Sound Effects

Our house is old and makes noises. The poor thing groans, creaks and whistles as does, given half a breeze, every tree surrounding it. It also thumps but that’s not the house’s fault; rather it’s a consequence of twenty-four CD’s that produce sounds in sequence, and are supposed to improve health, hold back age and cause general rejuvenation. The noise they make is like a furnace functioning in extremis. I have no idea if the thumps are working but I’ll keep you posted.

“What in the world is that?” my husband used to say before he got accustomed to it.

Meanwhile, it bothered him so much I purchased another machine to minimize the noises coming from the CD changer. This machine played the sound of rain, the sound of waves crashing, a white sound and several others we never heard. These new sounds just added to the general hubbub that included dogs breathing heavily by our bed, coyotes howling in the woods, and squirrels and mice skittering overhead in the attic.

Nevertheless, my husband is more likely to wake himself up with his snoring, or as he sometimes claims, mine. Of course you and I know I don’t snore; I’m much too well behaved even when unconscious.

On the other hand, my grandmother snored and she was even better behaved. Hmm.

When the house isn’t groaning my good husband is. If I ask him what’s the matter he asks why I ask. When I tell him he says, “You’re wrong. I didn’t groan.” Ditto when he sighs. If he’s not groaning or sighing he’s using expletives although according to him he’s not doing that either. So you can understand why I’ve been looking for my voice-activated cassette recorder.

My husband is asleep seconds after he turns off his light-and often talks or responds to questions so that we have amusing conversations I can’t remember the next morning. I need the recorder for that, too. Also he speaks in foreign languages although English is his only conscious tongue. I don’t know what this means but am willing to consider his having had lots of former lives in different countries or just one former life as a consummate linguist. Sometimes I ask him what language he’s speaking and either he won’t say or I can’t understand him. Most recently he answered, “Ancient Russian,” which is exactly what it sounded like. Once again the recorder would come in handy especially since I don’t think he really believes me when I give him a play-by-play the next day.

Nothing is unique about the noises our phones make but we have five lines, three in the office, two in the house plus a cell phone and although each has a different ring, the rings are not different enough to know absolutely which phone to sprint for.

I think of us as having embraced the quiet life despite the many sound bytes bouncing around and banging uninvited into our ears. Groan. Sigh. G-ddamn it to hell. S–t.

Soon to be recorded.

I Believe Therefore Let’s Talk

 

Now and again the furniture goes on attack and I’m done for. Tables hit me on the hipbone, chairs trip me, and our bed throws me over its side. I end up near or on the floor wondering what I’d ever done to them. I have bruises as proof so please don’t scoff like my husband. I am against scoffing and never do it myself unless I’m responding to the promise of an elected official. When I was young I thought such individuals were doing their best for the country and guileless as newborn pups—I truly thought they were next to God in their goodness and wisdom. So I’ve come by my scoffing at them the rocky uphill way. In all other regards I’m pretty much a believer.

For example: I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows. You may believe the same— although I doubt either of us has a garden with enough flowers blooming to show for it. A true believer, as you know, doesn’t need proof. A true believer for good reason or no reason has embraced a philosophy or a point of view and will stick by it no matter what. And so, too, the true unbeliever. In fact there may be more true unbelievers than their antonyms. True unbelievers do not believe in evolution, global warming or leap year and some thus can be identified without confrontation when you ask them what day it is.

What difference does it makes what anyone believes or doesn’t believe? Either way whatever is or isn’t remains the same and at the proper time the Almighty, in whom I believe, will let each of us know what’s what and what’s not what. I can’t wait. Can you? Of course that implies I think my beliefs and unbeliefs will prove out, an unbelievable form of hubris for someone who purports to be reasonable, even sane.

On the other hand, what we believe or don’t believe makes a difference in the here and now, as you know perfectly well, because of what we do or don’t do to edify students, protect the shoreline and insure the integrity of the calendar. I can’t believe I had to explain that.

You may have run into the category of people who are neither believers nor unbelievers—they are the I-could-care-lessers. They are seldom interviewed or polled because they could care less. The extremists on the far right of this group are the I-don’t-give-a-s—tters and if you want my advice I suggest you stand back when you run into them because they really, really don’t, which means they could give you a surreptitious pop in the eye for which you probably don’t carry insurance. The extremists on the far left are the I-haven’t-the-faintest idea-ers. They often say, “Whatever.”

One redeeming quality of the latter category is that they are all non-scoffers since you have to believe or not believe in order to scoff. My husband believes what his nanny told him, which is you can’t take a bath until an hour past dinner for fear of drowning. I don’t believe it and yet, unless you count a half-hour laughing fit, I don’t scoff. Never. Oh all right. Twice.

I thought the inanimate objects in the house had given up their aggressive acts for the day, but a door that did not look the least bit menacing just flew back and hit me on the shoulder.

 

 

 

 

Foot Fault

August 8th, 2007

I tortured my poor feet for a very long time. Ten years ago they refused to take me where I wanted to go in the shoes I wanted to wear. Since then I haven’t worn heels measuring even one measly inch. Moreover, I can only wear shoes deep enough to accommodate orthotics-plastic molds that match the bottoms of your-that is to say my-feet to correct their imbalances. Such shoes do not win awards for pizzazz.

Details of what I did to torture my feet were seized by the CIA to use against terrorist operatives Here are a few from memory:

I wore high-heeled shoes.

I wore high heels shoes with pointy toes.

I didn’t take off my shoes when they were killing me.

I never soaked them or gave them the time of day.

I just took them bloody well for granted as perhaps you are
now doing yourself.

My mother hated her feet. “They’re ugly,” she’d wail, holding them one at a time and giving them the full force of her most disapproving look before pulling on her panty hose.

“It’s all those years on my feet,” she’d say as if most people had an alternate way of standing and walking about.

“It’s all those years on my hands,” perhaps some woman gymnast is now complaining to a palm-reader looking at the calluses on her mounds of Apollo and Saturn.

“Look at these toes!” my mother would command as if I hadn’t already observed them a few hundred times.

The toe next to her big toe on each foot crossed all the way over its two sister toes and snuggled up to the littlest one. In order to put her foot into a narrow high-heeled shoe she had to force the rambling toe back to where it belonged while moaning and looking up at me for sympathy.

Finding shoes that both feel and look reasonably good to me and pass muster in the eyes of my mother, as well as my two daughters is daunting; my mother does not approve of anything clunky or flat. On my last visit to see her I noted she was in a bad mood the moment I arrived from the airport exhausted from carrying luggage and grateful that my feet were still willing to support me–never mind that I was wearing clunky black running shoes.

“Are you going to wear those?” she asked before I could sit down.

I changed into other shoes somehow more acceptable even though they held my travel-swollen feet as if in a vise.

“Now that’s better, isn’t it?” my mother sighed, flashing, for the first time, a loving smile. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”

My daughters have pretty feet that do not hurt-at least not yet.

Both often wear sling-back, high-heeled numbers destined, were it not for my daily prayers to the Almighty, to catch on something and throw them flat on their lovely faces. Whenever I’m with them something disparaging comes up about my appendages or, rather, what I have elected to put on them.

“Oh my Goddd!” one or the other will say. “Don’t you have any nice shoes?”

I reassure them that as soon as a good percentage of boomers require orthotics, attractive, even stylish, flats will appear in stores and I will be able to look fashionable and move about comfortably at the same time.

A frown crosses each face. What did I say? Oh dear, I completely forgot. They’re on the cusp—call it a foothold—yes, borderline boomers—and if they end up wearing orthotics—it will be, like so much else, all my fault.

 

You’d Think by Now I’d be Somebody

I am a mature woman and then some. Still, what I don’t know fills the internet and all the libraries even though I may have read more than the average dowager and even paid closer attention to the world around me. Nevertheless, wherever I look, experts abound and it occurs to me that, by now, I should be one, too. I am not an expert on, in or at anything and so I’m looking to prove myself wrong.

There are areas in which I excel or used to:

Short order cooking: Assuming nothing needs to be defrosted–add a few minutes if it does–a great, nutritious meal in fifteen minutes is yours at our house, or was until I crossed over into another age group.

Dishloading. Not my strong point. I do fine on the bottom rack but the top rack is wild with cups, bowls and glasses. My husband fixes it nightly and God bless him for not giving me sidelong, exasperated glances while he does. By the way I wash and dry all pots, pans and knives after every meal. Do I get stars for this? Also I have three shiny sinks. If you need instructions on how I maintain them do not hesitate to ask.

Gardening.: Yes, I’ve had years when my tomatoes were fabulous but was it really worth all that watering, mulching and weeding when I could buy luscious ones at a local stand and have time for a nap to boot? And oh my zucchini—beautiful and bountiful until our squash borers killed them from the underworld. And yes indeed, I put fireplace ashes on the seedlings and later cut out the squash borers then squirted organic insecticide into the wounds. To zip avail. Yes, I already know anybody can grow zucchini.

I grew corn one year–it was wonderful–but when twelve months later I tried again, the raccoon network descended and made off with every cob of the crop. Had I been I an expert, I would have known to harvest them the day before they struck.

I have also grown kale, collard greens, assorted string beans, pea pods, snap peas, cauliflower and broccoli with success, sort of. My radishes and carrots have come up too gnarled and uncivilized for polite consumption. My brussel sprouts, the one time I grew them, were adorable to behold at a distance but covered with tiny gray-green insects up close. I removed each sprout and their outer leaves so they were absent all bugs. It only took all day until midnight to accomplish this.

The lettuces, basil, parsley always are fine—but never mind the dill and cilantro. Peppers and eggplant are fun but the frost comes along every year just as they begin producing in quantity.

For the record–-I know how important this must be to you–-I will continue to plant broccoli. Nothing can beat it straight off the stalk to the steamer.

Sewing: I made all of our curtains–-most of them by hand so they’d hang right, but how I managed such an undertaking is a mystery. Clearly, I’m not the woman I was. Too bad you didn’t know her. She may well have been an expert.

A Little More Drivel Please

With everyone so well informed by pundits and twenty-four hour news, it’s hard to believe people are still alive who were raised with hardly any information about the world and the people, famous and infamous, who ran it. They dwelled instead in silence, except when allowed to turn on the radio, listening from time to time to adult homilies, proverbs and other sayings, which semi-filled the sound molecules of one’s childhood home.

Yes, perhaps it was pure drivel but, damn it was comforting—not a terrorist other than your principal loomed on the horizon—and one only had to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth or make a stitch in time to save nine and all would be well. The horse homily was and is beyond me still and what did the other one mean when you were five and had never held a needle? Absolutely nothing but without television there was plenty of time to hang over a porch chair wondering and perhaps expanding your brain so eventually you would find a cure for the common cold. Did I? Well not yet…but hold on–have some patience if that virtue is one of the arrows in your character’s quiver.

Sorry to be in your face– but you may not have any at all because you never stood or sat waiting for buses and trains and then ascended them to take multi-hour trips to wherever and back. Right. Well in my day of very public transportation that’s the way people got around. whether they liked it or not. No one asked or cared if you minded. There were cars, of course, but in my experience you didn’t have one until you were a bona-fide adult, if then, and before that you were on your own carrying a heavy bag. In my case make that two heavy bags because I didn’t learn about traveling light until last year.

If you were so blessed as to go to college—your parents, if you didn’t live a great distance, might drive you up freshman year with all your paraphernalia and then pick you and same up four years later following graduation. Otherwise you were traveling on your own by train or hitching a ride with someone’s boyfriend who had a car and would give you a lift if you anted up part of the gas money. Many of my friends never even had the freshman year benefit–they lived in far off Ohio, Illinois, California, Texas or Louisiana but arrived none the worse for wear—unflustered and enthusiastic from planes, trains and buses neat as you please in stockings, heels, and suits.

What is the point? Well there was just plenty of time while you waited for or rode on buses and trains for lovely drivel—talking it and listening to it for as long as you liked until you fell into a deep sleep full of drivel-laden dreams. There was time to do crossword puzzles and time to play bridge before dinner. There was time to do a lot of very silly things I don’t suppose you’d care to hear about if I could even remember what they were. It was, after all, pure drivel but there was time for it and, sorry to say, maybe you can’t have one without the other.

Cutting Remarks

We ought not to have a lawn but we do. It was here when we moved in and, until recently, I never thought once about its carbon footprint or, for that matter, the carbon footprint of anyone or anything.

Not to say the lawn is in and of itself a creator of environmental bad-stuff––it’s what you’re cutting it with that is–or might be––assuming if, like me, you haven’t figured out how to make it into a charming meadow. The first cutting choice is clearly a family of goats that would nibble the grass and fertilize it at the same time. I like that idea a lot as well as the one of making cheese from their milk, though having an illegal product on my hands tends to upset the bucolic vision. “Oh do take some,” I hear myself cry to departing friends. “It’s unpasturized, yes, but we eat it all the time with nary an ache of the belly. I mean, we don’t sell it, do we?”

Also, there’d be the barn cleanup, the vet bills, and the immense unknowable goat fall-out no one will tell you about until after your dogs have died and you are scratching all the time from something dire. Seeing that our barn is now a garage, the idea becomes a complete non-starter much like our gas push-mower which, along with our riding mower, is now in for repair. Upon their return, courtesy of Dave at Chain Saws, my husband will assume the duties formerly executed by Mark whom we paid in advance for five weeks; he needed the money––as if we didn’t––and who then mowed twice and has not been seen since. Yes, the good-deed/punishment association is much in our minds and, no, it isn’t the first time.

During the weeks it’s taken for us to come to terms with tall and taller grass and before we decided to fix the machines long moldering while giving shelter to mice in the garage, I looked into quiet, pro-environmental alternatives. I nearly purchased a reel mower until I read the only one that would work on Soysia grass wouldn’t work on tall grass, and we have only a little of the first and a lot of the second. I then sought an old fashioned mower on-line, over the phone and by car but was unable to find one anywhere. The people in stores dedicated to mowers were either confused by my request or pitying; on-line searches turned up more reel mowers. To be fair, I found a place in town where the manager knew what I meant and said there had been such a machine in the store but, alas, some other person of doubtful state-of-the-art intelligence had already purchased it.

It was then I broke down and purchased an electric mower so I could achieve a near-silent, non-polluting cut above. It is here, unpacked and not ready to go. Apparently, I need to oil just about everything including the wheels–meaning I must remove the wheels before and after I approach the lawn. No one told me this was part of the deal. All I can hope for now is the thing won’t work so I can pack it back up and hit send.

Goats, again, are starting to appeal. I could put up a little shed.

Encore! Encore!

“Oh go play with your encyclopedias!” my stepfather used to say when he wanted to show what pals we were, how smart I was supposed to be, and how generous it was of him to have given me the Britannica, A-Z, for Christmas. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I had heard him say this a few dozen times before. Nevertheless. he always preceded it with the kind of wink that meant: I’m about to say something incredibly clever. Of course he wouldn’t say it unless company was around so that at least someone would believe he’d thought it up on the spot.

I don’t remember if anyone laughed, but my stepfather always did–which gave him just enough in the way of encouragement to repeat it two more times while nudging me in the side with his elbow. Maybe he should have been a stand-up comic–not because his jokes, if you can call them that, were any good but because it didn’t bother him if no one else thought they were funny, and he never tired of repeating them.

My stepfather was not the only one in my life for whom once is never enough when it comes to one-liners or story telling. Such people, I regret to tell the waiting world, frequently take more than their fair share of cookies. My husband is a prime example of both these behaviors. I’m happy to report he tells his vast repertoire of stories very well–even though he cannot help chortling and guffawing his way through them—a habit he dislikes intensely in others and refuses to believe he practices himself. The fact is that by the time my husband has finished a story he is giddy, pink-faced and aglow from his ever-escalating fits of self-appreciative merriment. Nevertheless, although the telling of his tale has taken long enough for someone to roast a small chicken, and his listeners have responded throughout with gratifying laughter, he will not pause to take a breath but instead, with undiminished fervor and the belief that those assembled are longing for this to happen rather than being allowed to have another glass of wine or tell a story themselves, he performs the entire epic word for word one more time.

You will therefore understand why experience has taught me to keep my knitting in a nearby basket. There are simply too many story-telling occasions when not only do I need to calm myself, but it simply won’t work to leap out of my chair and run screaming into the countryside or, more sedately, rise and excuse myself for a long soak in a hot bath redolent with aromatic oils. Even family and old friends would think either action, at the very least, odd. Instead, numerous afghans, sweaters, mittens, hats, funny little bears with scarves or small male dolls with beards and hats have been created. I think of them as wooly memorials to the twice-told tale.

The only time I tell a story is when something quite amusing has just occurred and I’m so inspired with the particulars I can’t be restrained without a rope whereupon the whole marvelous thing is gone never again to be properly recalled—so it is only retold by request.

That no one has made a request is perfectly fine. Or maybe someone has and I forgot. Never mind. I’ll just go play with my encyclopedias. It’s very soothing because nothing’s happened in them since 1948.

Did I mention any of this before? Please let me know, because I have a horror of repeating myself, and my children tell me I’m beginning to do exactly that.

Never mind. I’ll just go play with my encyclopedias. It’s very soothing because nothing’s happened in them since 1948.

Road Rage

Our mile-long dead-end road is not clearly defined on the local map. It appears to join another road of the same name, although they are separated by seven hundred or more feet of land and solid rock. It appears that way because on the map there’s a broken line attaching them in accordance with a long ago plan to make them one.

If they were joined, our quiet little road would become a thruway for trucks and traffic from the middle of town to an area now less easily accessible. No one on our road wants that to happen.

Agreement ends there, and we’re nose up against whether or not to pave our dirt road or not, and some residents on our quiet, neighborly road are up in arms about it. Lengthy letters with words in UPPER CASE appear in our mailboxes claiming dishonesty and scare tactics on the part of those who prefer to keep our road unpaved. If paved, say the pavers, the road will be widened and safer for pedestrians, cars and the bus one neighbor would love to see scheduled to pick up her children by her driveway rather than at the end of the street. It is probable she is the only one who looks upon this as a positive outcome.

The others want to keep it unpaved because an elected official has said if it is paved, the thruway will, lickety split, become a fait accompli.

A town employee insists this isn’t true–so what it comes down to is—whom do you believe?

The non-pavers believe the first, of course, and the pavers, the second but no one actually knows what’s true.

Work is afoot by the non-pavers to have the town abandon the property between the two roads making the possibility of their marriage moot. If that happens, the non-pavers will join the pavers and everyone will be happy assuming the measurable amount of ill-will now floating around disappears.

I am counting on an amiable resolution so that I can continue to hope Israel and Palestine, the Shiites and Sunnis and any other dichotomy on the front page of the morning paper will—someday, somehow—achieve the same.

Yours, a non-paver,

Oh No! Am I a Misandrist?

My husband is a channel surfer and so I see snippets of many programs after dinner glancing from time to time at the TV as I chug about the kitchen. Sometimes the snippets are long enough to be called pieces. I saw such a piece the other night–it was a Western and, to my astonishment and dismay, it made my heart sing. A woman, blonde, beautiful and mad as May, was in a dusty street looking up at a fellow who was shouting threats at her.

“I’ve had enough!” she said and whipped out a gun from a fold in her voluminous skirt and shot him. He fell dead and then a number of men pointed their guns at her and she shot them—also dead. A tough-looking woman came out of the saloon with a gun and shot a few more. Dead.

“I like that,” I said without meaning to.

My husband laughed. I laughed. He surfed.

“What was the name of it?” I quickly asked from the sink. He channeled back but the info button wasn’t working. Somehow I must find out what the title is so I can rent it instead of attending an Empowering Women seminar next weekend.

Not that I’m not already empowered—especially when I compare myself today with the person I was in young womanhood. That poor creature had no clue she was a doormat. She thought she was okay. After all, she and her first husband made such an attractive couple. Looks were everything or so she’d been brought up to believe as was the appearance of a happy marriage. The neighbors across the street described them as dead-ringers for some now dead movie stars, a compliment that distracted her enough to make her think everything must be all right.

She also thought men were perfect creatures even though nothing in her experience supported such a theory. She believed absolutely in the man/woman equation of the movies: his ninety-nine percent to her one percent smart, brave and significant. And even though she graduated from a highly regarded college, she believed her most important role in life would be to make a man happy.

No, I’m not kidding.

One August afternoon in the third month of her first marriage, she jumped up to give her husband a kiss when he arrived home from his base–this was during the Korean War–and in her haste knocked over a just-poured coke on ice. It was a Hades-hot Baltimore day.

“Shit,” she murmured.

“I’ve told you never to say that,” he said.

“Sometimes nothing else will do.”

“If you say it again I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Shit, shit, shit!” she said.

She thought he was joking when he took her by the arm and led her into their tiny bathroom. He turned on the water, put the cake of soap under it; she was sort of helplessly laughing thinking he couldn’t be serious.

But he was.

Why didn’t she/I say something? I did but it didn’t do any good. Not then and not when he said he had no choice but to fly to a three day football weekend because he had tickets, leaving me with my nursing newborn, eighteen-month old baby and a nasty case of bronchitis. Or when I nearly sprained my ankle when he made me run down a hill—I was pregnant with our fourth child–and thus moved too slowly when I walked from the car toward our house. He told me to hurry up and kicked me hard in the leg—the one with the sore ankle. I don’t know what I said, but I do know I hopped around the kitchen to fix his dinner. Eventually, when I asked for a divorce, he said, “You will have nothing and the children will have nothing.” I knew he meant it as indeed he proved some thirteen years later.

Nevertheless, in the first seven years of that marriage I mostly saw our relationship as a huge practical joke and anticipated my husband would surely turn to me one day and say so. Then we would have a long laugh and start our real life together. In the eighth year I knew it was as unlikely as his giving up golf. Still we stayed married for twenty years.

All that was a long time ago and I thought I was well over my maritally induced misandry—-but my extreme delight while watching a couple of minutes of that movie told me something else. Thus, when my husband, much amused, said he might buy me a gun for my birthday, I had no choice but to come down on the side of law and order.

“Thanks, honey,” I said, “but please—if you do—hold the bullets.”

 

 

A TOOL FOR LOVE

Necessity isn’t only the mother of invention, she also gives birth to women who take things apart and put them back together, or just put things together. I’m speaking of ergonomic chairs, fans with many parts, geodesic domes, particle-board bookcases and dollhouses to name a few. I’m thinking of one woman in particular who has no talent for such projects, poor thing, but has had to learn how because her first husband wouldn’t take them on and now her second husband won’t either. Both have claimed they can’t, but then neither could this woman until she’d spent many a Christmas pre-dawn on the floor with instructions, screws, bolts and tools. Have I dropped enough hints for you to know of whom I am speaking?

“Why didn’t you buy this assembled?” my ex would ask as he watched me become familiar with many tiny parts. A rhetorical question I was, nevertheless, supposed to answer.

“It doesn’t come assembled.” The recollected gentleness of this response fills me with awe.

“Ridiculous,” he’d snort. “Well there’s no point in both of us staying up all night. I’m going to bed!”

Yes, well that was in the deep past and I am grateful for the excellent on-the-job-training I received then since it prepared me so well for my present contract. Note: Although in the first instance my husband was almost never home and in the second, my husband almost always is, the handyman results are exactly the same.

“Where’s the screwdriver?” asks either husband meaning: “Go get the screwdriver and follow me to the place where the problem is. Then fix it.”

The screwdriver of this time and place, in case you may one day be looking for it yourself, is, with most of our other tools, in the giant-size Chock Full of Nuts coffee can in the cabinet under the toaster, as it has been since we moved into our house seventeen years ago.

For all I know, dear reader, you are a capable guy or, lucky lady, live with one of them. If so, I’m glad such a person still exists. I’ve been looking for him ever since I saw specimens in the old black and white days of the movies. He changed oil or tires, fixed screens or back door locks, mended Sister’s doll carriage or Junior’s bicycle, painted the house or the fence and mowed the lawn. Always with a big smile on his “I’ve got every under control, darling” face.

Where is he now? Under Classified: Services, Handyman. Reasonable.

It’s not the same.

A confession: I loved him–in truth I love him still, maybe even more than in 1960 because now I know he will never —please hand me the wrench, sweetheart—be mine.

 

On Another Note

 

Ever since Hollywood made such a mess of my book, “More Than You Want To Know About Me,”my life has been a closed pamphlet — and yet here I am writing an open letter just as if I didn’t respect my privacy and was about to let the calico cat out of the bag again. I am just so special and it really wasn’t fair the way Meryl Streep played me with a lockjaw upper Eastside NYC accent. I mean we never even met. “They” wouldn’t let me come out for a conference and a pedicure at the Beverly Hilton and if you’re at all interested – “they” are the director, the producer, the stars and that goddamn snotty little script girl who was sleeping with everybody (alternately I believe but you never know in tinsel-town) right after lunch on a daily basis. How, you may well ask, do I know these things? Well I have my sources and if I were to name names I wouldn’t have them any more now would I and then what? There have been rumors about my long term friendship with Dominick D. but there hasn’t been a murder connected with my movie yet so what our talking on the phone for two hours every night has to do with anything I’ll never know.

We’re just friends and he appreciates my brilliant, unique psychic predictions of future mayhem and — well I’m sorry to say — there is going to be another murder — big names, blood, a missing shoe and all that — and we’ve been going over the details. That’s ALL I’m going to say at this time. More later.

Disclaimer: Don’t worry–not a word is true.

 

My Apologies on the Offchance I’ve Wounded Your Feelings

“You’re sorry?” asks my husband every time I say, “I’m sorry.” “What for?” he continues.

“Oh nothing,” I say.

“Then why are you sorry?”

You will be glad to hear the interchange usually ends there, although in my mind I’ve always done something to be sorry about but can’t remember exactly what. I tell the dogs I’m sorry, too. “Oh dear,” I hear myself say, “I’m so sorry,” every time I bump a head or step on a tail—easy to do I admit with four dogs running around or lying about in a place they weren’t a second ago. But still they have feelings and always appear mollified when I apologize and pat their heads. Nevertheless, it’s just not smart to apologize to them when other people are around especially people who have no pets. They might think you’ve lost your software.

My sister-in-law came for a visit the other day and is now of that exact opinion. After dinner I got up to clear the dishes and, when I returned for another stack, collapsed and landed on my knees so as not to fall on and injure the dog that had just crossed in front of me.

In the process I nudged him slightly. “I’m sorry, Casper,” I said.

Stacy was indignant “He was in your way, “she said, helping me up, and then, “He’s a dog.”

Well, I know that but so what? Anyway my sister-in-law is not a dog-lover. She doesn’t like to be poked by their noses or licked by their tongues. She wants them to go away for the rest of her stay, which of course makes them want to climb onto her lap forever. And she certainly isn’t going to bury her face in their fur and hug and kiss them to death.

In any case, who’s to say who’s in whose way? Our kitchen is a wider-than-normal- galley-type and has two perfectly satisfactory lanes. There are moments, however, when three or four would be more suitable because some dog or person is always in some dog’s or person’s way. Anyway, most in my generation of women were brought up to say I’m sorry whenever we were in the way or bumped someone accidentally and so forth. Some, or maybe only one of us took this polite behavior to include animals and furniture.

Thus when I say I’m sorry, I can’t help it and, the truth is, I’m sorry I’m sorry.