In Bloom

Bored half to death on a breathlessly hot day in the tiny town, I've decided to explore the close-up functions of our kickass digital camera. Lucky for you, I'm feeling more Georgia O'Keefe in my sensibilities today and less Diane Arbus, though someday when I get up my nerve I've promised myself I'm going to photograph the proprietress of a local junk store, a large, bubbly bottle blonde who lies way up about her age (like Coco Chanel), and dresses up for the air shows with her horse as "Porker: Texas Ranger."

 

Today though, I've stayed close to home, stalking the wildlife of our backyard. Incredibly, our efforts at plant resuscitation have paid off, and not even the howling serenade of the miserable dobermans who linger on in their tiny shit patch of a yard, thoroughly abandoned by the exiled son of our neighbor, has discouraged the birds, butterflies, and homeless kittens from settling in our yard. It's a veritable toilet paper commercial out here.

 

This lovely guy is a Great Kiskadee from Northern Mexico, and the first time my husband and I saw one, we were in the car and nearly rammed someone's parked motorhome chasing brilliant flashes of yellow down the street. The not very flattering description in my nerd guide calls him a "big-headed flycatcher, sometimes feeding on small fish." Further killing the romance of his presence, I can only assume he loves it here because of the clouds of flies attracted to the nearby stockpile of doberman poop.

 

We're also blessed with random flowering vine-things that do their valiant best to class up the chain link fence. There are even some growing on the tractor and the 1950's dump truck parked in one corner of the backyard, but when we moved in, I promised a friend that the first picture of the broken down vehicles in our yard would have me on top of them, drunk and covered in Christmas lights. (I'm working on it, Lily.)

 

Possibly the coolest thing, though, is this wacky tree that grows right outside the kitchen window called a bottle brush tree. About two weeks ago, it let loose with a profusion of bizarre fuzzy red blossoms that smelled oddly like cake batter. The only way I know how to describe the blossoms is to compare them to severed muppet fingers, like if Elmo was tortured by violent extremists-- and the hummingbirds go nuts for it.

  

One night last week, my husband and I stood in awe on top of the picnic table on the back patio while at least two dozen hummingbirds zipped around in the canopy of this tree chirping at each other. We tried to get a few pictures, but it's understandable difficult capturing nature's tiniest crackheads on film. Nevertheless, we were able to pick out at least four different species, and again the nerd guide came in handy-- we've spotted the Buff-bellied, the Black-chinned, the Ruby-throated, and the impossibly tiny Anna's Hummingbird. Another priceless unflattering description pegs these speicies as "casual vagrants."

 

Unfortunately, a freak hail storm blew through last week and ripped off all the bottle brush blossoms and plastered them all over our house. (It also dinged up one of our cars and stranded Abby and I on the other side of town, where we had been enjoying a nice blazing hot afternoon stroll. Yet another interesting fact about the tiny town is that storm sewers apparently seemed like an extravagant extra, hence flood time in a strong storm is a short three minutes. The streets are just heavily cambered to channel water into the intersections, so at the end of every block, Abby happily waded and I angrily sloshed calf-deep in nastiness.)

Since the storm, we've tried to make it up to the hummingbirds by putting up feeders, and they seem amenable to the arrangement, except when we try again to get pictures. Their faces are tinier than the surface area of a dime, but I swear I can see an almost sarcastic look of shock when I try to slowly bring up the camera to capture a blurred shot of their retreat.

Mother's Day

"All women become their mothers; that is their tragedy. Men do not, and that is theirs." --Oscar Wilde

 

Ways I am Becoming My Mother

1) I have exposed my ass in public. One of my mom's best stories, and one I still can't top, is a lively montage of the times she has accidentally exposed her rear end in highly public settings. I'm beginning to appreciate the humanizing quality of telling embarrassing stories about myself, both to put others at ease and to learn to laugh at myself.

2) I love NPR and will turn it up to deafening levels to feel like I'm participating in the conversation. My mom did this as she drove my brother and I to school when we were little, and the blast of the "All Things Considered" theme music is now both haunting and comforting. My mom taught me to use my down time in the car as a time to reconnect with what's going on in the world.

3) I love putting M&M's or Nestle's semi-sweet morsels under my tongue, one on each side, and letting them melt while I watch TV late at night. When I couldn't sleep and had growing pains in my shins, my mom let me stay up and watch "Dallas" with her and she taught me this trick. I learned then to appreciate small pleasures slowly, and to share them.

 

4) I make cookies when I'm sad. My mom taught me the recipe for chocolate chip cookies, and I've got it memorized now because I remember making them with her since I was very little. There's extraordinary comfort in this ritual, and it makes me feel less lonely.

5) I cultivate a healthy appreciation for the absurd. Whether she just bored or actually trying to teach me something, I don't know, but my mom always created voices and characters for every situation. Whenever she read aloud to my brother and I, each character had a distinct identity, style, and accent when they spoke. She had random voices and songs for cooking, driving, gardening, and cleaning, and I never thought it was anything but normal until I did the same thing around my college roommates and they thought I was nuts. Luckily, my husband also has whatever gene this is, so I don't have to stop singing the garbage disposal song.

 

6) I dance in the grocery store. God help us all, this is something I promised myself I would never do, but it's undeniable. Madonna's "Holiday" came on in the HEB yesterday and I danced by myself down the entire bread aisle, not giving a shit that people were giving me looks, until I caught sight of the ghost of my 7-year-old self riding on the side rails of the shopping cart and glaring back at her mother, who was defiantly dancing while she compared bunches of broccoli.

Ways I am Still Trying to Become My Mother

1) I'm still trying to master the grandiose way she tosses her head back and says, "Fuck it. I'm going to have a glass of wine and watch a little TV." This statement was borne of the incredible pressures of balancing an insane workload and still trying to have a home life, something I've failed at spectacularly at several points in my life. The "Fuck it" statement is a defiant act of self preservation, and a ringing call of "Halt!" to the pressures and expectations and perceived judgments that multiply exponentially all around her when she's under stress. My husband and I like to imitate the "Fuck it" statement, and when we do it might sound like we're poking fun at my mom, but at the same time it's a reminder to us that we're able to call a timeout. We're still working on this one.

2) In all things I am still trying not to take myself too seriously.

3) I am still trying to remember to stand up straight. My mother can conjure elegance and power simply by drawing herself up to her full height. Her acting background taught her the importance of how she carries herself, even when she's not actually feeling confident, and over and over again she's caught me revealing my mental state in my posture.

4) I'm still learning how to love someone with a demanding job that requires big moves and long absences. My mom has single-handedly moved our household to and from foreign countries in Britain and the Middle East, and whenever I start to compose the operatic lament of my next military move, I think of my mom sitting in coach with two infants on a transatlantic flight. When I think of my husband leaving for a three-month training school, I think of my mom and dad running up an $800 phone bill while he was in Saudi Arabia for a year and she was in Texas. I think of all the times she forced us to write my dad letters to stay connected, and let us cry when we missed him, and leave school early to pick him up.

5) I'm still learning grit, and class, and gallows humor, and the kind of unfailing loyalty that makes someone drive five hours to bring me a bed.

  

Love you, Mom.

Plugged in, tuned out

I haven't had cable in nearly six years, not counting a brief mistaken glance into the full spectrum provided a shady cable guy in the last town we lived in (it lasted one mind-numbing week and the very first image I saw was from HBO's "Cathouse," a reality show about a whorehouse, wherein a midget woman, a fat male trucker, and a beautiful sad black girl were listlessly re-enacting one of the kama sutra's more challenging poses. I didn't know whether to laugh or weep for all humanity).

But one of the conditions of moving to a town whose length and breadth are walkable in an evening stroll was that we take the plunge and sign up for that most American of rights: the right to veg out to other people's drama. And God, have I loved it.

One thing I've noticed though-- ours is a culture obsessed with pop psychology and calling in The Expert to preach the gospel of our inadequacies before a national audience for the trade-off of a quick fix answer to the problem. We can't get enough of it. "Honey, We're Killing the Kids," "Wife Swap," "Shalom in the Home," "What Not To Wear," "Ten Years Younger," "Celebrity Fitness Challenge," "The Bachelor," "Extreme Makeover"... people will submit to incredible amounts of embarassment and an epic invasion of privacy just for the glimmering promise that "after this week of intensive therapy/shopping/exercising/shameless copulating/plastic surgery" they will finally be stamped "Acceptable" and paraded before their families and friends as such.

Not that they're not good shows.

What's interesting is that we seem to have exhausted most of the fixable problems and now we've turned to our pets. I saw one yesterday morning called "Barking Mad," which was pretty much the UK version of "The Dog Whisperer," and it tracked the lives of Giles, a cat who pissed on electrical outlets, and Honey, a hamster who chewed everything and bit people. The hamster was my favorite. Honey was psychopathically depressed and afraid of humans, which was unfortunate since her owner had just gone through a divorce and was fond of tracking and hunting Honey for extensive cuddling.

As a solution, the show's host built Honey an elaborate, interactive hamster mansion where she could hide from her owner and chew on bells, leather, seeds, plastic, all kinds of shit. Honey was thrilled with this arrangement but her owner lamented, "It's great for her, but now there's no relationship," to which the host of the show rather roughly replied, "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

This exchange echoed back to me a short two hours later when I found myself in a nearby town's mall fifteen minutes before most of the shops opened. I'd decided to go try on evening gowns for the upcoming, attendance-mandatory, military ball. The plan was to stroll around a bit while the shops opened, but it turned out that forty aerobically-attired seniors had the same idea, and they wanted to go FAST. Around and around and around they went, some grimly silent, some chatting happily, all swinging their arms and keeping to the exact contours of the labrynthine mall layout. Overhead Fleetwood Mac kept pace at an inoffensive volume. I sat down on a bench and tried to smile pleasantly as wave after wave passed me by. None of them even gave me a second glance, even the silent ones. "Honey doesn't need you. Her brain's just not wired that way."

I guess it's a nice way to get exercise. It's air-conditioned, there's music. There's lots of glittery stuff for sale and people to look at. But I think I finally get the British woman's comment now. Life goes so fast and so many things get hopelessly broken along the way. So much of what passes for entertainment these days is the frantic insistence on fixing these things-- FAST-- so you can hurry and get on with the rest of your life! It's no wonder we look for the smallest amount of comfort in something like an angry hamster, and truly grieve that comfort's loss.

And lo, the earth vomited chihuahuas

This is Abby. Tell me she is not beautiful and I will tell you, correctly, that you're a dirty liar.

Abby and I run together and it's the most heartbreaking experience. People will literally stop their cars and turn around to ask what kind of dog she is (Australian shepard mix) and then tell me how gorgeous she is. And it's not just the "Hey, cute dog" kind of comment. People stare into her mismatched eyes transfixed, murmuring the kinds of things you'd imagine old men say to strippers, "Oh, you're a pretty lady, aren't you? You're a little heartbreaker." That is, until she emits a piercing "FUCK OFF!" bark and tugs me on our merry way.

This is the kind of public awe and adoration that formed the entire plot of my seventh grade revenge fantasies. Lying in bed at night, all gawky limbs and braces and zits, I would construct elaborate fantasies about how things would be when I finally "blossomed" (my mother's promising term). As fantasies go, they were pitifully one-dimensional-- just one day I would blossom and everyone would be drawn to me like mosquitoes to a bug zapper, breaking themselves against the rock of my beautiful and absolute indifference.



So imagine, now, the irony of escorting around town someone who's achieved this level of careless, captivating beauty, and who doesn't give a shit. Someone who, in fact, takes a special glee in taking a dump in front of her admirers and baring her teeth when they try to pet her rabbit-soft gleaming fur.

This used to be torture when I'd take her running around Town Lake in Austin where glistening, shirtless hunks of chiseled man would trot by, and then skid to a halt to offer panting compliments on my sleek, gorgeous... dog.

Tonight we went on a long, brisk walk around the tiny, tiny town and as usual, Abby stopped traffic, drew strangers from their porches, led toddlers from their yards like the Pied Piper, and set every chained dog in town wailing from the sheer beauty of her dainty little trot. On the course of this walk, I finally understood what it must be like to be Ashlee Simpson-- an uninspired, talentless echo of the original who must nevertheless live in her beautiful sister's orbit because she lacks the strength to break free of Jessica's gravitational pull.


Towards the end of our walk I finally saw the dark side of being so strangely breathtaking. We rounded the corner on what seemed like a quiet street when all of a sudden the bushes on either side of us erupted with chihuahuas, more than I've ever seen before, a veritable pack of the miserable bastards, and they mobbed Abby like papparazzi, swirling around and beneath her in waves and chipping the air with their yips. At first I pulled her leash closer to me and firmly told her, "be good!" meaning, no biting, but by the time we'd gone two blocks with no apologetic owner in site to reign in the ear-splitting, snapping river of dog-vermin, I decided to give her some space in case she needed to throw down. When she didn't seem to get that I was giving her carte blanche to kick ass, I channeled my inner redneck and told her urgently, "Get 'em, Abby! Get 'em!"

To my disappointment, she opted out and instead kept her head high, focusing on some point in the distance until the last of the chihuahuas got tired of the 15:1 footstep ratio and peeled off.

Not only does my dog outshine me, she outclasses me now as well.

My uterus causes ten strangers to mix vodka tonics without the tonic

I made ten new enemies today. Or rather, my uterus made ten new enemies. My fallopian tubes snaked across time, space, and state boundaries to antagonize seven women and one man in Texas and two women in Virginia. I am back to square one with the military when it comes to gaining access to the particular birth control I've been using for seven years, and ten people have gone home to yell at their spouses and pour a stiff drink after having dealt with me.

Coincidentally, this is also the week I've decided to kick my addiction to caffeine. I do this every now and then, embark on random, grandiose cold turkey purges and they're less an honest effort to become healthy than they are a test of internal willpower. After today, after having heard so many varieties of hold music and so many varieties of "no," I'm questioning my caffeine embargo.

Here's the long and short of it-- I caused an unforgivable backlog at CVS today establishing the following facts:

1) my birth control is not covered by the military

2) no one can provide any sort of clues as to why

3) at my last duty station, a tragic experiment with my mental health proved the necessity of NOT switching me to a far cheaper alternative medicine, and my access to the Good Shit was restored

4) documentation of this experiment exists in Texas, but not in Virginia, where the insurance people make their scaly nests and eat their young

5) documentation exists in only one town in Texas, and it's not the one I'm currently living in

6) refunding payment for a medication that should have been covered by insurance is many times more complicated than, say, discovering what went wrong on a failed shuttle launch

and 7) If I want this medication, I can get it for free if I drive sixty miles, but if I wanted it filled in the town where I live, it'll cost me $50.

My poor heroic husband got involved at the mention of $50, and between the two of us and ten grumpy people in two states, we've arrived at the following compromise: I will make a day trip to pick up a three-month supply of my Baby-B-Gone, but come July I'll be back, slashing my samurai sword through red tape and demanding that Uncle Sam regulate my hormone levels FOR FREE.