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I’ve reviewed the notebook where I jot down ideas for blog posts and none of them appeal to me. This week I’m drawing a blank. If I was Harold, of Purple Crayon fame, and I drew a blank, it would probably actually be a blank. I don’t know what a blank looks like, but if anyone could bring a blank to life, it’s Harold. I can’t draw anything. I wish I could.

My husband is a wonderful artist (although he’ll be the first to admit that he isn’t very good at drawing people). His mindless doodles are works of art. I have retrieved sketches from the trash that I couldn’t bear to see destroyed. We vacationed in Bar Harbor recently and while waiting for our meal he used the crayons supplied for our nephew to draw on a napkin. That napkin, which sports a lobster holding a knife and fork over a small human on a plate that is waving it’s limbs in the air, is now framed and hanging in my home office. A little blot of butter gives it a touch of verisimilitude.

I want to share something with you, so below is an illustration he created on the computer for our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah invitation a couple of years ago.

I know it’s not polite to brag, but I can’t help it. His creative ability brings such joy to my life. When we agreed that I was going to try my hand at writing, full time, my excitement was dampened by the knowledge that that meant he would have to keep working in the real world. And as we all know, the real world can be a bit of a challenge, particularly for a creative person.

I don’t know what conclusions to draw from this short ramble. Maybe none are necessary. After all, I’ve already told you, I can’t draw.

When I was little, my favorite picture books were The Lonely Doll series. In the first book, the doll, Edith, meets Mr. Bear, a stuffed bear, and his son, Little Bear.

In subsequent books Mr. Bear is her guardian. I remember vividly one picture of Edith turned over Mr. Bear’s knee as he spanked her for doing something naughty. Today there are many things about these books that would make parents and librarians cringe, but the same could be said for much of the beloved children’s literature of my childhood.

The author, Dare Wright, had a strange and complicated upbringing which was documented in Jean Nathan’s biography, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll.  As the original lonely doll it’s not hard to understand why she would turn to Edith and the bears for comfort.

My childhood, on the other hand, was, as far as I remember, remarkably mundane; and yet I, too, play with stuffed animals. And I’ll wager I’m not the only other adult who does. I may, however, be the only one who will admit it in public. This may be an inherited predilection. When my uncle was in the army, his beloved bear sent him notes, via my grandmother. There’s a photo of my parents, mom pregnant with my older sister, cavorting with two stuffed dogs and a ’57 Chevy. When I went away to camp, our cats wrote me letters. And when my daughter went to her first sleep-away camp, two of our stuffed animals sent her a photographic accounting of a big adventure. (It was slow going, they don’t move fast, and it took almost three dozen photos to document the outing, but they were very patient with the photographer.) Below is a shot of them near the beginning of their journey.

If you’re paying attention you may want to point out, huffily, that when I was at camp, live animals wrote to me, not stuffed ones. When it comes to anthropomorphizing, I don’t make much of a distinction between them. Neither, it appears, did Ms. Wright.

I will concede that when there are real animals on the scene they tend to demand more attention than the stuffed ones. At the time of the great outing above, however, we had not yet adopted Boo and Scout, our cats, so the point is moot. And if we had had the cats, we would not have been able to document an outing with them. It’s not that we wouldn’t have wanted to, but they would never grant us the unfettered access to their activities that our stuffed friends do.

When I was around eight or nine, a neighbor who was the same age told me that her family was going to be moving, but that it was a secret and I couldn’t tell anyone. I imagine that this must have been upsetting news because that little girl and I were purportedly very good friends; nonetheless, I dutifully kept it to myself. Some weeks after I’d been sworn to secrecy, my mother told me that the neighbors were going to be moving. I said I knew, that my friend had told me, but had asked me not to tell anyone. My mother was astonished that I’d been able to keep that secret from her. It became the basis for her belief that I was the sort of person you could trust with your secrets.

The irony is that I’m probably one of the worst people to trust with a secret. It’s not because I’m malevolent, but rather that I love telling stories, and secrets usually make great stories. I also love to gossip, which is really just another way to say I love to tell stories. I would never say something as simple as, “John quit.” If I wanted to share this tidbit with you I’d say, “I was in the kitchen after Monday’s staff meeting, making a cup of coffee, when Gary came in.” By the time I got to the punch line, you’d be late for your next meeting, and you wouldn’t mind at all.

To be fair, just as there is honor among thieves, I have my own code of ethics when it comes to gossip, or keeping secrets. If the information is of a personal nature, or would hurt an innocent third-party, I have no trouble tucking it safely away. If, however, someone says, “Peter told me this, but don’t tell anyone else,” I figure I’m not obligated to keep silent. The odds are excellent that any time someone says, “Don’t tell anyone else,” they’ve already spread the news far and wide.

When it comes to secrets, I also happily share my own. Today you might say I over-share; when I was younger, I confessed. This was not something I had any religious experience with, but as a daughter I was an expert. Whether it was the fear of being found out or a compulsive need to punish myself, I had a tendency to share all of my transgressions with my mother. Fortunately, she didn’t retain the information for long, and if she did she was likely to ascribe it to a different daughter, but she was always surprised if I mentioned something I’d already told her. “You did what? When did that happen? You never told me that!” So you see, I knew if I could live past her initial reaction it would be off the front page soon enough.

As an adult, I learned to curb my need to confess. I learned that from my chief Confessor, my therapist, but please don’t tell anyone else. I prefer to keep that a secret.

The debt ceiling kerfuffle has been settled and as far as I can tell it was a pyrrhic victory at best. I started out paying close attention to the discussion, but as the rhetoric ramped up I got more and more anxious until I decided I had to stop listening. My plan was to put my fingers in my ears and whistle until someone told me that fiscal disaster had been averted, but that turned out to be as uncomfortable a solution as everything John Boehner proposed.

I’m not particularly savvy about how things get done on Capitol Hill. Oh sure, I watched the Schoolhouse Rock lesson on how a bill gets through Congress with the rest of my generation, but I must have missed the episode about applying common sense for the greater good. There were steps to take to lower the national debt that seemed liked no-brainers to me. Yes they involved raising revenue: corporations should not be getting ridiculous tax breaks so they can operate private jets and rich individuals should pay more taxes than lower-income folks. That would be applying common sense to solve a problem.

My town email list just had a vigorous debate on dog poop disposal etiquette. A list member posted that she had been chastised by a passerby for dropping a bag of dog poop in a garbage can in front of someone else’s home. Alarmingly, this post provoked more traffic than the subject of whether or not to out local sex offenders. Some people thought it was perfectly fine to use a private trash can for your dog’s poop. There were those who thought it was beyond the pale for the passerby to have commented in the first place claiming it was none of her business. There was even debate over whether the position of the lid of the garbage can should effect one’s decision. There was, however, one positive aspect to this discussion; it didn’t follow party lines. It wasn’t dog owners versus non-dog owners. It was a bi-partisan debate.

Nonetheless, I find myself asking ─ why was this even being discussed? It is not alright to put your trash in my trashcan. Period. Does something that reeks of common sense need to be legislated for the odd bozo who just doesn’t understand? Come on everyone, sing along with me:

I’m just a bill.
Yes, I’m only a bill.
And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.
Well, it’s a long, long journey
To the capital city.
It’s a long, long wait
While I’m sitting in committee,
But I know I’ll be a law someday
At least I hope and pray that I will,
But today I am still just a bill.

Music & lyrics: Dave Frishberg

I have curly hair. I married a guy with even curlier hair. My daughter was doomed. She has curly hair that makes her life hell. That’s what curls do to a girl. Left to its own devices, her hair arranges itself into layers of ringlets. At this point you may be picturing Shirley Temple and wondering what all the fuss is about, but bear in mind that my daughter doesn’t have a Hollywood makeup team slaving over her. Her curls are long and untamed, their length pulls them down, stretches them out; her hair is dark and frizzy, unmistakably ethnic.

You can’t look at her hair without feeling a primal urge to twine a ringlet around your finger. People always come up to her and say, “Look at those curls,” as they reach out to touch her head. When she was little, I didn’t think it would be polite to say, “Please don’t touch my child,” so instead I tried to explain to my confused daughter why stranger danger didn’t apply in those circumstances.

My daughter is handicapped by the fact that I grew up with no hair care training of my own. It was a time when everyone, men and women alike, had long wild hair. As a young woman, I looked like the character with the wedge-shaped hair in Dilbert. In a rash, fear-of-forty moment, I finally cut my hair short enough to take advantage of my curls. But it was even later before I learned about product, that generic term that applies to all sorts of goop you can buy to enhance your hair care.

When I was younger and people admired my hair, I would say, “Well, the grass is always greener on the other head.” When I was sixteen, my mother agreed to pay an exorbitant fee to have a salon slather chemicals on my hair to straighten it. I was transformed. I felt beautiful for the first time in my life. I went to a party that night and boys who had never given me the time of day swarmed like bees to honey. Over time the chemicals wore off and the curls crept back. I don’t remember if it was the money or the fear of damage to future generations that kept my mother from agreeing to pay to have it straightened again, but that was the only time in my life I had straight hair.

My daughter’s friends like to use their flat irons to straighten her hair, so for her birthday this year I bought her one. I thought we had both matured enough to work together to tame her curls. I was wrong. I merely introduced a tool that is not only difficult to use and bad for her hair, but can cause serious burns. One yelp was all it took before we agreed to abandon the effort.

My daughter is a beautiful girl, no matter how her hair behaves, but like all teenagers she’s more likely to listen to strangers than to me. For that reason, I’m eternally grateful to all the strangers who continue to reach out to touch and admire her hair.

*August 8 update. After reading this post, a friend sent me this photo with the note: “See the attached photo (taken at the MFA in the Roman section)  for proof of the longstanding popularity of curly hair.”

I’ve been helping my mom clean out the attic. Technically it belongs to both of my parents, but the stuff that’s ended up there over the years seems to be mostly her purview. I’m being polite when I say stuff. George Carlin’s observation was, “Have you noticed that their stuff is shit and your shit is stuff?” It’s worth reading his routine on stuff; he nails it. I’ve offered to take on the garage and basement for my dad (for all that most of the stuff around the house seems to be hers, he’s quite the pack rat) but so far he’s been quietly resistant.

Cleaning out the attic has been much less stressful than either my mom or I thought it would be. I think it has something to do with the shared nature of the project; we get to laugh, reminisce, maybe share a few tears. Regardless of the specific emotion, things get sorted quickly into the relevant piles; garbage, Goodwill, recycling, and my favorite, free to whoever wants it.

My town has an email list where a group of people share thoughts about all sorts of things. Participants refer to it as the list. The list is purported to have over four thousand members: they’re mostly lurkers. The core, visible group is much, much smaller. (I’d put a number on it, but that’s the kind of thing that would then be debated ad nauseum on the list.) I contribute from time to time, when I think I can be helpful, but mostly I lurk and post when I have something I’m trying to give away. That didn’t work too well for my treadmill if you recall, but that was a rare failure. For the most part, I can find a new home for almost anything, if I tell the list.

Most of the things I give away can be left on the porch for the new owner to pick up at their convenience. I’ve only met a few of the recipients of mom’s down-sizing and my house cleaning. Once in a while, an item is too big for me to manage on my own, and I need to take the interested party down to my cellar. When that happens, I wonder briefly if I’ve just invited an axe murderer into my home. Sometimes I ask before I invite them in, “Are you an axe murderer?” So far the answer has been no, but if the answer was yes, they’d lie, wouldn’t they?

Assuming I continue to avoid becoming a news headline, I’ll keep giving things away. It feels good to know you’ve made someone else happy, or solved a problem for them. I know that Dad’s scraps of wood and old chicken wire are going to make someone very happy, as soon as I can convince him to part with them. When I do, you’ll read about it on the list.

This winter I took a class on writing short, short fiction; those in the know call it flash fiction. I thought I’d do something a little different this week, and share one of the stories I wrote for that class with you. This story, It’s Called Fast Food, was written in response to the assignment to create a one sentence story.

It’s Called Fast Food

She was in a big rush to get home because guests were arriving any minute and she’d had to wait longer for the Chinese food than she’d expected, so she tried to perform multiple tasks at the same time to get moving as quickly as she could; she put the Chinese food on the floor in front of the empty passenger seat, turned the key to start the engine, yanked the shift to ‘D’, and with her left hand turned the steering wheel, while using her right hand to reach across and grab the seatbelt and grope for the buckle at her side, simultaneously giving the car some gas and, without looking to her left, pulling out of her parking space, right into the path of an oncoming car, which effectively ended her ability to go anywhere, fast or otherwise, ever again.

When you fall in love, everything looks brighter. Your world revolves around the person you’ve chosen and you picture a future walking hand-in-hand, sharing private jokes, the two of you alone against the world. In the flush of romance you willfully ignore the fact that it won’t be the two of you alone. He has parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, and cousins, first, second and once-removed. You don’t stop to think about whether or not you’ll like his extended family. Your own rarely intrude.

You may have met the future in-laws, and perhaps a sibling or two, but until the wedding itself, you are only vaguely aware of the other relatives. Sometimes, the family you marry into is a grave disappointment, the boorish uncle, the over-bearing aunt, the elderly curmudgeon, the cousin with wandering hands. Every family has someone, although some are buried so deep in the closet along with the other skeletons that you may never discover them. I did not marry into that kind of family. I married a family that is the envy of my family.

My family is quite small and half of them live on the opposite coast. Growing up I had no extended family nearby. When I was young, I knew that if anything bad ever happened to my parents, I could call on my mother’s brother, who lived in New York, or my parent’s best friends, who lived in our town. These adults were my back-up parents, and as such, they occupied a place in my affection befitting people I knew I could rely on, without hesitation.

When I married into my husband’s family I acquired two more people that I consider back-up parents. I’m not talking about my in-laws; they occupy their own unique space. For back-up parents you have to go a tad farther afield. I’m talking about my husband’s aunt and uncle, Amy and Adam.

This designation comes with no obligations. In truth, the members of my generation are starting to envision a future when the roles will be reversed and we will become care-givers for those who came before. Rather, I use the term to convey a fondness and respect that would otherwise be difficult for me to articulate.

This weekend we will be celebrating Adam and Amy’s birthdays. I hope you’ll all forgive me for using this week’s post as a vehicle to wish them both a very happy birthday.

Happy Birthday. I’ll see you soon; have a gin and tonic ready.

I love our Toyota Prius. It’s fun to drive, makes me feel greener than I have any right to, and gets great gas mileage. It does, however, have one huge drawback; it doesn’t make any noise when it backs up. If you’re thinking, “Hey, my car doesn’t make any noise either, what’s the problem?” you’re mistaken. I’m not talking about the backup beep that trucks make. I’m talking about the regular engine-running-noise that most cars make all the time, whether they’re going backwards or forwards.

The Prius is a gas/electric hybrid. When the car is moving slowly, the battery is doing the work, not the engine, so it moves along quietly, with only the noise of the tires on the pavement. When it comes to a complete stop, it falls silent. (First time passengers always think the car has stalled at that point.) When you put a Prius in reverse and take your foot off the brake pedal, there is no audible clue that the car is beginning to move. In a parking lot, this silent running can be dangerous.

We have a small shopping plaza in our neighborhood that has Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Walgreens. It’s a busy place with, from my layperson’s perspective, a poorly designed parking lot. There is no prescribed traffic pattern so it’s rarely entirely clear who is at fault when there is a dust up between cars; there are so many ways to go wrong. Between a car and a pedestrian though, the pedestrian is usually right, unless the car is a Prius.

One day, after a quick stop at Walgreens, I got back in the car, checked each of my three mirrors, swiveled my head until I was dizzy, and eased backwards out of my parking space. I heard a loud “Hey!” and stopped. An older man and a younger woman had appeared in the tiny space of blind spot, during a split second when I must have blinked. I rolled down my window and called, “Oh! I’m so sorry.” The woman yelled back something like, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” or “You almost killed us!” I stuttered that I was sorry again and drove off when it became clear that they were not the forgiving sort. But at that point, I was mad.

While it’s true that the Prius is quiet when backing up, it does have back-up lights. Do pedestrians eschew all responsibility for their own safety on principal? Yes, the law is on the side of the pedestrian. Does that mean you should close your eyes and step off the curb without checking to see if anyone’s coming? Is being right enough compensation for being dead?

When we bought the Prius, early in ’05, it did beep when you put it in reverse – inside the car! The only people alerted were the ones buckled safely in their seats. In short order, Andrew figured out how to silence the beep. If he could figure out how to make it audible on the outside, we’d all be a little bit safer.