The Late Arrival

The rush of cold air and sticky summer heat created a thick fog as I opened the freezer door. It was someplace in the back. Forgotten and alone, but still usable: the whole chicken I planned on making for supper. At a few months shy of turning twenty, this would be my first attempt making a “mom dinner” for the family since my mom’s death a few months back. She’d buy whole chickens – fryers – because they were cheap. This last lone fryer, a rock hard frozen bird, was one of her last purchases and my inheritance. I threw it in the sink and covered it in tepid water to defrost. Some hours later, as I cut away the now defrosted chicken’s shrink-wrapped plastic shroud and gave it an icy cold kitchen faucet shower, I could feel something shaking around inside the cavity. Instantly, my mind’s eye pictured mom’s hands going inside the thing and pulling out tiny, mushy flesh-colored baggies before cutting up the bird for frying. With chin lifted skyward and mouth corners turned down, I...

I work for a nonprofit. More specifically, I raise money for the nonprofit by writing grants, mailing solicitation letters, making calls and tap dancing and singing, if asked. It’s a challenge, I mean, let’s face it: my nonprofit’s not helping puppies, kittens or another awwww-so-cute-invoking constituency. The people coming to us have alcohol and/or drug problems, or struggle to put food on the table, or are unemployed, or have been abused, or are abusing, or are on public assistance, or fall within any range of broke, struggling and searching for a lifeline. Sometimes one person has all of those issues, but more often than not, they’ve got a combination of a few. Issues like those never thrive in a vacuum. We see and hear a lot of the ugly, seedy side , and it isn’t just the ugly seedy people from the ugly seedy side of town who need help. The well-dressed professional from the burbs is just as likely to ring us up or walk through the door as is the tattered person from the slu...

This is mom at about five years old. It was long before she made the vow that changed her name, before balanced meal moderator duty, before matching five different people's multiple pairs of socks post-laundry, and before preventing four kids from strangling each other daily. Even as an adult, it's still hard for me to imagine her as something other than Mom . Maybe she had those days when it was hard for her to imagine it too. I wonder if that season seemed a distant memory as she was elbow-deep in cloth diapers, or waiting at my brother's hospital bedside while he recovered from one his many surgeries at Children's Hospital, or realizing that every thought, every decision she would ever make would be tied to our best interest. I wonder if she giggled at herself amidst the chaos of four children, absent mindedly signing her maiden name on a permission slip, quarterly grade report or some other piece of paper that we kids always seemed to be pushing...

It’s been raining here for about three hundred years. I’ve turned these days that aren’t even colorful enough to be considered gray upside down and tried looking at them from a grateful perspective. You know... sunny thoughts like “This is God’s way of getting us to appreciate little things like sunlight” or “You can’t have rainbows without the rain” or “April showers bring May flowers.” That worked for about two days. Turning on the nightly news didn’t help either. I can’t exactly remember what the "Up Next" teaser was. It might’ve been something about someone killing someone else and how they did it; or maybe it was about what war might break out next, or it could’ve been about a senior citizen getting scammed, but then again maybe it was just something about politicians being at each other’s throats in between filibusters. I frantically switched the channel in search of something lighter…like the Weather Channel . The weather guy, who was donning a stove pipe hat,...

One-third of a woman's life is spent in menopause. One-third . I heard this on a daytime newshow from a "Ladies' Doctor" who works at one of the nation's most respected hospitals. So it's true. Knowing this, and knowing I'm living in some fraction of the dreaded third, you'd think the last thing I'd have done was purge my closet, otherwise known as the Multi-Decade Crypt of 80's and 90's Beloved Relics. Which is the very thing that makes the one-third statistic problematic. My body won't stop changing. I figure I'm in the first third of menopause, which means I'm in perimenopause. My body's doing weird things. Stuff is shifting. Things are flattening out and increasing and decreasing in unpredictable zones at will. The cullling of the jeans made that apparent: some were the Skinny size and some were the Ah-What-the-Heck-I'm-Just-Expandin g Size. Jeans of Broken Dreams I remember buying the Skinny  sizes quit...

It’s taken nearly a week, but I’ve figured it out: Staycations are overrated . And people who happily tell you that their family wanted to staycation are lying on two counts: They wanted  a staycation. No one wants a staycation, but sometimes you must Staycation. That the time off is staycation in the first place. It’s not staycation, it’s time off , and that’s all it is. If a name must be attached to it, it’d be whatever the snappy pun is for “Of course we’d like to leave this crappy weather and spend our time off school and work someplace tropical, but we just can’t aford it." So there it is. My family is on whatever that snappy little pun is, but we’ll call it Staycation because I haven’t come up with a snappy little pun yet. The truth is that we would’ve loved to escape to Jamaica or Disneyland or anyplace without snow, cold or the threat thereof, but it just wasn’t in the cards for us. Or more specifically: the bank. Or our wallets.     I put a good fac...

You’ve got six words to tell me about yourself. Six . Only six. Could you do it? Even though I know myself relatively well, I’m not sure I could because I have a penchant for flowery language and on occasion: bloviating. Six words sure doesn’t leave a lot of space for bloviating. But it leaves just enough space for. The Truth. Now let’s spin the question a little: You’ve got six words to relate your thoughts on race . Six words. No flowers, no bloviating. Just. The Truth. It is possible; and, in fact thousands of people are posting their six word thoughts on race via author and NPR contributor Michele Norris’ Race Card Project . The online project invites everyday people to submit their thoughts, their stories on race. These thoughts and stories are intended to act as a catalyst that stimulates conversations about race, a particularly touchy subject and sometimes sorespot in America. Race makes us shift uneasily in our seats. We dance around it. Don’t talk it about i...

Oh, everyone can sing. That was the encouragement my musician mother gave many a reluctant choir member who claimed “I just can’t sing solos” throughout the years. She nudged me along with the same admonishment when I joined the high school choir and offered the same protest. Mom knew I was keenly aware that my voice was nowhere near the caliber of her classically trained soprano and that of my sister’s pipes with an insane range of tenor to alto to coloratura. Oh, I could carry a tune in a bucket, but it was clear that Carnegie Hall wouldn’t call for a command performance anytime soon. My voice was different from theirs. Not bad. Just different . Fortunately for her musical charges -- and for me -- one of the many wise things about my mom was that she could see the beauty in The Different and open your eyes to see it too. So...her reluctant singers would sing. Including me. Not sounding like her, not sounding like my sister, but sounding like… me. Today,...

What I’m about to say may put me at risk of being drawn and quartered by an angry, torch-wielding mob, but before I go on, a preface: I love women. In fact, I am a woman who comes from a long line of women. My mother was a woman, as was her mother before her, and her mother’s mother’s and as far as we all know, so was her mother’s mother’s mother. However when I found out that March 8 was International Women’s Day , I rolled my eyes and sighed heavily. I was not moved nor was my heart aflutter. I get it. We’re women. We function and think differently than men. We don’t well up at the mere thought of a male dog being neutered, and yes we are aware that our monthly hormonal shifts make no sense to anyone, including us – so don’t expect logic and/or ask for logic during those times. We accept that, with each passing year, our breasts slide downward, yet we sojourn on wearing constricting contraptions to veil gravity’s sag, er…I mean pull…uh, perhaps effect is a better choice o...

What did he say he wanted to do on Saturday again? Jamie's list of to-do's scrolled through my mind as I drove to work: a trip to the store here, an errand there, another errand across town, maybe sledding, maybe work on the basement redo. Next thing I know, it'll be Sunday which means church, errands after church, maybe a nap. Then dinner. Then Monday. Again. My rant was interrupted by the slippery road indicator light blinking at me as my tires spun a through a four-inch snow "drift." Overtired, I giggled at the thought of a four-inch snow drift and remembered the time I got caught in a real blizzard. In 1996, I was a faithful bus rider (faithful because I had no car, but that's another story). From our bachelorette apartment, it took a forty-five minute ride east on the Route 57 downtown, then another twenty-minute stretch northward on the Route 30 to my job at St. Mary's Hospital. At the end of the day, the rides were reversed. This particul...

Besides “ Swamp People ” and “ Mad Men ,” my favorite show is “ Scandal .” Olivia Pope is the main character who’s known for “erasing” Beltway bigwigs’ career-threatening indiscretions. Impossibly beautiful, wicked-smart, put-together and cool as a cucumber, Olivia’s also in an on-again, off-again, rain-forest-steamy affair with the President of the United States . The married President of the United States. The white , married President of the United States. And he is yummy. But I digress. Olivia Pope is black, which in this context, is an important fact. Personally, part of the show’s appeal is that color is immaterial to an already absorbing plot line that never descends into cheap racial characterizations or stereotypes. But I’m betting race will become an issue in the coming weeks. Not from within the show itself, but from the fans. Here’s why: Olivia and the POTUS have put their relationship on ice (sort of) and a new love interest has appeared on the scene for our heroine....

At the risk of sounding like an Unromantic-Grinchy-Hag, I’m going to say it: Enough with the Valentine’s Day badgering already! But, Rochelle you say, I thought you were happily married and living the dream with a precious daughter and adorable little dog? Well, yes all of that’s true, but this year, the Valentine’s Day crush has, well…crushed the romance right out of the holiday. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’m worn out on what peddlers peddle as “love.” Every card I find makes me throw up in my mouth a little: “To My Darling Husband, I need you in my life, in my world; I can’t live without you…” REALLY? Jamie and I love each other, but come on: we were both alive for thirty-plus years before we even knew the other existed. So the “can’t live without you” part. Spare me. Please. Or the “Every kiss begins with Kay” commercials that make every woman who’s been in a relationship longer than five minutes believe that this February 14 will be The Day he pops ...

Ahh, the flu season. When adults are reduced to crying out for their mommas and sales of hand sanitizer skyrocket. There’s nothing like it; and there are definitely distinct types of flu sufferers. Recognize any of these? The Wounded Animal In the opening scene of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch shoots a rabid dog. The dog was perfectly fine before the disease, but once he contracted it, he went mad and terrorized the town, attacking people at will – even those who might have offered help. The Wounded Animal sick person is kind of like this. He/she is a normally upbeat, go-getter puppy-like being. But when sickness hits, look out. The flu won’t make them go mad. It makes them go crabby; and The Wounded Animal snaps, bites and growls at everyone around them. Recognizing The Wounded Animal : They respond to “How are you” with guttural noises, grunts. The asker is often heard saying with a puzzled look “All I did was ask how he/she was doing.” Handling The Wounded An...

“He/She just can’t see the forest for the trees.” That’s an old saying that means someone’s missing the big picture because they’re too bogged down in the details. Enter Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman. This guy planted a whole bunch of trees in a press release  stating“"Almost no black people today care about Kwanzaa -- just white left-wingers who try to shove this down black people's throats in an effort to divide Americans…" I thought it was stupidly funny; but in the meantime, not everyone shared my sense of humor. There’s been outcry on television, radio, Facebook --furor over his feeble attempt at dismantling Kwanzaa, attacking Black traditions and whether the man is a racist or not. I don’t know if Senator Grothman is a racist, but what I do know is that Kwanzaa sure as heck isn’t going anywhere. The Senator's words are just that. Words. Hurtful to some who cherish the holiday. But just words.  Silly words . So, let’s look past the trees here jus...

The New Year is a few short days away and the "Year in Review" lists are coming fast and furious, as are "The People We Lost" montages. Neither tells us much, really. They serve as much purpose as Chris Farley's in-depth interview with Paul McCartney. We're like Sir Paul: we know what happened this year. We were there . What I wish those lists would relate are the things we've learned from the things that have happened. Seriously, I mean what are the take-aways from the Kardashians' latest breakup, or from reminsicing about the year's bitter bipartisianship, or even from Whitney Houston's untimely death? That we love celebrity soap operas? That we're sick of campaign ads? That drugs are bad? This is all old news. In fact, it shouldn't even be called news, it oughta be called Olds . Granted, there is something fascinating about looking over the year and remembering, but what if we as individuals came up with our own lists? What ...

In between swallowing back the crying lump and blinking back the tears, I’m fighting back the urge to scoop my daughter up from school. Even as I’m heartsick, nervous and wondering if there’s any place safe or sacred anymore, my kid’s at school . Going about her ten-year-old business. Either chatting when she’s not supposed to be chatting; or most likely, making her dad’s birthday card right now. The last thing on her mind is a lunatic desecrating her school – a place that Jamie and I consider to be a zone of safety – with a loaded gun. I hate that the consideration or threat of it happening even makes it onto my radar screen. I hate that right now, this tragedy is already evolving into battle of special interests. I hate that screaming “Mama!!” or “Daddy!!” isn't enough to scare off the nightmarish bogie men of real life . As hard as it is, I know I can’t let her see me being heartsick and nervous about this crazy, scary world. So until I pick her up, maybe I’ll...

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...

It’s beginning to become uncomfortably routine: disaster strikes by either an act of God or deranged person, and then we see them: the better angels in all of us. Celebrities hop on fundraising bandwagons for humanitarian organizations, “everyday heroes” do valiant deeds to sustain people in the hour of need and rival politicians beat their swords into plowshares as the rest of us look on and wonder why it takes a tragedy for people to simply. Do. The Right. Thing. At least I do. I mean, why is it so hard to help? To really look someone in the eye who’s in distress – even a little distress – and help? It’s not for lack of people who are hurting, that’s for sure. Just go to the store. Park your car in the first open space. Grumble to yourself that the space is ten miles away from the entrance and that you’re stuck hauling groceries alone. After working all week. Again. You see her, a woman about your age. She’s crying.   Weeping. It’s that familiar cry as if she’s just fou...