trail until we found the perfect rock . . .  and there we sat, toes in the water, reading our books in between talking about the weeks we had just endured and solving our little world’s problems between us.  In the breaks between our conversation and our books, we listened to the birds, waved to other passing hikers, and watched the crawfish in the creek.  On the way back to reality, we stopped for Mexican food and peach margaritas.  It was a very good day.  Today, I am thankful for Trixie. 

To have an idea of how clear this water is, look carefully, my feet are completely submerged in it.  Poor Trixies little feet wouldn’t reach at this particular moment.  It’s okay though, she has a much better pedicure than I do today and she was able to settle further down the rock and reach. 

This was our rock that we shared for the day. 

This is the view from our rock. 

If you look very carefully here, in the bottom left corner, you’ll see one of the crawfish we watched scurrying around on the bottom under our toes.  See his red tipped claws? 

June 27, 2008 @ 21:04

This afternoon, when I was supposed to be making a hundred daisies for a wedding cake tomorrow, I came home to an injured Charlie.  He jumped in my lap and yelped and then I noticed the bloody footprint that he left on my shirt.  Then I noticed the trail he’d left across the floor.  I bundled him up in a towel and rushed over to the vet, who thankfully was still open.  They called it “blowing a tire”.  He injured his little toe somehow and it had to be declawed I guess is the best way to describe it.  They knocked him out and took care of it.  The called me back just after they finished.  It was strange to see him stretched out on the little operating table.  They gave me the instructions for the meds he’ll have to take for pain for the next week.  Then they asked me if I wanted them to wake him up for the night or let him sleep.  He was limp as a little dishrag and so cute.  I remember how horrific it was when we had a cat declawed years ago, they suffered badly.  I swore I’d never do that again and so was feeling terrible that Charlie had just had one little toe suffer that treatment.  So I agreed with the vet it was best to let him sleep.  He was lolling in my arms and making little doggie smiles, basically like he was a sweet little passed out drunk.  I told the office girl that I’d probably take about a hundred pictures of him like that.  But on the drive home I realized he was so so completely out cold that still photos of him in that state just would not convey the cuteness.  In fact, I had to put my hand over his little chest a couple of times to reassure myself he was breathing, not unlike I did for the first year of my boys lives as they slept.  So when I got him home I tucked him into bed under his favorite blanket.  And then took one little picture of him soundly asleep. 

June 27, 2008 @ 11:21

For Annalia, who is four . . . 

June 26, 2008 @ 19:26

It’s really hard to explain that you cannot have breakfast to a five year old.  We left the house hungry at 9 a.m.  We left the hospital hungrier at nearly 4 p.m.  I’d like to send a special shout out to the dirty tart who cut us off from the very last parking place in the PATIENT lot at the CHILDREN’S hospital.  Who then stepped out of her SUV and clicked into the hospital on her hooker spike heels carrying what was obviously the supplies of a pharmaceutical rep.  As a result I had to walk my baby boy two blocks, across a busy street and through a construction site (nevermind that he loved that part, dammit) to get to the hospital.  I had a pretty easy day ahead of me and my boy, but you didn’t know that, did you?  I hope you twist an ankle on those stupid shoes.  Heifer . . .  This was a hellish long day, but we know that in comparison to all the other children at the hospital today and all the other parents in that waiting lounge, we’ve got no complaints.  The procedure is done, we have one ear with icky bloody ooze that hurts, but it’s done and we’re fine.  He kicked up a fuss about me not letting him play outside when we got home, which is the only sign you need, right?  I just didn’t think sweat and sandbox debris was a good call for the oozey ear.  Yes, you’re welcome for the detail, no prob . . .  He tolerated several very long stretches in various waiting areas and one little room . . . 

But then after being released, we visited the gift shop where he picked out a Bob the Builder friend for his collection and then got to stand next to biggest coolest train ever and show off his round red ouchies from the monitor adhesive thingies. 

He was particularly delighted with sitting on the cow catcher.  This was great silly fun.  

All is well. 

June 25, 2008 @ 21:47

Tomorrow, I take Puppy to Children’s Hospital for a minor surgery.  He’s got tubes in his ear.  The third set.  The kind that have to be removed and it is time.  So under we go.  Routine.  Not scary.  Except that there is no such thing as routine or not scary when it’s your baby.  So, before the day overtakes you tomorrow, say some thoughtful words into whichever ears that you trust, or into the air if you wish . . .  for Puppy.  We’ll appreciate it. 

Existing timestamp: June 25, 2008 @ 17:44

This week, this is the cake I’ve made for various friends and family . . . 

Mocha Orange Torte for a co-worker’s mother’s 90th birthday.  Another mocha orange torte for Trixie.  Praline cake for potluck at work.  Coming up for the weekend, a strawberry Hello Kity for a co-worker’s daughter, Mickey and cupcakes for a co-worker’s son, and Trixie’s family wedding requests.  Four tiers of turquoise and celladon sweetness covered in daisies and a turtle cheesecake for the groom.  If that were retail priced, I’d have made enough to pay the bills for the week.  Every week it grows.  More friends tell their friends and so on and so on.  Soon I’ll have to start telling people I’m sorry, but I can’t.  What will I do?  And then there’s just looking back.  If you could spend your days doing this . . . 

 . . .  instead of sitting in front of a computer all day . . .  would you?  Would you walk away from certain security for this?  Away from a different kind of happiness?  Where does bravery end and selfishness begin? 

June 22, 2008 @ 21:30

Yesterday I sat on the couch folding laundry and listened to Bear and Puppy make brownies in the kitchen. 

That is a whole list of things to definitely be thankful for.  A thirteen year old son who is patient with his five year old brother.  A five year old who thinks his big brother hung the moon.  And all the little things that made the moment possible that we might forget.  The roof over our heads and the food in the pantry and the safe little town that we live in.  Cleaning the brownie mix off the counter and floor and the big decorative bowl and whatever else Charlie couldn’t reach?  That was a pleasure.  I thought about taking a picture.  But didn’t want to disturb one bit of the moment.  So I just sat there on the couch with a lap full of unmatched socks and listened.  And was thankful. 

June 20, 2008 @ 22:33

My Friday the 20th totally trumped last week’s Friday the 13th.  Not that I’m superstitious or anything . . .  phtooey phtooey phtooey . . . 

This morning, I went to the ATM at the bank where my household account is.  This is where my paycheck is deposited and today was payday.  I checked my balance first.  Occaisionally, the ATM doesn’t show overnight direct deposits before 8am.  Yes, I know that IS stupid.  So, I checked my balance.  And then I panicked.  A little background, besides the household account I have the boys account.  This is the account where the OCSE (Office of Child Support Enforcement) deposits the boys child support payments.  Oh, a little more background, I suck with money.  There wasn’t enough there.  Not even if the overnight direct deposit wasn’t showing.  I drove back home.  My plan had been to get cash, pick up Puppy his favorite breakfast, kolache (raised yeast dough roll filled with ham and cheese) and juice box from a local bakery and then take us to school and work.  But all I could think of was where had the money gone?  And I have automatic drafts set up for the day for two regular bills and a big fat check due to the preschool on Monday.  Oh, crap.  I take Puppy back to the house and feed him breakfast while I get online to see what has happened.  I log in and the online banking page that I normally would have logged in to just says this:  “You have no documents available to view for this account.”  I log off and log back in.  The same.  I log off again and notice this little line of red text:  “If you are a Treasury Management Customer that has not moved over to the New Online Banking system, please contact this number as soon as possible.”  Well, crap.  I drive Puppy to school and on to work.  I call and begin my sitting on hold.  As I am sitting there, I begin to think more clearly.  I hang up and walk back out to the car and get the slip from the ATM.  I walk back in and log in to the boys child support account.  Look, it’s exactly the same amount minus the two dollar fee from checking it’s balance at the wrong banks ATM.  So I paid two dollars to be freaked out for an hour. 

I get on with my day.  I am working on some fairly tedious stuff.  I look up, it’s 10:30.  I’m supposed to be getting my haircut at 10:30!  I run out of the door on fire, race across town, extra thankful that it’s a small town, and arrive only ten minutes late for my appointment.  There is a partition between my girl and the front door so she doesn’t see me.  But another stylist greets me and tells me she’s with another client.  I assume she’s either running a bit late as well and am happy that I haven’t made her wait, or her next client was early and she got started and that’s totally fair.  Thirty minutes later she comes around the corner and begins to laugh.  She asks me, “What are you doing here?  Your appointment isn’t until four!”  We laugh.  I ask if she knows where it is that I am supposed to be?  No such luck. 

I go back to the office.  I spent the rest of the day doing some catch up work.  I decide that it’s probably not a good idea for me to make any big decisions for the rest of the day as I’m not thinking clearly at all today.  Around 3:00 I begin to get nauseous and realize that they began laying down another coat of epoxy on the studio floors.  I cannot help but think that I have breathed in far more fumes this week than I needed.  I left early for my real hair appointment and shopped a bit, buying a pair of white pants, btw.  No, that’s not a decision that should have been left for another day, no!  Then came home cooked dinner for us (Bear is home from Summer visitation for the weekend) and rented In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale on On Demand.  I could blame that movie choice on Bear or the fumes, but I’ll admit I liked it.  I almost rented in one night when the boys were both gone earlier this week, but decided to wait and watch it wih Bear this weekend.  Maybe I can blame liking it on the fumes . . . 

Oh, and the haircut is cute.  Super short and cute.  I hope I think so tomorrow when my brain fog is cleared.  I am happy, unintentionally high, but happy.  And so so glad Bear is home for two days . . .