30 Mennonites walk into a Cracker Barrel....

May 25, 2010
Abingdon, VA

Serious. I just saw it happen. They got off a small tour bus and paraded in for their dinner. It was a sea of deep blue dresses, black stockings & black hiking boots. The men all looked like clean versions of ZZ Top - without the sunglasses & guitars. It made me stop and think about all the things I do not know. Like: Mennonites go on bus trips.

I wanted to ask them about that. Where were they going? Where had they been? But they simply surrounded me during their meal, heads down and mouths shut. So I did the same. I left before I had the chance to see what drew their attention in the Cracker Barrel Country Store. The Weasel Ball? The Goo-Goo Pies? I'm sure the fellas would've been pretty hot for the John Deere baseball hats. Mesh has to be cooler than wool felt. Maybe they'd have gone for the VA Tech hats, though. And the giant Whoopie Cushion would've been fun for the bus ride back to...wherever.

Mennonitemaiden.com tells me that I can buy a deep blue dress for $55. The little cotton prayer cap is $9.99. So are the mens' suspenders. Think I'll skip this opportunity - I'd need to hem the dress up too high and forgo the stockings. I didn't inherit my dad's excellent legs just to hide them like that. I was happy to see that all online purchases are via a secure website. Again, something I've never thought about: Mennonites with credit cards.

And there is a fly in my hotel room. Seems pretty creepy to me - the window is welded shut so where did the fly come from? How long has it been here? I bet he's been in here for a while - he's flying in low, slow circles. Still, he's spry enough that I can't catch up with him and smack him with the Holiday Inn Express Guest Directory. Or maybe I just ate too much at Cracker Barrel....


(migrated from Facebook)

Man vs Machine

Grocery stores are too smart nowadays.  They track what you purchase and then spit out coupons that are somewhat relevant to what was in your cart.  It's not like I need to be reminded that I spend too much money spoiling one cat with single-servings of stinky food or have a kid with bad eyes that require gallons of contact lens solution.  It's not like I need a reason to return to the grocery store; I have teenage boys.

Let me preface my story by saying that the feeding machine that is my youngest son is leaving for 3 days of football camp tomorrow morning.  His pending absence removed the usual amount of food required to stave off his unsatisfiable appetite (and those of his buddies) from my grocery list.  Don't get me wrong.  I love this kid and I love his friends but the gross tonnage of at least 3 high school football players in and out of my pantry does not always jive well with my budget.  I usually manage to hold them back with a few packages of what they call 'ghetto cookies' - the store brand with the plain packaging, serving up about 100 cookies in each plastic slab for $1.99.

Even without an immediate need to stock the training table, my grocery bill was going to take a hit.  It's Father's Day weekend.  My darling husband put in an order for Jerk Steak with Fried Plantains and Collards.  Not too pricey but the plantains require a trip to the Fancy grocery store.  And, since I'm going there, I may as well pick up some nice steaks and some over-the-top ready-made dessert.  I figured I could get the rest of my shopping done at the Not So Fancy grocery store.  Yes, that would be the store that goes overboard with it's techno-friendship/mind-reading schemes.

You also need to know that it's hot today. It was hot yesterday and it's going to be hotter tomorrow.  My husband is slaving away in the back yard, repairing and repainting the shutters from the house.  I checked on him in between stores - he was sweaty and filthy and not enjoying himself.  So I figured I'd be a sweetheart and made a mental note to pick up some beer for him, something nicer than the long-neck Buds he usually inhales on a hot day. 

While I was in the Not So Fancy store, it also occurred to me that we didn't have any wine in the house.  I grabbed a bottle of Australian Shiraz.  The next aisle offered up a 12-pack of Blue Moon, a Belgian white beer that a dear friend introduced to my husband and which, I knew, he would look upon as a 'treat'.  Score one for the wife.  Fairly close to the Blue Moon was a stack of Mike's Hard Lemonade.  I pictured myself gently swaying in my hammock, ice-packed glass of Mike's sweating on the grass beside me.  I wedged a 6-pack into my cart beside the beer.

On my way through the store I remembered that the kids had gone through all the soda so I plunked a couple cases of 'ghetto' soda under my basket .  The tonic water at the end of the soda aisle caught my eye, so I picked up a six-pack of pony bottles, thinking that a gin and tonic or a vodka tonic might be refreshing before dinner, what with our current heat wave.  Looking high and low for Bitter Lemon (do they even make that anymore?), I landed upon a funky-looking bottle with an unnatural blue liquid inside - a mixer for Blue Raspberry Martinis.  Now, it my be that my current photography fetish has awoken a sleeping eye for form and color...the bottle itself is square and weaves left-right-left, from its base to its neck.  The color is, I guess, supposed to make me think of the tropics but, to my immature eye, it looks like the exact blue of the bottom of a Bomb Pop.  That has to be a great combination - a Bomb Pop Martini.  I've got vodka at home, so I added the martini mixer to my cart.

And then I remembered that I needed a rubber chicken.  I know a great kid - not a kid, a young lady - who just had her wisdom teeth removed and, for a giggle, I bought her this disgusting rubber chicken.  It's smaller than a clown's prop rubber chicken but has the added feature of laying an egg when you squeeze its stomach.  And not just any egg but a transparent, fluid-filled bulge of an egg that emerges from between these tiny rubber chicken legs.  Squeeze really hard and a firm, yellow plastic yolk will swim downward, too.  I found out on Friday that the daughter of a woman I work with just had her wisdom teeth out so I figured I'd buy her one of these stupid rubber chickens, as well.  I swung off to the toy aisle, grabbed one, gave it a squeeze as a quick quality assurance test, and headed to the check out lines.

The woman who got in line behind must have chosen my lane because of the relatively few items that I was purchasing.  The checker kid scanned everything silently and sent it down the conveyor belt where I waited to pack it back into the cart.  Here came the beer, the wine, the blue martini mix, the 5% malt-beverage lemonade, the tonic water...a parade of booze and mixers for the Schizophrenic Alcoholics Picnic.  The checker didn't say a word and neither did I.  The woman in line behind me eyed everything silently, gauging how much space each of my scanned items was freeing up from her side of the checkout stand.  Generously, she did point out that this week's People magazine was not her's - I would've been hearbroken to leave that shirtless Zac Efron cover behind, so I thanked her for that.

And then the checker picked up the rubber chicken.  He eyed it, untangled the tag from between the fowl's legs, and scanned.  He turned to his left and placed it gently amongst the booze that I hadn't yet bagged or loaded into the cart.  Our eyes met and then he burst out laughing.  My response?  "Yeah, I'm a really fun person."  Thankfully, he just kept laughing. 

I slid my debit card through the 'we are taking all your money now' machine and waited for my receipt to print.  At the same time, the checker waited for the coupon machine to spew forth whatever bargains it had calculated, based on my current purchase pattern.  Nothing happened.  Nothing came out of the printer.  That was a first - I typically get 6 or 7 different coupons.  Today, I got nothing.  I stunned that machine into silence.  Looking back on it, you'd think that a smart marketer would have programmed an aspirin coupon or a Pepto Bismol coupon into the brains that reads your food, if only for a giggle.  I would have laughed.

Finalist for Not The Mother of the Year Contest

My 15 year-old slammed his finger in my car door yesterday - just the very tip of his middle finger.  He didn't yell or curse (he says he did; I didn't hear it), just walked around the car flapping his hand a bit.  It was one of those tough slams, the kind where the car door closes all the way and won't give back your finger until you open the door properly so his response was, in my opinion, rather subdued.  The fingertip emerged a violent red color, so much the better to highlight the insta-black nail.  My response was to have him dunk it in a cup of ice water but the pain prevented him from keeping it there.  I dug deep for nursing skills, for something I'd learned in Girl Scouts, and came up empty, repeating, "How is it now?" over our 1/2 hour ride home.  We made it home and his finger didn't fall off in my car so I dosed him with Tylenol and promptly forgot about it.  Continued pain and swelling warranted a trip to the doctor this afternoon; an x-ray revealed a cracked distal phalanx.  Doc strapped it into a splint, remarked that he could have drilled into the nail and relieved some of the pressure if I'd brought him in yesterday, and directed us to return in 3 weeks.  Wow, nice job there, Mom - you really keep your son's well-being at the forefront of your world...

Actually, I was worried during our ride home.  Not so much for his finger, after all, we're talking about a strapping 6' tall, 215lb rising-Sophomore defensive lineman.  He's always got a cut or a scrape, or has picked a scab off some body part, returning said body part to something close to the original injury.  How much hovercraft mothering does he need?  What really worried me was his lack of obvious pain response and the way his emotions hunkered down somewhere inside him.  What happened to the kid who would howl when he skinned a knee?  How did this stoic, mature person arrive in my life?  He's got size 12 feet, for God's sake, but when did he grow size 12 emotions? 

The replacement of my little guy's typical response with my now-giant guy's stiff upper lip was hard to watch - especially since the one who lives here now has still got the little guy's round cheeks and rapid-fire grin.  I couldn't help myself; I told him that it would be okay for him to cry.  He gave me a 'what are you, crazy?' look out of the corner of his eye.  Then I told him that he could cry at home and I would sing to him, like I did when he was small.  He gave me a 'don't make me throw up' look - full frontal disdain here.  So, I swallowed my hurt and dished up the medicine that he prescribed for himself.  I left him alone.

Hearing the result of his x-ray today, I laughed.  Really laughed.  Not a mean laugh at him but more a pathetic laugh at myself for, once again, eliminating myself from the "Mother of the Year" contest.  My response to his injury will now live in family lore.  "Remember when I broke my finger and you ignored it for a day?" will be repeated over and over again, proof of my seemingly careless parenting skills.  I know this for a fact.  When I told his uncle what the kid had done and how I'd responded, my darling brother reminded me of my broken finger, 37 years ago.  My injury is legendary for my own mother's response, "If you can eat pizza, your finger's not broken."  I'm sure she felt awful after my midnight x-ray proved otherwise.  And so the uncanny cyclical nature of parenting rides again...from mom to me to Tom...to infinity and beyond.

Drama in Real Life....

I bless the Reader’s Digest that recently arrived in mailbox – thanks for the subscription, Dad – for the twisted memories I found tucked inside its perfectly-sized-for-the-bathroom pages. Everyone of us, young or old, has at least one good Reader’s Digest memory, one part of that teeny periodical that attached itself to your brain and has stuck there for all these years. Jim and I giggled over our shared memory of the “I Am Joe’s (insert gross body part here)” articles but we both agree that the “Drama in Real Life” articles beat everything else in the book.

The current edition did not disappoint. Opening the magazine to its table of contents, I spotted those magical words, the enticing, oh-my-God-how-awful type of title that fascinated me decades ago: “Hit By a Train.” I burst out laughing.

Now, I probably shouldn’t have laughed that hard. The poor woman was, after all, “Hit By a Train” and now holds her toothbrush with a hook. The problem is, that title slammed into my brain as though I, too, had been “Hit By a Train.” My mind fell through a wormhole, straight back to my grandmother’s tiny bathroom with its stack of worn Reader’s Digests piled on the radiator. Nothing drew my attention more – not the dusty smelling Emeraude perfume powder puff nor the folding glass shower doors that jammed once and trapped me in the tub – than that stack of Reader’s Digests. I would head straight for the best one, the one at the bottom of the pile that, warm from its proximity to the radiator, would toast my legs while I sat reading, and page through it until I hit the Drama in Real Life section. I’d devour the illustrations, almost cartoons, of a particularly graphic part of the story – the limp body sinking under the water, the injured Boy Scout concocting a splint of sticks – and then go back to the beginning and read about Real Human Tragedy. This, by the way, was always the more accurate heading. “Drama in Real Life” could describe a wife-swapping party at your next door neighbor’s house that is inadvertently busted by cops acting on a tip that the school board president who lives there is abusing shelter dogs in his basement – but Reader’s Digest is a wholesome magazine whose only vaguely smutty stuff is the incontinence pad ads at the back of the book, so the benign “Drama” misnomer had to suffice.

So I’d sit there until my legs went numb, mesmerized by stories with titles that always lacked their grammatical direct object but never failed to draw me in. “Mauled by a Bear”, “Fell from the Chair Lift”, “Unable to Breathe” were typical but the really special stories, the ones you knew included a climb out of the pit of hell, were the ones with the single-word title like “Trapped”, “Mayday”, or “Fire”. These stories amazed me not because they were particularly graphic but because the tragedy was visited on a regular Joe who just wanted a day on the slopes or a woman who skidded off the road on the way home from the grocery store. They weren’t like the over-the-top tabloid tragedies where the victim did something so stupid they practically asked for the outcome. “Drama in Real Life” stories could happen to you, they could happen to me. I could be in Reader’s Digest for “Falling Down the Stairs” or encountering a “Rabid Dog.” Hell, I used to sit there so long it’s a wonder I wasn’t immortalized in “Sucked into the Toilet.”

There really isn’t a point to all this rambling unless I start talking about how the tiniest thing can present you with a memory-gift from the past. I haven’t smelled my grandmother for almost a decade now but I remembered her Emeraude as soon as I was “Hit By a Train.” I could compare the sensationalism of a gentler generation (were we?) to the in-your-face Iraqi beheading videos that my kids can easily find on the internet. I could wish that they’d be empathetic to a tragedy that befell some ordinary schmuck who just wanted to go fishing. But they’d probably tell me that they saw a better one on YouTube and I don’t want to know that. I don’t need my kids telling me that they saw a video of “I Am Joe’s Left Nut”… but I bet there’s one available.

(migrated from Facebook note....)

The Reason for Being

I can't imagine a better reason for starting a blog than to simply have a dedicated space to spew my thoughts and opinions.  It doesn't matter if followers happen....it's just a spot for me to slap out my random, sometimes touching but oftentimes twisted, viewpoints.  I don't tweet, I don't send dozens of text messages, I don't post everything that I'm thinking or doing to my Facebook page, I'm not taking on an heroic challenge....but I do think that I'd enjoy a spot to scribble upon.  So, without a defined goal, here I am.