"Who are these people?"

For a long time Dad resembled Henry Fonda playing Norman Thayer in "On Golden Pond".  They wore the same hats.  I never did look much like Jane Fonda playing his daughter even back in 1981, especially not in a bikini. 

For thirty years now, "Who are these people?," has been a joke line in our family.  We didn't have a cottage or loons, but we had plenty of old photos sitting around. 

Now Dad's loony questions have become his obsession.  For a week he's been struggling to sort out the names of two grandchildren and their dog.  He canoes all around the issue, but can't quite express his question.  He worries about this every waking moment.  These moments are fewer and farther between, but are as likely to be at midnight as noon.  Today he asked me about "Nadine and Hogan" wondering what were "their short first names?" 

Don't know why I didn't try this days ago.  Wrote cue cards in very big letters and tacked them on Dad's bulletin board.  Scoped it out to be sure he could see them when he is sitting up in bed.  It won't help when he's flat on his back in the middle of the night, though.

There's no Hogan, but there is Logan The Dog.

Dad and I both have ET, essential tremor.  It's a very common progressive non-fatal inherited neurological disorder.  Mine is mainly in my right arm, and is aggravated by stress, fatigue, and overuse.  Good vibrations from car wash spray wands, power tools, mowers, and weed-whackers are the worst. 

Katharine Hepburn had ET, too.  Ethel Thayer should have tacked up some cue cards for Norman.  Katharine and I send this advice for Dad while I'm "out of pocket"*:

"Don't be an old poop."

*"Out of pocket" is not limited to medical expenses unreimbursed by insurance.  "Out of pocket" is Texan for unreachable by any communication device.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Fretting and Stewing

It's amazing the things that keep us awake in the middle of the night. It's not surprising that we wake up in the night, trot to the potty, then worry about affordable health care for an hour or more. The U.S. health care and medical insurance system is a waking nightmare affecting all of us. Still, I don't worry about deductibles all that much. Lately I've been fretting about my lack of a winter coat for dress occasions.

My last dress winter coat was paid for by my parents when I was a sophomore in college. My gosh, I bought it at Hovland Swanson in Lincoln! It was a camel-colored wool wrap style, and hung in my coat closet for over twenty-five years. I liked it, but it was a rare winter when it actually fit. Some winters I weighed 105 lbs., looked anorexic, and the coat wrapped around me twice. Some years I was pregnant, and the wrap wouldn't go around my middle. Many winters I never had a single occasion for a dress coat. Then we moved to Texas, and it just wasn't wintery very often. Finally, alas, I hit a stage in life when it became obvious that the camel coat was never going to be big enough again. One year some natural disaster set off numerous coat donation drives, and the camel coat and I said farewell. It was sad, as we never really knew each other well, like employees in adjoining cubicles assigned to different projects.

So every recent autumn I have fretted about my lack of a dress winter coat. Menopause is a good thing, since I rarely need a coat anyway! Still, I know my parka looks really dorky on those January opening nights at the Dallas Opera.

Fretting, stewing, and insomnia don't have the hold on me they once did. I don't worry about the first day of school, or what to give people for Christmas. I gave up keeping track of the plastic chickens for the Fisher Price Farm. I got rid of my spouse so I wouldn't have to worry about what to wear to his office Christmas party. Okay, there were a few other issues involved in that transition, but we won't go into that now. There's no obsessing about what to wear to work anymore. When I started back to work a dozen years ago, I would be awake half the night, then unable to swallow breakfast, worrying about what to wear.

Funny thing. Next to nobody notices what you are wearing, as long as you are in the wide spectrum of "normal". Nobody cares what you do as long as you don't wipe boogers on their sleeve or puke on their shoes. Most people don't remember what you gave them for Christmas last year. Those plastic chickens will turn up eventually. In the meantime, EVERYBODY ELSE ON EARTH is obsessing about their own winter coat. We are all just galloping past each other at high speed, trying to lasso the right outfit!

So today when I went for some recreational zoned-out wandering at our aged, decrepit mall after a couple hours of spray-painting student sculptures, I was pleased to find a London Fog coat that fit without even looking for it! Better yet, it was seventy dollars off. Hat and gloves were on sale, too. I am good to go, and just not going to worry about that anymore! This coat may only fit one winter if I get suddenly skinny. It may hang in my closet for the next twenty-five years. I'm just not going to fret one way or the other.

Admitted we were powerless over stripes

Step One
My co-teacher stages an intervention to convince me that I have a serious stripe dependency. She suggests that I go into wardrobe rehab to learn how to purchase clothing without stripes. I protest that I have some plaid shirts, but that is apparently considered stripe variant dependency.

Now I just stay at home wearing my stripes in private. In my solitary time, I take photos...of stripes. Maybe, just maybe, I have a problem.

Grizzly Man in Seventh Grade

Irrational dread of starting junior high school filled me during sixth grade, and expanded through the summer of 1967. Now I know that this was my first episode of depression and panic disorder, possibly aggravated by or masquerading as an enervating illness that resembled mononucleosis. As the start of classes loomed, I bundled my fear into obsessive reading of magazine stories about fatal grizzly bear attacks. I'm sure there's a psychological term for this coping mechanism.

In my black and white memory of this time, I am reading the magazine stories while lying on the gray living room carpet--reading the stories over and over again. The carpet is new, just installed the summer before. In my recollection, Sports Illustrated ran a continuing story for four issues, although I can only find a citation for "Menace in Our Northern Parks; Grizzlies," by E. Watson, SI 27:62-4+, October 30, 1967, in the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. The Time Magazine online archive provided some corroboration of my memories, and I was able to print out the ghastly report, "Night of Terror; Two Killed By Grizzlies in Montana Parks," Time 90:19, August 28, 1967.

Werner Herzog's new documentary film about the grizzly-obsessed Timothy Treadwell is in theaters now. I'm both repulsed and attracted by the subject. I'm thankful, too, that I don't have to start junior high ever again, speaking of horrifying.

Herzog made a film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972 . I saw the film in college at the UN-L Foreign Film Series in 1975, give or take a year, and I have been haunted by it for thirty years.

Amazon.com reviewer, Bret Fetzer, writes that Aguirre, "becomes more pertinent every year. The astonishing Klaus Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre, a brutal conquistador who leads his soldiers into the Amazon jungle in an obsessive quest for gold. The story is of the expedition's relentless degeneration into brutality and despair, but the movie is much more than its plot. Director Werner Herzog strove, whenever possible, to replicate the historical circumstances of the conquistadors, and the sheer human effort of traveling through the dense mountains and valleys of Brazil in armor creates a palpable sense of struggle and derangement. This sense of reality, combined with Kinski's intensely furious performance, makes Aguirre, the Wrath of God a riveting film. "

Watching the Grizzly Man movie trailer, I mentally substitute Klaus Kinski for Treadwell. Do I want to be haunted by another Herzog movie for thirty years?

Living in Texas in the summer often leads sane persons, trying to steer their cars along congested expressways without actually touching their fingertips to the red hot steering wheel, to wonder what-in-the-hey-ho those armor-clad Spanish conquistadors were thinking when they decided this region was fit for human habitation. Had they completely fried their brains inside those helmets in their obsessive pursuit of gold, the fountain of youth, and opportunities to abuse the indigenous population? Fried brains may account for the Spanish conquistadors speaking German!

Going Strapless, Stripeless

Fred MacMurray visited me in the fitting room yesterday while I tried on assorted white capri pants. The Son of Flubber was whispering whale blubbery insults in my ear.


The Dallas Museum of Art, in conjunction with Starbucks, presented Isaac Hayes in a free outdoor concert to celebrate the powerful exhibit of Gordon Parks' photographs. The huge crowd presented fabulous people- and fashion-watching opportunities. The clear bra straps quite visible on women around me snagged my attention, and sent me off on a reverie. Nothing perverse here, as I was pondering possible reuse options for plastic six-pack beverage holders. Think of all the aquatic animals who could be spared entanglement if the beverage rings were otherwise occupied hoisting up major buhZOOMS. The safety of otters is at stake here!


One of the inexpensive art reproductions hanging in our basement when I was a kid was similar to this Toulouse Lautrec painting. I used to worry, while I was supposed to be practicing the piano, how the woman kept her dress on. Being a skinny eight year-old, I had a lot of trouble just keeping my swimsuit straps on my shoulders. Still, when we attended the Shrine Circus, I was disappointed to learn that figure skaters and circus performers weren't really in danger of falling out of their costumes. It made their amazing feats seem far less amazing if they didn't have to keep their outfits on by sheer force of will.


Through the miracle of plastic bra straps, just about anyone can look like a circus performer. Through a different miracle, I was able to purchase an outfit that doesn't have stripes. A realio-trulio outfit all in white, and NO STRIPES.

I don't know how it happens. I go into a store to get a floral or solid top. I try lots of them on. But once I've checked out, I realize I've purchased something striped instead. I'm never sure at what point in the shopping mission my brain has been taken over by aliens switching remote control toggles from their spaceship. It's another magical mystery tour through Kohl's.

I suspect that our living room curtains during my very early childhood are the real mind controllers. The curtains were bleached muslin with horizontal stripes in the primary colors, gray, and black. Stripes were equated with the safety of home, so now my homing mechanism nearly always arrives at the stripes.

Please celebrate my stripeless accomplishment with me by playing the White Album. Enjoy, too, these interesting Images of Antartica taken by a blogger named Seth White. I hope I won't look like a walrus.