The Lipstick Chronicles

Margie's Story Time: Sleeping Margie

Margie's Story Time: Sleeping Margie

By Me, Margie

It's time again for another tale from Margie's Big Book of Stories.  This one, like all the great stories in the world, has many lessons and if I were you I'd write them down because you are totally getting all of this for free.

It all started when one of my cousins returned from a trip to Coronado and decreed (that means rushed in, dropped her bags, and made a breathless announcement to the rest of us) that we were all getting our belly buttons pierced.

I barely looked up, because I was trying to finish a french pedicure and you have to focus or you'll mess it up.  It's this kind of ability to concentrate that would make me a great surgeon or maybe an astronaut, but alas I have to answer phones.  Which is why I am able to multitask and need my own office with a door.

Rocco was on board immediately.  He's been wanting us to get matching ink for ages, which I simply will not do while our Nonna is alive.  I mean, when you are blessed with a body like mine, all you need to decorate it au natural is, you know, another body, or maybe some red silk.  Anything else is overkill. Rita refuses to get a tattoo because she prefers to be covered in sailor.  That's right.  I could have said it but I am more clever than that, and I didn't even use a thesaurus, which is how I got Esteban the Phone Guy to help me set up my own private extension at the office that doesn't show up on the other phones.

Our cousin Rosie, who doesn't even have her ears pierced because of that thing when her mother sent her to the convent, was so excited, she was jumping up and down.  That girl is like a puppy.

I didn't even look up.  I just said:  "No. Way."  I didn't have to explain why.  I don't like needles.  Sure, I give blood, but that's a community service.  Plus, where else can you have someone warn you ahead of time: "You are going to feel a little prick."  

My other three cousins jumped on my laptop and started Googling or Binging or whatever to choose rings.  I focused on my last two toes.  Because that is where you can make a mistake, because you lose concentration and then you end up with a little toe that is all white and it ruins the whole damn thing.  It is this kind of single-mindedness that can sometimes lead to trouble and not just because you don't hear the doorknob until the door is totally open and you are busted.  Which is why I am getting Stephano the Locksmith to put a lock on my office door as soon as I get one.

By the time Stevie the Pizza Guy arrived (extra sausage) the three of them had changed subjects and were making fun of rich people's outfits.  We had to eat right away, because I had a dentist appointment in the morning and couldn't eat after 11.  This is because our dentist, who is also our cousin Dino, still uses the nitrous oxide, which is fantastic.  When Rosie was first in the convent and learning how to cross-stitch, she made him a sampler that says: "Just say N2O", which he has hanging in his private office, because he only uses it for family and he doesn't want anyone breaking in to get at it.  His office has a serious lock, and I took a picture of it with my phone so I could show Stephano.  Before they left, we confirmed that Rocco would take me to the dentist and Rita would pick me up.  No one lets Rosie drive yet. She's too easily distracted by the A&F billboards.

Everything seemed normal - I only had one cavity, so it was pretty quick, although it's hard to tell on the gas.  Before I knew it, I was in Rita's car having a nice Starbucks. It never even occurred to me to make sure Rita used my Gold Starbucks Card. Which should have been my first internal warning.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a strange bedroom.  Before I even opened my eyes, I realized there was something sticky on my stomach.  Uh oh.  Boys and girls, if you don't already know it, those two things at the same time can mean that something happened, and you need to proceed with caution.  Also - don't think that works because just ask our cousin Raven who had to get married in March - when no one wants to get married because the weather sucks and you can't get  a decent fresh bouquet to save your life.

Before I could even figure out which cousin to blame first, I heard Rosie whispering in the next room.  "I just love it, don't you?  Look at the way it bounces because it's happy!  I'm not even mad that it hurt even though you told me there was no way because the belly button is all scar tissue and has no nerve endings."  Boys and girls, I worry about Rosie.  Because that is just bullshit and she should know better than to listen to Rita and Rocco when they are on a mission.  Also, I could see that we needed to get Rita another book because she obviously didn't understand our illustrations with the half-peeled bananas.

When I was done rolling my eyes, I lifted my head up.  Sure enough, there was a gauze bandage taped to my stomach.  I am telling you, regardless of what is under there, if that tape messes up my tan lines, there is going to be hell to pay.  I took a moment to congratulate myself on the choice of the red silk set.  A lady does like to dress up for company, even if she is passed out and across town. It's just good manners, you know?

Just as I was gently peeling away a corner of the tape, Rosie bounced into the room with her t-shirt tied under her bra.  Good grief.  She had a cross hanging from her belly button.  It caught the light every time she moved. Swarvoski crystals, no doubt, because no way does that girl have the money for real ice. The way she was moving around, I was just happy it wasn't a bell.

Next came Rita and no surprise there, an anchor.  Same sparkle.  Rita has never been known for her subtlety.  Hers was bigger, no doubt because she was planning to replace it with a budweiser pin at the first opportunity.  I hoped the weight of it gave her a nasty scar.

Rocco brought up the rear, and I was afraid to look.  The possibilities were endless. It was an arrow. No crystals.  Just steel. He was carrying a glossy catalog with pictures of other charms. Good thing we have a cousin in the gold business who could get jewelry at cost.

I looked at them and they all took a big step back.  That's right.  Any Mancini worth her salt can fry a person at 20 feet with a look.  I learned mine from Uncle Sal, who is known in some circles at The Incinerator.  

"Now Margie," Rocco took point, palms up in a gesture of surrender, "if you don't like it, we can take it out right now and no one will ever know.  And it won't hurt a bit."  Where have I heard that one before?

I tried to sit up and winced.  No pain, my fine ass.  Someone had stuck a needle in my skin and then left something in there that was not part of the original equipment.  Plus, my mouth was all fuzzy. Rita rushed over with some water. "Dino said lots of water.  He, uh, was here a little bit ago when we couldn't get you to wake up.  I mean, I only gave you one Xanax which isn't even enough to get the Aunts to stop talking, so I guess you need to be more careful when you mix things but Dr. Etienne is on his way and he is going to check your vital signs and stuff."

"He can check my stuff too." smirked Rocco.  Rosie nodded and bounced away to get the door.  That girl needs to get better bras or she's going to hurt herself.

Etienne rushed in with his black doctor bag.  He says he only carries it for me, because I like surprises.  I guess most doctors don't use them any more which is a shame.  He took one look at me, propped up on my elbows with my jeans half open,  finished removing the bandages, and then sat back.  I was afraid to look.  But his eyes were very sparkly, and it wasn't just the reflection of the belly charm.  He didn't even turn around. He just said: "Get out.  She needs rest."  

"I am sleepy" I said, stretching and faking a small yawn.  "Uh huh," he said, leaning down to get a better look at my new, shiny gold letter M. "Hey! I observed - it's for Me, Margie." The Doctor didn't even look up.  He just said "Mmmmmmmm"  Then he licked his lips and said: "I think I need to check closely for any signs of infection. Nice tan. Lines."  Turns out it was a good idea I was already horizontal because, you know, doctors study anatomy and they know things.  Between gasps, I heard glasses clinking together in the next room and Rocco giggling: "The doctor is in."

The End.  Because the rest is private stuff which a lady does not tell unless there is lots of tequila involved.

This is such a good story that you get to pick your own moral:

1.  Never trust a cousin bearing Starbucks.

2. If anyone tells you it's not going to hurt, they are probably lying.  Your only option is to decide if the gain is worth the pain.

3. Always wear nice underwear because you never know who is going to see it.

4.  Beware of little pricks.  They can lead to big trouble.

 

 

 

 

 

Scary Story

by Harley

Last week a bloodcurdling midnight cry of “MOMMY!” sent me racing to the bedroom of my 9-year old daughter.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“No.”

“Bad dream?”

“No.” she shuddered. “It was a . . . story.”

She wouldn’t discuss it, but insisted I sleep with her, which I did, on her twin bed that accommodated most of me, although not my left arm.

 I’m used to Nightmare Patrol. One scary night last month my older daughter asked me to sleep on her top bunk. Our dog Cairo, not used to seeing me up there, began barking. I hopped out of bed to reassure Cairo, only I miscalculated how far it was to the ground, so my daughter woke to see me fly through air and crash into her desk, further terrifying both her and the dog.

Anyhow. The next day I asked my 9-year old if she remembered what scared her. “Of course,” she said. “At recess, Jenna told us this story about a girl named Molly who went to a doll store and found this really ugly doll holding up two fingers, like a peace sign and the man who worked at the doll store told her never to take her eyes off this doll, but one night Molly forgot and left the doll in the kitchen, and she heard the doll on the stairs and it yelled out, ‘Hey, Molly. I’m on the first step.’ And then, ‘Hey, Molly, I’m on the second step.’ And like that all the way up the stairs and then Molly hears the doll say, ‘Hey, Molly, I’m outside your bedroom’ and then, ‘Hey, Molly, I’m right here by your bed.’ And then the doll cuts off Molly’s head. Oh, yeah – and the doll guy knew that would probably happen, because the doll had already cut off two other girls’ heads and that’s why she was holding up two fingers.”

 Okay. Leaving aside questions like “is being left overnight in a kitchen motivation enough to turn a doll into a murderer?” and whether the doll salesman had some moral or legal liability in the matter, what struck me about this story was its popularity. Among pre-adolescents in our neighborhood, “Molly’s Murderous Doll” is the #1 scary story.

In my day it was “Dead Babysitter.” You know, where the babysitter gets the phone call saying, “I’m three blocks away . . . I’m on your street . . . I’M IN THE HOUSE.”

For my friend F. Paul Wilson, with whom I discussed this at Bouchercon, the story in the 'hood was “The Hook,” featuring a one-handed killer who preyed upon teens parked on Lover’s Lane, which ends with a satisfying . . . hook. Paul, who knows from horror, feels it’s all in the ending (and recommends Ray Bradbury’s short story, “October Game” as a case in point.)

It is all in the ending. I came home from Bouchercon to find that my son, perhaps to torment his sisters, had checked out a book called Scary Stories, on which the school library had slapped the exciting warning label: THIS BOOK FOR 4^th and 5^th GRADERS ONLY. Alas, the book was a bitter disappointment. Several of the stories ended with the word “Boo!”

Which wouldn't even scare a 3^rd grader.

Here’s my kind of ending: discovering that things that once frightened me no longer do. Like high school principals, driving on the freeway, soufflés, speaking French in France, clowns, root canals, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Or Bob, our family mannequin who used to scare us all, even the dogs, but now only scares the Ukrainian dishwasher repairmen.

I am, however, still scared of those twin girls in The Shining, the Gregg Hurwitz novel with the severed head in the refrigerator and Don’t Look Now (I can't even post those stills). Dead children who, for one reason or another, remain behind to haunt the new inhabitants of their old houses. Victorian clothing.

But Molly’s Murderous Doll? Ha. I could take her down.

                                 

And you? Apart from cancer, war, or natural disaster, what scares you? And what do you laugh in the face of?

 

Guest Blogger, Tammy Kaehler -- Mantras

Take Good Advice Wherever You Find It

 

I’ve had mantras on my mind lately. Not the dreamy, inspirational sayings that make me think of beaches and yoga and striving for greater things (I’m a fan of those too, and I have them littered around my desk on paperweights or torn pieces of notebook pages). I’m talking about the words I sometimes have to chant to myself through clenched teeth to keep my competitive instincts—or maybe my murderous ones? sometimes they feel like the same thing—from kicking in.

You see, I’m an overachiever. I rise to meet challenges. But part of realizing I’m now a mature adult (since I’m the “old lady” at my day job, where the average age skews very young), is realizing I can't do everything. More importantly, I’ve learned to save my skills and energy for what’s most important to me. This isn’t always easy, when I’m aware that those young kids I work with are wallowing in their inefficiencies without my sage advice. Wallowing!

 

Or something like that.

Here’s the audience participation part of this blog. You can all say my favorite mantra with me … first, pretend to be Chris Rock, assume an attitude (maybe with an incredulous look and some finger shaking), and repeat, “Just because you CAN do something, don’t make it a good idea.”

 

Well done.

 

For a couple years now, I’ve been attributing this quote to Chris Rock—which is part of the fun because I’m about as far from Chris Rock as you could get. I’m short, female, and very, very (very) white. I like to think of myself as kind of a badass sometimes, but I, yes, pale in comparison to him. And I’ve been carefully quoting those words verbatim.

But I should have known better, because I don’t remember quotes correctly. Like, ever. (This is part of the reason why I can’t tell jokes.)

Sure enough, I recently looked up the exact wording of my beloved mantra, only to discover it’s not what Chris Rock said at all. Turns out what he said (more colorfully, of course) was this: “Yeah, you could do it … but that don't mean it's to be done! Shit, you can drive a car with your feet if you want to, that don't make it a good f&*%ing idea!” Moreover, he was talking about bad parenting, which has nothing to do with me trying to establish priorities in my life. 

Close enough. Take the good advice, Tammy. Don’t worry about where it comes from.

What this mantra helps me remember is that what’s important is not that I. Can. Win! It’s that I choose to win what I want to win, and I let some battles pass me by. My day job? I really appreciate that it’s there, I’m committed to doing good work, but I don’t need to lose sleep over the problems. My novels? That’s where I want to spend my emotional energy creating good plots, interesting characters, and a realistic picture of the racing world. Anything else that pulls my physical and emotional energy away from writing is just a distraction. 

My husband prefers Stephen Covey’s version of the same message: “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” There’s also the pithy “Pick your battles.” But I find the insouciance—and the simmering potential for profanity, I’ll be honest—of my version of Chris Rock does a better job of stopping my blind rush to Achieve. At. All. Costs!

Dr. Tammy’s prescription? Repeat “Just because you CAN do something, don’t make it a good (f&*%ing) idea.” as many times as it takes to remain sane and correctly focused.

It’s all about figuring out what keeps you on track, isn’t it? So tell me, what’s your mantra?

 

Before trying her hand at fiction, Tammy Kaehler established a career writing marketing materials, feature articles, executive speeches, and technical documentation. A fateful stint in corporate hospitality introduced her to the racing world, which inspired the first Kate Reilly racing mystery. Tammy works as a technical writer in the Los Angeles area, where she lives with her husband and many cars.

 

A Comedy of Airhead...

By Cornelia Read Okay, I am all unpacked in Brooklyn, but now have bronchitis and haven't slept more than an hour at a stretch for the last three days, AND my new wireless hotspot thing just shat the bed AGAIN and t-mobile doesn't open for another two hours... Please forgive me for not having a post up. I will have something by early afternoon, pinkie swear!

Too Old for Peer Pressure? Never!

by Diane Chamberlain

 

Do I look like I'm having fun? You're right. I'm not!

Remember when you were a kid and all your friends started drinking, so you started drinking? Or when they sneaked out of their houses in the middle of the night to meet at the park and you joined them? Or they dove from the cliff above the quarry and you didn’t want to look like a chicken, so you did it too? I guess that’s why I now have a Mac. Almost every one of my writing friends uses a Mac. My grown stepdaughters and numerous other family members use Macs, too, and Mac users are zealots, oh yes they are. How they look down their noses at PCs! I figured I must be missing something. I’d been enjoying my new iPad immensely, so when my laptop recently died and my desktop started sputtering, I joined the lemmings and jumped into the Mac abyss. Never one to do things halfway, I now have an iPad, a Macbook Air and an iMac. And a week into this adventure, I also have a boatload of regret, matched only by my determination to conquer this bloody thing on my desk.

I plan to stick with it. I plan to take all the workshops and the one-on-one classes. I plan to learn everything I can and become a Mac Whiz, but no one will ever be able to convince me that a Mac is more intuitive (give me a break) or simpler or more elegant to use than a PC. If it’s so intuitive, why am I stuck staring at a frozen screen five times a day, with a mouse doing unpredictable things and a message that pops up saying something like:

 Simply click &*$@%F1-#$&*F12

Oh please. One click of the mouse on a PC and whatever I need it to do would be done. (I tried several ways to get the actual command in this post, but Typepad wouldn't allow me to put the command/option/control symbols, so I had to make do. Trust me, it looked nearly as silly as the above. So silly I laughed out loud.)

Where oh where is my right click?? I know where it is, but I resent having to press a keyboard button and the mouse at the same time when a right click on the mouse would be so much simpler.

My few friends who haven’t yet been suckered into a Mac ask me “Why are you doing this to yourself??” Yes, there’s the lemming factor, but there’s something deeper going on. There’s the challenge element--a desire to keep my mind supple and learning. Angry Birds and Sudoku just aren't enough. If you want to stretch your brain, try learning a new operating system. I can think of no better way. Just be sure you take your blood pressure medication before you start.  

There’s also hope. The hope that Mac lovers are right and I will someday come to appreciate all that a Mac can do. One of those things is running Scrivener, a program many of my novelist friends use for organizing their books. I’m an obsessive organizer when it comes to writing a novel, so I’m excited about that possibility. Though right now, I have to admit the thought of learning a whole new program is not appealing. Scrivener will be on the back burner for a bit.

(side note: I just heard a yelp of surprise from my bedroom. I'm trying to train my dogs not to jump on the bed.)

Back to the Mac. A significant problem I’m having is the keyboard. I’ve used an ergonomic keyboard for many years. It’s raised in the middle and the keyboard is divided. It’s perfect for fingers and wrists with rheumatoid arthritis. But finding a truly ergonomic keyboard that works with the Mac has proven to be a challenge. There are a few, but the keyboards are not split. Instead, they have a faux ergonomic wave shape. I finally found a truly ergonomic keyboard by Microsoft (the 7000 model). Although it doesn’t have the same functionality as the Mac keyboard, I can set it up so that it’s close, as long as I remember the Alt key is the command key and the Windows key is the option key, etcetera. The mouse that came with the keyboard has a nice feel beneath my palm, but it’s so heavy and clunky that I quickly reached the top of my cuss-ometer while using it and I’m now trying to use the Mac mouse instead. It’s too thin, so I must prop it up to avoid hurting my wrist. (propping here with Bland Simpson’s wonderful book on The Inner Islands of North Carolina, which I bought while doing research for The Lies We Told.)

I don’t understand Mac’s organization for pictures either. What’s the difference between the pictures folder and iPhoto? Is iPhoto a way to organize them? I had all my pictures copied over from my PC and some of them came over in duplicate and triplicate and quadruplicate—enough so that I now have over 13,000 images on my hard drive. I have a little clean up to do there! In the middle of trying to clean up last night, the mouse suddenly developed a mind of its own and began selecting hundreds of pictures at a time. I couldn’t get it to stop. Kind of frightening! Around that time is when a facsimile of the above message popped up on my screen (Simply click &*$@%F1-#$&*F12), but my non-Mac keyboard left me stymied. Since I couldn’t stop the madness occurring on my screen, I reached for my iPad, thinking I’d Google for help. As I reached forward, the crazy selecting process instantly stopped and the mouse returned to normal. I have no idea what I did to start it or stop it, but the next time something goes kaflooey, I plan to reach for my iPad again and see what happens.

Oh, and those "notes" on the right of my screen above were another thing that "got stuck". Clearly I'm doing something wrong.

One of my biggest bugaboos right now are these boring “aliases”. When I wanted to put a shortcut on my PC desktop—say I wanted to go instantly to my Facebook Readers Page—I’d just right click and create a shortcut—a simple Facebook icon, for example. But every icon on the Mac is the same and butt ugly. I know there must be a way to make them prettier and more useful, but it’s certainly not, ahem, intuitive.

I know what you Mac users are saying: "If she hates the Mac so much, let her go back to her virus-ridden PC!" But please reread my reasons for the switch. I really want to do this. I just desperately need to wail and moan for a while, okay?

My dogs and I are about the same age, if I think in terms of dog years. They've spent all their lives jumping up on the bed. If they can learn to stay off the bed, I can master this machine. Then again, they don't seem to be catching on to the whole tinfoil thing too quickly.

I’m done being a curmudgeon for today. Thanks for letting me get all that out of my system! I’ll spend the rest of the day ‘learning by doing’. Putting this post together on the Mac is the first step. It’s now 12:06 pm. We’ll see how long it takes. Then I’d love to hear what new things you’re learning these days. 

P.S. I think I'm finished. It's 5:26 pm. Sigh.

 

Home, Sweet Home

          By Nancy Pickard

  Sometimes I think I could be a turtle and carry my home on my back--except for that crossing the road thing and not having a buddy to right me if I overturn.

 

            Peace Pilgrim did it, alone, and carrying only what she could put in her pockets, and with no money.  But even she tried to find a bridge to sleep under in a storm, or somebody's guest room, when she was invited. Even turtles like to claw a hole in the ground or find a hollow stump when it's time to hide and watch or snore and sleep.

          What if, like Peace Pilgrim, I didn't have a home at all?  Not so much as a (camper) shell of my own?

            Well, I'm living in a borrowed shell right now.  I share a condo with my mother, and as generous and sharing as she is--and she is--it's still her home, not mine.  It's simply the place I live and am content to do so for now.  But it's not. . .home.

            What is home?  Good question.

            I've been thinking about this a lot this week because I saw so much homelessness on a road trip I took to southeast Kansas and down into Oklahoma and across into Missouri.  The homelessness I saw wasn't the kind we usually associate with that word.  I didn't see a single person with a shopping cart full of her belongings, for instance; I didn't see a City Union Mission, a Salvation Army headquarters, or a welfare office.

* But I did see, in Picher, Oklahoma, a ghost town where everybody was bought out by the federal government because of toxicity in the air and water due to waste from lead mines.  All the little houses are empty now.  The ones who didn't leave during the buy-out were forced out later by a tornado. Maybe all or most of them have new homes now, but for a while they were home-less. The houses that are left, abandoned, are home-less, too.

* In Joplin, Mo., I saw block after block after block of shattered brick and boards where that monster tornado blew all their homes down.  The third little pig was wrong about brick, by the way.  Many of those folks are temporarily living in FEMA trailers now, on the edge of town, or they're squeezing in with friends or relatives.  I don't know what they'll do next, the ones without insurance.

* Everywhere I went and everywhere we all go we see foreclosed homes and farms and ranches and businesses, even if they don't always have signs announcing it so that we can identify what we're seeing. There are literally millions of foreclosed homes now in the U.S. of A., and still more coming.  I think about those people, those families, every day, and my heart aches for them because I know they're terrified and desperate. Many, if not most of our politicians don't care, from what I observe.  Even worse, they keep doing the very things that are most guaranteed to make life harder for, well, all of us.

* On my road trip I drove entirely on land that once was home to American Indians, but they were forcibly "removed" from it, swept down to Oklahoma like refuse that my own Kansas felt compelled to get off the dirt floor of our lives.  You should see the poverty where some of them landed in that state to the south of me.

            Empty towns, emptied land, empty houses, broken hearts.

            If there's one thing I know, it's that there's no such thing as material security, and the older I get the more astonishing it feels to me that we humans spend our lives trying so desperately to get some.  There isn't any.  Things come, things go,  sometimes with the shocking suddenness of an F5 tornado, as in Joplin.

            So, I have to ask, what is "home" when there isn't any structure to house it and to call my own, or to call anybody's own ? Some people go to a lot of trouble and expense to recreate the home they've lost.  On this trip I visited a "town" that consists of buildings a man has moved from his original hometown to another site.  He is nostalgic and wants life to go back the way he remembers it.

            But what is home if we can't, like him, take it with us?

            Maybe it's not a place, it's a moment--this moment, and now this one, and this one.  Maybe it's love and beauty and a willingness to ride with change instead of clinging to what doesn't exist any more.  Maybe it's comfort and kindness, which would help explain why I felt at home on the road, because I ran into a lot of those things--the beauty of a winding, tree-lined road, the kindness of a curator who let me work in her museum, the cat that stretched when I petted it and that pushed its head into my hand for scratching, the care a chef took over a perfect nut-encrusted catfish and corn muffin, the way the library director took her time to sit with me and let me ask her questions about her job, the way the B&B owner cared that the toilet handle was broken.  On this trip, my "home" seemed to be decorated by a full moon that rose over the building across the street from my hotel, and by the Spring River, and by a woman's smiling face, and a man's, and that girl's and that boy's.

            Some of that took money, it must be noted, which made it easy for me in ways it is not easy for other people.  Money for the gas to get there, money for the B&B, money for the food, money for almost all of it.  Finding "home" gets so much harder when you have to create it out of the nothing in your pockets.

            I want people to have homes they love.

            I want our leaders to care deeply in ways that help that happen.

            But sometimes life doesn't co-operate in those ways, and we don't get what we want, and then we have to find "home" in other ways and sometimes we even make a home for other people in those ways, too. 

            How would you make yourself at home in the world, if you no longer had a home in the world?

 

Mothers-in-Law

Margaret Maron

 

 

<<Mack Sennett:  A mother never gets hit with a custard pie.  Mothers-in-law, yes.  But mothers? Never.">>             

 Mack Sennett was right.  Mothers are sacred. The second Sunday in May honors them. Songs are written about them. 

 

Mothers-in-law, on the other hand,  are automatically the butt of jokes and deserving of a pie in the face. Why?

My husband loved and pampered my mother and I adored his.  She was funny, loving, supportive, and although at times bewildered by some of the things I did and said, she almost never showed disapproval.  And when she did, I fully deserved it.  Her formal education ended with the 8th grade, but she taught me how to play Scrabble and then wiped the floor with me. She showed me how to cook the Yankee foods her son missed when he married me, taught me how to budget our money, diaper a baby, and bring down a baby's fever. When I became a stay-at-h0me-mom, she quickly disabused me of the idea that it was "his" money.  "You're working just as hard.  His salary is just as much yours as his."

She ironed socks, dishtowels and underwear, but admitted that was her hangup and nothing I needed to do. She was a meticulous housekeeper, but tactful as hell when it came to my house.  Even though she lived on the next block, she dropped in only once without calling and was so shocked by the clutter that she always gave me at least a half-hour warning after that.

<<Mark Twain:  “Adam was the luckiest man in the world.He had no mother-in-law.”>>

 Even though my mother-in-law was the yardstick by which others should be judged, I have heard enough from my friends to know how lucky I was.

 <<Juvenal:  "One cannot be happy while one's mother-in-law still lives.">> 

 When a good friend’s fiancé told his mother that he was going to marry a shiksa, she said, “Fine.  I’ll be out in the kitchen with my head in the oven.”  She did everything possible to prevent the marriage and then spent the next 30 years trying to undermine it.  She said such hateful things to her son, to my friend, and to her own grandchildren that I couldn’t understand why they continued to let such a toxic woman in their lives.  Now in a nursing home with deepening Alzheimer’s, her face lights up when this previously-despised daughter-in-law enters her room.  She grasps my friend’s hand and says, “We’ve always loved each other, haven’t we, dear?”  My friend says, “I could weep that she never showed us this gentler side when it would have made such a difference.”

<<A man sends his mother-in-law to a seaside resort for a month to get her out of his hair.  Two days after she gets there, he receives a tweet from the resort manager:  “Regret to say your M-i-L drowned and washed ashore covered in blue crabs.  What shall we do?”     To which the man tweeted back: “Ship the crabs and set ′er again.”>>

Another friend, I’ll call her S., married into a rather wealthy family. His father was in the diplomatic corps and he was decent enough, but the mother made it quite clear that her son had married “down,” and she loved to give formal dinner parties in the hopes that S. wouldn’t know which fork to use, nor how to eat squabs or meringues. She had bursts of calculated generosity, followed by bursts of stinginess and she was a notorious for giving someone an expensive gift and then declaring later that it was only a loan.  S. learned the hard way.  The dragon lady gave her a pair of lavish brocade drapes when she redecorated the embassy, then asked for their return a year later:  “I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed them, dear, and the room looks lovely decorated around them, but I need them back now.”

She decided that S. needed an “important” piece of jewelry and, upon the birth of her first grandchild, gave S. a wide gold cuff encrusted with high-value gemstones.  “It was really garish,” S. said, “but I wore it to parties in an attempt to please her.”  A year or two later, when her  m-i-l asked for the return of “that bracelet I lent you,” S. said, “Certainly,” and went straight to her jewelry box and gave it back.  “Of course, I had taken the bracelet to a jeweler as soon as she gave it to me and had the stones replaced with imitations. After the divorce, my daughter and I lived on the proceeds of that bracelet for two years till I could get back on my feet.”

<<Joan Rivers: “I told my mother-in-law that my house was her house, and she said, ‘Get the hell off my property.’”>>

Another friend’s m-i-l has taken just the opposite tack.  She thinks that her son married “up” and sneers that nothing she has or does is good enough for her d-i-l, who couldn’t care less about such things.

So what about you?  Did you luck into a lovely mother-in-law like mine or was she someone who could give the dragon lady a run for her money?

Could be the Transmission. Could be Cell Tower.

By Sarah

So, I'm driving my 20-year-old world traveler of a daughter to Logan the other day down I-89 when
about about an hour into the drive, somewhere around Quechee, the "D" light on the dashboard of
my  Honda Pilot starts flashing. No sound coming from the front or rear ends. No change in power. Just a freaking flashing D.

 Now, this is the first automatic I've ever owned. You had no choice with the Pilot which Honda figured would be driven by sedentary, lazy mothers like me. But after talking to a mechanic, I've been thinking there's more to it. Something to do with computers. Because after I pull off in a panic and call my husband (No. Help. Whatsoever.) who tells me it's nothing and to Google it on my iPhone if I'm concerned, I call down to Grappone Honda in Concord, N.H. ,where I bought the car all the way back in 2004. (Going on 127,000 miles, thereby beating my frugal parents own record of keeping cars for at least seven years.)

Fortunately, there is still a mechanic on the premises as it was Saturday and they closed by three. I tell him the problem - simple enough, right? - and he gives me not one, not two, but at least four possibilities. And here all I want to know is if I can make it to Boston in time for my daughter's international flight.

"Could be the transmission," he starts, immediately sending my adrenaline spiking. Transmission? I'd heard horror stories of people driving cross country, their transmissions failing for no reason and them being stuck in the scalding desert with buzzards circling overhead. "Could be a loose connection. Probably a loose or corroded connection with the sensor."

I relax a bit. Everything in this car is corroded from driving on miles of salt-covered roads in the winter. This is nothing new.

 Then he says, "Could be the oil. You low on oil?"

"I don't know. Wouldn't the oil light come on?"

He sniffs. "Not necessarily." 

Okay, I think, check the oil.

"Then again,"  he adds, "could be cell towers. They can mess with the communication system."

Seriously? "Cell towers?" He's screwing with me. I can imagine the other mechanics stiflling guffaws. He told her it was the cell towers! "You're making that up."

"Ma'am, there's lots of stuff going on you have no idea."

Guess so. Anyway, the point pertinent to him is that he'll be closed by the time I hit Concord. Final advice? Drive for a few miles. Maybe one. Maybe two. If the light starts flashing again, call a tow truck. It's over.

Let me just pause in the story to note that it is approximately 2 p.m. My daughter's flight to Rome does not leave until 9:45. Call me neurotic. Call me a Nervous Nellie, but THIS is why I allot so much time to get to the airport, for emergencies. My people are Lithuanians well-schooled in the philosophy that if anything shitty can happen, no matter how remote, it will. Example: no one expects Cossacks to kick down the door in the middle of the night, dragging you to your death. My people did. And that is how I am able to write you today. I am the product of survivors.

And, somehow, this applies to the Pilot which has been mostly trouble free aside from a prior drama over the Check Engine light. (Who here has not suffered through a Check Engine light?) This is where I miss my friend, Trish, who again talked me off the ledge when the Check Engine light suddenly appeared during a cross-New York State trip on a book tour. No, it wasn't that I hadn't tightened the gas cap past three clicks. ( I KNEW you were going to say that.) It was because my O-rings were shot. So there.

This was different, however. Check Engine I could handle. A flashing light I could not. I added a quart of oil, got back on the highway and the light remained a solid happy green D, once again proving that 99% of electrical problems can be solved by unplugging or turning something on and off. Alas, just as Anna and I were laughing about cell towers, the D started flashing again at 22 miles in.

Ignored it. Like Charlie said.

Sailed into Logan. Turned off car to drop Anna curbside at airport. Turned it on. Solid green and it has been so ever since.

So, what to make of this? Are the computers that control our cars - and our lives - sending us to a premature death? What good is a warning system if the warning system causes us to have a heart attack at the exit for Storrow Drive? What good is having a witch for a daughter who inherited her grandmother's propensity for fizzling electronic items?

And what to do with a husband you could have clobbered who turns out to be right?

Sarah

P.S. On the way back from Boston, I passed "Hillbilly Highway," the makeshift on and off ramp onto I-89 that was cut through a Royalton farm on a road washed out by the flood. Had it not been for this, locals would have been trapped. Best part? The owner of the farm, instead of being pissed, set up a farm stand and sells sunflowers and tomatoes for the new "commuters."

 

 

Changes

by Heather

 Well, you know all good things come to an end, but you hold on. And time still goes by.

 As in children growing up.

I know you have to let go. I've done that. No, really. Okay, sorta, maybe, just a little. I want them to have the best life possible. I just wish it could be with them all somehow kids forever and with me. Impossible, I know. 

Summer comes, and it's great, because I know I'll get to see all of them. A number of the conventions are in the New York or New England area, so I'll get to see Derek, one of my 3 sons. And Chynna, my youngest daughter, is home from college.

So the summer started off with a bang. Convention city. And it always ends with a convention, my own benefit, "Writers for New Orleans."

 

But after that, bringing Chynna back to school.

In New Orleans, we're so busy that we don't know what we're doing. We try very hard to provide great panels and great night life, so there are a million things to set up. These are things I'd be totally incapable of doing alone, so, thankfully, amazing Louisiana friend Connie Perry does all that. But there are the little things. Like discovering that although I'd spent a week writing the bios for “Bourbon Street Bash, Know Your Civil War Characters,” a theme party thrown by Kathy Love, Erin McCarthy, and F. Paul Wilson, we hadn't seen until Kathy is trying on her costume that Julia Dent Grant had suddenly turned into Judy Dent Grant on the cover. 

 

We redid the booklets, finding a few more mistakes along the way. (And still missed the fact that someone died in 1995 instead of 1885!) Ah, well. 

But there was also Helen Rosburg's “Angelique” champagne reception to get ready--although weather kept Helen herself from flying in. Then, setting up our amazing band--and they were amazing. F. Paul Wilson again, my friend--and vocal coach for many an American Idol finalist!--Mary Walkley, Chris Croteau, a professional who stumbled in through friend and poet Corinne De Winter, Greg Varecchio, husband of writer Jennifer Hughes, and Bobby Rosello--lifelong friend dragged along. Wow. What they managed in two days--never having worked all together before--was amazing. And there were the rehearsals with the cast, of course, for "Civil War Zombies for Peace" (including our Harley, another true professional who somehow allows herself to indulge in twenty-four hour low-budge dinner theater, and Alex Sokoloff, and Vegas entertainers Lance Taubold and Rich Devin and a lot of my family. And Connie's family. We don't call it interactive for nothing.)

My little nephews are there, a little freaked out when see Auntie Heather and the rest of the family in zombie make-up, but, hey, they're troopers. 

 The panels, thankfully, are managed by other friends and include great authors and editors. It was a challenge this year because Irene was rolling around out there. It never got bad, but it was pretty wet. Luckily, attendees were undaunted.

The last night was a trip to the Haunted Mortuary. It wasn't open at the time, but they arranged a "behind the scenes" tour for us. No actors yet to jump out at people, but . . . I'm not sure I'd manage it if there had been. The place was used as a mortuary for many years, and the original embalming room remains,and a crematorium--it was a "full service" mortuary. If you're in New Orleans any time around Halloween (or Christmas! Turns into a great place for little ones!) you must go--it's truly scary and amazing.

The point is that the whole thing is crazy and busy, and there isn't time to get weepy.

Then . . . .

Then it is time to get weepy. It comes to an end, and Dennis and I take off in a plane to take Chynna back to California. My son Derek and daughter-in-law have already flown back to Connecticut, and the rest of the family is headed to Miami.  

         I know how to let go. I know to be a grown up and allow my children to fly and have great lives and go where they need to go and do what they need to do.

  It doesn't mean that I don't get to cry when they fly away.

 

This Day to Remember.

Where were you on September 11th? What do you remember?

From Margaret:

  I was awakened earlier than usual to be told that a close relative was in the hospital with a broken hip, so when I flipped on NPR to catch the morning headlines and heard that a plane had crashed into the Trade Center, I immediately turned on the television and was shocked to watch as that second plane went in.  The first could have been a weird accident; the second was clearly deliberate, but who?  why? The horror continued as I flashed on the few times I'd taken an elevator up to one of the towers' high floors.  How long it took even on the express.  To think of trying to walk down through smoke and fire . . .? Ghastly. In addition to all the people who died that day, there were even more deaths to come.  Of the two close friends who lived in lower Manhattan, I'm convinced that  breathing those contaminants for months caused the death of one and hastened the end of the other even though neither was in the building itself.

 
From Nancy Martin: 

 I was living on a mountaintop in rural Virgina--alone because my husband had already moved back to Pennsylvania for a job. Between writing the last chapter of my first mystery, I was packing boxes that morning and watching the Today show.  With packing tape in my hand, I heard Katie Couric's incredulous voice saying,  "We don't want to alarm anyone, but it looks as if a small plane may have crashed into the World Trade Center." And while I watched, the second plane hit.  I thought, "My daughter is in New York," and you know that expression "my blood ran cold?"  Well, that's how I felt---as if a terrible block of ice hit my chest and spread through my veins all the way to my fingertips. 

An instant later, the phone rang, and the voice of my great friend (and backblogger!) cried, "Are you seeing this?"  It was just like our mothers telling us about Pearl Harbor.  We couldn't believe it.  The sky was so blue and perfect. For hours, I kept trying my daughter's phone, but of course it was out. Thank God for Ethernet.  When she got back from class, we emailed, and she begged me to phone her boyfriend's mother in DC.  Her boyfriend had been on a plane from New York that morning, but I couldn't make the call. I kept thinking he'd been in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.  I couldn't call a mother whose son had died.  But he was already on the subway in DC when the plane went down, and he reached my daughter by email within a few hours. 

My mother called from Pennsylvania.  Her voice shook.  "An airliner flew over the golf course.  It was so low, we thought we could reach up and touch it." That was minutes before it crashed. When I phoned my husband--already at his new banking job--he said in amazement that the guys he'd been doing business with the previous day weren't answering their phones.  They worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. My sister, in Brooklyn, said her front steps were covered in burned bits of paper with the Cantor Fitzgerald letterhead.

That night, alone in the house on the mountain, I heard a tremendous roar of powerful engines down in the valley.  It went on for hours, and the concussion rattled the windows of the house.  I was afraid to go outside to listen by myself, so I took the dog, and Dolly and I stood on the lawn, listening in the dark. Dolly leaned against my leg. I remember how warm she felt, and comforting. Turns out, all the east coast railroad companies had sent their locomotives to hide in the old coal yard in the town below. To be safe from terrorists. Terrorists!  What was a terrorist?

I remember how we all felt in the weeks that followed--joined in a common spirit.  Makes the current Congress look so self-absorbed and petty. If nothing else, I'm glad we have so many stories of heroism and patriotism and unity from that terrible day.

From Barbara O'Neal:  

I had been on a very challenging hiking trip in Provence, and made it home on September 11 at 3 am Colorado time.  I awakened to the phone ringing, and it was my grandmother calling to be sure I was home. She said, "Oh, thank God you are not on a plane. I didn't know when you were coming in. They've bombed the Pentagon."  I thought she was being alarmist, but turned on the television to see the towers smoking after the first plane hit.  The calls continued all morning--my family calling to make sure I was actually home and not on one of those planes.  I have a lot of friends in NYC, but my thoughts that morning were for the friend I'd gone hiking with.  She was stranded in Paris, alone, because she'd taken a later flight than I did, and didn't get home for two weeks.  

The story I think about the most is one from an editor I was working with at the time. She lived in the village and couldn't get to her apartment for quite some time. When she finally got back, she said the smell was awful in the neighborhood and she commented to her boyfriend that it smelled like rotten garbage all the time. He said gently, "Honey, that's not garbage."   

From Hank Phillippi Ryan:

It was a beautiful, beautful day on the East Coast, as you remember, too, Nancy.  And chillingly, as it turned out, that's one of the reasons the plot could work--because it was so clear that it allowed the terrorists to see the towers.

I was--crazily--at the hairdresser, getting a hair cut. That night was my station's preview party for the upcoming TV season, and we were all sprucing up.  Someone came running in, saying something incomprehensible, and then the news came flooding in. I had wet hair.

I knew I had to get to work, GET TO WORK as  soon as possible. As a reporter, this was...well, it was work. Separating the journalists from everyone else. I called Jonathan, yelling over the sound of the blowdryer. Yes, he knew.  Are the kids okay, in Park Slope? Our step-son works in the city...yes they're okay. I don't know when I'll be home, I said. (And I will admit, what I really wanted to do was go home.)

I walked to work, maybe 4 blocks, in that beautiful day. The bars were all open on Congress Street, all the glass fronts wide open, all the televisions on. I remember, so clearly, deliberately walking slowly. Thinking, so clearly, so clearly, "this is the moment our lives are all changing. When I get to work, our lives will never be the same."

(Ridiculously: I'm the investigative reporter, you know? And my boss came racing into my office. "How did this happen?" he yelled. "You and Mary (my producer) have to find out how this happened!"  As if we could do that. I think we stayed in the office for the next--three days? And every time we started to   complain, we'd look at each other and say: "We're not dead. Not dead." And then go back to work.)

From Sarah Strohmeyer:

Yes, it was a beautiful September morning and I'd just sent the kids off to school and sat down to write. We'd recently redone our computer system and installed a New York Times news alert. So many ways to procrastinate! Oddly enough, the first message that popped up was from my childhood friend, Connie Jordan, whom I hadn't spoken to in, gosh, ten or more years.

Connie is a smart, beautiful woman, a Swarthmore/Harvard grad and Presbyterian minister whose husband survived a nasty bout of cancer early in their marriage. I've often thought of Connie as being deeply spiritual - though we occasionally butted heads over different interpretations of Christianity. Anyway, I'm still moved by the randomness - or not - of hearing from this woman of God just as my New York Times news ticker started firing bulletins about a plane crashing into the twin towers.

The bulletins were confusing. First it was a small plane. Then it was a jet. Wait, something was going on in D.C.? Was that another plane in New York? Or the same one? I remember thinking that it was probably a joker pilot. About a month before, a single-prop plane had flown precariously close to high rises in Manhattan and in flying from Manchester to New York, our little commuter flight often followed 5th Avenue. You could even see people working in their offices. 

But this was different.

Finally, I wrote Connie this: "Something's going on."

Connie wrote back. "I know. But what?"

"It's bad," I wrote back, getting chills as the bulletins became more alarming. A missing plane in Pennsylvania. Reports of a small plane flying into the Pentagon. More planes missing.

"I have to pray," Connie said. And that was it. I've never heard from her since.

I called Charlie at work and he was just getting the news. I flipped on the TV and there was Peter Jennings, smoke swirling from the twin towers in another frame. I told Charlie to come home immediately, that the towers were on fire. I thought of all my friends in New York, of the husband of my daughter's godmother who worked at Merrill Lynch. Like Connie, I prayed.

And then the unthinkable. The first tower fell, just crumbled like a house of cards. Peter Jennings went dead silent as Charlie came through the door and I looked at him and said, "We'll never be the same."

All those people. Gone.

From Elaine Viets:

 Silence.

That’s what I remember most after 9-11. Don and I lived in a beach condo in Hollywood, Florida. After the attack, the airport was closed for weeks, silencing the constant drone of commercial flights.

Instead, the skies were patrolled by sinister black helicopters. Warships cruised offshore, some with the ominous bulge of nuclear weapons.

Three of the terrorist leaders moved to Florida in 2000, near our home. South Florida is an international community, and they blended in. They used our local library, where the computers are free to all. They made one of their last appearances at Shuckums Oyster Bar in Hollywood, where at least two "holy warriors" drank forbidden alcohol – screwdrivers and rum and Coke. You can make what you want of this: They ate chicken wings.

Twelve hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, the FBI flashed their photos around the bar. The Shuckums’ server remembered them – and their lousy tip.

From Heather Graham:

9/11

The very words will, for everyone old enough on the day, be horrible and poignant. And no matter how much time passes, we all know where we were and what we were doing on that date. 

For me, I was mourning, and cleaning out mother's house with my sister; we had lost her just weeks before. And one of the things that kept running through my mind was at least she doesn't have to see this.

But my mom's passing became back-burner; I hadn't seen a TV. I was driving to a store to buy cleaners when a friend called me and frantically told me not to go to downtown Miami. At the time, I never went downtown, and I thought she'd spiked her morning diet coke. Of course, when she told me that two planes had hit the towers, I immediately started trying to reach my third son--he was going to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn at the time, and the kids there were always on the Path train to reach the store where they bought their art supplies. I was frantic, trying to reach him. His cell went straight to a dull tone. 

I rushed back and got on my computer and I was amazed when I got an instant message. He was on the roof at Pratt and miraculously, his Internet was up. He was alright; he was feeling his gut wrench as he and fellow students watched the towers burn. Suddenly he wrote, "OMG! It fell, it fell!" And I didn't know what he was talking about, until he explained, "It went down; the whole damned tower went down. Oh, God, oh God."

The day that travel was allowed again, Dennis and I got on a plane and flew to New York; I had to see him, and friends in the city who had lost loved ones. If I didn't get on a plane, I could never suggest that anyone else ever do so again. I was terrified getting on that plane. It turned out to be Dennis and I, a few scattered people, and about ten pilots heading up to start commercial travel again. I'll never forget flying by the place where the towers had been--and the ground was still smoldering. 

I'd considered myself a student of history, and I had thought I'd known something about terrorism; my mom and her family left Dublin because they were "mixed" and the "troubles" continued. But I had never understood the kind of hatred that could make anyone massacre so many people so blindly. I'd been to Egypt, I had friends who were Muslim. And I had to make myself realize that while their was a culture of hatred--quite possibly the result of poverty and misery as so much hatred was--was not the culture of everyone. 

Today, I know that we often wonder what our men and women in the service are accomplishing because it's true that you can't kill and ideal. But I was with a young serviceman the other day who told me, "You don't get to see the good very often on TV. I was there when we opened a new school, and the parents and the children were grateful and wonderful. Building and giving, yes, we can make a change."

So what do we do in our world today? We defend ourselves. We learn how to do that through intelligence. We suffer, because we can't stop everything. We keep trying to be the country we began to be after the Civil War, seeing all people as equals. It's so easy to hate. And I hate fanatics of any kind who would do harm to others; I pray that I never do so blindly, and I always judge a person for the person they are. And because I really have no control, I pray for our men and women in the service, and I pray for all who are caught in the violence brought upon them by others. Most of all, I pray that we stop being such a party-determined society, and that our law makers can stop following party lines, and work hard to defend and strengthen out country, and show others, through our united front and efforts to benefit all mankind, that we should be emulated, and not alienated, assaulted, and attacked.

From Joshilyn Jackson:

I went downstairs to get coffee and I turned on a little television I had on the kitchen counter. There was the first tower, with the plane going into it.

I immediately called my friend Lydia Netzer and said, Turn on your television, because I didn’t want to be watching alone. They showed it over and over.  It seemed crazy and impossible. We began coming up with explanations for it, back and forth, two fiction writers constructing implausible scenarios, looking for a way it could have happened. We were like children telling each other fairy tales ---- pilots having strokes and electrical instruments going haywire, anything to keep ourselves from understanding.

The second plane came. We saw it happen.

Then we knew. There wasn’t any way to not know. This is on purpose, we said back and forth to each other, but only because there was no other explanation left. We had tried so hard to make it be Fate---God---Accident---Error, anything at all. Anything except a deliberate, human choice.

From Brunonia Barry:

I worked at the World Trade Center for several years in the mid-seventies, soon after it opened. I was in the accounting department of Toyoda America, Inc. on the fiftieth floor of the North Tower. It was one of my first jobs out of college, and I loved the whole experience. But most of all, I loved the WTC. It was like a small community. I was there when Phillippe Petit walked the tightrope between the towers.

Windows on the World had not yet opened, and, for a short while, we were allowed to take our lunches up there and enjoy the view from the top floor. A small group of us representing many different companies lunched there most days, until the construction crews put an end to our visits. After that, we all continued to meet for lunch at the restaurant on the 44^th floor.

I was our company’s fire marshall, and used to lead the employees in monthly evacuation drills, things they sometimes participated in and sometimes refused to take seriously. Thankfully, my friends at Toyoda had relocated their company offices a few years before the towers came down, but there were others I knew there who remained, friends who were lost.

Ten years ago on September 11^th, I was in the hospital undergoing emergency surgery. I remember the television and everyone huddled around staring. I remember hoping that I was hallucinating from the medication, and then realizing that it was not a dream. In the ten years that have passed, I have not visited the site. It’s still difficult for me to think about, as it is for many of us.