The Late Arrival

"What's that, mom?" Georgia asked as she pointed at my forearm. It was a bump, a little mole that appeared when I was carrying her and has lived there since. Thinking about how my body changed during those nine months brought a smile to my face and I explained that it was a "present" she gave me before she even got here. A year or two later, someone else asked about it and I told the story. Concerned, the person asked if it had gotten bigger, or if it hurt. They suggested it might be worth having a doctor look at just to be sure it wasn't cancerous. Geez. I hadn't thought of melanoma. The doc checked it out and it was the harmless present as I first suspected. Even so, I began to play it safe and religiously slathered on sunscreen from that day forward. Now enter Donald Sterling - He of bazillions of dollars who flaunts a girlfriend while married and airs bigoted, heartfelt rhetoric, He who has been sued for housing discrimination - is like my m...

A little over one year ago for the kid barely in his twenties. A month ago for the forty-nine year old rock star’s girlfriend. Barely a week ago for the twenty-two year-old entrepreneur. Come July, it’ll be seven months for the thirty-some year old mom of little ones not yet in their teens. Sometimes death by suicide makes headlines. Sometimes, the loved ones drowning in its wake are the only ones who know about it. When it’s a headline, count on news anchors to assume a pseudo-sad tone as they report the tragedy with heads cocked to one side, staring through the camera’s lens and into the eyes of whoever is on the other side, and asking Why? …and then moving on to the next news bite for popular consumption. "There are such things as dumb questions, and in suicide’s shadow, Why is the dumbest of question of them all." Answers to Why are never productive. They don’t restart the heart, cause oxygenated blood to course through the body to...

But. It’s the lovechild of Truth and Denial , second cousin to Nevertheless . A simple three letter word that takes up less than a half-inch of nine point Arial font. Easily read and pronounced unlike the billion dollar, multisyllabic words. And so we use it a lot. Maybe the sheer convenience of But is why we default to it so often. At the same time, And - another short, easily recognizable word - is used sparingly. I can’t help but think the world would be a better place with less Buts and more Ands . With But , everything is a mutually exclusive event, and everything is an either/or proposition. This pot roast is good, BUT it needs a little seasoning. Can’t you just see crotchety Aunt Sally (or whoever is notorious for critiquing your meals) grimacing as her words mask her intent to say your pot roast is barely palatable and far beyond the help of a little seasoning? And , on the other hand, is a connector. In the land of And , things happen in tandem and mutually excl...

There is no perfect time. There isn't a certain time when things settle down or the pieces all fit together. Things are what they are when they are. The Mallard Duck Couple already knows this, as did all the other Mallard Duck Couples before them, I suppose. I only know this because I watched them as we walked by a narrow stream. Standing in the stream's current was a hip-wadered fly fisherman. Oblivious to water bubbling over rocks, gurgling past driftwood and moving through and around his hip waders, he gracefully cast and re-cast lines creating more ripples on which sunshine could dance. That's when I noticed the Mallard Duck Couple. They weren't faring well in the current as fly-guy was. Beneath the water, their little orange feet were visible, and paddling fast and furiously against it, even as their bodies couldn't help but bob and dance along atop the water to the stream's rhythms. But soon, their feet joined their bodies and gave in to the...

We needed paper plates. Not one thousand paper plates. Just enough to tide us through the days when we don't feel like washing dishes. That would be a quick trip to Walgreen's. From parking, to running in, to checking out, it'd be ten minutes. Tops. Which is perfect, because despite my near constant presence at The Store, capital "T" capital "S," I hate shopping. From making the list, to scavenging for items matching the coupons painstakingly clipped, to throwing the stuff in the cart, to waiting in the checkout line, to lobbing the stuff from the cart onto the conveyor belt, to stuffing it all into the car, to hauling it into the house, only to pack it away where it magically disappears into the cupboards, fridge and freezer: I loathe shopping, and also, especially The Store, capital "T" capital "S." Doesn't help that the place is one square block, and nine times out of ten, if I'm there for even four things, all four th...

It came to me in the space between our commode and bathtub, which is about six inches in older, smaller homes like ours. The area rug had been removed to expose the tile floor for its weekly scrubdown. (If you're thinking What type of slovenly person only does this weekly , stop reading here because you're way beyond my pay grade.) After gathering a plethora of multi-colored, pungent toxins, with my right hand bracing the tub's edge and the left bracing the porcelain throne, I took the knee and began scrubbing, rinsing, re-scrubbing and rinsing again over the pop and crackle of patellas, rubellas, nutellas and other assorted bones. Soon my forehead was in this tight spot, around three inches from the floor. Geez, it probably looks like I'm praying down here or something . I   shook off the thought and craned my neck to inspect the underside of the bowl. Wait a minute...really?  Wasn't I just in a board meeting a couple of weeks ago, spouting off a super-import...

Sometimes second-guessing is a good thing. Yesterday was one of those times. Jamie read the post in which I borderline ranted about what I perceived as my daughter and her basketball team being racially painted with a broad brush. Even though I don't take back what I said, our conversation was what I needed to self-reflect. I was angry about Street Ball being used to describe how our daughter's team played, and to an extent - the individuals on the team. Now, in my mind, Street Ball is just code for poor and black. What I didn't know, and what Jamie told me, is that the term can also be used to describe a certain type of aggressive play. I don't know Rochelle...maybe she was just using the term just for what it is and not any kind of code. Maybe it's just what she really meant.  I hadn't thought about that. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she brought her experience with that as a technical term and used it in this particular instance while I, on...

Does anger have stages? You know, like the five stages of grief? Maybe there's just two: the Anger itself and Forgiveness. I figure Forgiveness either happens quickly and replaces the anger, or it slowly sidles up to anger and co-exists alongside it. Forgive and Remember. It can happen. Right now, I'm angry. Forgiveness is inching its way to my anger but right now, that emotion is so wide, it's not leaving a sliver of space for forgiveness. Not just yet anyway. Georgia's little school participates in basketball tournaments against other little schools, some suburban and some city-based, like hers.  It's great for these kids to interact with each other, especially since our community is very segregated: whites in one enclave -- many in the suburbs, blacks in another - many in the city and a few sprinkled in the suburbs, then Hispanic/Latinos over there, and Asians over here.  Tonight, they played a suburban school -- mostly white. Georgia's te...

It's no secret that I'm no fan of Valentine's Day . Grocery store card aisles bathed in red and pink give me a nervous twitch. Despite that, each year I find myself standing there on Valentine's Day after work skimming through picked-over cards in a panic. Maybe its because they're all picked over, but it seems the only ones I find are the You are the air I breathe and I can't live without you variety. For whom are these cards written anyway? God? And do I really want to tell Jamie via Hallmark that I think of him as little more than a glorified ventilator? Sappy love song lyrics like When we're hungry, love will keep us alive evoke a knee-jerk response of No, when I'm hungry I don't want a big bite of love, I want some food. Then there are lyrics that, in the name of love, write checks that no one's butt can afford to cash like The Fabulous Thunderbirds'   I would walk ten miles on my hands and knees just to come home and kiss y...

Both eyes welled up and I blinked back the throat-lump that, if released, would send me into an ugly, snotting, snorting cry. Darnit, Disney did it again. How could they have made me cry over a little egged shaped robot crying over the death of another trash compactor robot? Outisde of a WALL-E or Eva said in robot voices, I don't even think they actually had a conversation during the entire  movie . But there I was, on the verge of boo-hoo-crying in a theater over them. Another Disney movie had me believing a house could fly if only enough balloons were tethered to it. That same movie had me seriously considering the plausibility of science developing a collar that could translate dogs' thoughts into words...and wondering what our Charley would say once we got such a collar for him. That one made me cry too. Yet another movie had me enchanted by the absolute beauty of paper lanterns floating up into a dark, star-spangled sky to commemorate the birthday of a lost...

There's nothing special about our neighborhood. No quaint cul de sacs. Just streets that run north to south, sandwiched in between two busy avenues. It's a throwback place -- a hub of post-WWII homes and tree-lined streets whose limbs form a sort of cathedral ceiling. It's a silent night neighborhood . After dark, outside of a few who power-walk dogs begging them to go potty or poop and the occasional car slowly driving north or south, everyone's inside at nighttime. At midnight, Jamie and I were driving that occasional car, returning from a date night while Georgia was at a sleepover. The sky was clear, snowflakes sprinkled past the streetlamps and the streets and sidewalks were empty. Modern Love came on the radio as we began making the slight ascent to our block. We sang along and I knew we'd have to abandon it and our singing by the time we parked. We reached a stop sign at the top of the hill, and Jamie checked for any occasional westbound or eastbo...

The ice ruts in our narrow alley are at least a foot deep. I fought-drove through these uneven passages, trying to strike a balance between keeping the tires aligned within them but not so aligned that the car gets stuck in one. The vehicle and I successfully made it to our destination. The next step was gingerly angling the car across the ruts and backing it into a one-car garage that already bulges with Jamie's many "treasures" without breaking a side mirror. Somewhere in between the first or fourth attempt, I thought about how crazy it is that 22 ° feels balmy in comparison to the minus 22° it was two days ago. And that's when I checked out and drifted back to the day when... ...the air was a thick hot blanket that wrapped itself around each limb, making clothes cling and hair fall limp – or in my case, kink up even more. Smoky pregnant clouds above seemed close enough to touch. They promised rain but refused to deliver, as if intimidated by the sunshine...

A comedian once said that meteorologists have the only job where you can be: evasive: There's probably maybe kind of sort of about a 50% chance of rain ambiguous: We'll have 2 to 12 inches of snow... and wrong: Looks like the storm we've been anticipating just missed us... and still keep your job. I should've been a meteorologist. But this isn't a time for ruing over unfulfilled wishes. The weather guys and girls are predicting a Mini Ice Age. Shouldn't come as a shock. I grew up here, it's just winter in the Midwest. But despite that, I still had my undies in a bundle with the incessant cold-weather-warning harping. In fact, I got depressed. Starting wishing we had deeper pockets so we could flee to someplace warm; and then seriously considered going into debt so we could do it. Finally, I decided that neither wishing nor being buried under a stack of bills were viable options, so I did the next best thing: perused warm-weathe...

The coming New Year's been tapping my shoulder, pulling on my blouse and prattling and tattling at me like the people with whom I live as soon as foot number two crosses the threshold of our house. My response to the New Year is much like the one I give to those two people:  I swat and whisper at it Okay, okaaaay...Let me get my feet under me and then I can pay attention to you. I just need one moment. Just one. Please. That was pretty much last year's response to the incoming year too. In all rights, I owe an apology to 2013. Poor thing, it's been waiting for me to get my act together, develop some sense of clarity and attend to its needs like I promised way back in late Aught '12, but that still hasn't happened. I'm sorry, Outgoing Year, I really am. So, to the New Year: I feel you there with your tapping, pulling, prattling, tattling and pushing me to attend to your needs. I understand you think you need some goals or resolutions; and I get...

The easy way. The path of least resistance. Admittedly, it's my route of preference. Conflict? Confrontation? Any sense of discomfort, and I'll go over the hills and through the woods and three times around grandmother's house to avoid it. Especially at this time of year, the easy thing is kvetching about the endless running, the needle on the scale that threatens to inch ever forward, the expectations put upon us by our kids, our significant others and ourselves. Not to mention the music. Which I did. Right here . In this post . But sometimes you have to dig and do the hard work. The antithesis of the easy way. I mean get dirt under your fingernails to find the joy -- even in the holiday music, since most of it beckons us to joy, happiness and peace. Peace in the midst of reality. For me, that reality is having terminal illness and death in some shape or form breathing down my back and lurking around every corner. Too many people in my circle will have one less ...

After Thanksgiving, a birthday party last week, another birthday party this week and Christmas coming up next week, I am officially overwhelmed. It'd take more time than I have to explain what yet needs to be done and if you're like me, you're probably overwhelmed and don't have the time nor inclination to read it all anyway. But even with an overflowing plate, I still love the Christmas season -- from setting up the Christmas tree that we got two weeks ago and decorated only yesterday, to lighting bayberry scented candles, to every Rankin & Bass Christmas Special, and the music. Oh, the music. Songs have a way of putting you in the Christmas spirit, warming your heart and next thing you know, you're hugging a stranger in the elevator. Okay, um...maybe that's just me. But alas, all songs are not created equal; and the following Christmas songs inspire and awaken anything but peace on earth and goodwill to men. 1. Christmas Shoes : This song makes my ...

The little blue (or was it pink) line inched across the tiny screen on the stick. That stick. The plastic stick sold by the drug store that tells you whether you'll be taking another person home in around nine months to live with you for the next eighteen years or so. I saw the line and walked away. Maybe it was a fluke. Came back in ten minutes. Still there. Yep. I was gonna have a baby. I don't say the politically correct We were gonna have a baby , because while We would be parents, only my part of We would host the cause of the little blue (or pink) line. Feed it. Expand as it expanded and ultimately usher it into this world. The line was a surprise and I sat and thought...and panicked. The reality of knowing that I could barely go through three months straight of not locking myself out of the house, much less be in charge of another human's formative years of emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual welfare hit me. Hard. Fine, I'd have a  vodka...

I can't remember it. It's in addition to packing and taking lunch instead of buying the over-priced-over-greasy-over-daily-caloric-intake quick lunch. Which is also in addition to remembering to sign Georgia's homework assignment book before we leave for the morning. And that's on top of remembering to remind her to take the envelope with the signed class trip permission slip inside. Oh, and the bottle of water. I've slacked off in drinking water lately, so I definitely have to remember that. But I can't remember The Other Thing. The Other Thing that doesn't have to be at my fingertips, but it'd be nice if it were at least in reaching distance of my mind's eye. Can you remember it? You know, that Other Thing. Or maybe it was a feeling...or a time. Like the time when you broke out into a run, and I mean a full-fledged-out-and-out Run . Not because you were pushing yourself. Not because you were proving something to anyone. But you ran because...

Advertisements would have us believe a lot of things. That potty training will be a fun experience for parents and kids alike if we use technology to do it. If you've potty trained a child -- or even a puppy -- there's no app, tablet, laptop or gadget that can make it fun. Yeah. An iPad on a potty chair. Fun for everyone! That we'll have wrinkle-free radiant faces after a few applications of the right lotions and potions. Listen, you can butter up your face in every kind of oil, spackle and even acid, but wrinkles will forever be there. Don't ask how I know that. Yeah. Not. Of course, there's more. Achieving a lean, hard-bodied physique after just sprinkling magic fairy dust on food without exercise or change in diet. Irresistible magnetism to the opposite sex because of wearing the right scent, driving the right car or even drinking the right top shelf vodka. I've decided that Nutella should be added to the list too. No, not because of clai...