The Daily Grind

This is me at the daily grind. Ironing that is.  OK, not really. This lady's naked and I mostly stay dressed when I iron - nowadays anyway; it's not like that long ago time when we all heated  our houses to  80 and we could iron in bikini undies and a bra.  (Burned myself good doing that once. Still have this pointy little delta of a scar right next to my bellybutton.) As i say, I stay dressed while I iron now. I watch dumb TV at the same time so I kind of like the fact that no matter how many times I iron I still have a lot more ironing ahead of me in my life.This is the real me below having just ironed the tablecloths. I say tablecloths, with an 's,'  because you should always use two cloths in case the cat throws up on the table or someone has a nosebleed in the middle of the entree or something. With two you just whisk off the top cloth and you’re set (and don't try to tell me they don’t do exactly this in restaurants.)  The bow on that Christmas wreath is a hair thing from the 80s. (Remember when we all had poofed-out hair and wore all this fabric up on our heads?) That bookshelf  deserves a post all its own so I'll leave that alone for now but see that lint roller on top of the cookbooks? Again the cat. He sheds like mad and the lint roller picks up the hair . Just under that shelf and out of sight is the tube of tuna-flavored cat cream the vet made me get for old Abe. You smear it around the cat's mouth and he licks it for the nice fishy-smell, swallows some in the process and after a while - boom! - out comes a furball. Never mind that I have never once seen a  furball in 15 years of caring for him. I keep the tube around anyway for comic purposes. I try to pass it off as fancy lip balm and offer it to unsuspecting guests.

Sex and the Ninth Grade Ninny

The column I wrote for this weekend is a tribute to my middle school teacher who just last week departed this life at the ripe old age of 102. You can see it at right now by clicking here.

In it I told of the English class we had her for and her sweet vexed utterances at all our hi-jinks. (“What AILS you people?” she was always saying to us.) I did not tell how naughty we really were, especially my best friend Kathy and I. For example we had a music teacher named Miss Priest, a maiden lady, young and pale in a cashmere sweater and pearls who disapproved of the two of us, perhaps because we held our violins under our chins in Orchestra and those instruments just shook with our laughter the whole time we were rehearsing up under the sweltering roof of that Civil War-era schoolhouse. Kathy always got assigned the cool complicated part with many curlicues and arpeggios, while I was always given the dumb part that no matter what the tune was went basically “Uh uh, UH uh, uh uh, UH uh..." - just the two sounds, just what you could saw out for the low notes without doing too much violence to the melody. A monkey could have played my part and this was what we found so killingly funny. We laughed all through "Scenes from Carmen" and even, preparing for graduation, through the grave and weighty bars of "Pomp and Circumstance" itself

We thought we didn’t like Miss Priest; probably we had crushes on her. Anyway we found a greeting card designed for an ordination, tore out the real message inside, wrote a new message in a demented-looking scrawl and slipped it under her door. “Thou Art a Priest Forever” the real part of the card said, then in our writing on the inside, “That is, until I crush you in my arms my little PASSION FLOWER ha HAH!” We didn’t get suspended but we sure-enough got caught and so set out to compose a long and earnestly over-the-top letter of apology that made us feel wonderful connected to the side of the angels, just wonderfully forgiven if only by ourselves.

And that wasn’t half as bad as what we did when we found out the youngest male teacher in the school was getting married: We put a jar of Vaseline on his desk which carried the strong implication that of all things he would need in his new conjugal state Vaseline was uppermost – just as if we actually knew Thing One about the marital act, which, uh, we didn’t.

Back in the late-90’s, thirty years and three kids into my own marriage I remember a youth group leader telling the high school kids we both worked with that they really and truly would be a lot better off postponing sex until much later because it was, well… it was just too complicated.

“Complicated?” said one of these sweet kids, looking truly puzzled. “Why complicated?”

“Let’s just say it involves a lot of towels,” she said with a meaningful look.

Dave! I rushed right home and said to my husband, “I think we’re doing it wrong!”

Ah dear…Our old English teacher was great all right but how could she answer the pressing questions of her middle-schoolers? How could anyone have answered them when what we really wondered about was sex which of all things in this wide world is STILL the most mysterious?