The Late Arrival

After leaving my job back in June, my bank account has now gone Ryan Gosling on me. Like any red-blooded American woman, I can't resist Ryan Gosling, so I dove in. Understand, the last time I applied for a job was fifteen years ago. FIFTEEN. It was simple back then. I'd show up with a resume and a starchy blue suit, scribble in forms with a fancy pen, sign the application and leave. There'd either be an interview call a couple days later or a thanks-but-no-thanks letter in the mail. It was simple. But online applications are icy cold as a Wisconsin winter and as frustrating as driving through a snowstorm in rush hour. First, I searched. Then I refined the search by city, then I further refined by miles away from the city that I just refined. Then, I searched by industry and then refined the industry by sub-industry. How refined of me. After an hour, I finally found the position and description. Press Here to Apply! Yay! I thought, Techn...

Despite having every intention of holing up during today's first snowfall, we attended the commissioning ceremony of the USS Milwaukee today like many other "hearty" Wisconsinites. County sheriffs, city police officers and military personnel - active and veteran were well represented. One sailor in particular caught my eye. He couldn't have been that much older than my own teen daughter, I thought, and he definitely couldn't have been a Wisconsin native because Wisconsinites feel the cold, but we don't necessarily look like we feel it. This poor kid, he looked like he was feeling every bit of the minus zero wind chill and snow. In my mind, he was a baby. His ears stuck out from his sailor's hat. They were bright red from the cold and his teeth visibly chattered. My motherly instinct was to grab his shoulders and give them the warm-up-down-rub or at least shield his ears. Before I could do any well-meaning gesture that would get all of us removed fr...

There were no recipes. No measuring spoons. Just a mish-mash of ingredients that went in the stuff. We used our senses: did the veggie pile look like another celery stalk should be added; did the dressing feel too mushy when you stirred it; could the sweet potato pie use a little more vanilla when you tasted it? The heat, the stirring, the tastes of my childhood Thanksgiving followed me into adulthood. And then I got married. Of all the things people tell you about marriage, the thing they don't tell you is about Thanksgiving -- or more specifically -- Pumpkin Pie v Sweet Potato Pie. My husband and I can handle the black/white thing. We can handle the financial thing. We can even handle the division of labor thing. But Pumpkin Pie v Sweet Potato Pie? That's another matter entirely. Our first Thanksgiving, we found ourselves in the midst of an escalating war of the pies. Him: Um...why don't you have pumpkin pie written down on the Thanksgiving menu? We always ...

One the way to school this morning, my daughter asked What's with you wanting stay in pajamas all the time? She had a point. At that very moment, in the car, in public I was in my pajama uniform: standard t-shirt layered with a standard blue sweatshirt, my husband's standard blue sweatpants and baseball cap. Comfort, I told her confidently. I like being comfortable. Besides, who's gonna see me? I'm only dropping you off and heading back home . Thing is, I had heard about insanely low gas prices at a station I always pass on the way home. The car was nearing a quarter of a tank, so I stopped to fill up when I heard... GOOD MORNING! I flipped around to see a TELEVISION REPORTER and CAMERA MAN. They wanted to talk with me ON THE AIR about the cheap gas I was innocently buying while I was in my PAJAMA UNIFORM looking like this: And mind you, it wasn't just a television reporter and camera man but a reporter with whom I had been on television back in t...

Today's NaBloPoMo post also appears in Metroparent Milwaukee . I don’t remember mom enlisting me to help her with Thanksgiving dinner prep, it somehow happened naturally. It was an annual exercise that ultimately helped me absorb family recipes and replicate them now that I have a family of my own. We must have exchanged a thousand stories in between the stirring, chopping and tasting. Now, in the week before Thanksgiving, the stories of social and political unrest and extreme violence frighten us. But startling as they are - they are, unfortunately nothing new. History is a continuum of life-changing, civilization-changing events – many of them frightening. How I feel about it all is heavily shaped by motherhood; and sometimes, I wish I knew how my mom felt of about the social issues going on when my siblings and I were kids through her lens of motherhood. But throughout our years of Thanksgiving cooking and stories, those particular stories were never told because I ne...

Get out and I’ll park. Just find a spot. It’s gray, cold, and clammy. Misting enough to make kinky hair get kinkier, but not enough to merit an umbrella. I’m happy for the favor, especially because we’re running late. My daughter and I tumble out of the car and hightail it to the megachurch’s entrance while my husband parks the car. Exterior door ushers extend a warm welcome, and I hug the usher whose smile is familiar. I still don’t know his name, but I’ll always know his smile. As my daughter and I look out the interior entrance searching for my husband’s tippy-toe trot between the misting drops, ‘Visitor Coffee Aroma’ reminds me that we were running so late I’ve missed my morning caffeine intervention. My husband finally enters and we make our way toward the sanctuary entrance, past ‘Visitor Coffee Aroma,’ through smiling volunteer lobby greeters, past the grand visitor information desk, past the early service’s attendees still milling around the central fireplace, ...

Remember when she found the tallest inflatable slide at the festival? She crawled to the top with a trail of fifty kids lined up behind her waiting their turn. You panicked while I beamed with pride at our daughter’s fearlessness. She decided the top was too top and refused to slide down, damned the kids behind her. But you were her Prince Charming that day, scaling up along the side and coaxing her down to the ground. She felt safe, was unapologetic and I saw you relish your role as her protector. My heart melted at the scene, and I took her stubbornness as an early sign of an independent attitude, nearly immune from herd mentality. It’s been ten years since that day. She’s now a teen who is fearless about standing out, and you – you still see yourself as Prince Charming. And that’s sweet. But, honey, there are some things from which Prince Charming can’t rescue her. She’s part you and part me. She’s our biracial daughter, and though we know and she knows she's...

Hey, you didn't go anywhere today, my husband said. Any day I don't have to go anywhere is good day, dude. The answer tumbled from my lips before I had a chance to edit it. He looked worried and I swear he started dialing 911 to get me the emergency help I obviously needed. He might've even Googled Involuntary Commitment on his phone. Maybe I should've answered better. Maybe I should've said Why is staying home not good? We call it home, we dust, vacuum, scrub floors and baseboards and Febreeze it to make it feel homey, and yet people think we're crazy if we want to stay inside and enjoy it. Although I meant -- and mean -- every word of that, I didn't say it. Maybe I didn't say that because deep down in my bones, I know the greater joy in not leaving the sacred doors of home is in the not-having-to-make-yourself-presentable to people who live outside of your home. Understand, I've been willingly unemployed since June of this year;...

This marks the 6th day of my participation in NaBloPoMo - or National Blog Posting Month. What it means is that I, along with thousands of other bloggers, are posting something EVERY DAY in November. It's no small task and, frankly, my brain is a little bit tweaked. So what helps when a brain is tweaked? TELEVISION does. And that's what I'm posting about today. ******************** There’s something about the solitude of home when everyone, including the dog, is asleep. That's when the dark sky brings a peculiar comfort as it settles on everything it touches. So tonight, I’ll cocoon myself in a plush blanket with laptop or cell phone in reach and channel surf until sleep arrives. Now that I think about it, I’ve always been a late-night loner who kept close company with TV. Especially during high school, that whole innocent time before boyfriends that never should have been boyfriends, two drinks over what should have been drunk, marriage, babies and pet...

This is ridiculously adorable. And funny.  Go ahead and watch; it'll only take a minute. I cried laughing the first time I saw that little fluffy dog refusing to enter the house because he needed someone to open a door that only he could see. I watched it again and laughed just as hard. Then I looped it a third time for good measure, but that's when something eerily familiar resonated with me. Doggone if that little dog and his invisible closed door didn't remind me of me.  I think we've all stood on the outside, looking in and waiting for someone to open doors that existed only in our minds. For me, the 'right time' was my door. I kept waiting for the time when we'd be more financially stable, or for the time when stress would resolve itself and then -- then I could get out of a miserable job situation and into peace of mind.  I waited outside of that closed door only to finally realize the right time wasn't even a real obst...

People, places, odors, phrases can hit me in a visceral way. Dying autumn leaves, for instance, take me right back to the time my mother was fighting cancer. Phrases like No offense, BUT… shoots a reflexive, defensive clench from my jaw to spine. Whatever comes after BUT is never good and always offensive. In the past week, the infamous Spring Valley High School video was the visceral gut punch to me, and I just carried it around inside. I swallowed back tears seeing that girl tossed around like a rag doll. I stifled back the anger and exhaustion at history’s echoes of rationalizing abuse of brown and black bodies. I got quiet and relegated the incident and my feelings about it to another place within myself that was far enough to be safe and out of reach to write about in a post. I’m guessing that any time I write about race or my feelings about injustice or structures that uphold the unevenness of it all, one of the five people reading my words will roll their eyes an...

This is the house we used to live in This is the place I used to know This is the house we used to live in Where if I liked could always go -Smithereens My second earliest memory is a tiled floor. Rich reds, burgundy and brown tiles, an inch wide each and three inches long. They overlapped and intertwined each other making a shiny patchwork of floor just inside the house’s entrance. From there, a Jacob’s ladder staircase that seemed too high, too majestic to see what was at the top. It was 1974, back when you could buy a house with four bedrooms, a formal dining room and bathrooms enough to keep kids and adults alike from going at each other’s throats for $28,000. Which is exactly what my parents did. $28,000 for scenes and sounds permanently etched in my memory and retrievable at will.   Echoes of Baptist hymns and selections from the Fred Waring songbook mom played on the living room’s upright piano. Front steps where Zeus, the family dog ...