I just didn't know no better

This is spring break, and for most of my life those two words, when combined, have formed an ominous verb pair, as in, "now the black bear will spring upon its victim and break her."

I've never had good spring breaks.

This time around, since I'm teaching, I actually do get to observe the break again, but it's been consistant with its historical tendency to disappoint. It's almost over and I've spent most of the break toiling over Pants's banner. The pads of all my fingers are needle-perforated and exacto blade-sliced and coated in scales of super glue.

(I'd like to pause here and comment wryly on the commercially-driven, widely held expectation that spring break is supposed to be a time of wanton, sun-soaked abandon, rife with possibilities of fleeting romance and youthful leisure-- I'm just too damned tired and disaffected to do it.)

Anyway, back to the banner. We had a moment yesterday, the banner and I, where I realized that I'd brought it along as far as I could, and that what it now required (i.e., a backing and a precisely attached border to tie up all the raw edges) was far beyond what my skills could provide-- kind of like when Yoda and Obi Wan realized Luke's training was incomplete, but that the only way he'd learn to be a Jedi was to go out and fight the Dark Side himself. So I caved. I called professionals, an older retired couple who take in sewing and embroidery in their garage workshop a few blocks from my house.

I met with the woman yesterday morning shortly after Pants made his triumphant departure to go replace the back end of our pick-up with only a set of instructions printed off the internet, a box of cryptic looking parts, some dry ice (??), and his bare hands. I waved. "Go enjoy your inevitable success!" And then I called Marge, folded up the banner and some extra material, and bought myself a latte on the way to her house (I figure anything worth doing, including admitting defeat, is worth doing well).

Once there, I laid out my work with mixed feelings of tender pride and embarassment. Most of the good parts come from my mother's work on it weeks prior, but some of the elements I'd completed looked quite nice as well. I just couldn't do any more. Not a thing. It was maybe a tiny, tiny echo of what an overwhelmed mother might feel when dropping her kid off at the orphanage. Please help, do what you can, I'll mess it up if I try anymore...

Marge considered my work, clucking over the part where I'd tacked on a square of fabric instead of ripping out the underlying seams and properly sewing it in. More than once, this exchange:

"Now. What did you do here?"

"Where? Oh, um. That's tape. And I'm not sure what that is."

"Oh, Honey. Well, you just didn't know no better."

I endured her critiques and suggestions and tried to remember the compliments (mostly for my mother's work, so I could report them to her later), but mostly I just enjoyed hot sips of caffeine and wondered when I could write her a check.

The differences in generational skill and priority setting couldn't have been clearer-- Marge is from a different era of woman. She too was a military wife, and we discussed this, but her perspective was that of a mother trying to find good schools for her children while mine has been and still is focussed on finding a job and applying to graduate school.

"Of course, you don't work, do you?" she asked at one point, and for the first time I saw that question for what it must look like to a woman of her era, a woman fully capable of sewing her own and her children's wardrobes without using super glue or staples, feeding a family daily from scratch, and operating a household without a Shark Cordless Sweeper. Working would seem ridiculous, almost self-aggrandizing, on top of that kind of skilled labor.

"I do," I wanted to say, "It's just the unpaid part that I do so poorly."

So, gratefully, reverently, I left the banner in Marge's capable hands and came home where I defiantly hobbled my hands by applying fake nails. I did this with outright glee, because it makes me feel like a frivolous mob wife, clawed like a bird of prey and incapable of dextrous tasks like zipping my own pants.

Since then, I've been engaged in the following:

* hating our lurching, Stone Age Dell laptop-- I've actually drawn a little comic strip on all the creative ways I would destroy it, if I could. I completed the whole thing, with color, while waiting for it to load Google.

* reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

* drawing a comic strip on all the totally inappropriate things I'm going to do when I'm an old woman and can use my possible senility as an excuse (ex.: throw rocks at cars, cuss at cusomer service reps, spike my hair and wear suspenders, make butter sculptures).

I think I might title the drawings, "Oh, Honey. She just don't know no better."

"Dear Homemaker,"

This is how the manual to my mother's sewing machine, which I've recently inherited, starts out. "Look!" I crowed to Pants, "It's Sears enforcing gender roles through appliances! Ha, ha!" And then I sat down to try to put thread into the thing and quickly realized that what I initially read as a derogatory term subtly implying limited horizons was really, when applied to me, the equivalent of saying, "Dear Nuclear Physicist,..."

Threading a sewing machine actually made me break out in a cold sweat. First, I had to identify the parts, whose names don't even come close to describing what they look like. Do you know where the "feed dogs" are? Am I the only one who sees that as a command and not a name? Evidently, feed dogs are the little cloven chrome thing* on either side of the jabbing needle, whose eye, by the way, is on the wrong end.

*(A more accurate name for the feed dogs, Sears, would be "Satan's foot," because that's what it looks like. I don't know where you got dogs out of that.)

Perhaps we're alpine climbing now to the very heights of idiocy, but honestly, two threads? Sewing machines have to use two separate spools of thread at once? The manual goes on to explain different kinds of stitches, varying needle gauges for different fabrics, and probably the process of calculating mass for black holes, but once I got the thing threaded, I walked out of the room, cracked open a beer and congratulated myself.

The reason I'm making this ill-fated foray into proper sewing is that soon Pants will be reaching a major milestone in his military career, and some anachronistic custom requires that wives create a banner proclaiming said event to hang in the front window. Initially the idea seemed so antiquated and bizarre, like leaving fresh pies to cool on the window sill, or churning butter, or any of the million things that no one bothers with these days, that I thought for sure Pants would scoff at the idea. "A banner in the window? What am I, a boy scout? Is it my birthday party?" But instead, he nodded and muttered, "Hmf-- cool," which in Pants' lexicon means, "I enthusiastically endorse this practice! I must have one!"

I was fully prepared to grumble and botch my way through this, cobbling together some kind of lumpy and vaguely obscene attempt at a banner, and then hanging it up only after everyone had had a few drinks, and then maybe taking it out back and letting people throw darts at it-- but then I happened to mention the banner to my mom. There's something about Mom Enthusiasm*, that bright, can-do pep talk in the face of ridiculously bad odds, that's intoxicating. "That sounds fun!" she cried, and I partially believed her. Off we went to Joann Fabrics.

*If my mom had proposed the idea of a troop surge in Iraq with a good dose of Mom Enthusiasm, the country would be all for it. Of course, my mom is not corrupt, misguided, or a moron, so it's a moot point.

Since then, it's taken quite a hefty assist from my mom to keep the banner alive and developing. The magpie in me loved the part where we collected a rainbow of different colors and textures of fabric, and then when we opted for the more ambitious route of piecing together a design based on a quilt pattern, I was all for it. In fact, if she'd suggested we incorporate tessellations into the design, and then custom dye our fabrics with the juices of ground berries, I probably would have said, "Awesome! Sounds easy." But when the rulers came out and math got involved, my enthusiasm and confidence took a sharp nosedive.

If my mom and I were partners and this was a school project, she'd be the girl who does 80% of the work and then patiently explains to me what "we" did on the day it was due. I'm used to being on the other side of that arrangement, so to be so blatantly benefiting from someone else's efforts is humbling. Without question, if I'd had to put together the parts that she's done so far, I would easily have destroyed at least one room in our house by now, and possibly killed my dog. I'm that bad with fabric.

So now I'm working on my 20%, some precision hand-stitching that I think I can manage, since I went through an offensive needlepoint phase last winter and made Pants a semi-pornographic tea towel. Oh right, and then I need to sew a border on the whole thing using the Superconducting Super Collider sewing machine.

(One final ego-saving rationalization: asking a modern woman to thread and operate a sewing machine is comparable to asking a woman magically transported to the present from thirty years ago to debug Windows. Right? Oh, man...)

I attend, but am not present at, a party

Have you ever been at a party where you just wanted to ask somebody if maybe they had something for you to read off in a quiet corner until it was over?

I went to one of those this weekend. It was actually nothing to do with the party itself, this rising desire to be Away From Everyone, somewhere dim and quiet where things happened at a measured pace, preferably to other people and on paper, so that they go away when you close your eyes. As parties go, this one was well-equipped. It was in a club, the club, on a nearby base next to the water, which meant the night was humid, windy and dank-smelling, and the little glass airlock hallway that leads to the main doors was covered in condensation and smeared footprints.

I'd never been to any of the clubs at any of our previous bases, but this one was about how I imagined them-- an older building with many layers of paint on the baseboards, respectable floral carpeting, quaint little restroom doors and brass plaques on the walls, but lively, thrown open, and completely given over to the party in progress. Kind of like your grandmother's house if she routinely hosted frat parties. The bar was in full swing, lit like a cathedral with personalized mugs and patches and emblems all over it and a giant brass bell bolted to the countertop-- supposedly anyone dumb enough to ring it buys a round for the whole house.

Who knows why I wasn't feeling it, but I wasn't. I found myself thinking about frat parties I used to go to in college, and how bizarre all of their various paraphenalia looked hung on the walls next to pictures of men long dead but neatly arranged, looking just as arrogant and intent as the ones standing in front of me with jello shots, their fingers down inside the lips of the cups to hold five or more per hand.

The female cast seemed familiar as well, skillfully styled just like something out of a magazine with their war paint, sequins, and violently flattened hair. Considering the humidity, the hair was quite impressive. As always, the unattached ones looked the best and also the least comfortable. One in particular caught my eye. Actually it was less that she caught my eye and more that she stumbled into my chair, because she was already well into her evening before most of the party even arrived. Amazingly, she appeared to be drinking with her father, which is something I just don't get.

I've had friends who claimed to have gotten drunk with their parents, or even smoked weed with them, and this is a barrier I just can't imagine crossing. A few drinks with your folks, sure, a looser evening where everyone gets a little loud and tells stories, why not?-- but this girl was hammered. One eyelid was at half-mast and she reached out to steady herself on passing landmarks, living or inanimate, as she shuffled from table to bar and back, carrying on the conversation as she went and just adjusting her volume. Several men came to the table over the course of the evening, and I couldn't tell if they knew the girl or her father, but she slumped towards each like the passenger in a swerving car. I started calling her Stumbles McTitties for the impressive valley of flesh she had on display. Just watching her I felt like I was already experiencing some of the rocketing headache and landslide of dazed regrets she was bound to wake up with the next day-- and there was her dad, absently swirling his drink in one hand as he joked with another of the young men stopping by the table.

I'm no saint. I've had my moments-- hurling someone's plastic reindeer, which had just been named Uncle Buck, off a balcony and into a swimming pool, tiling someone else's refrigerator door with white bread, using peanut butter as mortar. I just haven't had these moments in front of my parents, with their consent or aid. I think my father's or mother's face, rendered in the flickering reel of utter drunkenness, would be enough to set me screaming in terror. Or at least get me to focus every last atom of my energy on sitting up straight. They're not hardasses, they're just my parents. Some people shouldn't have to see you clinging to a kitchen counter making muppet faces into the reflective side of the toaster because it's funny looking.

The rest of the evening was long, and seemed to get longer as the hours went by. I spent most of my time wandering around outside in the foul-smelling humidity, trying to avoid surprising anyone hidden off in the shadows. This is something you learn after a few frat parties-- approach inviting corners of solitude loudly, with much theatrical coughing and stomping, and then if you find them unoccupied, stake your claim and guard the perimeter with your own carefully measured warning sounds. The darkness was thick, though, and there were ants, and I had to see an older man gruffly vomit near his shoes, like it was an annoying inconvenience, so I took regular loops back into the shocking coldness of indoors to make a lap or two around the party before heading back outside.

My husband was having a good time, so I was trying to be inconspicuous about how utterly separate I felt from the current of energy that seemed to run through everyone else. I felt an eerie calmness when I was outside, savoring my silence like hard candy-- it was a separate pleasure not to have to explain to anyone what I do, where I'm from, where I went to school, how my husband and I met-- but after a while it got old and I wanted very suddenly and very sharply to leave. Luckily he and I have developed matching piercing gazes for these occasions. When one of us catches the gaze from the other, we know a countdown has begun, and social disentanglement must commence forthwith.

Handily stone sober, I enjoyed ferrying him first to Whataburger and then along the black expanse of rectilinear country roads home. All the roads back home are marked out along the property lines of large fields, and you get the disorienting sensation that you're traveling straight the whole time but the faint pinpricks of distant city lights are making 90 degree shifts around you.

Mostly, though, I enjoyed talking to him, and knowing that even though I'd had an off night and nearly every other human had set my teeth on edge and I felt all tangled, I still got to go home with this one, easily the best by my estimation. Sometimes it seems like all the parties I go to, people are engaged in a focussed and active search for someone, like a bunch of radio towers blasting off in a all directions at close range. This weekend I enjoyed casting my needle back into the haystack and then reaching out for him and finding him, true as any magnet without any digging at all.