Caffeinated Ponderings

A Picture Perfect Vacation

It is true that a picture captures a thousand words, but I recently discovered that many of my family snapshots are lying cheats. They’re not telling just any lies, either. I am talking about the kind of tales that would make Pinocchio’s nose reach from Giapetto’s Italian puppet shop to the Golden Gate, and then claim it only went as far as the Brooklyn Bridge.

The problem, I suppose, is that we are a family of posers. It is our unspoken mantra that candid photo taking is for the paparazzi who, thank God, have no interest in the likes of us civilized civilians. This fact, coupled with the reality that we rarely remember to charge the battery on the video camera, means that our image is only captured when we want it to be—when we’re showered, shined and have a three-second warning to turn our frown upside down for the sake of future memories.

In no time during our family history has the three-second warning been more important than during last week’s summer vacation. Sure, we have endured tougher times, but never when we were supposed to be frolicking in the sun with our extended family. Frankly, the experience can best be compared to a heat index, which explains in weather-speak why hot feels even hotter than the thermostat’s reading. The fact that our misadventures happened while we were on vacation just made our 100 degrees of sucky feel 5 degrees suckier.

The trouble started at 6:40 a.m. on the first full day of our trip when my husband tapped me on the shoulder to say that my brother, sister-in-law and their two children had spent the night turning our shared beach house rental into a vomitorium. This meant, of course, that our first day would be anything but a day at the beach as we looked to the Yellow Pages for a local urgent care clinic. Though my sister-in-law and nieces seemed to have a textbook case of a nasty flu, my brother required blood tests and IV fluids to rehydrate. The rest of us lived in fear that the evil spores were contagious and did our best to support those who were green, weak and whiny from a safe distance.

Nevertheless, as I look through the pictures now that we are all healthy and back at home, I see smiling faces with nary a sign of our true concerns: “Please don’t exhale your toxic fumes on me as we pose around the dinner table and you choke down your saltine crackers while I savor my barbecued chicken.”

By day three of the trip, when most of the misery had subsided, the six healthiest of us spent the day at Disneyland. In addition to being just plain hot outside, we had the added pleasure of having our credit card declined by our bank because the ticket prices were so high for a party of six that it triggered an early fraud alert that took us 30 minutes to resolve.

Inside, the lines were long and the sun continued to blaze. As my parents and I found a shady spot to rest while my husband and the girls spent one hour in line for the Space Mountain ride, I did a quick mental survey of the people around me and started to giggle. Considering that we were in “the happiest place on earth,” why was no one smiling? After all, mine didn’t count because I was only laughing at the irony that everyone else looked so miserable.

My pictures from Disneyland do not tell this story. In fact, if I could Photoshop out all of the sweat, I could probably sell them to the theme park’s marketing department as testimony to their claims. There’s certainly no proof within the pictures that just before we said “cheese,” I performed a perfect Darth Vader voice threatening an early departure if the girls didn’t stop bickering.

By the next afternoon, believe it or not, I received a call on my cell phone from a kind neighbor at home who tracked me down to let me know that our water main had broken and water was pouring down our driveway while the meter spun around like a pinwheel on a Chicago pier.

After processing the damage and making calls to remedy it, we took the girls out for a Balboa Bar frozen treat and we crossed the ferry to Newport Beach. By now it will be no surprise that our stress-induced scowls are nowhere to be seen in the pictures from that day. Though, to be perfectly honest, it’s only because my husband did not join in our attempts at fun, spending the day, instead, pacing around between calls to the plumber and wondering how we would pay for the repair.

As I organize the pictures of our faked vacation, I’m getting a little nervous that our acting skills might be good enough for Hollywood… which means we might have to embrace those candid shots of the paparazzi after all.

Everything we need to know we learn when our kids are in kindergarten (through 5th grade)

Robert Fulghum may have earned an A+ and a cool million dollars from the lessons he learned in kindergarten and subsequently shared with us in his 1989 best-selling book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, but some of us slow learners needed to watch our own kids go through the paces before the life lessons sank in for us.

The honest among us will even admit that our newfound understanding comes as a whopping relief. I think we sensed that another round of instruction might leave us looking like some of those three-timing fifth graders with G.I. Joe biceps and stubble that hints at the makings of a ZZ Top-like beard.

While my own personal marks don’t qualify me as valedictorian of the graduating fifth grade class of parents of Los Alamitos Elementary School, I did end up with a respectable B average. In a humbling act of generosity, I thought I would share my report card with you, complete with comments from my teacher, Mr. Fulghum himself.

Because I should have mastered these life lessons either when I was in kindergarten myself or when I was raising a kindergartener, the man was generous enough to devise something of an elementary school exit exam, which allows parents like me to keep trying until our dunce caps can be traded in for a mortar board when our last child graduates from fifth grade.

Lesson 1: Share everything

“Shana consistently forked over her last $20 so that her children could have fun, fun, fun till their creditors take the T-Bird… er, Master Card away. Since no one said the sharing had to be voluntary, Mrs. Moore ranked at the top of her class for sharing/being blindly pillaged.” Final grade: A+

Lesson 2: Play fair

“Shana impressed me with her growth this year by learning to avoid making her kids cry by stealing their Monopoly properties, sneaking an extra roll of the dice in Yahtzee, or stacking the deck in Candyland so she would get Queen Frostine early in the game. She did, however, resort to tricking her kids during a Scrabble match into believing that “Qoxz” was a real word meaning “a special form of quartz rock,” which when placed on a triple-word square landed her a cool 87 points and, subsequently, lowered both my trust in her and her daughters’ love of board games.” Final grade: B

Lesson 3: Don't hit people

“Shana demonstrated a thorough understanding that today’s generation of kids knows and sees manipulative value in the Child Protective Services (CPS) organization. If not for one alleged incident involving a controversial wrist grab, this insight would have qualified Mrs. Moore for an A.” Final grade: B

Lesson 4: Put things back where you found them

“Shana excelled so greatly in this subject that she also managed to put away every cell phone, ipod, mismatched sock, text book and hair clip for every other human and canine in the household.” Final grade: A+ (despite all attempts to fail this class)

Lesson 5: Say sorry when you hurt somebody

“Mrs. Moore’s lightening speed in making amends for the wrist grabbing incident resulted in an aborted call to CPS. Extra credit points were given for her bravery for not hiding the phone during this volatile situation.” Final grade: A+

Lesson 6: Wash your hands before you eat

“Shana is a woman who appears to know precisely where her hands have been (i.e., in the hamper, toilet bowl and dog dish) and has a perfect record for washing them before consoling herself with cookies and milk, which, according to my research with kindergarteners, are good for you, yet appear to do little for Mrs. Moore’s ability to zip her pants.” Final grade: A+

Lesson 7: Take a nap every afternoon

“Shana doesn’t actually know she takes naps, so this grade will come as a surprise to her. She believes that her third cup of coffee sustains her throughout the day’s activity, but she is actually sleepwalking as she sorts laundry, battles soap scum, feeds the dog… and, yes, washes her hands with enough frequency for an endorsement from the obsessive-compulsive society.” Final grade: A+

Lesson 8: Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some

“Shana tried to convince me that driving other people so that they might have these opportunities gave her a vicarious experience or “contact high” in this subject matter. Her grade was raised slightly because of her expressed desire to be sent to a 60-day summer sleepover camp to get back up to grade level.” Final grade: D

“It was a delight to have Mrs. Moore in the class of life lessons over these past 35 years. I have every confidence that her mastery of our coursework has prepared her for a bright future as a middle school parent, where she will be well equipped to cope with a more grade appropriate amount of GI Joe arms and ZZ Top beards.”

At the Check-Out

Sometimes the cost of a check-out is pricier than a cart brimming with fillets and Silver Oak Cabernet.
(Please click the arrow in the blue bar to listen, or scroll below to read it yourself.)

I just got checked out, and I wasn’t even at the grocery store.

It should have been a banner moment for all thirty-eight years of me. After all, the only thing fuller than my grocery bags these days is the luggage I’m carting under my withered eyes. Sigh. I’m resigned to having passed that baton to my tweenage daughter. In fact, I thumped her on the head with it on the transfer.

Think what you will, my friends, but aging gracefully is overrated.

Perhaps this is why I took the following incident as well as I did. There I was, stopped at a red light, passing the time by looking at the cars around me. After a quick glance to my right, I did a double take as I noticed a guy actually check me out. But before I could even consider sitting taller in my minivan captain’s chair, he followed up with a dramatic post-stroke face and shoulder shrug that said “Eeh.”

Good God. Had it really come to that? This, after all, is the same reaction I had to my first bite of eggplant. One squinted eye, a half smirk, as if to say “So, what’s all the hype about? It’s not repulsive enough for a spit-take, but I’m not about to devour it, either.”

With that, any fantasies I’d held onto about being considered an “American Pie” M.I.L.F. were obliterated. Unless, of course, this young man defined the acronym as a “Mother I’d Like to Find at least one car length away.”

It could have been worse, though. No? He didn’t retch, or even bark, or moo.

When you take into consideration that this moment coincided with my very first non-beach, public debut of my arms, which I not so affectionately refer to as “tharms” (thigh arms), I nearly honked my horn and waved in appreciation. But that would have sent the arms a flapping… the very thing that had me doubt my skimpy clothing selection on this hot summer day.

The outfit choice was a bold move for someone who had no business tempting karma. I’d already fulfilled half my destiny by becoming a high school Spanish teacher. And now that the tharms and the man were involved, the universe was ripe for a payback.

You see, the debt was incurred twenty-six years ago when I had my first Spanish class with Señora Améndola. While the kind woman surely taught me irregular verb forms in a way that made me love the language enough to want to teach it when I grew up, I have only one real memory of her class: Each and every time that poor woman wrote on the chalkboard, any and all learning stopped as I giggled and snickered about how her arms wagged like my dog’s tail on steak night.

I had built-in insurance that my students would never have the same memories of me. Long sleeves pretty much guaranteed it. I must admit, however, that this approach once led a student to proclaim to the class that he pictured me sweating on my upcoming wedding day. He was right, of course, and was part of the reason I dared to brave ¾ sleeves, and squelched all fantasies of transferring to a Catholic school and dressing as a nun. Sweat and public ridicule can do that to a girl.

Summer vacation recently arrived and inspired me to get braver still. I decided to tackle an afternoon of yard work while wearing a bright orange fitted tank top. In the privacy of my own yard, my superficial thoughts became secondary to my deep-tissue issues as I stooped, yanked and hauled the afternoon away. That is until my hungry family declared a craving for Chinese takeout. I was exhausted enough to rationalize the indecent exposure of my tharms, and hop in the car. After all, odds were good that I wouldn’t need to wave excitedly or give any high-fives while picking up our order.

Once the exchange was completed, I left the restaurant with nary a condemning glance and re-entered the safety of my minivan. Not so bad at all. I might just dare to bare again someday. Then, not one mile down the road, along came the reluctant “Eeh” of approval to remind me of my needs for growth in some areas, and a lot more restraint in others. I love it when the gods go easy on me.

Now pass me the egg rolls…

Points of Light

If the teen magazine quizzes from your youth have spoiled any chance of your appreciating the work of Thomas Kinkade, "The Painter of Light," this is sure to tickle your funny bone... or prompt you to keep that next appointment with your therapist.

(If you would like to listen to this as an audio file, please click the arrow in the blue bar. If you prefer to read it yourself, please scroll down.)

Why IS it that… there’s no light at the end of some tunnels?

While faces and names tend to fade as we age, there are moments in our youth that are as pan seared as an ahi fillet in our memory banks.

One of mine that will always carry the stench of burning flesh came about when Michelle, one of my best friends in junior high, gathered the girls around to plant a disturbing little seed in our heads. You know, the kind of seed that would allow you to intentionally grow crabgrass or dandelions— if you wanted to promote terrorism through gardening.

Now, after 27 years of germination, this seed has spawned the size of a weed-infested vacant lot for me, and for the other girls who would’ve preferred to keep their self-esteem as pure as some freshly laid sod.

You see, Michelle lined us up for an enlightening presentation. She stood before us in her P.E. shorts, her exposed legs and pointer finger serving as an effective visual aide as she made her declaration. “When you put your ankles together like this, you’re supposed to have, like, three points where light shows through,” she proclaimed with all the conviction of a lifetime subscriber to Seventeen magazine.

According to Michelle, one ray shines between the ankles and calves, another beams between the calves and knees, and the other would apparently radiate between the knees and thighs. I say would because I have never experienced this type of sunburst. In fact, for me, there is such black-out darkness in that region that I’m surprised I haven’t sprouted mushrooms to harvest and sell at a roadside stand.

Did I mention that Michelle was bow legged? Yeah. This means you’d need to wear sunglasses to give her poles a peer-thru. So it’s no coincidence that she was the one to educate us, the chafing masses, about this apparent truism. The rest of us would have held the floor with something safer, like the latest scoop on Rick Springfield or the teen-zine’s guide to applying blue eye shadow.

Nevertheless, we mechanically brought our ankles together; many of us sensing that we’d fail this test worse than we did the one Mr. Frisch just handed back in science class. And we did, so much so that if there had been a remedial thigh class, we’d have been transferred instantly.

It should come as no surprise that once we realized we’d have to hand out night-vision glasses to complete our inspections, the deal was sealed that our cover-ups would get more play than our swimsuits that summer. And every summer since.

The “lesson” still haunts me today. It shows in my abnormal fascination with fall, which has little to do with ghouls and gourds and a whole lot to do with the return of full-coverage pants. And as strange as this may sound, it also shows in my interest in the paintings of Thomas Kinkade.

While the rest of the world celebrates Mr. Kinkade as a neo-Norman Rockwell slice of Americana, my interest is a little less conventional. Don’t get me wrong, Victorian mansions and quaint cottages are charming, indeed. But I’m far more captivated by the whole “Painter of Light” thing: The glow he captures in the way a candle illuminates a dark corner of the room; the way the moon glistens on the ripples of a river; how the sun sets over rolling hills—this man can find light in a cave. Is it too much to hope for that with a little help from a NASA laser and a stretch in my stride, he might be able to spot some on me?

Until Thomas comes knocking with palette, paintbrush and retina-searing light in hand, I’ll be spending my time with the weed whacker. While I’ll never get control over every blade of crabgrass that clutters my memory, I’ll be sure to get the ones that look bow legged.

Rash Decisions

The first time I heard about the Darwin Awards, named after the father of evolution, Charles Darwin, and given posthumously to people who “improve the species... by accidentally removing themselves from it,” I cackled like I was auditioning for a voiceover gig for the clown ride at the county fair.

It slowly sank in, however, that all the honorees did actually die because of their antics, so I felt a little guilty for laughing. But I was still flabbergasted that anyone more evolved than an early Homo erectus could be more concerned with packing their camera equipment than their parachute when preparing to go skydiving, or deciding the best way to avoid bee stings to the face is to encase your head in a plastic bag.

So, unless you’re an obese P.E. teacher or a doctor who smokes, you’ll appreciate the irony that I, Madam Le Smug, was recently a contender for a Darwin Award myself.

It all started when a dear friend decided I had not been appropriately acknowledged for my volunteer work at the school. But rather than present me with flowers like the other volunteers received, she knew the ideal consolation gift for a friend who seemed to like her pants just like her coffee – filled to the rim – was to give her an iced loaf cake from her favorite bakery.

It started innocently enough as I sliced off a piece (okay, a wedge) for an afternoon snack. I ate it. I may have also, possibly, let out a few sounds of ecstasy while I did so. Nothing out of the ordinary. I then went about my afternoon.

A couple of hours went by and I commented to my husband that a mosquito must have bitten me in the exact same spot on both sides of my torso. Soon after, I declared this mosquito to be the “Where’s Waldo” of his species, popping up as he was on every nook and cranny of my body.

I finally raised my shirt with the trepidation of a dedicated La Leche League mother of five at her first Mardi Gras and discovered a rash and welts so severe that I rushed to the medicine cabinet for Benadryl.

I then spent the next hour feeling like a kid’s Scratch ‘N Sniff activity book, though no one would get close enough to see if I smelled like strawberries, lest it was something contagious.

Once the medicine took hold and my condition was downgraded from epidemic to eczema-like, I pondered the cause of the reaction. And try as I did to blame the healthier items I’d eaten  – like the banana, wheat bread or chicken breast – I deduced that the cake was the only thing out of the ordinary I had consumed that day. I digested this sad fact alongside the decadent frosting and settled in for an itchy and restless night.

By 10:00 the next morning, I was itch free and in desperate pursuit of my second cup of coffee. As I headed to the coffee maker, things started to go decidedly

Darwin

on me. I spied the demon cake nearby and, somehow, convinced myself that it couldn’t have been the cause of such physical distress. The only possible explanation for this decision is that the secret ingredient in my favorite pastry is one heaping cup of devil, because I swear that cake called out to me: “Here, not-so-little girl, one bite won’t hurt you.”

In a trance-like state, I immediately convinced myself that having a second serving would be like conducting a science experiment. I simply needed a controlled sample to exclude any possible variables. (If this doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably because I made it up as I went along.)

I now understand that real scientists would have started out with a very small bite, or would have conducted the experiment on a rat instead of themselves. This scientist? Well, I cut myself a hog’s hunk of cake, just in case it would be the last one I ever ate. I assure you I meant this in the sense that I wouldn’t be able to order this cake again—not because I would be dead.

I ate it. All of it. I was home alone and may have uttered further sounds of ecstasy, but – just like those proverbial trees that fall in the forest – because no one was home to hear them, they can’t be included in my Honorable Mention Darwin Award application. What may have to be disclosed, much to my embarrassment, is that this time the welts were on the inside as well as the outside of my body. My throat started to close up and I dove for the Benadryl.

As I waited twenty anxious minutes for the medicine to take effect, all I could think about was the fact that if I died next to a plate of these cake crumbs, my husband would have to declare my cause of death to be gluttony. All of a sudden the parachute-less skydivers and head baggers are looking pretty smart, aren’t they?

##

Award-winning writer* Shana McLean Moore is a resident of Almaden Valley in San Jose, CA.  For more information about her essays, books and podcast, visit www.caffeinatedponderings.com . (*Does Honorable Mention for a Darwin Award count?) In the spirit of misery loving company, she’d like to hear about your near misses for the trophy. 

There's No Real Harmonizing at the Barbershop

If you're a gal who looks forward to her hair appointments like a kid counting down till Christmas, while your husband views his as just a mow, blow and go, this one should tickle your funny bone.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret's Mom

This essay is for every parent who has raised a teenage daughter.

Judy Blume's novel, "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margret," written in 1970, is now old enough to captivate a second generation of adolescent girls... and remind their mothers to be patient and understanding... and find God if they haven't already.

If you prefer to listen to the essay, click the blue bar to play. If you prefer to read it yourself, please scroll down.

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret’s Mom

Shana McLean Moore

Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret’s mom. I barely recognize my daughter these days. Please help me, God. One minute she wants to snuggle me and the next she spits “Mom” like it’s a swear word. It’s scary, God! Please make sure my Margaret doesn’t make the same mistakes I did as a teenager. If you could take away even a few of my worries, I’d probably stop aging like a two-term president. Thank you, God.

We’ve all been Margaret, Judy Blume’s main character in the most memorable novel of our youth, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, a book now old enough to reach a second generation of adolescent girls. In fact, we couldn’t possibly be in the role of raising a daughter of our own if we hadn’t faced the same issues ourselves. The trouble is, from our new vantage point, it’s twice as scary to raise a Margaret as it was to be one.

And that says an awful lot.

I distinctly remember the hushed but passionate whispers on the upper-grade playground at Grant Elementary School , where we girls discussed a story far more personal than anything our mothers would ever tell us. Sure, some of us had communicative mothers who shared a few clinical facts, or some ominous threats of hell and damnation, but nothing like Margaret’s confessions that spoke to the fears and longings we were afraid to utter ourselves.

So who could blame us for being mesmerized by Margaret? After all, her message about adolescence being “pretty rotten—between pimples and worrying about how you smell” was a great improvement from the grown-ups’ “church and state” explanation. I almost expected my mom to grab a pointer and a pull-down wall chart as she described the journey of an ovum traveling down the fallopian tube, through the uterus, and out the vagina. It sounded like something Weird Al Yankovic could have sung to “Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother’s house we go.”

The part of Mom’s lesson that baffled me, though, was the fact that blood was suddenly deemed to be fine and normal, not something that should send me screaming to her and Dad for Band Aids and some TLC, as it always had before.

Yet despite all the disturbing details, I longed, just like Margaret, to have physical proof that I was a pad-carrying member of young womanhood. And while I was creating my secret wish list, I agreed with Margaret that it would be nice to not only have a bra, but something other than Charmin two-ply to stuff into it. Then maybe, just maybe, I’d be like every other sweater-filling girl in my class who made the boys blush when it was her turn at “Spin the Bottle.”

Fast forward nearly thirty years and I now understand that puberty is so much more than a tissue issue, where we gain some up north and shed a few down south. It has far more to do with the intangible things that hop aboard our psyche at the very same time. Welcome to middle school, where your grades really count, where you find out who your real friends are, where the same boys who pulled your hair in kindergarten are now asking you to the dance. It’s got to be enough to make our Margarets feel like they’re being speed-cooked in a convection oven, with all those powerful waves coming at them from every which way.

I understood this the first time I walked the halls of my daughter’s middle school, pan searing in my memory the date my opinions became secondary in her decision making. For the first time, my Margaret is making friends that she meets away from my watchful eye. Friends who don’t also happen to be the daughters of my close friends, whose parenting styles and values so closely mirror my own. Will these friends allow my Margaret to be her goofy, fun-loving self? Or will they take away her innocence eye roll by eye roll, cut down by cut down, with their own insecurities projecting outward at her? Will my Margaret buy in to it enough to consider these girls the new authority on what is right and wrong, cool or un-cool, Paris-Hilton "hot" or not?

When will I know if we’ve laid enough groundwork for her to make the right choices for herself when it really matters? I’m not talking about the length of her skirts but rather the lengths my Margaret will go to in order to date her version of the novel’s Moose Freed, the naughty older boy at school. To be one of the popular kids on campus.

I know she’ll experiment. She’s supposed to.  But will she be able to talk to me about things? Or will she be afraid disappoint me or make me worry? When I discover this, will I overreact to  the degree that she’ll shut me out? Will she hate me until she’s twenty-five for being “too strict” and “ruining” her life by not letting her carouse the streets in the middle of the night like “everybody else.” God, for the record, I do see the irony here. I’m calling my mom right now to apologize.

Please, God, don’t let my Margaret be too hard on herself for her perceived inadequacies. May she see the models and glamour girls of the world as airbrushed versions of her own self, who wake up with bed head, pimples, and bad breath, just like the rest of us. Remind her, too, that the characters she admires in books, movies and even in the house next door have their own inner battles to overcome, even though they appear to be the picture of style, beauty, and excitement from the vantage point of our couch, or the kitchen window.

I hope my Margaret’s first love will be kind to her, God, I just can’t bear the thought of looking into the eyes of a broken heart personified. For that reason and so many others, please make her remember what I said about never blowing off her friends, even when she’s under the influence of puppy-love potion.

While we’re at it, please don’t let her have sex too young, God. And if she does, please let it be because she is madly in love with someone who loves her like I do, right down to a cellular level. Make sure that the gossiping masses don’t find out about it either, leaving her branded with a scarlet “S” on her reputation.

And God? Please, oh please, don’t let her get pregnant with a Margaret of her own until she has not only sown her wild oats, but watered and nurtured them enough that she has a sturdy harvest of memories to sustain her through the selfless early days of motherhood… in her thirties.

Thank you, God.

Why IS it that... it's all relative?

Do you ever stop to think about how you evaluate your life on a bell curve instead of a strict percentage? I'll tell you-- the fact that your messy house makes my house seem clean to me is part of the reason I like you so much. And, yes, I would appreciate a thank you note for making you feel so good about your thighs.

Parent Repellent

I never really pondered the plight of a bug until I made my first few trips to the trendy teen boutiques at the mall. Next time I see a roach, mosquito or ant, I'll be sure to tell them just how good they have it...

I Wanna Re-locate to Old England

Sometimes the monotony of wiping down the same kitchen counters 3 times a day can get to a girl. In fact, it can evoke all kinds of fantasies that have nothing to do with George Clooney or Matthew McConaughey. These fantasies may not be quite as sexy as George's smoldering eyes or Matthew's bulging pecs, but they at least make a girl feel like she has an escape somewhat rosier than Thelma and Louise's.