Secret Santa

My cat, Moshe, is really getting in the holiday spirit. Today he left me a present on the floor of my laundry room.

He apparently had a little trouble with constipation or a clinger-on, if you will, so he decided to drag his asshole all over the floor until the turd was finally dislodged. Nothing makes you happier to have a pet than finding a shit smear across the floor, ending in a piece of crap, like a period on the most disgusting sentence ever written.

In his defense, he can’t really wipe. No thumbs. The struggle is real. He did the only thing he knew to do, the poop scoot, and the worst part is, I knew something was up when I heard him getting out of the litter box. I was downstairs, sitting on the couch for ten minutes of alleged “me” time, while upstairs there was a great ruckus going on, with the sound of the kitty litter door flap opening and closing and then some crazed running around the house, cat claw toenails scrambling against the hardwoods.

I didn’t discover the scene of the crime until a few hours later when I went up to the laundry room to transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer. I cleaned up the mess and then disinfected the floor and the bamboo slat rug which he defiled, wondering where else he may have rested his cat ass after his largely unsuccessful bowel movement. So far it seems an isolated incident.

I am not surprised if he is feeling a bit sluggish and irregular this holiday season. He has been feasting regularly on Christmas ornaments from the day we put up the tree.

We have one of those fake that we decided looks real trees, pre-strung with white lights.  My husband adds a modern version of old-fashioned bubble lights, and then we all decorate with our eclectic assortment of ornaments while trying not to kill each other. We get new ornaments in our stockings every year, snails for me, robots and dentists for my husband, ballet related ornaments for the younger dancy teen, and owls and sharks for the older and more difficult teen. A large number of our ornaments are glass, and we make a point of hanging them up higher on the tree, ensuring each one is secure on its artificial branch. Towards the bottom of the tree are the unbreakable and handmade ornaments, since they are not as delicate. I am sentimental to a point, but some of those handmade ornaments weren’t all that swell when they first came home some ten years ago. If the cat wants to eat those, have at it.

Every year, Moshe dines on whatever he can reach. When he was a kitten, he would climb in the tree, which was really cute until it fell over. Now, at a robust 15 pounds, he realizes that flimsy tree can’t support his excess weight. He still tries, which I know because of the odd way the lower branches are mashed down, kind of like a fat cat tried to sit on them. We will lose an occasional glass ornament to those climb attempts, but only the ones we really love. After he gives up on reaching the higher branches, he concentrates his effort into snacking on whatever is close at paw.

Mostly, he likes to eat the metallic loops used to hang the ornaments on the branches. Pompoms and ribbons also make a delightful midnight treat. He enjoys chewing through cords and felt. Every morning before breakfast I do a quick check of the tree skirt for his nighttime victims. If you look at our tree, it looks like we have a toddler. All the ornaments are a good two feet from the bottom.

Two days ago, he tried to eat one of my husband’s metal robot ornaments. It was a cute ornament too, with arms and legs attached with curly springs like those inside a clickable ballpoint pen. Moshe removed the robot from the tree and chewed the spring off the top and also one of the arms. I couldn’t find the arm anywhere and immediately had a panic attack that he had actually swallowed it. I had this unshakable mental image of me taking him to the vet, where they would find the arm on X-ray, and then he would get really sick because he couldn’t shit a robot arm.

I found the arm a day before I found his feces debacle, so at least I know things are moving and he isn’t obstructed, which is a Christmas present in itself.

Not to be outdone, as I write this, Yoko decided to throw up a hair ball in one of the empty shirt boxes I have out for gift wrapping. A Merry Christmas indeed.

Service Interruptus

Here we are, a few days into Chanukah, and I have a great Jewish story to share. It doesn’t have anything to do with the holiday, but who cares, really? A good story is a good story.

Let’s start with a little background for context. I have been on the board of my temple for what feels like centuries. One of the duties, nay, privileges, of being a board member is that we have the honor to sit on the bimah during Shabbat and other special services.  The bimah is like the stage of the sanctuary where all the religious stuff takes place, where the rabbi does his rabbiing and the torah ark is kept and a few chairs have been placed for board members or other recognized congregants. Even though it’s an honor and a privilege, few board members willingly sign up to take a turn. To be honest, it’s not my favorite part of being on the board, but once I am there, I am usually over my dread and rather enjoy myself.

Part of the reason why is our rabbi. I don’t know if other board members have this problem, but whenever I have bimah duty, something happens that makes the two of us crack up and spend the rest of the service trying not to laugh. Many a time he has caught me laughing at something I shouldn’t, maybe a person coughing, his voice cracking, him choking on water, that sort of thing. Who doesn’t want a rabbi with a sense of humor?

Last week, I was doubly honored to have bimah duty because I was the attending board member for a bat mitzvah. My family is friendly with the bat mitzvah family, and I was genuinely happy to be a part of their daughter’s special day. They decided to have a Havdalah service, an afternoon service that is sort of like the closing ceremonies for Shabbat. It’s a lovely tradition, especially in early winter, when the sunset occurs right at the end of services.

Bear with me. I am getting to the great story, I promise.

At our temple, the chairs for the board members are stage left on the bimah, and the far right wall of the sanctuary is glass with a lovely view of the setting sun. Less lovely is the view of the neighboring church. I always call it the Church of the Nazarene, which may or may not be its name, but close enough.  I don’t use churches as landmarks because to me, they are pretty much all the same. Some are more conservative (or crazy) than others, but in my southern town, we have churches on every corner like real cities have Starbucks.

This particular church is in full Christmas mode right now. They do a live nativity drive-through production, complete with animals and back drops and costumes and hastily constructed mangers and whatever else is involved in a crèche. Every year, they use the parking area on the right side of our building to store the animal trailer. It doesn’t interfere with our temple much, and we are happy to do it in the spirit of Christian neighborliness.

So here we go.

While the bat mitzvah girl stood at the podium to lead the congregation in prayer, the rabbi sat next to me as we watched her. I could see what was going on just outside the windows from my board member chair, and since I am easily distracted, I paid a bit more attention to that than the Hebrew prayers. I watched as a man dressed in ancient Bedouin attire led a horse down the hill to the parking lot.

I whispered to the rabbi, “Is that a horse?” He replied, “Just wait. There’s going to be a camel next.”

As the service continued, more people in period clothing walked back and forth behind the neighboring church. I couldn’t look away. I wanted to see the camel.

Eventually, we reached the Torah portion of the service. During a bar or bat mitzvah,  three generations of family stand in a line in front of the congregation and pass the Torah from grandparent to parent to child, symbolizing the sharing of Jewish teaching and values throughout the generations from ancient times to today. It’s always a precarious situation; Torah scrolls are pretty heavy, and grandparents and children are not the physically strongest of the Jewish people.

As the congregation stood and watched the ceremony, the dromedary camel made its appearance. Two people in traditional desert garb were wrangling it, but the camel didn’t give a fuck about the live nativity in which it was to participate. It struggled against its lead, flailing its head back and forth. In a show of defiance and anger, the camel reared up on its back legs, wildly thrashing its front legs in an attempt to make a run for freedom.  It finally gave up, defeated, and was led away to participate in the live nativity. I wondered if an unfortunate wise man volunteer was going to have to ride it. An angry camel doesn’t seem like a safe mode of transport, even for a biblical reenactment.

I continued to watch through the window, but alas, no other livestock appeared. After the Torah was read, the bat mitzvah girl gave her speech.

The rabbi again sat next to me and whispered,” I would like you to recognize my professionalism for not losing it with that camel.” I smiled and whispered back,” Very impressive. I doubt many people could maintain their composure.” “I’m worried about my car. I parked it in that lot,” he said. “Why did I park over there? I hope it didn’t take a crap out there.”

Now, I can’t be certain if that was what the rabbi whispered to me, as we were trying to be quiet. He may not have said that on the bimah, in front of G-d and everybody, but that’s what I wanted to hear.

The rest of the service continued without any animal distraction on the other side of the window. The bat mitzvah girl finished her sermon, kept it together during her parents’ speech, and beamed with pride when she was through. She was amazing.

The rabbi mentioned the camel’s appearance as he offered some final thoughts. He made a joke to the congregation that if they wanted to witness a reenactment of the birth of a Jewish baby boy 2,015 years ago, they could go next door after the service. From the pews, with the windows to the side, the congregation couldn’t really see what was going on outside. Not too many people saw the camel episode, so they didn’t have the distraction that the rabbi and I did from our vantage point.

Never before had I ever seen a distraught camel at a bat mitzvah, but I have to admit, it just added to the whole experience. To sit inside a modern building, listening to a child read from an ancient religious text, while on the other side of the wall, people dressed up in clothing that we assume was like that worn thousands of years ago, reenacting an historical event where people spoke the language she was reading, well, that’s some powerful irony right there. It also made for a one-of-a-kind rite of passage, and I was honored to be a part of it.

No Thank You

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I am still trying to make sense of this holiday. In the past few years, people used Facebook as a platform to show their gratitude for all the good things they appreciate. It was almost annoying, all those #blessed people humble-bragging, not because I was jealous, but more because they seemed so trite. This year, I kind of missed all the thanking. I am still wondering where all the thankfulness has gone, and why. I have come to a conclusion that makes me sad.

This year, we have replaced gratitude with fear.

The world has had its share of tragedy over the past month. Terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut. Boko Haram wreaking havoc in African nations. Distrust of the police on one side and protesters on the other. And shootings. All the shootings.

It’s difficult to know if it is as bad as it sounds or if the media is just putting a negative spin on the state of the world. We used to live with hope. We used to try to see the glass half-full. We used to believe we could make our world a better place. Honestly, I worry for my children and the future, not for their personal safety, but because this gloom and doom view that is so pervasive leaves everyone feeling depressed.

Frankly, we are afraid of the wrong things. What is the chance you are going to be the victim of a terror attack? Are you really concerned about being shot by the police? Do you think that Syrian refugees are on their way to destroy the American dream?

 

 When you live in fear, you become the victim you were afraid of being. The level of fear we live under is killing more than joy. It clouds our judgment. It jaundices our world view. It ramps up everyone’s anxiety, but also their anger.

When we get over being scared, we switch to anger. We don’t want to feel this way. We want someone to blame. The cops. The terrorists. The refugees. The politicians. The media. And each other.

I have to work at optimism. It doesn't happen organically. I realize my life is pretty damn good, and I sweat the small stuff regularly. I am fighting the blues that all this bad news brings. I try to make do with cat videos and weird news stories, to find something to make me smile on a grey and hopeless day.

Here’s a thought I’ve been stuck with: I kind of wish everyone was a reform Jew. Working on being the best person you can be. Treating others with kindness and tolerance. Taking care of the world around us. There’s a whole lot of good going on there, and not so much of the condemnation that’s prevalent in other beliefs and religions.

I look at my husband, who thinks organized religion is the cause of most of the world’s problems, and I think he’s onto something. The terrorists kill because they want the destruction of Israel and western Judeo-Christian values. People don’t want refugees because they are Muslims and therefore potential terrorists. Americans forget what American values are, and Christians lose sight of Jesus’ message of love. That doesn’t even take into consideration the eastern religions, but even the Buddhists are attacking Hindus.

How do you stay positive?  I try to focus on my daughters with their lives ahead of them. My children, all children, are the future. We are giving them a world where active shooter drills go along with fire drills and tornado drills. We are giving them a world where they are scared of the police, not because they don’t want to get in trouble, but because they don’t want to die. We are giving them a world where a peach doesn’t taste like summer anymore and delicate flaky flounder is rarely on the menu. We are giving them a world where they need to decide their careers before they even hit puberty and must compete against each other for a college degree they can’t afford.

I don’t have any answers, just observations. I’d like to see our politicians care about more than elections. I’d like to see food, medicine, and insurance be less about profit and more about people. It’d be great if we can stop expanding and consuming and exploiting. We could all do with a little less voicing our opinions and a little more self-reflecting. How about we do a little less hating and a little more loving. It’s worth a try, because what we are doing now sure isn’t working for us.

Stay Inside the Lines

Look, I get it. We are all under tremendous stress. Balancing work and family. Taking care of homes and cars. Paying bills. It’s all we can do to make it through a day, let alone plan for self-care. We should all be meditating and sleeping at least eight hours and doing yoga and just being present, in the moment, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

Well, I made time for that a few weeks ago. My friend MH posted a thing on Facebook about an adult coloring workshop. For $10, you could go to an art studio and have some snacks and maybe a glass of wine and just color, not like Paw Patrol or Barbie pictures, but real designs with lots of little spaces for color to go. I looked at her post and thought, hmmm, that might be fun, especially with MH. I asked her if she was going to go, and she said she wasn’t sure, and she asked me if I was going to go. It turned into one of those I’ll go if you’ll go scenarios. We had a date.

I told my sister about our upcoming plans, just in casual conversation, and she was like, you need a workshop to color? She had a point. I pretty much mastered coloring about forty-one years ago. I even worked on my technique a bit when my girls were little. I pointed out it was at an art studio for a fee, so they had to call it something. Workshop was just as good a name as any.

The night arrived, and MH and I rode together downtown and grabbed a quick bite to eat. I had stashed a bottle of wine in my car, since coloring when you are an adult means you get to drink. We drove around trying to find the art studio, which was in an old house in a sketchy part of town. I overthought the part where I hoped my car wouldn’t be stolen or burglarized, and then I thought about how much I needed to color. Like an adult. We decided to leave the wine in the car. The whole thing sort of begged for sobriety.

I don’t know if you follow the news much, but there have been a few studies recently about the benefits of coloring. According to some researchers, you get the same effects from coloring as you would from meditating. It’s all the rage now. You can find a whole variety of intricately patterned coloring books at Barnes and Noble or online from Amazon. Hell, I even saw a weird little Reader’s Digest version of an adult coloring book in the grocery store checkout line today, which is how you know it’s time to stop.

MH and I went inside and were pleasantly surprised to see it was a real art studio with real art on the walls and the smell of paint heavy in the air. We found our way downstairs to a room with folding chairs and tables on which boxes of markers, crayons, and colored pencils were arranged. On another table against the wall were stacks of coloring sheets like you would see in a preschool class, only instead of sheep and apples and shit, they had skull designs on them. Seventies music played softly in the background. At one of the tables, two women were coloring intently while carrying on a very loud conversation. One of the women had brought her own coloring set, a very professional assortment of crayons and pencils and pastels. She took her coloring very seriously.

We signed in and were greeted by the hostess/artist in residence. She looked artsy, with her skull t-shirt and messy grey bun and very friendly smile. We settled in at the other end of the table away from the loud talkers. We felt awkward, unsure if we should sit near them but not really wanting to but then feeling bad like they would think we didn’t want to sit near them. We didn’t verbalize this, but rather communicated it through a series of facial expressions and eye contact.

We got down to coloring business. A few more women showed up and filled in the empty seats around the table. I noted that there were no men present. Men would never attend a coloring workshop, at least not any of the men I know, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it. Hey men, you should, because the whole place is crawling with the ladies. Except they were all pretty much bat shit crazy.

How do I know this? Well, as the wine poured and the crayons scribbled, the other women began to play an elaborate game of top that. You know how someone will tell you about a bad day and then someone else tells how their day was worse? That’s how the game is played.   It’s not an official game, it’s more of a subtle dance of human nature tweaked with a smattering of ego, or, if you are the winner, grandiose narcissism.

These women took the game very seriously. One of them told how she had just traveled to China, so another one had to explain she lived in Nepal and lived off yak milk or something. That one also turned out to be a nude model, which was another detail we didn’t need to know. Another one commented on her failed marriage, which prompted someone else to tell us about her brother’s suicide. MH and I began to color faster.

More wine was sipped, and then the woman with the professional coloring kit looked at me and realized she knew me. We are both members of the Chosen people, so apparently, we really do all know each other. She started asking me all these questions about my temple, screaming them at me from across the room. It went on long enough for the rest of the tragedy parade to stop and observe this tangent. MH kept her head down and colored furiously, wearing down all the points on the new crayons.

“This isn’t very relaxing,” I said to her. “I think this might be harder than meditating.”

“I know,” she said. “I have to get this right. This is really triggering my OCD.”

I stopped trying to make it look good and just started filling in all the white space. The hostess walked in the room carrying a bowl of snack mix.

“Here, eat up, ladies. I would but I’m gluten free,” she said to the room.

“Of course you are,” I whispered to MH.
“I had a waffle two months ago and I still have a rash,” she overshared, and then she pulled up her shirt so we could all stare at the angry boils on her trunk.

I finished my skull, sat back, and quietly said to MH, who was still hard at work,” Done. Should I start another one?”

 

MH normally has a sweet little southern voice that is reminiscent of hummingbirds sipping at fragrant honeysuckle. She answered, “NO!” with Satan’s own larynx.

The rashy gluten-free hostess drew names from a bowl for some door prizes. I won a skull ornament. I was hoping to win the jar of little clay teeth that sat on a shelf, but that was actually for sale. MH decided she would finish hers at home. She gathered up her jacket and purse, announced she needed to get home to her children for bedtime and whatnot, and we skedaddled out of there.

On the car ride home, we sat quietly for about five minutes. Then MH said,” What the fuck was that?”

“Oh good, I thought it was just me,” I laughed. “Next time you feel like coloring, just bring your coloring book over to my house for a play date. I’ll have some gluten-free snacks for you.”

“There won’t be a next time,” she said. “Coloring is too much pressure. All those lines and spaces that need to be filled up. Too much pressure. That wasn’t relaxing and peaceful at all.”

“At least we weren’t the crazy ones,” I pointed out.

 I don’t know what MH did with her skull page, but I hung mine on the fridge because that’s where all art should go. That way, every time I opened the fridge, I could remember how adult coloring isn’t like meditation, but being with friends is.

Go Along for the Ride

A few weekends ago, my husband and I took our darling children to Savannah for a night over their fall break. We are not big Savannah fans. Way back before we had kids, we lived in Charleston, South Carolina, a port city also rich in history but with current industry as well.  Even though they are both popular destinations on the eastern coast, Savannah is more of a tourist attraction, a sleepier, dirtier version of the Holy City. People tend to prefer one over the other. We are Charleston people.

That being said, it isn’t fair for my children not to be able to at least once experience Savannah, if nothing else, to say they’ve been. Plus, it’s not a horrible drive from where we live, and we are running out of places to visit within a three hundred mile radius of home. I looked online and found a cool hotel, one that was in the historic district but tricked out with a hip, modern vibe. I didn’t really see anything we had to do during our stay. We didn’t need to tour the historic Mercer house because “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” isn’t really relevant to their generation. I didn’t want to wait in line for two hours to eat southern food with a table of strangers at Mrs. Wilkes, and I have a serious Paula Deen aversion because she looks too much like my mother. I decided we could just stroll around, do a little shopping, and take a ghost tour at night.

I could be wrong, but does every town have a ghost tour? Spooky walking tours. Haunted trolley drives. Sinister horse and carriage rides. Ghost buses. In my town, we have a haunted Segway night tour, which sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Every year, they could take stupid patrons around on their douchey Segways and tell them about the idiots who died the previous year on the tour. I’ll never know because I am not coordinated enough to use a Segway, which is why I am qualified to judge others who do.

The ghost tour I chose was a Haunted Hearse tour. It’s not unique to Savannah, as other historic or funky cities with a plethora of old hearses have it; Austin, St. Augustine, you get the idea. Anyway, here’s how it works. The company has a whole fleet of hearses that have been decommissioned and repurposed with a bunch of rickety seats for people to sit. Your feet rest on the rollers that were used to move the coffins, and your shoes can be seen through the little curtains on the side windows. The top of the hearse is raised up with a sort of open viewing area. You enter through the rear of the hearse by walking up a step ladder, take your seat, and wait for the drive to begin.  It looks like this:

 

Lucky for us, the tour picked us up right outside our hotel. Our tour guide had one of those ghost tour guide names. Let’s call him Ghoulish Gary; that wasn’t his name, but close enough. He looked like the kind of guy, and I mean this with the utmost respect, who spent his formative years masturbating to “Faces of Death” in his parents’ basement. He wore all black, a little pork pie hat, and he did this thing with his eyes where you couldn’t tell exactly at whom he was staring. I couldn’t tell if it was congenital or just like a special effect.

He proclaimed himself an expert in the local paranormal community and promised to tell us things that would keep us up at night. I had no reason to doubt him, but I also didn’t have much reason to believe him.  I only hoped he meant that he had lots of good Savannah ghost stories and not a litany of sad personal tales. We settled into our hearse seats and he drove to another hotel to pick up the rest of the tour, a foursome of elderly people that I admired for being so nonchalant about being in a hearse.

Ghoulish Gary drove us around the historic squares of Savannah, stopping every now and again in front of an old home to tell us about how someone died there or some similar sort of tragedy. Other hearses drove past us, a continuous loop of hearse traffic that took over Savannah’s streets after nightfall. He also spent a lot of time in front of a cemetery talking about how many people were buried on top of other people.

Basically, all of Savannah is a giant mass grave. Also, according to Ghoulish Gary, it was an ancient Indian burial mound before it was Savannah, so all of the spirits are angry and malevolent just like in “Poltergeist.” A couple of times he referenced some bullshit about how paranormal experts had taken soil samples here and there throughout the city, and they all came back at least 17% human remains. I thought if you tested soil samples everywhere from around the world, it would be around the same amount of dead human. People have been living and dying for thousands of years.

Ghoulish Gary ended every story with a long, drawn-out Yyyeeeaaasssssssssss for emphasis. Occasionally he would cough and choke on his cigarette. One of our stops was at a bar, where he encouraged us to go inside and order him a soda. We waited in the hearse, although I had a feeling the tour would have been better with an open container violation.

We drove around a little bit more and then pulled into an empty lot. Three other hearses were already parked there as their tour guides, Scary Sam and Creepy Carl or whoever the fuck else, told identical stories that just didn’t sound all that… believable isn’t quite the word. Hmm. Interesting, maybe? Our very own Ghoulish Gary left our hearse to go over to the other ones to give them the wall eye stare and make them as uncomfortable as he made us. I had this feeling he didn’t think we were all that great of an audience and needed to have a little more attention from a fresh group of hearse captives.

He finally ambled back over to us and took out his cell phone to show us images that would prove the very existence of spirits. One was a flying orb that looked suspiciously like a flash reflection on a window. Others were just blurry images.  I’m pretty sure one was his thumb. None of them spoke to Savannah specifically or any of the familiar legends you might expect. Then he stared at some of us, possibly, because I couldn’t tell for sure, before loading himself back in the driver’s seat.

We circled around a few more times to see if an apparition might appear. It wasn’t our lucky night, so he dropped off the party of retirees at their hotel before taking us back to our own. On the way, Ghoulish Gary told us about the history of the building where we were staying. Apparently, it used to be a stable, until one night when it burned down, killing all of the horses inside. He took a few pictures with us and then left us in front of the building and tootled on down the road and away into the dark night. As we walked the halls inside, we noticed that the walls were decorated with murals of horses. We just thought it was odd when we checked in, but after the tour, it made sense to us.

Later, as we got ready for bed in our room, the lights over our bathroom mirror blinked on and off. It wasn’t a flicker or a power surge. It was as if someone turned the lights on and off with a switch, slowly, and the four of us watched it from the comfort and safety of the hotel beds. None of the other lights went on and off, just the ones over the mirror. It only happened one time, for about ten or fifteen seconds, but for real, it did.  We didn’t hear any hooves down the hall, no whinnying, no neighing, nothing like that.

Savannah was kind of fun. We’re glad we went. You should give it a try. It’s no Charleston, but it’s good for a night. Yeeeaaaaassssssssss.

Don't Get Me Wrong

Do wrong numbers irritate you?  They drive me insane. It’s not that I mind the part where people make mistakes because we all do that. It’s really the intrusion of the phone call that gets me. I am a phone-a-phobe. I detest, abhor, loathe answering my phone. If you need me, text me.  I am not afraid of typing words. Typing words is my favorite.

It probably stems from my years of working for state government, where most public contact was through phone conversation. No phone call was pleasant for years. At home, the only person who called me on a ridiculously regular basis was my mother. Her phone calls were on par with my work ones, so for years I dreaded answering the phone anywhere. I would have nightmares of the phone ringing, ringing, ringing. All the ringing.

Now I don’t talk to my mom nor do I work for the state, but my dislike of telephone contact persists. Between my cell phone and caller ID on my landline, I generally know who’s calling. Sometimes I answer. Most of the time I call back. I have to set my intention before I can do either.

It’s just a thing I don’t do. Don’t take it personally.

Lately, despite my registering with the do not call registry, I have been getting more sales calls than I used to. Which means I answer my phone even less. If it’s important, someone will leave me a message. If it’s one of my usual contacts, the name pops up as a missed call even when there’s no message. I know you called me. Chances are good I texted you back a response.

Every once in a while, it’s none of those, a local number that I don’t recognize, a wrong number. And sometimes, that stranger will leave a message not intended for me.

That happened to me the other day. A local number I didn’t know called me, and left a message. It was from some gruff sounding man who said he was contacting someone who wasn’t me about a concealed weapons course he was teaching. Apparently someone else wanted to take that course, and he was calling to discuss the class. Not only was it not for me, it would never be for me. I hate guns even more than I hate answering the phone.

Since it wasn’t me, I didn’t call back to let him know he had the wrong number. It’s the kind of thing I figured would sort itself out without my involvement. And since it’s 2015, etiquette doesn’t dictate that I return messages to wrong numbers. I chose to do nothing.

The next day while I was eating breakfast, I got a Facetime call from the same damn number. Odd, I thought. Does he normally Facetime people to sign them up for concealed weapons classes? I again didn’t answer it because now I was a tad afraid.

This guy couldn’t take a hint. An hour later, he texted me.  It went like this:

Him: I am contacting you in reference to my October 31 concealed weapon class. If I am interested, call back.

Me: Wrong number.
Him: Please excuse.
Me: It’s fine.

Should have been the end of it, right? But no; fifteen minutes later, I got another text.

Him: Are you interested? Call me back and I will get you prepared for the October 31 class.

He impressed me with his persistence. Here is a man who has a pretty creative marketing strategy. He could just call random numbers all the time, “accidentally”, and maybe every so often he would get a bite.

Me: No thanks.

Him: If you change your mind, call or text me back.

When a little old lady calls me by accident, I call back. I let her know she has the wrong number. She might have written it down wrong. Maybe she can’t read the numbers on the paper. Maybe it’s really urgent, like she’s fallen and can’t get up. She might think she’s calling Life Alert, but it’s just me avoiding my phone. You never know.

Concealed weapons course instructors are not little old ladies. They don’t need my help. What they do need is to just move on. If someone doesn’t call you back, they’re just not that into you, especially when it’s a wrong number.

Olive's Fair in Love and War

I have two teenage daughters.

I don’t need to say anything else for you to know how life is in my house. Ups and downs do not adequately describe it. Roller coasters are not a fair comparison. Jumping out of a plane with no parachute, free falling onto an extra strength trampoline that catapults me across the sky only I’m still attached to a bungee cord that brings me right back so I am dangling precariously until I get whacked like a giant tether ball around a pole, never ending twisting and untwisting and twisting and untwisted…still not quite what it’s like.

Take a moment to appreciate your sons. When you aren’t driving them to sports or band practice, chances are good they are holed up in their rooms playing video games and pausing briefly for some feverishly furtive masturbation before they come to the kitchen and eat all the food in the pantry. You might have some moodiness, some acne, perhaps some other hygiene issues. Sneakers and armpits stink.  The sleeping makes up for it.

Daughters, well, my daughters, are just raw nerve endings with twenty pounds of makeup to dress up those synapses. There are a lot of moods. Trashcans overflow with tear filled Kleenexes and used feminine hygiene products. Sometimes the two of them are witty and smart and impressive. Other times one is a bitch, the other an asshole.

Our latest waste of time issue is fighting over clothes. The older one is on her fourth or fifth look since middle school. I’m running out of money and storage space to accommodate her ever evolving signature style. We’ve gone from funny t-shirts to a sort of rock edgy look to extreme suburban preppy to surfer girl. We are now settling on a sort of college co-ed hipster vibe. That’s a lot of transition if you ask me, but she isn’t on drugs or pregnant so I keep quiet.

The younger one is a lot easier to please for now. She favors a flowy bohemian kind of thing, but she’s really not too picky. She just appreciates something new. Don’t we all?  Now that they are the same height (well, the young one is a teeny bit taller), the hand-me-downs have ended. It’s all new to her these days, and she is pretty happy.

I was hoping they would be the kind of sisters that gave each other advice and shared each other’s secrets and swapped clothes back and forth. Instead, the older one is the kind who sneaks into the other one’s room and takes what she wants without asking, shoes, shirts, pads, you name it.

The younger one will ask to borrow something from the older one, who always says no thank you, because she thinks manners soften the no blow. Occasionally I intervene and tell the older one to share and also to appreciate the fact that the younger one is respectful enough to ask first. That subtle dig is always lost on her.

Currently, they have been at war over an olive green tank top. I found it at Old Navy, on a clearance table. It’s made of cotton and has thin straps and comes up high on the chest. It might be called a high choke neckline, but how the hell would I know? I’m not up on fashion terminology, but I know it’s cute. Also, it was on sale for $1.99. I bought it and brought it home for the older one. She likes to wear camis and tanks with a blanket or bathrobe type schmatta on top, so I thought it was perfect for her urban homeless chic.

She loved it. Unfortunately, so did the younger one. She asked the older one repeatedly if she could borrow it, and was always answered with the no thank you bit. The younger one complained to the older one about taking her things without asking permission and how unfair she was being, but the older one just looked at her phone and ignored her.

After a week or two of this, I went back to Old Navy and bought another olive green tank top. I brought it home and gave it to the younger one, and she was happy and began wearing it immediately.

A little while later, the older one came to me to complain about the younger one taking her things. I asked what things she had a concern about, and she said the olive green tank top. “Oh that? I bought her one too so you would stop fighting over it,” I told her.

She couldn’t believe I would do such a thing. I pointed out that for an extra $1.99, I eliminated one of the daily battles, which was worth the two bucks. Her response? “But it’s exactly like mine.”

“Won’t it be fun when you wear it on the same day accidentally?” I said.

That happened once with a side braid. They came downstairs for school sporting a side braid, only on opposite sides of their heads, because even their parts have to be different. I don’t think the older one has worn a side braid since that day.

Come to think of it, I don’t think she has worn her olive green tank top either, which is fine, because I’m only out $1.99.