Saggyboobosity lonesome Playtex blues

Over in Illinois there are some very tired 18-hour bras working a double shift.  In the preschool room my tiny French student notices the Bandaid over my hot glue burn and says, "Boo boo."  From this small step she suddenly expresses the big idea, "I like your shirt. Do you like my shirt?"

 I do.  I like that party shirt! Go, Dog, Go!  We are cooking.

Here in Texas I put a Chicken Davenport ala Doris casserole into my preheated newlio trulio functioning oven. Doris was my sister-in-law way back in the before time.  She made a gourmet dish of chicken, frozen broccoli, frozen hashbrowns, cheese, and cream of chicken soup for a bridal shower a quarter century or so ago. I can't remember "divan", and I can't exactly google "Doris", although I miss her and wish her well after all these years, and her husband, too. Another former sister-in-law lived in Davenport, Iowa, a swing state. Somehow Chicken Divan got mixed up with davenports, couches, sofas,sleepers, settees, divans, loveseats, futons, and sectionals. The secret is having plenty of buttered bread crumbs baked on top of the casserole.  Enough might even prevent divorce.

I am so far behind.  I zip and dart from Halloween tie-dye experiments to Hurricane Sandy fretting. Sitting in the waiting room for my blood pressure checkup, I pass the time writing fall student progress reports. This creative endeavor seems to calm the blood pressure.  My doctor pronounces my blood pressure "beautiful".  Not bad for a divorced couch casserole boo-boo art teacher.

It had been a bad day.  I couldn't even wear my own shirt.  There was so much poop in the preschool that I had to scrounge up a new outfit to wear to the doctor appointment.  My little French student would have looked at my shirt and said something other than "Boo boo"!




© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Lurger Burger

Toddlers bring strange words into a family's vocabulary. Sometimes the toddler word lurks submerged in the subconscious until decades after the meaning has been forgotten.

More decades ago than I want to admit, a toddler, who might have been me, came up with the term "lurger burger". It bubbled to the surface the other day when I was pantomiming scuba divers with my preschool art students. The kids are at that age when putting their face in the water and blowing bubbles is the main focus of swim lessons, so they know that bubbles make gurgle-burgle sounds.

Once "lurger burger" surfaced, I got the mental equivalent of The Bends. My gosh! How many times did Jacques Cousteau warn me about that during the Sixties? Due to our family tv set back then, I am always surprised when Jacques'undersea world is not black and white!



What was "lurger burger?" Person, place, or thing? No clue. I called my dad late at night--after 8:30--to ask about this toddler word. He remembered the term, but didn't recall if it was animal, mineral, or vegetable. Bewitched, bothered, or bewildered? Magician, mathemetician, or musician? We are stumped.

A few days pass. Dad wants to know if I've figured out "lurger burger." Still no. He thinks it might have been a person at his office in the mid-Fifties. Neither of us think it was a food*.

My own kids had some toddler words. The one that pops to mind first is "rackoo". "Rackoo" is a combination of the toddler drop game of "Oh-oh," Chinese water torture, and a Hot Wheels-style John Deere tractor:

1. Toddler in carseat on family driving vacation holds toy tractor.
2. Toddler in carseat throws toy tractor to the floor of the 1985 Ford Tempo.
3. Toddler in carseat screams, "Rackoo! Rackoo! Rackoo!," with increasing agitation and volume until mother retrieves toy tractor from the floor and gives it back. [Dad is driving and bigger preschooler is in the front seat listening to Wee Sing cassettes.]
4. Repeat Steps 1-3 from Omaha, Nebraska to the Grand Tetons.
5. Mom tries unsuccessfully to repress the memory of this particular toddler word.

The second toddler word is a splendidly descriptive term for the space created by taking all the cushions and pillows off a soft, but ugly jungle-print hand-me-down sofa, and piling them up to make a cave/fort. When you sit in this space, you are in "the crabbis-crow." "Crabbis-crow" is on my mind as my students make wacky pirate ship hats with crows nests. A sofa-cushion cave is a bit like a house for a hermit crab/toddler, plus it rhymes with Jacques Cousteau's Calypso. After a long, hectic week of teaching, I am ready to sit in my own "crabbis-crow" for a day or two!

But "lurger burger" still eludes recall. It doesn't have a frightening gut connotation like "the Gooies," or "pea burgers." "The Gooies" are worse than The Bends. They are the creepy things down the stairs in a dark basement.

Pea burgers are the scary concoction of a harried mom trying to stretch the ground beef by mixing in a can of peas from the basement pantry. Nowadays the Dallas Morning News prints ideas for "desperation dinners." I'm sure my mom got the idea for "pea burgers" from a similar journalistic hint. Still, the pea burgers were the inedible food for family lore and nightmares, along with the "cardboard box cake."

My elementary students are sitting in a circle around the rug to play a game I call, "What's something you might find in the ocean THAT NOBODY ELSE HAS SAID?" It's a good game for encouraging listening, visualization, problem-solving, and for stocking the group's creative pantry. The kids start our second effort at the game with good ideas:

1. Tiger shark
2. Electric eel
3. Stingray
4. Water
5. Sand
6. Angelfish
7. Treasure chest
8. A killer whale and her baby
9. Seaweed
10. "A great big, a really GREAT BIG... [The child then periscope-ups his index finger into his left nostril and brings forth a GIANT LURGER BURGER] ... batch of plankton."

*Definitely not a food!

Transmission of viruses from animals to people

I've got a bad case of the Primate Samsonitis A virus. This dangerous virus has made the jump between species and is evolving faster than Asian Avian Influenza, according to the CDC. The Bush administration has not stockpiled doses of the vaccine. In fact, there is no known vaccine. The virus must be allowed to run its course. Quarantine is the only method of stemming its spread.

I don't just want to stomp and throw luggage. I want to throw file cabinets and chests of drawers. My kids took away my saw after the sofa incident, so I haven't destroyed anything in the living room yet.

I'm having fever-induced flashbacks to memorable tv ad campaigns of the Sixties and Seventies. "Mikey likes it." "Mama mia, that's a spicy meatball." "It's the real thing." "I can't believe I ate the whole thing." "I always keep two in my tutu."

Home Decorating 101

What location is to real estate, balance and harmony are to interior design. Some people have a natural gift for creating balance and harmony in their spaces. Others consult feng shui experts. Many check out the large, heavy, gorgeously illustrated interior design books from the library about French kitchens and Santa Fe living rooms as a guide. Some use computer programs to rearrange without sweat.

In my own unbalanced way, I strive to move the pieces in my home to achieve a harmony of color, pattern, density, openness,antique, and contemporary. I like a variety of textures, which means some surfaces aren't covered with dust just to act as accent contrasts to the rest of the arrangement.

What sets me off fenging the schwee all around the condo is cords. Cords AND cables. They make me nuts. I can't sit down and watch a movie in my "home entertainment center" if I can see the electrical cords squirreling around in my peripheral vision. My plan for the day was to do the mountain of ironing while watching some tv and videos in the living room, but the cords behind the tv were taunting me.

Before long I had all the books off the shelves, all the entertainment devices unplugged and on the floor, the aquarium drained and headed to the dumpster, and a cold Miller Genuine Draft to aid the search for balance and harmony. At least I don't have a couch any more. And, by the way, complaining about the lack of a couch gave my two sons and their friends a safe, harmless, meaningful teen activity this summer when they could have been out on the streets rabble-rousing and leaving chewed bubble gum under the table at Taco Bueno! Just another free parenting tip...

After a couple hours I reached living room nirvana. Every chair, table, and framed photo was perfectly positioned to exude sheer bliss to anyone who enters. Unfortunately, I missed Lesson One of the class. Lesson One was when I should have learned not to achieve balance with the ironing board in the corner and the pile of wrinkly clothes plunked in the middle of the floor as part of the serene equation!

Dumping the Shark

The Art Teacher Wore White: Clearly a Mystery

Why would a practical, sensible, Type A fifty year-old art teacher who scored a 39 on Dr. Phil's alleged personality test wear an all-white outfit? Why would she worry the whole day about resembling an albino manatee? Why would she think this was a good day to take Larry the Shark to the dumpster?

And just who was this Larry fellow?



It is easier to boost a sawed-up couch into a dumpster than it is to chuck a nearly toothless one year-old papier mache shark.

Smashing my guitar

About a year ago, at the time of Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas, a Dallas Morning News critic named Thor Christensen wrote a piece on the history of rock star guitar smashing as ritual. It started off, "The rules of romance say if you love something, set it free. But the rules of rock tell you to smash it to smitereens."

When I first got the sofa, it was true love, but our relationship had lost the spring and shine of love about a decade ago due to trauma inflicted on it by the four men in my life. Sons are rough on a couch, and so is being hauled around to different apartments in a divorce. Too bad I didn't set it free in the property settlement and stick my ex with it. For several years now, the couch has been held up by three sturdy under-the-bed boxes from Target jampacked with National Geographics, debate trophies, Magic cards, and role-playing game books. The guys and their friends still found it comfortable enough to throw themselves onto it perfectly so that the three threadbare cushions were never properly pushed down and back under the upholstered back.

Gradually, the sofa became the symbol for my suppressed aesthetic needs, my overcrowded, cluttered condo, and my chronic low-grade financial frustrations. Basically, it came to represent the dark side of being a single mother. Don't get me wrong. My sons are fantastic young men, and I have loved every bit of being their mother. I love being single, too, and this condo has been a wonderful haven for rebuilding a family.

Over 66% of my sons has shared a fondness for Classic Rock with me. My youngest's most vivid tantrum was thrown in the Penneys store at Quail Creek Mall in north OKC while I was trying to purchase a red polo shirt for his dad's thirty-fifth birthday. He threw himself out of the stroller onto the floor, sobbing, kicking, and screaming, "I NEED my Classic Rock!!!!" And that was just last March.

No, not really. It was March, 1989, but it's gouged in my memory like the carving on a junior high school desk. His room, his incredibly messy, overflowing, sweaty, and oppressively stacked room (See Exhibit A) where he managed to write his scholarship applications, is decorated with Led Zep, Beatles, Who, Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, and Doors posters.

Exhibit A

His brother took the poster of Jimi Hendrix burning his Stratocaster off to college, along with a great one of Stevie Ray Vaughan. The guys have shared John Mayall, Santana, and Steely Dan concerts with their old mom, along with the aforementioned Crossroads festival.

So perhaps it isn't entirely peculiar that after we received the long-awaited word of my youngest's college destination and the way to finance it, I smashed the davenport. I'm only sorry I wasn't able to set it on fire out in the parking lot. I hauled the cushions to the dumpster, then cut off all the padding and upholstery. I sawed the frame up enough to collapse it for ease of dragging across the parking lot to the dumpster. Climbed up on each side of the dumpster to tip open the double lids, and was well on my way to sliding the sofa carcass up and over, into the mosh pit when a passing jogger decided to help. This is my cathartic transition into empty-nesting------tidy, spacious, relaxing, soothing, white-walled, fingerprintless, tastefully decorated, eclectic-style empty-nesting (See Exhibit B)!

Exhibit B

You're never too old to rock and roll. On guitar-smashing, Eric Clapton told Christensen, "To me, it's show biz. I don't see much value to it, to be honest." I didn't see much value in keeping the sofa, either. Now, I've got to find my cd.

Catwoman I'm Not

I'm allergic to onions, bananas, and cats. I'm careful to avoid all of them in my diet. I'm not allergic to coconut, artificial cheese-flavored alleged food products, or black jelly beans, but I would be if I could. I'm equally careful to avoid them in my diet. You don't want to know why I have these intense aversions, but I will say that two of them involve chain-reaction carsickness on hot vinyl backseats.

Back when I still lived in "the house" with the boys, we were visited by Danger Kitties. I hadn't thought about the Danger Kitties in years. They kept trying to climb the screen of our sliding patio door, and would get stuck several feet off the ground, and mewl at surprising volume until unhooked from the screen.

The Danger Kitties were born in the rotting storage shed across the alley. The Boat Boys who lived in that house were oblivious to the presence of feral cats in their shed. The Boat Boys used to sit out in the large motor boat parked in their driveway, drinking beer and listening to loud music. One morning I got all three boys buckled into the Mazda MPV minivan, opened the garage door, started backing out to drive them to school, and found the motor boat blocking the alley. No Boat Boys were home, of course, only feral Danger Kitties incapable of moving the motor boat. Hadn't thought about that particular weirdness in years.

My youngest is in the college scholarship savage jungle hunt. It's part tsetse flies, and part high stakes Texas hold-em poker. We have to play the odds to hit the big money. He's the third child of divorced parents. If you think there's a big chunk of wisely-invested college savings socked away for him, you would be seriously deluded.

In fairy tales it is often the third son who manages to convert the inheritance of a cat and a burlap bag into marriage to the king's beautiful daughter. This son will land on his feet wherever life throws him. He will respond to my anxieties and micromanaging with smug detachment from the warm hearth in front of his computer screen. He will trick the giant into becoming a mouse, and charm the miller's daughter into driving him around town in her dad's new Mini Cooper. Plus, he will have thick, luxurious hair without even earning it. He's already clawed up the couch, and I still let him live here.

Froofing on a winter Friday night

I couldn't stand the holiday stress anymore, so I brought the Christmas tree downstairs from Mike's closet. I don't get stressed about whether we will have Christmas, or whether Santa will really deliver, or even whether the weather will be bad. I worry, starting about Halloween, where I will put the Christmas tree.

Every year since 1997, the year we moved to the condo, the tree has been in the same corner of the living room. Every year I go though anxious mental gyrations and aerobic cleaning and furniture-shoving before the tree gets into place.

This afternoon I decided I would rather get it over with than worry for another week. I wrote not very long ago about wanting to burn much of my furniture in a big bonfire out in the parking lot. Then I came up with a plan to feed the Friday lunch gang a really great meal of baked ham, twice-baked potatoes, and Klondikes, then beg them to carry the armchair to the dumpster and somehow boost it up and over the top. I explained my plan to my youngest, and he said, "But, Mommmmmmmmmm, I sit in that chair."

So, I was back to the furniture-shoving, dusting, cobweb-battling. What happened next is difficult to explain. I took the ceiling fan/light fixture over the dining table apart to wash off the "velour" of grease and dust. By comparison, putting up the tree is simple. The base opens. The three sections fit together. Then comes the labor intensive "froofing" of the branches into something vaguely reminiscent of a live tree after their long year squished in the box. Froofing requires hours of perserverance, an artist's eye, and a high tolerance for being poked and scratched. It also requires a lot of light for these old eyes. I know that when I look at the tree by the morning light, I will see that further froofing is required.

Then, and only then, I will put the lights on the tree. And that's a different dilemma. Stay tuned. If you drive, don't froof, and if you froof, froof sensibly.

Non-specific existential interior decorating dissatisfaction

Didn't recognize the Early Warning Signals, and slipped into one of my spells where I want to haul nearly all of my worldly goods out into the condo parking lot and set them on fire. Then I want to rip up all the carpet, roll it up, and add it to the fire.

What holds me back?

• If I rip out the carpet the cracks in the concrete slap will show.
• I'm pretty sure the fumes from the carpet would be carcinogenic, if not mind-altering.
• If I burn the furniture, the biggest spots on the carpet will show.
• If I burn the couch, where will I put the under-the-bed storage boxes full of Magic cards and role-playing game books that are holding it up?
• If I get rid of the mattress and box springs stuffed under the stairway, the terrorists will have won.

I haven't actually looked in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV for this debilitating form of recurrent davenport dysthymia. If it's not there, it should be!

My ex used to say I was having one of my "Buddhist Attacks" when I had an episode of NSEIDD. He was one to talk. His idea of a clean house was a Japanese shogun's retreat built of sliding rice paper walls, with grass mats on the floor, one low table, and one vase holding a plum blossom, and absolutely nothing else. Needless to say, we had serious culture clashes over my desire to hang art work on any wall, and the Legos, toy soldiers, and Hot Wheels of three small sons.

This holiday I will have a large assembly of able-bodied males in residence to lift and move. Now if I could just find a charitable organization with very low aesthetic standards to haul everything away!

Om.....

"Stand Back," Said the Elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!"

That's the title of a children's book by Patricia Thomas that I don't really recommend. The title is great, though. For weeks now, I have sensed that the elephant was going to sneeze, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. Yes, "Stand back," said The Mama, "I'm going to rearrange!"

The only time I deep-clean and dust is when I rearrange the furniture. It takes a major disturbance in the force to provoke this activity. Like storm clouds in tornado season, I have an inkling that the rearranging disturbance is coming. All I can do is stock up on plywood, duct tape, and bottled water.

Rearranging is usually provoked by emotional and hormonal typhoons. It probably indicates a need to reaclaim control over my psychic tract house. In the most oppressive years of my marriage I would push major home appliances around the basement to vent this barometric crisis. Never mind that I was seven months pregnant. I would still shove the washer and dryer around, then go upstairs to attack the hideous hand-me-down sofa.

I've rearranged the dining area this afternoon, and even dusted the ceiling fan blades. Pictures are rehung. The room is happy, but I have dislocated the cosmic alignment of my bedroom and the living room.

It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that feng [shui]
Doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah, doo-ah