Hints and Guesses

You’ve been dying to know more about the products that fill (and fulfill) my life. To meet the demand, I’ve created The Be Like Ducky Store (also seen in the sidebar). Yes, you too can be like Ducky! You’ll (eventually) find it to be a handy guide to what to get yourself for your birthday (especially) or Christmas (when necessary). All proceeds go straight to the Ducky Plastic Surgery Fund.

While I can’t recommend it to others, the Gall Bladder Diet seems to be working well for me.

The Gall Bladder Diet requires one to consider the potential for future pain from every bite of food one eats. Does it contain fat? If yes, think long and hard before eating it; in fact, the default response should be “What? Are you crazy?”. If no, still think about it, as one might still be wrong.

I’m taking some pants in to my tailor next week.

By 11 o’clock this morning, this Starbucks chai was the nicest thing anyone had done for me all day:

Then came a picture from a young friend (annotations mine):

Until this:

Then I made my own chai:

Curiously, in yesterday’s job interview I was not once asked why I left my last job. This is the first time the interviewer has not asked that question (one interviewer in another interview asked why I left every single job I’ve had since college. Even the skating rink job. If you didn’t know I’d worked at a skating rink since college, we are more out of touch than you thought. And that is probably not your fault.)

Given the nature of the location of this position (currently identified as the university in my backyard), it is not surprising to imagine that they know, in fact, that I left my job because I got fired. That’s the nature of the church grapevine. Still, I was there for almost two hours (partly because I had a number of questions, and partly because of an add-on conversation at the copier). They’re making a decision quickly—today, in fact. I just wrote and sent two completely different thank-you notes, one for each interviewer, showcasing my personable writing personality and reminding them that in fact, I am the best person for this job. Pleasepleaseplease (except that I didn’t actually say that).

Should I get this job, I will start tomorrow, because the person I’d be replacing is leaving at noon on Friday, for good. I would like this job, which is probably not going to pay enough but will have fantastic benefits for parents of children in private school. Which we are, and we do not currently have these benefits. Should I get a job at this institution, the firstborn has promised to take his shoes off at the door every single time instead of sporadically, and he will always turn the lights out when he leaves a room. I am not sure that is enough for thousands of dollars less in student loans, but it may be all I get.

For the rest of what may be my last day of freedom, I am going to watch a movie and then maybe play croquet. It sounds good, doesn’t it?

Coming up: The end of the Death Tree, with pictures.

Last week our family took our annual vacation in Tennessee. In my opinion (and that of several others), it was the best one we’ve ever had.

On Monday, I got fired.

Depending on how you look at it, I’ve either sunk into melancholy or am taking a long, deep breath before jumping back into the work force. Since Tuesday, that is.

On Monday, I went straight from my former place of employment to the staffing agency through which I got that job several years ago. Then I went home and told the family. After that, I made several face-to-face networking visits. Later, I applied for a job online, and then I applied for unemployment. Oh, and I went and applied for a replacement Social Security card since mine never turned up after the last move.

That was Monday. Tonight, I took my first shower since Monday morning.

That is all for now. I thought there would be more.

I stood alone. My father sat to my left in the black lounge chair. My stepmother sat to the right in the brown recliner. My mother sat somewhere in Kansas.

“Your mother sent a birthday card,” she said. My tenth birthday—or it had been, four days past. “What kind of mother sends a card like this?” She’d signed the card “Happy birthday, Mother.” There was no gift, just the card. And it was four days late.

“She doesn’t love you,” she said. “If she did, the card would have been sent on time, and she would have written something meaningful. And she would have sent a gift.”

My small, skinny, 10-year-old self began to cry, and for the first time, my father spoke.

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

Why was I crying indeed? Perhaps because the mother I got, the one I lived with every day, was not so much mother as caretaker. She fed us three times a day. We wore clean clothes. We went to school. She made birthday cakes and held small family parties. These are not small things, and acknowledging them is to recognize part of the truth.

She served as religious educator. We studied our Sabbath School lesson and read assigned religious books every day—an hour on weekends, half an hour on weekdays was the setup, but in reality we started when she told us to start, and we stopped when she told us to stop. She often told me I was a bad, unrepentant child who was on the certain road to committing the unpardonable sin (whatever that was), so to save my soul she repeatedly assigned Steps to Christ. I can spot a quote from that book at fifty paces.

She hit us. Sometimes with a wooden paddle. Sometimes with the leather belt that hung behind our bedroom door. Sometimes with the plastic ruler in the pencil cup on the table next to her brown recliner, or the one she kept in her car visor. Occasionally she hit us with her bare hand. She hit us often, and almost always she hit us in places no one else would ever see.

Fours years and a handful of visits with one mother. Five years of living every day with this other one, plus a father who was often gone. In the face of overwhelming emotion, my ten-year-old self was powerless to do the math, but the result was still the same.

“I’m all mixed up,” I said.

He took me in his arms, and I cried some more.

Read the companion piece to this post at Thursday Drive.

Jennifer at Thursday Drive, as some of you may know, is my sister. She has recently begun to tell stories of our family. Her stories make me think of other stories, the ones that I write in my head, and of a particular problem, being what to call our stepmother. In real life, we call her by our name. Here, I may follow Jennifer’s example and call her Sue, a deceptively plain name.

While unwieldy (it works better as a book title than a nickname), I have stumbled upon a name that describes her well: Hitler with a Heart of Gold. HWAHOG. HOG for short.

Here are the stories by which she gained this name.

In late September, I ran into my aunt and uncle at a church function. Neither my church nor theirs, we were surprised to see one another.

“We’ve just come back from moving Grandma into a nursing home,” Ann said.

I’d missed making my monthly telephone call to Grandma that month, so it was really no one’s fault but my own that I didn’t know about the move. Still, I did little to quell the small explosion of anger in my chest. Couldn’t Ann have called me before the trip? Was she ever planning to call me? But the anger was useless. Grandma had broken her hip in the spring; Ann hadn’t called then, either.

Since then, Grandma had been in the hospital, and then rehab, and she’d never made the move back into her tiny senior apartment.

Grandma, it should be explained, is the mother of three daughters: Marie, Ann (who stood before me), and Sue, the stepmother. For better or worse, this was the family I’d grown up in, and like it or not, they’d always be part of me.

“She just wasn’t able to live on her own anymore,” said Ann. “We asked her to move up here with us, but she didn’t want to move away from her church and her friends.”

“What about Sue?” I asked, knowing full well Grandma would never have moved in with Sue. Still, Sue lived near Grandma, and I thought she might have tried to make a go of it.

“Sue?” Ann snorted. “She’s like Hitler, or a general.” She caught the look on my face and hastily added, “She’s better now, you know.”

Ann was right. Sue is better now. As far as I know, she no longer beats children. She no longer tells children that if they can’t sleep, they must be feeling guilty about something. She no longer makes children eat whole raw onions for telling lies.

As far as I know.

She does, however, still have a tenuous hold on the truth, and she still uses her influence to stir up family dynamics. Ann has her own reasons for keeping her relationship with Sue, and it helps that she doesn’t want to know about how Sue raised us.

“No. You said Hitler,” I replied. I’d never contradicted Ann before, and my heart pounded. She dropped her eyes, and we moved on to something else.

It was enough to say that, to bear witness to what she really said, and to know what she really meant.

Grandma didn’t last long in the nursing home. She died shortly before Thanksgiving, and I went home for the funeral. Before I left, on the road, at home—every moment I expected a telephone call telling me not to bother, as I wasn’t wanted at the funeral.

In the event, it was my father who got the telephone call—years had passed since he’d formally been her son-in-law, but they’d kept in touch, and he wanted to pay his respects.

My uncle, Ann’s husband, did the dirty deed. Sad, really—the only trouble he would have caused was entirely in their—Ann’s and Sue’s— heads.

The funeral ceremony itself was nearly anticlimactic, although I spent some time trying to figure out if certain family members (besides Jennifer and I) had been left out of the eulogy. Ann’s husband rose at the end to make a few comments and give the benediction.

“These two women [Ann and Sue] have hearts of gold,” he said, referring to their work in the previous week. My eyes and my mind boggled. Hearts of gold? The same hearts that asked my father not to attend the funeral? The same hearts that gave funeral scheduling preference to a grandson-in-law over a grandson? The same hearts that left another son-in-law out of the obituary? As for Sue, the same heart that beat children and inspired guilt where none existed?

Hitler with a Heart of Gold indeed.

Today was the Big Day. Last week I had the bright idea to take it off and head to Chicago in order to see movies I couldn’t get (at least right now) around here.

On the schedule were The Host, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Children of Men. The first two were at one theater, and the third was at another. I planned to eat at a Middle Eastern restaurant in between.

I got up just a little later than I should have, so I hit the road with just enough time to get there, as long as I exceeded the speed limit and didn’t make any wrong turns. I did the first exceptionally well, but I missed a turn onto North Clark and suddenly found myself on Lakeshore Drive. The lake was beautiful, but I missed the opening scene of The Host. I hate missing the first part of a movie. The last time I did that was for As Good as It Gets, and some punk theater employee wouldn’t let me stick around for the first part of the next showing. She claimed that if the theater were audited that very night, something bad would happen.

I had better luck this time. After making a quick call to hear my five-year-old niece count sweetly to twenty in French (her birthday gift to me) and picking up some lunch from a deli, I bought my ticket for Pan’s Labyrinth but headed for the first few minutes of The Host. I had a lovely lunch during Pan’s Labyrinth which would have been even lovelier had I been able to see my food while eating it.

I had counted on having enough time between the first and second theaters to eat at the Middle Eastern restaurant, but traffic and parking got in the way (every time I go to Chicago I’m reminded that I really need to learn how to parallel park). By the time I got the theater, I had twenty minutes to wait.

In the end, I should have gone to the restaurant. I re-read Children of Men a couple of weeks ago, and I am baffled as to why they chose to make this particular movie. It’s not a simple case of “the book was better than the movie.” The movie was almost entirely different than the book, except for the central premise, a couple of scenes that were reminiscent of the book, and a couple of lines of dialogue. Poor P. D. James. No amount of money could make up for this travesty. A long list of writers got a writing credit for this movie, which partially explains this train wreck. Honestly, it wouldn’t have been that hard to make a movie that was more faithful to the subtle intimacies of the original story.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Host (and not just because it was Korean), and I liked Pan’s Labyrinth. The Host was the only movie that hasn’t come here, but I missed the other two when they were here, and I really wanted to see them.

In all, however, it was a good day. I didn’t mind the driving and the weather was sunny. If I had to make one new resolution for this new year, it would be to learn how to parallel park.

(The film festival actually started Thursday evening with a local screening of Little Children. While I haven’t yet decided what I think about the movie, I will never again look at a Hummel figurine in the same way. Who knew they were so creepy?)

The festivities continue this evening with Jojo and Nacho at a restaurant I have yet to choose (Polo is on his first no-grownups road trip). There may be a movie if there is time. There will certainly be more movies tomorrow.

Comment and I’ll give you a letter. Then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. After, post this on your blog and give out some letters of your own.

pepperedjane gave me my letter.

1. Men.
2. Marmalade. Orange, particularly. On buttered toast.
3. Movies. Many, many movies.
4. Marshmallows.
5. Maps. Because I get lost.
6. Meaning.
7. Music.
8. MP3 players.
9. Ministers. More than most. I have no idea why. If you think you know, keep it to yourself.
10. Milk, chocolate. But not milk chocolate.

   
  .

But a calm end to an otherwise exciting day.

Mine:

Jojo’s:

This, on the first night of our annual anniversary trip.