Life, death, and itty bitty pith helmets

It was only a Super Moon sitting up in a paper sky, but Norton the rabbit didn't get out to see it.  He was ever so pleased this morning to get out on the patio to continue crafting his rabbit cave in the ground cover.  He wore his make-believe pith helmet.  I took a big mug of coffee.  It was sixty-three degrees.  Together we might dig the Panama Canal and find a cure for malaise.

The moon over White Rock Lake was quite fabulous last night after Fred Curchack's one-man play at the Bath House Cultural Center.  Dang if the play wasn't about life, death, generations,  words, and our sense of self.

Dad is not wearing his pith helmet.  Still in his hospital gown, he is refusing to get out of bed.  This would seem right if he was just protesting the end of spring break.  Alas, it  is a larger comment on mortality, the weekend staff, over-grown nose hairs, and self-determination. 

One of the stand-out reviews read in March issues of Library Journal  was Elizabeth Foley's consideration of  the Law of Life and Death.  When are we alive?  When is life gone?  What happens when the latest medical information meets the current legal opinions?  Why is the juice always red?

Started reading Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names for Love while sitting under a tree by the jogging trail.   Kites.  I love kites.  So many families picnicking and frisbeeing in every language.  What is language?  How do we communicate love?  How can we repair a writer's brain after a stroke?
© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Prate vs. prattle

All Questions Resented, weekdays at five p.m. and weekends anytime.  Dad doesn't like questions.  At all.  Any more.  I Q.  He won't A.  He has no Qs for me.  Tricky breaking the conversational ice in this deep freeze.  Dad sits with his back to me in his wheelchair.  If I move, he moves.

After forty-five minutes feeling unwelcome, I put on my coat.  Without looking at me Dad says, "Please don't go so soon."  I take off my coat, and try a new tactic.  Dad always complains about his children talking on and on, or, apparently worse, philosophizing. 

I'm pretty desperate, so I ponder aloud the possibilities for an elephant clay project with the elementary students, brainstorm the art update for the school newsletter, and report on the class rabbit's earwax problems.  Thank heaven for the recent discovery of the oldest wine-making operation in Armenia, because Dad doesn't want news of disasters, either natural or manmade.  He barely tolerates capsules of my campaign sign removal campaign and blue bag letter-writing effort.  He says "no news is good news" about my sons.  (That part is true, as they are busy and self-sufficient adults.)

Somehow, we survive another forty-five minutes of togetherness.  His supper tray arrives.  I open the packet of pepper and the tiny tub of butter.  He doesn't want either, of course.  He is tired of my chatter, or is it prattle?  At least I didn't babble, but it was getting close.

prat-tle  --intr.  To talk idly or meaninglessly; babble.  --tr.  To utter in a childish or silly way.  --n. Childish or meaningless sounds; babble.  Good grief, it is a [Frequentative of PRATE]!  Isn't that like prune juice?

prate  --intr.  To talk idly and at great length; chatter.  --tr.  To utter idly or to little purpose.  --n.  Empty, foolish, or trivial talk.

Now I'm ready for a glass of 6100 year old wine!

© 2010 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!

Short and stout

My younger brother, who was not really named Igor, was terrified of creatures he believed were living in our basement. He called them The Gooeys. We were never sure how he pictured The Gooeys. I gradually developed my own mental image of his fear factors. The first time I saw pool noodles in Albertson's in the mid-Nineties, The Gooeys popped into my mind.

My biggest basement fear was just of piano practice, but maybe "dread" is a better description than "fear". When my parents bought a piano and paid for piano lessons, I thought they had ruined my life.

For the past year, my high school senior son has told me regularly, "You ruined my life, Mom," all because I insisted that he take fourth year French. His school counselor backed me on my requirement that he continue with math OR with French in twelfth grade.

Over the year, French 4AP has become the biggest YRMLM ever, even bigger than a basement Gooey adjusted for forty years of inflation. YRMLM is pronounced yerm-lim, of course. It is a noun, and also a fairly active and useful verb in its past plupretzel-apoplexic tense.

This weekend I'm not the POD or the T-POD. Im still a yerm-lim, though:

POD Parent on duty
T-POD Transporting parent on duty (sing along: I'm a little T-POD, short and stout)
YRMLM You ruined my life, Mom

Danger Baby turns 20

This week my middle son will have his twentieth birthday. I never thought we would make it! Maybe I can finally quit having that nightmare about him being washed down the storm sewer of our long-ago suburban Omaha cul-de-sac house. I just always felt that I needed to worry double-time about him, waking or sleeping.


A former brother-in-law summed it up well when he announced why he liked three-year old Mike:

He's ornery, he wears hats, and he eats fish.

Often Mike wore more than one hat--fireman, cowboy, baseball, racing helmet, army, construction hard hat, way-too-big stocking cap-- in various configurations. He only played soccer two years because soccer is a seriously hat-deficient sport. He had to make do with a neon yellow sweatband!

T-ball was better. It had caps, and he could wear one of my clip-on earrings to pretend he was Ruben Sierra. We cranked up the volume on the car tape player for "We Are the Champions" on the way to T-ball games!

Harry Houdini's mother had a tough life. She has my complete sympathy and respect. Danger Baby was an Eighties escape artist. I had to tie his shoelaces together when he sat in his baby carseat to keep him from climbing out. He could stand up in the crib and tear the wallpaper off the wall.

I never could keep him confined to the grocery cart child seat. I would stop to read the nutritional info on a can of soup, and Danger Baby would be three aisles away. In the time it took me to select a head of lettuce, he could climb out and load six dozen fresh bakery cinnamon pull-aparts into the grocery cart.

The only thing Danger Baby couldn't escape was the electric mixer beater. While licking the beater he managed to get it hooked over both his teeth and his chin. Jaws!

In 1986 we took a family vacation to Yellowstone. For at least six hundred miles Danger Baby played with a Matchbox tractor while sitting in the carseat, then threw it on the floor, hollered "rackoo-rackoo" until the tractor was retrieved, then repeated the cycle. On this vacation his claustrophobic tendencies were revealed as he ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY refused to sleep in the tent. After a long highway drive, I ended up sleeping in the car while Mike slept in the carseat, and his dad and brother slept in the comparatively relaxing and luxurious tent. In the Tetons I had to keep Mike zipped into my sleeping bag to keep him from burning himself testing the cabin woodstove. At Yellowstone I had to keep him from falling into the geysers, and from completely freaking out when Old Faithful blew. At Jewel Cave he suffered a total spelunko-wacko panic attack that disrupted the whole tour group, and he never did like elevators after that.

Danger Baby really wanted to be a stunt rider. He watched a "Reading Rainbow" show about rodeos, and took to standing on the seat of the wooden rocking horse while wearing the "Lyle the Crocodile" Halloween costume, blue snowboots, and as many hats as he could balance on his head.

While reckless, Danger Baby was also very caring and attentive to his imaginary baby alligators. Whenever they fell off the back of his red tricycle he would stop and carefully help them back into position. Danger Baby has turned out funny, considerate, focused, planning, frugal, sentimental...