Column archives

Look out, Florida, Hurricane Patti is on her way

2008-09-09T16:11:00.000-07:00

What makes a woman -- who is not going into witness protection -- up and leave family and friends, a comfortable home and a newspaper career to move 1,200 miles away?
A husband whose lifelong dream has been to live among palm trees and palmetto bugs, that’s what.
You see, a few months ago, I dragged home from yet another day leading the charge to put out this newspaper to find my teacher-husband hunched over the computer, feverishly tapping on the keyboard with his two pointer fingers.
There were manila folders and stacks of paper everywhere. His reading glasses were perched on the end of his nose and I’m pretty sure he was sweating.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Sending out resumes to Florida,” he answered.
“We’re moving to Florida?”
“We can if I find a job down there. What do you think?”
What I thought was that our lifelong dream of moving to a tropical climate could actually turn out to be more than a dream.
And I also thought that it would give me an excuse to get out of the newspaper.
Putting out a 25,000-circulation daily newspaper is like riding a never-ending roller coaster. I would never voluntarily get off that roller coaster. It’s too much fun. But, at the same time, I always wished the thing would stop for just a minute so I could catch my breath.
And now, with the words, “moving to Florida,” I thought for the first time in my life, I could actually hear the sound of that roller coaster pulling into the station.
In recent years, there have been some things going on at the paper that told me it’s time to move on. Now I had the chance.
And, so, we were moving – or at least we were willing to move.
My husband sent out close to 100 resumes to Florida school districts that had teacher openings.
He never heard back from any of them … not even a “thanks but no thanks.” It’s as if he was filing those applications into a black hole.
And then he heard from St. Petersburg. He was one of a dozen prospects for one job. He went down for an interview. They hired him that very day.
And so, we really were moving.
Fast forward two months and here we are today. He has a job. I don’t. For the first time in 30 years, I not only don’t work at a newspaper, I don’t work anywhere.
Talk about a woman without a country.
I hope to get some writing work, hopefully on a magazine, and I plan to shop my column around down there.
But I just wanted to say how much fun it has been telling you stories every week in this column.
And I want to thank you for all the kind comments you have sent back to me about it and the stories of your own lives that you have shared with me.
I always thought that deep down we really are all a lot alike. Your reactions to this column proved that to be true.
I’ll keep writing online at pattiewald.blogspot.com.
I’m sure the skunks and other critters that have been terrorizing me in Ohio will get word to the wildlife in Florida that I’m on my way down.
Do you think beating with a broken broom handle on the top of the metal lid of a fire pit will scare away alligators in Florida the way it scared away birds of prey in Ohio?
Stay tuned.

Patti Ewald’s last day as managing editor of The Chronicle was Friday. You can always reach her at pagewald@hotmail.com. Please stay in touch.

Nothing tastes better than a fond memory

2008-06-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Published June 23, 2008

In a box of old photographs on my mother’s table is a picture of my grandfather.
He’s sitting on an overturned orange bucket holding a slab of bacon over a backyard fire with a tool that looks like a homemade fireplace poker.
It was taken at a Hungarian bacon fry, the main event at all family picnics when I was a kid.
My grandmother would buy a slab of bacon from the butcher shop, and she would cut it into pieces about the size of postcards.
She would score parallel lines with a knife through the meaty side of these smaller pieces so that the meat would fan open — allowing the grease to drip out — when it was held over an open fire.
My grandfather would hold the meaty-side down close to the fire until it started to drip.
Then he would swivel around and hold the dripping bacon over a tray of bread that my grandmother had gotten ready. The tray — a cookie sheet covered with tinfoil — was on a small bench next to him and held more than a dozen slices of rye bread.
My grandfather would let the bacon grease drip on several slices of the bread, dabbing the bacon on them every now and then.
Once a piece of bread was adequately saturated, my grandmother would heap it with cut-up salad vegetables — iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, onions, green peppers — that were in a bowl she held in the crook of her elbow.
Then my grandfather would drip a little more bacon grease over the salad.
There was usually a line at the bench waiting for one of the open-faced salad sandwiches because you couldn’t take one until it was deemed ready by either the chef with the bacon or the chef with the salad.
Every once in a while, my grandfather would take a big knife and slice off the tips of the bacon that had gotten crispy in the fire.
Those little nuggets were sprinkled on top of the salad like croutons.
If you were lucky, you were next in line when the bacon was being trimmed.
Back then no one seemed to care — or even know — about the evils of eating that much bacon grease.
All we knew is that it was delicious.
Once my grandparents got too old to host the family picnics, bacon fries got rarer and rarer.
And, once my generation became of age and started having families of its own, they became even rarer — because we knew about the evils of eating that much bacon grease.
Except, my grandparents were in their mid-90s when they died, so I’m not sure exactly how evil it really is.
Every once in awhile, I think that maybe we should resurrect those old bacon fries. Maybe we should have one at the Fourth of July picnic at my house.
We could do it just like my grandfather used to do in his Elyria Township backyard.
No doubt, it would be good, but it would never be the same.
I don’t have a bucket to sit on; we’d have to use lawn chairs.
And I don’t have one of those homemade spears for the bacon; we’d have to use a store-bought utensil.
My grandma isn’t here to cut up the salad fixings; we’d have to use a bag-o-lettuce.
And most importantly, my grandfather isn’t here to cook.
Well, maybe I won’t plan one of those bacon fries for the Fourth of July.
Because come to think of it, they weren’t about bacon at all.

Half the fun of picnics is getting there

2008-06-17T15:02:00.000-07:00

Published June 16, 2008

At least one day of every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we have a family picnic to go to.
First there are the holidays — the three patriotic ones and Mother’s and Father’s Day. Those are given picnic days.
And that would probably be enough family gatherings for most people.
But, in our large extended family, every person was either born in June or July or had a child born in June or July. The birthdays are endless.
It’s hard enough for my husband and me to just haul ourselves out of bed on the weekends and actually leave the house.
The drill is always the same. I wake up and look over at the other side of the bed. Empty.
I go downstairs and look out the patio door.
There is my husband, well, the backside of my husband, who is kneeling on the concrete next to the pool with his arm down in the pool filter.
By the time I go and pour myself a cup of coffee and go out in the backyard, he is upright with the skimmer pole or the pool vacuum in his hand.
I sit down to read the newspapers, and he goes about his pool business.
Until one of us eventually mentions that day’s family gathering.
And the food we have to take.
And the present we have to bring.
And how much time we have to get those two things before the picnic.
We’ve got it down to a science. Most of the time, we’ve had the foresight to have already gone to the grocery and purchase the ingredients for the dish we are making to take with us.
But the present? It’s usually still on a shelf in a store somewhere.
That means one of us has to go present shopping and the other has to cook.
I’m usually the cook because my husband can go to the store and be back before I’m dressed and ready to go — because he is a husband.
Husbands can actually walk into a store and make their way to the item they intend to purchase without getting waylaid by every single piece of merchandise between the door and that item. It’s an amazing feat.
Plus, the gift we were going to buy my dad for Father’s Day — the picnic started at 1 p.m. at my youngest brother’s house — was one that my husband knew much more about than I did.
It was an orchid.
I thought my dad would like to have one. He likes to grow flowers outside, so why not get him the most fussy, finicky — and beautiful — flower on the earth?
And since I have a hard time telling petunias from begonias from geraniums, I thought it was probably best that my husband went to buy one.
And I would stay home and make the coleslaw because I do know my cabbage from my lettuce.
It was only about a half hour after the picnic starting time that we gathered up the beautiful orchid and the bowl full of coleslaw and headed for the party.
We were a little late, but we weren’t the last ones there.
An hour or so later, I asked someone where my sister was.
"She’s in Marc’s, buying the food she was supposed to bring here," her daughter said, laughing.
See? That’s what happens when you send a shopper to do a husband’s job.

They know who's stealing cemetery flowers

2008-06-09T23:57:00.000-07:00

Published June 9, 2008

You’ll never guess who’s responsible for stealing flowers off graves around here.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about flowers getting stolen off my grandma’s grave for the third Mother’s Day in a row.
She’s buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery on Lake Avenue in Elyria Township.
I called the local office for the cemetery and the Lorain County Sheriff’s office but neither place said it had gotten complaints about stolen flowers.
But it didn’t matter, I still didn’t believe thieves would zero in on the humble little grave of my dear sweet grandma.
And it seems they didn’t.
I heard from lots of people who were victim to these graveyard robbers – and most of them had put their flowers at St. Mary’s.
One woman said she has been taking flowers there for 21 years to put on her daughter’s grave. And, for 21 years they have been stolen.
She said it didn’t matter if they were live or cut, in a pot or in a vase. They were gone.
Several people said they would put flowers on a grave one day only to have them gone the next.
One couple said they even resorted to putting notes on their baskets asking the thieves to please not steal their parents’ flowers. But that didn’t work, either.
And, know why? Because the thieves can’t read. And the reason they can’t read is because they are DEER.
I know; you are probably having as hard a time believing that as I did but that’s what Joe Smith, director of marketing and family services at the Catholic Cemetery Association Diocese of Cleveland, told me.
I called Joe because St. Mary’s – by far the cemetery most complained about – is one of the 18 cemeteries in four counties that his association oversees.
"It’s a real problem," he told me, "and you’re not the first person who has asked about this.
"It’s the deer."
"Deer?" I repeated, imagining Bambi and his mom carting off the pot of my grandmother’s yellow violas.
"Deer and other wildlife. They eat the flowers," he said.
"I was out there. I saw a herd of deer come out of the south side of the cemetery. There is a thick row of trees there," he said.
OK, now. Joe was very kind – and earnest. I was trying to get my mind around what he was saying.
"So the deer eat the flowers and then the cemetery workers carry the chewed-down pots off the graves?" I asked.
"They take the pot in an effort to keep the cemetery looking pretty," he said.
"caught in a position where we can’t do anything about it. We can’t really hunt deer on cemetery property," he said.
"We know flowers are important to people," he added.
He said the deer situation is even worse at Holy Cross Cemetery on Brookpark Road in Cleveland. One time, he said, there were 47 deer in Holy Cross.
Hmmm. I was prepared to pepper the director of the Catholic Cemetery Association with questions but now, with four-legged gentle creatures -- who do have to eat after all – being named the culprit, I was stymied.
"So is there anything people can do to keep the deer away?" I asked.
"They can try putting a bar of soap in with the flowers," he said. “Sometimes that will keep them away but there’s no guarantee it will work."
If he wasn’t so kind, I would have told him that there’s no guarantee any of us will believe this, either. But I didn’t.
He said people are welcome to call him.
"We do solve problems," he said.

A Sunday ride back in time

2008-06-03T16:52:00.001-07:00

Published June 2, 2008

A beautiful sunny day like yesterday would have been perfect for one of those Sunday drives our parents used to take us on when we were kids.
The destination - parents always enjoyed the ride, but we kids only cared about the destination - was most often a "custard stand," some ice cream place that we may or may not have been to before.
My father, a connoisseur of soft ice cream, seemed to know every little out-of-the-way custard stand from Indiana to Pennsylvania. We'd pull in, and he'd take our orders. Back then, it was easy. You had two choices - a cone or a sundae. There were no fancy concoctions like they make today with Oreos or Butterfingers swirled in.
So, we'd all order our cones, some with sprinkles, some dipped, and he'd go get them. My mother never ordered, though. She didn't like ice cream. (I know - I can't believe it either.)
Sometimes before the ice cream, our parents would take us to one of those roadside attractions - like the Blue Hole - that people used to flock to but are now just things for Tommy Boy and Clark Griswold to make fun of.
By the way, the Blue Hole is still there, except now it's part of a fish hatchery on land owned by the state. I have a feeling it's not quite as spooky and mysterious as it used to be.
There's a place in Marblehead called the Prehistoric Forest and Mystery Hill. I don't know how prehistoric it is, but it is definitely caught in a time warp. I have a feeling the place isn't a whole lot different than it was 40 years ago.
The Prehistoric Forest is a 10-acre plot with a trail winding though it. Every once in awhile, you'll spot a dinosaur - some of them built in the 1960s - along the way.
Len Tieman, who has owned the park since 1995, is constantly repairing the fiberglass beasts and building new ones.
"The park was not meant to be here this long," he said.
The other half of the attraction, Mystery Hill, was built in 1953, Tieman said. To get there, you walk up a hill and behind a fence. There, you come to a house that is on about a 45-degree slant - or is it you that's on a 45-degree slant? Either way, it makes you lose your equilibrium.
And it's not the only mystery spot in the country. A Web site called Roadside America lists 32 of these places where gravity is defied and balls roll uphill. Included are three Mystery Hills, two Mystery Holes, two Mystery Spots, one Mystery Area and a House of Mystery. There are also 11 Gravity Hills, one of them Ghostly.
I'm not sure how they work, but here's a tip: If you close your eyes, you regain your equilibrium (which I had to do several times to get from one side of the house to the other). Hmmm. I'd guess the mystery might be optical illusion.
I want to take my boys there this summer. I want to know what they think even though I'm pretty sure just about all they'll have to say is: "I bet Tommy Boy slept here."
It'll make me feel old because - unlike my sons - I'll remember a time when you couldn't experience much stranger and spookier things by hitting a few keystrokes on a computer. But it will also make me feel sort of special for being able to remember that.
I guess that means I'm old enough to get nostalgic - and that's the spookiest thing of all.

Gram, did you see who took your flowers?

2008-06-03T16:51:00.001-07:00

Published May 26, 2008

"They did it again."
It was my mother on the phone. She called to tell me that my father had just gotten back from the cemetery where my grandmother is buried.
He went to pick up the pot of violas they had put on my grandmother's grave for Mother's Day.
My mom thought the tiny little pansies were a fitting flower because they look so much like the African violets my grandma liked so well.
And my father had gone out to pick them up because the sign in St. Mary's Cemetery in Elyria Township said that all flowers had to be removed by May 19.
Except when he got there, the flowers were gone.
That's what my mom was talking about on the phone. For the third Mother's Day in a row, someone stole the flowers she and my father had put on my grandma's grave.
"Who would do such a thing?" my mom asked me.
Three years ago, the first Mother's Day after my grandma died, they put a pot of geraniums, another of my grandma's favorites, on her grave. It was stolen.
The next Mother's Day, my parents once again put geraniums on the grave, never thinking the plant would get stolen again.
It did.
So this year, my mom decided to try another flower. Maybe it was geraniums the thieves were after.
Enter - and soon exit - the tiny pansies.
I echo my mom's sentiment: Who would do such a thing?
What do people do? Scrounge around graveyards for their yearly landscaping?
The flowers that my parents put on other grandmothers' graves - in St. Joseph Cemetery in Amherst and Calvary Cemetery in Sheffield Township - weren't stolen.
I called the office of Catholic Cemeteries, which owns both Calvary and St. Mary's cemeteries, to see if it got a lot of stolen-flower complaints.
"We don't," a woman named Peggy told me, "but it would be hard to catch people even if we did.
"We don't have patrols there in the evenings. They are there during the day but we really can't approach people who are taking flowers off a grave. We don't know if they are family members or not," she said.
"If we see something suspicious - like people loading flowers into a van - we do check that out," she said.
It was beginning to look as if the situation was hopeless.
My hunch is that thieves aren't singling out my grandma. It's just that others aren't complaining about it.
"So what can my mom do when she wants to put flowers on the grave?" I asked.
"She could get one of those in-ground bouquet holders and put fresh or artificial flowers in it," Peggy told me.
She must have sensed my disappointment because she added, "I'm really sorry that happened."
Still finding it hard to believe there have been no other "grave robbing" complaints, I called the Lorain County sheriff's office, which has jurisdiction over Elyria Township where the cemetery is located.
But, once again, I was told they don't get complaints about stolen flowers. Stolen brass urns, yes, but not stolen flowers.
When I relayed all this to my mom, she said, "That's OK. We learned our lesson. We won't be putting flowers out there again until their anniversary in August, but when we do, they'll be in one of those in-ground holders."
Hopefully, thieves will leave those flowers alone.
Until then, if you see a big beautiful basket of tiny little yellow pansies on someone's porch, think of my grandma.
There's a chance they were meant for her.

Have bike, will travel -- hopefully

2008-06-03T16:50:00.001-07:00

Published May 19, 2008

In my never-ending quest for health and thinness, I decided to buy a bike.
I figured it's easy enough to ride the one at the gym that has a TV hooked to it. How much harder can peddling around the neighborhood be?
My brother had given me a bike last summer that his daughters thought too uncool to ride. Well, it was cool enough for me - with its curled-down racing handlebars - but it was too small. My knees hit my elbows when I rode it.
And that's why I needed a new one.
I started at Sears, but The Store-That-Sells-All-Things-Metal no longer carries bikes. It's true. The salesman told me.
Oh, well, it didn't really matter. I couldn't just go into a store and buy the first bike I found anyway.
First I had to do Google research and look on eBay and read some blogs on bicycling.
There's no sense making a major purchase these days unless one is thoroughly ... informed.
But I knew what I wanted - a girl's pink racing bike with a real comfortable seat and gears that didn't let the chain slip.
It became readily apparent that color was the least of my worries. Bikes come in sizes - and I'm not talking just 20- or 26-inch wheels. Oh, no. The frames come in different sizes and the wheels come in different sizes.
So, even after you figure out what size frame you need according to your height and inseam - and most importantly, where the bar hits you when you straddle the bike - you then need to pick a wheel size.
It was all too complicated for me.
I decided to shop for a bike the way I had always done - in department stores.
I found a Schwinn I really liked. It cost a little more (twice as much) than I had planned to spend, but it was on sale.
It wasn't pink. It wasn't even a girl's bike, but it was big enough and it had a really comfortable seat - and some other features the salesman told me about.
"It has a quick-release front wheel," he said.
I must have looked puzzled because he added, "If you take it off, the bike will fit in your trunk."
Hmm. That's handy, I thought.
"And see these tire valves? If you push down on them, you can let some of the air out of your tires when you are racing," he said.
"When I'm racing? Wait, maybe this bike is too elaborate ..."
"Well, you don't have to use them," he said. "Look, you can put these caps on them."
I hope he didn't say anything too important after that because I kind of stopped listening.
I liked this bike. I was going to buy it. I wasn't going to use all of its functions, but what else is new? My younger son and I both have Blackberries. His does everything but the laundry. Mine makes phone calls.
Anyway, I paid for the bike and the salesman walked it out for me. He quick-released the tire but the bike still didn't fit in the trunk. We crammed it in the backseat and I brought it home.
So, if you see a big blonde woman on a big blue men's bike go zipping by, it's probably me.
And, if you see that big blonde woman go sailing over the handlebars of that big blue men's bike, you'll know why.
She probably wasn't paying enough attention when the sales guy showed her how to put that quick-release front wheel back on.

Talk about a line for the bathroom!

2008-05-12T19:55:00.000-07:00

Published May 12,2008

Michelle Duggar of Arkansas is pregnant with her 18th child.
Yep, 18. A dozen and a half.
But, wait, it gets better.
The names of the 17 she already has all start with the letter J — Joshua, Jana, John-David, Jill, Jessa, Jinger, Joseph, Josiah, Joy-Anna, Jeremiah, Jedidiah, Jason, James, Justin, Jackson, Johannah and Jennifer. There are 10 boys and seven girls, ranging in age from 20 years to 9 months.
The family lives in a 7,000-square-foot house in Tontitown, in the northwest corner of Arkansas, not far from the spot where Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Kansas meet.
And if that isn’t enough to make your head explode, I have even more.
She homeschools them all.
Maybe you already know about the brood of Duggar and her husband, Jim Bob. They’ve been on cable TV reality shows and have made appearances on network news shows like “Good Morning America” and “The Today Show.”
I must have missed all of that because the first time I heard about this family was last week when we carried a story about her latest pregnancy — just in time for Mother’s Day.
I always thought I accomplished a lot raising two kids. Kind of put me in my place as a mother.
I tried to figure out how they could afford all those kids.
They claim to be able to feed the entire brood for less than $2,000 a month but, shoot, even if all they eat is toasted cheese sandwiches, it would take two loaves of bread just to give them each one sandwich.
Maybe money isn’t an issue anymore what with their celebrity status and all — but it still made me wonder.
When Jim Bob, a former state representative who made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, was asked what he did for a living, he didn’t give a direct answer. He just said he is still guided by a seminar he went to 20 years ago that blends finance and religion.
Hmm. Somehow that brought into focus the fact I would never understand any of this.
And, seriously, who has 18 kids?
The family is taking it on the chin all over the Internet. It’s getting pretty nasty. They say the parents aren’t taking care of the kids, the kids are taking care of the kids.
And Mama Michelle — called “Jichelle” by bloggers because she’s the only one in the family without a J-name — didn’t help herself when the first words out of her mouth after delivering little Jennifer last year were that she couldn’t wait until the next one.
This warning was posted on one blog: “Please note that we will not be hosting a discussion on whether their number of children is right or wrong, as the last two posts we've attempted to run have been closed due to fighting.”
It’s a hot-button issue, all right, the question of just how many children one set of parents can adequately care for.
There has been a continuing story in The Chronicle about a woman in Sheffield Lake who had more than 80 cats.
She really loves all those cats, and they seem to be well-cared for, but Sheffield Lake says 80 cats are just too many — and to show it is serious, it has vowed to levy fines against the woman until she gets rid of all but four of them, the maximum number of cats one person is allowed to have.
Now, I’m not suggesting the Duggars be fined until they get rid of some of their kids, but, hey, maybe Sheffield Lake has an idea about what a kid-limit should be.

Patti Ewald is managing editor of The Chronicle. You can reach her at pewald@chroniclet.com. BTW, the Web site that shut down negative comments on the Duggars is www.celebrity-babies.com. However, it did recommend people with a beef check out the forums on www.televisionwithoutpity.com.

Money talks but we don't always listen

2008-05-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

Published May 5, 2008

It was late afternoon on the beach, and I was hungry.
"Let's go for a walk and find something to eat," I said to my husband.
He came willingly, so I guess he was hungry, too.
We walked and walked and walked. Lots of condos and hotels but no restaurants.
We finally spotted a place where we could sit out on a deck.
We found an empty table with an umbrella and sat down.
A waitress came over.
"It's two-for-one happy hour," she said.
The sun, the beach and two-for-ones. Life doesn't get much better.
A couple of salads, blackened grouper sandwiches and two-for-ones later, we sat looking out at the water and batting away pesky sand flies.
"I hope we have enough money," my husband said casually. "How much do you think it's going to be?"
Hmmm. Probably something we should have thought about before we upgraded our potato chips to French fries - or maybe even before we ordered our two-for-ones.
"I don't know ... $30 maybe.'
With that, I thrust my hand into my beach bag and he stuck his hand into the pocket of his swimming trunks.
Together we had $36.
"That should be enough," I said.
"I don't know ..." my husband said just before the waitress put the faux-leather folder containing the bill on the table.
He opened it up.
"$41.80."
I stuck my hand back into the beach bag and swirled it around on the bottom.
A camera, a book and some suntan lotion. No more money.
"I'll walk back to our hotel and get my debit card. I'm tired of these flies anyway," I told my husband as I reached down to swat at one biting my leg.
It took me awhile - it was quite a way down the beach - but I brought back the card.
Another problem solved. We paid the bill and left.
Our sons weren't with us that day, but the story would not have surprised them. They grew up with parents who have a clueless disregard for money - and the lack thereof.
My boys know all too well about people who don't have money.
The test will be whether they can deal with people who do.
My younger son's girlfriend comes from a very wealthy family, something that hasn't been a problem - until the other day when he got into an argument with her father.
They were together because her father had come to help her pack her stuff and haul it home from college for the summer.
Things were going well between the three of them for most of the day, my son said. And then it got ugly.
"He treated me like dirt," my son said.
Then he related the profane and condescending things the father had said to him. They had been drinking, so the words were no doubt fueled by alcohol, something I tried to tell my son.
"He's probably just used to getting his way. You're taking it personally, but it's probably the way he treats everyone."
"I tried to apologize, and he wouldn't even shake my hand," my son said.
I didn't know what to say. I guess there's no way to teach our kids about the people they'll encounter when they grow up. Shoot, forget about potty-training, this is the tough parenting stuff.
We'll just have to wait and see if my son and his girlfriend get through this.
I suspect they will, because up until now most of the things my son has told me about her father have been positive.
Or maybe they were just about him being positively rich.

The sexes and the scales of injustice

2008-04-28T16:05:00.000-07:00

Published April 21, 2008

"I'm just calling to remind you of your appointment tomorrow."
I regularly get that phone reminder from three places: My hairdresser, my doctor and my dentist.
I don't mind getting those calls from the hairdresser. They just give me a chance to look forward to a couple hours of pampering and girl-talk. The only stressful thing about hair appointments is worrying whether I have enough money in my account to cover the cost of them.
Oh, but that same reminder message from the doctor's or dentist's office ... gulp! Panic and dread.
I guess everyone dreads the dentist, and that's unfortunate because, think about it, when is the last time your dentist hurt you? Actually, if anything, it's the other way around. You hurt, and he makes it stop hurting. But it's just the sound of that drill and all that poking and prodding that goes on. Not quite the same as looking forward to getting your hair shampooed or your toenails painted.
And then there is the appointment reminder from the doctor's office, the call that trumps the others as the King of Dread - and the one I got last week.
Why is it so scary to go to the doctor?
Because the doctor does something that neither the dentist nor the hairdresser does. He weighs me. Well, he doesn't weigh me; his capable assistant does. But those numbers she sees on the scale are recorded in my file and the file is handed over to the doctor.
And then he opens up the file and looks at it - and it's time to face the music.
On the rare occasion those numbers from the scale are smaller than the ones she handed him the last time I was in his office, life is good. He's proud of me and he tells me so. I feel as if I just told my dad I got all A's in school.
But, oh brother, if those numbers got bigger, I feel as a dog must feel when he gets caught ripping up the garbage.
Sometimes when the doctor's receptionist calls to remind me of my appointment, I ask her if I can reschedule it for next week, the thought being that I will eat like a bird and exercise like a horse until then.
Of course, I never do that, but who lets past behavior influence renewed resolve? Not me.
In the midst of all this irrational getting-weighed-at-the-doctor dread, I read about a study that was done by researchers at the University of North Carolina.
It seems that some women are so self-conscious about their weight that they put off really important doctor business like cancer screenings. It seems not all doctors tuck their scales away in a corner as mine does. Some are in high-traffic areas and the women are ashamed.
The study also found that some of these obese women are afraid that the hospital gown they are given to put on will be too small.
Men don't act like that. They weigh what they weigh - good, bad or indifferent.
A co-worker participating in the newspaper's version of "The Biggest Loser" was actually going around the newsroom looking for heavy objects to put in his pockets before the initial weigh-in.
He didn't care what the scale said. He just wanted to weigh-in heavy so that the next time he was asked to step on the scale - pockets empty - it would look as if he lost weight.
And he probably would have gotten away with it, too.
If only he would have filled his pockets with teeny little iron pellets instead of big old office staplers.

Homework not the only thing dogs eat

2008-04-28T16:04:00.000-07:00

Published April 14, 2008

"I'll be a little late coming to work," a co-worker told me when she called one recent afternoon.
"My dog ate an ant trap, and I don't want to leave him alone," she explained.
"Your dog ate an ant trap?" I asked, a little alarmed.
"Yeah, he seems to be all right, but you wouldn't believe what I had to go through.
"I wanted to make him eat salt so he would throw up - but I couldn't catch him," she said.
She finally got him, but only after enlisting the aid of her 4-year-old daughter.
Dogs.
It seems some of them will eat anything, no matter how pampered and well-fed they are.
According to what I've read, this eating of non-food items can be either a medical or a behavioral problem. I guess that means you should take your dog to the vet to make sure there isn't a reason he feels the need to eat socks or rocks - or ant traps. If there isn't, you just have yourself a bad dog.
A friend of mine once had to rush her dog to the 24-hour (very expensive) animal emergency room in the middle of the night because her dog was having seizures. Thinking he may have been poisoned, the vet pumped his stomach only to find it full of Styrofoam packing "peanuts."
No, the dog wasn't being mailed anywhere, but I have a feeling my friend fantasized about it once she got over worrying that he was going to die.
The bearded collie we once had ate the light bulbs out of a bunch of those electric candlesticks that we had put in our windows at Christmas time. He must have gone from window to window like Wee Willie Winkie when we weren't looking.
That was the last Christmas we had candles in our windows.
Sophie, our late and beloved Old English sheepdog, had such a sweet tooth that she didn't let things like wrappers or plastic Easter grass stand in the way when she could smell chocolate.
One Halloween, my husband went to grab the bowl of candy bars off the coffee table for the trick-or-treaters at the door but found it was empty. Sophie had eaten them all.
Unfortunately, we forgot that had happened the following Easter when the bunny left a basket full of chocolates on the floor. Sophie licked it clean, Easter grass and all.
So, anyway, back to the ingestion of the ant trap. As my co-worker talked to me, I typed "dog ate ant trap" into the Google search. I read about a lot of dogs that had eaten ant traps and lived to shed another day.
Actually, it looked as if dogs could eat just about anything without it killing them.
I found stories of dogs that had eaten underwear (that seems to be a favorite) and shoes of all kinds, especially flip-flops. They ate stones and loofah sponges, ropes and string, chains and knives. I was surprised to find that my dog wasn't the only one to eat light bulbs. In fact, they seem to be a popular non-food item among dogs.
My co-worker's husband finally got home to spell her on poison watch, and she came to work.
"Well?" I asked her.
"Oh, he's fine. The vet said the trap was so old it probably wasn't even poisonous anymore," she said.
I guess she should be thankful he's not one of the "gourmet" hounds I read about.
Those dogs wouldn't look twice at an ant trap. They only eat expensive things like iPods or Uggs boots, or even whole couches.
Kind of makes me glad I have a cat.
He won't eat anything.

Hey, Silda, stand up -- for YOURSELF

2008-03-19T07:24:00.000-07:00

Published March 17, 2008

While Silda Spitzer was standing by that dog of a husband of hers – the New York governor who only likes sex he has to pay a lot of money for – I, too, was standing by my man in New York.
Standing by him in line for an airplane.
Standing by him in line for a train.
Standing by him in line for a shuttle bus.
Standing by him in line for a cab.
Yes, we just happened to be in New York City the week all hell was breaking loose for the state’s governor.
And, to tell you the truth, I could not get enough of the “Luv Guv” story.
It was better than fiction. Who could make this up? Who could be that stupid? Who so deserved to be toppled – by his very own fantasies-come-true, no less?
By all accounts – and I read each and every one of them in all the New York papers – Eliot Spitzer was an insufferable human being -- an arrogant, self-righteous jerk.
And somehow the story became to me more than just one about a governor (that most of us had never even heard of) gone bad.
It was as if Eliot Spitzer came to represent all those arrogant, self-righteous jerks who never will topple no matter how much they deserve it or how hard we wish it to happen.
And that’s what makes the story so intriguing.
Anyway, back to being in New York with my man who, by the way, was not nearly as fascinated by the slimy governor as I was.
It was his birthday last week and I thought it would be fun to take him to dinner and a show in New York to celebrate.
On Skybus, the airline of $10 fares -- $36 round trip with taxes.
Great deal, right?
Absolutely – if you don’t mind a few minor inconveniences -- such as flying into “less congested” (their words) “out in the middle of nowhere” (my words) airports.
In other words, to get to New York City, we had to drive to Columbus, the airline’s only Ohio stop, and fly to Stewart International in New Windsor, N.Y. From there, we took a shuttle bus to the train station and boarded the Metro North for an hour-and-20-minute ride into Grand Central Station. A short cab ride later, we were at our hotel.
We just chilled, had some lunch and got dressed for dinner and the theater -- to which we walked side-by-side, hand-in-hand.
Which brings me back to Silda and her man. Today is the day Spitzer’s resignation takes effect and I can only hope that if he makes a public speech, she is not standing next to him again like some lobotomized lover.
Look, Silda, just because you watched Suzanne Craig and Dina Matos McGreevey stand by their unfaithful husbands does not mean you have to do it, too.
I mean if he was just a regular criminal who killed someone or stole from someone, maybe I can see why your love for him would make you want to show your solidarity with him.
But, for heaven’s sake, girl, he’s a sleazebag and what he did is humiliating to you.
Can’t you see that?
If you are truly looking for a man to stand next to, I suggest you find one who likes the same Broadway shows as you do.
Then you go and park yourself next to him as the two of you wait in line to get into the theater.
And that, poor misguided Silda, is the way a real woman stands by her man.

Snow days: No school, lots of fun

2008-03-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

Published March 10, 2008

When it was blowing and blustery last week, I had a fleeting urge to grab a sled and head over to the hill on the golf course.
But the thought passed as quickly as it came and I grabbed an afghan - well, now it's called a "fleece throw" - and snuggled up on the sofa.
As I watched the snow get deeper and deeper against the sliding glass door that leads to the patio, I was thinking about "snow days" and how much kids look forward to them.
I don't remember a lot about the snow days my boys - and my teacher husband - had when they were little. I wasn't there. I didn't get a snow day. Somebody has to put out that paper. No snow days for us journalists.
But I do remember my favorite snow day activity when I was a kid myself.
Ice skating.
We would get all bundled up and my mom would take me and a friend - and sometimes my sister - to the skating pond at Oakwood Park on Grove Avenue in South Lorain.
And drop us off and drive away.
Drive away? Yep, that was something moms could actually do back then - before stranger-danger. Mothers and fathers didn't have to hang around all the time to make sure we didn't get kidnapped or murdered. We got to be on our own sometimes.
As my mother drove away from the park, I would wave, feeling delighted and abandoned at the same time.
Then we would trudge over to the big shanty next to the pond where all the kids went to put on and take off our skates - and, more importantly, to warm up.
We sat down on one of the benches that lined the building's perimeter and pulled off our boots. There was a fire pit in the middle of the building, so I guess there must have been an adult around in some supervisory capacity - or at least to make sure the shanty didn't burn to the ground - although I don't remember ever seeing one.
You had to kind of hold your breath while you were in the shanty - or breathe out of your mouth. The place smelled awful. I always thought it smelled like Limburger cheese even though I had never smelled Limburger cheese. But, if I had, I was sure it would smell like the inside of that shanty.
The room was so warm that you were sweating by the time you got your skates on.
That's what that smell was. It wasn't Limburger cheese at all. It was sweaty, smelly kids bundled up in lots of wet, woolen winter-wear.
When we couldn't stand the smell a second longer, we'd walk across the wooden floor in our skates and go outside and onto the ice.
We'd skate around and around until we got cold, and then we'd go in the shanty to warm up. And that's what we did over and over again all day long.
I never made any new friends at the skating pond for although I wasn't afraid of strange adults, I was plenty afraid of strange kids who might be mean and make fun of us or call us names.
So my friend and my sister and I would just keep to ourselves, skating and thawing and skating again.
And then at some point, we'd spot my mother's car coming to pick us up.
And suddenly, after having been fine all day, we were cold and hungry. Our ankles hurt and our fingers were frozen. She had gotten there just in time.
Isn't that just like a mom?

Have noodle, will travel in swim class

2008-03-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Published March 3, 2008

I wrapped a towel around me and went into the pool area.
It was my first day at "deep water aerobics" class.
I wasn't sure what the class involved, but I do like bobbing around in the deep end of a pool and - in my never-ending quest for a type of exercise I might like - I thought I'd give it a shot.
"Is this the deep water class?" I asked a woman on the edge of the pool who was giving exercise instructions to people standing waist-deep in water.
"It starts in 10 minutes," she said smiling, "down there." She pointed to the other end of the pool, the deep end.
So I walked down to where my class would be. There were two women already in the water.
I hung my towel on a peg along the wall and lowered myself down the ladder into the water.
I floated over to an open spot and watched as the rest of the class - one by one - got in the water.
Most of the people were wearing flotation belts. Hmmm. I don't need one of those belts, I thought. Or do I?
Then I saw a woman with a "noodle," one of those skinny, brightly-colored foam tubes that can miraculously keep any size human being afloat.
The teacher, who had finished with her shallow water class, came to join us. She stood on the edge of the pool, bent over toward me, gave me that big smile, and asked, "Do you need a belt?"
"Maybe I'll just take a noodle," I said to her.
She got me a noodle and class began.
"OK, let's walk," she said as she began power-walking in place, swinging her arms in tune to her steps.
Everyone in the pool started doing this movement - marching in place, staying in their own little spot.
Me? I was off like a shot. I marched to the front of the pool and when I hit the wall, I turned around and marched the other way. No matter how hard I tried to stay still, I couldn't.
I tried not to bump into anyone as I raced from one side of the pool to the other.
"Maybe it would be better if you would straddle the noodle instead of keeping it around your waist," the teacher said to me as I whizzed past her on one of my trips around the pool.
As I repositioned my noodle, the teacher and her assistant began handing out sets of foam barbells to the class for the next set of exercises.
We were told to move these barbells around in a circular, bike-pedaling motion with our arms as we exercised our legs water-walking.
In other words, I had just been handed another means of propulsion.
Now, with my arms helping my legs move, I was flying around that pool. I went from front to back and side to side and corner to corner, all the while smiling and apologizing to each of my classmates as I zipped in front of them.
"That's OK," they would yell as I whooshed by, "you'll get the hang of it."
An hour and about a dozen laps around the pool later, the class was over. We all walked down to the shallow end and climbed out.
"Hope to see you again," the teacher said to me as I was leaving.
"I'll be back," I told her.
The way I had it figured was that I had two days before the next class - two days to practice standing still.
Now, that's an exercise I like.

Patti Ewald is managing editor of The Chronicle. You can reach her at pewald@chroniclet.com

Yeah, the dog's crazy but he's hers

2008-02-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

Published Feb. 25, 2008

I'm afraid my friend's dog is going to kill her.
I don't mean bite-and-maul kill her.
I mean drive-her-crazy, deprive-her-of-sleep kill her.
He's a Jack Russell terrier, and although he's 12 years old, he's spry as a pup.
When we go over to visit, the dog greets us as we walk through the back door. He barks, spins around in a circle, barks again and then takes off for the living room, presumably to let my friend know she has company - as if she hasn't figured it out yet.
The drill is always the same. As we walk into the living room, my friend walks toward the door and puts the barking dog on a leash outside.
She shuts the door and invites us to sit down.
But before we hit the sofa cushions, the dog starts barking again. My friend gets up and lets him back inside.
He's almost as excited to see us this time as he was when we first walked through the door. He races around, jumping up on each lap to (try to) lick our faces.
My friend sits down on the floor, picks up a chew toy and calls the dog. He comes running over and she heaves the toy toward the kitchen. The dog chases it.
He brings it back to her.
You would think this would be a distraction, but my friend carries on a conversation as if there wasn't even a dog in the room let alone this one.
"Know how many times this dog got me up last night?" she asks as she heaves the chew toy down the hallway toward the kitchen.
"Four. Four times," she says, not waiting for us to answer.
"He won't let me sleep. He whines until I get up and let him out and then as soon as I get back in bed, he starts barking to come back in," she says as she heaves the toy again.
"Tomorrow he's going out in the back when I go to work. It's not supposed to be so cold," she says as she lets the chew toy fly again.
She sometimes leaves the dog in the fenced backyard, where he has a dog house, hoping he will spend the day running around like a lunatic and tire himself out so he will sleep at night - and then she can, too.
Sometimes it works.
When it does, he only gets her up twice in the night instead of four times.
The University of Minnesota recently did a study and found that a person who owns a cat is 40 percent less likely to die of a stroke or heart attack than a person who owns a dog or has no pet at all.
I consider telling that to my friend whose dog is going to give her a stroke - never mind not prevent one.
But first I have to figure out how to do that. She really does love that dog - despite everything. And I don't want her to think I don't like him. He really is sweet - when he's sleeping.
"Know how long these dogs live?" she asks, breaking my train of thought.
She pulls the toy back and forth to get it out of the dog's mouth.
"Seventeen years," she says as the dog lets go so unexpectedly that she has to catch herself to keep from falling backwards.
"That means I have five more years of this," she says as she whips the toy toward the kitchen like a knife-thrower.
"Then," she says, "I'm going to get a cat."

Where will I get down on my knees for a bargain?

2008-02-26T10:51:00.000-08:00

Published Feb. 18, 2008

Value City is closing.
Sadder words were never spoken.
To me.
For you see, you either love or hate shopping at Value City. There is no in-between.
But the people who love it - me - find a lot of good bargains there for the people who hate it - my husband, my sons, my mother, my brothers and just about everyone else I know.
It's a place for treasure hunters - and people who don't mind crawling around on the floor looking for those treasures.
I was there at Christmas time, looking for presents - specifically sheets and men's dress shirts.
Get a shopping cart - if you can find one - and follow me on that Christmas shopping trip.
But first we have to get into the store, and that's not easy. There are tables laden with seasonal items - today it would be Easter baskets; at Christmas, it was wrapping paper and popcorn tins - that seem to have been placed close together to keep us from getting in the store, but we will not be deterred. Just push the cart hard and squeeze through.
The sheets are over to the right.
The shelves are lined with sheets of every color, good sheets with high-thread counts - and cheap. But they are packaged separately, the fitted sheet, the top sheet and the pillowcases.
There seem to be a lot of packages of tan sheets. I pull a couple of them off the shelves. The colors are close but not quite matching. I pull out a couple more.
Pretty soon I have more than I can hold, and none of them match. I put them all on the floor. I never realized there were so many shades of tan.
I keep pulling them off the shelf and soon I put another pile on the ground.
Then I get on my hands and knees to re-sort my piles.
Not a match in the lot.
I put them all back on the shelves. It's hot in here. I take off my coat, lay it over the top of the cart and survey the selection again.
White. White is white, right?
When I start pulling white sheets off the shelf, I realize that there is white and cream and patterned white.
Let's forget about the sheets.
I walk around the perimeter of the store toward the shoes. I don't really need any shoes but it's fun to look. I especially like to look at the women's shoes - fancy high heels - in size 12 and bigger. Who wears those?
Maybe the women who go with the men who shop across the aisle in the big-and-tall department, where I have seen size 6X.
Housewares are on the far side of the store.
In the clearance aisle are flower vases and baskets and picture frames. Lamps and candleholders and "art" objects. Some are broken and many are missing their mate - kind of like the sheets - but it's as fascinating as any shopping trip you can take.
The last stop is the dress shirts. I see a sea of lavender and an occasional bright blue or yellow on the shirt tables. This isn't looking promising.
In the end, I find a black shirt in the size I want to get but put it back. I'm simply too exhausted to weigh the merits of that shirt.
I head toward the checkout. Hours have passed since I squeezed past that wrapping paper, and I have nothing in my cart to show for it.
But that's the thing about Value City. You always knew that even if you didn't find something that day, you'll find something next time.
Except that soon there will be no more next time.

The son shines, whether or not his house does

2008-02-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

Entry Number 8,687 in things they never tell you when you have a baby: Some day that baby will grow up and get his own place and you — the mother — will be a houseguest there.
Mother. Houseguest. Mother. Houseguest.
How can one possibly be both those things?
My husband and I recently spent a long weekend with our older son who lives in Denver.
He has a very small two-bedroom apartment and a roommate who was gone for the weekend.
So there we were, three people in about 550 square feet of living space for three days.
The place was very clean, especially for a place that houses two working men.
But … (yes, there’s always that “but,” isn’t there?)
It was Super Bowl Sunday and we decided to make some party food and hang around the apartment to watch the game.
We went to the grocery store and picked up the ingredients we needed. When we got home, I set off for the kitchen to cook and the men watched the pre-game show in the living room.
The kitchen was clean and the countertop was cleared off but the dish-drainer — with its bad design containing a hundred nooks and crannies — was in dire need of some scrubbing.
That was the first dilemma I found myself in: Am I a good mother or a meddling houseguest if I clean it?
Would the chore be appreciated or seen as an insult to his housekeeping?
Well, I cleaned the dish-drainer. And while I was at it, I took everything off the counter and wiped it down.
Ahhh. Now I could cook.
“Thanks for cleaning up,” my son said when he came into the kitchen during a commercial break to check on me.
It sounded sincere enough.
So, I went in the cupboard to get out a pot for the chili and a pan for the cornbread. Well, I found a pot, lots of them actually, but the only thing vaguely resembling a pan was a cookie sheet. Wouldn’t work for making cornbread.
I started a mental list of things I would buy for my son when he was at work the next day.
And that was the second dilemma I found myself in. Was I still supposed to see there were necessary items missing from his cupboard, or should I respect his definition of “necessary”?
Well, I went to the store and bought a square baking pan the next day, along with some dish rags, a serving spoon with no slots — because all he had in his drawer were slotted ones — a garlic press and a couple of other things.
“Thanks for buying all that stuff,” my son said when he got home from work.
It sounded sincere enough.
While I was staying there, I tried to be a good houseguest. I cleared my stuff out of the bathroom when I was done. I reused the bath towel he gave me. I tried to be as unobtrusive as a mother could be.
We really did have a great time.
After three days, we left, my eyes brimming with tears as usual.
I think next time I visit, I’ll try to tell him what I really want to tell him — how proud I am of him. How proud I am that he has managed to make his way in life.
Without cornbread pans and garlic presses and dish rags.
And, of course, the thing I’ll never be able to say.
Without me.

Hurka recipe

2008-02-09T18:02:00.000-08:00

After I wrote the column below, I got many requests for the hurka recipe my grandparents used. I e-mailed my aunt, Anita Csincsak, in Tecumseh, Mich., for the recipe because it was her husband, Dick, who inherited the hurka maker when my grandparents died.
Anyway, this is what she sent me:

Hungarian Hurka, from Dick Csincsak

Pork Liver 2& 1/2 lbs.
Pork Heart 2 & 1/2 lbs.
Fresh Side 2 & 1/2 lbs.
Pork Shoulder 4 & 1/4 lbs.
Rice ( 4 cups) 2 lbs.
Onions 1 lb.
Lard 1 lb.
Salt 3/16 cup
Pepper 1/8 cup

Boil pork livers and hearts until punctured when they do not bleed.
Cook the fresh side and pork butts ( or shoulder) in a separate kettle.
Cooked diced onions in the lard.
Cook rice.... one cup rice per 2 cups water
Grind the cooked meat and add to the rice, onions and seasoning
Stuff hurka and boil in water till they rise.
Let set and package..

Patti, there is no way a novice could make this without someone showing them.
... Love you Aunt Nin

So, hope that helps all you little hurka makers.
p.

Opposite of fast food? That'd be hurka

2008-02-06T06:25:00.000-08:00

Published in The Chronicle Feb. 4, 2008

Some people have stories about their ancestors picking up muskets and going out into the wilderness to hunt for food.
Me? I have stories about my ancestors picking up a meat-grinder and going into the basement to make sausage.
My grandparents had a very limited list of things they would eat, mostly things familiar to Eastern Europeans that you couldn’t find in an A&P, a Stop&Shop or a Pick ’n’ Pay.
Things such as a Hungarian rice sausage called hurka (pronounced who’d-kuh), which was made with pork shoulder, onions and rice -- and other things you probably don’t want to know about.
My grandparents made their own hurka because shadier sausage-makers used ingredients not to their liking – things such as pig snouts and ears.
None of that for my grandparents. They only wanted the “good” stuff – things such as pig livers and lungs.
Scary as that sounds, it was good stuff.
And unfortunately, when my grandparents died, so did the hurka making. It is just too much trouble.
These days, the only time we get hurka is when my parents order some from a local Hungarian church and share it with us. My dad brought some over last week.
When my grandparents made hurka, it was quite an operation -- an operation that would never be done in a kitchen. The grease and the mess made it no job for a spotless Hungarian kitchen.
That’s why my grandparents had a second stove in the basement where grease and mess belong. It was in a small room off the basement TV room.
If you are old enough, you probably remember those basement TV rooms people had before there were family rooms. They contained furniture and TVs deemed no longer good enough for the living room.
It was in this big TV room that the actual sausage-making took place.
Along one wall was a long table that my grandfather had fashioned out of plywood and scrap lumber. It was covered with a vinyl tablecloth that was thumb-tacked under the edge.
On that table was the sausage-maker, a heavy metal appliance that looked something like a meat-grinder only bigger. Next to the sausage-maker was a pan filled with water in which sausage casings – another thing you don’ really want to know about -- were soaking.
The cooked rice and meat products were brought from the stove to this table where the meat was ground, mixed with the rice, seasoned and loaded into the sausage casings.
My grandfather would take a sausage casing out of the water and push it onto the sausage maker spigot the same way pantyhose are gathered on your foot before you pull them up your leg.
Then he would crank the machine and the sausage mixture would slowly fill the casing. My grandmother would guide the plump link, pull it off and curl it into a ring. She’d place the ring on a tray to await packaging in white butcher paper. They would repeat the process until they ran out of mixture or ran out of casings, whichever came first.
And then my grandmother would bake some of the hurka in a cast iron skillet in the oven for any helpers -- or kids who were hanging around.
Mmm, I can almost smell it cooking.
Wait, I can smell it cooking.
I put some in the oven – and I think it’s just about done.

It's what's in the cupboard, not in the bank

2008-01-17T16:05:00.000-08:00

Published Jan. 14, 2008

Know how to tell if someone is really well off?
You can’t tell by the house she lives in or the car she drives. There is a good chance the bank owns both of those things, and she can just barely make the monthly payments.
You can’t tell by the clothes she wears or the vacations she takes. Those expenses could be piled up on a Visa card or two or three.
No, the only way to truly gauge the wealth of a person is by snooping in her cupboards.
For financial well-being is measured in rolls of toilet paper and paper towels and Scotch tape.
Or cans of chicken stock and tomato sauce.
Or jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise, bottles of ketchup and vegetable oil.
Yes, wealthy people have healthy cupboards.
It’s true.
One time a lot of years ago, we were overnight guests of one of my college friends.
She and I both got journalism degrees from Ohio State, but I used mine to get into newspapers and she used hers to get into corporate America.
While my career path may have been nobler, it certainly appeared hers was more lucrative.
And I figured that out by what I found under her bathroom sink. There was not one extra roll of toilet paper — like the cupboard in my bathroom — there were several packages of toilet tissue.
There was not one extra bar of soap, there were a dozen.
And there were extra tubes of toothpaste and shampoo and even toothbrushes.
Wow. I felt as if I was in a store.
How luxurious it was, I thought, to run out of something and find more in the cupboard.
I’m going to be like that someday, I thought.
Someday, I’m not going to have to run to the store every time I’m out of tissue or peanut butter or ketchup. Someday, I’m going to have extra.
And, for the most part, I have achieved that goal.
Now, if I run out of pancake syrup, I can go to the pantry and find a full bottle.
Or when my son dumps the last of the A1 sauce on his steak, there is often another bottle up in the cupboard.
Ahh, it’s great to find things in the cupboard.
I’ve been on a hunt for matzo meal for a couple of weeks. Matzo meal is that stuff that you use to make matzo balls to put in chicken soup.
I looked for it at the local grocery stores. I looked for it at the West Side Market. I couldn’t find it anywhere.
I stopped over at my parents’ house the other day. My mom’s got a larder that could feed the town of Amherst in a natural disaster.
But it wasn’t always like that. There were five kids in the family. We were almost always out of one thing or another.
I told her about my futile search for matzo meal.
“I have some in the cupboard,” she said. “If you want it, take it.”
Hmmm. I scoured Northeast Ohio for the stuff and my mother has some in her cupboard.
“It’s been in there for a while but it’s not open. It should still be good,” she said.
As I took the box of matzo meal down from the shelf, I couldn’t help but think that the only thing better than having a full cupboard is knowing that your mother has one, too.

We have a new perspective on the news

2008-01-10T13:37:00.000-08:00

Published Jan. 7, 2008

Until last week, the newsroom had not been affected by the $11 million expansion and renovation project going on at The Chronicle.
Oh, sure, we've been a little inconvenienced.
Most of the parking lot was off-limits for a while, leaving us scrambling for parking spots.
And the back door, our main entrance, was closed off.
Pounding and jack-hammering have been made it difficult to talk on the phone.
And then there was the time we had no phones because water leaked through the roof into the phone control room.
Most everything has been coated with a thin layer of construction dust for a while but it has hardly been noticed by reporters and editors quite at home in years-old dusty piles of notes and notebooks.
At least we all had our own little familiar spots, dusty and noisy as they were.
Until last week.
We had to empty the newsroom so the workers can come in and build us a brand new one.
Do you have any idea how much stuff is in a newsroom?
It's not just desks and bodies, it's file cabinet after file cabinet and drawer after drawer of information gathered before a lot of us were even born.
What do you do with box scores from a 1950 Elyria High baseball game, photos from a 1970 car accident, results from the 1982 Lorain County Fair?
Will they ever be used again? Probably not. But can we bring ourselves to throw them away? It's tough.
And in the midst of all this priceless stuff are people, people who had to relocate until the newsroom construction is done.
"Get your stuff packed up," I started telling them a couple months ago.
But you see, there is a reason most of us got in the news business -- we can only do something when a deadline is imminent.
So there wasn't a lot of packing done until we got word a couple weeks ago that we had to be completely out of the newsroom by Jan. 4.
We hurriedly packed up our stuff and carried it to our temporary surroundings, a spot on the first floor that has already been remodeled.
We are a little crowded. The desks are arranged in three rows of back-to-back desks stretching from one side of the room to the other. Wires run across the floor to connect our computers.
But everyone seems to be working on rebuilding his or her own little area.
One reporter uses as a privacy screen a bulletin board onto which pictures of her children are tacked.
Other reporters have squeezed bookcases between their chairs and the wall and put on them essential reporter things -- like phone books and dictionaries and city directories and coffee mugs.
One wall is lined with more than a dozen file cabinets filled with things too precious to leave behind.
As exasperating as it was to get the staff to move -- and throw some things away -- it also made me remember why I like them all so much.
The newspaper isn't just a job to them. It's who they are.
In the piles of things that were headed for storage, I spotted a magazine holder, its metal sides carved into a word.
I picked it up, carried it down to our temporary quarters and perched it on top of a tall bookcase.
NEWS is the word carved into its sides.
And as it stands there, its metal shining out over us like a beacon, it feels as if we are home again.

Celluloid heroes have nothing on skunk man

2008-01-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Published Dec. 31, 2007

It was the final minutes of the triple-feature.
We had watched the "The Bourne Identity" and "The Bourne Supremacy."
And now we were watching the end of "The Bourne Ultimatum."
The boys were sprawled across the sectional pit.
I was on the floor in front of the TV.
And Jason Bourne was floating in New York’s East River.
Could he survive a 10-story fall and the shots fired at him as he fell?
In the midst of the suspense, I realized something menacing was in our own house.
I smelled it.
And suddenly, being face down in the East River didn’t seem so bad.

I got up the next morning and the smell of the menace from the night before still lingered.
A skunk.
My husband had found the source of the odor: The critter was hunkered down in a shoebox-size hole that allowed access to the plumbing under the pool house.
"Come see," my husband said.
We bent at the waist, squinting down into the hole while keeping our distance, ready to run if need be.
The skunk wasn’t moving but it looked as if it was watching us. Its teeth were clenching a stick like a dog clenches a bone.
"Let’s get something and poke him," I said to my husband.
"Poke him?"
"Maybe he’ll run away," I said.
My husband got the handle of a shovel and poked. I stood back.
"I think he’s dead," my husband said.
"We need to call someone," I said as I walked toward the house.
I went inside, pulled out the phone book and opened the yellow pages to Pest Control.
As I was dialing the phone, I looked out the window and saw my husband walking deliberately across the back yard.
He was carrying a handful of spear-like objects -- a spade, a tree trimmer and a couple other sticks. Draped over his other arm was a coiled orange extension cord.
He looked as if he was going to harpoon a seal.
A woman answered the phone.
"We don’t do skunks," she told me. "We only do bugs. You need critter control."
And then she rattled off some phone numbers of people who might be able to help.
I dialed one of the numbers.
"How much would you charge to get a dead skunk out from a hole in our yard?" I asked the man who answered.
"Are you sure he’s dead? $65."
Shoot, a bargain at twice the price.
I asked him how soon he could be here and went to tell the mighty hunter in the backyard that he was off the hook.
As we stood looking at the critter, we heard a car pull into the driveway.
The skunk man.
"That’s not a stick in its mouth," he said as he peered into the hole. "That’s an electrical wire. He must have been chewing on it and got zapped," he said, contorting his face into that of an electrocuted skunk.
My husband cut the electricity to the house so the critter control man didn’t end up like the critter. Then the skunk man went to work.
He thrust a grabber tool into the hole and yanked on the skunk’s head.
Whoa. That was it for me. I jumped back as the first try was unsuccessful and the critter’s head popped out of the tool.
But, a couple more yanks and it was out and safely deposited in a garbage bag.
Now, if only that grabber is strong enough to pull a body out of the East River …

The skunk

2007-12-30T17:47:00.001-08:00

This is the skunk that found not-so-safe refuge at our house.

Early bird still hungry after catching worm

2007-12-30T17:43:00.000-08:00

Published Dec. 17, 2007

There weren’t many "Early Bird" shoppers at the mall Saturday morning.
But my friend and I were two of them.
I had asked her half-jokingly the night before if she would be up for some 6 a.m. shopping.
She said maybe she would.
I thought maybe I’d be awake at 6.
But I knew it was fat chance on both counts.
Yet, here we were, dragging ourselves into JC Penney’s before dawn.
The few people who were in the store were lugging to the register $200 kitchen mixers that were on sale for $99.
For a moment, I got caught up in the frenzy and thought that I, too, should buy one of these mixers. I didn’t really need one but I hated to pass up such a bargain.
But I came to my senses and went to find what I was really looking for.
You see, this Early Bird was looking for a whirlybird – two of them actually. Remote-controlled helicopters for my boys – my boys who -- at 21 and 26 – outgrew toys long ago.
Too bad their mom never outgrew the need to buy them.
Or should I say the need to hunt for them? That’s what it’s really about because there are few things more thrilling to a mother than snagging an elusive toy at Christmastime.
When my boys were growing up, people didn’t shop online. They actually went to the stores.
It was mother-vs.-mother in the toy aisle – and may the best mother win.
The most formidable battles took place the year that every kid in the world – including mine – wanted “Ghostbuster” action figures.
The factory shipped the toys to the stores in big boxes, each containing an assortment of characters from the movie. Handy, unless you were looking for the Marshmallow Man. For, although these big boxes contained lots and lots of action figures, they only contained one Marshmallow Man.
One.
And you’ve never experienced real terror unless you’ve been in the same toy aisle as a Marshmallow-Man-crazed mom.
Store clerks risked life and limb as they opened these boxes – a dozen moms hovering over them -- to put the figures on display.
That’s the Christmas shopping spirit that I miss – and try to re-create every year.
About a month ago, I spotted mini remote-controlled helicopters in a drug store ad.
I had visions of the boys flying them around the house on Christmas morning.
But, when I went to the store to buy them, they were sold out.
I felt a momentary jolt of Marshmallow Man mania.
From that day forward, I scoured the ads looking for mini helicopters.
I spotted them again but the result was the same: The store had none left.
And so it was this helicopter hunt that brought me to the mall before dawn on Saturday.
I have to admit I was hoping for a Marshmallow Man showdown with a crazed mom or two but, alas, I just walked into the toy aisle and plucked two mini radio-controlled helicopters off the shelf.
There wasn’t even another mom in sight. It seemed too easy.
But I found out something after I bought those helicopters. I found out that there may be better ones.
Apparently, there are battling helicopters that come two-to-a-package and they have lasers so you can shoot your opponent’s copter, sending it into a tailspin.
I wonder where I can find those. I could always return the ones I bought and get the battling ones. It’s probably too late to order them online.
But there is still a week before Christmas.
And that’s a lot of time for a mom on a mission.

A Griswold, er, Ewald family Christmas

2007-12-04T07:57:00.000-08:00

In a scene reminiscent of the movie, "Christmas Vacation," my husband and my brother drag what will be the Ewald Family Christmas Tree out of the tree farm.

They dragged the tree out of the trailer hitched to the Explorer and into the house.
It took two of them.
My brother and my husband yanked and grunted as they pulled the giant evergreen up the front steps and into our foyer.
It was a little rough making the turn into the living room but, luckily, it only sounded as if the woodwork was getting ripped off.
They laid the tree down gently in the center of the room like the prize it was. We all just stood there admiring it and the smell it was giving the house.
Then my brother said something that one of us had to say sooner or later.
“Think it’ll fit?”
We all looked at the tree and then up the wall to the 15-foot ceiling.
No one said anything in response but my husband and I both began pacing off the tree. He on one side, me on the other.
“It should,” we said in unison.
“I don’t know,” my brother said, looking back up to the ceiling.
“Maybe you should have cut some off before you brought it in,” his wife said.
We hated to cut any more of it off. After all, we had already left the bottom five feet of it in the forest.
“Let’s try to stand it up,” my husband said.
Then, he and my brother got down on their bellies and shoved the trunk into a huge round plastic tree stand and screwed it in.
“OK, you hold the stand while we walk it up,” my brother said to me.
I walked around the gigantic green bush and grabbed a hold of a bottom branch. Soon the tree was coming at me. I put my foot on the tree stand to help ease it to the ground.
Three quarters of the way up, they stopped pushing. The tree was lodged at a 45-degree angle.
I guess it was a little too tall.
The two of them lowered it back to the floor.
Now what?
“Let’s take it back outside. I’ll get my chainsaw,” my brother said.
Take it back outside?
“Just cut it in here,” my husband said.
“Use a chainsaw in the house?” my brother said. “Not a good idea.”
“Not a good idea at all,” his wife echoed.
But the next thing I knew, my brother was firing up his chainsaw. In the living room. Two minutes and a lot of gas fumes and wood chips later, our tree was three feet shorter. And 10 minutes after that, it was standing upright. The biggest tree I had ever seen.
That was Saturday. Ever since then, my husband has been stringing lights on it. He dragged down from the attic every box, bag and ball of lights we had.
Up the ladder, string some lights. Down the ladder, get some more. He did over and over and over. But at some point he ran out of lights. Then, the drill was up the ladder, string some lights, down the ladder, go to the Walgreens, buy some more and up the ladder string some lights.
The tree is beautiful now, lit – at last count -- with 1,300 twinkling little colored lights.
There was a message on my phone today. It was from my brother who cut a tree almost as big as ours. We helped him get his tree to stand upright in his house before he helped us.
“Just wondering how your tree is coming,” his message said. “Ours is done, all decorated.”
Wow, he’s done already. Wonder how he did that so fast.
I’d ask my husband but he’s not home.
He just ran over to the Walgreens.

21 really is a magic number in Vegas

2007-11-27T12:04:00.000-08:00

Our younger son just turned 21.
And I lived to tell about it.
Barely.
You see, the birthday party was in Las Vegas. He and his brother — my older son who lives in Denver — cooked it up over the summer. A bunch of their friends were going.
"It will be fun, Mom. You and Dad should come," they said.
"I don’t think so. We’re old. We can’t hang with you guys," I told them.
I’m not quite sure how the rest of the conversation went, but the next thing I knew I was looking at the Las Vegas strip out of the airplane window as we landed.
It was 10:45 p.m., a mere hour and 15 minutes until my baby was an adult.
Where was my baby?
He had taken an earlier flight.
I called his cell phone.
"We’re at the Mirage. Come on down," he said.
I wonder where the Mirage is, I thought, as I dragged my bulging suitcase through the airport. We were only going to be there three days but I had heard the horror stories about how far you had to walk to get anywhere so just to be safe, I had packed virtually every pair of shoes I own.
We checked into our room at the MGM, which, of course, was at the opposite end of the strip from the Mirage and set off to find the party.
The phone rang. This time it was my older son.
"Where are you guys?" he asked. "Get a cab. It’s pretty far away."
I hung up.
"Mike said we should get a cab …"
"We’re not getting a cab. We can walk," my husband said. "We’ve been sitting on that plane for hours."
A little while later, the phone rang again.
"Where are you guys? Did you get a cab? I told you to get a cab," my older son said.
"Mike said we should get a cab," I told my husband again.
"We don’t need a cab. It’s right there," he said, pointing at the Mirage sign.
Here’s a little tip if you’ve never been to Las Vegas: Nothing is "right there." It’s an optical illusion. It’s a two-dimensional place. There is no depth of field. Your perception is always off. Near-far, day-night, rich-broke … you can’t tell anything apart.
Except maybe sober and drunk for when we finally got to the party, it was clear which one of those everyone was — especially the birthday boy.
He disappeared for a while and I found him sitting on a railing outside the casino. He told me he was sick and wanted to go lie down, so I got him a cab and told the driver to take him back to his hotel.
The next morning, we met the gang for breakfast — burgers and beer (add breakfast and dinner to that list of things you can’t tell apart in Vegas).
This was The Day, The Birthday.
We rode the roller coaster that zips and zooms around the outside of New York, New York. We went from bar to bar and casino to casino and, in between, we drank fruity drinks out of yard-long cups.
Every once in a while, the birthday boy would say, "I can’t believe you just stuck me in a cab last night. I couldn’t even walk."
I wanted to hop in that cab with him, really I did.
But I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure who I was putting in that cab — my baby or my all-grown-up son.
What a relief it was to find out they are one and the same.

How much is that mousie in the window?

2007-11-05T14:36:00.000-08:00

Published Nov. 5, 2007

There are dog people and there are cat people.
And there are people who want both but have husbands.
My husband didn’t always hate pets. In fact, at one point, we had two cats and two dogs all living in the house at the same time.
But, the cats peed in his shoes and one of the dogs (the bad one) ate doors and woodwork and took off like a shot whenever he spotted an open door.
It was around that time my husband decided an animal-less house is a happy house.
After those animals were gone, we compromised. A cat, OK, but no more dogs.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t look.
The classified ad said in bold type: Puppies for sale.
“Shih-Tzus, Yorkies, Dachshunds, Poms, Malti-Poos, Puggles, Yorkie Chons, Lhasa-Poos, Cavaliers, Yorkie mixes, Yorki-Chis, Chihuahua mixes and more.”
And then it said they would be for sale for two days at a nearby motel.
Little tiny designer dogs. I had to go check them out.
As I pulled into the motel parking lot, I was a little afraid I would run into a collection of puppy-mill dogs, raised by one mad breeder, mixing and matching with no regard for the animals.
But that wasn’t the case at all.
What I found were four breeders — representing scores of others who have banded together to form what amounts to a traveling pet store — and about two dozen cages of cute little puppies.
I walked around looking at the fuzzy little creatures.
There were Yorkie Poos (a cross between a Yorkshire terrier and a poodle) for $199, Malti Poos (Maltese and poodle) for $299, Pom Poos (Pomeranian and poodle) for $199, and Shih-Tzu Poos (shih-tzu and poodle) for $350.
There were Yorki-Chis (Yorkshire terrier and Chihuahua) for $325, toy fox terriers for $225 and a Peke-a-Pom (Pekinese and Pomeranian) for $275.
“The poodle mixes and the Bichon mixes are the most popular,” said Steve Litener, a breeder of Puggles (a cross between a pug and a beagle) from Vienna, Ohio.
“Poodles don’t shed, so when you mix a dog that sheds, like a Lhasa-Apso, with a poodle, you get a dog that doesn’t shed … most of the time,” Litener said.
He brought four of his puppies this weekend. By late Sunday, there was only one left. It was $275.
This traveling pet store was Litener’s brainchild. He said he got the idea three years ago after he rented a table at a craft fair and sold all the puppies he brought.
So, he and Marti Drozdek, a Yorkie breeder from Youngstown, hatched the idea of the traveling puppy store.
Every couple weeks, the breeders take turns setting up shop in motels near highways in Northeast Ohio. They take about 40 puppies from assorted breeders, splitting the cost of the motel and the classified ads.
“There are really only about 45 good breeders we deal with,” Drozdek said. “We check them all out.”
“We turn some of them down if we don’t like the way they raise their dogs or we already have too many of one particular breed,” Litener said.
They usually sell between eight and 15. This weekend in our area, they sold 30.
They check out prospective buyers, too.
“We ask how many kids they have at home and what other kinds of pets are in the house,” Mark Crane, a breeder of Australian shepherds from Mentor, said.
Hmm. I knew my 20-year-old son would be OK but I wasn’t sure about my spoiled 15-pound Siamese cat.
Especially since the dog I would have bought — the Yorkie-Chihuahua in the photo — looks exactly like an overgrown mouse.

Finding space for treasurers ... priceless

2007-11-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

Published Oct. 29, 2007

"I really wish you'd get rid of that doll. It's creepy," my son said as he came in the house.
I didn't see him as he walked through the garage to get into the house but I had a pretty good mental picture.
He stepped between the tables laden with "getting ready for a garage sale" stuff.
As he turned to wedge himself around an old TV whose back end sticks a foot into the aisle, he saw it.
The doll.
The life-size doll that that my parents gave me for my fifth birthday. It had been in their attic until my mother came across it a few years ago.
She bought the doll a new outfit, including made-for-human-children shoes, fixed its hair and presented it (back) to me.
"Look what I found," she said proudly as she handed it to me.
I took the huge plastic little girl from her.
Now, the first time my mother gave me this heartfelt present, I’m sure I must have known what to do with her.
But now, I hadn’t a clue what to do with a doll the size of a small child.
So I thanked my mom and brought the doll home.
I walked in the door and set her in a corner.
“That thing looks like Chucky,” my husband said. “It’s going to come alive when we are all sleeping and kill us.”
I looked over at her. She was a little creepy. I took her out of the kitchen – and away from the knife drawer – and put her in the living room until I could figure out what I was going to do with her.
Nothing says "something you can't keep and something you can't get rid of" like a 3-foot doll you got on your fifth birthday from your parents.
My husband, the Chucky chicken, put her in the attic and we forgot about her.
Until we moved.
Now the doll is perched in a corner of our garage, standing guard over all the other stuff we pulled out of the attic in the old house and didn’t know what to do with when got here.
All the sentimental stuff we've been holding onto for decades.
The garage is full and winter is coming. We have to get it cleaned out so we can put the cars in there. Cars? In a garage? Imagine that.
We've separated the attic junk into “stuff for a garage sale” – things we don’t expect to get more than a $1 for -- and “stuff to be sold on eBay” – stuff we hope to get more than $1 for.
But then there are still a lot of things that don’t fit in either of those piles, things such as the big doll and the mobile that hung over my babies’ cribs.
And the revolving bookcase that used to belong to my mother-in-law, the epitome of stuff you have absolutely no use – or room -- for but can’t bring yourself to throw away.
And then it hit me. I had an idea.
We should borrow my dad’s pickup, pile all the stuff in there and take it to one of those U-store places – those rental units that serve as garage annexes – and unload it.
Then we lock it up and give the man our address so he can send us a monthly bill.
The key? Oh, we’ll give that to our sons.
In our will.

If it wasn't meant to be, it will be -- maybe

2007-10-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

Published Oct. 22, 2007

The couple in front of me on the plane were agitated.
“Where are they?” the wife asked her husband as she craned her neck to see the front of the plane.
“They were right behind us in customs,” her husband said as he looked out the window.
They had apparently lost the adult children who were supposed to be flying with them. After some frantic negotiations, most of which I couldn’t hear, the husband decided he would get off the plane, find their kids and take a later flight. The wife would stay on the plane with their baggage.
As the husband walked toward the front of the plane, I was momentarily panic-stricken.
I guess we all have our own rationale as to how those big heavy airliners filled with 300 people get and stay aloft.
Well, my rationale is that all of the people on my plane are destined to be flying on that particular flight, on that particular day. It is that combination of lifelines that fate will fly safely to its destination.
And now one of those lifelines was getting off the plane.
Gulp.
When I said momentary sense of panic, I meant it. Rational thought came back and I realized how ridiculous I was being.
Or was I?
In that case, yes, because obviously I got home safely.
But what about the destiny I interjected myself into when I made my only trip to Jacobs Field for the American League Championship Series. You guessed it. I was there Thursday for the home field shelling that sent the Indians back to Boston for Game 6. And you know what happened there.
Did I bring them bad luck? They won the first two at home when I wasn’t in the stands. Am I the curse of the Indians?
A couple of my friends thought so.
“You are not going to any of the World Series games,” a co-worker — who had been in the Jacobs Field stands for a couple of playoff wins — said.
She didn’t have to tell me. I already had decided I wasn’t going anywhere near downtown Cleveland if the Indians got to the World Series.
But even if my karma wasn’t bad enough to do in the Indians, could it have been a collective Chronicle whammy?
Did the column written by sportswriter Scott Petrak that was posted on the Red Sox door before Thursday’s game have anything to do with the Tribe’s undoing?
The column read, in part, “This Indians team is better than the Red Sox and will prove it once and for all in cramped Fenway Park. Sure, a home-field celebration would’ve been nice, but silencing Red Sox Nation in its house will be just as sweet.”
Could that have fired up those Red Sox enough to pound the Indians? Or was it a combination of my bad karma and that column?
Somehow, rational thought isn’t returning to me on this one as quickly as it returned to me on that plane. I’m wondering if I should even watch tonight’s game on TV.
By the time you are reading this, you will know how it ended.
If they lost again, I don’t blame you at all for holding me — and Scott — responsible for sending the series back to Boston.
Hopefully all this superstition will seem silly as time goes by.
Because we’ll realize that while there might indeed be a finger of fate, the only place it can possibly be is on the hand of the pitcher who couldn’t find the plate or the batter who couldn’t find the ball.

Thorns? Well, yeah, they come with the roses

2007-10-15T14:15:00.001-07:00

Published Oct. 8, 2007

Today is my 30th wedding anniversary.
Hard to believe it has been 30 years since that day I walked down the aisle with the guy from New Jersey I met at Ohio State.
We were just kids when we got married. We didn't have jobs, but we had a 1968 Firebird convertible that started most of the time. We'd be fine.
And we have been.
We've been like two boats tethered together, riding calm seas and rough seas. Yeah, we've gotten a little banged up over the years - we raised two boys - but we're still riding those waves together.
I asked my husband why he thought we have been able to stay together for so long.
"You just have to keep mother happy," he said, laughing.
When he quickly noticed I wasn't laughing back, he stopped making fun of me, illustrating what may be the most important key to a long and happy marriage: Realize what irritates the other person and don't do it.
"To last for 30 years, two people have to really like each other," he said.
"Sure, we're in love, but we are also best friends. We have fun when we are together. We laugh all the time."
We laugh all the time because we look at the twisted world through what seems to be the same set of eyes. The people he sees as nincompoops, I see as nincompoops. The people he sees as blowhards, I see as blowhards. The people he doesn't like, I don't like.
Hmm, I'm beginning to see a pattern emerge that may explain why we don't have a lot of friends.
It is a good thing we have each other.
"Even the things we differ about we have fun with - like our constant temperature battle," he said.
We only have temperature battles because he's a hothouse plant with no need for circulating air, and I'm a normal person who needs a fan in the room to be able to breathe.
But this, too, we have found a way to resolve. He lets me point a fan at my side of the bed and I let him have a gigantic comforter to wrap himself in.
See, that's all it takes to have a good marriage - a little give and take.
"We love to travel together and want to go to every Caribbean island we can before we are too old," he said.
Yes, getting out and seeing the world is great - as long as you want to see the same corner of the world, and we'll take any corner with a beach, a lounge chair, a turquoise sea and a fruity drink.
And go on those vacations even if you think you can't afford them. It's only money, and you only live once. We've never been very good at managing our finances but we always seem to get by. When we're old, we may be sitting on a corner somewhere with tin cups in our hands, but we'll always be able to look back and say we've had a good life.
"We've had our share of tough times, but that's where the love came in - neither one of us could bear to think about life without one another," my husband said.
When I got home yesterday, he was standing at the kitchen counter arranging 30 long-stemmed yellow roses in a big vase.
Every anniversary, he has given me yellow roses - as many as the years we have been married, but he wasn't going to get them this year. I'm going to a newspaper conference tomorrow and - we talked about it - by the time I get back, the flowers will be wilted.
"Afraid breaking the tradition will be bad karma?" I asked him as he put the roses he wasn't going to buy on the table.
"Yeah," he mumbled.
"Aren't they pretty?"

Want to forget your ills? Watch daytime TV

2007-10-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

Published Oct. 1, 2007

I walked into the hospital for my routine woman exam.
I spotted the door that said "Women's Health" and walked in.
It was a tiny room, more like a cubicle than a room actually.
I checked in with the receptionist and took a seat.
In this tiny room was a television, the volume up so high that the sordid tale that was unfolding on it could be heard in the next county, I'm sure.
"I caught my husband in bed with my cousin's daughter," a female voice said.
"I didn't know she was your cousin," a male voice replied.
And on they went, revealing secrets that I had no desire to hear (and wondered how anyone else could either).
There were two other women in the room. I asked them if they were watching the television. They said no.
Kindred spirits.
"Who watches this stuff?" I asked them, not expecting or getting an answer.
I opened my newspaper and tried not to listen to the trash tale of woe.
I looked around the cubicle for a place where I could not hear the television.
The guests on the show, who were now screaming at each other, were sporadically interrupted by a calm voice - the daytime TV show's host - that only served to set them off at an even higher decibel.
"I can't take it," I thought, feeling a little panicked. "I can't sit here any longer," I thought, feeling like an animal in a cage.
I got up and walked over to the receptionist.
"Do you think you could put on a news channel?" I asked her.
"Oh, you can change the channel. Go ahead," she said.
So I did. I put in on CNN, and then I turned the volume down real low.
Ah, much better. I read my newspaper until they called my name to go back for my exam.
When I was done, the X-ray technician took me down the hall and told me to have a seat in the waiting room. This was not the first waiting room I was in. This was the post-exam waiting room, and it was even smaller than the first one.
I looked in. It was nearly filled with women in hospital gowns who were staring toward a corner of the room where a TV was playing if not the same show I had seen earlier, one with the same theme - loud people telling the world things I would not tell my mother.
I stood on the threshold. I looked around inside for an open seat. I spotted one, but I couldn't make myself go in. So I just stood there.
I was lucky in the other waiting room - it only had two women in it. This one had six. I couldn't just tromp in this one and be Queen of the Television.
I turned around and walked back down the hall. I found a little alcove with a couple chairs in it. It was almost out of earshot of this new Mr. and Mrs. Trashy TV Couple. I sat down and read my paper, waiting for someone to tell me they had looked at my X-rays and I was free to go.
After getting out of my hospital gown and back into my own clothes, I considered asking someone working there why we had to be subjected to those obnoxious TV shows playing loudly in every corner of the place.
But I didn't.
I was afraid I was just being a brat who is used to having control of the remote control. Maybe everyone else there liked to watch those shows.
So I just left. I walked through the waiting room and out the door.
Wondering how many ailments are as painful as watching the Jerry Springers and Judge Judys of daytime TV.

Oh, say can you see? Well, not too well

2007-09-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

Published Sept. 24, 2007

I've become my sixth-grade teacher.
You know the one - the woman who clickedy-clacks over to you in her high-heel pumps and peers at you over the top of her rhinestone encrusted bifocals.
The bifocals that she is constantly searching for because she takes them off and puts them down and then can't remember where.
Yep, that's me.
Yesterday, I got to my desk, sat down and reached into my purse for my reading glasses, one of about two dozen pairs I own, most of which I bought at Marc's for 88 cents.
I couldn't feel them in the bottom of my purse, so I flipped the purse onto its side and rooted around a little more. Phone. Wallet. Sunglasses - but no reading glasses.
Then I did what any desperate woman does. I actually picked up my purse and looked into it. I stirred around all the stuff in there a couple times. No glasses.
Y-I-K-E-S.
I cannot read a thing without those glasses. It was the darnedest thing. One day I could read the paper, the next day I couldn't. My close vision went - overnight.
"It happens to everyone," my eye doctor told me, "when they get older."
Small comfort - on both counts.
Then I remembered that I had stowed a pair in my desk drawer for just such an occasion. I opened all the drawers. You see, I only used the front three inches of each drawer. I guess it makes things easier to find that way. The back 90 percent has been untouched, I figure, since at least 2002, the date of the unopened desk calendar I spotted back there.
Anyway, no glasses. I was getting a little panicked.
I went out to my car where I have a couple of purse "annexes," those canvas totes they give away at places such as newspaper conferences - and Costco. My annexes hold things that won't fit in a purse - like magazines and hair gel - and hopefully a spare pair of reading glasses.
Ah-ha. Yes! I found a pair in the first canvas-tote-annex I looked in.
See? And my husband can't figure out why a woman needs so many purses. This is why.
Speaking of my husband, the above scenario would never happen to him and not only because he doesn't carry purses. He has one (O-N-E) pair of reading glasses that he got from the eye doctor at slightly more than 88 cents.
And he can never find those glasses.
Making the matter even worse is the fact that his near-vision is almost non-existent without magnification. I can't read the newspaper but he can't find the newspaper without his glasses.
His glasses, when he can find them, sit at about a 20-degree angle across his face.
"You ought to get those glasses fixed," I tell him.
"What's wrong with these glasses?" he asks, looking at me over the crooked frames hanging on the bridge of his nose.
And then he adds, "I know. I have to call the eye doctor. I can't see a thing anymore."
And that's the conversation we have had - almost word for word - every week for as long as I can remember.
Because, you see, we have turned into those people, those poor aging souls who can't read a thing without glasses that they can never find.
One day, our younger son, who is in college, said, "I feel like I'm in a Seinfeld episode when I'm around you guys.
"It's not what you do that is so funny, it's the fact that you think it's perfectly normal."
Well, it is perfectly normal.
Isn't it?

She left her map in San Francisco

2007-09-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Published Sept. 15, 2007

My husband had the steering wheel.
I had the map.
And off we went to see the sights of San Francisco.
It wasn't five minutes later that I was wishing I had the steering wheel instead of the map.
Who does have more power in the rental car? The spouse who is driving or the spouse who is directing?
There was so much to sightsee. We wanted to drive through the Presidio and go shopping in Haight-Ashbury and Chinatown. We wanted to drive down the World's Crookedest Street and ride the cable car. We wanted to see the view of the city from Coit Tower. And we wanted to eat dinner on Fisherman's Wharf.
To get all that done, we had to have a plan (devised, of course, by the person with the map), and we had to stick to it (turn where the person with the map says to turn).
That should mean the map-holder has the power, right?
You would think.
We had no sooner entered the grounds of the Presidio - a former Army post that is now part of the Golden Gate National Park and is known for its spectacular views - when we came to a fork in the road.
"Go right," I said to my husband as I manically waved a rolled up map in that direction.
He made a left.
"We were supposed to go right!"
"You didn't tell me soon enough!"
"But that way is the Scenic Route," I said, collapsing back in my seat and pouting as any diligent navigator would.
He just kept driving probably to make me mad but maybe because we were on a very narrow and winding road in a forest of very tall cypress trees.
I went back to studying my map to try to figure out how get us out of this jam - and back on the Scenic Route, so designated by the signs that were posted along the way. It turned out that we were going counterclockwise instead of clockwise on the road that ran along the perimeter of the park. I guess that was OK but it was probably more scenic if you drove the right direction.
We parked the car - a Mustang convertible - and got out to see the view of the Golden Gate Bridge (which is actually red, by the way) and all our navigational woes were forgotten. It was so beautiful.
We actually got around pretty well when we were on city streets. We found Chinatown and the cable car without any problem. It was the parks - greenery and trees - that got us all bollixed up.
We wound up in Golden Gate Park - San Francisco's version of Central Park - as we tried to get to Haight-Ashbury, that famous intersection associated with beat poets and hippies.
I hadn't studied the map for this park the way I had studied the one for the Presidio. We were lost. As I looked at the map, my husband looked for a way out. He saw it - a glimmer of city streets beyond the green - at the exact moment I figured out where we were in the park.
He pulled into the turning lane just as I said, "Go straight."
"I can't go straight. I'm in the turning lane."
"Just go straight," I said as we rounded the corner. I was sitting on my hands to keep from grabbing the steering wheel out of his.
And then I had an epiphany.
We aren't really "map people." We rarely have a plan. We live life by the seat of our pants, so why should we change now just because we are lost in a strange city?
A sense of calm washed over me, and I folded up the map and stuck it into my purse.
I wasn't really lost anyway. I knew exactly where I was.
Sitting next to the guy with the steering wheel I promised to love in sickness and in health - and, so it would follow, in bumper-to-bumper traffic in San Francisco.

The only black suits I know are clubs and spades

2007-09-14T09:41:00.000-07:00

Published Sept. 3, 2007

My husband was going shopping for a new suit.
"I'll come with you," I said.
The plan was to leave for the mall at 6 p.m. so, in keeping with that schedule, we backed out of the driveway a couple minutes before 7.
By the time we got there, we only had about an hour and a half until the stores closed.
Can a tailor-made man with an off-the-rack pocketbook find a suit in that little time?
I didn't think so.
We got to the store and my husband started walking down one of the rows as I stood there trying to get my bearings in a sea of jackets and pants in varying shades of black.
"What are you looking for?" I asked my husband, the man who has been pawing through the likes of Esquire and GQ for so many years that I was sure he saw the differences in these suits that all looked exactly the same to me.
"I want a plain black suit," he said.
And with that began my lesson in the nuances of "plain black suit."
There are two-button and three-button jackets with narrow or wide lapels. There are one or two or no back vents. There are different weight materials and types of lining.
I was still being schooled in jackets when the salesman came over and offered to help.
He asked my husband his size, walked to an end area in the suit sea and pulled out about six of them.
I hadn't had enough lessons to see the difference in these half-dozen suits. I wondered which was the least expensive.
My husband eliminated a couple of them, and the suit salesman carried the others over to an open spot in the sea of suits where there was a full-length mirror.
The salesman pulled jacket after jacket off their hangers and helped my husband into them.
He looked anywhere from dashing to very dashing in all of them.
And then finally, the slightest mention of a price.
"Here, try this one on," the salesman said to my husband. "I think it's as nice as that other one, and it's a couple hundred dollars cheaper."
OK, well, now at least I knew the dollar ballpark - hundreds.
But neither of them flinched at the salesman's words, so I didn't either. I did, however, stand up straighter and try to smooth out my shirt in an attempt to look like a woman who didn't flinch at the words "a couple hundred dollars cheaper."
He finally picked out a suit. He looked marvelous in it. If he had a clue how much it cost, he didn't let on and, by this point, asking him "How much?" would have been gauche no matter how softly I whispered it.
Besides, how much more do you have to know when the difference in prices is measured in hundreds?
The next day, my husband related part of the conversation he had with the suit salesman as he got the hem of his pants pinned up.
"As soon as you asked for a two-button suit," the salesman had told him, "I knew you were a Democrat.
"And then I saw your wife," he went on, "and I knew she was a Democrat."
"What's that supposed to mean?" I asked my husband.
"I don't know," he said.
"Well, what kind of suit did he have on?" I asked my husband.
"A three-button one."
Hmm. It's true; you do learn something new every day.
It's just that some days, you have absolutely no idea what you just learned.

Lifestyles of the rich and homeless

2007-08-30T10:22:00.001-07:00

Published Aug. 27, 2007

Did you ever see that show "House Hunters?"
Homebuyers are shown three homes in their price range with the amenities they are after and they pick one of them to buy. It's as if you are house shopping with some friends - often, some very rich friends.
"House Hunters" is the most popular show on Home & Garden Television - HGTV - and it's addictive.
You get to see a bunch of cool houses in different parts of the country and then you get to play a guessing game - in my case, against my husband - to see if you can figure out which one they will pick.
We're relatively late to the game. The show premiered in October 1999, but we just discovered it about a month ago.
The good news is - between regular "House Hunters" and "House Hunters International," which is the same show except the houses are all over the world instead of all over the country - you can watch the show at least three times a day.
And if you have one of those snazzy DVR or TiVo gizmos like we do, you can stack up so many episodes on your recorder that if you don't like a particular one, you can just delete it and watch another.
I set my DVR to record every instance of the program so that I can switch on the TV and call up an episode of "House Hunters" whenever I want to - usually about 10:30 every night.
This is how it goes: I turn on an episode and get about halfway through. In other words, the couple has looked at one or two of the houses. Then my husband wanders in and sits down and starts asking questions. Instead of answering him, I push the rewind button and we watch the show together.
Despite me getting a second look at most of the show, he still guesses right more times than I do.
A couple of days ago, the first episode I chose began by showing a family - a youngish couple with three small children, all of whom were scurrying around and climbing their parents' legs like they were trees.
The announcer began, "Joe and Mary Smith are looking for a larger home for their growing family ..."
And then he went on to say they didn't have much money.
While I appreciate the fact that Joe and Mary are looking for an inexpensive house for their three darling children, I've been there, done that with two kids of my own.
Oh, no. I want something more exotic, more expensive. I want to dream, not re-live.
So I delete the Smith episode and go back to my list of recorded programs.
The next one I play is about a childless 50-year-old couple, both real estate agents, who live in a swanky Washington, D.C., suburb and are looking to buy a vacation house on the North Carolina coast.
Ah. That's more like it. I want to watch people who are looking for granite countertops, not a place for a swing set.
The real estate agents ended up choosing a waterfront house with a boat slip - and a yard big enough for their two little sweater-wearing dogs - for close to $1 million.
I was looking on the HGTV Web site and found a "casting call" for potential homebuyers and real estate agents. You can be on the show.
There is an application to fill out that asks you things such as "Why do you want to move?" and "What kind of house do you want to buy?"
There is no stipend mentioned and there are lots of warnings about how much time it is likely to take.
So you might wonder, "What's in it for me?"
Well, what was in it for one homebuyer was a huge new house a stone's throw from the beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, for $225,000.
Could you get that deal without going on "House Hunters?"
I guess not knowing the answer to that question is the whole appeal of the show.

Whoever said 'thrill of the hunt' should be shot

2007-08-21T15:31:00.000-07:00

Published Aug. 20, 2007

We are always on a mission for something.
It seems we never have the right stuff, enough stuff or the stuff we have needs to be replaced.
Our most recent mission was for a new bed.
You may know the drill. One morning you crawl out of your bed and you realize you just had a pretty lousy night's sleep on a pretty lousy mattress.
And before you know it, you are obsessed with a hunt for a new bed. You pore through the pile of glossy ads that spill out of your Sunday newspaper.
And, I don't know how it happens but it seems that those Sunday advertisers always seem to know the object of your hunt-of-the-week.
For every other ad that spills onto your kitchen table includes a page of mattresses on sale.
We studied those ads but after a couple Sundays, brand names and prices all began to run together, sending me into the second stage of the hunt.
The Internet.
There, "customer reviews" offer insight into brand names and prices. Theoretically.
Trying to figure out what bed is best by what customers say online is like trying to find out which bed you want to sleep in based on what Goldilocks has to say.
And so, finally, you are at the third stage of the hunt: Getting in the car and actually going to the store.
And, in our case, once we started lying down on mattresses, brand names, customer reviews and even prices were of little consequence.
We fell onto one particular bed and we knew it was the one we wanted - even if it was a brand I had never considered at a price I had been unwilling to pay.
But we bought it and finally our mission was accomplished.
Momentarily.
You see, we bought a king-size bed to replace a queen-size bed, therefore setting up another series of hunts, starting with sheets.
The drill was the same. Look in the Sunday ads. Look on the Internet. Go to the store and buy some on sale.
And then we needed pillows.
You see, king-size bedding needs king-size pillows.
"Let's go the mall," I said to my husband late Saturday afternoon.
"The mall, I don't want to go to the mall. Why do we have to go to the mall? I don't feel like ..."
An hour later we were at the mall standing in front of a wall of pillows. I'm not kidding. As far as the eye could see upward and outward were pillows - down pillows, alternative-down pillows, down-surround pillows, firm pillows, medium pillows, soft pillows.
Some cost $7; some cost $27 and some cost $157.
It was a hunt for a master hunter. I pulled down a pillow and squeezed it. Then I smashed my cheek against its plastic sleeve. My husband was doing the same at the far end of the wall.
Two hours later as we were trudging out of the store laden with bags of pillows (they were buy one, get one free), I lost sight of my husband.
I put down my pillows and looked around.
I could see the top of his head across the furniture department so I made my way over to him.
He was sitting on a sectional sofa.
"You like this?" he asked, brushing his hand across the seat of the sofa.
"I think it would look good in our living room."
And so begins another hunt.
But we should be able to pay for this one with the proceeds from that garage sale we plan to have.
A garage sale sure to include an old sofa and lots of queen-size bedding.

Table for two? Yes, a man and his crazed wife

2007-08-14T10:48:00.000-07:00

Published Aug. 13, 2007

Summers sure are a lot hotter these days.
It used to be that on a warm summer day, a person would look at the thermometer hanging on the side of his garage and say, “Whew! 90! It’s hot outside!”
Then some weather guy factored the humidity into the temperature, inventing the “heat index” and turning that 90 into 94.
And then another weather guy decided you can’t ignore things like wind speed, sun intensity and elevation, either. And so was born “real feel” temperatures and that 90 was now 96.

We were down in Key West last week.
Who goes to Key West in August? Crazy people, that’s who. My husband and I.
The same two adventure seekers who fly into Fort Myers so they can drive across the Everglades and the Keys.
In a convertible.
I donned a visor, sunglasses and 30 spf sunscreen for the five-hour voyage. It wasn’t so bad, especially when I turned on the air conditioner when my husband wasn’t looking. Each time, I managed to cool off a bit before he switched it off. (“It wastes gas.”) On. Off. On. Off. It was our little car game on the way to Key West.
One day, we walked 10 blocks or so to have lunch at “Blue Heaven,” a famous Key West restaurant, but it wasn’t until we got there that I realized all the seating was outdoors in a sweltering, er, shaded garden.
When it hit me that my trek was not going to end in an air-conditioned restaurant, I got a little panicked.
“You eat outside?” I asked my husband.
“Yeah, is that OK? Look, it’s nice back here,” he said.
I couldn’t see anything except the half-dozen or so standing fans that were strategically placed around the tables.
Look at a fan. Look to see where it is blowing. Look to see if anyone is sitting there.
Look at another fan. Look to see where it is blowing. Look to see if anyone is sitting there.
As we stood — my husband admiring the place, I taking stock of the fans — a waiter came up. He was carrying menus and two bundles of silverware.
“Hello. Would you like to sit here?” he gestured to the table nearest us.
I was off like a shot. I saw a fanned location.
My husband was right behind. The waiter behind us.
“Here then?” he motioned to the table where I had stopped.
Again, I was off like a shot. I spotted what looked to be a better place. I wriggled around seated diners on the mulch-covered ground. My husband was behind me. The waiter behind him.
“She’s looking for a table with a fan,” I heard my husband try to explain my behavior to the waiter.
“Well, here,” the waiter said. “Why don’t you just take these?” He handed the silverware and the menus to my husband. “Just sit wherever she decides.”
And then I had to make a decision: Yank out of their chairs a rather large couple seated directly in front of the best fan in the place or take an empty table nearby.
I decided I was probably already pushing my luck with my husband, so I took the open table.
Two glasses of ice water and two glasses of iced tea later, I was composed enough to realize that I had just led a chase around the outdoor dining room.
I started laughing and then my husband started laughing, too. We laughed so hard I forgot how hot it was.Now, if I can only figure out a way to factor into that real feel temperature the speed at which a diner scurries around a patio with a husband and a waiter in her wake.

Modern-day Gladys Kravitz solves a mystery

2007-07-31T09:47:00.001-07:00

Published July 30, 2007

The house down the street looked empty.
I passed it every day on my way home. It always had three or four or more cars in the driveway. Now there was none.
"I wonder if that house got foreclosed on," I said to my husband a couple weeks ago.
I kept meaning to get the house number so I could look it up.
There are a lot of Web sites that list foreclosures, but alas, most of them give only the most basic information - such as the street name - before you have to sign up and pay to get the rest.
One site offered a seven-day free trial.
Shoot, I thought, I only need it for seven minutes. I'll sign up. I had to provide credit card information, which I had no qualms about being the avid online shopper that I am.
And then I read the fine print: If you do not cancel within the seven days, your card automatically will be billed for the following month: $49.95.
I closed out that Web site fast.
I don't know about you but I always, always, always forget to cancel subscriptions that have that caveat after a free come-on.
Anyway, what piqued my interest about the house down the street was that last week after I noticed all the cars gone, I noticed the pool gone. An above-ground pool that had been visible from the street had vanished, perhaps having been drained and folded up and carried off into the night.
"It has to be a foreclosure," my husband said. "Did you check the auditor's Web site?"
The Lorain County Auditor. That's the ticket.
So I went looking.
I tried to figure out the house's house number. It is five houses down, add 10 to my house number and I should have it, right?
No, that would be too easy. My house number plus 10 brought up the next door neighbor's property.
Puzzled again. I ended up - the auditor's site allows this - putting in a range of numbers and looking at all the houses in the range.
I was typing and clicking and studying the computer screen for hours when my husband said, "Hey, Gladys Kravitz, what are you doing?"
For those of you who don't remember - or, gulp, are too young to remember - Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor always threatening to expose Samantha's magical powers on "Bewitched."
"Actually," he said, "you're the modern-day Gladys."
It was true. Gone are the days when neighbor had to spy on neighbor over the back fence or between the slits in the drapes.
Now, with enough time and ingenuity, anyone can get information on just about anyone by using the Internet. It's kind of scary.
I found out the names of the people living on my short street. I found out, in many cases, what they had paid for their house and when they bought it.
I found out how many square feet each house has and how many bedrooms and baths. I compared our square footage with the other houses on the street. I was lost in my research.
And then I remembered what I was looking for.
Did the house down the street get foreclosed on?
I figured out what house number it was and clicked on the address for property information.
Sure enough. The words "sheriff sale" came up on one of the categories on the page.
Hmm. Wonder what the people who lived there did for a living? Wonder how they lost their house? Did something bad happen?
OK, so, I guess the Internet can't tell a person everything about her neighbors.
Maybe Gladys Kravitz was onto something with those binoculars of hers.

(By the way, you have to pay to look on the auditor's Web site, too, but it is a fraction of the cost of the others.)

Attack of the cicada killer wasps

2007-07-25T10:09:00.000-07:00

Published July 23, 2007

What makes grown men flail their arms and run around the backyard shrieking like girls?
Dive-bombing flying insects as big as your thumb, that's what.
There's been a lot of flailing and running and shrieking around here lately.
Actually, the above scene could be juxtaposed with a magnified version of the scene I am about to describe, and a filmmaker would have himself quite a horrifying Grade B science fiction movie.
A huge striped wasp - the same bug (or its cousin) that has been terrifying swimmers in my backyard - was dragging a big, fat dead cicada into the crevice between the concrete walkway and the pool.
The wasp squirmed down in the hole and tried to pull the fat cicada in after it.
The cicada was clearly twice the size of the hole and its predator.
But the wasp didn't give up.
The dead cicada seemed to move of its own accord like those metal filings in those board games in which you put a beard on a man with a magnet.
But it wasn't a magnet that was levitating the bug; it was another insect.
You could see the wasp's furry little insect legs sticking up through the hole trying to get some leverage as it twisted and turned and tugged at its prey to get it into the hole.
The hard-working bug - according to Shelly Hill, program assistant for horticulture at Lorain County's Ohio State Extension office - is actually called a cicada killer wasp or, scientifically, sphecius speciosus.
Hill convinced me, and now I'm trying to convince you, to please stop swatting and bug-poisoning these annoying dive-bombing bugs that are almost as big as hummingbirds.
"They are beneficial," Hill told me in that sweet bug-loving entomologist way, "and very interesting."
Cicadas - not the 17-year locusts we are all familiar with but the ones called "dog day cicadas" that come around annually - will eat trees and eat the roots of trees.
"The cicada killer wasps go after them," she said.
And although they will dive-bomb you - that is the aggressive male, by the way - they don't sting.
The males don't even have stingers and the females will only sting if cornered or trapped - like in laundry brought in from the clothesline, she said.
I told her about watching a cicada killer fly back and forth over the same small area of grass day after day.
She told me that what I was seeing was probably the same male guarding his brood of eggs or larvae in the ground below.
"The male is real aggressive toward its young," Hill said. "He doesn't have a stinger, but he will head-bang you if you get in his way."
The wasps' life cycle parallels that of the cicada, spanning 60-75 days from mid-July to mid-September. They are solitary insects. They don't live in colonies. There is no queen. Just a bunch of little cicada-killer families. The female lays eggs in the ground, and in one or two days larvae hatch from them. The insects spend about two weeks as larvae before becoming fearsome cicada killers.
Boy, am I glad I didn't kill that diligent dad. I considered it. I wanted to. But, I couldn't find a flyswatter.
So anyway, the next time I walked past that crevice into which the wasp had been trying to pull its levitating prey, the cicada was gone. Either the wasp managed to wedge it into the hole or he swallowed it whole.
"That's kind of surprising that it was trying to take it underground," Hill said. "They usually fly up into the trees with them."
Oh, now that's a comforting thought.

Everything's good -- except my flipping age

2007-07-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

Published July 16, 2007

“Have any of you guys ever played ‘Flip Cup’?” I asked a group of 20-somethings in the newsroom.
“Yeah,” said one, nodding vigorously.
“Oh, yeah,” added another.
“Yeah, we used to play it in college,” a third chimed in.
“Well,” I told them, “I played it last week when my sons were home. It was boys versus girls, and we won.”
“Cool (or some other words expressing that sentiment),” they all said.
Flip Cup is a popular drinking game on college campuses. Teams line up on opposite sides of a long table. Each player has a plastic cup into which a couple fingers of beer — the $6-a-case variety — is poured.
The game starts with two players standing opposite each other drinking their beer and then placing the empty cups on the edge of the table with about half of them hanging off.
Then they have to flip the cup over so that it lands on its top. That could take a few tries for the uncoordinated.
As soon as it is done, the next player goes. It’s like a drinking relay race. The first team that finishes wins a point. The game goes to seven or 10 or whatever number is arbitrarily chosen.
It’s loud and it’s wild with team members egging on each flipper in turn.
It’s also a game we never played long ago at Ohio State. Back then, the only energy we expended was what it took to haul our meat off the sofa and walk up to High Street where we found a bar in which to again park ourselves.
I guess the game is just another example of “today’s more active lifestyle” that everyone talks about.
Anyway, I was feeling pretty good about having something in common with my much-younger charges in the newsroom. I was hip to their party games.
That was until one of them came over to my desk a little while later.
“Did I hear you say you were playing Flip Cup?” he asked.
“Yeah. My sons and their girlfriends stayed at our house last week, and they talked my husband and me into playing.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” he asked.
Whoa. I felt as if I had been sucker-punched.
Old? Moi?
“No!” I blurted out. “I mean we still act like we’re 22. We still do wild things,” I told him, my voice trailing off.
I spent a few minutes thinking about the way I act, the way I see myself, the way others see me but then my brain blew a fuse and I went back to my work.
I didn’t think about my age — real or perceived — again until my new “Shape” magazine came in the mail. Now, my age I have a problem getting a handle on, but my shape I’m well aware of. I know I’m not the demographic targeted by that magazine but, hey, won’t hurt to try to get some pointers, right?
This month’s cover touted: “Your best body at 20, 30, 40.”
I turned to the story inside. The first pages were about looking good in your 20s; the next, 30s; and then 40s. I turned the page again and it was a different story, so I flipped back and flipped forward again, rubbing the glossy page between my thumb and forefinger to find the pages I was skipping.
Nope. That was it. I don’t know what I was looking for anyway. The cover said it: “Look great at any age (as long as it’s under 50).”
Hmmm. What to make of that?
So maybe I don’t look so good when standing at the Flip Cup table. But, hey, what I lack in youth and beauty, I make up for in wisdom and determination.
And my record as a winning flipper proves it.

Some people (not us) just can't let go

2007-07-11T15:21:00.000-07:00

Published July 2, 2007

When people buy a new house and fix it up, they want everyone to come over and see what they have done.
Everyone except the old owners, that is.
Well, it's not that we don't want them to see it, it's just that we are afraid they will be offended that their way isn't exactly our way.
I know my husband and I have been worried about the things we have done to our new house.
"What do you think they would think of that wallpaper?" I asked my husband one day.
"Don't you think they would be proud at how clean the pool is?" my husband asked me another day.
But, I have to admit, we haven't made a lot of drastic changes here.
However, at the old house, trees are coming down, rolls of carpet are out for the garbage man and red geraniums have been planted out front.
I think it's great.
When we first moved in that house that was built in 1890, we did the same thing. We ripped out and remodeled like crazy.
Back then, the questions my husband and I exchanged about our work and the new owners started with, "Wouldn't they die," not with "What would they think."
But either way, I think we all do a lot of worrying for nothing.
No one expects new owners not to make changes.
I left a note for the new owners of our house explaining some things and leaving my e-mail address in case they needed to get a hold of us for anything.
A couple weeks later, I got a note: "The house is loved. I am the new owner at your former very lovely old girl as you say. She is quite the lady, I do agree."
And then she went on to tell me about how they both fell in love with the house and were happy to get it.
She ended with "We are making transitions and changes, naturally. Some are from the recommendations of the building inspector. Other changes are just personal."
Hmm. Bracing me.
But I didn't need bracing and I wanted her to know. I wanted her to know that she had my blessing to do whatever she wanted to do with the house.
I told her so.
"I'm sure the changes you make will be great."
An old neighbor came to visit last week.
"They cut down a big tree in your yard," she told me.
I finally figured out it was the hemlock we planted right against the house to hide the electric meter. It seemed like a good idea at the time (when the tree was 5 feet tall) but it grew and grew. I can understand why they cut it down.
But now, the electric meter will show.
OK, I'm beginning to understand why people are afraid to tell former owners what they have done to a house.
I got another e-mail from her the other day.
"Everyone is watching what we do," she wrote. "People in the neighborhood who walk by comment on it and us and what we are doing. I know we are watched but I am not concerned. We only have the best intentions for the house."
And I'm sure they do.
I'm also sure I'll find out about how those intentions look. I don't go through the old neighborhood very much any more, but I know a lot of people who do.
And come to think of it, I wonder what carpet they ripped out.
All the carpet in the house was in pretty good shape - and it was expensive, too.
What could they have been thinking?

Traveling with dad -- and boot

2007-07-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

Published June 25, 2007

It was 4:50 a.m. and I was walking toward the back door of my parents' house.
My dad was standing in the doorway.
"You're late," he said.
Hmm. I told him I would be there at 4:45. Five minutes is, relatively, not late for his oldest daughter.
"You said you would be here at 3:45. I've been up since 3," he said.
"Dad, I didn't say quarter to 4," I told him as I reached for the door handle and scooted up next to him inside the doorway. "Anyway, are you ready to go?"
My dad and I were going on a trip. I've been trying to talk my parents into going out to Colorado to visit my son - their oldest grandchild - for a couple of years, but my mom won't fly and my dad won't drive so that was that.
But somehow my son finally talked his grandfather into coming out for a long weekend of golfing. I was just along for the ride.
A couple of weeks before we left, my father did something that would turn our trip into an adventure.
One morning, he took the hard way down the basement stairs - on his side with one arm sliding down the handrail and his long legs buckling underneath him. He got down the stairs faster that way but ended up with a broken ankle.
A broken ankle that - along with the size 13 foot attached to it - was now, in lieu of a plaster cast, encased in a big, black knee-high boot.
A big, black boot not good for hobbling around airports, let alone golf courses.
But nothing holds my father down - not even what amounts to a cement shoe - so the trip was still on.
My husband drove us to the airport and we had to hurry because, of course, even though my dad had been up since 3 a.m., we were still running late.
We were making good time until we got to security. They took one look at the boot and told me to wheel my father over to an inspector wearing plastic gloves and holding a wand.
He was joined by another inspector and while one poked and prodded with the wand, the other got out a fistful of those white circular swabs that check for explosive powder.
The swabber wiped the top of the boot where my father's toes were sticking out and fed the circle into a machine.
Then he got out another and wiped the side of the boot and fed it into the machine. And another. And another.
Finally, apparently convinced my father and his boot were no threat to other passengers, the inspectors released him. I whisked the wheelchair under him and we took off for the gate.
We were flying standby and knew that I - the sister of a Southwest employee - was a low-priority traveler. What I didn't know is that my dad - the parent of a Southwest employee - had a much loftier position that would also carry his traveling companion.
In the end, there was only one flight we wanted to get on and didn't. We were like VIPs on the other three legs of the trip. Being in a wheelchair - or pushing someone in a wheelchair - means you get on the plane first. And at Southwest, where there are no assigned seats or first class, that means sitting right up front.
And while the boot killed any golfing plans, it didn't keep us from sightseeing up in the mountains or sampling some of Denver's best restaurants.
It was a great adventure and, although it may pain my dad to hear it put this way, I think he got a kick out of it.

Operation Leave Me Alone (please)

2007-07-02T13:51:00.000-07:00

Published June 18, 2007

Across the hall in a cubicle identical to mine, stood a man with a white woven purse hanging on his left arm.
He was talking to a woman - most likely the owner of the white woven purse - who was lying in a hospital bed.
I peered over the top of my reading glasses to get a better look and as I did, I tugged on the elastic of my hairnet that was digging into my forehead.
And then I went back to reading my newspaper.
I was in the on-the-way-to-surgery wing. You see, a couple months ago, I tore the ligament in my knee and the doctor assured me that all he had to do was "trim it up a bit," and the excruciating pain that it sometimes gave me would be no more.
Sounded like a plan.
I wasn't scared about having surgery. There is a day when I would have been. But there also was a day when I was scared about getting on an airplane.
I'm not sure when I stopped being a fraidy cat -when my kids grew up, I guess.
Anyway, I wasn't too worried about the "little trim" on my knee ligament. My husband drove me to the surgical center for my 7:15 a.m. appointment last week.
"You don't have to stay," I told him as we left the house. "Just drop me off and come back home. They'll call you when I'm done."
"OK. We'll see what happens," he said.
We pulled into the parking lot and I said again, "Just drop me off."
"Don't be silly," he said. "I'll come in with you and see what's going on."
So we went into the waiting room, and I went to the front desk where the woman put a plastic name bracelet on my wrist and told me to take a seat.
I sat next to my husband who was reading one of the newspapers I had brought with me.
It wasn't too long before a nurse came out of the office and called my name.
My husband and I both stood up.
"Bye," I said as I gave him a quick kiss. "I'll have them call you."
And off I went. As the nurse and I walked back, she said to me, "We'll get you checked in and then your husband can come back with you."
"Oh, that's OK. He's going home," I told her.
She put me in one of the little cubicles that lined both sides of the hallway.
"Take off your clothes and put on this gown. It fastens in the back. And put this on your head."
I took from her the gown that fastens nowhere, let alone in back, and a hat-hairnet thingy. I put them both on.
So this is where I was when I looked across the hall and saw the man with the white purse.
I couldn't help but wonder what he and the owner of the purse were talking about. I mean we were in a surgery center. They did minor knee surgeries and removed cataracts. They weren't doing heart transplants or removing brain tumors. There was a pretty good shot we were all going to live long enough to eat supper that night.
I started wondering if I was the odd one. How come I didn't need loving support in the form of another human being in my cubicle as I waited for surgery?
Then I decided, no, I'm actually one of the lucky ones. The people who care about me don't make me talk to them when I'm wearing a hairnet thingy.
And they're wearing my purse.

Dr. Jekyll and Mother Hyde

2007-06-07T09:54:00.000-07:00

Pubished June 4, 2007

It was 9 a.m.
"Matt, aren't you supposed to have that car to the gas station by 10?" I said softly to my younger son, who was sleeping diagonally across his big bed, his long body twisted in his sheets.
"Yeah. I'm getting up," he mumbled.
At 9:20, I turned it up a notch and yelled up the stairs, "Matt!"
At 9:40, I tromped up the stairs and cranked it up yet another notch as I pushed open his bedroom door. Still there. Still diagonal.
"Matt!" I shrieked. "Get. Up. And. Take. That. Car. In."
Once again, he had managed to turn his kind, loving mother into a raving, shrieking lunatic. Dr. Jekyll and Mother Hyde.
What usually happens next - because most times he's awake during his mother's metamorphosis - is that he gives me a perplexed look and says, "What's wrong with you?"
But he wouldn't be saying that today.
Because he was still sleeping.
And I was done talking. I grabbed my car keys and went to work.
As I was pulling out of the driveway, I thought, "That'll fix him. Now he'll never get up to take that car in."
As I was nearing the corner, I thought, "How's he going to get up now that I'm not there to wake him? I should go back and try to get him up again."
As I was getting on the highway, I thought, "Ooh, he makes me so mad. He stays out with his friends half the night and then won't do what he is supposed to do."
And on and on. Back and forth. Good, evil. Sane, insane.
Finally, somewhere between that spot on the highway and the parking lot at work, I became, if only momentarily, rational.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong, I thought, he has to get that car fixed.
You see, Matt was to leave later that day for Denver. His brother had asked him to come live with him for the summer and get a job out there.
That's why he was driving; he would need a car for work. The plans were to pick up his girlfriend in Chicago and she would keep him company on the ride and then fly back home.
So there were a lot of people counting on Matt getting on the road as planned.
But first he had to get out of bed.
Well, as is almost always the case, things worked out. He managed not only to get out of bed but to convince the mechanic to look at his car even though he had missed his appointment.
He called me later that day. He and my husband had packed up his car and he was ready to leave. He wanted to know when I would be home.
I left work early so I could say goodbye, the morning's rage long forgotten.
"Follow me to the ATM, and I'll get you some money for your trip," I told him.
I pulled away from the machine and parked my car next to his. As I climbed out of the car, I could feel a lump in my throat.
"I don't want you to go," I said.
"Mom. I'll see you in a week," he told me.
"Oh, yeah." I had forgotten that I am flying out there next week.
Later, I was talking to my husband.
"You know you do drive him a little crazy," my husband told me.
"But I don't know what it is with those boys. They are really attached to you. It must be something about mothers and sons," he said.
Or maybe it's just that love really does mean never having to say you're sorry.
For driving someone crazy, that is.

Sometimes life really IS for the birds

2007-05-31T12:27:00.000-07:00

Published May 28, 2007

A fashionable socialite is standing near a school in Bodega Bay when all of a sudden, she looks up and the sky is filled with fluttering, squawking, dive-bombing birds.
They swoop down and start pecking and grabbing at Tippi Hedren in "The Birds."
Well, in my story, the fashionable socialite is my husband and our Bodega Bay is our backyard pool.
The birds here aren't vicious seagulls, they are blackbirds and they don't get in my husband's hair - they just get on his nerves.
One day last week, when my husband was lying next to the pool with his hand down in the filter he was trying to fix, he watched as one bird after another came from the front of the house, swooped down over the deck, released droppings, pulled back up and flew away. Bird after bird, swooping and dropping over the same 10-foot runway on the deck.
The next day, when my husband was again next to the pool, this time on his hands and knees, one arm in the still-broken filter up to his elbow, he looked up to see the same irritating little airshow taking place. Like little feathered airplanes, the birds would zoom in, dip and drop.
The deck was turning into a sea of white bird-droppings.
Why were they doing this? It was as much of a mystery as in the Alfred Hitchcock movie. Were they aiming for the pool and missing? Who was drawing up the flight plan for these winged creatures?
"What's with all those birds?" he asked me. "I hate birds. They sit up in those trees watching me. It's kind of creepy."
Me? I'll take the blackbirds and their white droppings any old day. The blackbirds only threaten my husband and he can take care of himself - and the deck. But the hawk that hung around our old house threatened everybody. He terrorized the other birds because he stole their eggs or their babies, and when he swooped down, it wasn't to drop something; it was to pick up something - like a baby squirrel.
Now, those are the kind of birds I hate.
But anyway, a bird problem is a bird problem, and we had to figure out how to solve it before an unsuspecting sunbather got pelted with little white bird bombs.
The third day my husband spent a couple hours with his arm down the pool filter, he watched how the birds swooped underneath the Japanese maple just beyond the deck in the side yard before hitting their favorite dropping place on the deck. He had an idea. He yanked his arm out of the filter, walked over and closed the gate into the side yard.
Voila. Runway interrupted.
He got the filter fixed shortly after that, probably because he was able to concentrate on the matter at hand instead of the matter overhead.
So, the next day he was in the flower garden, pulling weeds when he heard a loud splash.
He turned around, and there bobbing around in the pool as if he owned it was a mallard duck with a bright green head.
"Hey, get out of there," my husband yelled.
With that, the duck stuck its webbed feet deeper into the water and paddled around a little faster.
"Hey!" my husband said again, this time a little louder.
The duck flapped its wings, splashing before taking off over - except in the opposite direction - the same runway the blackbirds had used.
My husband watched it fly away.
"Geez, I do hate birds," he muttered.

Jim's flying higher than any old airplane

2007-05-24T11:26:00.001-07:00

Published May 21, 2007

A huge cake with gobs of white frosting proclaimed, "Congratulations Jim."
It was on the pastry table in the dining room.
Along the opposite wall was a long table weighed down with roasters filled with chicken and scalloped potatoes and other party food.
The room was packed with people heaping food onto paper plates.
And one of them must have bumped into the picture frame that was lying in front of the big white cake because there was frosting on one of its corners.
The frame with one white corner contained a photograph of my brother, Jim. He was wearing his graduation cap and gown, and he had a huge smile on his face.
The picture had been matted with a wide white board, and there was a pen next to the frame so people could sign their names or write a sentiment to Jim.
"Best wishes, Jim."
"Finally," wrote his twin, Tim.
"Congratulations Dad. Love you, Lauren."
"Luv u, Morgan."
Lauren and Morgan are his daughters.
For you see, my brother didn't enter college right out of high school.
He's 42 years old, and he just earned an associate's degree in applied science. He's an ultrasonographer - a person who does ultrasounds - and his degree got him a job in a hospital. He starts next week.
Jim was one of those people you read about. He had worked for almost 20 years as a baggage handler at the airport. It was a job he loved even though his elbows hurt most of the time, a vestige of his high school pitching career. He didn't complain much. It's not in his nature.
But then the airline started cutting his hours. It was OK for a while. His wife is a nurse so at least they had one steady income. But three kids aren't cheap. Finally, after yet another cut in his hours, he knew he had to find another job.
What could he do? He had some college but not a degree. He knew no other job than the one he had held for two decades.
So he went back to school - to Lorain County Community College - to learn a new profession. To be retrained.
That was two years ago, and we haven't seen much of Jim since then. He studied hard - and he studied a lot.
"Where's Jim?" someone would always ask at family gatherings, many of which were to watch big Ohio State or Browns games.
"Studying," would always be the reply.
"Jeesh," someone would mutter. "He's always studying."
"It's hard," Jim would tell me. "And I have a lot of stuff to do."
The classes may have been grueling but they seem to have paid off, not just for Jim but for the other 10 applied science ultrasonographer graduates in his class. Nine of the 11 have landed jobs in their field.
Many of his classmates were at the party yesterday to help him celebrate. Many of them added their signatures to the mat around his photo.
"Where's Jim?" I heard someone ask at one point.
For the first time in two years, the answer wasn't "studying."
"He's out back," someone answered.
I looked out into the backyard and there he was, looking a lot like he did in the photo.
Of course, he no longer wore his cap and gown.
But he did wear that same great big smile.

A house where 2 boys and their parents grew up

2007-05-17T09:46:00.000-07:00

Published May 14, 2007

A year ago this month, we planted a "For Sale" sign in the front yard of our beautiful old house on a tree-lined street in Amherst.
All last summer that sign was there, except when it was plucked out and leaned against the sandstone steps so the lawn could be mowed.
We saw that sign standing there every time we pulled out of the driveway, including the time last August when we hauled the last of our belongings from the place.
The sign was still there in the fall when there was no one living in the house to hear the roar of the crowds at football games on Friday nights, when no one was there to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters.
And it was there through the winter, although by that time, it was leaning a little.
I didn't drive by it much. It hurt my feelings to think that no one wanted the house that was our home for 22 years. I wanted my house to be like the prom queen - pretty and popular - but she was the girl who wasn't even asked to the dance.
The "For Sale" sign remained there in the spring as the rains fell and made the grass around it grow faster than its absentee owners could mow.
Finally, after almost a year, the square metal sign's sentry duty is over. Someone has bought our house.
We haven't met the new owner, but she must be someone who looked beyond the flaws of something that has been standing for 117 years (like creaky floorboards and wavy window glass).
I plan to write her a letter, passing down stories of the house, the way we pass down stories of our ancestors.
I want to tell her about the day my husband announced - and I panicked - that he was going to tear the shingle siding off the house and restore the cedar boards underneath.
I want to tell her there is a baseboard heater in the smallest bedroom because that's the room my baby slept in when I brought him home from the hospital.
And then I'll tell her the wall behind the bedroom door is patched because that baby grew into a teenager with a temper and one day flung the door open with such force that the doorknob punched a hole in the wall.
I'll tell her that the cracks in the grout in the tile floor of the kitchen are there because the people who installed it - my husband and I - didn't know what we were doing. But she should probably be thankful she can even see the tiles because I remember crying while on my hands and knees because the grout was drying faster than I could wipe it from the tiles.
I'll tell her how the fireplace mantel in the family room addition came from a salvage yard in Ohio City and the big oak columns came from an auction.
I'll point out the tree in the backyard that came from my grandma's yard, and I'll show her how she can hang an Ohio State flag from the two cup hooks that have been screwed into the ceiling on the wraparound porch.
And maybe I'll even apologize for that smelly skunk and its smelly family that most likely will wake her up some nights - even though I did everything in my power - except convince my husband to shoot them - to get rid of them.
And if she doesn't believe me, she can ask the neighbor - the one who drove me and a cardboard box filled with five baby skunks out in the country to find them a new home.

Almost sleepless in St. Louis

2007-05-14T11:03:00.001-07:00

Published May 7, 2007

The plane was about to land in St. Louis.
The muffled voice of a flight attendant was coming in over the music on my iPod. I pulled out my earplugs, and yep, the mom behind me was still loudly encouraging her baby to continue his squealing.
I was that cranky business traveler unnerved by an assuredly first-time mom and her assuredly adorable baby.
I unfolded myself and got off the plane.
I had come to the Gateway to the West for a newspaper conference that was being held in a hotel right across the Mississippi River from the famous shiny 630-foot arch.
The hotel had two round towers, a tall skinny one and a short squatty one. I checked in, and the clerk pointed me toward the short squatty tower.
With my laptop and my carry-on on my left shoulder and my large rolling suitcase in my right hand, I went looking for my third-floor room.
The circular tower was set up so that the core was open from floor to ceiling. I got off the elevator and circled around until I found my room.
I was so anxious to see the arch, I let all my bags fall when I got into the room and ran over to the window.
I looked out. There was an arch, all right, the slight arch of a rather ugly bridge beyond the brick walls of rather ugly buildings.
Oh, well. I won't be in the room much anyway, I thought.
Might as well take a quick shower. I went in the bathroom, only to find a pool of water standing over what appeared to be a clogged tub drain.
Back to the front desk.
"My tub is clogged," I quietly told the desk clerk.
"Oh, there are always drainage problems over there. I'll put you on a higher floor. Those seem better," she told me.
Dreaming of my new room on the fifth floor - this one surely with a view of the arch - I hauled my repacked bags out of my room - and into the roar of dozens of teenagers pouring into the common area of the tower. A man was telling them to go find their rooms.
When the elevator came, about 10 of these teenagers dashed past me. I got in, looked at the "5" button but pushed "1."
Back to the front desk.
"Um," I said to the clerk who had accommodated me earlier, "there seems to be about 500 children in my tower."
"They're here for a retreat," she said.
I found myself wishing for the single noisy baby on the airplane.
I walked away. I had to think. I had to figure out if I was being difficult or if I was entitled to not only a tub with a working drain but also some peace and quiet.
Ten minutes of pacing in front of the hotel convinced me.
I went back to the front desk and chose another desk clerk. I explained - nicely - what I had been through. He not only put me in another room in the other tower, he also gave me some coupons for free cocktails.
I was tired as I got in an elevator for the third time. I had no expectations as I pushed "17" and the elevator carried me up.
I slid the card into the slot on my door and pushed it open.
There, before my eyes, stood the great arch. I walked over to the window and pulled the sheer drapes. Wow. What a view. I looked around. Wow. What a room.
Now this was the kind of place a girl from out of town could sleep in.

There must be some spread in heaven today

2007-05-01T16:18:00.000-07:00

Published April 30, 2007

"I love stories. Stories keep alive those who have gone before us."
And with that, jazz singer Dianne Reeves launched into a song about her grandmother during her appearance at the Tri-C Jazz Festival this weekend.
I couldn't help but think about the stories we will always have about my mother-in-law, June. She died last Friday, after being sick and bedridden for more than a year.
She would never recover to come to live with us in the house we bought with her in mind, a house with a kitchen big enough for her to work her magic.
And "magic" is as good a word as any to describe what the former school secretary and mother of three sons did with food.
God love her, she may have been the worst cook to ever put a head of cauliflower in the oven.
It's true. One of her favorite dishes involved coring a head of cauliflower, pouring milk over it, sprinkling nutmeg on the top and then baking it in the oven.
Then she would proudly squeeze it on the table between a roast, a pitcher full of "gravy" (grease drippings) and candlesticks, a centerpiece, and salt and pepper shakers in the theme of the nearest holiday.
Add a bowl of pureed coleslaw - she made it in the blender - and champagne glasses filled with still-frozen mixed fruit to the crowd in the middle of the table and you had Sunday dinner at June's house.
But her love of cooking wasn't limited to Sunday dinners; she baked, too. And it didn't matter that anything she baked had the consistency of the nutmegged cauliflower.
When my husband and I were first married, she invited me to help her bake Christmas cookies. I'm no whiz in the kitchen myself, but I didn't want my new mother-in-law to know that - at least not yet - so we set off to holiday baking.
Three hours and batches and batches of cookies later, the kitchen was as white as the snowy backyard. There was flour everywhere, even on the ceiling, but it was all in a day's baking to June. What she lacked in culinary skill, she made up for in enthusiasm.
She loved holidays. Maybe it's because she was born on the Fourth of July. Every day had holiday potential. What better time for a Thanksgiving feast than a hot July day?
In a beach house. In New Jersey.
Why wait until a cold November day when you can cook up a turkey and all the trimmings any day of the year?
When my boys were young, we would join my in-laws for vacations on the Jersey Shore.
Imagine my surprise when I came up from the beach one day to find a 20-pound turkey thawing on the counter. For three days, that bird sat there slowly becoming unfrozen.
I don't remember how the meal went, but I do remember fearing for the life of my young son. But we all survived, just as my husband had survived a childhood of living in a house where "refrigerate after opening" was seen as an option and not a mandate.
We'll miss all those Sunday dinners with June. We'll miss her company and her joy in putting them on for us.
And some of us will even miss her cooking. My younger son told me not to forget to mention how good her "rolled meat" was. In this, another of her specialties, she took some sort of beef, rolled it around onions and raw bacon, cooked it in her favorite cast-iron pan and then served it with the grease from the pan ladled over it.
Hmmm. Greasy beef of undetermined origin.
Would someone please pass the coleslaw?

Did you ever buy a vacuum you liked?

2007-04-30T09:42:00.000-07:00

Published April 16, 2007

Eureka, Dirt Devil, Kenmore, Fantom.
They stood like soldiers up on a shelf.
Below them were their boxes that proudly proclaimed things such as "Bagless!" "12 amps!" "Rated 33.0!"
And I stood in the middle of the aisle sizing up one vacuum soldier after the other.
I was on a "Buy a Household Appliance" mission and there are few things in this world that are more humbling.
There are two ways to buy: As an educated consumer or flying by the seat of your pants.
Which is better? Beats me. I've never figured it out. All I know is that there was always something better than the one I bought.
I recently bought a new dishwasher, and I could not have been more educated. I studied online, and I studied the Consumer Reports' Buying Guide. I narrowed my choices, tucked the guide into my purse and went to nearly every store in the county that sells dishwashers.
My choices were nowhere to be found.
I showed a clerk in a popular large appliance store my choice in the buying guide.
She put on her reading glasses and looked at the page.
"Oh, those are last year's model numbers."
"But this is the 2007 buying guide," I told her.
"Yeah, but it comes out before the new models do."
See, you try to be an educated shopper, and they change textbooks on you.
I followed her to the model that she said used to be the model I was looking for.
"This one," she said. "See, it has three washing arms and an adjustable top shelf."
I wasn't looking at the dishwasher. I was looking at her, trying to figure out if she was telling me the truth. She seemed honest enough, but I couldn't be sure.
In the end, I wrote down the new model number and told her I'd be back.
As I was walking out of the store, I started thinking that my old dishwasher wasn't all that bad.
In fact, I didn't even need a new one. Just because the door was broken and the bottom shelf rolled down it and across the kitchen floor during loading or unloading was no reason to get rid of it. I could just keep using my leg to keep the shelf from rolling across the floor.
And it did get the dishes clean.
A couple of weeks and a bruised shin later, I was back in the store. My spirit was broken. My will to find the World's Best Dishwasher gone.
All I had left was faith in my fellow man so I bought the one the saleswoman recommended and hoped for the best. Although it has been fine, I still wonder about the lost model.
My trip to buy a vacuum cleaner was completely different. I decided we needed a new vacuum to clean our old house - yes, we still have both an old and a new house - and I went to buy one.
So, there I stood in the vacuum aisle, wishing I had my Consumers' Report Buying Guide. I narrowed down my choices by process of elimination and bought one - not the least expensive, but definitely at the low end.
It seemed to work fine, but what do I know? I found my buying guide and opened it to "Vacuums."
My chosen model was not among the top 10. Shoot, it wasn't among the top 33. But the brand was - and maybe, just maybe, they changed the name of the model after the guide came out.
After all, it is the 2007 buying guide, you know.

That robin looks as if it could use a bath

2007-04-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

Published March 26, 2007

Ahh, spring.
Time to put on some shorts (yikes), open up the windows to air out the house and do some spring cleaning.
Suddenly the "ahh" is gone.
No, I shouldn't say that. As much of a chore cleaning a year's worth of grit and grime is, it always feels so wonderful to be sitting in a clean house.
I know you probably feel the same way. Because, according to a survey done by the Soap and Detergent Association, which represents the makers of 90 percent of the cleaning products marketed in the United States, 98 percent of people feel good about themselves when the house is clean.
Yet, despite that, only slightly more than half (54 percent) said they clean on a daily or weekly basis, and 18 percent said their homes are filled with clutter.
But 65 percent believe a good spring cleaning will fix all that.
What room do you think people found the biggest priority when spring cleaning? It was the kitchen, followed by the living room and the bedrooms - with the bathrooms and family room a distant fourth and fifth.
If you go on the Good Housekeeping Web site, you can take a quiz to find out what kind of housekeeper you are. (As if you don't already know.) It's all based on how much time you spend cleaning each week.
The soap group's survey also asked people what the least rewarding tasks were. Cleaning the kitchen was No. 1 - hmmm, guess that explains its importance when it comes to spring cleaning.
Other unrewarding tasks were doing laundry, cleaning the garage or basement, cleaning the bathroom and mopping floors.
I really don't understand those answers, because it seems that doing those things results in instant gratification. You can see results immediately.
My first choice would have been cleaning out the garage or the basement, places that no amount of cleaning can make look clean.
Or how about that side of the stove that butts up against the counter, that magnet for all things gross?
Good Housekeeping rated me - a person who spends seven hours a week cleaning her house - a "member of the White Glove Sisterhood."
It says I'm a "serious cleaner."
And then it estimated the time it would take to complete my spring cleaning tasks: Five days.
Five days? Shoot, I just did what I thought was my spring cleaning in five hours.
But I did forget a couple of Good Housekeeping's recommended tasks, like cleaning the blades and grills on all the ceiling fans and washing the blinds and shampooing the carpets.
Now, I knew that I absolutely could not do that all myself, so I went to find my husband.
He was last spotted in the back yard raking leaves off the top of the pool cover.
He had moved on.
Now he was clearing the tall ornamental grasses he had chopped down.
Spring cleaning the yard.
I watched him bend over, scoop up a pile of cuttings and throw it in the trash. Go back for another load. Bend over, scoop up cuttings and throw them in the trash.
There aren't a lot of things that are readily apparent in married life, but this one was. I knew this yard-working man was not going to come indoors and help me dust the grills on the ceiling fans. I actually knew better than to even ask.
Hey, that's a subject matter the soap people never dealt with: Who in a house is responsible for all the spring cleaning?
It's easy to figure out the answer to that question here.
It's the person in the house, of course.

A walk down pierogi memory lane

2007-03-29T09:35:00.000-07:00

Published March 19, 2007

When I was young, we couldn't eat meat on Fridays so we ate fish or pierogis.
(Yeah, well, sometimes we ate toasted cheese, too.)
Then, in the '60s, the Catholic Church relaxed the rules and we could eat meat on Fridays - except during Lent. So, this time of year always sends me on a trip down Pierogi Memory Lane.
When I was young, my mother - who, being Hungarian, had dumpling skills for chicken paprikash but not pierogis - would phone St. John's Ukrainian Catholic Church on East 31st Street in Lorain - my dad's family's church - and order dozens of the potato-filled dumplings.
Then we would take a big empty bowl and a piece of tinfoil to St. John's church basement where tables of old women chatted in Ukrainian as they turned out pierogi after pierogi, lining them up on a big wooden cutting board. When the board was full, someone would carry it into the kitchen where other workers would drop the stuffed dumplings into boiling water.
When the pierogis were done cooking, they would be ladled into a big pot and it was from that pot your order would be counted out into the bowl you brought, ladled with butter and sauteed onions and sealed up with your piece of tinfoil.
Well, St. John's is still making pierogis - not every Friday but the third Friday of every month. And the dozens of very old women who made them when I was young have been replaced with about 20 young and old, male and female, church members, about half of whom speak Ukrainian.
Friday I went to St. John's to pick up some pierogis I had ordered.
I introduced myself to the man checking orders and taking payment at the door.
He pointed over toward the stove. "Talk to Father," he said.
I looked across the room and I saw a man in a T-shirt stirring huge steaming pots. I looked back at the seated money-taker.
"Father. Over there," he pointed again.
Then I realized he meant the young man in the T-shirt.
Father Steven Paliwoda was working just as hard as everyone else making the 200 dozen pierogis they expected to sell that day. He spoke to me in English but occasionally spoke to the woman next to him in Ukrainian.
Donna Kapucinski, who is 69 and lives in the same house on East 31st that she lived in as a child, told me St. John's has been making pierogis for at least 75 years.
"My grandmother made them here," she told me.
Across town, at St. Anthony's Catholic Church on East Erie Avenue, pierogi-making has been taken to a new level.
The school's PTU - with help from volunteer parishoners - makes about 1,200 dozen each week. Last year, the group made $32,000 selling pierogis.
Chairpersons Carla Rock and Lisa Stefan have the weekly sale down to a science. Those who can't come to the church to help out can peel potatoes or chop onions at home.
Unlike the Ukrainian St. John's, St. Anthony's has no ethnic affiliation. In fact, the priest, Father Joe West, who is Scottish and German, said he never heard of pierogis until he got to Lorain.
When I went to visit its pierogi-making operation last week, I was sent home with bags of frozen pierogis to cook.
So we've been eating pierogis every day since.
My son just asked me if I wanted anything from Taco Bell. He was going to get a March Madness snack.
"There's a lot of pierogis left in the refrigerator," I told him.
"I don't know how many days in a row I can eat pierogis," he said.
And then he added, "How many did you buy anyway? A gross?"
No, I thought, that's just the number of calories in all those pierogis I've eaten.

Victims made not born

2007-03-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

Published March 12, 2007

"Help me. Help me, please! Please, someone help me."
Those were the words, the only words spoken - over and over and over - by the new roommate that the nursing home had moved in with my mother-in-law.
If this woman was my mother or grandmother, the words would have been heartbreaking.
But she wasn't. And the words did not break my heart; they made me angry.
I was working late last week when the phone on my desk rang.
It was my husband. He was calling on his cell phone from the nursing home to tell me about it. He was upset and he was angry.
"Where's her old roommate? Did you complain?" I asked him.
Apparently they had done some patient shifting at the nursing home that afternoon and the way it looked to us - the only way it could look - was that they put this troublesome woman in with someone who couldn't complain about her - my mother-in-law.
My husband's mother has been in hospitals and nursing homes for a year. Her health is steadily declining. She speaks a little but could never complain about a roommate.
And that's where her son and his wife come in.
"There's nobody to complain to," he told me. "The only one here is the night nurse and she doesn't know anything about the move. In fact, she feels terrible about it. She keeps apologizing," he told me.
Nobody to complain to? Quite impossible for this newswoman to believe.
I had an idea.
"I'll call you back," I told him.
It wasn't even 9 p.m. I had bothered people a whole lot later than that.
I got the phone book and looked up the number for the nursing home. The receptionist answered the phone.
"I'm Patti Ewald. My mother-in-law is a resident there. Can you please tell me the name of the nursing home director?" I asked her.
She promptly gave me the name.
"Would you like her voice mail?"
"Do you have her home number?" I asked.
"Just a minute," she said. With that, I cradled the receiver between my ear and my shoulder so I could use both hands to look in the phone book myself. Yep, she was listed.
I told the receptionist never mind and then I dialed the director's home number.
I was trying to stay calm but I was having about as much success doing that as I have staying out of the ice cream in the freezer.
"What happened to her old roommate?" I asked.
"She said she would move," the director answered.
"She asked to move?"
"She said she would move," the director repeated.
Now, I know this roommate. I talked to her often. I was fairly certain she had not asked to be moved.
The director continued dancing around questions until it became apparent what had happened: The patients who could speak up and complain were spared the wailing roommate.
And since my mother-in-law couldn't, she was the unlucky winner.
But not for long.
My husband and I complained enough that by the next night, my mother-in-law had been moved to another room with another roommate.
And the wailing woman?
I don't know what happened to her. This particular nursing home has no separate quarters for Alzheimer and dementia patients.
She probably was put in a room with someone else who is unable to complain.
But this new "someone" most likely doesn't have a son and daughter-in-law willing to insist on peace and quiet for a gravely ill loved one.
And that's a shame because that means they don't have a mother like mine who taught us not to allow others to treat us unfairly.
"You have to stick up for yourself," my mom always told us.
"Because if you don't, no one else will."

Yes, it was a purr-fect day

2007-03-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

Published in The Chronicle March 5, 2007

We were going to the cat show.
My brother, my friend and me.
I was going because I really wanted to see all the cats.
They were going because I was schlepping them there.
They lasted, um, about five minutes.
"Know what it smells like when they put 500 cats in a gym?" my friend asked.
"Like they put 500 cats in a gym," he answered himself.
I don't care. I didn't smell anything. Besides, it was 225 cats, not 500.
I love the cat show. The North Coast Cat Fanciers group holds one every year at Clearview High School. It was at this very show 12 years ago that I bought a skinny little loudmouth I named Charlie Chan. He's sitting on my lap right now, no longer skinny but just as loud as the day I bought him.
If you have never been to a cat show, let me set the scene for you.
Vendors of feline paraphernalia line the hallways leading to the gym. They sell cat toys and cat beds and anything else a cat could ever want.
In the gym, cages of cats sit on rows of tables that stretch from one side of the room to the other. Their owners sit on chairs in front of them. Some are friendly, some are not (the owners, not the cats). I saw more than one sign that said, "Do not touch; owner bites."
Four judging tables line one of the walls and there are so many categories, judging goes on all day long.
I peer into cage after cage. Fluffy cats? Not for me. I'm in search of Siameses and their look-alike brethren, the Oriental Shorthair.
Ah-ha. I finally spotted my favorite - an all-white Oriental Shorthair. He looked just like a white Siamese.
He was curled up asleep in his cage - which was actually more like a zippered pup tent - with a chocolate-point Siamese that looked exactly like my Charlie did 11 years and about nine pounds ago.
The white cat's name was Versace. His Siamese friend's name was Zhivago.
As I looked at them, a woman came over and took the white cat out.
"He's beautiful," I told her.
"Thanks. It's his turn to be shown. When I come back, you can hold him."
Hold him? Me?
With that, she went scurrying toward the judges' tables.
When it was Versace's turn on the judge's table, he was a star. His beauty was overshadowed only by his personality. He batted at the cat toy the judge waved in front of him. He was quite charming. A winner.
But he didn't win! The judge put a Second Place ribbon on his cage.
How could that be?
Versace's owner, a woman from Denver, took the beautiful white cat out of the numbered cage and walked back toward her table. I waited a couple of minutes, then I followed.
When she saw me, she said, "Oh, do you want to hold him?"
She had been serious!
"Can I?"
"Sure," she said and she handed him to me.
"I can't believe he didn't win," I told her.
"I can't believe it either. He's No. 1 in his region," she said, "and 25th in the country. Oh, well."
"Do you win money at these things?" I asked her.
She laughed.
"No. It costs me money, a lot of money.
"But, when he wins one of these," she said as the back of her hand brushed the ribbons attached to the front of his cage, "I feel pretty."

Her fortune cookie said she'd go far

2007-02-28T12:44:00.000-08:00

Published Feb. 26, 2007

Something wasn't right.
Guang was working the counter at my favorite Chinese restaurant, the Hunan Wok.
He never works the counter. He is usually cooking while his wife, Mengxiao (pronounced Michelle), rings up my order.
Many times, their daughters, Milly, 15, and Xing, 11, are up front helping Mengxiao.
But the girls and their mom were nowhere around. It was only Guang and he was trying to tell me something. He was really animated, really excited.
But, I couldn't quite understand him.
I caught a word here and there. College. No work. Here too much.
I was trying to figure out what he was saying when, suddenly, he pointed behind me.
A van had pulled up out front and Mengxiao was driving.
So, I took my General Tso chicken and seafood and garlic sauce and went outside. Mengxiao will tell me what Guang is so excited about, I thought.
I walked over to the driver side window. Mengxiao looked different. She was all dressed up. I have spoken to her many times so I can understand her better than her husband.
"I don't work here much any more," she told me. "I got another job. I'm working in Human Services.
"And I'm going to college," she said.
She was so happy.
By this time, Guang had come outside and was peering through the passenger window at us.
He was beaming and nodding his head vigorously as Mengxiao told me about going to school. The pride he had in her and her excitement about going to school put a lump in my throat. I was as excited for her as they were.
"It's real hard - especially English composition - because I speak English as a second language," Mengxiao told me.
"But, I got an A on my first paper - and that is good because it gives me confidence," she said.
Guang and Mengxiao have worked very hard to make their restaurant a success. Guang came to the United States in 1992 from China. Mengxiao joined him here in 1993. Until recently, the restaurant was open seven days a week. Now they are closed on Mondays but they still work 60-hour weeks.
Until Mengxiao got another job.
She has been working for Human Services since October.
"I did it for two reasons. We needed medical insurance and I also wanted to broaden my experience," she said.
And that is the reason she went back to school, too.
She took English-as-a-second-language courses in 1995 but had to quit because she had to work in the restaurant.
"I went back there now because I want to be a social worker. My major is human services. It is my personality to want to help people," the 36-year-old Mengxiao said.
About an hour after I talked to Mengxiao, my cell phone rang.
"Patti, I just have to tell you one more thing. Mary Miller is my tutor. She has been coming to my house every Tuesday since 1997. I have to tell you about her, about how much she helped me."
Mengxiao said the real estate agent who sold them their house in 1997 recommended Miller to her.
"She taught me English. She taught me how to read a newspaper. She doesn't have to teach me English so much anymore but we still get together every week for lunch or something," Mengxiao said.
It was one of those times in life when I realize how much I take for granted. I sent my sons to college as if it was their God-given right and they went as if it was no big deal.
But it is a big deal.
I could see it in the eyes of this woman and her husband who was so proud of her he could have burst.

My heart's in New Orleans

2007-02-20T09:57:00.000-08:00

Published Feb. 19, 2007

Happy Lundi Gras!
It's the day before Mardi Gras and if you were in New Orleans today you would be dragging from your wild weekend on Bourbon Street.
But, you would have to get your act together because your hotel room is probably about $400 a night and that's way too much money for sleeping.
The parade tonight is Orpheus. It starts at 5:45 at the intersection of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon, up in the Garden District, and ends at the New Orleans Convention Center, just a few blocks from the French Quarter.
(Yes, that is the same Convention Center that housed all those people driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina but let's not think about that. Today is a day to celebrate. The people of New Orleans would want it that way.)
A perfect Lundi Gras Day begins at Cafe du Monde, where you order beignets - square, hot, powdered sugar-covered donuts - and cafe au lait, coffee with cream.
Then you would wander around the French Quarter people-watching and shopping. You would have to stop periodically to get a hurricane, the official drink of Mardi Gras, a fruity rum concoction.
Mid-afternoon, you would make your way up toward the parade route and find a good spot behind one of the waist-high metal barriers that line the route.
And then you wait, drinking hurricanes and eating po' boys - submarine sandwiches overfilled with breaded shrimp - that you buy from street vendors.
By the time the parade comes, people are packed like sardines on both sides of the street. Everyone waves their hands in the air to beg for the beads the riders on the floats are throwing.
The parade won't actually stop when it gets to the end. It will drive right into the Convention Center, where hundreds of people with tickets to the Orpheus Ball will be gathered.
And that's where the real bead-throwing begins.
I know that because I have been to an Orpheus Ball.
We were there seven years ago when the big doors opened and the gigantic floats came in. It was different than being along a parade route. People weren't packed in and there was no reason to beg for beads. More beads and trinkets than I had ever seen rained down fast and furious from every float.
Big fat fancy beads hit me in the head when I bent down to pick up ones I had dropped. Riders threw entire bags of beads and stuffed animals and doubloons in the colors of Mardi Gras - yellow, purple and green.
And the crowd in tuxedos and ball gowns scrambled for all of it.
After the floats, the ball resumed with live music and dancing and a buffet.
When we were there, we danced while Irma Thomas sang.
Tonight, you would be dancing to the music of the Top Cats.
And when the ball is over, you would make your way back to the hotel to rest up for Mardi Gras.
The Zulu parade is in the morning and you really must have to have a good spot for that one because the black-faced riders on the Zulu floats have the most prized "throws" of Mardi Gras - Zulu coconuts. They are real coconuts painted gold and adorned with beads and feathers. Riders aren't allowed to throw them - it's dangerous to get conked on the head with a coconut - but if you can get close enough to a float, you might be able to get a rider to hand you one.
And somehow, having a Zulu coconut on your lap on the plane ride home makes the trip back to snowy Ohio not quite so bad.

Lost: One brother and lots of common sense

2007-02-13T07:15:00.000-08:00

Published Feb. 12, 2007

We lost my husband’s brother.
Now, there are a lot of ways to lose someone.
You can lose someone at a crowded mall.
“Now, where is he? He was just behind us.”
You can lose someone on the highway.
“Speed up; I think I see his car way up there.”
You can lose someone – who has the tickets – at a Browns game.
“Now what do I do? Gimme a beer please.”
Or you can “lose” someone in the most final way. To the great beyond.
Well, we didn’t lose my brother-in-law to the great beyond, unless you consider New Jersey the great beyond. If you have ever been there, you know how it would be easy to mix up the two.
This man, my husband’s younger brother, who was a fire inspector and a volunteer firefighter in central New Jersey, has vanished off the face of the earth.
His phone has been disconnected. He has moved out of his apartment. He has no driver’s license or vehicle registered with the state of New Jersey.
We started looking for him about a month ago. His mother -- whose letters and phone calls he stopped answering nearly 10 years ago – is gravely ill. We thought he should know.
I called the police. I called his workplace. I called his firefighter “family.” No one knows where he is. And, I was starting to get the feeling that even if they knew, they couldn’t tell me.
I tried the state’s Social Security office and was told that they would send him a letter – that is, if the address they have for him is a good one -- telling him we were trying to reach him but that is all they would do.
We have been stymied over and over by privacy laws or people’s fear of what would happen to them if they violated privacy laws.
Yes, I know the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees our right to be left alone.
But, come on. I don’t want to search or seize anything. I just want to talk to my brother-in-law about his sick mother.
I was in a department store this week when I overheard one clerk tell another, “Did I tell you we finally found my father’s sister?”
My ears perked up. “You found someone who was lost?” I asked him.
“We’ve been looking and looking for my husband’s brother,” I told him. “How did you do it?”
He told me about how he used the Internet to find out where she was living and then it was just a matter of looking up her phone number – which was listed.
My dilemma isn’t quite that easy to resolve.
I walked across the store with the clerk who was helping me, the clerk who had been addressed by the successful private-eye clerk.
I told her my story.
And then she told me hers.
Her husband died in December after years of suffering from asbestos poisoning. She needed to tell her 37-year-old son but she didn’t know where he was.
He moved away three years ago and she has not heard from him since.
Wow. How many people can’t find members of their family? In this one department store on this one afternoon, there were three of us.
Is it that easy to disappear? If so, why don’t people with $100,000 in credit card debt just take off and not leave a forwarding address?
Oh, now I get it. The government can always find you. Your mother or your brother have no right to know where you are, but commit a crime and have an arrest warrant out on you and you better believe you’ll be found.
Somehow, I can’t believe that’s exactly what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote that Bill of Rights all those years ago.

Last one to the register is a rotten egg

2007-02-08T15:35:00.000-08:00

Appeared in The Chronicle Feb. 5, 2007

The true battle of Super Bowl weekend takes place nowhere near a football field.
Its players aren't protected by helmets and shoulder pads.
They are protected by winter coats and shopping carts.
Their tunnel onto the playing field is a parking lot and the portal from which they enter the game is opened by stepping on a black rubber mat.
They are shoppers in a pre-game frenzy and they have come to do battle in Marc's.
* * *
Marc's is always crowded. That's a given. But, Saturday afternoon, it was packed.
It was not only the day before Super Bowl Sunday, it was also the day before the Great Arctic Freeze was predicted to hit our area.
Partiers and survivalists. No wonder the place was packed.
Anyway, the battle began in the parking lot where the wind had already picked up and was whirling the snow around in gusts. Every legitimate spot was filled as was every nook and cranny a car could be stowed in.
Whenever a spot opened up, there were always two cars in a face-off for it.
I finally found a place to park and trudged - bent forward at a 45-degree angle - toward the store in a wind that was much colder and stronger than it had been 20 minutes earlier.
I went inside to get a cart but there already was a shopper at each row, tugging on the end buggy, trying to free it from the others it had firmly latched onto.
Finally, one of the tuggers managed to free not one shopping buggy but a block of buggies. I calmly walked around her and pulled one from the row she had left behind.
And onto the playing field I went.
In a grocery store, everyone is an equal. Every shopper with a buggy is like every other shopper with a buggy. Talent, strength - and stature - account for nothing. There is no rich and poor, no privileged and underprivileged.
No respect for others.
In the produce section, there was a buggy backup behind a shopper having a conversation with the man who was restocking the produce.
In the cheese section, there was a buggy backup between two shoppers having a conversation about someone's divorce.
The main aisle was like a highway during rush-hour with a lot of braking and near-misses.
I turned into the dairy aisle and parked my shopping cart as I studied the prices of half-and-half. I was engrossed in my comparison shopping when a woman in a parka and a ponytail craned her neck around to the front of me and said, "Hey, move your cart. Everyone is tripping over it."
I snapped out of my concentration and started apologizing and reaching for my cart to get it out of the way when all of a sudden I realized I had nothing to apologize for.
My cart was fully off to the side, right in front of me, in no one's way.
Then I got angry.
"Hey, who are you?" I called to the ponytail. "The traffic cop?"
My sarcasm was lost on her. She turned around, put her hand on her hip and said, "Yeah, I am."
Gulp.
I looked at the carton of half-and-half in my hand and suddenly wondered what I was doing in the dairy aisle.
That's not where you go Super Bowl shopping. I was a partier, not a survivalist.
I turned the cart around and headed to the back of the store where I belonged.
At the beer cooler - where people are friendly and there are never too many buggies.

Courtroom drama

2007-01-23T15:47:00.000-08:00

Appeared in The Chronicle Jan. 22, 2007

The clock on the dashboard said 8:48.
I had 12 minutes.
I put the car in park and grabbed my umbrella. It was snowing that kind of snow that makes a woman look like a wet dog when the flakes in her hair melt.
I walked as fast as one can walk in pumps across the parking lot and down the alley.
I got to the door. I could feel my heart beating in my chest.
Elyria Municipal Court.
I walked in and through the metal detector.
It beeped.
Of course it was going to beep. I was carrying an umbrella and my purse that was so full I couldn’t pull the zipper closed.
The officer came over, took my belongings from me and set them on a table.
“Walk through again,” he said.
I stepped back through, swiveled, stood up straight and walked though.
No beep.
I picked up my stuff and looked around for the courtroom of the judge to whom my case had been assigned.
I won’t give you the gory details as to why I was summoned to court last week – I’ll save those for Nancy Grace if she calls. Let’s just say I don’t think I was as much to blame for a minor traffic accident as did the officer who wrote me a ticket.
I found the correct courtroom and took a seat outside of it.
A sign said the courtroom door was to be kept closed – and that it was.
I dug my cell phone out of my purse and dialed.
“Paul,” I whispered, “It’s Patti. Are you coming? I’m here. In court.”
“Who is this?” my lawyer-turned-friend asked.
“It’s Patti Ewald.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll be there in about 10 minutes.”
We hung up and I sat there. There were no other people around. I spotted papers on a table outside the courtroom door.
I walked over and — as nonchalantly as I could — scanned the list of names the paper contained, looking for “Ewald.” Well, actually, I was looking for “dlawE.” The list was upside down.
“Can I help you?” a voice called from down the hall.
I moved away from the table and toward the uniformed court guy who had spoken to me. “I was supposed to appear in this court at 9 and it’s 10-after.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ewald.”
He looked at a piece of paper in his hand and said, “You’re supposed to be downstairs.”
Downstairs. Unchartered waters. I looked at him.
“That way,” he pointed.
When I got down there, it was apparent where everyone was. Both sides of a long hall were lined with chairs filled with people, people whose eyes were all on me.
A gauntlet.
I gulped and walked to the end of the hall and took a seat.
And there I sat. With nothing to read except the label on my umbrella.
I remembered seeing newspaper boxes outside the front door. I went to get one.
Once back downstairs, I took a seat in a short hall leading to the hall filled with people. I read my paper. Paul showed up a short time later. I was feeling much better.
“Just sit here. I’ll be back,” he told me.
I occasionally caught a glimpse of him darting in and out of different rooms. Finally, it was time for the attorney-client chat.
“Well, we’ll probably have to get a continuation. There are a couple things I have to do,” he told me.
“You know,” he said, “I didn’t mean for you to waste your whole morning here. You should have called first. You didn’t even have to come. I’ll take care of it.”
Now he tells me.

Patti Ewald is (not a criminal) managing editor of The Chronicle. You can reach her at pewald@chroniclet.com.

800 miles away, a mom can still back-seat drive

2007-01-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

Appeared Jan. 15, 2007

“If one more person calls to tell me that it’s snowing in Denver, I’m going to drive off this bridge.”
Those were the first words out of the mouth of my older son when I called him this week as he drove from Orlando – where he had left a job – to Denver – where he has taken a new one.
He was in his Jeep somewhere between Nashville and Kansas City.
In an ice storm.
Well, you can bet I wasn’t calling to tell him about snow in Denver.
I was calling to make sure he was still alive.
Yes, I was living yet another chapter you’ll never find in any parenting book: “What to do when your child is driving across the country by himself — in an ice storm.”
I had gotten up early that morning (before my son put the kibosh on phone-delivered weather reports) to chart his course on The Weather Channel.
He was about to embark on Day 2 of his three-day journey to Denver. This leg? Nashville to Kansas City.
I turned on the little TV in the kitchen and stood there staring at the screen for a couple minutes, scrutinizing the weather lady’s hair (it was gelled into oblivion), her outfit (where do people even buy red sweater vests anymore?) and the silk scarf tied around her neck (what’s that all about?).
And then she started saying some words that made me forget about the awful plaid shirt she was wearing – words like “Kansas” and “slow-moving storm” and “bad road conditions.”
And “ice.”
I took a few steps closer to the TV and watched as she swiveled and pointed to an amoeba-shaped splotch of color that depicted the ice storm. The amoeba was at an angle, with its tail somewhere in Texas and its head somewhere in Illinois or Indiana.
And cutting right through the mid-section of this splotch amoeba ice storm was the path my son would take that day.
In his Jeep.
By himself.
I dialed his cell phone.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Didyouseetheforecast?”
“I just got up.”
“You probably better turn on the TV. They keep talking about ice storms …”
“I’ll check it out – but it’ll be OK. I’ll be fine,” he told me.
“Did you buy new tires?”
“My tires are fine. Really.”
And that’s how the conversation continued for a couple minutes: A burst of mom panic followed by a son’s calm reassurance. And then we hung up.
Well, not much left for me to do. I walked over and turned off the TV, cutting off the weather woman in mid-sentence.
And then I left for the office.
I got busy and aside from the occasional panic that washed over me, I forgot about my son on an icy highway in the middle of nowhere.
My phone rang late that afternoon.
“It’s bad. It’s real bad. There are cars all over the place and I’m going about 30 miles an hour,” he told me.
But the funny thing was, I was less worried about him as he told me that than I was when he was confident and reassuring.
Now, what’s with that?
I guess I knew he had things under control – or perhaps I just finally realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
When he finally arrived at that day’s stopping point – a friend’s house in Kansas City – he called to tell me he had made it.
“Wow. I’m so glad you got there safely. Now what about tomorrow? Be careful.
“You know … it’s snowing in Denver.”

Patti Ewald, managing editor of The Chronicle, can be reached at 329-7142. If her line’s busy, she’s likely talking to her son who is calling from his new house in Denver.

Moving heaven and earth and a TV for the Buckeyes

2007-01-17T09:29:00.000-08:00

Appeared Jan. 8, 2007

“Let’s move the TV,” I tell my husband.
Groan, grumble, mumble.
“I don’t want to move the TV,” he says. “I like it where it is … plus, do you know how hard it is to move that TV?”
An hour or so later, I’m hanging onto the large-screen television as he is on his hands and knees nudging its metal and glass stand out of the corner and flat against the wall.
This TV-moving is just another in the long line of bright ideas that over the years I have convinced my husband to go along with.
But because I’m never sure if he relents because he sees the wisdom of my ways or because he knows I won’t stop badgering him until he does what I want, I keep up the chatter to keep his mind off the task at hand.
“This will be good. It will make more room for people to sit,” I tell him.
“Hold onto that TV,” he says.
“We can square up the couch and there will be more room for some extra chairs,” I say.
“Are you holding onto that TV?” he says.
“We can bring down that new chair from …”
“Now, what’s this? He asks as he holds up a round metal object. This fell off of something,” he says.
We feel up and down the metal stand and find no hole matching the object in his hand.
Hmmm. That’s odd. He sets down the mystery object and I go back to securing the TV while he moves the stand underneath it.
We are setting up for tonight’s big game, the national championship game between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Florida Gators.
I’m not sure how many are coming over to watch it but I want to be sure there will be enough room for everyone to sit.
Finally, the TV stand is flat against the wall.
“There,” I say.
“Why is the TV pitching forward like … hey, that’s what that piece is for,” he says. “It levels off the front of the stand. We have to take the TV down.”
Take the TV down?
I think if you put all the wires attached to the back of that TV end to end, they would wrap around the earth. Twice.
“Are the wires long enough to do that without coming undone?” I ask.
He bends over the back of the TV, gathers the wad of wires and shakes them gently like a person would shake a pom-pom to get all the strips straight.
“I think so. Now you grab that side while I grab this side and set the TV down in front of the stand,” he says.
We pick up the large television – which weighs about 23 ounces – and, as we set it down, I see half a dozen plugs – those yellow, red, blue, white, green plugs – hanging there, attached to nothing.
Gulp. I’m starting to get a little nervous now. My husband has been a good egg up to this point but – as with any good egg – you never know when it’s going to blow its top.
He never did, though. Even though this bright idea didn’t exactly work out. We ended up putting the TV back where it was in the first place.
I even reconnected those colored plugs while he was searching for his glasses so he could do it.
“There,” I said when he came back in the room. “All fixed.”
“So, what do you want me to do next? Move the three-piece sectional?” he asked sarcastically as he pointed to the massive sofa across the room.
Well, I wasn’t going to bring it up but since he mentioned it …

Give me $10 on 2-0-0-7 -- and box it

2007-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

Appeared Jan. 1, 2007

I am the Grinch of New Year's Eve.
My dashing husband likes nothing better than to don a tuxedo and trip the light fantastic.
Me? I bah-humbug my way through the balloons and the confetti and especially through Auld Lang Syne.
I don't understand what a person is supposed to be feeling when the ball drops?
Is it hope for a new beginning? A clean slate? A fresh start?
To me, it signals lost hopes and dreams, the beginning of the end.
How grinch-like is that?
I don't even like to think about the fact that it's New Year's.
One of my brothers called about noon yesterday to see what we were doing for the big night.
“I don't know,” I said. “We were thinking about going to a movie. Why?”
“I was thinking we could get together,” he said.
“There is a catch, though,” he added.
Gulp.
“We have kids,” he said.
Kids? On New Year's Eve?
Double-gulp.
Oh, well. Maybe that's not so bad. After all, how can one get all melancholy and depressed about lost hopes and dreams when there are kids around?
There will be much more important things to fret about - like, say, cheese dip spilling all over the pool table.
I Googled “New Year's depression” and one of the pieces of advice I found (right after “don't have such high expectations”) is “live in the present, live for today.”
And there is nothing like small children to get you front and center in “today.”
My sons are much older than most of their cousins because I'm the oldest of five kids.
I often wonder what those young cousins think of Aunt Pat. They probably look at me as that eccentric, oddball aunt. You know the type. Every family has one.
Sometimes when I see the little darlings, I think that maybe I could be more involved with them, take them shopping, have them for sleepovers. But, alas, that thought is fleeting.
I do have a New Year's wish, however. And I'm sincere about it. (Hey, even the Grinch showed he had a little bit of heart.)
I wish that all those people who play the lottery at the gas station would win.
Yeah, it's aggravating when the line winds around to the back of the store because all the people in front of me are reciting their Lotto numbers to the clerk or are buying those scratch-and-wins.
But I really, truly wish they would win - and win big.
Last week, at a gas station in downtown Elyria, the woman in front of me bought $15 worth of assorted tickets and then right before she walked away from the counter, said to the clerk, “Give me $5 on Number 3.”
She bought $5 worth of gas that cost $2.29 a gallon presumably because that was all the money she had left after her lottery purchases.
Hmmm. That amount of gas might get her to Lorain and back.
But she probably didn't even think of that. She was too busy dreaming of winning the lottery.
A Harvard University student named Emily Oster did her senior honors thesis a few years ago on “Dreaming big: Why do people play the Powerball?”
She concluded that it was for fun and entertainment and even though critics suggest lotteries take advantage of people, they actually set up a win-win situation.
States get money for worthwhile things such as education while consumers get a chance to have fun and dream big.
And what's so bad about that? Because if life is, as I suspect, a lot of looking back on lost hopes and dreams, those dreams might as well be big ones.
Right?

The true spirit of Christmas is right beside you

2007-01-17T09:26:00.003-08:00

Appeared Dec. 25, 2006

He had Christmas under control - and then the letter came.
It was from his great-aunt. Stop by, she wrote, if you have a little time. I'll make us some Christmas tea.
He didn't want to go. She was old. She was crippled from a stroke. He wanted to remember her as she was when he was little, when she was the life of the party at Christmas time.
But in the end, his guilt won out and begrudgingly he drove from the suburbs to her house in the older part of town.
He hardly remembers walking up to her door. He felt disembodied. But then, he rang the bell.
“And just as I was thinking I should turn around and go, I heard the rattle of the china in the hutch against the wall. The triple beat of two feet and a crutch came down the hall.”
There was the click of the latch and the door opened. There she stood, his old great-aunt, tiny and fragile with a brace on her leg.
She wore thick glasses and her eyes seemed bigger behind them and were milky like old eyes often are. But as soon as she recognized her great-nephew, those old eyes lit up as if they were young again.
“Come in! Come in! She laughed the words. She took me by the hand. And all my fears dissolved away as if by her command.
“We went inside and then before I knew how to react, before my eyes and ears and nose was Christmas past, alive, intact!”
Christmas was spilled around the room. There were wooden soldiers and a porcelain nativity scene - and the room smelled of oranges and cinnamon and pine.
“Like magic I was 6 again, deep in a Christmas spell. Steeped in the million memories that the boy inside knew well.
“And here among old Christmas cards so lovingly displayed, a special place of honor for the ones we kids had made. And there, beside her rocking chair, the center of it all, my great Aunt stood and said how nice it was I'd come to call.”
Nervousness, excitement and guilt were all twisting around inside him so he began blathering about the weather and other impersonal topics. She listened patiently, but when she could get a word in, she smiled and said, “What's new?”
As if those two words gave him permission to be himself, he relaxed and opened up. He told her about his life and she told him about hers, about how the stroke had changed it.
She spoke with candor and humor about her physical limitations. Then suddenly, as if able-bodied, she got out of her rocking chair and scurried to the kitchen to brew the Christmas tea.
“I sat alone with feelings that I hadn't felt in years. I looked around at Christmas through a thick hot blur of tears. And the candles and the holly she'd arranged on every shelf, the impossibly good cookies she still somehow baked herself.
“But these rich and tactile memories became quite pale and thin when measured by the Christmas my great Aunt kept deep within. Her body halved and nearly spent, but my great Aunt was whole. I saw a Christmas miracle, the triumph of a soul.
“The triple beat of two feet and a crutch came down the hall, the rattle of the china in the hutch against the wall. She poured two cups. She smiled and then she handed one to me. And then we settled back and had a cup of Christmas tea.”
***

Father Mike Ausperk told that story at Christmas Eve Mass at St. Joe's several years ago. It has haunted me since.
Father Mike is now at St. Vincent de Paul in Cleveland. I called to ask him about it.
It was a story called “A Cup of Christmas Tea,” he told me.
It was written 25 years ago by Tom Hegg, who was then a 29-year-old teacher in Minnesota. His pastor had asked him to write something for the church's 125th anniversary.
I tracked down the author in Eden Prairie, Minn., where he still teaches drama at Breck, a private school affiliated with the Episcopal Church.
“It's based on my grandmother and my great-aunt,” Hegg said. “We lived with them when I was little. It was a big Victorian house in Minneapolis. My grandmother lived on the second floor and my great-aunt lived on the third floor.”
The book has sold 1.7 million copies and remains a holiday favorite. I recently spotted it on the table of Christmas books at Barnes & Noble.
“You wouldn't believe how many people say, ‘You have to be talking about my mom,’” Hegg said.
Or, in my case, my grandma. This is our first Christmas without her. She died last January. And, although I can no longer have a cup of Christmas tea with her, I can still think about her when I do.

Cat between a bed and a hard place

2007-01-17T09:26:00.001-08:00

Appeared Dec. 18, 2006

Charlie fell out of bed last night.
He made as much noise as any 15-pound Siamese who slides off a bed and becomes wedged between the bed and the nightstand.
I reached my arm over the side, looped my hand under his belly and pulled him back up on the bed.
It was kind of like the time my husband fell out of bed in a hotel on New Year’s Eve, except my husband became wedged between the bed and the wall and I couldn’t loop my hand around his belly and drag him back up. He was on his back like an upside-down turtle. Charlie was wedged standing upright like one of those little plastic reindeer on the mantel.
My husband was no easy loop-and-drag, he was more like a pull-and-tug.
It sure seems to me I’ve had an inordinate occurrence of wedging in my family.
Well, anyway, Charlie didn’t start immediately purring once safely back up on the bed last night and that scared me a little.
I was pretty sure he was just freaked out - as anyone who was sound asleep one second, a wedged plastic reindeer the next would be.
The only way he could have gotten hurt in his short fall was if he had caught - and chipped - one of the fangs that hang out of his mouth and make him look as if he has a Fu Manchu mustache.
But there were no chipped fangs and Charlie was soon lying next to me once again with his head on my pillow purring away.
He is a very cool cat (somewhat of a pest but an affectionate pest - he has pest-ed his way onto my lap as I write this) so when a friend of mine was looking for a cat, I wanted him to have a cat like Charlie.
Now this is the kind of friendly “help” that gets me in trouble - as my husband the turtle will tell you.
But I never learn, so I went in search of a Siamese on the Internet.
Purebred Siamese kittens cost about $250 so that was out of the question.
Cats from Siamese rescue groups were available for about $80 but money didn’t even become an issue here because the closest rescued Siamese was in Atlanta.
So I kept looking. I finally found a F-R-E-E Siamese - and he was in Parma, even.
I was thrilled. I told my friend and soon, he was the proud owner of a Siamese cat.
You can probably guess where this story is going from here - downhill.
The cat immediately went into hiding in my friend’s apartment. He finally found it up inside the bottom of the refrigerator. He did not loop-and-drag or pull-and-tug the creature, figuring it would come out when it was ready.
Well, it wasn’t ready 14 hours later when my friend went to work. He still held onto hope it would come out when it was ready.
Well, 24 hours passed and if the cat did get ready and come out, it didn’t use the litter box or eat its food.
Didn’t. Use. The. Litter. Box. Five words no cat owner ever wants to mutter.
It was becoming increasingly clear why this Siamese was free.
So, my friend called the cat’s former owner in Parma and she came and took it back home - back home where it lives out of doors, a little piece of information she didn’t tell me or I didn’t catch in the beginning of this episode.
Trust me, all the stories that start out with me butting into other people’s business don’t end this happily. But I sure was relieved this one did.
Now, does anyone know where I can get a Siamese -- cheap?

Christmas is a go-go at our house

2007-01-17T09:24:00.000-08:00

Appeared Dec. 11, 2006

The small gathering of 30 in my immediate family is gearing up for another Christmas Eve.
I’m never the host - I put the turkey on the table at Thanksgiving so at Christmas, it’s somebody else’s turn.
The last couple of years, it has been at my youngest brother’s house.
Last year we brought Grammy from the nursing home.
She was a good egg, all right.
We helped her along - one of us at each of her elbows - but she walked up the driveway and took the couple of steps into the house.
We sat her down at the table and got her a plate of food. She ate it all and, while she didn’t participate in the conversation much, she seemed to enjoy herself as she took it all in.
Then we helped her into a reclining chair in the living room.
We made it lean back and covered her up. She was thrilled to see all the little kids jumping around excitedly as they waited for gifts to be handed to them.
Finally all the packages were handed out.
And Gram was asleep.
She slept through the rustling of paper as everyone opened their presents.
She slept through the squealing kids. She slept through the “oohs” and “ahhhs” and the “thank yous.”
This year she’s gone. She died last January.
She’s just a happy memory now like my other grandmother.
My other grandma, my father’s mother, died years ago. We didn’t know her as well as our other grandmother.
She and my grandfather got divorced when I was very young and she moved to Los Angeles.
But she never forgot us at Christmas.
I was thinking about her gifts the other day when someone was talking about the last day to mail packages.
According to the United States Postal Service, you better get your packages in the mail by Dec. 13 - which is Wednesday - if you want to make sure they get where they are going by Christmas. (Unless of course you want to pay for Priority Mail - then you have until Dec. 20 - or the much more expensive Express Mail - then you have until Dec. 22.)
Anyway, my California Grandmother that we didn’t know very well would send us a HUGE box every Christmas, and what fun it was.
She apparently (my father told us) loved sales.
She must have shopped sales all year long and gathered up the fruits of her labor in early December to ship them to us. Every year, a week or so before Christmas, a HUGE box would come to our house - and you never knew what was going to be in those packages.
She would send cufflinks with the letter “W” on them. Now, we have no Williams or Wilmas or anybody else with a first or last name that starts with “W” in our family.
But the letter “W” was what was left when the cufflinks went on sale, so that’s what she bought.
One year, she sent these white go-go boots with flowers embroidered down the side of them. They were very cool. And, one was even the right size. Yes, ONE of them. It was a PAIR of go-go boots but each boot was a different size.
My sister and I were disappointed - but only for a second.
You see, there were still a lot of treasures to be unearthed in the box the size of a trunk. Just because the go-gos were a no-go didn’t mean there weren’t many wonderful things still to come.
She would always send pink dress shirts for my father. Back then, my father wasn’t a pink-shirt-wearing kind of guy (not that he’s crazy about them now). But, once again, pink was likely the only color left in a 17-inch neck when the shirts went on sale.
Those didn’t go to waste like the “W” cufflinks, however. My sister and I wore them as nightshirts.
I think what made those Christmas boxes from our California grandma so fun was the total irresponsibility that went into filling them.
And that was very different from the grandma we knew. The grandma who slept in the chair last Christmas.
She was practical and frugal and bought us pajamas and knitted us mittens and fed us wholesome food.
The pajamas SHE bought us were flannel and in our size ... we didn’t have to fashion them out of pink dress shirts my dad didn’t want.
So there you have it. That explains my three brothers and my sister and me.
What it explains I don’t quite know, but if you ever see me hobbling down the street in one brown boot with no heel and one black boot with a high heel and wearing hand-knit mittens that are keeping me from getting a firm grip on a big brown box I am schlepping to the post office, don’t feel sorry for me.
Because I was lucky enough to have two grandmas.
And not everybody can say that.

Parents behind the eight-ball at Christmas

2007-01-17T09:23:00.000-08:00

Appeared Dec. 4, 2006

It’s almost Christmas and we all want to give each of our children a “Red Ryder BB Gun” moment.
But granting a fondest wish, like the one Ralphie got in “A Christmas Story,” is a tough thing for a parent to accomplish because you have to have a child who wants something so badly he speaks of little else in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
And there is a very narrow window of opportunity because there are only a couple years when a kid is old enough to want something very badly but young enough to have not yet copped the teenage entitlement attitude. And when they are older than that, they have already learned they don’t always get everything they wish for.
Sadly, it never happened with my two boys. I don’t know ... they never wanted anything so badly they could burst.
Not that I didn’t try. I stood in line at Toys “R” Us at 6 a.m. to get the elusive Marshmallow Man “Ghostbusters” action figure for my younger son.
And my older son ... well, he was not only our first child, he was the first grandchild on both sides. His pile of presents was so high on his third Christmas that he was too overwhelmed to even go near it without some serious coaxing. I don’t think he ever wanted for anything.
But I remember my own Ralphie moment. I must have been about 12.
Of course, I was a greedy Ralphie. I wanted two things: A Spirograph and a tape recorder.
Remember Spirographs? You made beautiful geometric designs by putting a pen tip in a gear that fit inside of a larger ring you had pinned to a piece of paper. It was amazing to me.
And the tape recorder I got had two reels inside of it and I had to actually thread the tape through one of the wheels to get it started. I taped music off the radio and my little would-be Barbra Streisand sister taped herself making up songs (much to her later embarrassment).
It was a great Christmas.
This year, I’m predicting a Ralphie moment for my 7-year-old nephew Ryan.
Ryan is the third child - first boy - of one of my brothers.
And Ryan wants a pool table.
Yes, it’s a little more expensive than Ralphie’s Red Ryder - but what do kids know about things like that?
And guess who inadvertently introduced Ryan to the game of pool.
Yep, Aunt Pat. That’s me.
His arm was in a cast this summer - he had hopped a fence to retrieve a baseball - when all his cousins were splashing around in our pool.
Bored with watching his cousins try to kill themselves (or each other) as they jumped off the diving board, Ryan went looking for some other way to amuse himself.
He found the pool table, picked up a cue stick and became a different kind of shark than his aquatic cousins.
Then it started.
“Can we get a pool table?”
“When are we going to get a pool table like Aunt Pat’s?”
Soon his parents realized they couldn’t deny Ralphie, er, I mean Ryan his fondest Christmas wish.
Shhh. Don’t tell Ryan but the pool table sits unassembled undercover in his basement.
And now it’s his parents - not Ryan - who are ready to burst waiting for Christmas morning.
Anticipating that Ralphie moment when it becomes crystal clear why it truly is better to give than receive.

Not all turkeys are on a platter

2007-01-17T09:20:00.000-08:00

Appeared Nov. 27, 2006

I have a fancy Jenn-Air cooktop in my new kitchen.
I think it can do anything but send a man to the moon.
It has a grill that becomes a griddle and there is a whole cupboard full of gadgets and gizmos for the thing that I haven’t even explored yet.
The pictures in the instruction booklet show amazing feats of cooking being performed by a beautifully coiffed woman in a dress and high heels.
She is the picture of cool, calm and collected as she watches her chicken cook on its rotisserie (another amazing presto-chango of the grill-griddle).
Well, at 7 a.m. Thanksgiving morning, I was standing at my Jenn-Air cooktop, but that is where any resemblance to the June Cleaver woman ended.
It wasn’t a lovely sight.
I was wearing cutoff sweatpants and a T-shirt with my hair pulled up and no makeup on trying to figure out how I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner for 30 people on a stove with one burner - one ELECTRIC burner.
I really did not go walking up and down the street inviting every stranger I saw to Thanksgiving dinner. No, 30 is the number of people in my immediate family. But that’s OK. The way I look at it is if you have to cook for more than two, you might as well cook for 30.
And, sadly, it wasn’t 31. This was the first Thanksgiving without my grandmother. Even though she had some problems the last couple years - like serving utensils would pile up on her plate because she would forget to pass them with the platters - at least she was with us.
But we were able to bring my mother-in-law home from the nursing home for dinner so that gave us something to be thankful for.
Anyway, I knew there was a problem with the stove two weeks ago so I called a repairman.
He was there bright and early the next morning. He was this old guy with gray hair who said he was helping out his son who owned the repair business. That was nice, I thought. He must have retired and was looking for something to occupy his time.
We chatted - me, the youthful Jenn-Air owner and him, the old repairman - while he yanked and tapped on the cooktop, stopping occasionally to mop his brow.
The conversation came around to the question all conversations with repairmen seem to come around to: Where did you go to high school?
Come to find out, we went to the same high school.
And graduated the same year.
Good thing the stove wasn’t working, I would have choked on whatever I had cooked on it. But I don’t think I gasped and I recovered quickly, storing that little piece of information wherever middle-aged people store things that freak them out.
Anyway, he said it was just a loose wire, and he fixed it.
I repressed the overwhelming urge to tell him I didn’t believe it was that simple - a move I lived to regret when, on Thanksgiving morning with only six hours until dozens of hungry family members would descend upon me, I only had one working burner.
Well, there was some judicious potato-cooking and I baked and nuked everything I could and, of course, everything came out fine.
Preparing the meal was more difficult this year - burner problems aside.
I attributed it to being in a new house and not being able to find some rather important Thanksgiving things - such as tablecloths and the good china - but maybe there’s another reason I had a harder time preparing Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Wait, let me get a towel to mop my brow while I think about what it could be.