Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri
Katy is represented by
Rachelle Gardner at
WordServe Literary
Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net
Recent Posts
- Soul Train
- Live Out Your Dream And Discard The Box
- Tears In A Bottle
- From The Young Mom I Once Was, To You
- I Can’t Help Falling
- What A Difference Ten Years Makes
- The Next Best Thing To Robert Redford
- The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
- Where Have All The Years Gone
- Fun With Kiki Cullen
- Stuck On Mom
- Ten Years Later, Our Girls From Northern Ireland Remembered
- The Thrift of Grief
- Job Security
- The Party’s Over
Syndicate
E me at katy @ ngenius.com
Whatever Works
I mentioned that Starbucks was going to have to go, didn’t I?
Today marks Day Seven Of Starbucks Withdrawal. (Mantra: God is in control, and this is good for me.)
The thing is, Doug and I have racked up quite a habit at our local establishment. It’s four years running now, and frankly, we could have financed a significant hunk of our baby’s college education on what we’ve imbibed.
And not only that: Every time I read about the investors who got into Starbucks on the “ground” level and made their fortunes, I see cappucino. Or mocha. Or maybe green tea. Take your pick.
I lamented about it to Mom this morning.
“You know what? If I’d invested a measly $10,000 in Starbucks in 1987, I’d be sittin’ on 5 mil right now.”
“It seems to me,” she said, “that you’ve invested quite a bit in that place.”
“Yeah, but Mom, I’ve peed it all away.”
What she said next made me realize how much I love the old girl.
“Well, Katy, you DO like to pee.”
Repentance
I’ve been following a completely sugar-free, reduced-carb diet for approximately 2372.5 days, give or take an hour or two.
Who’s counting, you ask? Normally, no one. Not even me, really. I stopped counting after the first 24 monthiversaries, that’s how NOT O/C I am. Doug, on the other hand, is suddenly aware of every hour that passes with me in a carb-controlled zone.
Why? Because, just for fun, he’s attempting it himself for a tiny 24 hours. Maybe 36, if his nerve holds.
My dear husband, you see, is addicted to bread. And toast. And bagels and croissants, both in their toasted and untoasted forms. Did I mention plain old toast? Just so you know, the man consumes upwards of eight slices of toast per day, not counting any of his other floury delights.
It was about this time yesterday that he ate his last toast. You’d think someone died. When I ask him how he’s doing, he says, “Life is barely worth living.”
Tell me about it.
He’s repented for a number of sins over the past 24 hours. Fasting will do that to a man. Without comfort foods to satiate the beast within, the intentions and failures of the heart become plainer than the butter on your face.
“I’m sorry for the six and one-half years worth of pizzas I’ve eaten in front of you,” he says. “And especially for describing how great the crust was, how it melted in my mouth after I crunched into its parmesan-coated outsides.”
“I forgive you, honey,” I say, but who knows for sure whether a man in his condition is truly contrite or only using the occasion of his abstinence to dream aloud of his favorite foods?
“And I’m truly sorry for all the french bread, lasagne, manicotti, burritoes,the Pringles, Doritoes, the Hot Pockets, the mashed potatoes, and the Rice-A-Roni.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does he have to write me a grocery list?
“Babe, really, it’s fine,” I say. “I know you didn’t mean it. You couldn’t possibly have known how hard it was for me to watch you eat all those foods when I couldn’t have—”
“When this experiment is over, I promise you, things will be different around here. I’ll be a changed man….”
“That’s so sweet, Doug—”
“Life is short, Katy. Forget toast. From now on, I’m eating dessert first.”
Have You Got A Deal For Me?
My husband and I, both rather ancient by many of your standards (he’s 53 and I’m 52) need just a tad of advice on how to lower our communications costs.
Now, lest you think I’m only angry or bored with my current services, and am just in the market to switch to something new—well, you might be onto something.
I already mentioned in this space my intention to ditch cable TV altogether, but guess what? Evidently, we’d rather switch than ditch, because we ended up moving from DirecTV to Dish Network. It’s ten bucks less per month to keep basically all the channels we currently have, plus we get that DVR thingie. Kind of like TiVo, if I understand it correctly.
Don’t let me fool you. When Doug tries to explain TiVo to me, I just lose it. How can you be recording something at the exact same time you’re playing it back? Or is that really what he said? I don’t know, people. And I’m not sure I want to know.
Our cell phone family plan is a huge issue right now, and it’s not just because the two grown kids who are members of the fam use most of the shared minutes. It’s also because Doug and I often fail to keep our cells near our bods. So if a member of our closeknit group tries to call us using (I think this is correct) free minutes, we don’t answer because, well…we’re too old to chase phones. We wait for them to call us on the regular old landline phone, which happens to be on the desk or bedside table right next to us, and they always do.
But I suppose that kind of defeats the purpose of those free minutes from fam member to fam member, huh?
Last month, the two kids used 850 of the 1000 shared minutes. Doug used a few over 100 (and he’s running a corporation) and my phone registered a measley 26. Honestly, someone must have taken a turn at my phone, because I haven’t spoken 26 minutes on it in the last year. I can’t hear on the darned thing, because of being deaf in one ear, so I don’t even try.
Then why did you get your own cell phone, silly? you might be asking. Because, of course, it only added $9.99 to our monthly bill. And don’t discount peer pressure.
On top of the 850 shared minutes the kids used, they also accumulated another 500+ minutes of the type that are nebulously described on my invoice as “other.”
Not on-peak or off-peak or on-plan or off-plan or roaming or in-area—just other.
Thanks for that, Verizon Wireless.
One of these grown children is going to be out of the country for ten months starting in late August. The other is also grown. My feeling is that since we are no longer of child bearing age, we should not have to invest in any further “family planning,” and that includes family plans of the cell phone variety.
What do you think?
If one adult child went on the “me and my friends” plan and the other went on the “buy a cheap phone in a foreign country and load it with prepaid minutes” plan, then we could dump my phone and Doug could have a cell phone for business, just like the old days. Hmmm….sounds like a plan.
I’m not sure what the very cheapest way will be for the adult child in the foreign county to call the U.S. on a semi-regular basis. Anyone have any ideas? Calling cards? Skype? What exactly IS Skype?
I did it one day with my friend Mary DeMuth, who lives in France, but I was younger then and I didn’t know what we were getting into. We had a Skype fling, I guess you’d say, but I swear I haven’t done it since. Now Doug is looking over my shoulder and says that I didn’t go too far with Mary—we only used Skype to instant-message an interview she did here at fallible. He says Skype is a also voice dealie—wow!
Then while I’m learning that little tidbit, I get an email from my friend Will Samson. In an earlier email, he said I should “chat him up” sometime if I needed more information for an article I’m proposing. I know that Will was raised by a Scottish parent, as was I, but my dad never said “chat me up.” I had a feeling Will meant something else entirely, something that might have been included in that suspicious-looking secret code of links underneath his signature line.
“What precisely is meant by chat up?” I asked in all my elderly innocence.
He just now responded that it can mean using any of the instant messaging thingamabobs, as well as Skype (there’s that word again!) and Gizmo. Gizmo! Are any others of you out there using Gizmo? We need a free or very extremely cheap way to communicate long distance.
Our other communication prob is our regular phone line. It’s all AT&T now, I guess. It was SBC, but you know how these things go. We used to have cable Internet, but now I think we have DSL through AT&T. Not cheap enough, IMO. We also have two phone lines. Doug uses the home phone quite a bit for business, but so much that we need another line? Why? We’ve got caller ID on both lines, and CallNotes, as well. Something tells me this is significant overkill.
We do need a phone line for Internet and fax, but hey—here’s something else I don’t get: How come people who have no phones in their homes except cells have Internet access? With both wi and fi? Please explain that to me, because something’s gotta give over here.
Okay, look. I happen to know you savvy techie types are holding your communication expenses down to a low roar and what I need to know now is HOW? You’re young, you’re hip, you’re smart, you’re attractive. Please help us out here!
All we really want is to be more like you. As long as you don’t advise text messaging.
Good Grief
Since we got home from the Old Country, I’ve been going through the six stages of grief. You may have heard of them?
Denial, Anger, Depression, Bargaining, and Acceptance. Oh, wait….that’s only five. Something’s always disturbed me about that list, and I finally realized what the problem is. Whoever came up with it left out The Biggie that should be squeezed in right before Acceptance: Rebellion.
There is nothing like some great time away to give an old chick much needed perspective on her life: what’s working, what’s not, why, and what to do about it. We’d barely gotten on the plane and over the water before I turned to Doug and said, “If anything happens to Mom, I won’t be able to be reached until we land in Ireland. There’s nothing I can do for her now…”
This was one of a thousand revelations granted me on this journey, all small and obvious in and of themselves, but all huge in their implications should I choose to apply their truths upon returning stateside.
And choose, I have.
Do you know that TV ad for Luzianne iced tea? Where the old coot is sitting on his front porch, saying how he and his woman have lived in that same house for fifty years, and how they’ve been in the other-brand-of-iced-tea rut that whole time? Then his neighbor gives him a glass of crystal-clear Luzianne, and his eyes are opened to what he’s been missing.
“Kind of makes you rethink your whole life.”
That’s how I feel. I’ve rethought my whole life, and man, I’ll tell you what. I’ve not only been getting tossed to and fro by the six stages of grief (you don’t go through them in chronological order one time only, you know. Like a team of careless surgeons, they toss your miserable self around on the operating table of your soul), but I’ve been dealing with a number of losses at one time.
None of them are huge. No one close to me has died, at least not in the past two years.
But sometimes, in this life, there are other kinds of losses that we need to define as such. In my case, I needed to realize that in many ways, I’ve lost several years being over-vigilent on my mother’s behalf. I’ve hovered, protected, and instantly responded as if she wasn’t a person capable of many of her own decisions—be they good or bad.
That’s the thing: I really, really hate it when people make life-altering bad decisions. I really, really hate watching people live with the consequences (so easy to foresee!) of those bad decisions so much, sometimes, that I don’t want to allow them the freedom to screw up their own futures.
So I screw up mine instead. I lose days, weeks, months, years—time that can’t be recaptured, ever. I try to “do” someone else’s life—to protect them from themselves, of course. Or wait? Could it be something else? Could my real motivation be something I’m even less proud of?
Ummm….yeah. When I do someone else’s life, it’s to avoid my own.
Now, to most of you sane folks out there, this is not exactly a heavy revvie. But to me? A veritable epiphany.
It’s not just about Mom. I’ve had to weigh myself. Yes, on the bathroom scales. Yesterday. I’ve avoided the scales (can we say “Denial”?) for many months, which is never a good thing for me. In fact, it can only mean one thing: I’m out of control.
Six and a half years ago, I started low-carbing. It took me two full years to lose 68 pounds. Now it’s taken me four and a half years to gain back thirty. I’m just a little angry about all this, since I’ve never tasted sugar in all this time, and don’t intend to. Shouldn’t that be sacrifice enough? I don’t personally know a single diabetic who doesn’t eat sugar, much less a member of the healthy population. For all these years, I’ve been living the sugar-free lifestyle alone. It ain’t easy, which is why I’m mad.
I’m not in denial any more. I’ve looked in the rear-view mirror, and the truth ain’t pretty. And I’m only angry part of the time. The rest of the time, I’m depressed, bargaining with God, or just plain rebelling. However, acceptance is starting to seem like a real possibility now, and with it comes forward motion.
You know how St. Paul wrote in one of his epistles, “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now”? I’m going to let you off easy today. A bit about changing how I relate to my mother, and one about changing directions weight-wise.
I’m embracing change, folks. I’m not too old, even though I’d like to tell myself I am. (Excuses Backwards R Us.) I’ve teased before that Starbucks loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life, but at best, their plan is a poor substitute for the Real Deal.
I’m getting back to the Plan.
Worth
I’ve already admitted that Doug and I are not paragons of financial virtue. What? You thought I was kidding?
Compared to the millions of other families out there who are obviously “doing it right,” (if you believe the profiles in Money Magazine in which they are described as opening 529 college savings plans for their children who are still in utero), we are losers.
Here’s the deal: We’ve pretty much bankrolled college educations for our kids one year at a time. It hasn’t always been pretty, and we still don’t have a working knowledge of that whole compound interest thing we keep hearing so much about, but hey. It’s worked for us.
Our youngest child, Kevin, is enrolled in a not-very-cheap school for this fall. He’s finished his first two years of college at the community college here locally, which is—thank You, Lord—very extremely cheap.
Kev is our last child to put through college. We committed to paying for four years for each kid, and so far it’s worked out, even though we qualify for NO financial aid whatsoever. (The high cost of making a good income, and no, I’m not complaining….)
Anyway, this last phase of funding a child’s college education will not be without its unique challenges. In fact, we are going to bite the luxury bullet and cut out some things we really don’t need, in order to finish what we’ve started.
Kev will be leaving the area and won’t need a car at the school he’ll be attending, so first of all we’ll sell his car and put the cash toward his tuition. Then we’ll cancel his car insurance for the duration of his academic career, saving us $125 per month.
Health insurance coverage is included in the tuition, so we’ll cancel our private policy on him, as well. Again, big bucks per month, because (phooey!) we’re self-employed. I’ll also probably raise our deductible on our home owner’s insurance (thus lowering the monthly premiums), because we would hesitate to make a claim on it even if we had one. Ditto the car insurance.
Cable TV? Do we really need it? It’s a flippin’ $50 per month, and you know what? We can totally live without it. I’m cancelling it tomorrow.
We even had season tickets (a table for four) to the local dinner theater, which represents our social life, since we view it as a set-in-concrete way to make sure we are socializing with our treasured friends. Cost for the year? Over $600.
I don’t need a cell phone AT ALL, and it’s time to cut our daughter loose from the Family Plan, on which we’ve continued to pay her portion even though she is grown and gone. Savings? I don’t know—$100 per month?
In addition, we’re selling Doug’s Uillean (Irish) bagpipes for (hopefully) $2500, since the darned things have a 20-year learning curve and he didn’t get them until he was 50. Just so you know: Uillean bagpipes might be the most difficult instrument to learn in the entire world. But if you give it the old college try (Ha!) and realize it’s not going to happen, why hang onto to the things?
Today, we hauled a load of books to Half Price Books and got $45 in return. But we neglected to make it home with the Rubbermaid container we transported them in, so I’ve got to make a second trip. Hey, the container cost me $6.99! This afternoon, we gathered another assortment of VHS and DVD movies, and even more books, so I hope to score another $50 or so when I head back tomorrow.
There are other, smaller steps we’ll need to take, too. Fewer meals out, fewer trips for coffee, consolidating errands to save on gasoline—it all adds up.
When you have a goal that’s really important—such as seeing your baby’s education through to completion—it’s amazing how financial priorities can make themselves crystal clear. It’s amazing how you can do pretty much whatever you determine in your heart to do.
Kevin, I hope you know how happy we are to throw ourselves and our resources into getting you through school. The bottom-line truth is this: You mean more than the whole wide world to us.
Funny Emails
I love the emails I get in response to blog entries. Sometimes, they are from people who would like to leave a comment on fallible, but who are embarassed to reveal that much about themselves on the Internet.
I got a great one in response to the entry about zit-picking. Looking back a whole week, I can’t believe I had the chutzpah to make such a gross confession in this space, but heh—confession is good for the soul. Or the face. Whatever.
Anyway, this lady and I have formed our own little support group now. We are encouraging each other to fight the good fight, keep our fingers off our faces, and persevere to the end. I tell you what, when next you see the two of us together, you will think to your collective selves: “Wow! Such amazingly clear complexions! How do they do it?”
That’s the power of email.
Then this morning, I got a message from a girl I’ve only known for a year or so, who lives just twenty minutes down the road. She’d read my last post and felt like she’d learned something about me she’d never known before.
“Looks to me like you were raised by one of those wealthy Kansas City families down on the Plaza! Do tell more!”
Honestly, I had to go back and read my post to understand how she could EVER get that false impression! Yep, there it was in all its fallible glory—references to my girls’ school and the boy’s school and prep schools and high-powered careers.
Sheesh. My family lived fifteen minutes south of the Plaza. Believe me, fifteen minutes can make a world of difference! My parents didn’t have two nickels to buy a bottle of Coke the whole time I was growing up. I got a scholarship to that school, for one-quarter of the price of tuition. I started there in 1968, when the cost for an entire year was $400. (I’m guessing it’s something like $7000 per year now.)
My mother has told me often that my $100 per year scholarship made the difference in whether or not they could send me there. And that for them, coming up with the other $300 was no simple matter. Whenever I hear the phrase “Sacrifices were made,” I think of my parents. They put five of us through Catholic schools—K-12—on a bank teller’s salary.
So. If you’re ever walking around on the Plaza (make sure you pronounce it “plaaah-za”) and you see two clear-faced middle-aged chicks, at least one of whom dresses like she didn’t grow up in that neighborhood, well. Stop and say Hi! Chances are it’ll be me and the other half of my support group.
Everything I Know About Money. Were You Afraid To Ask?
I could definitely write a boatlload of books with those titles that start with “Don’t Know Much About…” You fill in the blank.
In high school, I competed in speech tournaments nearly every weekend. I loved debate. We had the same topic for an entire year, something like “Resolved That The United States Should Not Be Unilaterally Involved In Vietnam” or “Resolved That Abortion Rights Should Continue To Be Determined By The Individual States.” You get the idea.
Debate topics reflected the times we lived in, but my personal opinions didn’t matter one whit. All that counted was my ability to debate both sides of any issue (with a poker face) and prevail against worth opponents. I got pretty good at this. My all-girls’ school (St. Teresa’s Academy in Kansas City, MO) often came up against the neighboring all-boys’ school (Rockhurst High School). Those boys were being prepped for not only the most exclusive universities, but also for high-powered professional careers. They could talk circles around us.
But I’ve got the pics to prove that my debate partner, Beth Bowen, and I beat their socks off at least once. Nearly seven years ago, I contracted Dr. Brad Thedinger to remove my brain tumor. When I recalled that he’d been one of those infamous Rockhurst debate boys, I felt enormously relieved that the fellows usually whupped us good.
You don’t want the loser of a crummy debate tournie doing your head. After all, sometimes it IS brain surgery.
My favorite category in the speech tournies wasn’t debate, though. It wasn’t extemporaneous (in which each contestant is given a random topic and 20 or so minutes to prepare a five minute speech, with access to research materials), either. No, for me it was impromptu all the way.
For an impromptu speech, the entrant drew a topic out of a hat. Believe me, these were the most obscure subjects a 16-year-old could possibly imagine, maybe something like “Discuss the effect that the Japanese government’s investment in Icelandic treasury bills will have on the stability of the Swiss franc.”
I’d pull that sucker out, read it once, head to the front of the room, and bull my way, unflinching, through a three-minute speech. Whoever can persevere to the end without twitching, sweating, obsessive blinking, or weeping—wins.
Which brings me around to today’s topic: Tell Us Everything You Know About Money.
I’ll admit, sometimes this topic reduces even me to knee-knocking, and I am trained in this sort of thing. But now that the topic’s been pulled, there’s no turning back.
The first thing to avoid in personal finances is having a plan. Or a budget. Or even a plan to develop a budget. These types of artificial constraints only breed resentment, stinginess, and boredom. Why should you impose so many financial rules upon yourself that you can’t spend at Starbucks all the money you should be saving for retirement, if you so desire?
Trust me, when you retire, you are going to be surrounded by oldsters who for decades have had the codes for their drinks of choice embedded into their wrists so that—Alzheimer’s notwithstanding—their ever-more-juvenile-looking baristas can scan their orders. You’ll have all that money, with Starbucks still on your mind after years of sacrificial deferred gratification, but you’ll have NO CLUE about how on earth to choose a beverage. Is that what you want?
The second thing is to spend more than you make—way more. If you spend just a little bit more each month, what do you have to show for it? Nothing, plus you look to all the world like just another Average Joe. Really, how much imagination or even forethought does it take to only go a little past the point of no return? But if you go all the way, and spend as much more than you earn as humanly possible, you’ll have a LOT to show for it. And, I’m sorry, a lot is always better than a little.
The third thing is to permanently lose the checkbook. You know the old joke, “How can I be overdrawn? I still have checks left!”? I don’t get that joke, because I don’t get checkbooks.
Of all the ways to torture yourself, “finding that last penny” so you can balance your checkbook every month has got to be the worst. If you spend an hour looking for the penny, and your time is worth, let’s say, $25 per hour….um, you do the math.
Now, taking a peak into your account online every couple of days, that’s a good thing. Don’t worry: No matter what, the bank WILL let you know when you run out of dough. Why should you spend your high-dollar-value time sorting it out?
The last thing I know about money is this: Eat out every meal. I know, I know. You’ve probably heard that if you only eat out on that very special occasion, you’ll enjoy it more, plus you’ll save TONS of money by preparing the bulk of your meals at home.
Baloney! I’ve never met a meal out that I didn’t FAR prefer to anything I’ve ever fixed at home and besides, eating out can be significantly cheaper in the long run. I can guarantee you that the “you must manage expenses!” crowd isn’t factoring in that when you cook at home, you risk causing traumatic wear and tear on your stove, oven, BBQ grill, refrigerator, freezer, disposal and diswasher, thus causing the value of your home—your biggest investment—to plummet.
And not only that: What if you were to start a grease fire frying up those sopapillas that you should have purchased in the comfort of your local Chipotles? That $3000 wallpaper job that you only thought you couldn’t afford will look pretty shabby after you unleash the extinguisher on it.
And what if in the process of cleaning the kitchen sink after prepping enough vegetables that people will think someone died and left YOU in charge of the Salad Bar, you scratch the sink’s surface so badly that you need to replace it to the tune of eleventy gazillion bucks?
How far ahead do you think you’ll be then, hmmm?
So there you have it—my three-minute off-the-cuff presentation, during which I’ve told you Everything I Know About Money.
Yes, it’s true. Everything I know about money I learned doing impromptu.
Picky, Picky, Picky
Have you ever heard of Self-Injurious Skin Picking Disorder? Yeah. Me, neither.
The tendency to pick must be hereditary. My mother and grandmother were both zit pickers, and so am I. I just didn’t know the disorder had a name.
Now I know. Lucky me.
I went to the doctor, sure I had skin cancer or something worse, whatever that might be. After all, it’s been 18 months, and I just can’t get my face to clear up. Just so you know, this is the only part of me that still looks sixteen.
“You need to stop touching your face,” Dr. Craemer said.
“Oh, I’ve stopped picking it,” I assured him. “Five whole days ago. But I do find my hand running across the surface of my face all the time, just to see how it’s doing since I stopped picking it…”
He looked down at my chart, clearly avoiding eye-to-zit contact. “Katy, I think you might be a little bit…” The good doctor hesitated then, but as usual, I didn’t.
“What? OC?”
He nodded. “I could send you for a few appointments to learn some behavior modification techniques—”
“No, please! I’m fine. Besides, I’m too old to modify anything, honestly. And compared to Doug, I’m not OC at all. Can’t I just try this on my own?”
“Sure, you can. You know, OC can work in your favor on occasion.”
“You mean, if I can somehow become obsessive/compulsive about not picking my face?”
“You got it.”
I’ll just go on record here as saying that I have a brand new, positive OC behavior. How’s that for progress?
Extreme Home Takeover
I never thought this would happen to me, but it has.
You’ve all met folks who turned their kids’ rooms into veritable shrines after the little darlings left home, right? My mom was like that. When the first three of us flew the coop, it was good riddance, baby. But when Bridget and John left? Shrine City.
My kids still talk about the feeling they got from going into Bridget’s shrine—the good vibes. There were her ‘80s jigsaw puzzles, stuck on backboards with puzzle glue, hanging on her bedroom walls. Her prom dresses and dance costumes filled the closet, and I’m pretty sure the dresser drawers contained teenager-frozen-in-time secrets that fascinated my young children.
Doug’s mother, until 2004, lived in the same house he moved out of in 1971. His bedroom remained a shrine, too, in the sense that the wall decorations—all Jesus freak campy stuff that might sell for a gazillion bucks on eBay, or then again, maybe not—was never altered.
“If you feel far from God, guess who moved?”
Well, Doug might have moved, but his stuff didn’t. And not only that: His mama turned his room into a Where Broken Furniture And Pieces From Things We Can’t Identify Go To Die Room. In addition, the woman became incapable of tossing even an old Price Chopper ad, but filled grocery sacks with junk mail, opening his door just far enough to toss a fresh bag upon the pile.
Doug’s room became a shrine with plenty of flameable material, in case anyone got in the mood to offer a random sacrifice in there.
Is it laziness that keeps parents of adult children from lowering the boom on shrines? Or is it that they’ve got other stuff on their minds, and don’t have the time to devote to reclaiming their own space which they purchased at interest rates possibly as high as (in the late ‘70s) 15%?
Or is it that dreaded Something Else?
Until now, I’ve maintained (Ha!) that it’s probably laziness more than anything else. But you know what? That was before Carrie and I started going through her room and all its artifacts some ten days ago. She admitted then that until she went to Jamaica to work in the orphanage for five weeks, she probably would not have been able to deal with all her childhood stuff. She wanted the shrine, and I can understand why.
Sure, she’s been living away from home for seven years, but it took a complete change of perspective—seeing things through the eyes of children who don’t have many attachments to physical objects—for her to be ready to lose some of her baggage.
I’ve got to admit, she and I did some ooohing and aaahing over pictures and letters and awards and stuffed animals. We boxed up her china dolls, in case she has a little girl someday who might love them. We kept all the stuff of importance, and pitched the rest. There was a whole lot of pitching going on.
Since then, Doug and I have kicked in big-time. Carrie had a penchant for attaching posters to her closet walls with Scotch tape. Dang, that stuff works great! Much better, in fact, than whoever hung the dry wall. Our beautiful daughter also used sticky-tacky-gooey stuff to adhere Anne Gedde pics mounted on foam core around the top of her walls, like a border. It was darling at the time, but not quite as darling on this end.
Remember this, All You Who Refuse To Build Shrines: Sticky-tacky-gooey stuff, after it is scraped off, must be covered with Kilz or it WILL show through the new paint, no matter how many coats you use. I’m just sayin’.
And I might as well tell you this: I’ve bawled up there in that Temporary Shrine, paintbrush in hand, meticulously covering the material evidence of a little girl having ever spread her creative wings under our roof.
It’s the little things that got me, the things I didn’t expect. Like the one strand of stencilling Carrie attempted behind her closet door without our permission, a long gangly vine of tendrilled ivy, so gloppy and smeared that she must have despaired when she saw it, and then gave up the effort.
If she’d given up on other efforts, if she hadn’t gone on to grow into the amazing young woman God made her to be, I might have rushed out of the room, paintbrush in hand, and left the vine to wither for another day. But she’s a woman now, and so we, too, must continue to grow.
Her room was a shrine for a little while, for a few reasons, I’m sure. She wasn’t ready—until now—for us to perform an Extreme Home Takeover. And while I don’t think of Doug and me as lazy, and I’m not sure we have so much on our minds that we can’t keep up around here, there really is Something Else that must be faced.
Ah, Something Else.
Now I’m heading into Kev’s old room. Wish me well.
Emptiness
You know it’s bad when you catch yourself squinting through the narrow slot on the opaque lid of your latte, hoping against hope to spot even three more drops, elusive dregs that stubbornly refused to cross your lips when last you tipped the drained cup into your craven mouth.
We live in desperate times.
Progression Or Regression?
You may have noticed, if you’ve read the past few posts, a trend either developing or unraveling—depending on your vantage point, I guess. Even I’m not sure which one it is, or—for that matter—which one it needs to be.
The deal is, by the time Doug and I had spent a couple weeks in the Old Country, I’d become convinced that I’d been going about my life all wrong. That I’d been concentrating too much on my mom’s needs, over and above what was beneficial for her well-being. I decided to make some changes when I got back home, and I’ve managed to do just that.
I’m spending less time with Mom, and while I’m still aware of her complaints, difficulties, and deficits, I am not behaving as if I am God’s Gift To Moms. I am allowing her the opportunity to make more decisions on her own behalf, even if she chooses unwisely.
For example, I could have hustled over there to examine her injuries when she fell out of bed the other day. (Her phone on her end table has stopped working and she decided to “make a run for it” to the living room phone, which she knows better than to attempt….) The only thing she mentioned at first was that her finger might be broken, but now she says she’s black and blue over much of the old bod.
There was a time I might have chastised her for her indiscretions before spending a day with her in the ER over such a fall. I’d have her examined from head to toe against her will, just because I could. Now, I figure the nurses at the Funny Farm (Mom’s words, not mine) will call me if they need me.
Sounds insensitive and cruel? Maybe. But, hey, Mom bruises easily and I’ve just spent more than fifteen years overreacting to a pesky adrenaline buzz. I’m just sayin’.
So I’ve backed off a bit. Then I announce to the Internet, God, and everybody that my new conviction will give me the time I need to really get down to some potentially publishable writing. Sounds logical, right? For you, it probably would be. But for me—the one with the serious avoidance issues—it’s not that simple.
No, I have to immediately fill the Mama slot with another all-consuming project. Like weeding out the whole house—again. Huh?
The truth is: I don’t have any horrible disasters going on in my life right now (in the lives of my extended family members, though?—whoa, baby!), at least not ones that I’m willing to buy into emotionally. And that leaves me with a big hole in my life. Not a bigger one than I should have had available to me all along, you understand, if I’d only had the strength to resist getting over-involved—but a big hole, nonetheless.
Why don’t I just forget the cluttered house and write a book, you ask? Um…fear of rejection, maybe? I don’t know.
All I know is this: If you’re thinking of taking a nice long trip, watch out!
The Mysterious Case Of The Chronic Crap Manager
As most of you probably realize by now, I have a very short resume.
Before Doug and I got married 29 years ago (when I was 23, if you’d like to do the math…), I’d been employed as a data recorder for Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals. To put it into terms you young folks might understand—but then again, maybe not—I was a keypunch operator.
Our large corporate office only had one mainframe computer, and only Margaret was smart enough to run it. Helen and I sat at twin keypunch machines directly in front of Margaret and Moses (the mainframe). Every hour or so, Margaret would arrive at my desk to retrieve the stack of perhaps 200-300 cards (each one about the size of a playing card) that I’d processed since her last visit. Each card held only a small amount of information pertaining to an order we were filling: one card might represent a pharmacy or hospital’s name, address, and phone number, and then the following cards would each hold approximately 3 line items of the actual order.
So, a large company’s order might require the keypunching of 50 cards—some more, some less. In order to be a fast and accurate keypunch operator, it was essential to memorize the product number of each item sold by Parke-Davis. By the time I was eighteen years old, I’d committed 5000 product numbers to memory, each item being represented by 6-8 numerals.
For instance, if Skagg’s drug store ordered 3 bottles of 100 pills each Dilantin 100mg, I knew to keypunch 15-362-4, and then a 3 in the quantity column. If they wanted bottles of 1000 pills each, the code changed to 15-362-11. If they needed Dilantin with Phenobarbitol capsules, I knew to punch 15-365-4. Or 11. You get the idea.
I didn’t want to do keypunch for the rest of my life, you understand—or any of the systems that were destined to follow. I am not a numbers girl. Or a machines girl. Or an office politics, corporate culture girl. You can mark me down officially as “none of the above.”
So after we’d been married nine months, I quit. We figured we’d be pregnant soon, and we didn’t want me to work while I had little kids, so that was that.
Since then, I’ve only had a few jobs outside the home. I worked in a yarn shop while I was pregnant with Scotty, just a couple days a week. Have you ever become violently ill because of a gorgeous array of amazing colors? I have. The yarn shop, combined with morning, afternoon, and evening sickness, did me in.
Then there was the grocery store. I checked when Carrie was a baby, a few nights each week. Made a whopping $2.50 per hour. We could have qualified for food stamps back then, but we never applied. I didn’t stay at the grocery store long, but I guess that little bit of money made a difference. Man, I hated that job.
I’ve worked as an assistant to an insurance agent (yawn….) and as a circulation clerk for an agricultural magazine (Can you say “Pork”? I’m not kidding. That was the name of the mag!)
I’ve done a lot of work for love and no money, and those have been more satisfying occupations in lots of meaningful ways. I make a fabulous patient advocate, assuming I’m passionate about the patient. So far, no one’s died of something stupid and/or preventable on my watch, and I enjoy helping out like that when I’m able.
Freelance writing and editing has been the ONLY paying job I’ve ever been suited for. And maybe the editing portion of my suitability should be called into question, since I should have written “for which I’ve ever been suited.” Sigh.
But now I’m going to admit to you what I’ve spent WAY TOO MANY MONTHS—yes, even YEARS—of my pathetic life doing: Crap Management.
How may times have I written here on fallible about conquering the clutter that overtakes us here on Rolling Hills Road? How many times have I pledged that it won’t happen in the future, that we will never again permit ourselves to be overrun with overstocks? That we won’t cave in to clearance racks, succumb to specials, or be roped in by rebates?
Honestly, people. I’ve had it. I just spent another Memorial Day remembering ridiculous purchases as I sorted through wasted what-nots and bagged up crummy cast-offs.
If I got paid even $2.50 per hour for the time I have spent scouring ads, accumulating coupons, mapping out my shop stops, picking up bargains, garage saling, trying on clothes I don’t need to begin with, gathering unto myself the craft stuff necessary to begin a new hobby I never end up learning, purchasing what I think I want and then disposing of it at some later date—well, I’d be one rich chick.
Of course, I’d probably spend the extra dough on more stuff, huh?
Why do I keep doing this to myself? It’s got to end, here and now. As soon as I finish this latest round of weeding, I’m hanging up my Crap Manager’s hat once and for all. No more purchasing of useless junk, period. I refuse to spend of the rest of my short years on earth processing purposeless stuff into and then out of my life.
“Only a few things are needed,” Jesus said to his friend Martha. “Really only one.”
If Martha’s sister Mary could choose the Better Part, maybe there’s hope for me yet.
Two Witnesses
There’s a Scripture verse that says something like, By the word of two witnesses let everything be established. I’ll tell you this: that’s just what I did.
My pastor, Tom Nelson of Christ Community Church in Leawood, Kansas, and my good buddy, author Lisa Samson, both recommended the movie “Akeelah and the Bee.”
Because I thought the bee was a bumble bee, I had resisted even the notion of going to this movie. What’s the popular fiction title with the word bee in it? I have such a strong aversion to bees that I can’t even think of the name of the book!
Yeah. It’s like that.
But when I heard from these two witnesses (both people I trust very much) that the bee is a spelling bee, and that Akeelah is a little girl, well—that changed everything.
Please, please don’t miss this movie. We thought we were showing up in time for the twilight hour price, since the show started at 5:30. The girl said, “That will be $17.” I said, “I am going to try to behave like a grown-up about this, but that’s a freakin’ lot of money.” Then I told Doug that no movie was worth $8.50 per ticket.
But I was wrong! I can’t wait till Akeelah comes out on DVD, so that I can watch it again and again.
I think I’m finally cured of my fear of bees.
As Well As Can Be Expected
I am probably one of the slowest learners you’ll ever meet. And one of the most stubborn, as well.
(I promise that very soon I will stop ending half of all my sentences with the words “as well.” It’s just that in Ireland, 99% of everyone’s sentences end with those two words, and the same is largely true in Scotland, as well. Sheesh.)
If I were bright, I would have submitted my finished novel to the no-less-than-six publishing houses that asked to see the complete manuscript at the writers conference I went to in Nashville last fall. Instead, I totally lost my nerve, shoved the manuscript in a drawer, and handed my life over to my mother.
Granted, she did need me for a while there. Actually, for a large part of the past five years. Just not as large a part as I’ve let myself believe.
Dr. Laura said something on the air yesterday that clicked with me. She was speaking to a couple who are worried about their children. The poor tykes are being treated unfairly by their grandmother, who showers expensive gifts on the other grandchildren but ignores these.
Dr. Laura tried to explain that the situation—while bizarre—could be turned into a fertile training ground for their children, if the parents handle it well. “You have to get these kids ready to face the real world,” she said. “Your job is not to protect them from the world, but to prepare them for it.”
I’ve got to admit, I’ve spent years trying to protect my mother from reality: pain, old age, disappointment, fear, illness, death, and yes, maybe even God. As if she was a child, and a fragile one at that.
So I’m pulling back, cutting her some slack, giving her a much wider berth, letting the rope out a little—choose your cliche.
With the time I’ve reclaimed, I’m writing again. I’d almost decided to ditch the completed novel in the drawer because I’m not quite pleased with it, but I think instead I’ll work on it before I move on to another project. And after I work on it (or maybe while I’m working on it…), I’m going to start shopping it around.
I’m not getting any younger here, people! And just in case you’re in denial as well, you might as well know that you’re getting another day older today, as well.
I’m still a slow learner, but this is about as well as I’ve been in a very long time.
No Comment?
My cousin John McKenna in Scotland just emailed me to thank me for the very handsome picture I posted of him in the post below entitled “John McKenna.” Actually, he questioned whether I’d successfully captured his “good side.” I am here to say that as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have a bad side.
He also said that he tried to leave a comment on fallible, but wasn’t allowed to. If anyone else has had this problem recently, could you please email me to let me know?
It’s katy at ngenius dot com .
You can also contact me by email just to say hi, if you’d like! I’d love to hear from you.
