Every Minute

We also have an inordinate amount of fireworks images. You’d think we set fire to things on a regular basis.

Miles run yesterday: 4.5

Full-time job accepted on Monday: 1 (yay! more on that later…)

Cadbury’s Mini-Egg bags bought today: 2

My mom has always had a morbid fascination with natural disasters and disease epidemics.

She is not mean, just scientific-minded.

My mom likes to mention on almost every birthday involving cake and candles how strange it is that we light things on fire and take pictures of people blowing the candles out. She is convinced that either a.) aliens or b.) people living 500 years in the future will think we are a very strange “civilization.” I use that term loosely.

My husband, on the other hand, refuses to watch anything on TV involving natural disasters or disease states. He is also scientific.

Potay-to, potah-to.

If volcanic ash from an improbable volcano all of a sudden covers my little area of the world, and scientists far in the future uncover my family’s bodies and our detritus, here is what they will find:

1.) In the garage: man bones. Inside the jeans pocket: a tiny piece of notebook paper with the numbers: 0245749283-50-4734829348-22-218928430239. When the numbers are compared against any other sequence of numbers that has ever existed in the world, there is no match found.

Also found on man’s person: screws of varying sizes, a Werther’s wrapper, Kleenex.

Man bent over large, loud, vibrating power tools that scientists say contributed to the volcano’s eruption.

2.) In the laundry room: woman bones. The scientists struggle to understand why a family of four would require so many unmatched pairs of socks.

Inside grown woman’s purse: 17 different grocery lists with similar items, indicating a diet rich in calcium: skim milk, 2% milk, orange juice, cheese, eggs, yogurt, Lysol, asparagus.

Also found: 3 lipsticks of exactly the same shade but different brands, hand sanitizer, a wallet with not much more than insurance cards insuring against everything except volcanoes.

Woman found near multiple cleaning products, yet house shows no signs of being clean.

3.) On couch: boy bones, body curled around laptop. Headphones still in. Seemingly had no inkling of the imminent disaster.

4.) In girl-child bedroom: girl bones, in mid-jump. Scientists at first conclude that girl’s mouth was open because she was yelling about volcano eruption, but decide she was only singing at the top of her lungs. They are impressed that dancing could occur in a room with items strewn all over the floor.

Scientists were able to retrieve the outdated hard drive from the family’s computer.

Using antiquated computer forensics, scientists discover photograph files. Many of them involve blowing out candles on a round, gooey object, while others focus on people holding shiny square objects while standing near an indoor tree.

The scientists find no photographs of the man making things with his power tools, the woman doing laundry, the boy using his laptop or the girl dancing in her room.

They conclude that most everyday activities involve blowing out candles and standing in front of indoor trees.

Using power tools and washing clothes must be very, very special indeed.

Note: The kids and I are reading “Wonder” right now… a great book. One of the characters in the book is the stage manager in Our Town, a play which had a big impact on me as a teen. 

“Does anyone ever realize life while they live it… every, every minute?”

—Emily, from Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Wherefore art thou, Yugoslavia?

Our world changes as fast as weather in the South. It’s gorgeous, warm and sunny today; rain and snow are forecast for tomorrow. (By the way: in a twist on my “pre” blog post, one TV forecaster is now calling his forecasts “futurecasts.” Hmmm.)

Miles run today: 10

Age I was when I read about Anne Frank: 8

Year the Berlin Wall came down: 1989

When I was 13 and Sting was singing about whether the Russians loved their children too, I wondered: Did they really? How could they love their children so much if they were spending all of their time standing in long lines for toilet paper? Seemed like that would be distracting from the whole parenting thing.

And I was pretty sure both sets of leaders, American and Russian, would screw the whole thing up. I’d seen the boys in my classes, and they always had a hard time keeping their fingers off of buttons; presidents were only grown-up little boys.

Ergo: We were in big trouble.

I spent a lot of time listening to the “Dream of the Blue Turtles” album that year; “Fortress Around Your Heart” remains one of those pivotal songs in my life.

The English fortress thing spoke to me: I was way deep into King Arthur and longed for the days when men killed each other more elegantly, man-to-man, instead of obliterating whole states from across an ocean.

My daughter’s class is reading a novel based on a true story called, “A Long Walk to Water,” about children in Sudan who became “lost boys” when war broke out. The horrifying but gripping story has captured her imagination. I mentioned that she might want to read about Anne Frank, a young girl whose family hid from the Nazis but eventually died in the concentration camps.

She wanted to. So we went to the library and got the book.

There was a picture book of Anne’s life, too. We got the picture book.

There were heaps of dead bodies in the picture book.

Ooops.

Add it to the list of subjects she will need to discuss in therapy. We talked about how a lot of people died; dead bodies were the horrific reality.

She decided not to read about Anne Frank.

Now my son is concerned about North Korea. And nuclear bombs.

Around the dinner table, my husband and I talked with the kids about the Cold War, and the Berlin Wall, and guards who shot at people who tried to escape, and nuclear arms.

And then we YouTubed video from 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down.

“Will it be scary?” my daughter asked, putting her hands halfway over her eyes. “Will there be dead bodies?”

“No. It was like a huge street party with drinking and laughing and cheering. And sledgehammers,” I said.

Which now that I think about it sounds like a pretty scary idea.

The kids watched the video. It all happened a long time ago, way back in the 1900s, a century my children did not experience. The hair was… unfortunate.

But when I saw footage this morning from the Today show, with Matt and Savannah in Boston, men dressed up in redcoats and those representing the colonists, I realized: things change so fast.

To go from hating the British to being BFFs (and me marrying one), to go from a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union to calling it Russia and a bunch of smaller states, to go from a huge cement wall to a time when tiny fragments of the wall are all that remain…

When I was young I used to wonder why adults would say that they were horrible with geography. It was so easy. You learned the names and memorized where they were. How hard could that be?

Now I know: a third of the country names have changed since I learned them all back in high school. Wherefore art thou, Yugoslavia?

So when my son asked the other night, “Do you think we’ll ever be friends with North Korea?”

I had to say: “I think anything is possible.”

Also, I hope the North Koreans love their children, too.

When Destructor Robots Nearly Derailed Valentine’s

Yes, I’m recycling an image I’ve already used because I love these: Valentines my great aunt sent me from the 1930s.

Miles run today: 4.5

Valentines waiting to be addressed on our kitchen table: 30

Days until Valentine’s Day: 1

February 13, 2007, 8 p.m.

“Put on your shoes!” I yell, grabbing my keys and purse. I am on my way to the grocery store with my two children, ages 4 and 6.

My husband is out of town, it’s raining, and the kids are already in their pajamas.

“Don’t worry; no one will see you. Put on a coat, and we’ll pretend you’re wearing pants,” I tell my son, who is in kindergarten.

“But there are spaceships on them!” he yells.

“Sometimes people like to wear pants with spaceships on them,” I say, as we dash to the minivan, getting pelted with raindrops.

My daughter is sobbing, her tiny hands clenched into fists.

Five minutes earlier, 7:55 p.m.

“Hey, are you almost finished with those cards? It’s time for bed.” I walk into the dining room, where my daughter is addressing Valentine’s Day cards for her preschool friends. There is a list of 22 friends, and my daughter is using preternaturally gorgeous penmanship to write each child’s name on the Disney Princess-themed cards.

She reaches for another card, but her hand comes up with nothing.

She leans over the box and scrambles around inside.

Nothing. No more cards.

I tilt the box sideways. “So you must be finished, right? You had 30 cards, and you only have 22 classmates and two teachers.”

“Nooooo,” she says, pushing them all into a neat pile and pointing at her list with checkmarks next to most names. “I have five left to do.”

“Five? How is that possible?” I check the inside of the box again.

Her eyes focus on her lap. Silence.

“What happened?” I say, touching her shoulder.

“Well… I made some Valentines for my… my… my animals.” She looks up at me, and her face turns blotchy red, a sure sign of tears brewing.

“How many did you make for your stuffed animals?” I ask, sinking into a chair and cradling my head.

She starts to whimper. “Well, one for Bear Bear, one for Pinkie, and Bunny-Bunny-Love, and a few others, and I might have messed up on one or two…”

8:05 p.m.

A herd or flock or swarm of Valentine’s-loving locusts has ravaged the pink-and-red card display.

I am standing with two kids in pajamas and tennis shoes, one crying, one asking for chocolate, and the 20-something business-casual types who drop into the grocery store at 8 p.m. to grab sushi are eyeing our ragtag group with suspicion.

There are no more Disney Princess cards. No more mermaids or cute bunnies. What is left: destructor megatronic robots and manga-style girls with huge alien eyes and miniskirts with thigh-high socks.

“Mo-oooo-ooommmmy! There are no more caaaaaaards!”

We are causing A Scene.

I rummage through every single shelf until at the very back, I find some mangled Bob the Builder cards and emerge victorious.

“Yes! Can We Find It? Yes! We! Can!” I sing.

“Bob the Builder is for boys!” my daughter cries, but her sobs have switched back to quiet whimpers.

“But you have boys in your class who will love these!”

My son rolls his eyes. “Can we go home now?”

By 8:45 p.m., my daughter finishes addressing her cards. And the next day, some crazy mom brings in Ferrero Rocher candies for the kids. It will be the last decent candy any of them see for at least 10 years.

February 13, 2013, 8 a.m.

My husband has helped my daughter craft her own Valentines out of a rabbit picture she drew. He printed them off for her and only needed to cut them… but the nice cutting thingie is at work.

“Um. No. They need to get cut this morning,” I say, hands on hips.

He looks at me as he turns away from some serious work thing. “I’m working.”

I give him The Look and try to transfer some of my Valentine’s Day horror flashbacks onto his consciousness. This has never worked, and I don’t know why I expect it to today.

But he cuts them. “Are you sure you need 30? Are there really 30 people in the class?”

“She needs 30. Trust me on this.” Tears, buddy. Tears. Mayhem. Destructor Robots.

I have been remiss in accepting a couple of blog awards. I wanted to say thank you so much for thinking of me and point out some great blogs you may or may not be visiting.

Thank you, Mike Lince, who blogs at Applecore. He and his wife have set a course to move to a different country every six months. They just finished in Panama, now they’re in Mexico, they plan to move to Scotland in July, and after that, Spain. He writes some wonderfully informative posts with great photographs.

I’d like to pass this award on to a few bloggers (please feel free to use or ignore as necessary):

Vanessa-Jane Chapman’s new(ish) blog, Sugarness, will make you want to lick  your screen. (If it’s dusty, like mine, fight the urge.) Yummy chocolate recipes will start piling up on your to-bake list. Thanks, Vanessa, I think.

OK. Don’t be mad, because this one is a bit self-centered… I wrote a post about being 10, and someone else I follow got inspired to write about being 10, and hers was… wow! So much more (as Subtle Kate would say) muchier. Check out this post by Desertrose. So good.

Also, many of you already follow her, but JM McDowell’s serial mystery about archaeologist Meghan Bode, Buried Deeds, is one you won’t want to miss each Tuesday. Don’t worry; she’s on the 11th installment, but she has the rest archived if you’ve missed them.

Thank you to Kate at 4am Writer for the Blog of the Year Award for 2012. She is humble, kind, a generous blogger and friend to writers everywhere. I can’t wait to read her novel(s) when she’s ready to share them with the world.

I guess it’s a little late to be passing this one on… but I’ll share a few blogs that I’ve enjoyed over the past year so you can start enjoying them, too.

If you haven’t read one of Gabriela Blandy’s posts at A Sense of a Journey, you’ve been missing out. Fan.Tas.Tic. What a great writer! And if you want a title for your posts that draws people in, call up Gabriela. The woman can do no wrong.

You dig? I can’t stop looking at the photos of Florida at SmallHouseBigGarden. Gorgeous photos, she knows all the Latin names and growth habits of every blooming thing south of the Mason-Dixon line. Especially if you’re sitting inside on a drizzly rainy day like today, those photos will transport you somewhere warm. Divine.

I can relate to this fellow mom on the other side of the Atlantic. She turned 40 last year like I did, writes about shoes and lipstick and music and pyromaniacs and politicians and Cadbury’s. Yum. Check out TurningTwiceTwenty to read her latest musings.

And thanks for the awards!

When You Blog in Your Pajamas

Bluebird of Friendliness. My daughter took this sweet photo.

Miles I ran yesterday: 4.5

Hours in the day I wear running clothes: 1

Hours in the day I “dress up”: 2?

I made a Scarlett O’Hara-type vow when I was 13: I would never again, as God was my witness, wear a slip.

Of all the slippery-ish, uncomfortable, meaningless garments in the world… grrr!

By the way, have you heard we’re getting a new pope? And have you heard about what Princess Kate wore at her last public event?

My mom and I were talking last night about why the media seems to seize on certain events and people who may or may not affect the world too much one way or the other.

The answer: pomp and circumstance.

We, as a culture, are experiencing a dearth of pomp and circumstance.

No one (thank God) wears slips anymore.

I can blog in my pajamas (or sweat pants or running clothes).

When I meet clients or have interviews, I can meet with them in “business casual” clothes, whatever that means. When I see gorgeous gowns hanging in the windows of boutiques, I wonder who really wears them.

But a pope? Steeped in centuries of tradition, mysterious rituals and great costume changes? Why wouldn’t the media want to cover it?

My mom used to place a very high value on dressing “appropriately.” When we went to the ballet or the symphony or church or a silly school concert, it involved a certain amount of procedure.

There was the annoying process of getting ready. Then, throughout the event, the pantyhose would wriggle down my legs or tear or leave elephantine creases at my ankles. The dreaded slip would shift around in opposite directions from the dress or skirt or cling embarrassingly to my legs as the wind and static cling had their ways with me.

By the time I got to college, there were fewer and fewer events where I had to dress appropriately. And at the end of college, I had to dress up one final time.

The only time I remember being certifiably hung over was the morning of my college graduation.

Someone, I don’t remember who, talked me into tequila shots the night before. There was a certain throw-caution-to-the-winds-who-cares-if-I-don’t-yet-have-a-job-and-have-to-attend-graduation-tomorrow?

It felt nice.

Until my parents and sister showed up at the door of my room to attend the ceremony. I had dragged myself through the shower and was lying across my twin bed with my head dangling over the edge.

I was not a pretty sight.

But I threw on (slowly, very slowly) a dress, sans slip, and my Carolina blue graduation gown.

The temperature outside in May felt like 98; it was probably in the 80s. We made our way to the football stadium, a gorgeous procession of blue the color of the sky.

I was sweating underneath my gown, and I couldn’t find my friends. My best friend had graduated in December, and my boyfriend wasn’t even close to graduating. I was adrift in a sea of blue, buffeted about until I found a blessedly cool bleacher.

My head hurt. My heart hurt. I was finished with school and had nowhere to go but back to live at home with mom and dad.

But when I sat in the middle of a group of rowdy fellow graduates, the sky all puffy white clouds and clear blue, the mortarboards and gowns so festive and optimistic, I felt my spirits lift. The speakers played our fight song and “In My Mind I’m Going to Carolina.” The professors up on stage, set apart by their serious black gowns and stripes that meant business, told us that we’d achieved something.

My dress stuck to my legs, but I didn’t care.

I was going places in this world, and a slip was not going with me.

Do you think that pomp and circumstance still has a place in our super-casual world? Why do you think that we resist tradition when people are so obviously drawn to it?

No Bones About It

Way too crunchy.

Miles run today: 10

Social media class finished yesterday: 1 (yay!)

Mini Heath bars eaten today: 1 (only because that was all I could find)

It turns out that you can be 40 and still discover new things about yourself.

Or at least, you can discover a name for something that you feel that you had never put into words before:

I deplore bone-in meat.

One of my oldest friends and her husband send out an amazingly funny holiday card each year, and every year I think to myself, “I wish I could write something this funny for the holidays that didn’t sound ridiculous and overthought.” They usually manage to include several relatable points that make me nod and think, “I have had this very same experience.”

Their card this year had a list of “Likes” and “Dislikes” for each member of the family, up to and including the dog.

One of my friend’s Dislikes was bone-in meat.

I screamed out in agreement. Yes! We have been counseled: Know Thyself.

And now I do. I am Anne Woodman, disliker of bone-in meat.

I have toyed with the idea of becoming a vegetarian at various times in my life, but a.) I really like the taste that meat adds to a dish, and b.) my husband would never be okay with that.

So I keep cooking, and the family keeps eating meat. But I draw the line at meat with bones in it. Occasionally, I’ll roast a chicken and pretend that I can’t see the bones. I try to pull the meat off while closing my eyes.

For the most part, I don’t buy meat with hard, white reminders of the animal it used to be, and all the talk about chicken wings around the Super Bowl baffled me.

Chicken wings are weird. I’m sorry. I know I’m way, way in the minority here.

But why would you cook up a bunch of tiny little things and then pull the infinitesimal amount of meat off with your teeth in front of other people? There is hardly a bite of meat on each bone thing, people. And hey, news flash: They’ve figured out how to de-bone stuff here in 2013.

I don’t get it.

What is something that you’ve discovered about yourself within the past year? Please share; I would love to read about your weird realizations.

What Has Time Forgotten?

Time capsule: where did you think you would be?

Miles run Sunday: 5 (excellent!)

Miles run Monday: 3 (horrible!)

Miles run today: 0

When I was in elementary school, a few of my friends and I had an extra class that we got to take once a week.

I remember sitting out in a trailer (they now call them “cottages” to make them sound more upscale) near the PE classes, enjoying the sunshine and the respite from dreaded math and my teacher who used words like, “flustrated.”

Not a word.

Out in our trailer, we did fun things like create island nations and corresponding governments and argue about which resources were more necessary. Today, there’s a board game like that called “Settlers of Catan.”

We were the kind of trailblazers who made our own Catan… er, Rainbow Island.

The teacher was a bit of a wild card. We made fun of her, but secretly, we all liked her and her wacky, way-far-out-of-the-box skill set. During all hours of the school day, she held one of those tall, plastic cafeteria cups full of ice  and frequently crunched it with zeal while teaching. I hope her teeth survived to old age.

She had large, fuzzy hair the color of rust sprayed to her level of perfection, and the tips of her fingers would hover over it from time to time to check that its perfection was still intact.

Sometimes, she read us five-minute mysteries that we had to solve on the spot (I never did). They involved details like “larynx” and “late-model sedan” that remained foreign to me until I was at least 25.

One time, she brought in one of our classmates who later went on to be salutatorian in high school who tried to explain binary code to us (again, foreign, and dare I say it? Pointless.).

But one of my favorite activities was the time capsule. Various teachers through the years gave us time capsule busywork, but with this teacher, I had the strong belief that she would perhaps keep the information safe and present us with it on the day of our college graduation or wedding or even on the morning that we were launched into space.

So I laid out my information with great seriousness, thinking ahead to the time 15 years in the future, when I would be 25, and the time in the very distant future when I would be (gasp and gulp!) 35. Unthinkable.

But think I did.

My main exposure to future-think was my mom’s favorite TV show, Star Trek. I was dearly hoping I would not have to wear a unitard for my future on the space station.

The goal of the time capsule was to think ahead to what we would be doing, not the people we would become.

That’s why the concept of the book I just read, What Alice Forgot, was so intriguing to me. Almost-40-year-old Alice falls off of a stationary bike at the gym, bashes her head pretty hard, and forgets the last 10 years of her life. The last she knew, she was still in love with her husband, pregnant with her first child and prone to sleeping long hours on the weekends.

What a difference 10 years makes.

The author, Liane Moriarty, does a fine job of illustrating the small changes that lead to big changes… not only in what Alice is doing in her life, but in the kind of woman, wife and mother she has become.

I do set goals for myself for the next five and 10 years; things I want to experience, things I want to accomplish.

But do we do enough thinking about the person we are becoming as life has its way with us?

What are some ways you stay in tune with not only your outward goals but your very being?

What would your 10-year-old self be happy about your life today? How would he or she be disappointed?

Choices: Are You Proud of Yourself?

Stormy Weather.

Miles run yesterday: 4.5

Choices we make on an average day: 312 (a purely scientific number)

Packets of oatmeal I eat each morning: 2

One day the summer after I graduated from college, I stood in the warehouse of a special effects design studio.

There were masks, molds, goopy goop, clay and long tables filled with evidence of an artist at work.

I never really knew the boy/man who owned it, the one who created monsters and zombies for movies. He had sat nearby in my high school homeroom each day without us ever exchanging more than a “good morning.” But my mom knew his family through her work at the bank, and she scored us a tour through his little shop of horrible, ghoulish creations.

Back in high school, homerooms consisted of kids with last names alphabetically similar to our own. One girl with my same last name sat in front of me for four years in a row. She was a cheerleader who wore sweat pants with words printed across the bum. She had an annoying habit of announcing, “I am so proud of myself!” several times in the 15 minutes we spent desk-to-desk.

At a time when “preppy” was considered so mid-1980s, one of the boys, a football player, wore a neatly ironed button-down shirt most days. Sometimes in a pastel pink.

One kid who sat nearby revered the band Rush and smelled of marijuana at an hour of the day when my Wheaties were just barely making an appearance in my belly.

So by the time I was post-college, the guy who always sat quietly at the back of the room who created this whole Hollywood life for himself without fitting into the expected college-grad school-corporate-job mold surprised me. As he proudly showed off his portfolio with professional photos of grisly masks used in real, mass-produced films, I wondered: what had I done during my pizza-eating, falling-in-love, broadcast-journalism-unpaid-journalism-internship college career?

I was so predictable.

Not long after leaving the horror fest, I started waiting tables and met our high school’s former mascot. After college, instead of getting a job in his field (so predictable!), he decided to get a job in Tahiti at a Club Med there. He taught windsurfing.

There may have been a low point that day when I was forced to carry out 12 Diet Coke refills in a row. Windsurfing. Tahiti. Really?

Recently, I had lunch with a friend who wondered why she wasn’t as successful as some of her friends, friends who had traveled the world teaching in Africa, hosting national news broadcasts and writing stories about Haiti and its recovery.

I swallowed my bite of barbecue sandwich and eyed her across the table.

Do they have two gorgeous children? I asked her. When they fly home from Africa, do they have a partner to tell about their terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day?

No, she said. No, they don’t.

And they are probably perfectly happy with that fact, I said. But she wouldn’t be; she made the choice years ago to take a different path.

I am reminded almost daily of the paths we take, the choices we make in our lives that create unique selves. Our choices add up to lots of stories, to a whole life filled with color.

Some things we can’t control: illness, acts of nature, deaths of family members or close friends.

But the things we can control; what of those? Are you making the choices you will be happy with years from now?

What is one choice you have made lately that makes you feel proud of yourself?

Storytelling Superheroes

Detail vs. Big Picture: Do you focus on the tiny detail at the center or how the bright yellow petals make you feel?

Miles run today: 4.5

Hours school was delayed today: 3

Wintry accumulation: 0

My college best friend and one-time roommate had a superpower.

She could remember any conversation verbatim and recite it back 15 times to 15 different listeners in exactly the same way.

From this, you may infer that:

a.) she was an excellent student, recalling every single tidbit a professor uttered, and

b.) listening to one side of her multiple phone calls reciting the same experience over and over was both maddening and fascinating.

And Lord help you if you ever changed your mind. My whole life, things have come out of my mouth that I can’t recall five minutes later. And I might have a whole other opinion five days from now.

We would be standing in someone’s room, and I would say, “Wow, Julie, that is a gorgeous orange comforter you have!”

And my best friend would say, “You said last month that you hate the color orange. In fact, you said, ‘Please kill me if I ever wear, decorate or eat something orange.”

Awkward.

But probably true, given her total recall.

She had the kind of memory for minute conversational details that any writer would love to be able to access. On the stand at a Congressional hearing, she would be an ideal witness, reciting with perfect clarity words spoken by colleagues or friends nine years earlier. No “I cannot recalls” for her. No sirree bob.

Lyrics to every song written between 1975 and 1994? Not a problem.

One night, my best friend, a few other friends and I were heading out on the town. One of our friends fell down the concrete steps of our dorm headfirst, in slow motion, then popped up, unscathed, and proceeded to carry on a previous conversation. My best friend was able to tell the story of the exact song we had been listening to (“Divine Thing” by the Soup Dragons), The Slow-Motion Fall and all the way up to the last thread of conversation (a wild night in Shallotte).

I lived the experience, then heard about it at least seven times with the boring parts left in when retold to other friends, each time exactly the way it happened.

Over the years, I have decided that storytelling requires two things: a good memory and an ability to know what to leave out.

My mom is a natural storyteller, something I didn’t realize until I was grown.

Didn’t every child’s parents tell about the boy who came to school with no shoes? Or the scientist who walked through the chemistry lab carrying bubbling beakers while wearing full, Ebola-level-clearance gear?

My mom can recall names, dates and stories from each era of her life; she (mostly) edits out the boring parts. Unlike my college best friend, however, the details may be slightly editorialized or ahem, embellished.

My mom has some really good stories.

The difference between experiencing situations with my mom and my college best friend is that with my college best friend, I wished she would change it up a little each time she told the story. Just for the sake of her BFF.

And with my mom, well… I often felt that I didn’t live the same event. Or that maybe I had missed something.

We would go to a store, have to return something, and come home.

Here is how the dinner conversation played out as my mom explained the situation to my dad:

“So, I marched right up there to the desk and told the cashier (she was about 22 and couldn’t stop chewing gum; I wanted to say something to her, but I didn’t), ‘This hose doesn’t work. It is the most poorly engineered gardening implement I’ve ever seen. I demand my money back.'”

I would sit there, chewing my stir fry, wondering if my mom had maybe visited a different store than the one I had.

“And then she said, ‘Well…’ and I said, ‘If you can’t do any better than that, I will take my business elsewhere,’ and I slammed my hand down on the counter. That pretty much woke her up. She opened that cash register and refunded my money.”

My dad would say something like, “Good for you, honey,” and my mom would smile.

I would think: There was no slamming. There was no demanding. My mom was perfectly nice to the cashier. The cashier seemed like she wanted to give the money back.

But the stories always sounded pretty good, and the big picture was the same, so I learned from her that the actual details were less important than what you did to the story: the editing, the tone, the description, the way you felt about the event.

And I always wondered how I would be represented by the storytellers in my life, considering I didn’t remember my own utterances word-for-word as my college best friend did, and I did plenty of things to make my mom less than happy. She could have a field day telling stories about me.

Ultimately, I took a page from their books: I learned to remember, use the details I needed and editorialize when the mood hit me. Correction: I’m still learning.

What about you? How did you learn to experience, synthesize and share your stories?

Liquids and Things That Go Loud in the Night

At least he’s not scary.

Miles run today: 8

Inches of snow we’ve gotten from major storm system headed our way: 0

Gallons of milk bought for major storm: 1 (I am not sure why running out of milk is such a big fear.)

Setting: our kitchen, before breakfast.

My husband: post-coffee.

Me: pre-coffee.

Me: You turned the water on very loudly last night.

Him: I turned the water on. A little bit.

Me: It was loud, like a tsunami.

Him: I got that impression, from your obnoxious “shushing.” I just needed more water. Hmph.

Me: Where’s the coffee?

Back when I was a single girl and waiting tables, we had a name for the things that woke us up in the middle of the night, sweat pouring from our foreheads, imminent danger close at hand: Waitmares.

“I didn’t get that Diet Coke refill out to table 16!”

I would sit up in bed and feel relieved that table 16 would live to drink another day.

Always, it was the drinks.

After we had first one baby, then two, I would often awake to phantom baby cries.

Again with the drinks. I know now that “Crib number 16, more drinks!” is probably what my daughter was screaming all those nights at 2 and 4 a.m.

Of course, there were the very real baby wake-up calls, and then there was the much worse scenario:

The bound-out-of-bed-to-feed-a-crying-baby when the baby was sleeping, well… like a… nevermind. Phantom baby cries were the worst, because you knew that the real cries would be coming just about the time you fell back asleep.

Argh.

Back when the kids were little, we had carpet in our bedroom. Illness or a horrible troll nightmare would bring a ghosty little child tiptoeing up to my bedside, the body inches from mine without me waking from the dream world.

Then the tiny fingers would brush my shoulder… “Mo-ommy?” a little voice would whisper. “My throat hurts.”

Yowza!

Now, my son’s large, thudding man-feet hit the room’s hardwood floors so I get an early-warning signal.

More liquids needed: Children’s Motrin.

The other day, my husband, who finds it exhilarating to wake up at 4:45 a.m., regarded me with wide-awake eyes across the breakfast table.

Him: Am I really going to have to refill my water glass downstairs in the middle of the night?

Me: Your water sounds were aggressive and way out of line.

Him: Seriously?

Then I kissed him on the top of the head and poured some more coffee.

More liquids needed: this was going to be a multi-liquid day.

With a Name Like Viva

Standing in line makes me feel all knotted up like the tree roots. But I was cool and still like the lake beyond. And then I went for a run.

Words written on my blog since Sunday: 0

Minutes I stood in line at the cable store Tuesday: 63

Temperature outside at 3 p.m.: 35 (I’m ready for summer.)

Her name was Viva, and she wanted to help me.

I glanced back at the line wrapping around the small space and wondered at my good fortune. Finally!

So I lost over an hour of my life on Tuesday. It’s an hour I’ll never get back, folks. And while I used to think that Hell on Earth was tech support, I now know that the real Hell is Standing in Line.

There was Viva, cool as a cucumber.

All I had to do that Tuesday afternoon, a day when both kids were out of school, was return a cable box and pay a prorated fee, a nebulous amount they could not reckon over the phone.

The rough dimensions of the cable store: your family room.

Number of people in line at cable store when we arrived: 13

Average time employees spent with each person: 5-9 minutes

People in line behind us when we left: 17

Temperature outside cable store: approx. 25

Temperature inside cable store: approx. 81

General attitude of people in line at cable store: less than stellar

But Viva was fine.

One key point about lines: when you finally work your way to the front, you are alarmingly thankful. You become pliable, conciliatory.

Viva called me to her desk, and I rested the cable box, wires and remote on the ledge, balancing the weight there until she would relieve me of its burden.

I waited 15 minutes for that privilege.

Posted around Viva’s cubby were memos of varying legibility. I am fairly certain they were written in code so that outsiders could not understand.

I got the distinct feeling that if I walked around to view the world from Viva’s perspective that her cubby would sport these gems:

“Your mother does not work here.”

“This is not Burger King. You don’t get it your way.”

But Viva did not let her good humor slip. She was neither kind nor cruel, neither ebullient nor dazed. She may have been one of those aliens from Men in Black.

I began to suspect that her solution to my problem involved stalling.

I noted that each time an employee finished with the person at her desk, the next person in line would scoot up with no break in between.

My prorating problem became Viva’s break.

I was like a walk on a tropical beach for Viva, a tall glass of lemonade after cutting the grass on a hot summer’s day, a gentle wave licking her magenta-painted toenails.

But as I felt the breath of the man behind me in line, I was not enjoying the experience as much as Viva was, her fingers skipping happily over the computer keyboard.

I was not entirely sure I was going to make it out of there alive, folks. I was a little concerned that my epitaph would read: Anne Woodman. Died at the counter of the cable store.

And that would be sad.

So when the kids and I finally made it out into the icy wind, we shrieked like cable-free banshees.

Later, at dinner, when my husband started to get irritated about how much they charged us for the so-called prorated fee, I gave him The Look.

I took a sip of wine, remembered to breathe deeply and said:

“If you don’t like it, I’m sure Viva will be happy to see you.”

After all, she probably needs a break.