Spilled soup

My ears have no more room for listening. My heart has no more room for understanding. My nerves have fatigued of their ability to hold me back from wringing the necks of rude humans shopping for frivolous plants or breaking down in tears at a story of a nephew shot in Afghanistan, or explaining to you why your ears are ringing and that there's nothing we can do about it.  I'm like a bowl of soup filled too full and spilling over; what once was warm, nourishing and sustaining, is now nothing but a mess slopping all over the floor.

Why do I need to find a way to connect with everyone? Why do I need to make everyone else feel at ease, understood, relieved of their burdens?

Why does my way of interacting with the world end up overwhelming me? Why can't I figure out a better way?

Solitude.  I need you.

Toothbrush Technology

If you're like me, you probably wait too long to replace your frayed and splayed brushing device. Or maybe you're one of those people who uses batteries and replaceable heads.  I don't really understand that level of toothbrush technology. It seems like it would be embarrassing to admit that you weren't capable of handling the responsibility of brushing your own teeth. It's a wonder that the electric toothbrushes don't automatically tweet to your dentist and update your Facebook page: "OMG! I'm brushing my teeth!" Or text reminders to your phone: "WTF, you left the house without brushing? That's disgusting."

The dental hygiene aisle puts me in a state of choice-overload panic, much like the grocery store's bread aisle and stylish clothing stores. Maybe that's why I don't replace my toothbrush often enough, make my own bread when possible and haven't had style since, well...ever. Overwhelmed with choice, the consumer in me retreats to the safety of buying nothing.  So the toothbrush aisle: name brand, store brand, angled-head, flexible handle,  massaging bristles, color coded, compact, regular, single-pack, 3-pack, on sale, full price. I just want one damn toothbrush that doesn't need a list of parts and features on the back of the box!  Just think, there are highly educated toothbrush engineers working on the problem right now: what will be the next leap forward in dental hygiene technology?  One can only dream.

 No matter what choice you make in the dental hygiene aisle, using a brand new toothbrush ranks right up there with pulling slouched socks back to their proper height.  But never did I imagine that chevron-shaped ridges could alter my brushing experience so dramatically. Those little nubbles on the back of the brush? Genius! Suddenly, something I've done every day since I started sprouting teeth, is new again. The moment the back of the toothbrush slid past the inside corner of my lips, my eyes widened. Whoa! This feels cool! (yes, I am always that eloquent while brushing). And it made sense. Our lips are full of nerve endings. The surface that touches our teeth doesn't usually get much stimulation while brushing, so the sensation across the inner surface surprises your brain with input. Was I being titillated by my toothbrush? What were those toothbrush engineers doing to me?  As with most good sensations, it fatigues after the first few back-and-forths. Which is probably for the best, otherwise, I might just stand there all day brushing, amazed by the fact that, Whoa. This feels cool!

The day after my first nubble-backed brushing experience, I was in the checkout aisle at the grocery store, waiting my turn. I noticed toothbrushes hanging above the candy -  you know, for all those times when you want to impulse buy a toothbrush along with a deck of playing cards, 5-hour energy shot, and sex advice from Cosmo. (Hmm...that sounds like the recipe for a creepy date.) They also had some kind of ridges or bumps on the back. It's clearly the new "it" thing in toothbrush technology and I'm in favor of this advance.

Now if you'll excuse me, I just finished breakfast and I need to go brush my teeth.

Separated by too great a distance

The four hundred pound man lay face-up, immobile, at the end of the mossy alley. One ambulance had already peeled away from the curb, red lights revolving, sirens screaming. Out of a second, quieter, ambulance, medics wheeled a gurney. Standing around, watching the scene unfold were some of the town's most undesirable. Grown boys who would never be called men, loitered at the mouth of the alley looking like perpetrators. One pale, twiggy kid tugged against the metal-prong collar of a brindle pit-bull as I walked by. It wasn't even Spring yet, but unseasonably warm weather - high 70s and sunny - brought out the summer clothes ahead of schedule. Their long, loose, NBA jerseys, showcased scrawny arms, white and weak. Red and black polyester shimmered in the sun. Shoddy scrawls of blue-black tattoos adorned their bodies, signifying nothing to me, but perhaps everything to each other. Rural thugs, fed on high fructose corn syrup and cigarettes since birth, (second hand followed too quickly by first) some with missing teeth, some with missing intellect, all with nothing to do, intimidated me. Conversation halted as I parted their sidewalk gathering.  Down the alley, the man-in-blue (tall, clean, broad, armed),  loomed above the 400-pound man, talking to the only woman in the mix - she and her t-shirt were both too thin, an ACE bandage wrapped her arm.

 I had the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction weighing down my little red backpack. I'd walked 2 miles to the library to return this hefty tome and check out a few other light authors: Thomas Paine, Saul Bellow, Samuel Beckett, since, hey, there he was in the general area of Saul Bellow.  I finished my business quickly  hoping that I might be a chance bystander as they hoisted the 400-pound man onto the gurney and wheeled him to the waiting ambulance. How was something like that managed - with the weight and the alley and the people loitering?  But the alley looked back at me empty. The cop and the woman were still talking, but out on the sidewalk now, in front of the cafe window. Without any sense of urgency, the ambulance pulled from the curb, lights revolving, a few brief siren blasts as it pulled into traffic. Was its passenger dead?  Over my shoulder, with my ears straining backward, I heard the police officer ask: "And where's the baby now?"  The woman started to answer, but too much distance separated me from the scene, from those people. I couldn't hear her answer. Not without stopping, not without an effort. 

Thriving

Me and Rosemary - April 2009

Back in April of 2009 I nurtured our rosemary plant through its first long winter. That was three years ago. Take a look at Rosemary now. What's funny, is that the snow blower is still back there in the same spot as usual, but you almost can't see it because the plant's too big.

Me and Rosemary - March 2012

Becoming Our Mothers

If you are now, or ever have been, a daughter perhaps you'll understand. I can't say if these observations hold true for sons. (Does it seem strange to you that three out of four nuclear family roles are two syllable words: mother, father, daughter and then bam! - son - showing up with just its single, solid syllable?).

If you were lucky, like me, and born to the best kind of mother, there was a time when she could do no wrong. Your world revolved around her love, her approval, her kindness, her all-knowingness, her hugs, the way she told stories or made cookies. In turn, her world revolved around you.  

But then you got older and you started to see you'd been wrong. She wasn't perfection, not really, you'd been mistaken. How could you be so blind to her faults for all those years? To hell with that, I won't be like her! you may have said sometime in the two decades between 12 and 32. Those were the years you broke away, saw how other people lived, maybe went to college, became the most annoying of creatures: a privileged young idealist. You may have turned on your family, dating someone they didn't like, moving far away, judging them harshly and often. You launched yourself out of the gravity pull of mutual orbit. All good and necessary, but never a very flattering time. 

Eventually your 20s faded and with it some of that idealism and, I don't know why, but that also may have been about time you found yourself whispering in horror, "oh my god, I sound just like Mom." Or even worse, you felt your face or body act in such a way that for an instant you looked or moved just like her. You could feel it in your guts, in your bones. You may have panicked and said to yourself and to your very best friend since childhood, "I will not be like her! You have to promise to tell me if I'm getting like her." And that's also when you realized that you'd heard those words before. You remember hearing your own mother say that about her mother, usually after a long holiday visit or car ride with your grandma. Your mother would finally be free, she'd sink into a chair with exhaustion and say, "Please shoot me if I ever get like that."  You remember laughing, nodding and promising you would while thinking, but, Mom, you kinda already are. And you thought it was funny, quaint, that your mom couldn't see the inevitable happening to her. 

As your 30s rolled along you slowly resigned yourself to "being like mom" in the way you left the toaster-oven on long after your'd finished eating your snack, or left the mail sitting out next to the garden because you got distracted by some weeds on your way back from the mailbox. The weeds made it to the compost pile, but then you noticed that the blueberries needed water and so you did that and then you heard the kettle's distantly shrill whistle and remembered that you'd been boiling water for tea . The mail neglected until your husband came home from work and noticed it gathering evening dew by the tomato plants.

When you'd get together with your mom, you'd still notice many of the patterns and habits that could get under your skin but you tried not to let them bother you. You stopped vocalizing your judgments about her life and her approach to the world. Not because you'd become a more mature person, really, but because you realized that you, too, were permeated with faults in behavior and thinking, many of them similar to hers. Calling attention to her short-comings would be calling attention to your own. Such judgement was uncomfortably close to your own skin and psyche, so self-protection kept you quiet.

But then, if everyone made it this far and you eased steadily toward solid middle age, your mother's mother - your grandmother - began to fail. Maybe you watched this process from a distance with fear and humility. The daughter became the caretaker. Illicitly, she brought Cheez-itz and candy to her mother, one small joy for both of them. Your mother's every waking thought, and probably her dreams, became filled with "how do I help her get through this?"  A mutual orbiting returned for a brief flicker of painful time until it was finished, save for your mom getting down to the business of consolidating a lifetime of memories. 

And maybe a year or so after your grandmother's death, you began to see a profound beauty in the inevitability of "becoming our mothers". Maybe you got to spend a few days with your mom, you listened to her ways of talking and saw the mannerisms you share. You no longer got annoyed with how she interrupted her own quiet reading with interjections like, "Huh!" and "Wow!", so that you always asked, "What?" as she told you about something interesting she'd just read. You don't get annoyed because you heard yourself doing the same damn thing. And you knew that she couldn't help it, couldn't stop herself from doing it, because neither could you.  That was when it dawned on you that, dammit, there isn't enough time left. This will all be over way, way too soon, even if it's 30 years down the road. You imagine orbiting around your mother again, not as a child but as the caretaker. How will you negotiate that strange and looming landscape together?  And then, how will you negotiate your own without her? 

Someday it will happen, there's no way to stop it, you can't pretend anymore that it won't. And so you let yourself imagine what it might be like.  You imagine, when you sit at the piano there will be times when it's not you playing, but her ghost, rolling the big chords and holding the sustain pedal down too much. Even in the way you play the piano you've become "like your mother". The hemming and hawing over the mistakes and difficult passages, will not be your voice, but hers echoing in your ears.  When you walk over uneven terrain and your body moves awkwardly, you will feel that your are not yourself, but her.  When you leave things behind at other people's houses or your purse at a restaurant, your best friend will teasingly call you by your mother's name and you won't feel embarrassed, but proud and connected to your past.  "Damn, it's really happened. I'm just like my mother."  And so maybe, as you imagine this dreaded inevitable future, if you're lucky, you get to a point where you realize that in the time you have left there is no room for judgment and criticism.  Becoming our mothers is how we carry them forward, not just in our memories, but tangibly, visibly in our own gestures and habits, embedded in our own flesh and bones. There is no longer room to force her to fit some idealized "mom" shape and no time to fear "turning into her".  If you're lucky, you understand that there is only room and time enough for love, however you understand it.  

Promo Poster Caution

Before placing your gig promo poster in the restaurant's bathroom, consider the potentially unintended humor your band name may create.  Also, when writing promo poster content, consider refreshing your memory regarding excessive use of adjectives. Consider employing stronger verbs and nouns instead. This ends the "Promo Poster Caution" public service announcement.  Thank you.

And the creepy continues...

I know you've all been waiting patiently for more images and stories of decapitation. Cozy Toes is, after all, the smart internet surfer's main source for such educational treasures. Your wait is over! Here in Cozy Toes Land, Friday night involved a trip to the inspection 'scope with many months' worth of (mostly) dead insect samples.  A last second inspiration was to take a sprig of my rosemary plant which has some evidence of spider mites.  I put that in the container with the insect bits.  Without further ado, here for your viewing pleasure, the magnified treasures. Click on the image if you'd like to see the larger version. Go on, do it. Go big or go home, right? 

Just slightly down and right of center you can see a pale yellow blip of a creature.
I'm pretty sure that's a spider mite that crawled off of the rosemary plant. When I looked
through the scope at this (dead) Crane Fly sample, I yelped and jumped back from the desk.
I did not expect to see something crawling around, alive. 

I wish the camera could fully capture how stunning this Cuckoo Wasp looks in magnified glory. 

This is the actual size of the cuckoo wasp. I've been saving this
in a Gladware plastic leftover container since the end of the summer.

This is the husk of some kind of beetle - similar in size to a ladybug. I probably found it on a
window sill while inspecting my rock or feather collections.  So I added it
to the Gladware Plastic Sample Repository for future study.
In this photo, the beetle husk is resting on it's back, allowing us to see the iridescent hind wings
 folded up under the hard outer elytra. 

A small colony of spider mites on that piece of rosemary I brought. Dang it!
They are sucking the life blood out of my beautiful rosemary plant!
Actually, several weeks ago I sprayed Rosemary with Neem Oil and the infestation
is relatively under control. I sprayed her again last night and I'll check in another 10 days
to see if I need to do another treatment. She should make it.


Here you can watch one of the mites plodding along after I disrupted it with some tweezers. Thrilling, groundbreaking, cinematography. I've never tried to capture video with my silly little camera through one eyepiece of a binocular 'scope. Not as easy as you might think.