C'mon baby, do the olfaction with me

Get out those disco moves and dust them off! Step on out there on that lighted dance floor with Grand Funk Railroad.

Today's concept is smell memories. Went down to work yesterday. The custodian had stripped and buffed the floors, and was starting to wax them. Floor wax! Flashback. Robert Kennedy assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan. I was home sick from junior high school. Mom was hosting her bridge club that evening, so all the blue dining chairs were lined up in the living room. She was mopping the dining room floor. I was watching the tv news coverage. Walter Cronkite. Mop & Glo. Forever linked. Do The Bump on over to the Institute of Smell!


And yes, bridge club was on Wednesday nights. The front page is from the New York Times the next day, Thursday, June 6, 1968.

Effluent on EBay

An Australian blogger alerted me that researchers suggest fish should be raised in livestock effluence. Just what is effluence? Well, let's just say it has to do with flowing out. Try to visualize Isadora Duncan and her "Isadorables" dancing in floaty, filmy scarves. It's like that, only lots more slimy.



Had I known, I wouldn't have spent most of yesterday and seventeen dollars cleaning the darn aquarium. The tetras and danios were all pretty happy, healthy, self-motivated, working together as a team, and possessing positive self-esteems in the skunky tank.

Disclaimer

Just to make everything perfectly clear, I am not the Collagemama with the photos on community.webshots.com. One of these days I'll have to find out more about this other Collagemama. I'm curious how she came up with this name. Did her journey involve Merle Haggard or Jerry Garcia? Mama tried, Mama tried.

And I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole.
No-one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried.
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading, I denied.
That leaves only me to blame 'cos Mama tried.

This Collagemama tried to raise three guys better, and they turned out even better than I can claim credit for. So this is a disclaimer for them, too.

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.

Widor "Toccata"

Lightning didn't strike when CollageMama attended a beautiful wedding of two precious, gentle, wise, talented young adults yesterday at First Baptist Church of Dallas. I love this sincere couple, and celebrated their happiness together that I first saw when we attended the Santa Fe Opera's "Don Giovanni" together last August at the time they became engaged.

Their wedding recessional was Charles Marie Widor's "Toccata From Symphony No. Five". The First Baptist pipe organ was fine, but I was instantly transported to my personal Wonder Years church choir career of 1967-1973. The "Toccata" is a jubilant get-yourself-on-up-the-aisle-shake-hands-and-eat-fried-chicken-with-biscuits-and-gravy uplifting experience. I wonder what would happen if Lyle Lovett and Charles Marie Widor could collaborate...

To the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat
We've got some beans and some good cornbread
Now listen to what the preacher said
He said to the Lord let praised be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat

And the moral of this story
Children it is plain but true
God knows if a preacher preaches long enough
Even he'll get hungry too
And he'll sing

To the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat
We've got some beans and some good cornbread
Now listen to what the preacher said
He said to the Lord let praised be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat

I grew up attending First Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in Lincoln, Nebraska. The pipe organ behind the screen was dedicated in 1968. Our Minister of Music, C. Richard Morris could play a dandy Widor Tocatta that made the members of the junior and senior high choirs want to march up the aisle, snag a donut and some juice in the fellowship hall, and head out to Pioneers Park to enjoy God's gifts of sunshine, green grass, Frisbees, and good friends.

Pest Control

My preschool students presented me with a garden poster with their school photos glued onto a drawing they each made. They were extremely excited to tell me what they had drawn to be their character in the picture. "I'm a butterfly. I'm a tulip. I'm a worm. I'm the sun. I'm a snail..." My favorite was the little boy who told me he was a talk-roach.

Went to the condo association meeting last evening which quickly disintegrated into a complaint session on landscaping and pest control issues. Some residents were touting an organic magic elixir which when poured around all the foundations would spin straw into gold. No, wait. That's a different story. This fabulous product allegedly forms a magic force field that repels all insects without being the least bit harmful to humans or dachsunds. When I suggested we confer with the local bug expert from Texas A&M Extension, who happens to be a friend of mine, before trading the condo cow for a handful of magic beans, I got put on the landscaping committee to listen to residents' concerns. Just shoot me. Preschool talk-roaches are cute. Perpetually malcontent talk-roaches with too much time and too little to do are not cute. I may have to sell my condo and move to another town. That's the escape route of many previous association board members and committee members. They may even have a safe house I can use! I will hide under the refrigerator and only come out in the dark of night, then scuttle back if a light is switched on.

Rumpelstiltskin was at the meeting. Our little condominium complex's version of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, our former board president who went "a little funny in the head", showed up with a long list of rants.


If we can't get a restraining order against Rumpelstiltskin, maybe we can spray with amazing OrangeGuard.

Eau de Citronella

A dearly demented friend's plans for today involved "playing in the yard". That's a vintage phrase from the Dick, Jane, and Sally era. "Playing in the yard" calls up multi-sensory memories. It was what kids of my generation and socioeconomic level did whenever we weren't at scout meetings, piano lessons, or "playing in the basement", which will have to be a different blog a different day.

Moms of the Sixties believed that children were less irritable and/or constipated if they ran around out in the fresh air and sunshine as much as possible. It probably helped our moms' outlook, too.

The bell rang at Eastridge Elementary at 3:15 p.m., and we all walked home, with older siblings looking out for younger. We didn't have backpacks because we didn't have homework. What a concept! We accomplished a great deal at school because we wore our "school clothes" and knew not to bring "nuisance items", and then we went home, changed into our "play clothes" and played. It didn't hurt that our moms all knew that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, and that bedtime was eight o'clock. We went to school fed and rested so we could do our job of learning, and then we played in the yard. All that fresh air and exercise helped us sleep and eat well. What a wonderful, healthy, balanced system! I wish no child would be left behind from that system, instead of being stuck in the perpetual testing mode of elementary schools today.



"Playing in the yard" looks like kids wearing plaid pedal-pushers, Keds, grass stains, and calamine lotion. It sounds like Simon Says, crickets, squeaky swingsets, and a golf ball bouncing on the driveway in a game of jacks. It tastes like strawberries with powdered sugar, honeysuckle flowers, watermelon, and roasted marshmallows. Playing in the yard smells of fresh mowed grass, dog poop, pine needles, soggy fall leaves, and chalk for hopscotch. It feels like grass between toes, snow down your overshoe, and the stinging burn of merthiolate* on your skinned knee.

*I hope no one uses that stuff anymore!

Adopt a Word

The trouble with pets is the whole pooper-scooper issue. We have a small and skunky tank of ridiculously hardy tropical fish. No matter how much we neglect them, they refuse to die. That is my pet history in a nutshell. Harriet the Hamster was also known as The Hamster That Would Not Die. For all I know, she is now six feet long, and living along the Salt Creek Watershed in a west Omaha suburban community, feeding on small children and poodles. Our fish refuse to die unless they can leap out of the tank and get smelly on the carpet behind a son's bedroom headboard. Hermit crabs scuttle under the piano and starve to death rather than come back out into the savannas of the open free-range wall-to-wall carpet.

Don't get me started on cats and dogs. I am unable to comprehend that many people find these creatures cuddly and amusing and worth the trouble and the itchy eyes. People actually walk around with their pet dogs collecting warm feces deposits in plastic bags. These same people get squeamish about slimy papier mache glue!

I've seriously considered adopting a zoo animal in the past. Pride of ownership without hairballs and scooped poopering for my kids. Unless I wanted to sponsor Madagascar hissing cockroaches, this sort of pet was out of my price range.

Give this etymologist a butterfly net! Online Etymological Dictionary now offers users the option of sponsoring a word for six months for only ten buckaroos. You never have to take a word to the vet for shots, or clean its habitat. One still has the problem of selecting the cutest, fuzziest, most loyal word to sponsor. I want one that is playful, but never gets fleas, and cleans up after itself. You can the word pet's pedigree. Afterall, that's what etymology is all about!

Crabby start to the day

Shame on the Dallas Morning News for placing yellow adhesive advertising stickers on the front page banner many mornings in the past month. I cannot believe the newspaper really wants to annoy and alienate so many subscribers. We don't have to subscribe, you know. We can get our news online. For a small price I could get my New York Times crossword puzzle online, too.

I happen to like waking up early, but slowly, with the newspaper and hot coffee enjoyed in bed. So every morning at six I sneak out front to snag the plastic bag containing the DMN. I pour my first cup of coffee, and head back to bed to open the paper. Dagnabbit!! There's another one of those yellow stickers assaulting my eyes.

Newspapers have always had a silent contract with readers. Both sides know that "All the news that's fit to print," really means "All the advertising they can possibly squeeze in." Everybody got along more or less, as long as the front page was only news reporting. In the latest redesign of the DMN, we got a far left column (not politically of course, just on the page) advertising features in the next day's paper. It's the equivalent of t.v. news teases that say "Cows close four lanes of freeway. Details at ten."

This month, the DMN voided the contract with readers. It started slapping yellow stickers on the front page making sure we all know that advertising is king. The stickers are clearly marked with the 3M trademark. 3M is the maker of Post-It Notes, those ubiquitous "stickies" that contaminate recycled paper and gum up the works of deinking and recycling machines.

The American Forest and Paper Association defines contaminant:

Any item or material that reduces the quality of paper for recycling or makes it unrecyclable. Contaminants include metal, foil, glass, plastic, stickies, food, hazardous waste, carbon paper, waxed boxes, and synthetic fabrics. Collecting paper co-mingled with other recyclables may increase contaminants.

Today's yellow contaminant advertises Troy Aikman's car dealership. If you would like to call Troy and tell him this advertising is proof those concussions on the field caused major brain damage, the number is (214) 361-8100.

Dallas Morning News, a subsidiary of Belo Corp.
508 Young St.
Dallas, TX 75202
Circulation (214) 745-8383
Main number (214) 977-8222
Viewpoints (214) 977-8494
letterstoeditor@dallasnews.com
Fax (972) 263-0456

American Forest & Paper Association
1111 19th Street, NW
Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
Phone: (202) 463-2700
Email: info@afandpa.org

Following a fivesome on the green

The Nasher Sculpture Garden's "Saturday Night in the City" event was great fun. The Nasher is a lovely green art oasis in downtown Dallas' Arts District, between the Dallas Museum of Art, the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center, and the Crow Collection of Asian Art. The Nasher was designed by Renzo Piano to showcase the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection of contemporary sculpture.

The evening was low-keyed with jazz and wine, people sitting on marble benches, posing for photos by the fountains, and walking around the sculptures as the evening darkened. In some parts of the garden the breeze was pleasant, but in others the humidity portended a thunderstorm.

Contemporary Dance/Fort Worth presented a piece created for the garden. Five female dancers began at Jonathan Borofsky's "Walking to the Sky", then danced to different sculptures with the musicians and audience walking all around with them (an effect similar to following a foursome at a golf tournament). They danced around the George Segal figures, the Maillol and Rodin nudes, the "Schist Furniture Group", over to the Borosky "Hammering Man", around and through the Serra Curves, then the headless Polish crowd, the very large steel sculpture by di Suvero, ending back at "Walking to the Sky". The music was by three musicians with electric guitar, keyboard/synthesizer, and ceramic drum, that was only annoying a few times.

After the dance, I went through the David Smith exhibit, which is excellent. Smith's powerful calligraphic brush drawings give an excellent insight to the sculptor's though process. I am puzzled by his mixing ink with egg white, and have had no luck researching that online. Maybe after I go to the grocery store I can try it. Then back outside to see the sculptures in the garden against a darker sky. I am marking my calendar for the Bruce Wood Dance performance on June fourth.

Tangled up in blue

The Friday Lunch Gang helped me fill my youngest's bedroom with blue balloons this noon. I fed them even though my son couldn't be there for lunch. Actually, that worked perfectly. They didn't feel silly doing their ravenous locusts routine since they were helping me inflate fifty giant balloons and hanging five hundred blue Christmas lights. A dearly demented friend gave me the blue lights for my birthday because she knew they were my favorites. I didn't want to wait until Christmas to use them.

I had a snack of microwave nachos with cheddar cheese not long after blowing up at least fifteen balloons. That is a peculiarly lingering combination. During the Clinton administration I used to be an ice cream volunteer lady in the middle school cafeteria twice a month.* Several times I watched boys squirt entire cans of CheezWhiz straight into their mouths for lunch. I bet it was a similarly lingering experience.

*FYI: Cookies'n'cream ice cream sandwiches were the most popular. Today I served Mooo Bars instead. Once read a novel by John Updike called Memories of the Ford Administration. For some reason, my memories are starting to glump into four-year chunks. I wonder what frozen novelty each president preferred. And what Bob Dylan likes best...

John Kerry does not install hot water heaters

Back in March I had to buy a new hot water heater, which involves a city building permit. The city has to inspect the installation. The inspector showed up at eight yesterday morning although I had asked the installation company to set it up for this morning. The installation failed the inspection because the type B vent is touching the combustible sheetrock. This is a BAD thing. My water heater works very hard to keep up with the showers of a teen male, so the vent is frequently hot.

I called the installation company, requesting this repair be made today. They would call me back, they claimed. This morning the same city inspector showed up to inspect the repair, which, duh, had not been completed. More calls to the installation company...someone will call me within thirty minutes with the time they will arrive to make the repair. Yeah, right. That was two hours ago.

Finally the phone rings. I grab it. A timid-sounding woman introduces herself. I figure she's timid because she knows I am an unhappy customer (she doesn't even know about my ex-husband's latest stunt, after all, and that I am fuming enough to turn emails green). She launches very slowly into a Texans for John Kerry spiel. "Oh," I say, "I thought you were calling to fix the hot water heater!" She decides she will call back some other time. She probably senses I "still need one-inch minimum clearance to combustibles on my type B vent".

Sentimental Soccer Mom

An important part of my life is coming to a close. I have loved being a soccer mom, and a sometime t-ball/baseball mom since the final year of the Reagan administration!

When I explained to my students and their parents that I would be rushing out of class right at six p.m. to make it to the last regular season game of the PYSA Recreational Soccer Under-19 League, they asked if I would cry on this occasion. They were kidding around, but I seriously answered that it was entirely possible.

Turned out I didn't get to cry. The game was close and well-played. Our team advanced to the playoffs. At least one more game for my career!

She's a young thing and cannot leave her mother

Billy Boy, Billy Boy! It seems to me there used to be a saying about the best perfume being the aroma of home-cooking, but I can't seem to track it down. Not that I actually participate in home-cooking or flowery fragrances if I can help it. And what about that famous New Car Smell?

I'm scentsitive. Beauty and cleaning product smells really bother me. Cooking smells aren't as aggravating. Still, the aroma of home-cooking is trailing me, literally. Home is a euphemism here for grocery deli counter:

Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Oh, where have you been, Charming Billy?
I have been to seek a wife,
She's the joy of my life,
She's a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

Did she ask you to come in, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Did she ask you to come in, Charming Billy?
Yes, she asked me to come in,
There's a dimple in her chin.
She's a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

Can she make a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
Can she make a cherry pie, Charming Billy?
She can make a cherry pie,
Quick as a cat can wink an eye,
She's a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.

How old is she, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?
How old is she, Charming Billy?
Three times six and four times seven, Twenty-eight and eleven,
She's a young thing
And cannot leave her mother.


I bought a rotisserie chicken at Albertsons this afternoon. It was the apricot honey glaze $4.99 version. Loaded the groceries into the trunk of the Buick.

Aaaaahhhhhh. That chicken smells delicious. The Buick smells delectable. The chicken has flipped over in the trunk of the Buick, and there's apricot honey glaze soaking into the floor. The vent circulation is better than one might expect. Bon apetit!

Getting out the dyslexic makeover voting bloc

On my way to and from work I drive through Dallas City Council district 11. Linda Koop is running for the Council, and there are campaign yard signs all along my route. This blog doesn't endorse any candidate. I don't even live in Dallas. Neither does my coworker who reports that she reads the campaign signs as:

Kinda
Loop

The brain is a strange and wonderful thing. It sees things as it expects to see them based on previous experiences. It votes for the incumbent without really analyzing the challenger.



On Wednesdays I drive through Richardson, and notice the many yard signs with small yellow italic lettering against a navy blue background:

Kathy!
Justice-Nelson

Haven't found an online campaign page, so I can't post the image. My brain routs the information to the mental department of home improvement contractors where it will languish since I can't afford home improvements. Again, I don't live in Richardson, and I'm not endorsing anyone. If I knew who designed the signs, I would vote against that firm. It's confusing enough that the candidate's name includes the word "justice". I don't compute that Kathy is running for some office that doesn't involve justice because I'm still wondering if Kathy is roofing, landscaping, or doing a kitchen renovation on the house.

It may be that Kathy! is feeling kinda loopy.