Missy Diggs

This morning started out as many mornings do, with me feeling really groggy and already unable to keep up with the demands of one very Vivid Girl. I groaned my way out of bed, swallowed all the pills that go with the morning part of my lifestyle, brushed my teeth (wait! did I brush my teeth? um, well, I usually do brush my teeth…..), poured myself some coffee (many many thanks to Mr. B for getting up before me and making the coffee) and I put some breakfast in a bowl for the Vivid Girl, who was already barricaded on the couch with her craft supplies and her Netflix cartoons. But the Vivid Girl did not want the bowl of breakfast, even though I had carefully selected the items in the bowl to be pleasing to her. In this case, frosted organic tiny wheat cereal squares and dried apricots.
She loves these things, usually. Okay, well, actually, I can’t figure out what she loves usually, but I have seen her eat these very things before, on more than one occasion, and when I brought them home from the store she was excited, and so I foolishly thought that meant that when she was hungry she would eat them.
Because I never learn.
So, because I am the kind of parent who strives for joy more than for consistency or authority or even keeping the food budget down, I suggested that we could leave a bit early for camp today and drive through the fast food place where the Vivid Girl likes to order a breakfast that comes with a toy and that she can eat in the car. This is not something I am willing to do everyday, mind you, but somewhere along the way we came to a compromise in which we, the Worn-Out Parents of the Vivid Girl, agreed that we would do this once a week or so.
This made the Vivid Girl happy and so we quickly scrambled around pulling clothes and shoes on and off until we were both wearing what it seemed like we should wear, and we gathered up our things (my things: purse, keys, cell phone, kindle, wallet. her things: script, dancing shoes, socks, activity with many tiny pieces to do in the car), and we left the house. And we left another thing, too: we left the snack that the Vivid Girl needs for camp and that Mr. B had kindly packed while I was still pretending to be asleep this morning. We left that valuable item sitting on the kitchen counter. And we didn’t realize it until we actually got to camp, about half an hour later.
And by that time we were no longer early for camp, but right on time, which meant that there was no time to go back and get the snack. And the reason we went from being very early to having no extra time is this:
First we went to the fast food drive through that the Vivid Girl likes and she told me what to order. And what she likes to order now is actually a regular menu item, so I have to remember to also order the kids’ toy, for which they probably charge me extra even though they are already charging me full price for low quality food instead of the lower kids’ price for equally low quality food. And then the toy came and it was one that the Vivid Girl already has, from the last time she got fast food breakfast on the way to camp.
And maybe that is why when she unwrapped her food she decided she didn’t like it. She didn’t have to taste it to make this decision. She just looked at it. And she said it looked different. And she wrapped it up and set it aside and began to pout.
So I said, cheerfully and kindly,  “Well, did you taste it? maybe it looks funny but tastes okay?” Because now I was in the position of trying to encourage my child to eat food that I don’t want her to eat. Because that’s my parenting style.
So she tasted it, grudgingly, and then said it tasted pretty okay so she took two teeny tiny miniature bites of her full-sized low-quality fast-food breakfast sandwich, and then she said, petulantly, “But the meat looks kinda gray in the middle.”

She got me on that one. Even I am not going to try to convince my child to eat low-quality fast-food meat that I don’t even want her to eat in the first place if it’s GRAY. I mean, what even is it? Is it monkey or something? Why is it GRAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!

So I took a deep breath and drove in the direction of the Vivid Girl’s camp-of-the-week, and I asked, ever so sweetly, “Well, my darling daughter, what would you like to do about this situation?”

And the Vivid Girl threw back her head and wailed, “I DON’T KNOW!!!!”

So I said I would go to another, slightly higher-quality, fast-food drive-through on the way to camp so she could have something to eat before camp. Because you do need breakfast before camp, you know. Especially if you’re the Vivid Girl, and it’s your first ever acting camp, and you have been cast in the lead of the mini-musical, which is Annie, and which you have to be ready to perform in ONLY THREE MORE DAYS. So we went to the slightly higher-quality fast-food drive-through, which I had thought served breakfast, but it didn’t serve breakfast anymore. If ever. So finally I took the girl to a cafe where she was able to order real food. She chose a giant yogurt granola parfait with berries, of which she ate approximately three bites and then declared herself full.

By which time we were at camp, which is when we noticed that we had forgotten the snack, and she started to cry because now she was stuck either being late for camp or having no snack and what kind of terrible choice is that? So I took another deep breath, yoga-style, and pasted a smile on my tired twitchy face and said, “No, darling girl, light of my life, you go to camp on time and I will go to the nearest store and get you a snack and bring it back to camp so you will both be on time and have a snack.”

Which is what I did.

And so by 9:15 this morning, I had been to four different food sellers and had spent approximately $30 on 3 bites of food for a six-year-old. And I was exhausted. So I came home and did a few low-key things here until suddenly I noticed that it was 12:17 and I was running late for picking the Vivid Girl up from camp. Usually she wants me to have a snack all ready for her in the car when I pick her up, and today that would have been easy to do except that of course I ran out the door and left the snack that Mr. B packed sitting on the kitchen counter again.

And when I got to camp I was two minutes late, and there were three girls left, and one of them of course was the Vivid Girl. And she was crying. Because I was late. And in fact her teacher said she had just started crying, which makes sense because I had just started being late two minutes before. So I sat with the Vivid Girl and kissed her and comforted her and apologized for being late and assured her that I knew how much it upset her to be picked up late and reassured her that I will always come get her so there’s nothing to worry about. Then I dried her tears, and patted her hair, and gathered up all her stuff, including her street shoes, and her dance shoes, and her socks, and her script, and the bag that had contained the snack and which now contained a handful of soggy popcorn, an empty beef jerky package, and a half-full bottle of Vitamin Water with the cap off. The Vitamin Water spilled quickly filled the bag and the Vivid Girl sniffled and told me that when she had opened the jerky almost all the jerky had spilled out of the bag and so she hadn’t really had a very good snack at all.

And we walked out to the car and stowed all the stuff and  got buckled in. When I asked if she was ready to go, the Vivid Girl cheerfully said that she was. But as soon as I started driving, she started to sniffle and pout again. Once again I propped the corners of my mouth up into a sympathetic smile, turned my head, and said, “Oh, dearheart, lovely girl, whatever is the matter?”

And the Vivid Girl screwed up her eyes, opened her mouth wide, and howled, “I’m hungry!”

What I am doing right now is making eggplant/yellow squash parmesan using veggies from our bountiful farm box. More about the farm box some other time, and more about the vegan/not vegan issues brought up by cooking for my family in general, and making eggplant/whatever parmesan for my family in particular. Right this very minute I am sitting down to see what kind of blog update will come out of me while I am waiting for the salt to draw any potential bitterness out of the eggplant. I am not salted, so hopefully what comes out of me will be some flavor other than bitter.

I’ll tell you right now, though: I’m not promising sweet.

It’s summer here, as it is in many places, though certainly not all. Summer means no school, which in the case of our very own Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, means three long months yearning for school. In the case of the dedicated and loving mamas of this Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, it means three long months of periodic fun, punctuated by guilt, tied up together with yearning for school. Mothering seems to have a lot of guilt built in, on one side of the equation or the other, and these days it seems to be the mamas who feel guilty (rather than the mamas making the children feel guilty, which was popular for a long time), and one of the things I find myself feeling guilty about is my inability to give my child the kind of summer I used to have. But during the school year, the guilt is so much lighter and smuggier because I know for sure that I am giving the Vivid Girl a school so much better and more life-affirming than the ones I had.
But right here, at the point of summer that is farthest from school, the guilt is at a max and the smugginess (though not the mugginess) is at a seasonal low.

To counterbalance that, and also to get myself out of the house and away from certain chores such as thinking of family-friendly ways to cook the vegetables in the farm box, I took the Vivid Girl to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
Grandma and Grandpa live in what used to be a teeny-tiny rural town north of Dallas. To get to their house from Dallas, you drive north on the highway, drive east on a road that turns into a road with the same name as the town, and turn left at the little gas station/food mart/feed store. The sign on this store says:

Bait
Sandwiches

which is why I don’t go to that store. Also, my mom says it smells funny in there, though she allows that maybe that is because of the feed store aspect of the many conveniences offered by this store.

I am sure this store was much more convenient to the few people of the small town back when it was a small town, but now they have Walgreens, Petsmart, Target, and Jimmy Johns between them and the highway. Still, the bait sandwich business seems to be good, as the store is still there, unlike the junk store across the street that also used to mark the turn. Where I also never went, despite the fact that I love nothing more than shopping for junk, because I was never really sure whether it was actually a store, or just a house with a whole lot of stuff in the yard.

Anyway, turn left at Bait Sandwiches and turn left again and there you are. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.

But even though I know how to drive to my parents’ house, I usually don’t actually drive there. Me and the Vivid Girl, we like to take the train. We get on the train in Austin, ride 6 hours or so to Dallas, with all stops in between, and then get on the MetroRail and take it as far north as it goes. Then we climb into the back of Grandpa’s pickup truck and he carries us the rest of the way. The Vivid Girl likes the train because she can walk around, do crafts, practice cup stacking in the lounge, and buy snacks.  When we travel in the car, she needs to do all these things too, but we usually aren’t getting any closer to our destination while she does them.

The Vivid Girl also loves the train because she gets a whole day of my completely undivided attention. If  only for this reason, the Vivid Girl would probably ride the train every day if she could.  All day every day. Though I am pretty sure that the quality of my attention is at its very best on Day 1, and might devolve into something quite unpleasant before we reached such a distant destination as Chicago or Los Angeles. Probably it would be best to just ride the same stretch of rail between Austin and Dallas, so we could be rescued and revived by the people who love us at either end. Even so, I’m pretty sure I would get tired of it way before the Vivid Girl would. Several days and a bottle of Xanax before, most likely.

One thing about going to Grandma’s house is that sometimes there are cousins there. This time there weren’t any, but Grandma took time off work to play with us and we had a good time anyway. Grandpa doesn’t go to work, but he doesn’t really play either, so we left him home to think of ways to cook the vegetables from the garden.

I’m running out of time because I have to go pick up the Vivid Girl and her schoolmate from Gardening Camp, which is very fun but not as fun as school, which also has a garden, though school doesn’t have a pink poodle and gardening camp does. The way to get through summer is to focus on such advantages. With Grandma, we went to an amusement park where the Vivid Girl rode her first roller coaster. It was a tiny little thing called The Little Dipper, I guess because of its size and its hilliness, but after riding it I think it should have been called the WhipperSnapper, because of its size and its ability to undo months of chiropractic work in such a short ride. Whip! Snap! Ouch! Ride over.

We also rode the bumper cars, which was super excellent fun because the park was so uncrowded that we were the only two cars running, and we could really zoom around the track and also smack into each other hilariously.

And now I must zoom around the track to get to camp pick up on time. The eggplant has been rinsed and dried and breaded and is in the fridge waiting to be fried. I don’t know how bitter it will be, or whether the rest of the day will be sweet, or whether I will end up fried as well. Ah, the joys of summer!

Maybe it’s because I was thinking about high school, and reunions, that has my mind wandering around in the past, or maybe it’s because in the summer my thoughts naturally turn to what summer is like for my daughter, the Vivid Girl, compared to what summer was like for me, Missy Diggs. Or maybe it’s because the summer solstice is my birthday, and this year it was a big milestoney one. Whatever the reason, I’m thinking about the way summers used to be.

I grew up in the Midwest, as I may have mentioned, in a time when no one had air conditioning. If you’re going to be hot anyway, you may as well be hot outside, so we spent most of our time outdoors, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, riding bikes and climbing trees, and playing Gilligan’s Island under the mulberry tree that hung down over the canoe racks at the back of our yard. In the afternoon we’d bang in through the screen door to the kitchen to find our mother and beg for ice cream truck money or a ride to the pool. Our arms and faces were tanned, our knees were skinned, and the bottoms of our feet were tough as leather. At night, we’d be forced to go to bed well before the sun went down, and we’d lie there in the stifling twilight listening to the older kids playing tag and laughing. If our cousins were visiting, or if our parents had friends over for cards, we’d stay up late and catch lightning bugs in jars, putting the glowing jar on the porch while we played Bloody Murder in the dark, and then negotiating to be allowed to keep it on the dresser overnight if we promised to release the lightning bugs, outside, in the morning.

Most of our days followed this same drowsy pattern, punctuated by trips to the library or the grocery store, and summer dragged on forever. The big event of the summer would be our family vacation, which usually involved packing up the big red Chevy Blazer, tying the canoes to the top, and driving six hours to northern Wisconsin to live in a cabin in the woods at a Boy Scout camp. There were no boys in our family, just my sister and me, but my dad had gotten involved as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and that is how the Boy Scouts came to have such a strong influence on my childhood. We went to every Jamboree and every festival, and my sister and I knew pretty much every Eagle Scout around. In the summers, my dad would sign up to be the camp director at a small scout camp in Wisconsin, and the whole family would go with him, and that was our vacation.

At the camp, we lived in a cozy two bedroom cottage at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The cottage had a big picture window with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside, and a stone fireplace with some Boy Scout motto carved into the mantle. Some summers we had the cottage all to ourselves, other years we would have one or two older scouts living with us while they worked at the camp as guides to the troops who would come in for a week at a time. My favorite of these boys, and the only one I really remember at all, was a tall brown-haired boy named Melroy. In fact, he has probably taken on characteristics from all the Boy Scouts I ever knew, but no matter how well those boys embodied the scouting life, none of them ever had the sparkle and personality of Melroy. (Ah, Melroy….sigh)

Even at the time I knew that other people, especially grown ups, saw Melroy as a gawky, goofy, kind of unfortunate-looking kid, but to me he was beautiful. I thought he looked just like Robby Benson, who –along with Jodie Foster– totally made me swoon. Plus, unlike many of the boys, who for some reason had very little interest in two little girls hanging out at Boy Scout camp, Melroy actually talked to us like we were people, and he taught us about the woods, and how to build a fire in the fireplace, and how to whistle through a blade of grass, and all kinds of Boy Scouty stuff like that.

And even when he wasn’t staying in the cabin with us, we would often see Melroy in Wisconsin because we would make trips up to the big council camp and he would be there. My sister and I would drink “bug juice” (that’s what the Boy Scouts call Kool-Aid, which even at the time I thought was juvenile) from dented aluminum pitchers and explore around the edges of the camp while my dad did whatever Boy Scout business he had to do at the camp. One year, a boy (it probably wasn’t really Melroy but in my memory it is;  in my memory it is always Melroy) was raising a litter of baby raccoons in a box and we got to pet them and feed them milk with a dropper. We also would go to the big camp for the Council Fire and the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where men dressed as Indian chiefs would paddle canoes across the dark lake to deliver silent and serious boys into the firelight for some kind of solemn initiation ceremony.

All very mysterious, and holy, and so different from Girl Scouts, which my sister and I were both in and which seemed to have a lot more to do with butter cookies, knee socks, and folk dancing than Boy Scouts ever did. I also went to Girl Scout camp for a week or two every summer, and while it was a really fun and in some cases even profound experience, nothing about it ever seemed to approach the level of priestly purpose that the Boy Scouts’ firelight ceremony had. (This, even though I had it on good authority that both our fire-building technique and our canoe-paddling method were superior by far. In fact, the worst thing my dad could say about a person in a canoe was that they “paddled like a Boy Scout.” Oh, the shame!)

Although the big council camp was a sleepaway camp with a big mess hall, a camp store, and little clusters of tents or dorms or whatever (we were never allowed to go to the part of the camp where the boys actually slept, or where they swam, either, now that I think about it), the camp where we stayed was basically just  a boat house and a dock, and the boys would come with their troops and leaders and paddle out across the water to camp sites on the lake, where they would stay for a whole week doing whatever boys do in the woods. (From what I saw of them, my best guess was that they were telling fart jokes and daring each other to eat disgusting things.) Unless someone was homesick or needed to go to the hospital, we wouldn’t see the boys after they arrived until it was time for them to check in their life jackets and paddles and go home. My sister and I would sometimes help with the checking-out and checking-in of equipment, especially if there were several troops arriving or leaving at the same time, but mostly we hung out in the cabin with our mom when the scouts were around. During the week, we would canoe, or fish, or inventory the supplies in the boat house, or carry all the dutch ovens and cast iron frying pans up the long hill to the house, where we would clean them, rub them with oil, and season them in the cabin’s oven. Then we would carry them all back down the hill, inventory them, and put them on their shelves, where they would wait for scouts to come and claim them. I complained bitterly about this chore at the time, but now that I see what a great workout it was, carrying cast iron dutch ovens up and down the hill, I wish I could pay someone to let me do it again.

During the week we would go fishing early in the morning, or late at night, and eat freshly caught fish for breakfast. We would sit out after dinner and watch the stars come out and listen to the loons. Twice we went with some scout (let’s call him  “Melroy”) to a nearby lake where we could hike in and see a pair of bald eagles in their nest. My sister and I canoed (and we did not paddle like Boy Scouts, thank you very much) and swam and fought and  played in the woods. There was no tv or radio, just cards and books and the lake and the big woods and us.

This went on for many years, until I was about twelve or so. One day I was wearing shorts and a tank top and hanging out around the boat house helping my dad get a newly arrived troop set up with canoes and paddles and dutch ovens and whatnot. I remember that one of the boys came over and talked to me, and asked if I wanted a piece of gum, which I gladly accepted.  Suddenly his scout leader appeared and barked at him to get in his canoe, and the whole troop paddled off across the lake and out of sight. Sometime that week my dad told me that it had been decided that I was “too old” to hang out at the boat house and interact with the scouts and that I would have to stay in the cabin whenever there were boys around.

So I was exiled, but empowered, and I hid in the cabin glowing like a firefly in a jar and peeking out the windows whenever male voices floated up from the boathouse. Suddenly I knew there was danger, and potential, in even the most casual encounter, and I hummed with anticipation for the day Melroy would come for dinner or to go searching for an eagle’s nest. But Melroy didn’t come that summer, and my family never went back, and as far as I remember I never saw Melroy again.

And then we moved to Texas, where the Vivid Girl now lives, and where summer days come with either a heat advisory or a tornado/hurricane/flood warning. We live in the air conditioning and all the neighborhood kids are off at magic camp, or yoga camp, or math camp. We occasionally see a few lightning bugs, but not enough to fill a jar. We do have a jar of change reserved for the ice cream truck, but we’re rarely home when it comes by and we can’t usually hear it anyway, because the windows are closed, the A/C is running, and the radio or tv is on. And so far, as far as I know, my daughter has not encountered her Melroy but I’m pretty sure he’s out there. That’s the thing about Melroy; he’s always out there somewhere.

Many thanks for the photo originally uploaded to Flickr by McMillan Memorial Library Portrait Gallery and protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.

Halftime

You know how they say no two children ever grow up in exactly the same family? I think it also is true that no two teenagers ever go to exactly the same high school. And that goes a long way toward explaining how it is that my sister is currently traveling from Seattle, Washington to Small Town, Texas to attend her twenty year high school reunion while I am lounging around Austin in my pajamas, safe in the knowledge that my high school reunion committee doesn’t have my contact information, and would find a way to “misplace” it if they did. (Just like they did with all my Homecoming Queen votes back in the fall of 1987. Oh, yeah, little Miss Class President, I knew about that!)

Now, my sister is feeling a bit nervous about going to this reunion, as any normal person would, and she is wondering what she was thinking when she agreed to go.  She has been living in a beautiful blue island of liberalism and secular tolerance for quite a few years now, and it is safe to say that many of her former classmates are still swimming in the red red waters of their Bible belted hometown. But the reunion committee is headed by two of her best friends, by which I mean not just her best friends from high school but still her best friends now, because my sister is a loyal and friendly person who gets along with others and knows how to have a good time. I’ve made her promise to report anything crazy or scary that happens, but I’m pretty sure she’s going to have fun.

Now, I suppose it’s technically possible that I would find a way to have fun if I were to attend one of my high school reunions too (assuming I could find out when and where it was happening, that is). After all, I’m a woman who tried to make chemotherapy fun. And while I would definitely choose going back to high school over going through cancer treatment again (wait, is that right? hmmm, tough one. hopefully hypothetical), High School Reunion falls somewhere under Root Canal on my list of things I would like to do over my summer vacation. This is, of course, at least partly because my sister and I did not go to the same high school. Even though we did. oh, you know what I mean.

I started high school in the suburban Midwestern town where I grew up. It was a big school, academically competitive, crowded. I knew a bunch of the kids in my classes from junior high, but most of the kids I had gone to elementary school with had dispersed into different groups, and I only saw them in the band room or the cafeteria. Which was fine, cause I hadn’t really gotten through that whole 6th Grade Girls Are Mean thing very gracefully and I was grateful for a chance to reinvent myself and make a new start. And I was working on that, and it was hard (as it often seems to be) and then my family moved to Texas. And I thought, as have many before me, well, why not? If I’m going to recreate myself it might as well be in Texas.

Even though we had lived quite happily for many years on a dead-end street within easy walking distance of the library, the town hall, the elementary school, and the Tastee-Freeze, my parents decided to use the move to Texas to pursue some of their dreams as well, and this included Living Out in the Country and Having Land. At this time, in Texas, those things were very possible but did not usually come attached to what most people would call Good Schools. The first place my parents wanted to buy was basically a ranch on a lake and it sounded perfect until they decided to call the local school and make sure we girls would be able to go to school there and still get into college. The conversation went something like this:

My mother: So, my daughter is a freshman but she is taking Honors Geometry. Would she be able to do this at your school?

School representative: We have geometry.

My mother: Oh, okay. Good. Well, my daughter is taking French I and hopes to be able to take four years of French. Does your school offer that? (I know, French! What was I thinking? ah, les folies de la jeunesse!)

School representative: We-ell. Now, we did have a Spanish teacher, at one time. But she died.

So my parents let go of their lakefront dream and bought House2, which was still a respectable distance from town and still on a sizable piece of land. And which was on the bus route for the schools in the biggest town in the county, which also happened to be the only town that had a high school big enough to have both a Varsity and a Junior Varsity football team. Which, and let’s be honest, was basically the whole reason they had a high school at all.

But they did have a French teacher and a Spanish teacher (though we later discovered that these were actually the same person, a native Spanish speaker who really, really liked French food) and they later added a teacher of German, which is what my sister took when she got to high school. And that turned out to be a good choice, because when the Spanish/French teacher died the school got a new Spanish teacher but not a French teacher and there I was with only two years of language on my transcript and no desire, as a junior, to start over in Spanish with a bunch of freshmen.

Who were not at all like the freshmen I had gone to school with in the Midwest. No way. Those kids, maybe because it was a much more urban setting, knew how to fly under the radar. They played it cool and kept things quiet. They caused trouble, for sure: we had gangs, and teen pregnancies, and a “game” played in the hallways called Open Chest that actually sent several kids to the emergency room. These Texas kids, though, were a whole other deal. They were rowdy. They would get up and wander around during class, try on each others’ hats, throw things out the windows to their friends in the quad. In geometry we had an ancient teacher who every Friday would write out a quiz on an a transparency and leave it up on the overhead projector for the first part of class. Every other Friday this kid named Trey (half the boys were named Trey) would walk into class, pick up the spray bottle kept on the stand under the projector, and spray water right onto the quiz. The teacher would rise up out of her chair, flapping her arms in fury, and Trey would escape her grasp and run out into the hall laughing.

He was in my Trig class the next year, though, so I’m pretty sure he passed Geometry. Everyone passed Trig cause it was taught by one of the football coaches, though not the same one who taught World History. Football players passed everything.

If I could have attended high school in Texas as an anthropologist of some sort and not as an aching, lonely, bored, irritated teenage girl, things probably would have gone a bit better for me (though I’m still not too sure I’d be invited to the reunions!). However, I was wandering the halls looking for connection and meaning and damn if those things weren’t hard to find. When I was a junior the high school moved into a brand new building (we had been going to the same school that most of my classmates’ parents had gone to, and I think it was haunted by small town kids from an earlier, less college-bound, time), and my sister started school as a freshman. By then I had more or less branded myself as a Loner and an Outcast, though I still had some friends in less windy corners. Being an honors student helped. So did being in band.

My sister was in band, too, and she and I looked so completely different from each other and had such a common last name that no one ever suspected we were related. This was how it happened that when some older girls took her under their wing and told her what she needed to know about high school, they actually pointed me out and said, “See that girl over there? Stay away from her. She’s weird.” And my sister, bless her heart, said, “Oh, yeah, her. SHE’S MY SISTER!”

After which nobody really fucked with her, either. Though when the time came for the big “voted most likely” weird ceremony my senior year, my sister was nominated “Most Popular Girl” in her class. Another reason why I suspect she is going to have a pretty good time at her reunion this weekend. (I was nominated “Most Scholarly” but I didn’t win. Maybe if they had called the category “Most Eager to Get the Hell out of Here so she Can go to College and Have Some Fun” I would have had a better chance.)

It used to drive me crazy when grown-ups would go out of their way to tell me that my high school years were supposed to be the best years of my life. Literally, crazy. More sensitive but still grown up people would acknowledge that I would probably do better at college, especially outside the Bible belt. That did turn out to be the case, and I have been to several college reunions already (SO MUCH FUN) and you better believe I keep my contact info updated with the college alumni office, even though they mostly use it to ask me for money and not to invite me to parties. But I’m a grown-up myself now, and I can have my own parties pretty much any time I want to, which is why, as I always suspected they would be, these years right now are the best of my life so far, and I have every reason to expect that they are going to keep on getting better and better.

However, if they ever want to offer up a recount of those Homecoming Queen votes, I would still like my chance to ride around the football field in a golf cart wearing a tiara. And I probably wouldn’t even insist on wearing the outfit I had picked out for the event: my mom’s prom dress, torn longjohns, and green hightops. Though it might be fun to get a tattoo of a girl dressed like that to commemorate the event as one of the best days of my life.

Thanks for use of the photo, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mad African!: (Broken Sword and protected under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

Outdoor Academy of Sweden – Ice Hotel

I used to be the kind of person (if this is a kind of person) who didn’t really think much about Sweden.

That, however, was a long time ago.

I started to think seriously about Sweden the same day I tried sushi for the first time, when I was in college. The way it came about was this: I danced (and flirted) with a very charming young man at a waltz party. Then I asked this young man out on a date, after which he revealed that he was gay, but also that he wanted to go out with me anyway, but not on a date. Up to this point, there is nothing Swedish (or, actually, unusual, at least for me) about this story.  Because I had a car, I picked the guy up at his apartment (he lived alone, off-campus, which was one of the things that would have made him such an awesome boyfriend) and he gave me a little gift that he had made for me. It was like a card, sort of, in that it was made of cardstock and there was an outside part that had my name written on it in fancy letters filled in with colored pencil. The inside part, when slipped out, turned out to be Sweden. By which I mean, he had drawn a picture of Sweden on a piece of cardstock, and colored it in, and cut it out, and written the word “Sweden” on it. It was actually quite lovely, though really very puzzling. When I expressed surprise at being given the country of Sweden, he seemed puzzled that I would  be surprised and explained simply that I seemed like a Sweden sort of person to him. Then we went to dinner, and he tricked me into eating raw fish, which I was sure I would not like at all but which of course turned out to be one of the loveliest and most wonderful things you can eat.

Time passed and we were friends for a while and then he graduated and I took a year off, and I lost touch with him and with many other Scorpio boys both gay and straight. But I never stopped eating sushi. And because he was so right about me and sushi, I had to wonder whether he also knew something about me and Sweden.

But I was busy trying to be an adult and start a career and find love and all that stuff, so I didn’t think about Sweden too much or too often.

Until my parents moved to Ireland. They were going to be there for two years, and they were going to pay for a trip for me to come visit them and do some traveling and exploring around those parts. See, I had never been overseas but my sister had been to England on a college trip. And in our family, fairness is important and it means that no kid gets something that the other kid doesn’t, and so they owed me. I didn’t go visit them the first year they were there, because I was so busy with the career-starting and the love-finding and also the giant-puppy-training, which was not even part of the original plan. And then my dad’s company closed their Dublin office and my parents got sent home a year early and they still owed me a trip but they weren’t in Ireland for me to visit anymore.

So then I realized that I could go anywhere I wanted. And, for reasons that I can’t remember now, because this was a long time ago, I decided that I wanted to go to London. And also I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel.

The Ice Hotel is a hotel made entirely out of ice. It’s in Sweden, and it’s only in the winter. In the spring it melts and then in the winter they build it again. To get there, you take the train to Kiruna, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and then you travel by dog sled 15 km or so to the hotel.  When you get there, you get to drink hot lemonade or other drinks that you order at a bar made entirely out of ice, and you get to sit on chairs made of ice and sleep wrapped in furs on a bed made of ice.

If reading the last paragraph did not make you want to go to the Ice Hotel yourself, I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time reading about the Ice Hotel and thinking about the Ice Hotel and talking about the Ice Hotel. Ice Hotel Ice Hotel Ice Hotel.

Strangely, I couldn’t really find anybody who wanted to go to the Ice Hotel with me. So I decided to go on my own.

I was planning this trip in the summer, in Austin, and it is hot here in the summer, and that may be part of the reason why the Ice Hotel appealed to me so much. Also, I was born on the summer solstice, but I have always been a night owl, and so the idea of spending long hours of darkness in northern Sweden on the winter solstice had a definite appeal for me. Also, it was 1999 and the last full moon of the millennium was going to be on December 21, my half-birthday and the winter solstice. How could I resist? I booked my reservation at the Ice Hotel seven months in advance. For the rest of the trip, I decided to fly to London, spend a week hanging about there, then fly to Stockholm, spend a night, and take the train up to Kiruna the next day. It is a 12-hour train ride from Stockholm to Kiruna; the train leaves in the evening and arrives in Kiruna in the morning, although morning is a funny thing to think about in a place where the sun won’t even come up.

It was a perfect plan, and when the time came I embarked on my trip with a little bit of fear and a whole lot of enthusiasm. I had a great time in London, staying in the Holland Park youth hostel, singing Christmas carols at St. Martin in the Fields and then enjoying mulled wine and mince pies in the cafe located in the crypt. I bought a pair of Doc Martens in the shop at Covent Garden and then gave myself terrible blisters wearing my new boots and walking all over the city. Up and down the steps of the underground stations, in and out of parks and shops and museums and churches. I had no schedule and no commitments and so I just did what I wanted all day every day. It was lovely. I went to the movies and to the observatory at Greenwich, I searched out the street with all the Indian restaurants and spent long cozy hours reading in pubs. Looking back now, after six and half years of motherhood, I can’t even imagine having that much freedom and independence.

And then I flew to Stockholm. I had prepared myself for this part of the trip by taking a Swedish class at UT Informal Classes. The class was taught by a very cute and idiosyncratic young American woman who had been an exchange student in Sweden in high school and was currently the only PhD student in the Swedish program at UT. She told us that Swedes have a very high opinion of their own country and that they will often say that “Sweden is just like America, only better.” She explained that Swedes are more physical and less verbal than Americans; so, for example, if a Swedish person finds that your cart is in their way at the grocery store, they will not say, “Ahem, ahem, excuse me,” like we might. They will not even step over, move your cart out of the way, and then push their own cart through. Oh, no. They will take their cart and they will RAM your cart with it. They mean no offense. They are simply being Swedish.

Also, in Sweden, it is very important to be self-sufficient. Therefore, it is considered quite rude and insulting to offer help to people. For example, if you see a young mother with three small children, a dog, a stroller, and four grocery bags struggling to get on the bus, you might think it would be polite and friendly to offer her a hand. In Texas, you would be right. In Sweden, you would be oh so very wrong. Way out of line. Astonishingly rude.

Also, in Sweden they have vowels that we don’t have. I learned how to pronounce most of them, and I learned how to say please, and thank you, and a few other things like that. And I learned that in Sweden high school is conducted in English so in most cases I would not be called upon to use any Swedish at all, which was good, because Swedish is hard and that class was short.

When I got to Sweden I learned a few other things. For example, if you are allergic to the species of juniper that we here in Texas call cedar, you probably should not go to Sweden in the winter time. Cedar Fever hit me as soon as I got off the plane, though it was so bad and so unexpected that it took me a few days to figure out what it was. Also, it is not so easy to get a train ticket from Stockholm to Kiruna the week before Christmas. I never expected that there would be so many people traveling north of the Arctic Circle at that time of year! But when I went to the train station, all the trains were full. The girl at the ticket counter explained that she could sell me a ticket, but I would have to stand (all night!) and there would be nowhere to put my backpack, so I would have to hold it in my arms (all night!). I stood there, shocked, blinking my red allergic eyes and wiping my runny nose, and I stared at her for so long that she finally said, in her crisp clear English, “I don’t know what you want to do.” I wanted to go to the Ice Hotel, is what I wanted to do, so I left the train station and went back to my youth hostel, which was in an old prison and where I slept in one of the cells, and I called the airline to see if I could fly to Kiruna instead. And they said they would sell me a ticket, but it would cost more than my whole trip, which I simply could not afford.

And so I did not go to the Ice Hotel.

And I spent a couple of days crying in my prison cell and trying to figure out what to do and when the desk clerk told me that I had to leave the hostel because they were closing for the season I gave up. I came home early, and instead of celebrating the solstice at the Ice Hotel and spending a gloriously independent Christmas all by myself in Stockholm I spent the next few days curled up on my parents’ couch and playing with my giant puppy, who was very glad to see me, in a way that no Swedish person had been.

And I have never been back to Sweden. Though I have been to IKEA many times, and with much better results.

And now I have a Swedish car, who is a big white Volvo station wagon, and who is named Vendela, which means “wanderer” or “Vandal” or something like that. It’s a Swedish name. And my family is very very safe inside this wonderful car, and we drive her to the chiropractor and all around town, and when the Vivid Girl and I go wandering through parking lots looking for our lovely car we call out, “oh Ven-DEH-la!” until we find her, and this makes us happy.

And once again it is summer in Austin, which is hot, and which means that the Vivid Girl is not in school and instead has wanted to spend all her time with me and I was going crazy because she was even following me into the bathroom and she would follow me when I took two steps into the laundry room to toss a towel into the basket and she would get in between me and the fridge when I opened the freezer to get out some ice and then finally I found something that would keep her busy for a few minutes at a time so I could catch my breath and gather my thoughts: the Swedish Chef, on youtube.

And tonight I finally got a chance to write because when I came home from my new book group the Vivid Girl was already asleep, even though we are so very close to the longest day of the year. And the book that got me out of the house tonight? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which is, of course, Swedish.

Sweden. There’s something about it. I’m just not sure what it is.

Tack så mycket for use of the photo from flickr, originally uploaded by VisitSweden and protected under a creative commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

Maybe Mercury’s shadow is still casting a bit of gloom over the situation, or maybe buying a car is just hard, but the last two days I have been busting my butt trying to find, finance, inspect, and purchase an appropriate replacement for the Big Red Car, and what do I have to show for it? Nada, that’s what.

It all started last week when I found the perfect car at the perfect dealership. Well, actually it was a minivan and even if it wasn’t perfect it was at least my favorite color. And I found it on the Internet, and the dealer conveniently provided a way for me to apply for financing on line, and then they sent me an email that said, Come on in, and if you bring a suitable down payment we’ll sell you the car.

Hooray!

But it took us about 24 hours to scramble around and determine that we have about half a suitable down payment in our hot little hands and it will take us a few days to come up with the rest. We are struggling for liquidity, you see. So the next day we went in to the dealer to give them the money we did have and see if they would hold the car for us but right before we got there somebody else bought it.

So, we were sad, but we knew they didn’t have any other cars that we wanted that day because the Internet had told us that they did have some cars that we might want except that they were all white and the only thing we want less than a white car is a black car. Which they also had. So we left but said that we would keep an eye on their inventory and be back in a flash if they got something good. And we said to each other, Well, it’s too bad we didn’t get that seemingly perfect car but at least this gives us a little time to liquify the necessary assets so we will have the suitable down payment all ready to go when the next great car comes up.

Which it did, just yesterday as a matter of fact, though unfortunately not at the perfect dealership, rather at some other dealership located much farther away from perfection. In the suburbs, if you will. But this car was silver, and not white or black, and it had LEATHER seats and other lovely extras, and reasonably low miles, and a very lovely low price.

And so I applied for financing at that dealership and first they told me that if I had a trade-in they could finance my purchase of this car, actually a minivan, that I so desired. But I said, I don’t have a trade-in cause of how one of our cars is all smashed up and the other of our cars is our only car. But I do have a suitable down payment, actually worth more than our only remaining car would fetch as a trade-in anyway. Cause it’s our “second car,” you know? Not the really good one (which got smashed) but the other one. The one that needs work and that leaks certain fluids and that has the back seat window held up with duct tape. The one that we certainly would have loved to trade in if only we still had the Big Red Car to bop around in.

But no, said the car salesman, they won’t finance this car with a down payment of actual money. Only with a trade in. Is that, I asked, because of the credit rating? (Because there is a bit of trouble just right now with the credit rating and let me just share this tip that I have learned from my own experience: you may think that getting a really rare and aggressive form of cancer and then having your reliable mid-size economy car smashed by a recklessly driven SUV is a good way to build financial security, but you’d be wrong. Turns out it works against you.) But no, he said, it’s not the credit rating. It’s the mileage. The bank wants to finance a car that has less than 80,000 miles on it, but this very well kept and reasonably priced minivan has 80,500 miles on it so the bank says no.

Oh, I see, I say, though at this point I do not see at all and also time has elapsed during which I have gone home, eaten dinner, slept, spent time with the lymph machine, eaten breakfast, and come back to the dealership to continue the same baffling conversation. But! he says. We have some other cars! That the bank says you can buy. They will finance a car with lower mileage for up to almost twice the cost. Say, maybe this car, or that one. And he points to a giant Lexus SUV and also some other car that is so completely everything I don’t want that it is literally invisible to me. But then somehow I get the idea that if they will finance almost twice the cost maybe they will finance TWO cars, and then we could trade in the one car or something (not that we actually have the title in our possession, you see, but it is on its way to us and we can always pray that it will arrive today).

And for some reason, maybe because I have mesmerized him with my car-buying insanity, the car guy says Yes! I think we could do that! And so I test drive two cars, which happen to be the Lexus SUV and this little Kia Rio. Which I think is just a hilarious combination and for that reason alone I want to buy both of them and see if they interact in any way that would reveal basic and startling truths about social class in America. Or something.

Well. They are both great, and fun to drive in totally different ways. The Kia because it is tiny and thrifty and eager to please and it has a cute personality and it stops on a dime. The Lexus because, even though it has a weird perfumey smell all in it, is all leather and fake wood and automatic everything with a sun roof, and when you accelerate it smoothly and gracefully picks up speed at an almost alarming rate, and there is a place to put your purse and even a special little footrest for your non-accelerating foot so it doesn’t get tired just sitting there or so you don’t smudge your newly-painted toenails or something.

So I get back to the dealership and then things start getting really weird. The guy who I’d been talking to is supposedly “with a customer” but in fact everytime I see him he is walking from the showroom to the office. I never ever see him walk the other way. He stops on the way to give me some news about my case, but I only understand about half of what he says because he uses pronouns exclusively without antecedents and also he seems to use car dealer lingo, which I can only translate about a third of the time. Also there is a woman who is somehow helping us, though her name is something other than “Rebecca” even though the guy keeps telling us that Rebecca is working on the numbers and Rebecca will be right out. This other woman also does  not believe in antecedents and she is maybe a little bit rude, though not in a way I feel I should take personally because it looks like she talks to everyone like that. And she really is “with a customer” but keeps getting up to go “talk to the boss” the way they do at car dealerships and some of the time when she is going to talk to the boss she actually comes over to tell me things like, “Looks like you’re gonna get your deal but my finance manager says he has to put everything in his name,” and then she stalks off while I try to figure out what exactly my deal is and whether the finance manager is talking about himself or about Mr. B, which is what I figure it must be, but the way things have been going, who knows?

But I have a vague sense that things are going okay, and anyway Mr. B and I have talked and agreed that we want to buy both cars but if we can only buy one we want the Kia cause it has way fewer miles on it, would make a good replacement for our second car (though we’d still be searching for our “first car”) and anyway costs a LOT less than the ridiculous luxury SUV.

But the dealer guy has been working the deal to secure financing for the Lexus. Cause that’s what he wants to sell us, for one thing. And cause even though it actually has MORE miles on it than the minivan that we couldn’t finance because it had too many miles, it also costs lots more so apparently the bank thinks that’s fine. And we say, well if we can only get one of them we want the Kia. And he says well, you probably only can get one of them because of how you still have this “open auto.” And we finally figure out that he means because there is still a balance on the loan for the Big Red Car because of how the insurance company offered us the “retail value” but not the “replacement value” and we had never heard of this thing called “gap insurance,” which is apparently what you need if you are in a situation like ours where somebody totally trashes your car so that it can never be driven again and the only thing you did wrong was leave your house that day and neglect to buy a kind of insurance you had never heard of.

So, because the paperwork for the Big Red Car is still haunting us, we can only buy one car. And it can’t be the Kia cause the bank “likes” a Lexus better than a Kia. For obvious reasons, I’m sure, but we don’t even like SUVs (actually, I may have mentioned that I am planning to destroy get them all off the roads by the end of the year someday) and we do like buying things that we can afford rather than buying things that are much too expensive and that we can’t afford to repair just so that the bank can feel secure about their investment or whatever.

So we flee. Actually, by this time I had totally taken leave of my senses and I was in love with the Lexus SUV and I couldn’t believe that I’d never realized how much I love the fake wood and the leather and the perfumey smell and probably the only reason I think luxury cars are a little ridiculous is that I’ve never been fortunate enough to own one but now here is my chance and I can’t let it pass me by!!!!! But Mr. B takes me gently in hand, and he says, in the kind of voice you use to talk someone in off the ledge, “Honey. I don’t want to say anything negative, and I am just as eager as you are to get this whole thing settled and behind us, but I honestly believe that a Lexus SUV with 85,000 miles on it, and that will cause us to go over our budget on our monthly car payment, is not the right car for our family.” He reaches out for my hand, and I extend my hand as if in slow motion, and nod my head without blinking my eyes, and allow myself to be led away from the giant luxury vehicle.

And now we are back at square one and even the white and/or black minivans at the perfect dealer are starting to look mighty perfect to me. Providing, of course, that they will accept a down payment and not require a trade in, and providing also that the cars are sufficiently expensive without having too many miles on them, and providing, of course, that sweet darling Mercury continues to get her giant meddling butt out of our way.

Well, just when I was getting on a kick of updating every couple of weeks instead of once a quarter, I fell back into my old rhythms. And I’ll tell you why. Cause it’s been a hell of a month around here, that’s why.

I told you about the car crash, of course. Well, that has provided me with various and annoying inconveniences, such as Not Having a Car and Going to the Chiropractor Every Damn Day. I mean, I’m glad I wasn’t seriously hurt, and I’m seriously glad that neither the Vivid Girl nor the wedding cake were in the back of the car, but I’m still really irritated that there are people out there driving cars three times the size of mine without feeling the need to exercise at least three times the caution that I do. More would be better, cause honestly I’m not even that careful what with all the makeup application, phone calls, and passing snacks and drinks to the back seat though at least I do manage not to run right into people.

So anyway it was obvious that once I rested up a bit and stopped popping pain pills I had a bunch of stuff to do. Like deal with the insurance paperwork and go to the chiropractor and get a new car. But first I had to go to Houston to meet my new doctor and have a checkup and a treatment so I did that first. And, despite my determination to have the most. fun. cancer. ever. it wasn’t really that fun of a trip. For various reasons. My new doctor is good, though, and I finally found the secret of getting the right person to start my IV the first time so that I don’t have to listen to the chemo nurses moan about what bad veins I have while they stab with needles for 45 minutes in order to get me ready for a 15 minute treatment. But some of my paperwork didn’t get to the right place in time, and the chemo suite was running two hours late, and there were just generally some irritating aspects of the whole venture that made me feel that I would much rather be at home playing Bejeweled in my pajamas.

Which is exactly where I was for the following week, because even though my treatment wasn’t technically “chemo,” in that it’s a drug that is being used to prevent cancer rather than treat it, it still makes me sick. And even though the effects of chemo were somewhat predictable, the effects of this drug on me have been all over the place. Sometimes I get really sick with a fever and everything. Sometimes I get a weird rushing sound in my ears and my legs hurt for a couple of days. Twice in a row I had no apparent reaction whatsoever. This time I got depressed. And even though I have a personal rule against looking up health information on the Internet when I am depressed, I looked it up: depression is a known side effect of this treatment that occurs in 14% of patients studied. Why a bone medicine causes depression I do not know. Everything else about depression I know all too well. The kicker is that, even though my old rock star cancer doctor (from Italy, swoon!) thought that I need to take this medicine every three months, my new (stodgy, old, American) cancer doctor says that he will give it to me if I want it, but only every six months, and he doesn’t think I need it.

And both of these recommendations are based on the same study. Which apparently is the only one available. What’s a cancer patient to do?

Well, in this case, I guess I just need to plan ahead for the next treatment and make sure I’m in a cozy quiet low-stress place (Lake Tahoe, anyone?) with my iPhone charged and plenty of chocolate laid in. But that’s not what I did this time. This time I came home to where my husband and the Vivid Girl live, and I got up in the mornings, and I drove them around in Mr. B’s car. Cause of how I don’t have a car anymore. But the problem on at least two of the days was I got started driving them around but then I would start crying and falling apart, and Mr. B would have to leave work to take me home and then he would have to do all the driving around. On the third day I just stayed home and played Bejeweled and watched 30 Rock and got friends to come pick me up and drive me to the chiropractor. Much better.

So that week passed and then it was the next week and I still didn’t have a car. Because of how I still had to deal with the insurance paperwork and by that time it was also obvious that I should have gone to see a personal injury lawyer and also I was so irritated that I had decided to declare war on SUVs and if I can’t get rid of them through legal channels I guess I’ll have to turn to more unconventional methods and then also I was still spending all my time at the chiropractor.

But, and here I come to the point of the post, I realized that all my problems were not because of the car crash at all. They were because Mercury is in retrograde. Or, it was, at the time. And even though I don’t place a whole lot of stock in all that astrology stuff I do place a bit of stock in it and here’s why. For two years when I was in college every single guy I was ever attracted to was a Scorpio. I could walk into a party with 50 people, only one of whom was born in October or November and that’s the one I would end up talking to. Every single time. Now, a lot of people I love are Scorpios (my mom is a Scorpio! and the Vivid Girl!) but any astrology book will tell you that it is not a good love sign for me, a wet and weepy Cancer girl. And I still don’t know what to make of the fact that for two years I was really attracted to what could only be dangerous, but I was pretty damn convinced by the numbers. It just wasn’t statistically possible for all the guys I met during two of the most social and flirtatious years of my life to have the same horoscope unless astrology is true.

So even though I like to think of myself as a Scientist, I had to admit that I was overwhelmed by the evidence. Just as, since then, I have been completely overwhelmed by the evidence that when Mercury goes into retrograde life goes into chaos. Total communication breakdown. Complete inability to do paperwork. I can’t schedule a meeting, get a good cell phone connection, or have a civil conversation about money with my husband. (This may have something to do with the fact that my husband, as a Gemini, is ruled by Mercury. Or, who knows? it may not.)

So here it is, more than a month after my car crash, and I still don’t have a car. Or an insurance settlement. Or a blog post. Because of Mercury. Because it has been an inauspicious time, all around. But as we move out of the shadow of Mercury in retrograde I can feel the auspiciousness rising. My sources tell me that things should be all cleared by May 28. And a good thing, too, cause that’s when the Vivid Girl gets out of school. For the whole summer.

Apparently the universe read my blog post last week and suspected that I wasn’t going to slow down anytime soon. Because this week started with a series of bangs that have definitely stopped my wheels from spinning.

First of all, we discovered over the weekend that our pockets were full of lint and empty of cash. Everything came due at once and here we are with only a few dollars to last until payday. Time to eat the food that I have squirrelled away in the pantry, the beautiful pantry with the double doors and the luxurious spice rack that seduced me into buying this house in the first place. Time to cook up some oatmeal and soak some beans. Time to eat canned vegetables and bake our own bread.

So Sunday evening I put some oatmeal in a pot with water and Monday morning I got up and cooked it so we would all have a cheap and nourishing breakfast. But the Vivid Girl woke up on the wrong side of the middle of our bed and she most emphatically did not want oatmeal. And she stomped over to the pantry and flung open the door……….. and it broke, and came off in her hand, and bottles and jars and little packets of seasoning hailed down on her.

Mr. B looked at it and said it was amazing the door had lasted this long, considering how it was made and how many heavy things I had been storing on its shelves. And we calmed down the Vivid Girl as best we could, and forgave her, and stepped back to survey the damage, which wasn’t too bad because even though there were a lot of glass bottles and jars on the floor, only one of them had actually broken.

It was the molasses. It’s always either the molasses or the fish sauce. I don’t know why.

So, we got the worst part of that mess cleaned up and we gave the Vivid Girl something to eat and Mr. B took her off to school. And I said to myself, “Now I can really get caught up around here!” and I started rushing around putting loads of laundry into the washer and cooking the beans that had soaked overnight and getting myself ready to go to my weekly therapy appointment with my therapist, Dr. Suess (yes, that is her real name!). And as I was putting down my hairbrush and leaving the bathroom I looked down at my left hand and noticed that my wedding ring wasn’t on it.

That was a little strange but not too much because I have been wearing my wedding ring on my pinky finger because my ring finger is sometimes, but not always, too big for me to get my ring on and off comfortably and when I can’t get it off I feel kind of panicky because when I was a kid my dad told me about a guy whose wedding ring got caught on some kind of machinery and it tore his whole finger off and that’s why my dad never wears a ring and that’s why I like to be able to slip mine off without feeling like my finger is coming off with it. So I wear it on my pinky but then sometimes my hands are cold and the ring is a bit loose. So I looked around a little bit but I couldn’t find it and that’s when I started to worry that I had dropped it down a drain and lost it forever.

So I was feeling a little bit bad about that as I drove down to Dr. Suess’ office. And maybe because I was feeling bad about the ring I did something that you are not supposed to do, which is I decided to give my husband a quick call so we would have a little time to connect and I wouldn’t feel like losing my ring was some big portentous event.

And I was talking on the phone and driving, which you are not supposed to do, and I came to a stop because the car in front of me was stopped, because the car in front of her was stopped and waiting for an opportunity to turn left.

And I was chatting to my husband about this and that and feeling pretty light-hearted and happy and then suddenly I wasn’t.

Suddenly I was sucked into a vortex of motion and soundless crashing. Suddenly I was rushing forward in space and backward in time. I could not understand what was happening to me, but I felt my feet going one way and my head and arm going another. I felt myself being pulled under by some fierce and unexpected undertow. There was nothing to hold onto, and I couldn’t see or hear anything that made sense.

And then that stopped, and I found that I was lying down in my car, and someone was standing next to me saying “Are you all right?” And I took a deep breath and did a quick body scan and said “NO I AM NOT ALL RIGHT!” and he took a few steps back and sort of walked around a minute and came back and asked me again. And I said again, “No, I am not okay. This is not okay.” And I realized that I couldn’t see anything because my glasses had flown off my face and so I asked him to find my glasses, which he did. And I was up and walking around, and talking to people, and I realized that what had happened was this: I was sitting there waiting for the person in front of the person in front of me to turn left so we could all go again, but this guy drove up behind me in his huge and speedy SUV and he just didn’t stop. He ran right into me. And I ran into the car in front of me, and here’s who was in that car: a pregnant woman and two small children.

But they were okay. And I was okay. And the guy in the SUV? well, you know he was okay.

And my husband, who was on the phone this whole time and heard everything, he was surprisingly okay. He knew I was okay because he had heard me talking to the guy, and he was in his car waiting to find out where I needed him to go. As soon as he heard the crash he got his keys and left his office and waited to find out.

But my car, the lovely Big Red Car, is not okay at all. The back is all smashed in, and the glass is all smashed out. After the excitement of talking to the firemen and the paramedics and the police and the nice people who stopped who helped us, I settled down enough to realize that there was glass in my pants, and in my shoe. The driver’s seat of my car is twisted and mangled and bent out of shape, and I have corresponding aches and pains in my whole body. A sore neck, a bruised knee, an aching back.

So I came home and put on my pajamas and padded across the sticky kitchen floor to get a blanket out of the dryer, and my wedding ring fell out. So I put it on and laid myself gingerly down in bed and now I am taking it very very easy.

Last week was a crazy busy week here at Casa de Diggs. I made a wedding cake (and yes, I am planning to write a post about that), and also we have some dear friends visiting us (they live in Panama!) with their 21-month old daughter, and then of course there was going out of town to the actual wedding, which both Mr. B and I were in, and in the midst of all that I also started a weekly farm subscription so we got a big box of veggies and stuff. Whew! It was a lot, and I haven’t even mentioned what a big job it was helping the Vivid Girl identify and manage all the feelings she was having about all these major events. Suffice to say that it was a very big job, and since we were using all our regular time to do all the other stuff, we mostly worked on that job during the hours previously dedicated to sleep.

So, by Sunday evening, with all these fun and sometimes not-so-fun things behind us, we were all very very tired. And so we said, “Let’s take it easy this week.”

This was my plan all along. Over the past two or three years, since I’ve been dealing with cancer, I’ve had to slow down a lot. I used to be kind of a go-go rah-rah-rah just-say-yes sort of person, but since I got sick and went through treatment I’ve had to pay for every busy day by spending the following day in the ugly mauve La-Z-Boy. And this whole wedding extravaganza was way more than just one busy day; it was more like six busy days, and I can’t remember the last time I managed something like that. And Mr. B? well, he can do it but he really truly prefers not to. He likes downtime, and a lot of it. The Vivid Girl is like me, but also like him. She’s a study in inertia: once set in motion, she has a lot of momentum and will go for ever (in the absence of friction), but you’ve got to apply quite a bit of force to change her state. And the more friction there is, or the more often force is applied, the more things devolve into entropy and chaos.

So, being a wise woman who knows how to take care of herself, her husband, and her child, I left the calendar blank for this whole week. No meetings, no appointments, no playdates. No special events of any kind. Just resting and getting back on track.

You probably already know stories that begin just like that. And so you know what happens next.

What happens next is the houseguests from Panama realize that your house is much nicer than a hotel, especially for their toddler, and ask if they can stay a few more days. And because we love them and rarely get to see them and because it is more fun having them than not having them, we say YES! STAY AS LONG AS YOU LIKE! and we mean it.

Even though that decision has the unforeseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to school. This is unforeseen because the Vivid Girl, who often tried to find ways of getting out of going to preschool, almost never tries to get out of going to her new school. In fact, she often wishes she could go to school on Saturday and Sunday. And she resents all those times when there is no school, like Spring Break, because school is so much more fun than Spring Break, even if your mama lets you eat nothing but trailer food and takes you to the zoo to see baby lions and helps you collect and carry a whole pail of rocks from the Llano River. School, it turns out, is better than all that. But the Toddler from Panama? she is even better than school!

So this week I have been taking the Vivid Girl to school late (two or three hours late sometimes, but that’s okay, because her school is cool like that), or picking her up early (today, four hours early). It’s really cutting into my taking it easy time. Because no matter what I am doing when I am spending time with the Vivid Girl, I am not taking it easy. Unless I’m asleep. And usually not even then, I think, because lately I have been waking up sore from fighting for my space in the bed. (The Vivid Girl is sleeping in our room with us, and the Toddler from Panama is sleeping in the Vivid Girl’s room. Not that the Vivid Girl would be sleeping there anyway. Even if we paid her.)

There is also the totally-foreseen consequence of making the Vivid Girl not want to go to bed. This was easy to predict because she has never ever once in her whole life wanted to go to bed. But over the past six years we have actually developed a bedtime routine that usually results in her being asleep sometime before nine’o'clock if we’re lucky. The excitement of having a Toddler from Panama to bathe with and read to has been a very sweet disruption to our bedtime routine. The wrathful disappointment of having a Toddler from Panama who is still out with her parents when bedtime arrives has been a little less sweet but just as disruptive.

But still we are enjoying having our friends with us, and it is very touching and sweet to see our two girls having such a good time together, and the sweetness of seeing our child reading to a younger child who is wearing her old pajamas and tucked in to her very own bed is more than compensation for any minor disruptions in our daily routine.

So naturally when my friend called and said that she had to leave town for a family emergency and asked if we could take her dog for a week or so, I said YES! OF COURSE! FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE!

And I meant it.

And for being able to say that, and mean it, after the busy days I’ve been having…. for that, I am truly grateful.

Okay, so you guys want recipes and all like that. Which makes sense, because it’s hard to take that crazy leap of faith and start cramming a bunch of green leaves into your blender when you are so excited about the otherwise fruity and delicious drink you are about to enjoy.

I don’t really use recipes.

But I do read them for inspiration, and I have also found some resources that have given me a fair amount of guidance about how to do this crazy thing of drinking my greens.

Be warned: many of the people who are inspired enough by the greatness of green smoothies to want to shout it from the Internet rooftops are a little…. well…. enthusiastic is a nice word…. totally wacked out is also fun to say. You’ve probably had some encounters with True Believers before. They’re delightful and informative, as I’m sure you know, and sometimes they can be wildly emphatic and dogmatic. It’s okay, though; it’s just vegetables. Lovely green and organic vegetables. (Though some True Believers claim –and I agree with them actually– that leafy greens should get their very own food group and not be considered vegetables at all. )

The first book I read that really turned me on to the green smoothie situation was Green for Life by Victoria Boutenko. She has another book that I haven’t read yet called Green Smoothie Revolution: The Radical Leap Toward Natural Health. She is a raw foodist, and she and her family are not fooling around! They don’t just buy some bag of triple-washed spinach and stick a few leaves in with their bananas and berries: Oh No! They go tramping around in the woods looking for wild edibles, and there are videos on YouTube of her son Sergei doing just that. Anyway, if you do any reading about green smoothies you will definitely run across Victoria and Sergei. Green for Life has some smoothie recipes and is also just a great read if you are wanting to get fired up about going green.

I really like the greensmoothie.com web site too. It is wacky and has all kinds of crazy highlighting and outrageous health claims (which may very well all be true; what do I know?) but it also has good basic information about how to blend fruit and greens together to get a good smoothie. Here’s their basic recipe (note the highlighted title; they love highlighting over there at greensmoothie.com):

Basic Green Smoothie Recipe:

• 2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple or pear – blend first to form a tasty base,
• 1 vegetable fruit or a celery stalk – add next for extra minerals, e.g. summer squash or zucchini,
• One tray of organic baby greens like sunflower or salad mix from my Sprouter, or one packet of pre-washed organic greens, or a handful of farm greens or wild edibles.

And here are the week’s worth of green smoothies I posted on Facebook recently. Like I said, I don’t really measure quantities or use recipes per se, but I usually like the results pretty well. And if I don’t like it, I just drink it anyway and make a yummier smoothie the next day.

• Tuesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, collard greens, frozen cherries, and coconut water. Yum? well, it tastes healthy, for sure. And the rats…. they love it.
• Wednesday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, honeydew melon, coconut water, arugula, frozen peaches. Tastes like spring! nom nom nom
• Thursday’s green smoothie: grapefruit, celery, Asian pear, amba hardar (mango ginger, from the Indian grocer), arugula, coconut water. Sweet and grassy! Hardcore and delicious!
• Friday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, cacao pods, banana, apple, dandelion greens, frozen strawberries. Color: scary dark olive green (scary? or sophisticated?). Mostly tastes like banana but has a seriously bitter afterbite. Not for sissies. Me, I’ll drink anything if it’s been run through the blender with a banana, so I’m okay.
• Saturday’s green smoothie: flax seeds, raw cacao powder, cinnamon, banana, frozen strawberries, almond milk, spring mix. OMG y’all this is GOOD! It has a very rich dark chocolate color and a perfectly sweet choco taste. This week’s winner!
• Sunday’s green smoothie: almonds, cacao pods, flax seeds, dates, oranges, romaine lettuce, almond milk, cinnamon. I wish it were colder, but it’s delicious! Very creamy and exotic. Lovely green color. If I want to drink any more of it, I will have to chase away Miss Kattie Rat: she is dipping her paws in and scooping up great handfuls.
• Monday’s green smoothie: honeydew, avocado, matcha (green tea powder), dulse (seaweed), coconut water, romaine. Speckled and refreshing. Tastes a bit like cold California roll soup, if there were such a thing. At first I thought it needed something sweet and crisp, like fresh mint, but now I am grooving on it.

My green smoothies are not always green. Sometimes they are red, sometimes they are brown, and sometimes they are the hideous green color that lies in the totally unappetizing range between red and brown.  For me, a nice color can be a nice benefit, but I haven’t found a real correlation between taste and color or anything like that.

Also! a lot of these green smoothie Internet people love to go on and on about two big lies:

1. you can put certain greens in a smoothie without affecting the taste at all, and
2. if you use those certain greens, your kid will drink a whole green smoothie and beg for more

I can taste pretty much every type of green I’ve tried. Probably the least conspicuous taste is baby spinach, which probably means that’s a good one to start with if you’ve never done green smoothies before. It also means you can put a whole bunch of spinach in there before it really affects the taste much. I read one web site that claimed green cabbage would be undetectable in a fruit smoothie and so I mixed up a big batch of strawberry cabbage delight and I will tell you now that the cabbage was totally detected. (I think it was the horrible taste of wet farts that gave it away.) And I don’t know about your child, but my child does not like to be in the same room with a green smoothie, and she has never consented to actually taste one. She doesn’t actually care much for fruit smoothies either, as a rule, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I am guessing that she is not the only kid who isn’t going to be eating two pounds of greens a day any time in this decade.

I have made a lot of smoothies with spinach, either raw (I buy the big bags of triple-washed spinach at Costco) or frozen. I also love to use arugula, because I love love love arugula. I love it so much I would like to write a waltz for it and dance it around the room. I also buy from Costco those big plastic bins of prewashed organic salad mix and I grab great handfuls of it and shove it down into the blender. Beyond that I have also tried collard greens (fresh or frozen), frozen mustard greens, cress, sprouts, dandelion greens, parsley, cilantro, kale, chard, romaine, and various other lettuces. I always have big bags of frozen berries and fruit from Costco and I use whatever fresh fruit or melons we have sitting around as well. Bananas and avocados make things very creamy. To my surprise, cucumber seems to make things creamy as well. I often put in flax seed, cacao pods or powder, cinnamon, or turmeric. Sometimes I throw in some nuts, or sesame seeds, or tahini, or nut butter. I use nut milk, soy milk, water, coconut water, or juice. If I want it sweet, I’ll use dates or agave nectar or honey or molasses or xylitol. Our ice tastes funny to me so unless I use frozen fruit or frozen greens my smoothies tend to be a bit warmish and that’s not always good. If that happens I’ll usually stick it in the fridge and go take a shower or something.

I like posting about my smoothies and sharing recipes because that keeps me inspired and trying new things. Otherwise I get in a rut and the next thing you know I’ve eaten Cheerios for breakfast three days in a row. So, here’s my challenge/request to you. If you read this, and you make a green smoothie, post a comment telling what you put in it and how it was. And that’ll keep me going for awhile and give me time to figure out what I’m going to blog about next, and we’ll see how many posts I end up with this quarter, thanks to the power of green smoothies.