Fallen Angel

Last Monday, just as the macaroni and cheese finally reached its melty perfection, my youngest daughter tumbled down the stairs. It sounded much like you would imagine it sounding, sort of an unusual bumpity noise, followed by a cement bag-like smack hitting the ground. And then a pause, an unnatural quiet. Then followed by howling, screams exhaled from the diaphragm, a deluge of salty tears, and lung filled sobs. My husband and I were in the kitchen, he complaining about his day and pouring some wine while I stirred and mixed and set out plates and filled glasses. Minutes before, we called our girls to dinner. One remained safely in the bathroom while the other heeded our call too rapidly and was now a crumpled pile at the bottom of the stairs.

She looked much like she did as a toddler, only with the legs of a supermodel, all gangly and long and jutting. She is past the age where she is easily scooped up and carried from one room to the other; now bending from the knees, not the waist, is the key to successful hoisting. But hoist we did, since we didn’t yet know the extent of the damage. We waddled our way to the sectional sofa, propped up her foot, and soothed her tears. I wrapped an ice pack in a dish towel and brought it to her. She calmed down enough to let us know her head was fine, and her pain was limited to below her knee on her left foot, the epicenter being her left ankle. No significant swelling. No bone protruding from flesh. No shade of purple blooming on pale skin.

“She’s fine,” my husband declared. “Let’s eat.” “Don’t you think we should take her to the ER and get it X-rayed?” I asked. “Can I eat dinner here on the couch?” my daughter asked me innocently through a veil of tiny tears. I got out her Dora the Explorer television tray and brought a plate of macaroni and cheese and chunks of fruit and plastic cup of ice water to her.

I had reason to believe we needed to get that leg checked out by a medical doctor and not just our family dentist, who was even more ready for that glass of wine he poured. My sister C had a broken leg when she was a little girl. She was about 5 and ¾, which in my memory was more like 5 and six dimes, but I was only three and had not yet learned about fractions or money. As the story goes, she and my other sister, L, were playing outside on Christmas Eve, while I was being forced to take a nap. They were hanging out on the picnic table, one of those allegedly redwood jobs with the benches. L demonstrated how she was able to walk from the table to the bench without falling. C attempted to do it too. She missed, however, and her leg went between the table and the bench. The rest of the story gets a little sketchy from here, only because I was young and it didn’t happen to me, so I am not one hundred percent how events unfolded. My mother took C to the emergency room, where her leg was X-rayed, inconclusively. The ER doctor, who probably had young children of his own that he resented for some reason, advised my mother that my sister was faking it and to make her walk. So what started as a hairline fracture on Christmas Eve turned into a compound fracture the following day. Merry Christmas! My sister spent the next six weeks in traction at a children’s hospital, becoming very familiar with bedpans and an assortment of games without dice and puzzles missing pieces. My other sister, L, and I were not allowed to visit her, which makes no sense since she was in a children’s hospital and we were also children. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was three, after all. I just assumed she was never coming home because the house was dark a lot and we stopped eating dinner together.

I didn’t want to be the mom who made my kid walk on her broken leg until it went from a little broken to a lot broken. I also didn’t want to be the Munchausen by proxy mom, running to the emergency room every time my klutzy kid takes a header. So I did nothing. Well, I did ice and Motrin, and coddling and constant “Are you okay?” checks. But no lengthy trips to the hospital. No after hours calls to the pediatrician. Just a little TLC and a lot of self doubt.

One week later, she is fine, and I am not my mother. Thank God for both.

Driving Home

What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation that took place behind my back on the car ride home from school yesterday. But it could be every day.

(Music playing, the iPod in shuffle mode.)

Me: How was school today?

S: Good. KB wasn’t in class today. (KB is the kid who bullies S on an almost daily basis.)

Me: Great. Glad you had a good day.

E: That is one fat taxi driver. (We all look out the windows on the right side of the care, where next to us is a taxi, indeed being driven by a rather fat man.)

S and E take out their magnadoodles, a magnetic drawing toy, and began to draw pictures. This is their favorite car distraction, and we keep the doodles in the seat backs so they have easy access.

S: Look! I drew a mud hut! ( S tries to shove her magna doodle in my face. I quickly peer at what I think is a coconut wearing a wig and then look back at the road. )

Me: A what?

S: A mud hut. From Kenya.

(We switch to the left lane to pass an older gentleman riding a bicycle in the right lane. He is not wearing a helmet.)

Me: What an idiot.

S: Who’s an idiot?

E: That old bald guy on the bike. He’s not wearing a helmet.

S: Well that’s dumb. He’s gonna get hit by a car and skin his bald head on the road.

E: Skittlehead?

S (laughing): No, skin his head. Like you skin your knee.

(E draws a stick person with a big round head on her magna doodle.)

E: Look! (She holds up her magna doodle.) Skittlehead!

(S and E erupt in laughter.)

(We change lanes again to pass a Buick going below the speed limit in the left lane.)

E: Figures. Old lady.

S: Ha! Old ladies are slow.

S and E started to talk about tapeworms, which was the subject of E’s latest science book report and accompanying poster. I have had enough talk about tapeworms of late, so I stopped listening to the back seat conversation.

Candy is Dandy

I sat in a waiting room, waiting (duh!) for my appointment, and next to me on the table was a candy dish filled with Jolly Ranchers. I am very judgmental of candy dishes, in that special way I am about most everything. Only certain kinds of candy should be offered in them, and very few people seem to understand the art behind a good candy dish. The trick is seasonal and individually wrapped. Please share that with everybody. The one next to me, like most candy dishes, was only half right.

My in-laws always have a candy dish or two set out, filled with plain M&Ms. It never changes, M&Ms, day in, day out. My children cannot keep their hands out of it, and if I catch them sneaking from the one in the den, they just slip past me and hit the one on the kitchen counter. Those candy dishes are unsanitary, with everyone sticking their dirty mitts into the dish, touching all the candy shells of the other M&Ms as they help themselves to just one more.

Growing up, I had an elderly neighbor who always had a candy dish sitting out, filled with ribbon candy. One piece of ribbon candy. Due to the constant humidity of northeast Florida, any unwrapped candy always became one giant piece cemented together by sugar and moisture. A chisel would not have loosened up a hunk. Add to that the fact that she probably had that same candy sitting out for thirty years, and there was no way anyone’s hands or teeth (or in her case, dentures) were strong enough to break that ribbon candy down. The fact that the ribbon candy was older than me and inedible never stopped that old woman from offering it to me every time I went over there to look at her husband’s gnarled hands and milky cataracts, which fascinated me when I was eight and bored.

The idea of a communal candy dish in public is even more nauseating, as if the plastic spoon inserted into the jumble of multi colored butter mints actually keeps anyone from passing their E Coli and other unnamed diarrhea causing bacteria to the unsuspecting victims who were only trying to mask the garlic on their breath. One of my friends refers to these after dinner palate cleansers as “fecal mints”, and anytime I almost slip and grab a spoonful of sweet melt in your mouth mintiness, I remember what is tagging along on its way through my digestive tract.

Seasonal and individually wrapped. If it’s almost Easter, then things should be egg shaped and wrapped in brightly colored foil. Halloween and Christmas are easy, with the plethora of snack sized goodies in appropriate colors. And really, you can’t go wrong with something unusual, like Chinese Hello Kitty candies or Israeli candies you get from specialty stores. Everyone wants to try candy they never saw before. But no one wants to eat those pale blue mints and butterscotch discs your grandmother had in the hobnail milk glass dish on her coffee table. That goes double for starlight mints, which might be traditional, but show how cheap and unoriginal you really are.

I dug around in that candy dish next to me, looking for anything beyond the four Jolly Rancher flavors. Grape, watermelon, apple, and raspberry. I would never eat those, not even when I was a kid. Yuck. I saw a strawberry candy, wrapped in its cute strawberry cellophane, and passed that too. Those are only used for fillers in gift baskets from Swiss Colony. And finally, on the bottom, was a caramel Nip. Score!

Clearing the Air

Congratulate me, we have a new addition to the household. Its name is the Blue Air 601 B Purifying System, and it looks like a giant computer. Not giant like a NASA mainframe circa 1960’s, but bigger than the one hiding under your desk.

Honestly, I don’t really know what it does or why it is here. I should know, because I am sure my husband told me all about it, on more than one occasion. But like a family dog, I don’t hear all the words, only the ones that involve something related to me: Blah blah blah (my name) blah blah blah (food) blah blah(chocolate) blah blah (30 Rock is coming on). So I am sure we had multiple conversations about the Blue Air 601B Purifying System, which involved a lot of blah blah and ended with me saying, “Sure honey, go ahead and order it.”

I didn’t remember me saying that until the Fed Ex guy showed up with a box that I couldn’t lift. He was kind enough to bring it in the house, much nicer than the way he normally leaves things in a puddle on the one side of the house we never look at, only to find it at such a late date we feel like we are unveiling a time capsule. The box was big and heavy, and it sat on the floor of my den for a few days with the cats perched atop it like gargoyles until my husband removed its many outer casings.

The Blue Air 601 B Purifying System is now a regular member of the family. It moves easily from room to room on its quiet casters, and you never know where the little imp will turn up. Well, it is easily moved, but it does not move freely from room to room. Rather, it is placed in various locations in the house by my spouse. But I am not convinced. During the day, while the kids are at school, it hangs out in one of their rooms. The other day, I saw it out of the corner of my eye while I was taking a shower. One night it was in the bonus room with me while I watched TV. I didn’t hear it laugh, but nothing good was on anyway, so I wasn’t laughing either. Last night, I found it with its back to me against my bedroom wall like it had been put in time out, no doubt for spying on the rest of the family.

I am pretty sure it is supposed to be cleaning the air in the house, “filtering” or something along those lines, since we all have annoying allergies. It has a HEPA filter, I am told, which I think means something better than it won’t share my medical records without my consent, and it is expensive, so it must be good. But that’s the thing. How do I know it is doing a good job? How do I know it is doing anything? When I run my dryer, I can empty the lint trap and know it did its job. The dish washer leaves spots all over the glasses, so I know it ran. But with the Blue Air 601B Purifying System, it is a leap of faith. A $499 leap of faith. So far the only thing it cleaned out is my discretionary fund. Hell, it couldn’t even clean up after itself when it moved in.

I am hopeful that at some point in the near future my husband will violate the Blue Air 601B Purifying System by removing its filter and showing me how dirty the air was but isn’t anymore, and aren’t we glad it came to live with us? It had better look like one of those Takara detox foot pads when he does, or else I am going to demand its return. Or at the very least, that it wait until I am done showering before coming in the bathroom.

Snow Daze

I am looking out the window and watching my daughters play with what is left of the snow. Our first and only snow of the season occurred last night, and less than twenty four hours later, it is all done. We got about four to six inches of the powdery stuff, which is a major weather event in this part of the country. Roads are impassable. Schools and government offices are closed. Power is out for some, and staying warm and dry seems like a distant memory, kind of like a 401K. Of course, by now, right before dinnertime the day after the snow actually fell, the roads in my neighborhood are practically dry.

When I was a kid growing up in Florida, we didn’t have snow days. We didn’t have hurricane days either. We went to school, day in, day out, unless there was a power outage that caused the classrooms to get hot enough to cook our little brains. They couldn’t have us dropping like flies, even though it was in the era before lawsuits. Here in South Carolina, three snow days are built into the school year. We usually use one of them, and today is that day.

My kids started the day by waking up about fifteen minutes earlier than they normally do, and before I ever have to wake them for school, excited by the Currier and Ives image out the window. (As an aside, my grandmother once referred to a beautiful snowy vista as a Burl Ives, showing either the depths of her dementia or a deep love of the Rankin/ Bass classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”) My theory is the blinding white reflection of sun off the snow covered lawn made it seem like noon on their little sleeping eyelids. Whatever the reason, we had to get up and fed so we could go out to play.

Now, as I have mentioned too many times already, it only snows once a year, so it’s not like we have actual snow gear to put on. Only one of my daughters has functional boots, but they aren’t snow boots, they are rain boots, and they are two sizes too small. The other one has red suede boots, which she tries to wear every time there is some sort of puddle on the ground. They are also two sizes too small, but I am not the one with the blisters, so what do I care? Our mismatched assortment of mittens might not even be ours. I regard their mittens as the school lost and found equivalent of the “have a penny-need a penny” dish at the convenience store. The rest of the family has hats, but I don’t, so I wear a horrible pair of beige ear muffs, the same color of undercooked biscuits ,that refuse to stay on my huge skull. Nothing is water proof or insulated, so going out to play never lasts longer than twenty minutes before hypothermia and potential toe loss sets in.

After we finally trudged outside like a pack of hobos, we tried our hand at making a snowman. Our snow wasn’t the good kind that you can pack nicely into sparkly orbs. Ours was powdery on top and crusty underneath, since it rained for hours before the snow started and stopped and started again. Not good snowman snow. Instead of Frosty, we had these piles that looked like termite mounds protruding all over the lawn. We don’t sled, as that would involve owning a sled, but we do have one of those worthless plastic saucers that won’t slide down the gently sloping driveway if anything over 40 pounds sits on it. What used to launch the kids across the street into the neighbor’s lawn now sat immobile under their growing asses. Next came the obligatory snow ball fight. Again, this was not packing snow. But if we dug down deep enough with our unfortunate mittens, we got these giant hunks of crusty ice we then lobbed at each other. Until, as happens every year, one rock of snow-ice was thrown by one child too close to the other child’s eye, which meant tears from the injured party as well as the one my husband yelled at. All that took the requisite twenty minutes, followed by another ten minutes of removing all the wet clothing in the garage, followed by more yelling when my hardwood floors resembled Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes after everyone trudged back inside.

Coming in from some intense snow related injury means only one thing to my family: hot cocoa. I used to make it from scratch, measuring out the cocoa, blending it with milk, heating it slowly and lovingly over the stove, whisking the whole time until a delicate froth was achieved before crowning the whole concoction with dainty mini marshmallows. Well, fuck that shit. Instead I found some stale packets of old cocoa from somebody’s birthday party two years ago and topped it with mini marshmallows that were not only expired but possibly petrified. Jet puffed, my ass. The rest of the day was spent trying to not fight with each other as we each slowly died from boredom.

Snow days. One hour of actual enjoyment of snow, followed by twenty three hours of “Shining” level cabin fever. And thanks to an email alert about another day off, I now know we get to do it all again tomorrow, only without the actual snow. Somewhere in Pennsylvania is a groundhog laughing his ass off. I think I hate him as much as the squirrels.