Something Funny

When I was grocery shopping the other day (read stellarpurpledaisy's post for another grocery store laugh), I didn't believe my eyes when I saw, on one of those signs hanging from the ceiling in my local Hitchcock's Foodway, that a brand new food category has been invented. Under the usual headings of "canned foods" and "juices," there is now the label "institutional food."

Institutional food? What's that? Jello, pudding, and Ensure? These were the only things on the aisle that I could imagine placing under this new category.

I hope I'm not being insensitive. It's just that if you're in an institution, I assume the insitution does the grocery shopping for you. I would object to asking my husband to "go down to the store and pick up some institutional food." I would, I think, object to eating institutional food in general. If jello, chocolate pudding, and Ensure are the only items on the institutional food list, then it is no surprise that old people loose their teeth and have loose bowels.

That's all. Oh yeah, and just in case it's never happened to you, it's hard to not feel like a dork when you're standing by the bananas laughing outloud to yourself.

Calendar

“November,” mouths the silver crane
poised aloft, in six-inch wingspan stride.
Bold calligraphy scrawls, Celebrate Change;
Behind, the bird soars in easy, thoughtless glide.
The girl who pinned-up this calendar, though,
recognizes that it has just turned January,
and the frozen field, outside her window
is wintry and stale, a cold, ashy grey.
She lifts two plates from the table,
scrapes yellow egg into the trash. This year
has just begun, she says.
She turns the page: an angel.
The petulant child on the floor cries
and grabs her ankle.

Ew, Issac, THAT IS SO GROSS!


Toilet paper, cardboard boxes, tissues, books. My two-year-old likes to have a wad of pulpy paper mush in his mouth whenever the opportunity arises. It's as though he's buying cans of chaw, discarding the tobacco, and filling it with scraps of paper. He's totally addicted.

From the front seat, as I'm driving, I can hear the most intolerable sound, a satsified, pulpy smack, coming from his car seat. He's found a cone-shaped birthday-party hat, and half of it is missing. The missing half is inside his mouth, a thick, lumpy, blue-green wad.

As a parent, you realize that you are regularly learning new things about yourself. Well, here's something I never knew about myself before: watching someone chew on wet wads of paper is one way to bring me this <> close to puking. It's sickening. Worse than nails on a chalkboard. Uuugh. Barf. Upchuck. Gross!

He's a regular billygoat.

I hope he grows out of this phase, and soon.

Everglades, 1999

Everything is wet, even my face, fanned
by my futile hands. We're lost,
but we've plenty of alcohol--

the inaugral fight of this vacation
centered on where to stow the whiskey
and how much ice to bring.

Since then, we've fought about everything.

For hours, I've studied
every detail of his back,
his straight spine, the movement
of his shoulders under his thin black shirt,

when not even the tangled
fishing line in the bottom
of the boat could hold us together.

I'm angry at the lonely sounds
of water dripping off the end
of my paddle, the hiss and pop
of beer cans, the scrape
of his wooden oar against our canoe.

I ignore the birds.
I let my oar drag in the wake.




I Will Die in Florida When the Orange Blossoms Freeze

Trailers get cold and winters in Florida get to freezing.
I will die in a cold, drafty room, a heater on my feet.
The noisy whir of the fan will be heard outside.
Who can bear the thought of her toes turning blue?

If I am lucky, a son or daughter will rise to smoke
a good brand of cigarette,
and reach down to pat my dog with trembling hands.

A day lasts only as long as you remember it.
Today, I cleaned twelve bathrooms; tomorrow more.
Hands up to my elbows in shit and always there's more.

Sometimes I think of disappearing.

When I die, it will be a Monday, ash-grey, and wintry.
There will be no snow, but the orange blossoms will be ruined.
I'll be covered with an electric blanket.
Samantha's new telephone will ring and Roy will say, She's gone.
They'll get breakfast and cry into their waffles
at the diner on 441.




The Summer of Her Twenty-first Year

The twelve-paned windows in this room
mocked her with their age.
If only you knew what we know, they said.
They refused to be scraped, or painted, or tamed.
One made a nice headboard for their bed.
She'd bring in gladiolas and gardenias.
He'd arrange them in water on the chest of drawers
while she read The Awakening.

Old house, when will you burn to the ground?
You've heard prayers meant for nobody's ears.
The nursery on the right was painted
how many shades of blue?
She broke her antique set of china here;
the wispy dandelion seeds, floating in the air,
were finally forced to rest.
She turned another key and walked away.

She's gone. The moon would fall in the window
now, bathing an empty room, low branches
gaurding the roof. Knots in the pine floor
would chill her feet. Crystal knobs on the heavy doors
reflect the spectral glow.

Letters

Letters are paper thin, the mailbox
is a black, gaping jaw,
a black-hole where my heart encloses
itself every other week.

Ink makes your words permanent.
Then, they don’t fall through the air
or disappear.

I know you are too far away.

Continents will drift
where no cable can cross them,
and no post-man can deliver.

The Maniac under My Car...

Do you ever begin a day-- a simple, pure, regular day--with every intention of keeping it that way, but then, out of your hands, events conspire to throw your simple, plain, regular day into a spiral of confusion and catastrophe?

This morning began with an attempt to get my car fixed. Not wanting to tow it to a garage, I got busy inquiring about local mobile mechanics. My relatives know a few guys who are "handy" with automotive things, who function under the misnomer of "mechanic," and since beggars can't be choosers, I thought I might borrow one.

My aunt called candidate number one, named Patrick. He seems very capable, and in a less complicated world, my car would probably be fixed by now. He jacked up the car and took off the tire to get to the fuel pump, which he then disassembled. His diagnosis is that the problem is not the fuel pump, but is an electrical short in the fuel relay. The relay may have gotten damp since my trunk leaks water when it rains, and since I was not driving, the relay got a little damp. Sounds a little far out, since the interior of my car is not damp, but I am willing to believe. After disassembling the underside of my car, Patrick went to lunch and didn't return for four hours. Patrick's downfall is that he is an alcholic. Apparently, he got drunk and fell asleep.

The problem begins when my aunt's van begins having transmission problems (yes, the same van that just spent two out of the last three days in a service garage). I assumed that when Patrick, the capable mechanic, returned from "lunch," he would then take up working on my aunt's van, since he is her primary mechanic and she often employs him to fix her things. With the goal of getting my car on the road as quickly as possible, and since I assumed Patrick would be occupied with the van for a few days, (it's a transmission problem, afterall), I went ahead and called my Mom's mechanic, named Will.

Will is quite simply the strangest, most bizarre, WEIRD man I have ever met. He is about six and a half feet tall and super, super skinny. He wears old hats from the eighties and has wild, fluffy, grey hair pulled back into a loose pony-tail. His glasses are an inch thick, and are attached to a ragged, yellow band that wraps around his neck. He walks like he's bouncing.

He is very, very intelligent but too introverted to make use of it. He simply CANNOT communicate with people or follow directions! To put it simply, this man is an eccentric. HE IS DRIVING ME CRAZY! I WANT TO FIRE HIM! But I can't because he's taken apart half of my car and ordered about a hundred parts!

Now, I trust him, because he's done some complicated things on my mom's car in the past, with great success and at a good price. But the way this man works seriously drives me insane. He's been at my aunt and uncle's house all day, and because of the way they were gritting their teeth I can tell that he's been driving them insane too.

His problem is that he is so eccentric that he can't communicate with anyone. When I left at two pm , in my uncle's truck, to pick up kids from school, he had been working on my car for two hours. But instead of addressing the issue I was concerned about, he was fixing the leak in my trunk. This is fine, but a) he didn't ask me if I wanted work done on the trunk, and b) if he had called he would have known that the trunk leaks from the top, not the bottom, which was the part he was trying to fix. My trunk doesn't leak from the bottom unless you take a waterhose and squirt it at full-force into the brake light, like he did. It's nice that he found a way to prevent this from happening, but two hours later, my trunk still leaks from the top! The clock is ticking and I'm paying him ten bucks an hour.

Since I have to go if I don't want to be late, I tell him to try to crank it when I'm gone (Patrick had set up a hair-dryer on the relay to try to dry it out) and if it cranked, then to put all the pieces back together and have it ready for me to drive. If it doesn't crank, I told him to investigate the top of the trunk and see if he can get that to stop leaking.

Two hours later, I return. My car looks exactly the same as when I left it. The trunk still leaks. Will is upside down under the steering wheel, his long, gangly legs sticking out of the driver's window. My driver door is disassembled. I'm thinking to myself, "What have I gotten myself into?"

Talking to Will is like pulling teeth. He doesn't answer me, or when he does, I'm not certain whether he's talking to me or to himself. After about fifteen minutes of interrogation, during which time I suggested he confer with Patrick to find out what Patrick has already done or not done, he says that he has conferred with Patrick, and at this point he knows more than he does. The he tells me that he has spent those entire two hours looking for the relay switch, and asks Did they already take it out? So I run to the house to ask my uncle, who says no, but they ordered a new one, and then I relay this information back to Will, who gets flustered and explodes, "I can't work like this! I've already called my guy in Newberry! I'm on my way out there now! Why order a new part when you can get one cheap? This is crazy! I can't work like this!" I'm thinking to myself, yeah, it might be cheap, but after I add the labor of you driving to Newberry and your gas, it's about the same price, and in that case, I'd really rather have a new one. I'm also thinking, I can't work like this either! But who knows where the alcoholic is, or when he's coming back? Will might be my best chance. At least he's committed to poking around my car, even if it is to no avail. I have a sick feeling that Patrick is going to show up at six am and start knocking things around, then leave, and Will will show up, completly flabergasted. Before I know it, these two mechanics will have my entire car in patchwork pieces. The entire affair is beginning to seem like a bad episode of Junkyard Wars.

To make a long story short, too many mechanics spoil the soup. None of the mechanics working on my car know what the other is doing or has done, and none of them bother to ask. If they do ask, they end up arguing with each other. In typical male fashion, each mechanic has decided that they will be the one to fix my car. The result is that I'm paying two bumbling idiots (well, not really idiots, but idiots when it comes to communicating with each other) to knock heads over the hood of my car.

Nothing is being accomplished, everyone is upset, my car looks pathetic, and I give up.

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig...

Boy is it ever good to be home. At first I was sad to leave our snowy little scene in the middle of the woods, but it sure was nice to get back to Florida and strip off our sweaters (Issac took off EVERYTHING), and enjoy the gorgeous seventy degree weather. I found my house in good order, but my car is not working and I think it needs a new fuel pump. That's funny, because on the trip back the van broke down three times and so we spent six hours in the waiting rooms of two different garages (one in Indiana, one in Georgia) while mechanincs replaced the fuel injection filter thingmabob and then, later, the fuel pump.

School started yesterday but I haven't attended (thanks,van!). Tomorrow, I'm taking the Spanish SAT II test to try to get out of a language requirement. Otherwise, I'll have to spend a miserable semester taking German II. Ich habe das deutch nicht gern!

Well, since time is pressing, let me go. I'll write more about the highlights of my trip later: about the sauna, my deaf friend, snowboarding, and my infrequent encounters with ferocious Aunt Deb.