Day Four (Finally)

This is Day Four of of the Love Your Spouse Seven-Day Challenge, assuming that we are on some unknown planet where days are as long as six or seven of our 24-hour Earth days. Seriously, have you ever known someone so completely lax about the rules of a game? (Well, except for the Chinese, whose gymnasts are NO POSSIBLE WAY 16 YEARS OLD. Ahem. Sorry.)

This photo literally fell out of an album at me a few days ago, and how could I not post it? One of the things I love most about my spouse is his total commitment to being a dad, and here is photographic proof. This would have been Mother's Day of 1992, which Boy#4 helpfully allowed me to carbon date by being three months old in it.

I love this picture. Those little hands! The cheeks! The ties! That denim dress I wore all. the. time! Husband's hair!  Four children five years old and younger.

I was reminded of those little Boys yesterday when I attended the 40th birthday party of the woman who, as a teenager, was their babysitter. Dear L. was having a hard time believing she had reached that age.

"Oh, the 40s are fabulous!" I told her. "You're starting to see your life take shape--this is what you've been waiting to happen."

And then I had to stop talking, because anything after that would just be made up.

The truth? My recollection of my 40s is sketchy at best. Those were the years when I was mostly trying to keep the kids out of the street and vaccinated, and I wasn't always successful with either of those things. Boy#3 had a reaction to the pertussis vaccine and wasn't able to get that shot until last year, at age 25. He also was the two-year-old who managed to unlock the front door while I was upstairs putting a load of laundry in the washer. He was delivered back to me, still barefoot and pajama-clad, by an extremely irate stranger. I was appropriately scarred by the experience, and could describe the scene in vivid detail even today.

In fact, the day-to-day from those years has pretty much disappeared. I remember the high spots and milestones--the first day of kindergarten for Boy#1, when I cried and the world continued to turn; Halloween costumes; sitting on the living room floor putting names on school supplies; emergency trips to the hospital for breathing treatments. I don't remember what we ate for breakfast, or anyone's favorite color, or how in the world I existed on so little sleep.

It was a constant balance between feeling inadequate and realizing that hey! I was doing it so I must be adequate!

I look at those little boys in this picture, and I look at the fine men they've grown to be, and I don't quite know how we got from that Point A to that Point B. All I know is that something visceral makes me smile when I think of that unremembered decade of my 40s.

And even while I know I couldn't do it again, I know it must have been fabulous.

That Which Doesn't Change

Okay, all of you married people on Facebook, is the Seven Days of Spouses craze hitting your area yet? In Small Town, it is a Big Thing.

Normally this is the kind of thing I ignore--"Here is my favorite flower! Now I'm tagging two people, who need to tag two more people who are going to tag two more people, and pretty soon we're going to know the favorite flower of every person in the world!"

This game of tagging, though, involves posting a picture of you and your spouse every day for seven days. And those pictures can be from any time during the relationship. I was tagged a few days ago, and I have jumped on this bandwagon with undue enthusiasm.

As it turns out, being married 32 years means that looks-wise, things have changed somewhat significantly for both Husband and me. (Here's proof.) He was cleanshaven when we got married, grew a beard six weeks later, and hasn't shaved it since. I was unwrinkled, naturally blonde, and a size 10 for the two minutes of my life that I was a size 10. I am none of those things now.

Today's picture isn't just about looks, though. It probably says more about the two of us than any other picture we own. It was taken during a professional photo shoot in Husband's home town as his parents were getting ready to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

We hadn't told anyone we were engaged yet so I was just hanging around the studio while the photographer posed the extended family this way and that way and brought in grandchildren and shoo-ed out in-laws. The photographer was kind of a fussy guy (Husband's childhood friends, you know the guy) and it was taking a loooooong time. Also, it was hot.

When all of the scheduled shots had been taken, there was one pose remaining in the pre-determined package. (This was before the days of digital photos and film was expensive, so unlike today's photo shoots that go into the thousands of shots, poses were limited.)

With just one shot remaining on the roll of film (yes, that long ago), Husband called me over. "Let's have him take one of us," he suggested. "That way we have at least an idea of what we might do for an engagement picture."

So I jumped up onto the photo bench, folded my hands, and began smiling. I smiled, and I smiled, and I smiled, and the photographer fussed with the lights, with the camera settings, with the drapes, with the way my hands were folded, with the flash, fuss, fuss, fuss. It was getting hotter and hotter under the lights. And all this time Husband's two brothers were teasing me.

"Say 'cheese!'" "Smile bigger!" "Look like you're having a good time!"

I responded in the only rational way one could respond: I made a fish-face at them.

Finally the photographer was ready. I quit clowning around and he snapped a perfectly lovely non-engagement picture. What I didn't know was that just as I made the fish-face my future brother-in-law had taken a picture with his own camera. That picture, which was presented to me as a birthday gift three days before Husband and I were married, shows a calmly smiling young accountant cuddling up to what appears to be a raving lunatic. It was accompanied by a poem that talked about "the one that didn't make the paper."

I don't know what happened to the picture the professional photographer shot but the fish-face photo is one of my most prized possessions. It hangs on a wall in the House on the Corner as proof positive: Looks may change but smart-aleck is eternal. Also, Husband knew exactly what he was getting into, and he married me anyway.

Awwwwww.



The poem, which sometime over the years apparently fell prey to silverfish. Ack! 

You Be the Judge

My Husband the accountant can painstakingly take two hours to hang one picture what with the levels and the yardsticks and the celestial navigation needed to make sure the picture is straight and centered. He also is the lawn mower for the House on the Corner, and he has decided the strip of lawn north of the fence needs a mullet.

Yes. This is not a mistake or an oversight. It is a deliberate attempt to see how tall the unmowed strip will get before it stops amusing him. So today the question for my dear reader(s) is this:

Mid-life crisis or brain tumor?

Searching for My Pony

Image Credit

I've been thinking a lot about luck lately, and one of the things I've been thinking about has been the semantic nitpicking that goes on in one of my circles. This is the circle that spends way too much time jawing about whether to use the term "luck" at all. To say one is lucky or unlucky discounts divine influence in our lives, this group avers with the vehemence that I, personally, reserve for my support of the Oxford comma. The proper term for this kind of unforeseen occurrence is "blessing," they say, and the blessing is either obvious or deferred.

If this is the case, I'm having quite the run of deferred blessings.

There was, of course, the change in my job status that I'm beginning to enjoy immensely, as I sit here in my home office in a T-shirt, comfy capris, and Birkenstocks.

Then there was the root canal and my dentist saying  "uh-oh," and the revised root canal, and my mouth's first crown. And guess what? It came out just fine (aside from the untimely hit to our bank account) and I've now discovered that root canals aren't the horrible ordeals they apparently were before improved dental techniques.

Last Friday there was the computer tech guy saying "uh-oh" as he tried to install the printer driver on my desktop. He texted me about the problem, and ended with "Don't worry, though, your data is most likely recoverable." Although this did not fill me with confidence, the latest word from the tech ninjas was positive, and this crash might even result in a better, faster computer.

Yesterday morning I had occasion to think about the old story about the father who decided to teach his twin sons a lesson concerning the futility of high expectations by giving them a pile of horsepoop for Christmas.

One son was angry. "I've been good all year and all I got was a pile of horsepoop? This is the worst Christmas ever," he told his dad.

The other son, to the surprise of his father, grabbed a shovel and began to dig into the pile. "With all this horsepoop, there's  got to be a pony  in there somewhere," he yelled gleefully.

This story came to mind as I sat on a large rock next to Pearl, my 2003 Ford Escape. Pearl had just been rear-ended by the sobbing young driver sitting next to me who had taken her eyes off the road for just a second and didn't see me slowed down for a left-turning car. She was fine, I was fine, but her car and Pearl were not fine.

A little later today we'll take Pearl in to find out the full extent of the damage. I'm hoping the guy doing  the evaluation will say "What? Your seat-belts aren't retracting properly? Why don't we just fix that while we're in there?"

I'm determined to see what kind of deferred blessing is waiting, because at this point it's not obvious and I know there's a pony in there somewhere.

Wherein I Am That Person

Husband and I traveled back to my childhood over the weekend, visiting my dad and his sweet wife and getting away from the skyscrapers and traffic noise of Small Town. You may think I'm exaggerating but our skyscraper is six stories high, and if you have the windows open on a summer weekend, you can hear a boatload of camper traffic headed for the city lake.

Boy#1 and Lovely Girl escaped their own Significantly Larger Town to join us for this trip down memory lane and the majority of my sentences began "When I was a kid..." (...this creek was a lot deeper; it was much farther from the house to the barn; Older Sister and I did ALL THE CHORES; etc.)

We walked to the mailbox (this time to get steps on our Fitbits rather than the mail), slept in the bedroom where I slept as a teenager, and leaned over the fence to see if we could catch a glimpse of the feral sheep my brother keeps as pets. Sadly, we did not see any fleeces that rivaled Shrek in sheer bulk.

The most memorable moment, though, came during Sunday morning church when, during a quiet moment, a cell phone rang several pews behind us.

"Whoops!" I thought. "That sure was embarrassing for someone."

So that I wouldn't be guilty of being that person, I reached down to turn off my own ringer. Unfortunately, sometime during the four-hour trip between the House on the Corner and the farm, I had put my phone into my purse upside down. Instead of grabbing it by the top corner as I normally do, I grabbed it by the bottom half.

You know where this is going, right? Straight to Siri. And while Siri could hear the sermon, she couldn't hear it quite well enough.

"I'M SORRY. I'M NOT SURE WHAT YOU SAID THERE, MOMQUEENBEE."

Yes.

In case anyone in the sanctuary had not been able to pinpoint where the Siri shout came from, my phone j'accuse-d me to the entire congregation.

Boy#1 immediately sent a note down the pew. "Most embarrassing moment in this church since we dropped that Matchbox car."

He was right: Until now, the low point on our church disruption barometer had been when one of my darling toddlers dropped a toy car and that car somehow miraculously missed every single foot to vrreeeeeeeeee its way to the front, only stopping when it hit the carpet in front of the communion rail. I'll never forget the look on the preacher's face as he tried to identify the noise.

Anyway, I'm recovering from the embarrassment to the point that when I was shooting the photos for this morning's illustrations I was amused by the things Siri suggested I ask her. Who is Barack Obama? Look up my videos from my last trip to New York City? I don't think so. Instead I'll leave you with the reaction from the Marie Antoinette action figure given to me by a dear friend.

Off with my head.

I Will Miss This

They're also extremely good-looking.

I'm settling into the New Normal quite nicely, thank you. By 10 a.m., I've checked off three of my daily must-do's (exercise, quiet time, cleaning) and added the delightful bonus of some piano practice.

I am experiencing, as well as declaring, that I'm going to be fine. But I am missing the people in today's picture.

Over the past decade or so I've been surrounded by the best working group ever assembled. They're not only really, really good at their jobs (and they have the awards to prove it), they are smart and funny and sensitive and hard-working.

Do you know how rare this is in a working group? To not have a single person who is irritating or distracting? No one you secretly hope is scanning the want ads and looking for a better job? As one with decades of experience in the hiring biz, I can tell you that this is the Holy Grail of a supervisor's quest.

A week ago they threw a transition party. "We're not calling it a going-away party because you're not going away," the lead organizer told me. "You're just transitioning, and that's very different. We'll still be your co-worker, and your friend."

Because they know me well and did not want to spend the afternoon in tears and maudlin muddling, we met at our favorite coffee shop, ate lemon poppy seed cupcakes (my favorite), and played Apples to Apples. This is the game we play every year at our Christmas party, and the experience has taken on a life of its own in our group.

We know each other well enough that we can play our cards based on personality rather than logic. The news bureau guy, for instance, was married in Reno. If it's his turn to choose a card and you play "Las Vegas" or "Casino" or anything Nevada-related, romantic mist fogs his face and you know you're taking that trick. Or if it's my turn to choose, the person who has drawn "Tom Hanks" has heard my long-standing and oft-repeated claim that TH is the only man I'd consider leaving Husband for, and that I'm choosing Tom, no matter what the comparison card is. We know that a category we made up called "Tony's Sister" will be funny every single time, even though no outsider would have the least idea what we're talking about.

When we counted our cards at the end of the game I had won, lapping the field with the number of tricks I'd taken. They said they hadn't let me win, and I believe them because they're as competitive as they are talented.

But maybe, just maybe, they subconsciously let me take a few tricks because I was the only one who had cried that afternoon. Just a little, and only for a few seconds, when I was thanking them for their transition gift that contained both fonts and puns and was another indication of how well they know me.

"The best thing I've ever done professionally is hire you all," I told them through tears.

They're what I will miss the most.

Look How Much I've Gained

I texted this picture to Husband last week on the first day of the New Normal.

"I am woman! Hear me roar!" I wrote in the caption.

Aside from the fact that approximately two people will recognize that reference (oh, Helen Reddy, I hated your voice but that song was a winner during my high school years) it's also borderline pitiful how delighted I was to see those screen savers.

I had just finished moving my computer from my old on-campus office to my new in-home office, and even though none of the males in the family were at home to make the connections work, both monitors and the mouse had booted up when I hit the power button. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that in all of my (many, many) years, it was the first time I've hooked up my own technology.

I've tended to defer that kind of work to the Boys: As children of the technological revolution, this was second nature to them and they could have things up and running in no time flat. Why bother my pretty little head with this kind of nonsense?

The time has come, though, that this kind of nonsense belongs to me. Oh, I can call on the Tech Monkeys (I'm not being derogatory; that's what they call themselves) but now fixing my computer issues doesn't involved a 30-yard walk to another building, it involves a trek off campus and the monkeys don't always have time for that.

So I'm learning. I am tentatively plugging a monitor cord into the back of the computer tower and marveling when a picture of my kids appears on the screen. I'm scheduling my time according to a different set of self-determined priorities. I'm exploring project that had never occurred to me, and I'm excited about these possibilities.

I'm looking forward, and if I have to, I can do anything.

Thanks for the reminder, Helen.