Dancing the Body Electric

No Telling

I‘ll admit it, I have an electrical problem. I’m not talking about my house, because it’s so brand new everything is probably under some warranty or other. I’m talking about me.

I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to small electrical and battery operated nuisances. There’s not a watch made that I can’t stop just by wearing it. I even wore a series of them around my neck on a chain – charming little pendant watches – thinking it was the direct contact with me that was the problem.

Nope. About once a month I’d be at the jewelry shop getting a battery replaced or apologizing while my favorite repairman scratched his head in disbelief. As a second-generation watch-guy, he’d seen cases like mine before. Chip died not long ago, and I quit wearing watches altogether.

Light bulbs. Now, they’re a real issue. I can blow a light bulb dark faster than anyone. Those can be a bit pricey to replace, so I tend to leave them be and live with a few lamps here and there. Climbing up and down the ladder that much is a worrisome venture anyway.

As a public school teacher I had an unnerving habit of blowing those little overhead projector bulbs regularly. Students in my classes took this phenomenon for granted after a while and one of the sweet backrow-boys would always scuttle off to the office to bring back more bulbs. Sometimes they came back emptyhanded.

I was rationed. My reputation was so tarnished that none of the other schoolmarms would loan me the use of their projectors, not even in a pinch. We were close friends who would and did share our last dimes and many times our county-line box-wine. Not their overhead projectors, though. They knew better.

There are other incidents. My favorite was the time both Em and I were writing furious poems at the dining room table and the chandelier bulbs began going out one by one. And the other time when we argued loudly over something teenagery and knocked out cable TV for three days. I suspect she’s got a few electrical issues as well.

Oh, and the neighborhood street lights. That’s okay. I don’t walk the subdivision loop anymore and no one on the Homeowners’ Association board has fingered me as the culprit. Let’s just keep that one between us.

The point of all this is that I think it’s getting worse. Recently I’ve found myself stuck in elevators that don’t seem to stick for anyone else. Twice last month and once again already this month. The first one was a particularly good stick, one warranting pushing that button and asking the campus police for a little assistance. The other two I’ll call “stalls.” The elevator hesitated, then decided to deposit me on a floor I didn’t choose all the while refusing to open the door.

The other day, I rode that badboy up and down half a dozen times before anyone could get the thing to release me.

I‘ve almost made friends with the problem, really. It’s a lot like the watch-and-light-bulb thing. If I half expect the elevator to malfunction, then there’s no reason panic. Eventually, the door will open. As long as it deposits me and my trick knee on the first floor, I’m golden.

I figure if it happens again I’m going to outfit that elevator with a comfortable chair. I’d carry a flashlight for emergencies, but that’s just asking for trouble and darkness. Maybe I’ll stow a box of kitchen matches and a fat candle under the cushion, just in case.

Why We Should Name the Storm

No Telling

Oldest known photograph of a tornado – August 28, 1884. South Dakota.

Yes, it’s hurricane season. I’ve been watching reports lately about that feisty Jimena, the one who threatens to ugly-up the Baja peninsula. Odd are she’ll wrap herself up once inland and head right straight through Arkansas. They always do, and even though these hurricanes are watered down by the time they visit us, there’s usually plenty of rain and a few fiery storms to make things interesting. We’ll have an errant tornado or three.

The tornadoes we’re stomped with have no names, at least nothing as swanky as “Jimena.” It must be because hurricanes are measured by what devilry they may bring, while tornadoes are only measured afterwards. All storms have numbers – category 4, F-3, that sort of thing – but only hurricanes have names.

So why can’t we name our tornadoes? I think we need a frame of historical reference at the very least. Here’s an example:

“That twister back in ’93 was a demon. ‘Member it?”

“That one that took Mr. Hightower’s fence and made a necklace of it over to the water tower?”

“Naw, I’m talkin’ about the one in the fall, the one that sliced the Chevron station in half. Found that ‘Pay Inside’ sign – remember? -stuck in the front glass of daddy’s Ford. You was there.”

“Damn. I thought it was that one closer to Christmas when we found all them dead fish from the waterspout. Them filleted ones.”

“Naw, now, that was the Chevron twister. Picked up the whole stockpond and shook it like a hound.”

“Ohhh, yeah. You’re right. I was there.”

You see my point. Our disasters need naming just like anyone else’s. Probably even more so, because we can’t rally ’round a good storm story if everyone’s confused.

I realize the National Weather Service (NOAA) has a lot on its plate just now, what with all the hurricane naming and warnings and projected paths and such. I hate to give them more work than they can comfortably handle. They’re performing a vital service and I’m sure many of their employees are working long days.

So here’s my proposal, NOAA: You name the tornadoes whenever you feel it’s warranted, and I’ll do the gruntwork necessary to supply the names. Gratis. In fact, I’ll start out with a few right now. Feel free to use them as you see fit and let me know if you need any more. I found these in the local phone book and there are scads more where these came from.

Tornado Names: Female

Anaverle, Beulah, Cozetta, Dymple, Elva, Flodine, Georgia, Halogene, Iva, Jo Nell, Kitty, Lurleen, Mavis, Nevetta, Otha, Pearlene, Queenie, Rowleena, Sissy, Twanette, Una, Vernice, Wanda, and Zelma.

Tornado names: Male

Ace, Buford, Clyde, Dax, Elmore, Finis, Garrett, Harvenious, Israel, Junior, Kimbro, Lester, Millard, Noble, O’Dell, Percy, Rusty, Skeeter, Twig, Ulis, Vester, Windle, and Zeke.

I left a few letters out, mainly because I’m not partial to names beginning with Q, X or Y. Makes no difference. What’s important is that we give each tornado a distinct identity. Simply calling a twister an “F-2” is hardly personal, and believe me, nothing is more personal than finding your car twisted around the uprights at the local ballfield.

Besides, using local names gives the storm a regional flavor. Retelling the storm would be much easier, and dire warnings more effective.

“Get the kids in the cellar, honey! This’n makes Skeeter look like a soft breeze!”

Exactly.

Snake Charming with a Big Shovel

No Telling

It’s entirely too early on a Sunday morning for this kind of excitement. I’ll need to huddle in my office and shake this off with a few more cups of coffee.

The weenie-dog doesn’t understand Weekend Time. Neither does The Perfect Grandson, but only one of them has to go outside on a leash in public at odd hours. I have a love/hate relationship with Bobo. His real name is Boner, and that explains a lot. Thankfully The Perfect Grandson is still practicing the language and has made hollering at the dog a little more acceptable. He’s Bobo now (pronounced Baaahhh-bow) and thank God for that.

Regardless, Bobo had to go outside before my second cup of Sunday coffee. I wear a lot of hats, but Em wears the one that says, “take the damn dog out.” Not my job. Besides, she looks cute all the time and I need a little spackling before I go out in the street.

I’m a Southern woman of a certain age. That carries a lot of lipstick-baggage.

So out they go and BAM, they’re back inside. Em’s hyperventilating and doing an odd tiptoe dance, Bahbow strains at his leash and throws his little black body repeatedly against the front door. Em finds enough breath to tell me there’s a baby SNAKE by the MAILBOX. She thought it was a big WORM, but then it STUCK it’s SNAKEY tongue OUT.

It was the closest thing to rap music that’s ever happened here at my house, what with the breathless emphasis and the hopping around and the thump, thump, thump of the weenie-dog slinging himself rhythmically at the door.

How silly, I thought, we live in a walled subdivision with an iron-clad set of Homeowner’s Association Rules and Regs. Snakes aren’t in the bylaws.

I snatched up The Perfect Grandson and we – all four of us – went out to the mailbox. Sure enough, there was a little brown snake half in the grass, half on the driveway. Both halves together were probably all of six inches long. It stood it’s ground and we kept our distance.

I know there are some snake-huggers out there who might take offense at what comes next, but babies and weenie-dogs and possibly-poisonous reptiles don’t mix. The snake had to go. Em high-stepped back inside dragging a frothing Bobo on a leash while I held The Perfect Grandson high and eyeballed the snake to make sure it made no fast moves houseward. The worst kind of snake is the one you can’t find. I have experience.

“SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!” said the boy, pointing down.

“You got it, buddy. That,” I said, “is a snake.”

Em came flying out of the front door, having traded Bobo for a really big garden shovel. I won’t give the gory details play-by-play, but you can assume Em’s mama-bear instincts kicked in and settled the standoff. Several times. Don’t worry, I whisked The Perfect Grandson away before he could witness the carnage.

The issue now is snake identification. Since it was a baby, there’s always the possibility of more. We need to know what we’re up against. According to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, it was either a deadly-venomous copperhead, or something harmless like a king snake. This isn’t an easy ID because, 1) the snake was young and those look different from the adults, and 2) it’s not easy to ID a snake that’s in approximately seven pieces.

Em got a little shovel-happy. I don’t blame her. If it’s any consolation, snake-huggers, she shouted something like oh God, I’m killing someone else’s baby just before the shovel hit concrete. On some level, she’s remorseful.

The distinction, though, between poisonous-killer and harmless snail-eater is an important one. We’ve got more research ahead of us. I’ll need another cup of coffee and an hour of sensibility before I can say for sure.

Think I’ll put on a little lipstick and look over those bylaws again.

Achoo, Y’all

No Telling

Well, that didn’t take long. Let’s see…The Perfect Grandson began preschool last Thursday. Here it is the following Tuesday and every last person in this house is sniffling, coughing, sick. I’m not concerned that this is the swine/H1N1 flu business that seems to be everywhere but here, it’s just a cold or a collective allergy or something irritating that has all of us in the No Telling household grabbing tissues and drinking orange juice.

The Perfect Grandson prefers to wipe boogies all over his face in a lightning-fast one-two motion with the back of his little fist. Em says she’ll be glad when he gets older and isn’t so haphazard with his hygiene and learns to use a tissue.

I’m not telling her. You tell her.

The news is fraught with dire predictions about this flu. As someone who works in a sea of devil-may-care college students, this is the kind of train I’d like to see coming down the track before it hits me. College kids stay out too late, eat crappy food, and live too close to each other. Anything that comes on campus sweeps across it like the Black Plague. Just so you know, I’m unapologetic about wearing gloves during Pink-Eye Season and think nothing of running off students before they have a chance to touch a doorknob. Shoo! I say. And take your pink-eye with you to the health center.

My sister is an elementary school teacher in Birmingham, Alabama, and she told me tonight that just about everyone has that H1N1 business right now. She says they’re not closing down the schools because it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. I’ll bet they change their minds when they try finding substitute teachers in another week or so. Good luck with that, Birmingham.

As I am a Woman of a Certain Age it’s likely I was exposed to that last bout back in the 70s, which may very well provide some bullet-proofing. We’ll see. In the meantime I’m headed to Walgreens for a gallon jug of hand sanitizer and some Lysol spray, because these college kids love to kick you when you’re down.

I can’t do much about The Perfect Grandson’s germs, though. Especially since he wears them everywhere and all over. When the little guy feels poorly he wants extra hugs and kisses – and he’ll get them, too. He already has, that’s why we’re in this condition.

No kissing on the face, though. At least not until he’s old enough to use his shirttail instead.

Finders Keepers

No Telling

I never visited the Palace Theater in Greenwood, Arkansas. This lobby card was in a pile of others like it underneath a dusty Chatty Cathy doll with a wonky right eye.

The Girls take a trip at the end of the spring semester each year to spend money at the outlet malls in Branson, Missouri. There are only two of us interested in roadside yard sales, rusty flea markets, and the like, so stopping at the little gas-station-turned-junk-shop in Marshall had to be a quick trip. Besides, everyone needed a potty break.

I bought the whole stack of lobby cards from the old theater, finished the trip, put them in a drawer, and forgot.

I don’t know why I started digging around tonight, but there in my Hideous Gift Scarves Drawer was the pile. The woman who sold it to me for five dollars felt guilty because they were so dusty and had packed them neatly in plastic sheeting. She was a sweet woman on the other side of fifty who wore her hair piled high in the back. Miss Clairol ash blonde. When she wasn’t waiting on customers, she worked a baby quilt behind the counter. Sunbonnet Sue, so it must be a girl.

She really doesn’t matter to this story, but I remember writing notes about her when I returned to the van. Can’t find the notes, but I remember her raisin-colored nail polish clearly enough.

In July 1967, the couples who bought tickets to the Palace Theater in Greenwood, Arkansas saw Doris Day, Charlton Heston, John Wayne, and Elvis. Some sat in the balcony and necked while others sat below and pointed upward. There were only about 2,000 people living there then and I know this because eight months later a good portion of them lost their whole world and many loved ones to a drop-down tornado that flattened most of the town.

I don’t know if the Palace Theater survived the carnage. It’s doubtful. What did survive are these fairly pristine lobby cards, stacks of them dating back from 1955 through this one in 1967. Some are a little brown around the edges from exposure, but none look like they were fished out of a tornado.

The storm blew up in the late afternoon and had it hesitated, waited a couple of hours more, the Palace would have been full of young lovers holding popcorn and each other on a Friday night. Maybe somewhere near the back row there would have been young fella with a fresh shave and clean fingernails escorting his ash-blonde sweetheart to her seat.

Maybe.

A Room of One’s Own

No Telling

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
~ Virginia Woolf

This has always been one of my favorite quotes. Not because it’s true, mind you, but because it’s amusing. If it were really true, there would be four, maybe five women in the whole world who had the ingredients necessary to write even flash fiction. Forget writing a novel.

I know a lot of women who write and they work the whole business piecemeal – half an hour here, fifteen minutes there, maybe an hour after the kids go to bed and if they don’t fall asleep on their keyboards before page three. Most of us sneak writing in between loads of laundry and incessant interruptions about Where Things Are. We are the keepers, we gals, and that always manages to come first because the guilt our mothers taught us stuck. Hard.

A room of one’s own? Unless she’s got one of those creepy “safe rooms” that locks hydraulically and requires a secret code to enter, she’ll never find a room no one else feels free to enter. And it doesn’t even matter if she’s got one of those, because no amount of expensive sound-proofing will drown out the pleading on the other side of the wall.

Here’s the thing: I’m not complaining. I generally love interruptions because they mean my house is full of life and love. It’s impossible to get deeply into a story that way, so I schedule my heavy-duty writing time in the early mornings for that very reason. You wouldn’t believe how much I can write in an hour and a half of complete quiet. The rest of the day belongs to other things and plenty of them.

It’s not the room, you see, it’s the silence.

The money thing is shiftier. Sure, I can imagine having enough money to buy time away from work. I think about this often when passing through states with lottery tickets for sale at gas stations (by the way, we’re beginning a state lottery here soon and I’m VERY excited). I’m not much of a math person, but I can wrap my head around the astronomical odds of winning such a thing as enough money to write fiction. It’s fun to think about, but it’s not going to happen. I’m guessing Virginia needed less money back then.

My theory about women and piecemeal writing is that we’ve all found something that fits our interruptible lives – blogging. Short pieces and instant publishing gratification between dentist appointments and fighting children…no wonder the blogosphere is awash in mommy blogs.

And I say, attagirl.

Maybe all of us aren’t producing Woolf-level fiction, but we get the writing done with a sense of accomplishment and a saucy pop when we hit “publish.” Nothing wrong with that. For heavy-lifting fiction there are always stolen hours late and early. I don’t know about you, but I’m not missing a hug from The Perfect Grandson just to get my head more deeply into a plot. The plot will wait for silent hours, but the boy will be a man in an instant and give his hugging to someone else.

(Note: During the process of writing this post I made two pitchers of iced tea, took one phone call, found a lost book, switched out the laundry, and comforted my daughter. Just so you know.)

First Day of School

No Telling

Tomorrow is the first day of school for everyone in the No Telling household. I’ll meet my nervous freshman comp students for the first time and Em will be all over the same campus taking this and that as she feverishly works at getting that degree under her skinny belt.

Nothing new there.

What’s new is that tomorrow morning The Perfect Grandson will attend his very first day of daycare/preschool. He’s two years old, a charming rascal beloved by all, and has never been taken care of by anyone outside of our close family. Oh my.

You mamas out there know exactly what I’m talking about. Em’s already worked herself up into a pre-first-day state where she envisions the worst – choking hazards, split lips, crying jags – the whole shebang. Why, she’s even thrown herself past the immediate and well into the future. Soon, Mom, he’s going to be in kindergarten, and then high school and then some wench [sic] will take him away from me forever.

And she’s right. That’s exactly what will happen, but not tomorrow. My experienced motherhood tells me that she’ll drop him off in the morning and cry much harder than he will, because kids are funny like that. When class is over she’ll fly to the daycare to hug him more tightly than he’ll want or allow. He’ll show her around, punch his new friends affectionately, come home with a few new words and nasty habits.

That’s how it works. There are women all over the world dropping their womb-babies off with strangers for the first time. All that common umbilical cutting doesn’t make it less excruciating for a first time mama. It doesn’t get any better, I suspect, with the second or the third.

I will not be a part of the dropping off and picking up tomorrow. That’s Em’s moment and she has a right to the love and pain of it. My job will be to comfort a weeping daughter, to give her a solid place to lean when the ground starts slipping underneath. It’ll be all right.

I‘ll make sure to to schedule my own moment behind a locked office door, neatly timed so I come out looking fresh for class. And for my daughter, who will never know I’m not the rock she believes me to be.

Get Out the Umbrella, it’s Going to be a Bumpy Ride

No Telling

What I like best are the five or so minutes just before the storm. You know, when the lightning hasn’t caught up to the thunder just yet and you can smell the rain coming. I took this picture with my out-of-date cell phone and even so managed to catch a little unexpected majesty. Nothing like the great beyond working itself up into a tirade just over the subdivision rooftops of forty or so aging widow-women and their little snappy dogs.

I live in a “garden home” complete with a tall brick wall snaking its way all around us, keeping us protected from – I don’t know – maybe young people with sex drives and fast cars and bigger dogs. It’s not my fault. As I’ve mentioned before, I moved here in the early building stages and was blinded by 12″ moldings and shiny marble counter tops. You would have fallen, too. Admit it.

I‘m now among the youngest living here. My daughter and grandson who live with me are the other two. This is most obvious in the mornings when we seem to be the only people in the world leaving to go somewhere. It’s also obvious when, like tonight, a storm blows up and there’s no one but me standing in the middle of the street in my house shoes, trying to catch a tornado on a cellphone.

Make no mistake, the old gals are locked up tight clicking between the Weather Channel and Fox News.

Let’s hope they weren’t watching me, because when a good dose of lightning sprung out of the north I nearly lost both the cellphone and my ability to walk by falling up my own front steps. They’ve been a little wary of me since The Obama Conversation anyway. That’s okay. I know better than to shout “Medicare!” in a crowded garden home subdivision. I can handle these gals.

I’m going back out there. I don’t care if they’re watching or not.

The Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets

No Telling

(Scribbling Paradisio by Dore’, with a little help from me.)

I taught at a traveling writing workshop this summer down in Harmony Grove, Arkansas. School teachers, tired ones, met with us in that sweet but woebegone way public teachers do at the end of the school year. This is when they love their students the most but are cheerfully able to say good-bye for the summer. The workshop was splendid, and you can read about it here and here.

We used a book I’ve had in the workshop arsenal for a few years called The 9 Rights of Every Writer: A Guide for Teachers. It’s geared towards educators, but it’s a fine fist-in-the-air book about what every writer needs/deserves. These are breathtakingly simple. Every writer has the right to:

reflect
finding personally important topics
go off topic
personalize the writing process
write badly to unearth and clarify meaning
observe other writers at work
assess constructively – and well
experience structural freedom
unearth the power of each writer’s voice.

This is a powerful book for teachers. You see, most of them are scared to death of students’ writing because many teachers don’t see themselves as writers. That’s an important hurdle during the workshops.

As an opening scribbling prompt, my partner-in-workshop-crime Stephanie asked all the teachers to pick one of the rights they wish they’d had as students. Good opener. We all began writing. Kind of.

My pen hovered over the page for a bit. It had been a few years (coughcough) since I was a public school student. I tried to summon up something, some writing experience gone awry or pinch-nosed schoolmarm with a bleeding red pen. Nothing.

The thing is, I was a public school kid in the Age of Aquarius and Mimeographed Worksheets. With the exception of one senior-year research paper, all I did was fill out purple-inked (you know you can smell them) grammar and punctuation mimeos. They were like a puzzle, really. All you had to do was figure out the pattern.

In public school, no one ever tried to teach me how to write. Huh.

But the writing happened anyway. I began as Harriet the Spy and became the girl with the contraband poetry books in her locker and a Secret Notebook in her purse. I wrote incessantly, mostly terrible poetry then published in the high school literary magazine, but would never have devalued my late ’70s coolness-mystique (good lord) by being on staff. My plan was to be Gloria Steinem and Sylvia Plath. Simultaneously.

That morning in Harmony Grove I ended up writing about the freedom students need to scribble outside of standardized testing and five-paragraph nightmares. I wrote about the freedom to be left alone with the words, to develop fearlessness and a casual attitude because everything we write isn’t stark reflection of our worth. It’s practice. It’s play. It’s necessary.

They’re just words. We can always make more.

So go write something.

Note on the Fridge to the Retail Giants… (you know who you are)

No Telling

Dear Retail Mucky-Mucks,

While other parts of the country religiously begin school just after Labor Day, around here the powers that be want school to start this week. You know, when it’s a nice and sultry 100+ degrees and the humidity makes the air palpable. It’s like breathing hot jello.

I’m trying very hard to remember what it was like as a school child in all those unairconditioned 1960’s classrooms. I know one whole wall was nothing but crank-windows and they were mostly open, but that’s because I recall fighting off errant wasps instead of the heat. Is this truly a sign of global warming, or was I too worried about playing on the monkeybars to care?

Regardless, I was reading a post about the horrors of back-to-school clothes shopping at Crazy Texas Mommy (I love her) and she brought up the tricky business of out-of-season shopping. She’s right, your stores are filled with sweaters and long pants and all manner of Fall bits, but Fall won’t happen around here until late October. Maybe not even then.

So what happened to all those summer clothes? They went on half-of-half sometime in late June. They’re gone, baby, and you’re not reordering. The Recession ate our school clothes.

It’s a double whammy. Somewhere all you retail CEOs are sitting around in turtlenecks and throwing back hot toddies. I’m guessing you’re enjoying mid-August somewhere in the Berkshires where folks have four distinct seasons. Down here, we can only dream and sling sweat.

In ragged old Summer clothes, no less.

Sincerely,

Monda