The Late Arrival

Almost every tchotchke in my house has a story. Here is one of those tchotckes and this is its story. We were out shopping in a pseudo-fancy store selecting fancy cheeses, meats, crackers and fruit for a New Year's charcuterie board. I grabbed some kind of goat cheese in the round and clumsily bumped the one next to it. It rolled and rolled. I laughed and a told my daughter to catch it before it got too far away, even as a another customer nearly crossed its path. I kept laughing as my eyes met with his. His gaze had an icy, somber and hostile demeanor that told me I, nor my daughter didn't belong at the pseudo-fancy discount store. I steeled myself and kept laughing almost out of spite as much as I laughed at the site of my kid racing the cheese wheel. She caught it and returned it to its place. That was 2016. A little over a month after the election. My daughter knew something was off, so realizing she'd follow my lead, I suppressed my eye-roll and shrugged...

So I usually fall asleep by one or two o’clock, and then I wake up around three-thirty. My then-therapist nods his head and lets out an Ohhhhh…mmmmm. Then, I stay awake long enough to see the sun rise and then drift off for what feels like ten minutes maybe, and then wake up groggy. It's a beautiful thing when you actually want to see it. Ohhhh…mmmm. *blank stare from me* You’ve got EMA’s. At last, a diagnosis. Wait. What are EMA's? Am I dying? I knew I was dying. *heavy sigh from the therapist* EMA's are Early Morning Awakenings. Well, no %$@&$! Sherlock! Look, I’ve never been a good sleeper, unlike my husband who can literally say goodn—and be snoring before his head hits the pillow. It’s some weirdo parlor trick that we probably oughta take on the road. Even now, it takes at least a week for me to fall asleep and then the dreaded EMAs hit. I was in my late-twenties at the time of my thirty-dollar-copay EMA “diagnosis.”...

Even though my ears couldn't pick up the buzz, I assume in Bug World the panicked hornet's buzzing thundered like a storm as he hovered at a window trying to escape. I, on the other hand, was soaking in the sun while waiting for my friend to arrive for a an all-too rare lunch. She arrived and we hugged. It'd been way too long since we had gotten together. She settled in and soon noticed the panicky hornet buzzing at our floor length window. I saw a look in her eye. Leave him alone and he'll leave us alone  I advised. I can now confess this was an untruth, as a beekeeper friend once said honeybees will only sting if provoked. Yellow-jackets and hornets, on the other hand... We continued chatting unbothered. Until our frustrated hornet friend hovered and lit upon my index finger, and then flitted over to my friend's shoulder. She jumped up and I was like Oooooh...you done messed with the wrong person. Next thing, the hornet's on the gro...

At around 10:00 Sunday morning, I'm sitting on the porch half-broiling in Milwaukee's special brand of humidity while relaxing away the time before we have to pack up and head back to church for volunteering at the church picnic. *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * In between wiping beads of sweat from my upper lip, my thoughts drift back to seven days before when we were tackling that last pain-staking two hours from St. Louis to Joplin and then later, Pierce City. I can still feel the silent fatigue hanging over my husband, my daughter and me as we drove those 200 hundred miles. We finally arrived, settled in, had dinner and then worried whether that we'd have to take cover from an impending tornado as National Weather Service suggested. But life in Joplin went on, as it was going on in Pierce City. In fact, the sun was shining. So we went. Back in 2012, I serendipitously found Editor of the Monnet Times, Murray Bishoff on the internet. He had re...

Dig if you will the picture: On a ordinary Saturday, kids show up at high school detention to pay penance for any number of infractions. They're all there: the Jocks, the Stoners, the Brains, the Perpetual Outsider and even the embittered detention monitor. A poisonous explosion blankets the town or the world, and our kids are now on lock down. The explosion didn't cause deaths, but it left multitudes of Undead ravenously hungry for the living. It's The Walking Dead meets Breakfast Club. Actually, it's  Freakish , a series on which my daughter was binge-watching over Christmas Break. Because I wanted to be the cool mom, I watched it with her. " A group of high schoolers struggles against predatory mutants who have taken over their town after a chemical plant meltdown. " It was a predictable, corny plot: Undead people crazily run in stopmotion and feast on the living -- of course, in between the survivors' teen romance, angst and anxiety. Just ...

The powder blue rental bikes are soldiers lined up in formation under a clear, spring sky waiting for twenty-something singles, newlyweds, families with kids who have long ago ditched training wheels, empty-nesters, and those with broken marriages, broken homes and broken dreams. They wait to be used for a slowed down exploration of the life that, up until now, had been under the grips of a long, dormant, cold season. They seem to understand that the cycle of sun, warmth and rain has brought to fruition blooming and reawakening. For a minute, I think I hear them say: Push one pedal, push another and feel your knees do what they were created to do with each revolution. No one is behind you honking and in a hurry to pass on to the next thing. Go ahead, squeeze the brakes. Stop. Now look – and actually see – what you’ve been missing while driving. This season is shorter than you think. For many years, my car was being wife, mother, clocking in, clocking out and trying to c...

My gut is all I have. This doesn’t discount my family, friends or my faith, because my gut instinct is tied inextricably to all of the above. It’s the second voice that whispers a welcome or a warning in the interest of keeping family, friends and faith intact. Teaching my daughter to trust her own gut is critical. I won’t always be here to give her the answers she needs. It’s gut-wrenching because I want to give her the right answers, but I know if I do that, she’ll never learn to trust her gut, or make decisions that grow into convictions. Most of the time, I end up sprawling myself strategically along the sidelines, allowing a toe or a foot or a half-shin to cross over into her decision-making territory while I pray she hears her gut and God’s voice and listens to them both. You’d think I was an expert at gut-listening-gut-heeding. You’d be wrong. Let the record reflect that I turned a blind eye, deaf ear and mute tongue during the relationship that was anything but ...

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...

Going from a small Lutheran grade school to a much, much larger Lutheran high school would have been intimidating had not my best friend since kindergarten been by my side. We scheduled most of our classes together, developed crushes on the same guys and giggled. All the time. At everything and everyone. Especially the guys who were the object of our crushes. We had high hopes for successful auditions into extracurriculars like pompon squad and planned our strategies to a tee – what we’d wear, the routine we’d do and scheduled our auditions back to back. We’d go in front of the coaches and knock ‘em dead. One of us made the pompon squad; and the one wasn’t me. It was devastating to a fragile teen, and the truth is I’d probably shed a tear now if I was telling you about it over a glass of wine. I got over it, but the rejected freshman girl in me still pokes at me during job interviews, or whenever I hit the publish button on a post (like this one), or whenever I submit a piece...

So what is your life’s purpose? It was a question posed in a moderated discussion thrown out to a small group of three. Up until that point, we had been responding to questions in ways we thought would make us stand out as individuals. Or at least I had been, truthfully. The question clogged my thinking and stopped me in my tracks. A s long as I could remember, I heard the perpetual question from my parents, well-meaning friends of my parents, teachers and guidance counselors: What do you want to be when you grow up? Then when I became an adult (seriously, am I really an adult?), my own voice grated in my mind even when it appeared like I had it altogether: What don’t I want to do? What I wanted to be as an adult had everything to do with career, money. What I didn’t want to do was a bar I’d set for making money in a said career. Neither had anything to do with purpose . But yet, there I was almost clocking in at the half-century mark with more years behind me than ahea...

You ever read a headline even though you know the news is going to be bad? I did. The headline was “Many Americans Have No Friends Outside Their Race” based on results from an online poll administered in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version: non-white people have a low percentage of close friends who are white, and white people have an even lower percentage of close friends who are non-white. The west coast is a little better in this regard than the rest of the country and the southern part of the country is worse. DUH. I think the knee-jerk reaction to this is for people to mentally shuffle through their racial rolodex and start ticking off friends who don’t look like them. Heck, I did until I remembered that I’m married to a white guy. (he’s my husband so I guess he counts as a friend, right?) But throw race out of the equation entirely, and you end up with a much bigger question: Of the people we consider friends, do we consider any ...

In the few years under my belt as a hack writer, I’ve read a lot of posts from a lot of other bloggers, hoping to pick up on the things that make a piece great or gripping. This nonprofessional research has turned up one thing: honesty. Honesty, as in Are-you-sure-you-wanna-say-that-out-loud honesty. Yeah. That. The great pieces have always been from writers who speak from their hearts and say things that are ironically funny, sometimes painful, but always glaringly, transparently, and sometimes embarrassingly, true.   Bare. Truth. Transparency. That takes courage akin to walking on a frozen pond during the spring thaw.  Think about it: we’ve all got stories that could make us great writers – even the hacks like me, but it’s all a question of courage: what are we willing to share? Are we willing to bare some uncomfortable things?   In my case, it’s missing my mom. Oh, the coward in me will casually refer to losing her at a young age and wax philosophic a...

That smell. That sour-sweet-earthy smell paired with the bite of the mid-fall wind puts me right there on 52nd street on the north side of town. Even as I write this, I can smell it: it's October, and I can almost feel crabapples from the Grady’s tree pop with a thud under my feet. These were all harbingers of winter – the smell, the bite, the pop. It meant things were dying and temporarily ceding their place to make room for blankets of snow. The dying never bothered me. In fact, I looked forward to the smell and this natural cycle that meant backyard igloos, “face washes” (courtesy of my brother) and snow days off school were on the way. Two years after mid-October of 1988, that smell was a punch in the gut. Tears started streaming from some internal well unknown to me up until that point. Evidently, my mom’s diagnosis of liver cancer, her struggling through it for weeks and her death one week before Thanksgiving had tied that smell to that time . That’s when I sta...

What's the ZIP Code for Crazytown? Because I moved here about a week before Thanksgiving and I still don't know what it is . Almost daily texts, email exchanges with and phone calls to my BFF have convinced me that Crazytown is population two.  She's unpacking boxes right next door to me.  From what I can tell, we're sitting on a prime piece of real estate. Between the two of us, in the past few months, we have: Loaded an offspring into the car and then gotten in to drive.  On the passenger side. When no other licensed driver was around. Wandered around in a parking lot in search of a car. For an hour. Put a dog on "time out" in the crate.  And then freaked out ten minutes later because the dog suddenly disappeared. Been en route to...to...to, uh...someplace and forgotten what the destination of intent was. Seriously considered wearing Pajama Jeans. One of the days, I'm sure we'll move away from Crazytown.  But at least we're her...