I'm Back . . .

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Things have piled up, and I’ve let my responsibilities to friends and even myself slide. Loads of illnesses, crises, and just plain laziness have kept me away.

I’ve started attending church, a local Episcopal church, after about twenty-five years away. I grew up in the Methodist Church but left once I got too big for my parents to drag, and haven’t been back except for weddings and funerals – and few of them. Maybe not even a few – I went to my brother’s wedding in 1995 and my maternal grandmother’s funeral in 1998. I refuse to go to any of my parents’ weddings (there have been three, I think) on the excuse that I didn’t go to the one where they married each other. That’s not really the reason. I’m suspicious of anything that requires new clothes, to paraphrase Thoreau. The church I’m going to now has no dress code, so I can get away with jeans and t-shirts. Perfect.

My mother is married to a Lutheran minister, so naturally she wants me to find a Lutheran church. I don’t think they’re quite as gay-friendly as the Episcopalians, and, in any case, they’ve got prayer books, too, so I might just as well learn the ways of the Episcopalians as the Lutherans. At least the church I’m attending is gay-friendly without being a gay church.

I’m still baffled as to when to stand up, sit down, and find my place in either the prayer book or the hymnal, but I’ll learn. I’m starting a new blog devoted strictly to church questions, debates, and what-not, so I’ll leave that for now and give you the link once I have a post on it.

The great news is that Kaye is finished teaching! All she has to do is give two exams, grade them, and post the grades. She should be done for real by Thursday, at the latest, although she doesn’t officially retire until September 1st as there is some rule somewhere that you can only retire on the 1st of a month. (I assume months where the 1st falls on a weekend let you retire on the 2nd or 3rd.) We’re both looking forward to her well-earned freedom after teaching for some forty years. She’s been at NCSU since 1970.

Hope everyone (and everybody’s cat) is well. See you in the funny papers.

Kindling and Such

I’ve been reading like mad in between bouts of one or another annoying health problem. Nothing deadly, just annoying. I finally managed to get a Kindle, the amazon.com e-reader. I had my doubts at first, which is why I wasn’t one of the ones to get it when it first came out. Since then, I’ve been waiting impatiently in line for them to make new ones. I mean, how long can it take? Suddenly I was seized by a wild and dangerous move: e-bay. I have never used e-bay, but I did find an unopened Kindle posted, and got it, as described. It’s great. It compares to the iPod, which I need to maintain my sanity. Music is that important to me. It also has the advantage of clearing out the house of thousands of books. I’m not going to get rid of all of them, no. Not anything with lots of pictures, not anything that looks simply beautiful on a shelf, and not anything I’d want to annotate (you can make annotations on a Kindle, but it’s a pain). Since Wednesday, I’ve sold ten books and got about $75 in my bank account and lots of books off the shelves (that haven’t sold yet). Those that won’t sell at amazon.com can probably be sold to local used book stores. Of course, not everything in my library is in Kindle format, but enough is to make it usable. Books decorate a room, but after a point, when they’re piled on shelves, on floors, on surfaces, they become somewhat oppressive. Anyway, enough about my new toy.

I have successfully (so far) grown fingernails so that I can use them to play the guitar properly. This near-impossible feat shows how much I want to play the guitar. The fact that I’ve spent more time reading than practicing is another issue. My hands look like they belong on another person. When I was a little girl, Memaw promised me five dollars and a manicure set if I’d just quit biting my nails. (She was a nurse and saw it more as a health hazard than disgusting and unladylike.) Sadly, Memaw is not around to see my new fingernails. I could go without the rewards now; I’d just like to see her happy about it.

This weekend I will be practicing my guitar to death if I am a good girl. That contingency will make for a pretty big if, but I do want to play the thing. It’s just frustrating to start almost anything to realize how much harder it is than it looks!

I Know It's Somewhere in the House . . .

Thanks to msnbc.com, I have discovered that I have a newly-defined psychiatric disorder, and so does Kaye: hoarding. Apparently, it’s genetic, which makes sense, knowing Memaw and Kaye’s father. We haven’t approached their level of “but this might be useful someday,” but I’m loathe to throw things out (except when I go on a purge and inevitably wind up throwing away something I have to buy again later). Kaye is more likely just to bring home some “perfectly good” something that’s being thrown out. Well, it may not be “perfectly good,” but it’s certainly functional and a waste to throw it out. “Kaye!” I say. “We are two people! We don’t need seventeen office chairs!” Well, I guess we’ll both have to be medicated and counseled into the neatness of Mom and Chris. I don’t know whether anyone on her side of the family can keep house, having only been to her brother’s house once, in 1985, and our place was neat then. I am relieved that we have not been able to pass this gene on to any children. I do take solace in that.

You Made Me a Pallet on the Floor

My conscience has been bugging me lately. My mother and her husband, a Lutheran minister, just had someone neither of them knew spend the night at the parsonage because he was going to speak to the congregation Sunday about some Christian something-or-other. I said, “Mom, you cannot let total strangers spend the night in your house just because they’ve heard of Jesus!” I mean, who knows, he could still be a lunatic. I know a lot of lunatic Christians. Fortunately, everything turned out fine, and my mother promised never to do that again. I think there must be a Motel 6 or something in the vicinity. The church could pay for the room. That way, the probably nice person could have a place to stay without being inside my mother’s house while everybody’s asleep. I was flashing back to when Memaw let some people stay with her because they were from Panama. Memaw and Gran-Gran were in the Panama Canal Zone during World War II, as my grandfather was blind in one eye and therefore not eligible for military duty. He was in the Civil Service, teaching ESL to the Panamanians while Memaw worked as a nurse and then had my mother. Anyway, the fact that these people were from Panama was enough for Memaw. She let them in. They stayed forever. We weren’t sure that they were actually taking anything (except food), but they were starting to make even Memaw uncomfortable, so my uncle Carl had to show them the door. I e-mailed my brother, Chris, suggesting he do the same for Mom. He’s more dangerous than I am. I would never let strangers spend the night in my house, yet . . . it goes against my principles. One of my favorite songs is by the Weavers, and it goes like this:

You made me a pallet on the floor.
Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

I was broke and so dissatisfied.
I was broke and so dissatisfied.
I was broke and dissatisfied and I nearly died,
And then you made me a pallet on the floor.

Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
You made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

I don’t want to see this town no more.
Don’t ever want to see this town no more.
But if I ever do, it’ll be on account of you
Because you made me a pallet on your floor.

Oh, yes, you made me a pallet on the floor.
You made me a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

So don’t turn a stranger from your home.
Don’t you ever turn a stranger from your home, oh no.
Don’t turn a stranger from your home.
The day may come when you’ll be roamin’
Looking for a pallet on the floor.

You may be looking for a pallet on the floor.
You may be looking for a pallet on the floor.
When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

When I had no place to go, you opened up your door,
And you made me a pallet on the floor.

Apparently, my humanity flies out the window when it threatens not merely my safety but my privacy. The fact that Kaye also thinks we shouldn’t let total strangers stay here overnight lets me tell myself that even if I were the kind of person I wish I were, it wouldn’t do any good to the poor people with no place to stay. But it is nagging at my conscience. What kind of person am I? I don’t much like the evidence. Seems I just want to make myself look like a nicer person.

Arlo, Migraines and Balconies

Last night, we did an amazing thing. We left the house, drove twenty-five miles, and got to see Arlo Guthrie on his Solo Reunion Tour: Together at Last. I must’ve snagged the last two tickets, because we were in the balcony, Row K, seats 1 and 3, which, oddly, were adjacent. That was all right, since I was expecting to have a total stranger sitting in between us, but that’s what we got. There is no Row L. Now I have not been to many concerts in my life, generally figuring staying at home and getting to act however I want and not worry about my hair or losing my stuff or whatever is preferable to being out among a bunch of people where I have to blend in or be a spectacle. The latter is easier for me. Well, sure enough, I made a spectacle of myself by not looking like an aging hippie or biker, mainly because I am only forty-one. That’s the first time I used the word only in front of forty-one, I think, at least as applied to me. But when Arlo did eventually get to “Alice’s Restaurant” song, he said, “Now it all started forty-three Thanksgivings ago, it was on, forty-three years ago on Thanksgiving.” I thought, damn, that’s a long time ago. Then I thought, wow, I sure am young. So it was fun. I had to use the bird glasses that Memaw gave me maybe twenty-five years ago for Christmas or maybe just for no reason, because Memaw was like that, giving you stuff, but, anyway, it was a long time ago, because I used them at the James Taylor concert in 1986, I think it was. Since I don’t watch a lot of birds or spy on the neighbors to the point of using special equipment, the bird glasses are practically like new. Anyhow, I could see Arlo. The thing was, I wasn’t convinced it was Arlo unless he started talking or singing. I mean, he had the same long wild hair in a ponytail, but he had a mustache and some glasses, and, well, he didn’t look much like the kid in the movie, which we had just re-watched to get into the Arlo spirit. Fortunately, he talked and sang a lot, and we sang a good bit, and it was great. I am still on an Arlo high. Which is good, because I have had the same damn migraine for about six days now, and I’m getting tired of it. I have thrown every controlled substance in my possession at it, and it’s not going away. I am just resigned to living this one out and being miserable if I stop and let myself. I have just adopted the very new attitude for me toward migraines, which is, well, fine, migraine. Make yourself comfortable. I am going to pretend you’re not here until you get bored and go torture an easier target. I have decided that I have been such an easy mark for so many years that the word gets out among migraines and they move in on me first. I am not going to be so hospitable any more. They want to follow me around, that’s their business. I’m not real hopeful about this strategy, but I figure it’s cheap and doesn’t require me to go out of the house, convince someone who can dispense narcotics (legally, that is) that I am, in fact, in this much pain, and, yes, I am drug-seeking, because only massive amounts of narcotics could kill this freakin’ thing. But at home, meanwhile, I can do any damn thing I want because it is my house, and, well, I don’t do anything illegal, that I know of. Weird and worrisome to the neighbors with impressionable youngsters, perhaps, but not illegal.

It’s a good thing we saw Arlo last night, though, because apparently he’s going to be in Berlin on Thursday, which is a lot further away than twenty-five miles, and you can’t drive there from here.

Also, a word on balconies. I had never been in a theatre with balconies before, and had only heard about them from my parents, namely, that they were where “the colored people” had to sit and even if you wanted to, you couldn’t sit there if you were white because that would be unnatural or ungodly or something. I might mention that I live in the South. I called my mom today and asked her whether black people used to be really small. Because I am not an especially tall person, and my knees were in the ears of the guy in front of me. I was sorry about it, but what was I going to do? They only bend at one place. And if my rear end had been two inches wider, which is actually not terribly unusual, I would have been sitting on the armrests.

But, that’s America. And this land was made for you and me.