Three Truths and a Lie

How well do you know me? Can you pick the lie out of the truths? Maybe the question should be, how well do I know myself? Can I tell the truths from the lies anymore? It all starts to run together, doesn't it?

Anyway, here goes:

1) I know which one of these, variorum or variorium, is a real word, but I had to ask a lot of people to find out; 2) I love alternative rock music, even though I don't really know what it is an alternative to; 3) One of my students told me she died her poodle's fur pink with Kool-Aid, thus making a punk poodle (she swears she stopped short of clipping it a mohawk); 4) Oysters on the half-shell make me swoon, or at least that's what my husband likes to think.

"You're completely alliterate."

I'm in a marathon of editing one of the final proofs of If Mama Don't Laugh, It Ain't Funny. This morning, I sat at one end of the kitchen table and my husband sat at the other. We both, with red pens in hand, marked up copies of the proof.



He broke my deep concentration with a low chuckle. I looked up to see if he needed my attention or wanted clarification on something. He stared at the pages, however, feverishly (a little too feverishly for my personal comfort), working his pen across the page.



Minutes passed. Again, my helpmate laughed out loud. This time I looked up to see him shaking his head back and forth. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I decided that for the sake of our marriage we may need to conduct these sessions in individual privacy. But for the time, I said nothing and continued with my work.



Suddenly, he belted out guffaws that brought the children running to see what was so funny. Knowing I had given him strict instructions to carefully search the manuscript for typos, misspellings, and other errors, and not to read the stories, I became very self-conscious. I bore my eyes into him until he raised his head to return my glare.



"What?" he asked.



"What are you laughing at?"



"Nothing. It's just that you're completely illiterate," he replied.



"Well, thanks a lot," I huffed, slamming shut my copy of If Mama Don't Laugh. "If that's what you really think, you can stop right there!"



Baffled at my intense irritation, he stammered and muttered a few unintelligible syllables. Then his eyes lit up with amusement (which, quite naturally, miffed me more). "No, no, no. I said alliterate, as in alliteration. You know. Lucy laughs long. Mama makes muffins. You have a knack for creative alliteration. It makes your stories so interesting."



Okay. Give me a compliment and all is forgiven. I didn't even fuss at him for indulging himself in reading the manuscript while he edited. I'll save that for later, when I need him to butter me up again.

Insomnia

This week I go back to the real world - my real job as a 2nd grade teacher. Yet, I'm still in the throes of book publishing here in my fantasy wish-I-could-do-this-full-time life. It's causing me so much overflow angst that my oldest son had to have his appendix removed last Saturday.

On top of that, I have insomnia. I lay awake mentally reviewing my book contract, and all of its intricacies, for If Mama Don't Laugh, It Ain't Funny. I pre-worry that I will choke in interviews or that I will forget my best friends' names when they ask me to personalize copies of my book . I think about my classroom and my new students and whether or not I can prepare in time for the first day of school. I hope that I won't forget to show up for the first day of school like I did in a dream back when I could sleep.

From there I ruminate on grease fires in the kitchen, and escape routes from my house, and how many of my sleeping children I can carry out a window at one time. I fear I've lost the nail clippers, again, and that my toenails will grow long and gnarly and I'll end up in the Guines Book of World Records for an embarassing hygiene problem. I rehearse my Parents' Night speech. I think about my checking account. I chew on ideas for my newspaper column that I will never remember in the morning.

Driven mad by my own musings, seeking a way to stop the thoughts from coursing through my brain at bullet train speeds, hoping to find relief, I decide to pray. I start out well enough, asking for help with my anxiety, requesting assistance with achieving balance in my life, pleading to be soon lost in sleep. Thanksgiving for a thousand enumerated things follows: my children, my husband, my house, my car, my dogs, my cat, the fish, the bird, flowers, rain, clouds, pillows, porch swings, parakeets, friends, my job, creativity, corkscrews, doormats, sofas, shag carpet, the color green, dice, my health, frozen pizza, ice cream, elevators, electricity, mice . . .

Before I know it, my mind wanders and I'm on a tangent, wondering if I left the rice open, or a door unlocked, or forgot to turn on the dishwasher, or if someone will try to break into my auto to get the dollar bill I may have left on the front passenger seat, or did I put the dollar in the pocket of my pants which are now in the washing machine, or did I put washing powder in with the clothes, or what if I trip on my husband's shoe on the way to the bathroom and fall and break my ankle in the middle of the night, or if I set the alarm.

But, oh yes, praying. God bless the insomniac. Amen.

What will the children want to be for Halloween? I bet there are no hair appointments available at the salon next week. I should check my eyebrows in the morning . . .

A Book and its Cover

I never knew how difficult and complicated getting a book published could be. I thought I would land a publisher and wha-la have If Mama Don't Laugh, It Ain't Funny out in print. But there's so much more to it. Like getting a decent book cover, for example.

The other day I met with the cover artist, Stan Mullins (http://www.stanmullins.com/), to wrap up the details of the cover art. As vanity would have it, I'm on the cover of my own book. So we had to discuss things like facial expressions, clothing selections, hand gestures, and very important technicalities like making sure he rendered me without any wrinkles - artistic license, you know.

Anyway, while we hashed things out, periodically he would leave and come back with an example of other work to help me understand the process and visualize the final product. In his absences I found my eyes wandering around his studio, the walls of which featured huge oil-painted canvases. One particular theme struck me as nearly universal - women's breasts.

There were probably paintings of lots of other things, but since I have a unique, but unintentional, habit of finding reasons to feel uncomfortable, all I saw were breasts. So when he eventually got around to asking me about that particular aspect of my persona on paper, embarrassingly, all the blood rushed to my face. I have no idea what he thought I was thinking, but he remained professional and plugged along at the task.

"Do you want them to be full, large, petite, what?"

Inadvertently my gaze shifted to the walls, sifting through the options like thumbing through a catalogue in a plastic surgeon's office, and I found myself thinking, "Well, hers are nice. Or those over there could be good."

In the end, I stupidly stammered, "No artistic license. As is." Flat as the paper they're on.

What Really Irks Me

Okay, so I'm pushing my buggy through Wal-mart, aggravated that everybody in my house ate all the food from my last grocery run, two (possibly three) weeks ago. They go through it like I plan to go shopping every week. They're insatiable locusts. If it were up to me, every person would have his own IV hooked onto a little stand with wheels.


But it's not up to me, so there I was in Wal-mart, pushing my cart, minding my own business, except for stopping to talk with Charlotte about her eyebrows, waving to my daughter's old pre-K teacher, explaining to someone how to generate a master shopping list from his computer, and saying, "Yes, I know my cart is overfull. I haven't been here in a while." (And my husband always wonders why it takes me so long.)


I could have finished much sooner, except he called me four separate times on my cell. Once to remind me to get the AA batteries, once to tell me never mind about the 2" paintbrush, once to try to sell me on checking out the Manager's Specials aisle, and once to engage me in a half public conversation about our son's little problem.


But what you want to know is the thing that really, really, really, really irks me.


What gets me riled, burns me up, sets me off, boils my blood, is seeing shelves packed to the hilt with school supplies, in JULY! JULY! It's diabolical. Evil. Completely unacceptable to remind us of the inevitable before we're good and ready to consider it again.


My gosh, at least wait until my ears quit ringing from the fireworks.

Grits Cookies

Cooking is not my forte. My kids call my kitchen "Mama's Smokin' Restaurant." And although a real, actual fire (not one I will admit to, anyway) has ever broken out, I have on many occasions stood over the kitchen sink with a butter knife scraping the surface of blackened toast. My husband blames it on ADD (Aimlessly Dawdling Disorder), so he cooks a good deal. Just goes to show how well things work out, in the end.

Nevertheless, I sometimes, against the better judgement of others, make up my mind to whip up an amazing culinary delight. It always excites my ever optimistic children to see what I will desecrate next. Yesterday, it was the all-American chocolate chip cookie; because of course I can make a good thing better.

I decided I could elevate the chocolate chip cookie to a whole new level by giving it a southern twist - grits. In my mind, where everything is as blissful as a Christmas Carol, the fresh baked cookies steamed with the aroma of homemade oatmeal desserts, minus the befoulment by raisins. Completely sucked into my self-delusional fantasy, I stood in the grocery aisle faced with a momentous decision - exactly what type of grits should I use?

Instant or regular? Whole or cracked? White or yellow? Impulsively, I bought every kind displayed. The cashier eyeballed me with a sideways glance, but seeing the feverish focus in my face, made a wise choice not to comment.

At home, whipping up my secret recipe sure to win me the blue ribbon at the state fair, I had a new dilemma. In what form should I add the grits? Cooked or dry? Runny and hot or cold and clumped? I can't tell you exactly what I did, mostly because it was sort of a combo of all of the above and I didn't write it down.

Finally, I pulled a batch from the oven, scraped the black edges off and fed them to my four lab rats, who, oddly enough, feigned joy at receiving my gift. Standing back so as not to pressure the critics, I watched them chew. And chew. And chew. And chew.

At last, the six year old's lips parted. I waited with bated breath. She bent her head into her palm held close to her mouth. Oh no, I thought and grabbed the trashcan. But then she lifted her head, grinned, and held out her hand. "They're a little bit crunchy, Mama," she said, handing me her front tooth.

Back to the mixing bowl.

Germ Repellent

I think babies come with germ repellent built in, like those shirts in mail order catalogues that repel mosquitoes. It's part of the birth package. How else can we explain how they can go around putting everything in their mouths, from rancid Cheerios that rolled under the refrigerator in 1999 to unsanitized shopping cart handles that have been in play for the better part of the last five years. If I put my mouth on the shopping cart handle three things would happen: 1) I would get thrown out of the grocery store, 2) I would contract a horrible disease like hepatitis or tuberculosis, and 3) The store manager would immediately sanitize the cart handle.

My daughter, during the potty training years, loved public restrooms; still does. At age 2, nothing said, make my mother convulse, quite like running her fingers along the edge of the porcelain toilet bowl or getting on the floor on all fours to peer under stall doors. Running with a cascaded strip of toilet paper, looping out of the trashcan, made her giggle like a banshee, while I, on the other hand, sounded the alarm: Eewww, stop that. That's gross. Put it back in there. Wash your hands, again; to which more elation erupts.

Thankfully (or maybe not), like those mosquito repellent shirts, the germ shield, after so many baths, washes off. My daughter, now six, and a complete success of my masterful conditioning through exaggerated repulsion and squeals of disgust, is finally getting it that public restrooms are no place for learning braille.