|
My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
|
3:10 p.m. - 2005-08-03
To continue on a theme… January- My birth month. The 21st is a good birthday. Too far after Christmas to have my gifts lumped together. Though I often get my b-day gifts sent with the Christmas packages from far away friends and relatives. I don't mind this at all. I never peek. I stack my prezzies up on top of the bookcase in the dining room and wait until my actual birthday to open them. Drives SIL batty. She's one of the most disciplined people I know, but she has ZERO willpower about waiting to open presents. She's always the one noodging to open gifts on Christmas Eve. That I have a frothy pile of wrapped goodies just sitting there makes her bonkers. She can't understand how I can bear the temptation. Oddly I'm not tempted at all. With Alex's birthday coming a scant 5 days before mine, my birthday has taken a real hit. Some years HIS birthday party happens on MY birthday and I'm lucky if someone remembers to say, "Happy Birthday" to me, let alone get a whole day of treats and hugs. So I save my presents and celebrate that way. February- By the middle of February I have a wicked case of spring fever. Now that I'm a bona fide gardener, my spring jones are even worse. I can see wanting to plant and stuff, but since I loathe hot weather and actually enjoy wintertime this crazed longing for spring is kind of dumb. Spring just means summer is coming and with it the miserable heat and humidity. I hereby resolve to spend next February counting my sweater wearing, snowball making, frost pictures on the windows blessings. March- When I was little my grandfather would take me and my sister into the city twice a year. Once around my birthday. We'd go to The Ice Capades or Ringling Bros Circus at Madison Square Garden, whichever was in town that year. The other trek into the city was in March for the St Patrick's Day parade. We never went to the Macy's parade. Never for tickertape parades for astronauts or other heroes. Just the St Patrick's Day parade. It ALWAYS snowed or rained. Always. It was crowded and cold and my grandfather was a wreck from trying to keep track of us (my little sister was a fidget). The real silly bit of all of this was my Irish grandmother refused to go with us. She hated St Patrick's Day. She said it was embarrassing. No love lost between my grandmother and the Auld Sod, the once a year green beer and shamrock orgy just reminded her of everything she'd been determined to leave behind when she immigrated to the States. Leprechauns made her break out in hives. If you wished her a Top o' the mornin' she'd smack you. My grandmother was so violently anti-Irish she hated Spencer Tracy. She must have had one miserable childhood, that's all I'm saying. April- I knew a girl named April. Her birthday was in August. Her mother never said why she named her kid 'April'. Weird, eh? May- I've always wondered about Maypoles. I've never seen one in person. I know if the dance is done correctly the ribbons end up neatly braided around the pole. Something that's amazing to me, I couldn't ever get the hang of turning double-dutch jump ropes, let alone coordinate passing ribbons over and around 7 other people and their ribbons. Nope, my only experience in wrapping something around a pole is tetherball. Probably one of the dumbest playground activities ever invented. I wonder who was bored enough to go, "You know, I think I'll put a volley ball on a rope and hang it from a pole. Then we'll hit the ball at each other to see who can bash the other guy's face in first." June- I used to cry on the last day of school. I loved school. School was a haven. School was order and reason and the one place I found approval. School had rules that made sense. School rewarded good behavior and excellence. School was an escape from home. School was safe. So while my bus mates were flinging worksheets and chanting, "No more pencils, no more books…", I was sitting with my face pressed against the window weeping and dreading the coming summer of chores never done well enough and my mother's drunken fits of rage. July- When Alex was a little guy and most of Mike's family still lived in Texas (including us, of course) we'd get together at my in-laws' house for a 4th of July barbeque. Big fun. We got together lots over the year, but the party on the 4th was always special. A whole lot of beer. Kids and dogs and doing the hula with MIL's pal, Pineapple. Fireworks and spitting watermelon seeds at each other. Jokes and funny stories and playing board games. Rip snorting around in my MIL's Fiat convertible. Taking the canoes out to the lake and cracking up when someone tipped over. It seemed like we laughed the entire weekend. We were so young! All of us, even my in-laws. August- It's wonderful to me to be living in a house I must have ridden my bike past hundreds of times. Those long summer days when we lived over the hill from Mini-dunk in Teensytown were magical. Lisa and Laura were in my life and I could take on the world with such friends by my side. On this very road not a quarter mile from where I sit right now is the cemetery which was our summer headquarters. Does that sound gruesome? It's not, really. We weren't incipient Goths entranced with the romance of death, the cemetery was just a fun place to hang out. It was cool and shady. Quiet and private. We'd invested it with a little magic, we never saw anyone tending the grounds yet the grass was always short and the landscaping tidy. How could this be if not for magic? We had our cemetery. We had streams to dam. We ran races. We stole corn and cooked it up, gnawing on that tough cow corn until our chins and forearms were slick with butter. We rode our bikes down this road and into Podunkville. To get there we had to go through the railroad tunnel, a scary proposition. The tunnel is narrow and the frequent gravel trucks from the pit up the road a piece were very wide. But braving the tunnel made the reward that much sweeter. Ice cream from the Guernsey farm which was our ultimate destination. Back then even something as prosaic as a dairy farm could be special to me. Guernseys were exotic brown beasts. In my world cows are black and white. Guernsey Knoll stood my Holstein complacency on its ear. September- There is something intensely satisfying about making a well-fitting bookcover from a brown grocery bag. It was a point of pride that I never used tape. A most practical origami, brown bag bookcovers made me happy. I liked making them. I liked drawing on them. I liked how I could tuck that night's homework into the inside pocket. I liked how over time the bookcovers grew soft and fuzzy, just like jeans. October- See? The Bushies are even frigging with my simplest pleasures. October used to mean the end of Daylight Savings Time. I like making the change back to regular time. There's something cozy and snug about sitting down to dinner with the lights on. The darkening windows the perfect counterpoint to the warm glow of lamplight over my table. My family gathered together to eat and talk about our day, the dinner food something heavy and rich. Such a nice change from yet another salad eaten standing over the kitchen sink while Mike uses the last of the daylight to do yard chores and the boys are off doing their own stuff. Extending Daylight Savings Time helps nothing. No energy is saved. All it's going to do is kill some school kids waiting for their buses in the dark and prevent me from having one of the few Norman Rockwell pleasures my unconventional life offers. Phooey. November- This is my month to fly. A desperate migration imperative comes to me in November. I gotta go. Somewhere. Right now. I feel I must be off on the wind. The honking geese seem to call my name. Every bit of my gypsy heritage cries out from beneath the veneer of my white suburban candy coating. I have to get gone or die. December- No Grinch here! I love, love, love the holidays. I watch Charlie Brown and Rudolph and It's A Wonderful Life. I bake scads of cookies. I plan and shop and wrap with joy. We decorate the tree and I have my yearly cry. I truly don't know how I feel about religion and the divinity of Jesus, but I do believe in Santa Claus. Christmas is a Very Good Thing indeed. Ahhh…Christmas. Nice to be thinking about Christmas on a day like today. It's a brutal 95 degrees. My lawn is dusty. I can't be sure, but I think a camel just went past the back door. I need a freezy-pop, ~LA
|
