stink pretty

I've never really been a fragrance person and hate the smell of most perfumes. 

There are a few exceptions. When I worked in retail and got a discount, I would occasionally spring for Clinique's Aromatics Elixir. My mom's worn it for years - it's more of a sandalwoody sort of scent rather than flowery. And lately I've fallen in love with a company called Demeter. They make fragrances that mimic real life smells, with names like "Dirt" and "Thunderstorm". 

David's son Dylan once told me that I only like smells that most people think smell bad, and I guess that's true. The smells I really love are things like gasoline and hot tar. Maybe they remind me of my childhood, when my dad would come home from his job at the railroad smelling like creosote. All I know is I always try to get a little gasoline on my glove filling up my car in the wintertime so I can sniff it all day.

Yesterday I was at Schnuck's when one of those little glass jars of chopped garlic slipped out of my hand and broke all over the floor. There was a tall kid with an Amish beard working in the produce department, so I walked up to him, told him what I had done and that I was sorry. "Don't worry about it," he said conspiratorially, "I broke one myself this morning." 

The side effect was that suddenly the produce department was flooded with the heavenly scent of garlic. A lady standing next to me said, "That smells great! What is that?" While I was explaining to her about how much easier it was to buy garlic pre-chopped in these little jars rather than chopping up a clove, another man walked up sniffing the air and declared "I'm staying right here." It did smell like the best Italian restaurant you've ever been to. I hated to leave.

Now that I have a job I can buy Demeter fragrance again. 

I wonder if they make "Garlic"?

spring

I am not sentimental about the holidays. If it were up to me, I'd take down the tree the minute the last present is unwrapped.

We did have a great tree this year - I almost hated to take it down.  After being horrified by the price of tiny little $40 trees at Ted Drewes', we went up Watson to be horrified by the price of tiny little $65 trees at a Boy Scout stand. We ended up at Lowe's (who woulda thunk?) right before closing and went home with a decent, although slightly dry, $18 tree. It smelled great right up until the day David donated it to Carondelet park.

But, I digress .  .  .

I'm a warm weather girl - the warmer, the better. I hate being cold and dread the approach of winter. I hate being cooped up inside. I look stupid in turtlenecks. I look even stupider in hats. 

The holidays are over, yippeeeee!!! Now I can start looking for spring!

In my imagination the days are already longer, the air smells different. Some days I might not even have to wear gloves - what a treat! Groundhog's day, Valentine's day, frozen Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's day all lead to Easter - that's a lot of holidays to cram into one 4-month period. I'm sure it was designed that way to keep our spirits up until we could go outside again. Robin freezin' his ass off in March with a look on his face that says, "I do this every year. When will I learn?"

Only with the utterance of the 4 most important words of spring - "Pitchers and catchers report" - will I truly know that winter is almost over.

Yikes! It's 22 degrees. Guess I'll go see if I have any clean turtlenecks.

holiday haiku

I love writing Haiku.

It forces you to put your thoughts into a mathematical format - five syllables for the first line, seven for the second and wrap your thoughts all up in a big five syllable finish.

When I worked for the department store which shall not be named, we'd have Haiku writing contests and email them back and forth to each other.

My lack of employment forced me to spread my holiday spending over a period of several months rather than my usual December 24th shopping spree at QuikTrip, so I was done early. 

Tree decorated? Check. Presents all bought and wrapped? Check. Cookies baked? Check. Toilet cleaned? Check.

As a consequence, I've had time on my hands to delve into the origins of Haiku and compose a few of my own. 

According to Wikipedia (I know, I know . . . I'm a Wiki head. Shut up.):

"Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 Japanese on (a phonetic unit identical to the mora), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 on respectively, and typically containing a kigo, or seasonal reference. In Japanese, haiku are traditionally printed in a single vertical line, while Haiku in English usually appear in three lines, to equate to the Japanese haiku's three metrical phrases. Previously called hokku, it was given its current name by the Japanese writer Masaiko Shiki at the end of the 19th century."

What could be a more seasonal subject than December 25th?

I wrote these on the bus today:

No money for gifts.

I will Simonize your car

when it gets warmer.

or

I'm a smart shopper!

I won't buy Rock Band 3 when

air guitar is free.

and my personal favorite

It's Jesus' birthday!

He knows what his present is

because he's Jesus.

Domo Arigato. Have the happiest of holidays, y'all. 

miracle on harrison street

I never believed in Santa.

I know that sounds preposterous, but it's true. I was a pretty reality-based kid and to my mind there was just a total lack of evidence as to his existence. 

For starters, my mom was (and is) left-handed. She has the kind of distinctive penmanship that can only come from a person that has to curl her left arm all around the paper to write. Strangely enough, Santa's handwriting looked exactly like Mom's. So did the Tooth Fairy's handwriting.  And the Easter Bunny's. 

Secondly, we didn't have a chimney. We had a space heater with a 6" diameter pipe that went up to the ceiling. Even if Santa could have managed to squeeze himself down the pipe, he would have ended up burning his ass.

My Mom didn't work, mainly because my Dad wouldn't let her. He thought people would think that he wasn't man enough to support his family if she did. I lived a block from my grade school and would come home every day for lunch to find more presents under the tree. "Where did these come from?" I'd ask. "Oh, Santa happened to be in the neighborhood and dropped these off early so he wouldn't have as much work to do on Christmas Eve," my Mom would reply.  

It was a big day when the J.C.Penney's Christmas catalog came in the mail. Mom would sit down with me to try and get an idea of what I wanted for Christmas. "What do you want Santa to bring you?" she would ask. "This, I guess," I'd say, pointing at something random. "Are you sure you don't like this better?" Mom would say frantically, pointing at the one she'd already bought. "This is much better, don't you think?"

I thought that kids who believed every Santa with a fake beard was sent down as a personal emissary from the Big Guy at North Pole were saps, but I didn't want to be the one to burst their bubbles. I'm pretty sure my sister believed - we really never talked about it. Our conversations were usually about who was the cutest Beatle.

So, I put cookies out for my Dad to eat and read the notes that my Mom left.  

And I never told my parents.

May your holidays be joyful, surrounded by people you love and people who love you. 

get on the bus that takes me to you

My car is dead.

Not exactly unrepairably dead, but the cost is certainly beyond my meager unemployment income and the value of the car. That means Metro and I have become close personal friends once again. 

David pities me for having to ride the bus, but I actually kind of enjoy it. I grew up in a small town and public transportation is a fairly new thing for me. I had been riding the bus off and on for years - usually when the weather got too bad to risk sliding my car into something - and rode Metrolink every day when I worked downtown, but this the first time I've had to rely on Metro as my sole form of transportation. 

Metrolink is relaxing, clean and a bit boring. Everyone is so polite and nothing unusual ever happens. 

Metrobus, however, is a show on wheels. Every kind of person in the world is there, having loud conversations with each other, arguing with the driver about transfers, yakking loudly into their cell phones about highly personal things, lugging packages and kids down the aisle. I always see something either entertaining or disturbing on the bus or at the bus stop. 

My favorite bus experience happened about a year ago when I was still working downtown. It was cold, there was snow everywhere, gas was creeping up in price, so I had been riding the bus to work a lot. One of the major places to catch a bus downtown is on Washington under the walkway between Dillard's and St. Louis Centre, both now closed. Just about every bus line passes through there at some point.

It was dark, it was snowing, I was tired and waiting for my bus to show up. An older gentleman with what sounded like a Bosnian accent walked up and asked me if the Gravois bus had been by yet. I told him that it had not, and that was the bus I was waiting for. The conversation went rapidly downhill from there:

HIM: Where you live?

ME: (guardedly) Um . . . Tower Grove.

HIM: I have seen you there. You have husband?

ME: No. I live with my boyfriend.

HIM: I kill your boyfriend.

ME: What? Why?

HIM: I kill your boyfriend, then I be your boyfriend.

ME: (backing up) Okay . . . . well . . . . Bye!

HIM: You know why?

ME: (regrettably) Why?

HIM: (putting his hand on his crotch) I am really hard right now.

I was too tired to do anything but laugh uncontrollably. He looked hurt and shuffled off into the darkness. 

St. Louis is such an automobile town, and Metro just announced that they're cutting a bunch of bus routes next year, so eventually I will have to buy a car.

I'm still gonna ride the bus, though.

It's the cheapest show in town. 

fifty is the new forty

I turned fifty on Saturday and it felt just like being 49.
I had been sweating it for a solid year, imagining how I'd feel, trying to guess other people's ages and feeling secretly relieved when I'd find out that they were younger than me and looked like crap.
Maybe it's because a lot of things have happened this year to take my mind off that big, looming number. Not just a lot of things - A LOT OF THINGS. Things like unemployment, mysterious illnesses and no health insurance, cars falling apart . . . I could go on and on. How I've managed to not go all snipery has taken all of my strength, hope, confidence, cheerfulness and budgeting acumen. And a lot of liquor.
Big half-century day started out pretty much like any Saturday. David's kids Dylan and Chloe were here. That means that they're gonna be hungry and want to go places right now. It took most of the morning to get all of that organized. My car is still out of commission, so I just hung around doing laundry and looking for jobs on the internet. I didn't even take a shower until 4:00, and that was only because we were going out to dinner at 5:00. David came home from taking the kids back to their Mom's house with a dozen roses, a bottle of Courvoisier and a song he had written for me burned on a cd (with cool cover art designed by Sharon). After a lovely dinner at Yemanja Brasil, I walked into our kitchen to the sound of 15+ people yelling "surprise!" and to the sight of Sharon's camera a-flashin'.
It was a great party filled with great people. I felt just like the Prom Queen.
I ended the evening taking a little 'ol nap in the papasan chair, but hell, I'm old.
So here I am.
Dear reader, if you have not yet reached that magical age, please take a look at "50 Things You Need to Know by 50" - 50 bits of advice written by 50 different people (I especially like #25). The article originally appeared in AARP magazine (don't laugh) in their July and August 2007 edition and can be found at http://www.aarpmagazine.org/lifestyle/50_things_to_know.html.
Thank you one and all for your friendship and your patience with me. I am not sure I deserve it, but I am gonna take it.
I love you, David.
You are what you love, not what loves you, I decided that a long time ago.~ Donald Kaufman

cheer up, you

Charlie Brown once said, "the secret of happiness is having three things to look forward to and nothing to dread." This has been a dreadful week with not much to look forward to. At one point David and I both had our cars in the shop at the same time - it's been a week like that.
Since I don't consider this week blog-worthy, let's play a little game of true or false instead. All of the questions are about me.
It's my blog, dammit. Shut up.

True or False?
I came home from a bar without my shorts on.
True
Sometime in the 70's I went out drinking with a pack of girls. On the way home we stopped to pee in a cornfield. I was just too drunk to fasten my cute little sailor shorts - they had a row of buttons on each side - so I decided that underpants as attire would be just fine for the remainder of the evening.
Of course it was summer. I'm stupid, not crazy.

True or False?
I worked at a Pizza Hut for one week.
False
I only worked there for 4 nights. On the 4th night a kid tripped me while I was carrying a tray with 3 pitchers of soda. Panic and hilarity ensued. I marched right back to the manager and quit on the spot.

True or False?
I was a member of the Zoning Board in Centralia, IL.
True
Don't ask me how that happened. They must have been desperate.

True or False?
I flunked Driver's Ed.
False
I didn't actually flunk, but I was such a bad driver that the instructor made me stay a week longer than everyone else just to practice. I think knocking over a "No Parking" sign may have had a lot to do with it, but I'm not sure. I'm a slightly better driver now.

True or False?
I flipped off an Indiana state trooper.
True
He was crowding me on the interstate in an unmarked car. I switched lanes to let him roar past me and flipped him off. It was at this point I noticed the Smokey the Bear hat in the seat next to him. He waited by the side of the road over the next hill, motioned me to pull over and proceeded to lecture me about my bad manners. I lectured him right back about his driving etiquette. He let me go because I was wearing a Cardinals shirt.

True or False?
I lost the Central City Grade School Carnival poster contest because of politics.
Undetermined
My entry in 8th grade was a huge cartoon of Chairman Mao with the caption "You WILL enjoy the Central City Grade School Carnival" (it was 1972). I thought it was hilarious. It did not win. To the best of my recollection, it was beaten by a sappy and poorly drawn clown. Not only was I crushed, but I got really strange looks from all of the teachers for the remainder of the school year. I like to think that it was too controversial for a small town, but maybe it was just a really crappy poster.

Hopefully, next week will be better. Or at least different.