Just Don’t Ask
What’s in the Sausage
The following two
sentences don’t go well together:
It’s moose
hunting season in Maine.
We ate something
called “Autumn Stew” at the Fryeburg
Fair.
“Hunting is a
part of life here,” my husband, Bob, said. “You go clamming
and crabbing. It’s the same thing.”
“Crabs are ugly.
That makes it OK.” I picked out something termed “sausage”
from the stew. “I just hope that porcupine roadkill is still
there when we leave the fair.”
We spent 3 days
camping on the Saco River in the town of Brownfield. There,
the lawns are decorated with stuffed deer statues, which are
lovely if you can overlook that they’re for target practice,
with hunting arrows sticking out of their vital organ areas.
We saw “Brake for
Moose” signs. “What would people do here instead?” I asked
Bob. “Yell, ‘We’ll see who’s chicken!’and floor it?”
I told the woman
at the campground office that we couldn’t find the center of
town, where I had hoped to find a Thai restaurant.
“The gas
station,” she said, and showed us to our
site.
“Oh, I love
wilderness camping,” I said to Bob.
“A camper with a
TV doesn’t fall into the roughing-it
category.”
I sat on the
banks and watched the leaves float down the river, wondering
why I never sit still like this at home. A young Husky dog ran
up to me and licked me on the nose. Her tag said
Kiya.
“KI-YAAAA,” our
neighboring campers called, and as quickly as she came, she
left.
That evening, the
Fryeburg sub shop delivery truck arrived. We’d had a long day.
Cooking was simply out of the question for Bob. The
roughing-it mode would commence in the morning, when we
planned on going canoeing.
We rose with the
birds at 10. The campgrounds offered a chauffeur service where
we’d be dropped off with our canoe up the river. That way we’d
float back with the current. Why would anyone say no to this?
“Turn right at
the pines,” the driver said and drove away.
“Hey!” I yelled.
“Maine, as in Pine Tree State.
Hell-ooo?”
We canoed around
the first of a billion little pine islands, then got stuck in
river muck.
An hour later
when the driver was dropping off another unsuspecting couple,
I caught his attention, which was relatively easy since I was
screaming.
“Those pines,” he
pointed.
And so we found
the right way. But we also found the current. And like two big
idiots, we flailed along at breakneck speed. Before we reached
the end, I threw up in the Saco.
That night Bob
built a fire, with wood I gathered from the camp store for $2
a bundle. Kiya sauntered over and put her head on my knee. I
felt a kinship that I all too rarely feel with people.
Kiya’s parents
had a propane light in their tent. I could see inside. They
were naked. I didn’t know that Bob was gazing at the
stars.
“I don’t believe
this,” I said.
“I know. You
never get to see them so clearly.”
I was stunned.
“Do you do this at home too?”
“Only after
you’re asleep.”
I realized then,
he was talking about stars. He realized I wasn’t. “You’re
very, very sick,” he said.
And sadly, our
wonderful trip came to a close. Early in the morning, I hugged
Kiya. “I’ll never see you again,” I said. I closed the door
and we slowly drove away. “Have a good life,” I whispered,
looking back. I felt the stinging pain of knowing that we’ll
both grow old and gray and lame, in separate
lives.
Yet, how lucky I
was to have come. The sadness of parting was due to the joy of
connecting, if only for those few brief moments, when the
autumn leaves floated down the Saco
River.
In the beautiful
secluded village of Brownfield, Maine.
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Party,
pluck and pins
to prop me
up
I didn’t know what to wear
to the Cape Women Magazine party. I don’t get out much. The
straps on the one bra I own are so stretched out family
members compare me to my grandma - whose chest eventually
ended up around her waist.
I was an anxious wreck. The
magazine is very elegant. I write funny articles in it. The
editors are mature and sophisticated, but somehow they let me
in.
All week prior, I flailed
through my closet. Half the things were Woodstock-fringed and
beaded. “What’s in style?” I asked Bob.
He picked up a tie-dyed
tunic with the words “Peace, Love And Rock and Roll” on it.
“Not this,” he
said.
I went to Bradlee’s for a
new bra. I tried several on over my tee shirt before someone
said, “They’ve invented dressing rooms.” Miracle bras, wonder
bras, sports, underwires, strapless, push-ups, and 18 hour
(What? Only six braless hours?). Forget it. I safety pinned
the straps of my old one so I’d be up where I’m supposed to be
when in public.
That night, Bob pushed me
out of the car in front of Penguins SeaGrille. I opened the
restaurant door, changed my mind and headed back. He made
“scoot, go on now” motions with his hands. I went
in.
The publisher of the
magazine greeted me graciously, then asked, “Where’s Bob?”
“Who?”
“Your
husband.”
“Yes, of course. That’s
right. He is.”
She looked baffled. “I was
hoping to see him,” she
said.
“He’s at the bank. We have
money in there. And
. . . we
need some.”
I darted out to the phone
and put in a dime. Nothing happened. Finally, I put enough
money in to work
it.
“What’s wrong?” Bob asked on
the car phone.
“Nothing. Everybody’s great.
I’m just scared. Could you
hurry?”
I hadn’t worn earrings in
ages. It hurt to poke my gold studs through closed-up holes.
My lobes were now swollen and itchy.
“I’m Saralee.” I forced
myself to say to another
writer.
“I’m Debi.” She was warm and
friendly.
“I’m Saralee,” I said. I
scratched my lobe. It was
bleeding.
“I like your columns in the
Cape Cod Times,” someone else
said.
“Thank you. I also write
columns in the Cape Cod
Times.”
“Here’s Bob,” people said in
chorus. He came to stand by me. “I read about you all the
time,” a woman said to him. I peered from behind his shoulder.
He took my hand, which had blood on
it.
That’s when a safety pin
broke, and my right side plummeted. I grabbed someone’s full
drink glass from the table, snugged the fallen flesh in the
crook of my arm, and held myself up, level with my left
side.
The woman who had the drink
politely motioned to get it back. I shook my head “No,” and
backed away, clutching the glass. Bob whispered, “You’re
acting demented.”
When I handed the drink back
to her, my right side plopped. I looked down, then up, and
explained, “Don’t you just hate it when your safety pin breaks
and your ear’s
bleeding?”
She put the glass down and
quickly walked away, while glancing back warily over her
shoulder.
And so, here is what I
learned at the
party:
1.The three people there I
admired the most were just as insecure as
me.
2. It is narrow-minded to
assume that sophisticated people are
snobs.
3. I had a better time when
I stopped thinking about myself and started asking other
people about
themselves.
4. Well-known writers
sometimes talk with a piece of green pepper in their
teeth.
5. And, when people are
wonderful like this, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know
something everybody else knows, or you repeat yourself out of
nervousness, or you can’t stop your hand from trembling when
you’re shaking someone else’s.
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Low Pressure
Causes Rise in Lunacy
Snow storms are
around the corner. Although Floyd didn’t hit, it gave us a
great opportunity to practice crossing the impending-storm
crazy line.
First, there’s
our D-cell battery hysteria. I bought 16, two days before
Floyd’s no-show.
“We have two
flashlights,” Bob said.
“You’ll thank me
tomorrow when nobody can get any.”
“But we don’t
need that many.”
“Everybody wants
something they can’t have. What if I told you that in four
hours you couldn’t get any pizza?”
That worked. We
loaded up on Ds.
The Oscar in the
fruitcake category goes to giddy weather forecasters. I saw
one on TV, demonstrating high winds by standing in a wind
tunnel. His feet were strapped to the floor and his arms were
stretched out to the side, grasping reins so he wouldn’t blow
over. He lost his hat in 20 mph wind. By 70 mph, his neck skin
was flapping. And by 80 mph, his whole face was fluttering.
But the thing is
- he was smiling.
And then there
are the nutso “tough it out” guys. Talk about men from Mars. I
think the planet Machismo Nincompoopus is more fitting. I
watched an interview. “Yep, we stuck it out for Hurricane Bob
and all we lost was our car and our house.”
We also have the
hardy campers asked to evacuate their campsites on the canal.
“Hey, those rangers don’t know anything. They told us to move
for the last one, and when we drove our camper to higher
ground, it got walloped by a tree. I’m staying here - right in
the hurricane’s path. That’s the safest place to be, and you
can quote me.”
I swear I’ve seen
this same man at Jack’s Lounge, having a “smash the ash tray
on your knuckles” contest to see who wouldn’t
flinch.
The scuttlebutt
before a storm reminds me of the children’s game “telephone”.
With Floyd, it started with the real thing. “Hurricane Warning
for Cape Cod.”
I bought ice.
“Are they closing the bridges?” the checker asked. The woman
behind me turned and said to the next in line, “They’re
closing the bridges! And we’ll probably lose power!” That
person turned to the next shopper. “ComElectric’s cutting
power to the Cape!” And so on.
Later on TV, I
saw a newscaster standing on a Falmouth beach. Behind him was
a jet-skier (another group I’m in love with) riding the surf
perilously close to the pier. “Look at that lunatic racing
through the waves,” I said to Bob, who was smiling. “What is
this? When the barometer falls, testosterone levels rise?”
Although the
current was swift, the land scene was calm. The newscaster
looked around nervously. “The winds . . . the winds . . . .” A family was
picnicking beside him.
And so, we never
lost power. But we turned out all the lights anyway and lit an
old brass oil lamp. Then, we snuggled together and did what
people in love do.
We played a
battery operated Trivial Pursuit game which, by the way, takes
2 Ds.
The sound of the
wind kept me up, afraid, most of the night. I thought about
when I was little. I was always too scared to fall asleep when
we lost power, so my neighbor Jamie got to sleep over. She and
I slept together, wriggling under the quilt to the foot of the
bed. There, we shined flashlights under our chins, made goofy
faces and laughed our fright away.
Even though we
didn’t lose electricity, this old fear washed over me. (Maybe
our individual storm craziness has roots in our memories and
is not so inexplicable after all.) So as not to wake Bob, I
pulled the sheet over my head, turned on the flashlight and
began to fall asleep.
I wondered if
Jamie was doing the same.
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“How to Stop
Worrying”
And Other
Baloney
The majority of things you
worry about never happen. But that’s you. Everything I worry
about happens.
I think we can agree that
our mothers get credited for all that’s wrong with us. And
when we grow up, it’s time to stop blaming them for our
problems. We need to claim responsibility for who we are
regardless of our mothers’ foibles. This worrying thing? It’s
all my father’s
fault.
“I’ll call you when I get
there, Dad,” I used to
say.
“God
willing.”
I heard those ominous two
words even if I said, “I’ll cook tonight.” The message being -
God willing we’ll still have a pulse by
supper.
I am now the same as my dad.
So I’ve studied the literature on worrying and here are some
tips.
1. Set aside ten minutes
daily for worry time and just worry then.
That’s about as feasible as
setting aside just ten minutes for chocolate
time.
2. Whenever you start to
worry, snap a rubber band around your
wrist.
I’ve done that. Now, I’m
worried about using too much cortisone cream on the rubber
rash.
3. Tell yourself that if
there’s nothing you can do about the problem, just forget
about it.
That should work the next
time the blood test people call me to come back in saying,
“Don’t worry. Your blood was probably mixed up with somebody’s
from the morgue.”
4. Write down a contingency
plan for all your “what
ifs”.
If I start now, by the time
I’m through, everybody I know will be
dead.
5. Ask yourself what’s the
worst that can
happen?
The plane could stop flying.
There, that’s
better.
A big slice of my worry pie
is in the hypochondriac zone. When I hear health reports on
the media, I have to stick my fingers in my ears and sing show
tunes. Otherwise, I develop the symptoms. My husband, Bob, kicks
me out of the room when the vet examines our cat (once I swore
I had ear mites).
Last month, we were at KMart
in the TV department. I heard “weightlessness, bone density
loss” and in a panic, I covered my ears and belted out, “THE
HILLS ARE ALIVE .
. . WITH THE
SOUND OF M-U-U-U-SIC!”
“It’s about astronauts, you
lunatic,” Bob yelled, while a shopper picked up the store
phone and dialed security.
Have you heard the ad for
frightened people who postpone dentist appointments? It says
your hygienist can see signs of dreadful diseases, just from
cleaning your teeth. And that’s supposed to make us go?
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
is the diagnosis characterized by excessive worry. The
symptoms, according to the American Psychiatric Association,
must include at least three of the following:
Restlessness or edginess /
fatigue /
difficulty concentrating or mind going blank / irritability / muscle tension / sleep
disturbance
HELLOOO . . . .
Call me crazy (I heard
that!) but I think the APA’s been watching me and taking
notes.
Lately, my Worry du Jour has
been the toaster oven, which sometimes doesn’t work right.
Every time we leave the house, I ask Bob, “Did you unplug it?”
“If I answer ‘yes’, you
won’t believe me,” he said on this morning’s
drive.
“I’ll believe you. I
promise.”
“OK. Yes,” he
said.
“You’re just saying
that.”
“Isn’t there a Get-A-Grip
group you can
join?”
“Swear on the dog’s life
that you unplugged
it.”
He pulled over, reached into
the back seat, and yanked out the toaster
oven.
So, I don’t know how to stop
worrying. But there is one vital and very crucial thing I will
tell you.
Every moment you spend
worrying is a moment you’ve lost to time. And you can’t get it
back.
I’ll write again
soon.
God
willing.
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Odd Couples, Face-Lickers and
Lunatics
It’s socializing
season on Cape Cod. Don’t you hate spending this time with
couples that bicker?
Our friend was
over with her husband. “Where did you put my glasses, dammit?”
she snarled at him. The husband, just as belligerent but
quieter, saw that she was wearing them but didn’t answer. He’s
an aggressive guy in a passive way. He left the table, but not
before knocking the cranberry sauce onto her
lap.
Bob and I attract
pairs that drive us nuts. Last year, we had dinner with a
couple that made constant sexual innuendos. I don’t want to
hear about someone’s sex life while I’m sucking in linguini
noodles. The husband was pompous and smarmy – always trying to
impress us with lofty stuff.
“You’ve read
Kafka, of course,” he said.
“Oh yes,” I said.
“Didn’t he write, ‘All the Girls in France Never Wear their
Underpants’?” Bob elbowed me. Then he handed the husband a jar
of our homemade raspberry jam.
He opened the
jar, smelled the jam for a long time and said, “I’d like to
smear this on my wife’s face and spend an hour licking it
off.” Now, what on earth am I supposed to say to that? “Great.
That’s just why we brought it. So you could stick your wife’s
face in it.”
What I wanted to
say was, “I could puke.” Instead I said, “It’s also good on
toast.”
When his wife
came in, carrying a plate of chilled shrimp, he said, “Ah, my
nubile bride.” Never in my whole life have I heard anyone say
the word nubile. He opened his mouth. I think she was supposed
to put a shrimp in it, but I’m not sure what was on his mind.
Bob and I sat like stick figures, knowing that if either of us
so much as glanced at the other, we would have to be carted
away from busting our stomachs open with hysterics.
Once we had
dinner with a couple that put on their bathrobes and invited
us to sleep over. I didn’t get it. I figured it would be fun
to have sodas and cookies at 3 in the morning. Bob got our
coats and pulled me out of there.
We used to
socialize with a pair that never heard a word we said. They
just wanted to spout loudly about whatever this week’s issue
was.
“How are you?”
the husband would say, not looking at
me.
“I broke off my
big toe and then I ate it,” I’d say.
“Uh huh. There’s
too much development. We don’t need a supermarket in
Cotuit.”
“Last night I set
fire to Bob’s face.”
“There’ll be more
traffic,” his wife said, shaking her
head.
And so, I asked
Bob. “How come we keep meeting couples that are
nuts?”
“If you asked
them about us, can you imagine what they’d say about
you?”
“They’d say I
have a few quirks.”
“A few quirks? It
takes us a half hour to get out of the house because you stand
in front of the stove and stare at it. What do you think it’s
going to do? Turn on by itself?”
I went pale. “Can
it do that?”
Once we had a
barbeque. Lick-face lectured the non-listeners about Camus.
They screamed about airport noise while passive-aggressive man
knocked over the red wine. All the while, I kept bugging Bob
about the fumes I smelled leaking from the gas grill.
“Now I know why I
get involved with flaky people,” I said, with relief, to Bob.
“Compared to this group, I look
normal.”
“I don’t think
so,” he said, adding briquettes to the fire. “We’ve never
owned a gas grill.”
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Let
No Good Deed Go Unpunished
Bob and I are
both really sick. And this is how we got this
way.
Several weeks
ago, my friend Mary and her husband Rich were planning a
night’s stay at a P'town inn. Knowing this, I thought I’d have
a nice bottle of wine waiting for them in their room. Then Bob
suggested we put together an activities basket, which we did.
We spent the day at Toys R Us and filled the basket with silly
putty, a yo-yo, a Frisbee, a bubble blowing bunny and
cookies.
The day before
their arrival, we drove from Marstons Mills to the lovely
Fairbanks Inn. The innkeeper, a good fellow named Gerald said
this, “They just called me. Rich is sick and they’re not sure
they’re coming. Want to see their room?” he asked, clearly
proud of his place.
We knew how much
they were looking forward to this trip, so we took the chance
that Rich would feel better and left the basket with
Gerald.
The following
morning, I called the inn to find that they were indeed
canceling. So we made trip number two to Provincetown and got
the basket. We would have left it there, had it not contained
such neat stuff.
By now, the
basket was looking disgusting. The white crepe paper had
leaking bubble blowing stuff on it. The cookies were moist
because I had wrapped them in too much cellophane and now had
