Right Place, Right Time

In 1996, I had my ears pierced for the second time. I don’t remember what possessed me to decide that two holes in each ear were better than one. However, I’m sure that my decision was influenced by the fact that the second piercing was free. I worked at Smart-Mart then, and the new jewelry department manager needed piercing practice.

Alas, I neglected the second holes in each ear, and, within a year, the holes closed. Well…sort of. I could poke an earring part way through the holes, but I just couldn’t get it to go all the way through.

Fast forward to February of this year. I had the failed second piercings redone. But my ears hurt for what seemed like forever. I blamed the pain on the very uncomfortable metal earring backs.

One afternoon, when I was out and about with a friend, we went to Michael’s to check on the availability of flag cases. While “Vi” went to the framing department to look for the cases, I went to the jewelry supplies department to look for some more comfortable earring backs.

After I found the right product, I went looking for Vi. She found me first. And she looked quite pleased. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “they have the flag cases and the sign below them says buy one get one free.

Yes, that did sound too good to be true, especially since we needed two flag cases. And they are a bit pricey. I figured that a sales associate probably stuck the sign in the wrong place and would hear about it later. But when I went to see for myself, I discovered that Vi was right. The sign beneath the flag cases read, Buy One Get One Free.

So I did.

 

Hiatus

On hiatus for a while. Finalizing plans for a family member’s memorial service. Be back soon.

My Parents Are to Blame for This

[Note: As short as this post is, I’ve incorporated material from two previously published essays (Tucson Citizen, July 1987; Themestream, January 2001). The revised Themestream essay eventually will be posted in its entirety on another (sorry about that) site. Until then, here is a preview.]

Give me a task, and I’ll do it well, unless, of course, it involves some sort of housework.

And there is a good reason why. As a toddler, I was terrorized by Mom’s vacuum cleaner, a baggy brown behemoth that roared through the house two or three times a week. When Mom wanted to run the vacuum cleaner, she had to conscript a relative to take me somewhere—anywhere.

My parents couldn’t figure out why I was so frightened by the darn thing. Who knows? (I certainly don’t.) Maybe the noise drove me crazy. Then again, one morning the machine came dangerously close to sucking up the cat. Maybe I thought it would get me next.

My histrionics, I mean hysterics, drove Mom and Dad a little crazy. Mom hoped it was just a phase I was going through. Even then, she looked forward to the day when I could start helping out around the house.

That finally happened when I was eight, and it lasted about ten minutes. I was no longer afraid of the vacuum cleaner. However, on my first try, I lost control of the machine, crashed into the china cabinet, demolished two table lamps, and knocked my little brother into a magazine rack.

“For Pete’s sake, Mary Frances,” Dad yelled, “do it yourself before she destroys everything.”

Unfortunately, Dad’s instinct for self-preservation condemned my mother to doing most of her own housework forever.

The Newsletter That Never Was

When I was ten, I got the bright idea to create a newsletter. I never followed through with that idea for several reasons. Reason one: I was ten. Reason two: I didn’t know how to type, which was a requisite for creating a professional looking newsletter.

However, reason three was the one that really shot down the idea. A newsletter has to report news, but I had no idea as to where to find some. Nothing exciting ever happened in our small town. And, at ten, the people I knew didn’t seem at all that interesting.

By the time I was twelve, I suspected that at least a few of those individuals were, or had been, involved in some really interesting stuff. Unfortunately, the adults who knew all the details usually tried their best to stay mum about them in front of the kids. By the time we were teens, though, my friends and I had figured it out for ourselves, thanks to keen observation and a little surreptitious eavesdropping.

At sixteen, I was more interested in dating than I was in writing a newsletter, which was probably just as well. I don’t think a newsletter would have gone over big then. By that time, several of my peers were adding grist to the gossip mill, and a couple of those peers had issues that seemed to appear in the newspapers on a semi-regular basis. Anything I dared to write about them would probably have made some people very unhappy with me, people like their parents, their probation officers, and whoever else was involved in whatever they did.

And even if I had wanted to resurrect the newspaper idea, it wouldn’t have worked. As a high school junior, I had to take a requisite typing class. Two weeks into the class, I discovered that I hated typing.

Hope to Get Back to Blogging Soon

Haven't been blogging much during these last two months. We lost a family member in November.

Hope to get back to blogging and working on other writing projects soon. Also resuming editing services in February.

Just One of Those Things You Always Remember

I was fourteen then and in the ninth grade.

Back in the Mid-Jurassic Period, students were allowed to leave the school grounds for lunch. On that particular day, I was walking to the diner with a friend who was in the eighth grade. I’ll call her Lily, but that wasn’t her real name.

We were halfway there, when Lily stopped in the middle of the street, grabbed my arm, pulled me closer, and whispered in my ear, “See that guy coming toward us.”

How could I not see that guy coming toward us? He looked nasty—scowl on his face, black leather jacket, tight jeans. The word hood popped into my head.

“That’s [Tough Guy],” Lily said. 

Although I hadn’t been formally introduced to Tough Guy, I knew some things about him, and they were not good things. He was a person whose reputation preceded him.

“He had to get married,” Lily whispered as he strutted past us. “Now he has to get divorced because he has to get married again.”

Yikes, I thought. “That’s crazy,” I said. “And anyway, maybe you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

Actually, Lily sort of heard right. The timing was a little off though. Tough Guy did get divorced within a few months. And he did have to get married again, but that happened about five years later.

He married Lily.

Ain't Misbehaving Much

When I was growing up in the Mid-Jurassic Period, my friends and I looked forward to wearing costumes and going from house to house on trick or treat night. We enjoyed doing this every Halloween until the year I was in the ninth grade. That year, we got a lecture instead of treats. A woman at the first house we went to yelled at us, saying we were too old for trick or treat. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she said before telling us to go home.

That woman took all the fun out of trick or treat night. But, even though she turned us away, we never even thought about playing tricks on her. We didn’t go to any other houses. We were afraid that those people would also turn us away. We went home empty handed, figuring that our trick or treat years were over.

They weren't. Sort of.

The next year, my friends and I came up with an idea to have what we considered a little harmless Halloween fun. We decided to do some window waxing, but we wanted to make it easy for people to clean up. We knew that removing wax from windows was a chore; so we “borrowed” bars of soap from home. About 8 p.m., we went to check out the window-waxing possibilities on the main street of a neighboring town. (Yeah, in retrospection, that was sort of dumb.) That town was larger than the one where we lived. We figured we wouldn’t be recognized if we were caught in the act.

While my friends scouted out their territories, I claimed a spot in front of a TV repair shop that had a Closed sign in the window. I could see a light at the back of the shop, behind an open door that led to what was, most likely, office space. Probably left the light on to discourage thieves, I thought.

I started spinning soap circles all over the window. A few minutes later, I glanced up and saw a man standing in the back of the shop. He was laughing, but I freaked out anyway. I dropped the soap and took off. I found my friends, and we got the heck out of there.

From then on, I behaved. Well, at least on Halloween.