The Obligatory Halloween Post
I tend to write a lot about Halloween. It’s one of my favorite holidays. My mother says I’ve always been this way about Halloween, and I can only assume that I never saw the downside to elaborate costuming and free candy.
I used to spend hours trick or treating, always hoping to stumble on the one cool house that gave out full-sized candy bars. One year, I found that house, and the candy bars were Snickers (my favorite). It was a true triumph. I vowed that when I grew up, I would be that person on the street, but we don’t get trick or treaters, and those full-size candy bars are expensive, so basically, I’d be spending a lot of money to gain five to ten pounds.
When I was younger, I also tended to bounce back and forth between choosing ordinary costumes and those that were incredibly difficult for my mother to make and made no sense to the neighbors.
When I was a witch (normal, yes?), I also had to have a wig, face paint and fake nails. The year I decided to be a ghost, I freaked out the moment I found myself covered from head to toe in a sheet and insisted on wearing my tutu instead. All in all though, I think we can still classify “witch,” “ghost” and “ballerina” as pretty standard.
Then, I decided I needed to be Jem from Jem and the Holograms. Apart from tearing one of my mother’s workout shirts and putting glitter on my face, there wasn’t a lot of room to work with that one.
The same thing happened the year I decided to be Jessica Rabbit. I mean, really, how is a kid in elementary school going to pull that one off? But I took one of my mother’s long red skirts, wore it as a dress and told people that I was Jessica Rabbit. I’m sure my mom feared what the other mothers thought of her allowing her daughter to dress as a cartoon sex symbol, but I was, and always have been, a determined gal.
(Between my love of Jessica Rabbit and Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, I can only assume that apart from an actress and lawyer, I also aspired to be a busty redhead as an adult. Lord only knows what I would have chosen for costumes if Kristina Hendricks had been around then.)
Despite my much-discussed love of the slutty costumes, I’m still a fan of the offbeat, too.
One year, I dressed up as a washed-up country singer because I happened to have a hideous and cheap red wig as well as a Western-style shirt from Old Navy. (Wigs inspire much of my dressing up -- it’s the only reason I was ever Elvira – but if that’s wrong, I don’t want to be right.)
Fortunately or unfortunately, the year I dressed up as a washed-up country singer also happened to be the year I discovered the voice memo feature on my cell phone. I woke up to a lot of song ideas in the style of “note to self” dictations at various levels of slurring, like:
“Why Did You Have To Ruin My Credit While You Ruined My Virtue?” (the one I apparently shared with everyone all night)
“You Robbed Me Blind While I Was Blinded by Love”
and “You Took Everything But My Tears.”
Considering I have never lent a boyfriend money (what would there be to give?), so-signed an ex’s loan or even shared a utility bill with a man, I have no idea why I was fixated on lost love and financial ruin that night, but there you have it.
This year, I didn’t have quite the same zeal for Halloween costumes. Not even my pumpkin carving was at its finest. I’m not sure if the dampened enthusiasm began when my first costume arrived in the mail damaged, and I had to send it back, or if it’s just that I acted like a normal person for once, but there you have it.
Either way, I ended up at the thrift story on the morning of the one much-anticipated Halloween party I was attending with few ideas. I came home with a housecoat and an ugly dress (‘80s career woman came to mind).
I told a friend about my purchases, and she said, “If you’ve come up with a valid reason to wear a housecoat around all night, go for it. Think of how comfortable you’ll be.”
That night, I put on my housecoat, some blue eye shadow, the ugliest earrings I could find and a shower cap. When anyone asked what was up, I said, “Oh, I’m not a guest. I’m just a neighbor from across the street who came to complain about the noise.”
The "Mills Slip"
I am not a subtle person.
It’s just one of those gifts I wasn’t born with. My sister is fond of saying that I am incapable of subtlety or keeping anything close to the vest. (Could this very blog be proof of her theory?)
I can’t lie, I tend to say what I’m thinking and when I can’t say what I’m thinking, you can read my emotions all over my face.
I may tell you that I love your haircut, but odds are that if I don’t, my face will involuntarily recoil into a look that implies you took scissors to your head while drunk and taking style cues from the Sneetches.
More than one teacher told me that they judged how well a lecture was going based on my face because it was always obvious whether or not I was getting the point of the lesson.
(When you’re not a subtle person, it’s usually best to have friends who aren’t subtle either. Since I’m likely to use language that some people might find offensive or over-share at any time, it’s best to surround myself with like-minded people. If I ask, “Do my nipples looks askew in this dress?” – which, yes, is an actual quote from a time I tried on a bridesmaid’s dress – I need a friend who finds that funny or is fully prepared to examine my chest area and give me an honest answer.)
In addition to lacking subtlety, I also lack patience, but love efficiency, so I find that these three traits can actually work together in a kind of oddly beautiful congruence. Anyone who uses the word “lady” in a non-ironic way or can’t admit to a secret crush on JWoww, or other embarrassing reality star, would probably best be seated next to someone else at the dinner party. We aren’t going to be pals, and I prefer to know that kind of thing without the tedium of 30 minutes of small talk.
Unfortunately though, sometimes my lack of subtlety even sneaks up on me. Through the years, I have adapted some filters, but my lack of subtlety is so strong that even this thin veil can fail, and when it does, it fails miserably.
If Freud were alive, I think he would have reconsidered calling the “Freudian Slip” a “Mills Slip.” (Sorry to indict the rest of the family, but I have to be consistent. If it were a “Sigmund Slip,” I would have gone with a “Laurel Slip.”)
Many, many years ago before I was deliriously happy and in a committed relationship, a male friend and I went out to eat at a restaurant. When the meal was over, and we were pulling out of the parking lot, I said, “The next time we have sex, we really should go to …”
And complete silence fell over the car.
It took a few seconds, but the look of shock and confusion on my friend’s face helped me realize what I’d said. The name of whatever restaurant, café or taco stand I’d meant to finish that sentence with as a suggestion for our next meal was gone, and it was gone for good.
Where I’d meant to say “lunch,” I’d said “sex,” and there’s no coming back from that one -- especially when you put the words “we” and “have” in front of it. (Luckily, most men are flattered by the idea that you might want to or have thought about sleeping with them, but it’s still hardly an ideal situation.)
In this type of instance, an “I meant to say lunch” is pointless. Not even laugher works well. Silence is an option, but it seems to just turn the uncomfortable moment into a gaping chasm of social faux pas.
I’ve found that when you’ve blown any cover that you have, it’s usually best just to keep the lack of subtlety going.
“So, that was awkward and weird,” I said. “Want a coffee or ice cream?”
Because, really, who doesn’t love a coffee or ice cream? And you’ve got to figure that conversationally, unless you have actual Tourette’s, there’s nowhere to go but up from there.
Lunch Wars: The Underworld Of School Food*
Lunch Wars by Amy Kalafa is exactly what the book purports to be, a guide on “how to start a school food revolution.” Filled with facts about local produce, the business of school meals, the impact of nutrition on children’s behavior and overall well being, as well as practical advice on who to approach in your school’s food program when working for change, templates for letters and petitions demanding better lunches, and lists of resources to get you started, Lunch Wars is the ultimate how-to guide for building a healthier school cafeteria.
Kalafa takes what would seem to be a daunting task – weaning children away from sugar and snacks to healthy meals while staying on budget and getting the school system’s support – and breaking it down into manageable and logical steps.
She never claims that the transition will be easy, but her determination and success stories are inspirational.
When I started the book, I was pretty sure Kalafa was preaching to the choir, and while she was doing that with gusto, I wasn’t always enjoying the read. (When the idea of foregoing candy on Halloween for other sugar-free activities came up, she almost lost me.)
I am not a mom, but I have had my own experiences with school lunches as well as spending time in cafeterias as a substitute teacher.
In my elementary school, the “cool” kids brought their lunch from home. I went to private school my entire life, so bringing lunch from home wasn’t a show of money, it just meant that if you already had your lunch in hand, you were guaranteed a spot at the cool table rather than having to wait in the lunch line and risking that the only seats left would be on undesirable cafeteria real estate. We also always had half an hour for lunch, so time was never a concern.
In my high school (also private), lunch was included in the price of tuition, so everyone ate at school. Also, since my high school was populated with both boarding and day students, you could eat three meals a day there. Our lunches included the standard hot fare of pizza and fried burritos, but we also had a baked potato bar and salad bar. There were healthy options, and when one attractive high school girl takes a salad, the rest tend to follow.
(My school was founded on the motto “learning through living,” so at one time it had been an actual working farm with students tending to cows and going to class. That ended pretty quickly since taking care of a farm can be too time-consuming when there’s other book learning to be done.)
My high school remains ahead of the trend in the “lunch wars” by Kalafa’s standards. Today, students grow a garden on the grounds and sell their produce at a local farmer’s market throughout the summer.
With my experience based only on private education and wealthy school districts, and conscious of the socio-economic makeup that seems to dominate my Saturday visits to the farmer’s market, I had concerns about less affluent schools that have trouble finding money for books, let alone freshly grown produce.
As a former managing editor of a magazine, I visited a school in an under-served area when the kids were given a playground as part of a grant from Kaboom!. I kept thinking that if playgrounds are a hard sell, what happens to school food – especially when government regulations are involved.
However, Kalafa changed my thinking on that. Her examples and anecdotal evidence come from all kinds of school districts throughout the country. Her data and commitment are compelling, and the end of Lunch Wars convinced me that healthy eating must be a priority in our schools and culture. I began to re-think my own eating habits, and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in food politics and the ever-changing landscape of how and why we eat the way that we do.
(Not that I'm ready to give up all of my bad habits yet, Cadbury Creme Eggs will always have a special place in my heart.)
* This was a paid review for BlogHer Book Club but the opinions expressed are my own.
What's On My iPod And Questionable Fashion Choices
To say that I like the musical Les Miserables would be kind of like saying I own a few pairs of Spanx and drink the occasional glass of red wine. In other words – it would be a gross, gross understatement
I saw Les Miserables twice as a kid – once in Birmingham and once at the Fox in Atlanta. My mother listened to the soundtrack non-stop for about four years. (Yes, I am often prone to exaggeration. When I talk about my mother’s listening habits, it is not one of those times.)
I can’t even tell you how often I wore the classic gray t-shirt with the Les Mis orphan on it.
(I also had a Cats shirt that I liked to wear with white Bermuda shorts, but it was old news the moment my Les Mis tee came on the scene.)
I liked to perform most of the score of Les Miserables for my nanny – my favorites being "On My Own" and "A Little Drop Of Rain." Dream role? Clearly Eponine. Oddly enough, my nanny often encouraged me to sing from the porch while she watched her TV shows inside.
“I can still hear you,” she would call from the sofa, even though I often had to remind her when to clap at the end of my numbers.
Now knowing that I’m tone deaf, I bet that two-room distance was not nearly enough, and I feel very loved for not being cut off from my musical re-enactments entirely.
My sister texts me “24601” from time to time just for fun (as well as random Suzanne Sugarbaker quotes, but that’s another story for another day).
So last night, when I got to see Les Miserables on the stage yet again, it was amazing. I laughed. I cried. I stood clapping for an extended period of time like there could be an encore for a play even though that obviously defies all logic, and the cast of Les Mis certainly isn’t Def Leppard.
And for whatever it’s worth, in the bits of theology and wisdom I’ve cobbled together for myself over the last 30 odd years, “To love another person is to see the face of God” still has a spot near the top of the list.
Also, if you think this is bad, just wait for when Wicked gets here in February. I’ve got all sorts of feminist, self-empowerment, “good girl” theories to go along with that one.
Consider yourself warned.
The Parade Of Shame
I grew up with “do-it-yourself” kind of parents. My school projects were never taken over by an eager Mom or Dad who wanted it to be just perfect or an anxious parent fearing for my grade. My dioramas looked like they were made by a nine-year-old, and my science fair projects were usually far less than stunning.
One year I did take home a third place ribbon for “Will your plant grow faster if you talk to it?” (Even as a child, I talked to plants and myself. A sign of genius or madness? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.) However, I think most of that win had to do with the fact that fourth grade is around the time kids figure out that it isn’t cool to be smart, so the level of competition was way down. Also, I used the tri-fold white board as instructed by my science teacher, and we all know how science teachers like rule-followers.
However, the worst do-it-yourself incident of all probably occurred in the fourth grade, the year that our class participated in the annual historic building parade.
“What’s a historical building parade?” you say. Well, let me enlighten you.
A historical building parade involves dressing children up in cardboard boxes that represent some of the finest and most famous works of architecture in the city. I think it might also be some cruel form of torture dreamed up by a particularly bitter city administrator or school official to humiliate 10-year-olds.
Either way, I learned two things the fateful day of the parade:
1. It is really uncomfortable to wear a cardboard box. Seriously, having your neck and arms rub up against cardboard for a few city blocks is quite chafing, and when your one of the shortest kids in class, it’s not too kind on the knees either.
2. 10-year-olds really don’t have the capability of making a cardboard box look like a historical building all on their own.
I vividly remember taking Polaroid snapshots of my building. (It was Firehouse #4. There was also a lot of competition over who got the “best” buildings, but surprisingly, there weren’t too many people jockeying for Firehouse #4. It was quite a relief at the time.)
I then remember spray painting my cardboard box and going to work recreating what I was sure would be an amazing representation. (I was sure all of my projects were going to be amazing. What I lacked in talent, I made up for in dreams. In kindergarten, when I turned in my depiction of the first Thanksgiving, I learned about the wide gap between talent and dreams – not that I let it stop me.)
Firehouse #4 featured a trellis, which was quite a challenge. It also had bricks of a uniform shape and size, a seemingly easy feature to recreate, but when it came down to actually doing it – not so much. While the first row of bricks kind of resembled rectangles, it was all downhill from there, and I mean that in a pretty literal way since my lines started to drift downward from one side of the box to the other creating strange shapes there were narrow on one side and really wide on the other.
In short, I was a mess.
The mother of one of my classmates took her building photos, made them into slides, and then projected the slide onto her box so she could trace every outline of her building.
I couldn’t even trace a ruler from one side of the box to the other.
Then, as if having a terribly homemade project wasn’t bad enough, I think I realized the absolute absurdity of walking through the streets of my hometown dressed as a building just before our teacher sent us out into the street.
And if you are thinking that people don’t judge fourth graders, let me tell you that you are wrong. People judge fourth graders, and you notice the hushes when you and your horribly distorted bricks are marching down Main Street.*
(In fairness, my sister probably had it worst of all because she had to dress up as the fairgrounds. This meant she couldn’t even wear a box, but instead had to strap a piece of white board over herself with something like suspenders. We used cake decorations to try and give her a balloon vendor.)
So, if anyone ever wonders why my bio mentions an extreme dislike of parades – here you go.
Fire Station #4, on the other hand, seems to have escaped unscathed. It turns out that it just got new tenants and everything.
I don’t know whether or not the annual Historic Building Parade still exists, but every time I think back on my experience then, I can’t help but think there has to be a better way to help children develop civic pride. Would a coloring book or guest speaker really have been so much less educational?
*It was actually 20th Street if you’re from Birmingham, but I think we can all tell I’m trying to make a point.
** If you were hoping for photos of me dressed as a building, I’m sorry to say you’re out of luck. No such photos exist. Thank God.
El Matador
When we went to the beach week before last, we stayed at El Matador, a family favorite for the Mills from 1979-1986 or so. I hadn't been back since I was six years old. Luckily, nothing about El Matador had changed. But, looking at this picture my mom sent me this morning, you can see that a few other things have. (I'm on the right in the cool sunglasses.)
Giraffes, Grocery Packaging And Guest Posts
I'm guest posting today, so if you'd like to read about some of the wacky stuff that popped into my head over the weekend, please head over to highly-entertaining Jamie's Rabbits written by the very talented Jamie Golden.
My Hands Are Just Too Small
According to family folklore, when my grandmother didn’t want to do things, she always said, “but my hands are too small.”
As soon as I found this out, I adopted the phrase as my very own and blamed it on genetics. Learn to use the lawnmower? My hands are too small. Time to help move the refrigerator across the room? My hands are too small. Get a ladder and reach the highest shelf? My hands are too small.
(By now, you’ve probably noticed a theme here, and that theme is manual labor.)
I’ve gotten over my issues with lawnmowers and ladders, but I still find plenty of sweat-inducing tasks to duck out of with my grandmother’s infamous phrase.
There’s no time my aversion to “work” rears its ugly head as much as it does when I’m moving.
I don’t like the packing process. I either find ways to reminisce about every single thing I’m putting in boxes – “Oh my gosh, do you remember when we took this picture outside of Graceland” – grossly slowing down the process, or, when I’m tired of looking at boxes, I go to another default mode – “Can’t we just throw it away?”
I have thrown away more pots, plant stands and random papers than any one human being should have a right to. When I left Chicago, I threw away a pot that still had food in it because I didn’t want to clean it or pack it. (Lazy, thy name is Laurel.)
Yes, I realize environmentalists all over the world are shuddering right now in disgust.
If it’s not the packing, it’s the lifting. (I gave up on driving the van 10 years ago after having to take a U-Haul truck through Washington, D.C. during rush hour.)
Those boxes are so heavy, and there are always more of them. Six years ago I started hiring people just to carry my boxes to whatever vehicle I’d decided on for transport (which I usually made my dad drive). Unfortunately, that also brought out a side of myself that I didn’t like.
“A water break already?”
“Is that all you can carry?”
“Is there a reason you’re just leaning against the wall right now?”
Paying by the hour did not make me a nice person.
In the moving world, there’s only one option for me, and that’s professional movers. I let them do it all – the packing, the driving, the unloading. It’s like a dream. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few checks I never mind writing.
Thanks to my movers, I hope that next weekend (when I move out of my house and officially become a landlord – eek!) will be as stress-free as moving can possibly be.
Of course, I’d like to help out the movers as much as I can, but there’s just this one little problem with my hands being so small and all.
It Feels Like Burning
In evolutionary terms, I’m not sure I was really meant for life in the South. By the standards of nurture, thanks to manners classes, ballroom dancing and some great stationary, I’ve done just fine here. However, if we have to look at nature, I’m not sure this pale, WASP-y body was meant for Alabama.
It’s not just the heat. You see, what comes with or causes the heat is the sun (I told you I never really paid attention in science class), and this fair skin and the sun don’t mix well.
(I’d like to thank my Scottish ancestors for the dark body hair and bushy eyebrows that come with my porcelain complexion. I’m sure if my forefathers had settled in Minnesota, I’d be more than prepared for the winters. Instead, I swelter and invest a lot of money in good tweezers. I guess the Scots never figured that they’d put all the distilleries in the South. (This really is the best reason I can figure for previous generations of my family to pick this region of the U.S.) In my family, you don’t follow the money; you follow the line to the bar.)
Luckily, I’ve had 30+ years to adapt, and I spend good money keeping the sunscreen companies in business, too. Still, every so often, I fail.
A few weeks ago, I didn’t just fail to protect my skin. I think I almost melted it.
I fell asleep reading on the beach, and when I woke up, I felt like I could be a little pink, but I wasn’t too worried.
“Why don’t you toss me some more of that Banana Boat, and I’ll reapply?”
Later that afternoon, I figured out that I was more than a little pink. While my shoulders and thighs could be described as pink/red, my stomach looked like the color of a tomato set on fire and felt about the same.
I dosed myself with Advil, slathered on the aloe and went to bed with a cold Miller Lite – not for drinking, but so I could hold it against my stomach in the night. Even the sheets were unbearable to touch.
For the next five days, I climbed out of chairs like I was eight months pregnant so as not to in any way agitate the skin on my torso and slept clutching either bags of frozen vegetables or frozen bottles of water for some sense of relief.
By day six, I thought I might need to turn to more than Internet forums for help.
In case you’re wondering, this is the advice I shouldn’t have taken:
1. The Vinegar Soak: Despite what the masterminds of the World Wide Web might say, vinegar does not “pull out the burn.” All that really happens is that you have to hope your friends always secretly wanted to know what it was like to spend time with a giant pickle.
2. A Baking Soda Bath: It’s not as stinky, but it’s equally as un-helpful.
3. No store-bought aloe is really better than any other aloe. Just make sure you buy the one with some kind of painkiller in it. I think the effect can be at least mildly psychosomatic.
I headed to my local pharmacy.
“What do y’all have for sunburn?” I said.
“Have you got aloe?” the clerk said.
“We’re a little bit past that,” I said.
“Let’s wait for the pharmacist to get off the phone then.”
While we waited on the pharmacist, the clerk and I discussed a number of different options for my sunburn, and she told me about some of her bad burns. (If nothing else, in a land where tanning beds are still prevalent, I didn’t feel judged for the potentially-hazardous-to-my-future-health slip-up.)
When the pharmacist did come over, I explained the problem.
“We have x, y, z and even a to treat sunburns,” she said. It was a litany of products with names I don’t remember. “How long have you had the sunburn?”
It was then that I decided the only good explanation would be to flash the pharmacist, so in front of her and the clerk, I pulled up my shirt to show them what we were dealing with.
“Foille,” she said. “It has to be Foille.”
It’s amazing how a little visual can take your list of potential saviors from 10 to 1 in a split second.
She was absolutely right about the Foille. If you’re ever in any kind of burn trouble, I highly recommend it. (Plus, it only costs about $4/tube.)
I know that normally one should only flash one’s doctor with skin abnormalities followed by awkward questions, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Nearly a week of burning tomato-colored flesh was my desperate time.
I’m a little embarrassed to go into the pharmacy again this month, considering how I’ve exposed myself to the staff and all, but a girl’s neighborhood pharmacy is a girl’s neighborhood pharmacy.
I’d like to pretend that they’ve forgotten about me, but I have a sinking feeling that the girl without shame and siren red stomach might have made more of an impression than I’d like.
Hot Times In The City
I have a knack for getting myself in trouble in the heat.
When I was 16, I had a mild heat stroke at my parents’ country club on July 4th weekend. I had gone with them to work out when I got slightly overheated. (It’s possible that my failure to exert myself physically in the previous two months might have had something to do with it, too.)
After sitting in front of a fan for 15 minutes or so, I decided to go to the snack bar for something to drink. That’s when I proceeded to faint and start vomiting -- in front of about 30 kids and their parents enjoying the pool over their holiday weekend. Oddly enough, if you know me, throwing up doesn’t bother me, but throwing up in public upsets me immensely. My legs were wobbly, and I was covered in some throw-up and shame. It was every teenager’s dream.
My father found me, scooped me up like a child and carried me to the car, so we could go home.
At 18, as a freshman in college, some friends and I were on our way to the first football game of the season when someone started complaining about the heat.
“You can’t think this is bad,” I said. “You should try living in Alabama.”
Well, I might as well have shot myself in the foot because it wasn’t even 30 minutes later that I had an EMT student checking my vitals and recommending that I get back to my dorm before I had a real heat stroke.
Here comes the weird part of this story: A friend of mine decided to help me back to the dorm, and to do so, she had her arm under me for support. We were ambling along when a frat boy on his way into the stadium yelled, “Lesbians!”
It’s not that I was offended; I just think it’s really strange. It was almost like he thought he was on a road trip and should point out interesting specimens on route to his friends. “Oh my gosh, did you see that deer by the side of the road?” Only this time, his fascinating find was lesbians?
Surely a college male has seen women and women that are close to one another before in his life. Also, everyone else was already in the stadium. There was one, count it, one, person, to hear him, and if he really wanted to be offensive, I’m sure you can imagine the terms we would have expected to hear.
My friend thought his behavior was very rude and would have liked to tell him so, but since I was having a little health issue, we tried to turn it around. We agreed that we would make an incredibly attractive lesbian couple, took it as a compliment and moved on.
However, the hottest I can ever remember being is in the summer of 2003. My friend Annie and I had purchased around the world plane tickets and were on the last leg of our global tour in Italy. There was an infamous heat wave in Europe during the summer of 2003 – to the point that the train was often delayed by melted sections of track.
We were in Venice, and we checked ourselves into the hotel we’d found in our guidebook. Being 23, we thought we’d save money by staying in a hotel without central air.
This was not a good idea.
As Annie later said, “The next time we see a woman lose consciousness in the lobby of a hotel as we check in, it’s probably a sign that we shouldn’t stay there.”
After dinner and some drinks, I feel fairly confident in saying that I then spent the most uncomfortable night of my life trying to fall asleep in that sauna they called a hotel. At one point, I even got up in the middle of the night convinced that a cold shower might save my sanity.
I stepped into the icy cold water only to have it switch to burning hot water within three minutes. I stepped back out of the shower and waited. A few minutes later, there was more cold water, and I climbed back in. Then the hot water came back.
I couldn’t even find cold sink water to save myself. By the time the morning came, I was an angry and nearly insane person.
“We said we’d stay here for two nights,” Annie said.
“I don’t care,” I said, when I decided to speak. I was so angry with Mother Nature or the world or our guidebook – you can pick one --- I didn’t even want to talk. “I don’t care what we have to pay. I can’t spend another night in this misery.”
“But they have our passports.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Believe it or not, I am normally a nice, non-confrontational person. Most of my bad thoughts are just that, thoughts, and when I recount long strings of crazy, confrontational statements, it’s what I wish I’d said, not what I actually did.
This was a different day.
After we had packed, I walked into the hotelier’s office. I had money to pay her for one night in cash and was hell bent on a passport for cash trade. “We’ll be leaving now,” I said. “I’d like our passports back, please.”
“You made reservations for two nights,” she said.
“We changed our mind.”
“But you said you would stay for two nights.”
“Your shower runs boiling hot on the coldest setting.”
“That happens sometimes.”
“That happens sometimes?” My voice was rising at this point, and I thought I might lose it. I wanted to ask where this happens. I thought most of the Western world had conquered plumbing and faucet settings, but we were in a very delicate place in our negotiations. I’d also seen her turn towards the cabinet where our travel documents were, and I wanted to keep what little of my wits I had left since I was pretty sure I was going to get what I wanted.
“In the summer. It is hot here in the summer.”
The idea of a physical attack briefly crossed my mind. As if I didn’t know that summer was the hottest month of the year? Instead, I nodded.
She brought the passports over; I basically snatched them out of her hand, gave her cash with my other hand and was at the door before she could say anything else.
Annie said a little “Thank you,” while I told her to book it out the door before the conversation could go any further.
Still angry – heat makes you crazy, there’s a reason the South has so many more crimes of passion than other areas of the country – we went to find lunch, and half a pizza and some white wine later, I finally felt human again.
Annie found us a great hotel for that night. It was more expensive, but you have no idea what I would have paid for a bucket of ice, let alone an air-conditioned room at that point. When we opened the door to our new room, and I saw a thermostat I could control on the wall, I think I cried tears of joy.
My advice to fellow travelers is to pay attention to those hotel ratings in travel books. Two stars are not enough, three is cutting it close and you will pay in so many non-financial ways if you’re not careful.
Also, if you ever really need an enforcer, deprive me of some AC for a few hours, and it’s like having a hive of angry hornets at your disposal.
A Sunday School Drop-Out Spared
My parents tend to worry – a lot. Kidnapping, hostage-taking, teen pregnancy, drugs, drunk driving – you name a problem; my parents have considered how to keep it from happening to their kids.
There’s only one thing my parents never worried about when it came to me and that had to do with joining a cult. Their theory? “You had so much trouble with conventional religion; we never really figured you’d fall for some extreme splinter group.”
I guess there’s at least one plus to raising a natural skeptic.
My parents both taught Sunday school when I was growing up. My father taught kindergarten, and my mother usually taught sixth grade.
Through what I will claim is no fault of my own, I tended to be a troublemaker in Sunday school class. It’s not that I ever meant to get in trouble; I just like to ask a lot of questions. (Outside of Sunday school, my mother and I spent many hours in the library researching my various topics of interest from why ostriches liked to stick their heads in the sand, how an egg develops and the growth of asparagus.) Curiosity, neurotic-ism or annoyance? You decide.
Wikipedia and IMDB have been Godsends in my adult life.
Long before I knew the difference between evolution and creationism, when one of my Sunday school teachers went over Genesis, I had to ask why she seemed to be in direct conflict with my science teacher. “If the Earth was created in six days, what about the dinosaurs?” I said.
Mrs. Johnson, my science teacher at the time, had explained that dinosaurs roamed the Earth with no humans, and I really didn’t see where Adam and Eve fit in on this time frame.
Then, there was the day our Sunday school teacher came in to explain that “We were all adopted because we were all God’s children, and He had given us to our parents on loan.” (The “on loan” might not be a direct quote, but I promise that that Sunday school teacher was not particularly eloquent.)
I think I started the crying that day, but I know a lot of other kids eventually joined in. I think adoption is lovely, but as a kid who feared learning she was one day adopted, breaking the news this way seemed insensitive to say the least.
I also did not know how much I would upset my first grade Sunday school teacher when I answered the question, “What’s the last movie you all saw?” with “Aliens.” My mom had been out of town, and it was true. I’m sorry she only wanted Disney answers.
Eventually, my Sunday school teachers seemed really tired of my questions, and it could be hard to get them to notice my raised hand, but I’m not one to give up easily.
“Would King Herod really have cut the baby in half? What if none of the moms said anything?”
“How could you really have all of your power in your hair?”
“Wouldn’t the whale’s stomach acid be a problem for Jonah?”
“Just going from Saul to Paul doesn’t seem like a real earth-shattering name change. Wouldn’t Joe or Sam have been more dramatic?”
Apart from making my class the Bible Trivia champion of 1980-something, I was not an asset to most Sunday school classes. (I actually had to share that title with another Sunday school class, a decision I contested and still consider to be an unfair ruling, but the journey to move on continues.)
I don’t know whether or not it was discussed during some sort of Sunday school teacher conference, but from fourth grade on, I spent three years in my mother’s Sunday school class. She was used to my questions, and I imagine my departure from the regular course of Methodist teachings was a relief to many.
So, this Mother’s Day, I’d like to thank my mom for putting up with a lot – from the struggle to define infinity for me to typing up the school newspaper my third grade class dreamed up one day. But, I suppose that most of all, I’d like to thank her for taking me in when no one else was eager to, listening to and trying to find answers to my questions and never making me feel like I was the weird one for going against the flow.
Happy Mother’s Day Mama! I love you!
The Beach, Perfection And Big Wheels
This past weekend I went to the beach, and I was reminded how important it was for me when I was little to create a “perfect” last day vacation memory. Basically, if we were leaving the beach the next morning, I thought that the last time I stepped off the beach the day before needed to be postcard-worthy ideal. (Can we say obsessive much? This is even before that obligatory age when you have to read Our Town, after which I tried desperately to notice life in the moment. I found it exhausting and only made it about two weeks.)
In particular, I remember a time that we were staying at one of those condo units where you had to use a raised bridge to safely cross the street from the beach to your hotel.
On our last day of the trip, I walked up the center of the stairs at sunset (because no perfect memory happens without symmetry or when you’re too close to the hand rail), turned around to face the ocean, took in a deep breath of sea air, and then turned to walk down the center of the bridge – without looking back – towards our condo.
At the time, I thought, “This is a perfect moment.”
Since then, it’s been my experience that trying for perfect moments is more likely to ruin an experience than enhance it. Putting too much pressure on anything other than a bleeding wound usually tends to backfire, and it’s pretty hard to manufacture perfection outside of a movie set. I find imperfection much funnier (usually) as well as a good indicator of whom you should and should not be dating. (I mean, if you’re going to be stuck in the airport for added hours, wouldn’t you far rather it be with someone who can find some fun in the situation rather than the person who yells at every flight crew member they spot?)
Also, being quite flawed myself, a life that didn’t involve embracing imperfection would be pretty darn frustrating. And I just don’t think Thornton Wilder wants that for any of us.
Moving back to what was going to be my core topic, I also remembered some other awesome ideas/beliefs/misconceptions I had as a child. Here are a few of the “brilliant” ideas from my youth:
1. Doctors should use magnets on gunshot wounds. If a bullet is metal, why wouldn’t the magnet just pull it out of the skin?
2. Unicorns – real. Everyone else – confused and unwilling to believe.
3. Drinking and driving applied to any beverage. Therefore, I would not take a coke or water with me before a bicycle or Big Wheel ride.
4. There’s no such thing as infinity. Space may be vast, but it has an ending or borders. It just fit inside a really, really big box.
5. Policemen were mind readers. If you had done anything wrong and were anywhere within their vicinity, they would know – whether it was sneaking cookies or robbing banks.
Truthfully, I’m still holding out hope on #2, and every policeman makes me nervous to this day, but at least I’ve given up on the idea of patenting #1. As for those perfect vacation memories? They have a much broader definition as well. As long as I don’t drown in the ocean, I tend to call it a good day.
Acts Of God And Nature
Not to go all Patch Adams on everyone, but I really do feel like laughter can be the best medicine (along with antibiotics and all the traditional Western stuff that is). I think we should look for laughter – and joy – whenever we can because life can be pretty darn hard.
However, there are also plenty of times when laughter doesn’t seem appropriate. Or when there doesn’t seem like there’s much to laugh about. For the past few months, I often haven’t felt like laughing, but that’s another story for another day, when I’m ready to tell it.
More immediately, today is not a day that I feel like I can share anecdotes or talk about my annoyances from trips to the pharmacy, talking on the phone or attempting to fit in the clothes at Forever 21 (because at 31, I still believe I can be Forever 21).
On Wednesday, as most of the nation knows, a tornado unlike anything I have ever seen tore through my state and my city. The worst reports I hear have the main funnel at 1.5 miles wide and traveling a 200-mile path. Hundreds of people are dead, missing or homeless. So, even though I’ve spent most of my life being called irreverent, I’m going to just let today be today. There but for the grace of God, they say.
Also, at the risk of sounding preachy (which is not anywhere I ever want to go), I’ve been thinking about the ring my best friend gave me when I graduated from college. She’d had the same one for years, and I’d always wanted one of my own. It’s made of silver and says “This too shall pass” in Hebrew. A skyline of Jerusalem is engraved on the inside.
(I’m not Jewish. I have a St. Jude medal, too, even though I’m not Catholic. I don’t worry about it, so I ask you not to either, if you’d be so kind.)
At the time, I thought my “This too shall pass” was just a reminder that the bad times aren’t permanent and won’t last forever. (I’m sure it’s the depressive in me.) However, my friend reminded me that the adage isn’t just for the dark moments. It’s a reminder in the happy ones, too. We will not always be sad, just as we will not always be happy. Life happens in the ebb and flow, and you have to appreciate each of the moments when you’re in them because you have no idea how long they’ll last or what you might learn.
Like we all know, life is hard, and it isn’t fair. I’m just trying to figure it out like anyone else. And what do I know? Very little. But I know that today I’m lucky while others aren’t, and I may not always be the lucky one.
To quote more pop culture (because that’s what I do) I like what Morgan Freeman says in Bruce Almighty. When it’s all going downhill, sometimes it’s not the time to look up, but to look around. I am thankful for the family, friends, volunteers and general human beings who share in our triumphs and do want they can to make the tough times a little easier to bear.
The Birds And The Bees
No one ever had the sex talk with me.
My mother once asked, while I was locked in the car (her preferred means of trapping me for uncomfortable conversations), clearly embarrassed herself, “Do you have any questions about sex?”
I, equally embarrassed and after a long pause, said, “Yes.”
“Do you have specific questions?”
I shook my head “no.” I was not prepared for this, although I did have a bad feeling when the lock dropped on the passenger seat door for our impromptu “fun trip to the mall.”
“Do you think you’d like a book or something?”
I nodded.
A few days later, my mom slid a large picture book under my bedroom door. (I was 11 at the time and hadn’t read a picture book since about the age of 5.)
Of course, I immediately dove into the picture book. I had had questions about sex for years (or two, whatever). When we went to my grandmother’s house, I used to grab the “S” World Book encyclopedia for her shelf and look up “sex” when I thought no one was looking. (I always kept a hand on another page like “Syria” or “sulfur” just in case someone would come downstairs and wonder what I was researching.) Unfortunately, the 1963 World Book only covered sex as a topic having to do with plant reproduction, so that was a quick dead end.
When I was six or so, a friend of mine told me what sex was as she’d learned from her older sister, but I had a hard time with her definition. In the end, she was right, but it sounded awfully made up at that point.
What I remember from the picture book were drawings of an overweight couple and mention of loving one another a whole lot, nudity and friction. It might be because I was a very shallow child, but the really overweight cartoons were an immediate turn-off. (I now think it was an excuse to keep from making the figures anatomically-correct. Those bellies covered a lot.) These people just disturbed me, and I was glad they had found one another, but I did not want to read about their expressions of physical love.
That book was the last mention of sex my mom made to me for another eight years.
We clearly had sex education in school, but our first sex ed program was a little extreme, and I think it scarred most of us for life.
At the beginning of the day, a woman stood before us with a pink paper heart. “There once was a girl named Jane. Jane met a boy that she liked. She thought she loved him. Jane decided to have sex with this boy – before they were married. Then the boy dumped Jane, and she lost a little bit of her heart …” At this point, a corner of the paper heart was torn off.
“Then Jane meets another boy, and she thinks that she loves him too …” she went on. Before long the entire heart lay shredded before us.
“By the time Jane wants to get married, she has no heart left to give.”
There was a later story along similar lines about a girl who decided to wear the special pearls her parents were going to give her on her wedding day before their special time. She snuck in to her parent’s room and stole the pearls to wear when she went out (which is what everyone does with pearls); so that by the time she received the pearls on her wedding day, they were brown and dirty. In short – damaged goods.
The latter story bothered me only because I knew from my mom that pearls needed to be worn to keep their shine. Something about the oils in your skin being good for the jewelry. I got where the woman was going with her story. I just thought she should have chosen a more accurate metaphor.
The day ended with abstinence pledges that were “our choice” to sign, but everyone from the program stood over our shoulders for extended periods of time while handing them out.
After the disastrous paper heart incident and poorly-chosen allegories, the school stuck to puberty and “our changing bodies.” When I changed schools, sex ed was led by someone who looked like the picture-perfect grandma, and after she said “fellatio” more than once with her lovely, I-made-you-cookies-dear smile, I think we were all traumatized in a different way. (If trauma was meant to counter raging teenage hormones, I suppose it was borderline successful.)
Cosmo was my new textbook, for better or worse.
It wasn’t until years later, when I was already in college that my father referenced the sex talk my mom and I had had when I was younger. My mother, my father and I were in the car on the way back from dinner.
“Sex talk? What sex talk?” I said.
“Your mother and I talked about it, and she agreed that she would be the one to give you and your sisters the sex talk. Surely, you remember that?” my dad said.
“There was no sex talk,” I said.
This is when my mother finally 'fessed up. “I couldn’t go through with it,” she said. “It was just too hard. I couldn’t do it.”
“Laurel’s mother!” (I don’t like to use real names.)
“You try it,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
“Clearly,” my father said, “but I think it’s a little too late for me to give it a shot.”
“You promised,” my father said.
“Well,” my mother said, "like you said, it's a little late."
Finally, the missing piece of my adolescence made sense. “So,” my father said after a few minutes, “where did you learn about sex?”
And that’s when I gave him the answer every parent wants to hear, “On the street, of course.”
My Sordid Past And New Relationships
I’m not sure how common this is in the rest of the country, but there are many Southern homes that still love their portraiture.
(If you are imagining English royals sitting on velvet tufts while petting King Charles Spaniels as you read “portraiture,” you wouldn’t be that far off the mark. Though, personally, I and no one I know have ever been painted on a velvet tuft, I can’t say for sure that it hasn’t occurred in the 21st century. The dog is also not out of the question. In my part of the country, it’s just more likely to be a lab in an outdoor scene than a lap dog.)
Olan Mills doesn’t count here. I’m talking about honest-to-goodness, calls-for-a-sitting, put-forever-in-oil portrait.
I believe portraits of children are most common – the kind with girls in smocked and French hand sewn dresses (you’ll have to Google it) and boys in, well, similar smocked and French hand sewn outfits. (In the South, we really don’t have issues with dressing boys much like girls until at least the age of two. Usually their smocked outfits are jumpers or shorts, but there are no guarantees.)
Some homes have portraits of adults, and there are even some people known to have nude portraits of themselves. The former are often rather wealthy. The latter are usually discussed in whispers at cocktail parties.
Personally, I have three portraits hanging in my parents’ house. One is actually in pastels, so I’m not sure I have to count it, but I’m in smocked dress, and I’m two. The second portrait is of my mother, my sisters and me. Again, my sisters and I are in very delicate dresses. I think I was six. The last, and final portrait, is of me at 17 in the dress from my junior cotillion. (Some day I will subtitle my memoir “Tales of an Irreverent Debutante.” Until then, I’ll leave the topic of cotillions alone.)
Now, portraits are hardly likely to come up in day-to-day conversation. Most of the time, I forget they even exist. I also tend to forget all of the other pictures from childhood to adolescence that my mom and dad still have. That is, until, a boyfriend is invited to the house to meet the parents. In the living room, the two following questions always ensue:
1. Is that you on a five and half foot canvas hung in a gold frame in the living room?
2. When was your hair red?
The answers are:
1. Yes. My mom likes portraits. Wouldn’t you rather check out the one of my sister in her bowl cut years? (Sorry to throw you under the bus, Sis.)
2. Off and on between the ages of 15 and 20. I was also blond at 22. If there’s a hair color, I’ve had it.
In my father’s study, we get into even more trouble:
"Why are you in a hoop skirt?"
It’s that one that takes a little longer to explain. (Note to reader: the hoop skirt is in a photo and not a portrait, just like the Birmingham Belle ceremony is separate from the junior cotillion. I wore the hoop skirt twice – once as a Belle and once for Halloween. For the sake of family peace, I’ll just say that I wasn’t too excited about joining that organization.)
For the uninitiated, the Birmingham Belles are a group of girls chosen to represent Arlington, Birmingham’s only remaining antebellum home. Arlington is also open for tours and home to a museum. Originally, Belles had all sorts of civic duties, like going to community functions and giving tours of the house. Then, thank heavens, Birmingham finally caught on to the fact that sending girls in hoop skirts, hats and white gloves to the airport to pick up visitors was a) incredibly embarrassing and b) not exactly doing a lot for the image of “The New South.” They also realized that self-guided tours were sufficient for a home with 7 rooms.
My friend and I attended one volunteer event as Birmingham Belles, and it was a bake sale where we wore jeans. I think I was still embarrassed even though we didn’t have our bloomers on.
In short, the visual artifacts of my adolescence can be quite fascinating – especially if you’re not from here. You also have some frightening insight into the kinds of information a Mills boyfriend is bound to discover.
* I apologize that the hoop skirt photo is not available at this time.
Thank you!
I'd like to thank everyone who has voted, RT-ed my tweets, commented on my blog, put up with my blog and liked posts on Facebook to help me in my quest to be Volvo's Biggest Fan of the Big East. I appreciate your support and patience, and I never could have made it through to the final four without you ... [Read more]
My Trinity And Good Intentions (With Video)
I fully believe the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, I’ve also always hoped the adage wasn’t referring to a literal hell. I just figured it was pretty obvious that we all get more than we bargain for when we try a little too hard ... [Read more]
911
A few years ago, the SO and I were in the car coming back from Atlanta when we saw a dog wandering down the median of the highway.
“Call 911,” he said. “We need to report this.”
“Report the dog?”
“Yes, report the dog. Call 911.”
Now, clearly I love dogs as much as the next person. If we could have stopped without causing an accident, I would have insisted on pulling over to rescue the poor thing. But call 911? I wasn’t so sure about that.
“Why aren’t you calling 911?”
“Are you sure we should call?”
“Yes, I’m sure we should call.”
“Really sure?”
“Really sure. Would you feel better if I called?” he said. “Even though I’m the one driving?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do think that would be better.”
The SO called 911 to report the dog, and then we had an extended conversation about why I wouldn’t call 911 and how I didn’t recognize that the dog could have caused a car crash at any second, etc., etc. (Sometimes I envy people who lived before the invention of motor vehicles because there was no such thing as being trapped in a car with someone – no matter how much you love and adore them. Not that I'm sure covered wagons going across the plains were all that much better, but at least you had buffalo, raids and other more pressing concerns to occupy your time. Incidentally, the car is also where my mother always chose to try and talk to me about sex, drugs and other teen issues.)
The problem I have is that ever since I can remember, I’ve had a terrible fear of calling 911.
In high school, I called 911 twice. Once because a woman in the store where I was working had a stroke and once because a friend and I drove by someone slumped over in his car. Both incidents required lots of cajoling.
In the first, an older man I worked with had to grab the phone from me and explain what was actually happening to the 911 operator. In the second, my friend and I agreed that if we drove by the same car twice, and the guy still hadn’t moved, we’d call 911.
On our second drive by, I made the call. “Yeah,” my 16-year-old self said, “there’s this guy in his car, and he’s like not moving or anything. He could be asleep or he could be, like, dead.”
“We’ll send someone to check it out.”
Then, I gave the female operator the address, and my friend and I went home.
It’s not that I was worried about the circumstances that could lead to such an awful call, or that I was afraid of accidents, it’s that I felt like the 911 operator would judge me if the reason I called wasn’t urgent enough or “emergency worthy.” I fear the judgment of a stranger on the other end of a phone line. Where this comes from, I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s related to my feelings about pizza orders and utility customer service.
“But it’s their job to take your calls,” the SO said. “And it’s their job to decide what to do in the situation?”
“Really?” I said.
“Really.”
Well, this little conversation was like being freed from a lifetime of 911 fear. I called 911 when I heard really loud noises outside my house at night. I reported a fighting couple outside of a housing project. I felt like justice was my mission and 911 was my weapon. I was on a tear.
Of course, like all good or bad things, this bent of mine eventually came to an end. This time it was after a particularly confusing conversation with a 911 operator.
I was driving home one night, when I saw a car pulled over in the parking area of a fire station that was being built. A man was laid out on the ground, and a woman was bending over him. (Now before you judge me for not acting in these kinds of situations, know that I don’t get out of my car for anything – especially after dark. It’d be lovely if we lived in a world where everyone could be trusted and no one used your desire to help someone in distress as a weakness, but we don’t. I’ll make a call for you, but I won’t unlock my door, at home or on the road.)
“911.”
“Hi,” I said, “I think there’s someone in trouble on 5th Avenue South.”
“What makes you think that?”
I described the scene.
“Where on 5th Avenue South did you see this?”
“Near 45th Street,” I said. “Across from that building …”
“What building?”
“Oh, it’s where’s 3rd Avenue and 5th Avenue split,” I said. “You know, where the new fire station is going to be.”
“Are you saying this man is going to be at this address?”
“No, the man is there. It’s the fire station that isn’t there yet.”
“When will this man be at the address?”
I had gone from savior to suspect because of what I’m hoping was a bad cell phone connection. In my best case scenario, she thought I was a drug user who was going to dump a friend having a bad trip. In my worst case scenario, she thought I was a murderer/mob king pin with a body to get rid of.
“The man is already there,” I said. “He’s there right now.”
“And where are you?”
That’s when I hung up, my fear of 911 returned and fully-realized yet again. I won't be rising to the title of the Savior of Avondale anytime soon.
My Top 5 Car Care Pointers
I don’t think this will come as a surprise to most people, but I am a very neat person. I love storage bins – easily identified thanks to my handy label maker. I enjoy doing laundry, and I might consider my steam mop more than just a cleaning apparatus – it’s kind of like an anti-bacterial friend ... [Read more]
Save The Skeet
When I was younger, we took a lot of family vacations that were combined with various lawyers’ conferences. At nine, I took my first trip on a plane, and we went to Disney World. It was awesome (and that’s only talking about the plane trip), and since my dad took me with him to pick up some papers in the hospitality area, I had some unexpected and treasured one-on-one time with Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
For fourth grade Spring Break, we went skiing. I liked skiing, but what I remember most from that trip is boarding the chartered bus that would take us from the airport to our condos and being surrounded by attorneys demanding a stop to buy booze on the way. (I kid you not when I say there was an actual chant at one point along the lines of “li-quor store, li-quor store.”)
However, it was our trip to the Greenbrier in West Virginia when I was 11 that was my favorite vacation by far. It was July, and I loved everything about the place. There were huge indoor and outdoor pools as well as a bowling alley and movie theater in the hotel. (How is that even possible?) The Greenbrier is also one of the few places I know of where you can practice falconry even though my dad wasn’t handing over the money for that one.
Also, being 11, I was right at the cut-off age for the kids’ activity groups. (At lawyer conferences, it’s very important to separate the children from the adults as soon as possible so that networking and happy hour can commence immediately.) While at first I resented not being able to go with the 12 and older set, once I made a friend, we, armed with our respective sisters, ran the under 11 group. The popularity and power were intoxicating. People fought for the right to sit at our dinner table – where we enjoyed three-course meals and used all of the correct silverware so as not to shame our professional parents.
This was also around the time that the news was beginning to break that there might be bunkers for government officials built in various strategic locations throughout the country in the event of nuclear war. The Greenbrier was a prime candidate, and my sisters and I liked exploring the resort hoping to break the story wide open.
“I think I see a tear in the wall paper over there.”
“Does the wall sound hollow to you?”
Superb detectives we were not. Good shuffleboard players? Yes.
At 16, we went back to the Greenbrier, but it wasn’t quite the same experience. By then, the Greenbrier had admitted to its underground bunker, so it was very cool to actually tour it. On the other hand, trying to reconnect with my lawyers’ conference friends from five years earlier didn’t exactly go as I had hoped, and I was full of the expected teen angst.
I spent most of the week lounging by the pool and reading The Virgin Suicides.
My father did want us to participate in one day outing as a family, and it happened to be skeet shooting. He figured it was one of the safest ways for us to learn to use a gun. (Even though we’re not gun owners, as anxiety-driven people, we do feel compelled to know how to do all things in case an emergency should ever arise. The killer drops his weapon? Be prepared to take charge of the situation. Not that a shotgun is often used in burglary and/or stalker-confrontation moments.)
Anyways, being as I was, full of teen angst and toying with vegetarianism, I was fairly dead set against not going. I looked my father straight in the eye and said, “Doesn’t anybody think about the poor skeet? Why should they be sacrificed for sport? The poor things.”
“Laurel,” my father said, “skeet are clay pigeons. Clay.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I guess you’re coming with us?”
“I guess so.”
I’m sure my father has never been more proud that he paid for all of that private education.