THE TEAL BADGE OF POVERTY

My mom’s car is an old Ford Escort with extremely low mileage. Among its many outstanding features are its vanity plates, “SORENCY”, an endearment bestowed on my mom by my cousin, Linda, who couldn’t say, “Florence”. The moniker stuck. Now family and friends and friends of friends refer to her with this peculiar yet touching sigmatism.  Additional features making this car so outstanding are its ability to skid into oncoming traffic on the smallest amount of ice, to fog up at the first indication of cold weather making it impossible to see until the hot air kicks in, or to shimmy like my sister Kate (if I had a sister Kate) once you start pushing the accelerator toward fifty. But by far its most outstanding and noteworthy feature might just be its peculiar color – teal, a shade of blue/green not normally an option on the color charts offered by Detroit. Although the “Sorency” plates are a major hindrance to my own vanity it’s the color that’s begun to cause the greater sense of consternation and concern.

At first take, the teal color of our tiny Escort seemed like your run of the mill anomaly. It wasn’t a color I could really say I saw a lot of before I started driving around Madison…or anywhere else for that matter. But then Wisconsin isn’t just anywhere. It was Emmy who first pointed out another car parked next to us at the mini-mart being the same color as our “SORENCY’ mobile. It was comparable in size, but maybe a little rustier around the chassis. Because of the odd color of our car we were a bit astounded to see another one so similar. Then it became a game. Who could find another teal jalopy? I thought I might put money on it thinking the odds would surely be in my favor. Good thing I’m not a betting man. All of sudden it seemed everyway we turned, every parking lot we pulled into the results were the same. Parked in the next spot, waiting next to us at the red light, or attached to the tow truck chugging down the road was another teal car. Now these cars were never of the BMW or Mercedes ilk. They were all sub-compacts or mid-sized sedans with fabric seats and plastic dashboards. It seemed as if these teal cars should have been called rabbits as opposed to Escorts or Tempests, they seemed to multiple and reproduce all over the cheaper ends of town. When I saw three of them all lined up next to each other with their trunks bent and dented and then wired shut with dirty rope and silver duct tape I began to understand the iconography of the teal car.  We were the untouchables of the auto world and the teal color was the black dot on our foreheads. We are the lowest caste of car owner, driving the cars no one else wanted. Our teal cars are our crosses to bear. For whatever reason we found ourselves at the bottom of the economic totem pole, our teal jalopies give a shout out letting the rest of world in our little secret. We are the cars the Cadillacs and Lexus’ shun in the parking lots around Madison. We ban together in little groups outside KFC’s and the Dollar Store. Sometimes we park them blocks from where we want to go so no will know they belong to us. Madison is unlike New York where public transportation can mask your economic situation. Instead, here your car is your status and our teal sub-compact is our badge of poverty.

LESSON 15:

Watch out for how you present yourself. The unfortunate truth is some people are going judge you by the condition of your shoes, the dirt on your nails or the color of your car 

WARNING

Someone needs to print out a set of rules and regulations for bloggers warning them against their own stupidity. I don’t know what I was thinking? I thought I was clever and only a little bit naughty when I wrote “PANTIES” in the header window on my last post, but I had no clear understanding of what I was getting myself into. I was trying to have some fun on an otherwise mundane day. So I wrote “PANTIES”. So what? Well “what” became a lesson learned in blogging repercussions. The words you use do have power and that power can have results that are sometimes good and sometimes no what you intended. Words like “PANTIES” have enormous power. They can increase readership and visibility but not necessarily in the way you wanted them to. I always said I readership wasn't my goal with this blog but with my last post readership rose beyond the usual group of friends and family. There were a whole set of surfers out there typing in the word “PANTIES” on their search engines trolling for access into the world of undergarments. It got me thinking about what other words I should avoid or perhaps take advantage of if I should become interested in casting a larger net. My head began to spin with other parts of the English language I might want to steer clear of if I start to become concerned about who is reading and following my blog. The first things to come to mind were the obvious body parts and anything having to do with sex. It’s a no brainer, if you use these words in your header you’re going to attract a whole group of people bathed in the blue light of their computers secretly surfing the web during the wee hours of the night. But there’s a whole load of innocent words when left on their own that can grab a similar set of trolling misfits with a little more creative approach to their surfing searches.

George Carlin had his seven words “that would infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.” He might have included screw up your blog but it was 1972 and computers weren’t as popular then as they are now.

Here are some other words I’ve come up with as words you might want to avoid:

1. First of all, as I unintentionally discovered with my last innocent posting, steer clear of anything to do with underwear, even granny pants can get you into trouble.

2. Auf with the words” naughty and nice”. Too many connections to whips and handcuffs.

3. Pearls. This one would have had me stumped if I hadn’t heard it explained by Jeff on Bravo’s “Flipping Out”. I’m way too gentile to explain it here. If you don’t know you’ll have to figure it out on your own, but please don’t ever couple it with necklace in describing a paint color or a piece of jewelry.

4. Extra large or anything else to do with size. These words when isolated can draw a whole host of trouble to your blog.

5. Never use the words yellow and shower together unless you can somehow add curtain onto the end of shower.

6. Wood is a little more obtuse but best avoided especially when coupled with the word, hard.

7. Bangs are okay but a good one to avoid when referencing hairstyles on girls under the ages of eighteen.

8. Benders are not going to get much attention here in the U.S. of A. but British gay boys will have a field day with this one

I’m sure I could go on and on about this one but for anyone out there who expected a more salacious posting I apologize for being only PG rated. 

PANTIES

When I’m not chauffeuring Emmy to school, Rick to work and my mom off to her elder (she thinks it’s work) daycare, I try to carve out time to meditate on discovering my million dollar idea. In New York, where there was a lotto machine on every corner and after I had devoted sufficient time to absorbing enough “if you dream it, you can do it” philosophy from The Secret I allowed myself two bucks each week in hopes of buying that winning ticket. My numbers never hit, at least not on the weeks I played them. Other ideas for financial success outside of just continuing with working at making a decent living involved: archival photo storage units, a line extension for our furniture collection in association with a tile company, and a t-shirt for peace, love and happiness I worked on with Emmy. So far none of these has panned out but now I think I might have hit on something and it’s all due to good old mom.

One of the more unpleasant aspects of Alzheimer care is the issue of hygiene. Emmy’s current favorite movie is, “The Notebook”. In the movie the heroine, Allie Calhoun,  spends her golden years in a similar stage of the disease as my mom. The problem I had with the movie, the part that didn’t ring true was how beautifully put together Allie's appearance was and how much better she fared than my mom. As she struggled with her memory lose she always managed to keep up her appearance with her hair combed, her pearls in place and a daily set of fresh clothes. On the side of reality, my mom gets a beauty appointment once a week, which is about the only time I see her with her hair combed. Pearls are never a part of her wardrobe and most days when I come to pick her up I find she has spent the night sleeping on the living room couch in the same clothes she wore the day before and the day before that. She has a drawer full of nightgowns we have given her over the past few Christmases and birthdays all folded exactly like they were in the boxes they came in. The only nightgown she wears, when she remembers to wear one, is a ten year old rag with tiny rips and faded little flowers. We wash it when we can, although the cleanliness of her nightgown nowhere near tops the list of our hygiene concerns. Our biggest fears by far center around her underwear. When I go to pick her up and see she is wearing clothes from earlier in the week I know the underwear hasn’t been changed. My youngest sister has taken on the duty of bathing her on Tuesdays so we all know she has at least changed her undergarments once that week. It’s a thankless job, but Boni goes over early on Tuesdays and forces my mom to sit in the bathtub. She also manages to snatch her old clothes and get them down to the laundry replacing them with a clean set. Sometimes this is an easy task and on other times my mom can put up the kind of resistance only expected form someone being hog-tied and horse-whipped.

Growing older myself, I have been thankful for the insight of those clever inventors who have devoted their creative energies to find solutions for an older crowd. Making remote controls with numerals the size of ritz crackers, manufacturing shampoo containers with letters large enough to read without the aid of soap filmed glasses and Florence Henderson providing a website with tech support for seniors, have all added to the quality of life for people in their time of eminent deterioration. So this year, when I drew my mom’s name for our Christmas stocking exchange, I thought “what better gift to give her than a set of day-of-the-week panties”? The perfect idea, granny pants with Sunday through Saturday printed or embroidered in big BIG letters across the front so she could see them. I jumped in the car and started searching the mall making a beeline to Victoria’s Secret, the quintessential procurer of feminine intimate apparel. When I arrived my request for granny panties only produced a quizzical look on the sale associate’s face that in a non-verbal shutter told me Victoria’s Secret didn’t exactly cater to an octogenarian crowd. I pushed on to The Boston Store, trying to keep the business in the family, but no success. Then I went to Sears and JCPenney, no one had anything close to what I was looking for. I left the mall in frustration and headed back home secure in the knowledge I could find what I was looking for on the world-wide-web. Surely Ebay or Etsey would have a set of seven old lady drawers each in a different pastel color and marked with one of the days of the week. I typed in “Sunday-Monday undergarments” nothing,  then “days-of-the-week panties”, and finally “days-of-the-week panties mature women”. The only things I ever found were a set of Princess panties for girls up to a size 6x and a set of naughty thongs where the type was so small only someone doing some serious eye to crotch action could read them. Neither of these seemed appropriate, so here is where the light bulb lit. No one seems to be tapping into the elderly market especially when it comes to clothing and hygiene and this issue swings both ways. Men need help below the belt as well. Someone needs to start making things like granny panties and grandpa boxers with days of the week printed in big letters across the front. Then for good measure reprint the days on the back band so when grandma says she’s wearing Wednesday you can give a quick yank on the back just short of a wedgie to verify she’s tell the truth. And this would only be the beginning of my elder wear line: blouses and shirts with Velcro or snap closures, slip-on shoes with built-in shoe horns (this one takes more than a verbal description), and pants that dissolve if you wear them more than five times in a row. These are only a few of the ideas I’ve been dreaming up. We could then broaden the scope beyond apparel. Someone needs to invent an odor detector alarm. They could be installed much like a smoke detector. When the body odor level rises above a predetermined level an alarm would go off or better yet a projected warning would begin to flash saying, “ TIME FOR A BATH”.

So if anyone else out there thinks this is worth a million dollars please feel free to add your comment and then back it up with some seed money. There must be someone out there who has the wisdom to see the brilliance of this idea or has at least a sense of humor.

TIP:

For anyone unaware of Florence Henderson’s unique website helping seniors become computer literate, here’s the link:

http://www.flohclub.com/

THE BLIZZARD OF 2009

We should have been prepared but I was too used to the weather forecasters in New York putting out a pumped up warning for a huge hurricane to blow its way up the east coast creating a swath of destruction right through the heart of the city. Everyone take cover, board up the windows, baton down anything not bolted to the terrace floor. Slow news days made for big erroneous weather headlines and I figured this was just another bit of weather hype served up Wisconsin style. Wow, was I wrong. The day started out just as our local meteorologist predicted, a little light flurry, nothing big. No reason to run to the HyVee or Woodman’s to build up the supplies in the larder. I did think I should look for a shovel to put in the trunk of the Ford Escort, our current means of transportation, a featherweight auto not meant for the icy covered streets of the snow belt. The only option I could see was the second shovel at my mom’s house, the one where the wooden handle and the plastic blue scoop were unattached so every time you took a scoop of snow and threw it to the side of the driveway the snow and the scoop both flew into the snow bank leaving me with a slender wooden pole. Even though the ability to separate the scoop from the pole made it the right size for storing in the trunk, I figured it was still pretty useless. All in all, we weren’t prepared for a major snowfall, but then Madison wasn’t prepared either. It takes a lot for Madison to close down due to snow or cold. They pride themselves in having state-of-the-art snow removal technology and a fleet of equipment to rival any city but even that wasn't enough to combat the storm that was brewing to our west.

It wasn’t long into the day before the big snow drop day that the little line at the bottom of the TV screen popped up on all the local stations with school and government closings scrolling by. Local weather celebrities started interrupting Ellen and Oprah telling us we should expect eight to ten inches, then they upped it to ten to twelve and by the time "The Housewives of Atlanta"rerun was coming to end the expectations had topped the fourteen inch mark. This time they weren’t lying. The snow started in  earnest around eight that evening, a wet heavy snow made up of flakes that stung your face. By the time we woke up in the morning everything the scrolling line told us what we already assumed: everything had been shut down. Our world was buried under a layer of thick sparkling white. We were now held hostage by the elements. Emmy was in heaven. Schoolmates had told her all the local rituals for insuring a no school snow day. You either slept with a silver spoon under your pillow, or wore your pajamas inside out and backwards. Every kid in town woke up that morning with silver spoons tangled in the hair and their pajamas sporting the dull images of Sponge Bob or the Little Mermaid as seen from the reverse side. 

Now we are completely snowed in, no work, no school, no bus service, and the final snow total measuring out at a whooping eighteen plus inches. We felt this was God giving us permission to not answer our emails, study for the upcoming math quiz or deal with anything remotely resembling our deeper woes. What we did decide to do was light a fire in the fireplace, put on some Christmas music and let the inner Martha come out in all of us as we finished decorating the apartment for the holiday to come. The theme was rustic elegance. Two dollar grapevine wreaths were transformed with red delicious apples, walnuts, hazelnuts and ribbons cut from a slightly off-white piece of burlap. The dining table held a sliver tray lit with the fragrance of burning cinnamon candles surrounded by more nuts, apples and boughs cut from our tree. The tree, a masterpiece in antique white, dripped glass icicles, red globes that reflected the tiny incandescent lights, garlands made from stripes of regular white paper and some of the vintage felt ornaments my mother made when she new Tuesday followed Monday. There’s nothing better for drawing a family closer together than being captured by Mother Nature at Christmastime surrounded by mountains of delicious snow, a warm fire blazing in front of the hearth and three separate souls hot gluing a new set of holiday traditions.

A TREE TO REMEMBER

We both vowed, come hell or high water, our holiday priority would be to make this a memorable and remarkable Christmas for Emmy. We’ve been secretly boxing up little treasures: body sprays from the dollar bin at Target, two dollar gloves bought with Rick’s discount at the Boston Store, a vintage Breyer horse I found at a flea market for three dollars. The gifts may be small but the tree will be full. It’s been very hard to gage how our poverty has effected Emmy. It’s difficult to see how much she has become aware of the meaning of money. We know she has learned how to shop for bargain shampoo. She chastises us for making a purchase she thinks is too costly or frivolous. She says no to things I know she would like to say yes to. She knows she is no longer monetarily rich. She senses that others have more than she has. I have yet to decide if this has taught her a valuable lesson about money and risk or if it has made her so fearful of spending she’ll end up a mattress stuffer or a hoarder of useless junk. The later is becoming scarier as I see her stashing away used popsicle sticks to make fences for her Sunshine Horse Farm. On the other hand her inventiveness is extraordinary. It’s heartwarming to see her being content with making do. I marvel at her imaginary play with her seventy-six and counting plastic horses. There is still so much of the little girl in this thirteen-year-old frame. I want to keep her that little girl with her little girl toys for as long as I can. Where many of her friends are jumping head first into that boy crazy phase, she remains content to build houses and stables out of building blocks, scraps of fabric and bits of tinfoil.

Now that most of our gifts had been put in boxes our next task was to find the perfect tree. We scoured Craigslist and pursued the recommendations of family. We were counting on them to serve as our roadmap for finding that short needled, perfect pear shaped tree. Because of the height of our new home’s living room ceiling Rick really had his heart set on a tall tree. Because the number of deposits in our checkbook continued to be on the short side, the tree we were going to find would have to be what it would be.  My sister and her husband had gone to cut down their tree the week before. They traveled forty miles north to a tree farm where you paid forty dollars for any tree on the lot. Pre-cut trees at the local lots around Madison were running around fifty dollars for a standard sized tree. One the size we wanted boosted the cost to way over one hundred dollars. We started to worry we were going to end up with a Charlie Brown twig instead of a ten to twelve footer. It made our search all the more critical. Finally we found it. “All trees $30 and under at our state licensed tree farm”. This was our ticket. Sandy and Dan lent us one of their SUV’s they insisted needed a trailer hooked up to it so we could safely cart our tree home without scratching up the vehicle. I thought we could just stuff one in the back of the Ford Escort. The thought of having to navigate yet another oversized means of transport was beginning to drain my resolve of making the cutting of the tree a joyous memory.

Emmy, Rick and I all piled into the front of the SUV, cranked up the Christmas tunes and set off to get our tree. I got the hang of driving the oversized vehicle until we got to the tree farm. Calm turned to panic as I saw the farm’s driveway, a narrow one car width dirt drive about an eighth of a mile long lined with cars and with no visible turnaround area anywhere in sight. What could I do? Either I went in and we got a tree or I kept on going ruining everyone’s day and turning a memorable family event into a family tragedy. I did the best I could, too bad the tree farm couldn’t keep up their end of the bargain. The minute we got out of the truck I could see we were in trouble. What they had billed as a tree farm was actually a series of six rows of the scraggliest looking trees you’ve ever seen and not a one of them over five feet tall. Now we had no tree and I was stuck with no visible way of backing that trailer hitched SUV out of that misrepresented tree farm . This is just the kind of situation that kicks Rick’s determination into high gear. Somehow he managed to have cars moved and a path cleared. Rick jumped behind the wheel and in minutes we were out and back on the road. We were going to try for our original destination when Rick remembered another tree farm he had seen on one of his driving adventures exploring the countryside around our new apartment. We decided to give it a try before we took off on what would now be a two-hour drive to Poynette.

It turned out that the tree we were looking for was only a couple of miles down the road from where we lived. The Hanson tree farm was run by a middle-aged woman wearing a big blue parka, big black-rimmed glasses and an even bigger Wisconsin smile. She started out being very apologetic. She only had big trees. She didn’t know that was exactly what we were looking for. We got our tree and in an act of true kindness she let Emmy cut down a tree of her own. Emmy took the saw, cut down the tree and then carried it back to the trailer to join our twelve-footer. It was a lop-sided misfit all of us knew Emmy would kiss with imagination and turn from a frog into a prince.

I had parked the truck on the road outside the farm not wanting to chance the backing out maneuver twice in one day. Now back in the truck, even though we were only a couple of miles from home, I drove back the long way going miles out of our way but making sure I would only have a series of right hand turns to get us back to where we wanted to be. It was a good start to making this as memorable, remarkable Christmas.

THE WALGREENS CURSE

I was out of deodorant and Emmy needed hair curlers. The “Twilight” phenomenon had pierced her psyche requiring her best approximation at transformation into everything Bella. The emulation of what Bella does, what she looks like, what she thinks are her secret and not so secret dreams. Emmy along with most thirteen-year-old girls and a few thirteen-year-old boys fantasizes about being the object of either Jacob's or Edward’s affection. The closer she could transform herself into the image of Bella, the bigger the chance the fantasy could become real. The curlers seemed a small price to pay and I view deodorant as an essential. This is what precipitated our trip to Walgreens Drugstore.

In previous Christmas seasons the trip to any near or distant Walgreens always provided a little smile as we perused the Christmas decorations aisle, winking at each other as we ran our fingers over the boxes of outdoor lights, specifically the ones with the pictures of our home in Andes. It was a thrill to walk into a Walgreens in New York City or Chattanooga, Tennessee and see our house pictured on rows of boxes of lights sporting so much holiday cheer.

Years ago, an Andes neighbor, who ran a PR firm in the city, but had a second home in Andes, approached us about using our house for a photo shoot for a holiday lighting company. They paid a location fee and as a bonus gave us the miles of lights they had used in dressing the exterior of the house. We were flattered they chose our house but we didn’t think much more about it until the following year when we were visiting Rick’s relatives in Georgia for Thanksgiving. I had forgotten to pack shaving cream. Rick’s sister, Sandra, directed me to the nearest drugstore, a Walgreens, a couple of blocks down the road. I got in the rental car and drove over to the Walgreens on what I thought would be a quick in and out for a can of Palmolive Sensitive Skin shaving cream. I was pretty focused on the task at hand when I entered the drugstore, keeping my eyes locked on the panels suspended from the ceiling with the information delineating what you would find in that particular aisle: cosmetics, skincare, depends, men’s products. I quickly found the aisle I needed. I mentally evaluated the selection of shaving cream alternatives, picked up what I needed and headed back to the cashier’s counter. Men’s products was stashed all the way in the back of the store and the cashier was stationed at the front. I had to traverse the entire store to get to where I could pay for the shaving cream and get back to Rick’s sister’s. With the shaving cream in hand I could now relax and scope out the rest of the discretionary merchandise I presumably didn’t need. Unconcerned about which way my journey to the front of the store would lead, I serendipitously took a turn up through the seasonal holiday products aisle and there is where I stopped in total awe. It was such an astonishing feeling of pride and comfort to see our home, a thousand miles removed, lighting up the aisles of a Walgreens drugstore. Discretionary became mandatory as I bought every version of the box they had. Every year since that first time in Chattanooga, we would make a pilgrimage to Walgreens to see if our home would still be gracing the outdoor holiday lighting aisle, and every year our pride would swell as our home continued to spread a little bit of luminescent holiday joy.

This year the feeling is very different. The house pictured on the front of all those boxes of holiday lights no longer belongs to us, but Walgreens still lines its holiday aisles with the same product wrapped in the same box with the picture of our former home. It’s an image hard for us to escape as they feature the lights in their local circulars as well as their in-store point-of-sale displays. The trip for deodorant and curlers is bittersweet. It’s a little reminder of what once was but is no more.  Rick, Emmy and I all try to remember the long list of wonderful memories our home gave us at Christmas time, the friends who shared that time with us, the Christmas Eve present exchanges with family, the open houses for all our neighbors with miles of desserts and glasses full of champagne. So here’s a toast to all those good times and the gift it gave us that no one can take away. Let the new season begin. Happy Holidays to all.

UGLY DUCKLINGS

I, like so many others, went to Youtube and clicked on “Britain’s Got Talent” the Monday after Susan Boyle's audition back in the spring of 2009. It was our assistant who told me to watch it and like so many similar enticements by people all over the world she prefaced it with nothing. All she said was, “You should see this video”. She knew how not to ruin the surprise. I was sucked in like everyone else in that theater audience smirking at the absurdity before me. I expected a real laugh. We have all been seduced into this familiar scenario, goofy contestant comes out for total humiliation and we all laugh at their expense and their audacity to think they have any talent at all.

Here comes frumpy Susan with the inappropriate swish of the hips indicative of someone so painfully socially awkward. How could anyone this unschooled in cool be anything other than a total loser? And at forty-eight if no one had discovered her talent she couldn’t possibly have any, could she?

She nodded to the men off stage to cue the music. The orchestral strains of; “I Dreamed a Dream” introed what we all thought would be the world's next William Hong. There was a split second that perpetuated the hoax of her eminent failure when she gave that little smile and appeared to clear her throat, the way an amateur schoolgirl would as she nervously stepped forward for her humiliating solo at a middle school Christmas concert. And then she sang. She sang with crystal clarity and total confidence. Her notes broke loose with a boldness so totally in contrast to her persona that there was a collective jaw drop before everyone rose to their feet in the delight of being so wonderfully duped. It was the triumph of the underdog that produced the lump in our collective throats. She made it possible for all of us to see ourselves as potential winners. It made us look at ourselves as if we too could have undiscovered special talents.

I must admit I still go back and watch that Youtube clip. I always pick the long version, the one that goes on for seven minutes and includes the pre-audition interviews and the judge’s comments. I still get chills when I hear her approach and hit those unimaginable notes on the crescendo of “turning your dream to sha – a – a – a - ame”. Then the lump in my throat forms time after time with the lyric, “I had a dream my life would be, So different from this hell I’m living”. It’s a lump formed not from the thought of where I might be now, but from the hope it engenders because of how it mimics the life of the woman who is singing it. With Susan’s courageous voice it becomes an harbinger of change. It is the miracle of witnessing the exact moment when someone’s life became something better than what it had previously been. It’s why I return to it time after time on my computer when things get really low. As schmaltzy as it may be, it grabs me by the shoulders and spins me around. It turns my back on defeat. It points me toward hope. It makes me want to persevere. 

LESSON 14:

So many of us are ugly ducklings just waiting to be swans.