Being A-Mazed

Judd Nelson (as you saw him in The Breakfast Club) wanted me to meet him at Applebee's on Lorain Road. I was much younger, unmarried, and willing.

So began my very vivid dream the other night.


I thought meeting Judd would be a piece of cake. I know where Lorain Road is, surely I could find the Applebee's.

Nope.

First of all, for some reason, I was on foot. Then I found myself wandering through car dealerships, a street carnival (complete with merry-go-round) and a whole host of stores. I asked for directions but got no help. In the end, I awoke, frustrated that Judd and I would never get together, wondering if he was sitting in an Applebee's somewhere in his dreams, waiting for me.

The thing is, I get lost a lot in my nocturnal rambles through dreamland. I don't know if it's because I have such a lousy sense of direction, or if incidents from my childhood are coming back to haunt me. Although I wasn't in the habit of getting lost, there was that one time...

My parents and younger brother and I went to the art museum so my folks could culture us up. I was at the surly teen stage (much to my everlasting shame and embarrassment). I did not want to be seen with my family. I was so cool (not ever). Anyhow, I wandered away to admire the treasures all around me, and I was pulled into the labyrinth of paintings and sculpture and such. Then I realized I was well and truly lost. In a panic, I began searching for my folks, zipping from room to room, each time ending up in the same place I'd started. Eventually, one of the guards stopped me and helped me to find my clan. My father was furious. My mom was relieved. I don't recall my brother's reaction, but he was probably disappointed that I'd come back.

Karma is a you-know-what. We were shopping with my young son, when he decided to hide under a rack of clothes and "surprise" us. He was definitely surprised when he got a crack on the rear end for scaring the crap out of us -- along with the lecture every parent gives their child about strangers and such.

The more famous disappearing act our son pulled was during an autumn trip to a farm with his preschool class. There was a hay maze, and Mr. Ginley was waiting patiently at the end of it for the lad to come out. Then he was waiting not-so-patiently, and asked another child if he'd seen our kid. The boy replied that there was a child in the maze who was sitting and crying because he was lost. So Mr. went in and got him. (Can a sense -- or lack of sense -- of direction be hereditary?)

We all get lost sometimes. Finding our way out of the hay maze can be very trying.

 I just hope that whenever I'm lost, there's someone who wants to find me.

It doesn't have to be Judd Nelson.

Singing Right Along

In a fit of nostalgia, I grabbed a Mitch Miller CD on my way out the door the other morning.

As is the case with a lot of old songs, I was singing right along (which is what you are supposed to do with Mitch Miller, after all), when I began to pay attention to the words.

It may seem odd to you that a professed writer hadn't given much thought to the lyrics before. But for some reason, the songs of my childhood soaked into my brain, seemingly by osmosis, and stuck, without question. But on this particular day, I started to listen as I sang.

And then I laughed and marveled at how things change.

She's got a pair of hips just like two battleships. I give her everything to keep her in style. Well, well, well, she wears silk underwear, I wear my last year's pair. Say, boys, that's where my money goes.*

Huh?

Then there was a song, a master of innuendo, called Sweet Violets.

There once was a farmer who took a young miss
In back of the barn where he gave her a...
Lecture on horses and chickens and eggs.

I began to listen and pay attention to the rest of the tunes. The "next" stanzas.

For example, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which always seemed like a nice tune about a woman pining for her man who'd gone off to war or something. Stanza three goes like this:

Behind the door, her father kept a shotgun. 
He kept in the springtime and in the month of May
Hey, Hey, and if you ask him why the heck he kept it
He kept it for her lover who is far, far away.

Hold on there, Tonto. I decided to go to my friend the Google and learn more. I found a crap-ton of versions. One involves a baby and calls the MIA in question a cowboy rather than a lover (although he was apparently both).

Well, now, this was an eye-opener.

Finally, I came to You Are My Sunshine. After my dad passed away, my mom told me he would sing this to her in bed every night.

Apparently, he only sang the first verse.

The tune is about a guy who is pining because the love of his life left him. At one point in the song he even issues a mild threat about how she'll be sorry.

Holy Cats!

When my son was a toddler, he listened to Raffi and Mary Poppins and such. Although, to be fair, Mr. Ginley did expose him to a fair amount of rock and roll. So I suppose it could be argued that our boy listened to his share of inappropriate tunes.

But, if they were appropriate, Mr. Ginley would often change the lyrics and render then unsuitable anyhow.

That's how we roll. And that's how we've given our son more material for his future based-on-real-life TV sitcom.



Notes:  *From a military variation of a folk song called My Gal's a Corker. Sweet Violets was penned by Joseph Emmet in 1882.   She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is derivative of a folk song/poem that goes back many generations. You Are My Sunshine is attributed to Paul Rice, who sold it to Jimmie Davis, who made it famous in 1939.

Bully, Bully

Mine was a very protected upbringing. I grew up in the suburbs, went to school with a ton of kids who had very similar backgrounds and attended church every Sunday.

I experienced schoolgirl crushes, listened with rapt attention to the weekly rock and roll countdown on the radio and watched all the prime time programs I could.

In the summer, I played outside until the street lights came on, rode my bike all over the place and made up games to relieve boredom.

Then came high school. And the bullying.

Every nail that sticks up gets knocked down, and I was no exception. First, it was the clothes my mom made me that incited ridicule. I soon learned to modify or eliminate certain items in my wardrobe, but I couldn't bring myself to tell my mom what was going on. My sister finally did. Mom, bless her, got a few new patterns and started to sew bell bottoms in material I picked out, and that helped.

Then I stuck my head up again.

In an expression of individuality (or weirdness), I latched onto the idea of making caps. Using leftover material (and some that I purchased from the fabric store), I made several and wore them to school. Some of the kids thought they were cool. Then came the note from one of my classmates.

"We don't want you to sit at our lunch table anymore. You're scaring away the boys with your clothes."

I was crushed. I didn't yet possess the emotional security to tell them to go screw themselves. I simply sat by myself for awhile until I found a new group of kids who welcomed me into their fold.

Even more distressing was that about this time my friend, Carolyn, abandoned me, too. She and I had been inseparable in junior high school. She told me I was immature.

I gave up. I spent the remainder of my high school years so desperately quiet that most of my classmates forgot I was there. I never went to a prom. I hated school so much that I never entertained the possibility of attending college. The only thing I loved about that time was working in the print shop in my senior year.

There has been a lot of attention paid to bullying, and that's a good thing. Although telling kids not to bully doesn't work. Giving the bullied kids the tools to deal with their tormentors is better. Exposing the bullies for what they are to take away their power is the best.

If only we could do that to a certain Republican presidential candidate.

Getting Testy

Well, once again they’ve changed the way schools measure the success of their students.

The headline in yesterday’s paper lamented the drop in scores for the educational institutions in our state.

Once upon a time, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills was the only game in town. It was supposed to give you an idea of the areas in which you excelled. (Or didn’t.) The test didn’t really count for anything. It was just a guide of your standing in the pupil pool. Me being the worrywart that I am, I would fret if one area or another dipped on the graphic summary. Usually, it was science where I lagged behind.

Fortunately, no one other than perhaps the school board paid much heed to these tests, and the results were soon forgotten.

Today, there is a lot of controversy associated with standardized testing. Teachers must now prepare their students to pass a nebulous test, rather than preparing them for life. So, facts are memorized and young brains are stuffed with knowledge that is soon forgotten.

And the cashiers at the grocery store still can’t figure out how to add $30 to the total when I want cash back.

I look out my window and wonder what kind of world the next generation will shape. Will they rely on technology and social media to do their thinking for them? Or will the pendulum swing the other way, and our children’s children question authority and think for themselves?

And, more importantly, who will teach them how?

Modern Conveniences

My grandmother used to have an old wringer-washer machine in her basement. It was a large porcelain number with a series of roll bars at the top. You washed your clothes in the tub and then put them through the rollers to remove as much of the water as possible. Then you hung your clothes outside to dry (in the summer) or in the basement (in the winter).

This lovely appliance (whatever it is) lives in our basement.

The advent of the modern washing machine must have been nirvana.

I was hanging in my kitchen this morning, waiting for my breakfast to emerge from the microwave, and nodding in appreciation to my appliances. But not the dishwasher.

Our dishwater came with the house. We were warned by the prior owners not to use it, and we haven't. It's a built-in number, so removing it would leave a gap-toothed space between our cupboards. And, for whatever reason, we've never purchased a new one. Maybe because it's only been the three of us, and it takes a couple of days to accumulate enough to justify running the thing. Also, I'm not sure how much labor it saves. You still have to rinse the dishes and put them in, then take them out and put them away. Mr. Ginley, who is primary dishwasher, has wondered aloud now and then if a dishwasher might not be nice. But we've never gotten beyond that point.

Of course, we do have the other standard modern conveniences. Although, I do question how labor-saving some of them really are.

The washer and dryer, definitely. The refrigerator, undoubtedly. The stove, sure. But the jury is out on the microwave. Sure, it cooks things lickety split, but I still do most of my cooking in a conventional oven. It's nice to wave butter to melt it or nuke leftovers, and it saves time in clean-up by using one dish and no pot. Still, if someone said I could have just one appliance in my kitchen, the microwave would not be it.

It's also occurred to me that we haven't progressed all that far with time-saving technology. We have cell phones that are certainly convenient, but we spend a hell of a lot more time on them than our parents did on their phones. And a good chunk of that time is not spent actually talking. To real, live people.

And, yes, we have computers and modern office equipment. I will concede they've certainly been helpful in the workplace. I was never a fan of typewriters when it came to correction fluid, and carbon paper was nasty stuff. But the expectations have also changed. Back in the day, for example, advertising layouts were done by hand, and folks had to visualize how the completed project would look. Now, a host of critics can change colors and layouts and copy, over and over and over, right down to the wire.

So the question becomes, have we saved any labor or merely displaced it?

Gadgets can be a wonderful thing. And I enjoy my Kindle as much as anyone. But there are days when I ponder how we would get by if we couldn't be on the grid. It's easier to imagine this during power outages, but it's harder to fathom how we'd manage without cell phones and the internet.

I mean, how would I publish this blog? Now that would be tragic.  ;)

The Movement, Stalled

I've been reading Nora Ephron's book, Crazy Salad, a series of essays about women written in the early 1970s.

The experiences she's had resonate with me, although they are slightly ahead of my time. I was raised by a woman who held traditional beliefs about marriage, family and faith. My mom, like the majority of women in her generation, quit work at some point in her first pregnancy and stayed home to raise her children and keep the home fires burning. She was so good at this, I wanted desperately to follow in her footsteps. 

At the tender age of 20, I married a man I believed with all my heart was my life partner. There are some 20-year-olds who are lucky enough to be right about this. I was not one of them. In three years, my marriage was toast, and I realized that I was more like my dad than my mom. I was not cut out to be a housewife and raise a passel of children.

Instead, I threw myself into my job. I decided I wasn't going to have any children.

Fortunately, I made this decision at a time when it was becoming fashionable to do so. The women's movement had been gaining momentum, and suddenly it wasn't expected that women stay home. Day care centers popped up. The tide turned. It became more of the norm for women to work outside the home. 

Of course, tides being what they are, they turned again, and it is now considered a luxury to be able to afford to stay home with your children.

One wonders what progress, if any, the women's movement has made in the last 40+ years. It's a sort of "two steps forward, one step back" scenario.

One the one hand, we have a woman running for president. But she is called out for ridiculous things her male counterparts would never be.

Women are far more prevalent in the workplace, but often are still not making the same money as the men who hold the same positions.

And, probably worst of all, if you follow Facebook, which is a fairly realistic microcosm of our society, women are still sniping each other based on their choices. Which is what the women's movement is supposed to be about. The right of each individual woman to choose how she wants to live her life, whether she stays home with her kids, is a working mom or decides not to have any children...whether she marries a man or a woman or remains unattached.

That's the goal here. The ability to make choices without getting crap from women who chose something else.

As most of you reading this know, I went on to marry again. And I had a child. At one point in my pregnancy, Mr. Ginley and I sat down and had a discussion about who was going to take care of the baby. He stepped up and said he would stay home while I worked. He is a wonderful dad, and most folks would agree our now-college-age son has turned out pretty well. But my husband took a lot of flak about being "Mr. Mom." The thing that frosted me was many of the snide comments he got were from women who should have known better.

And so it goes. Maybe the women's movement is not just about choices for women. Maybe it's about men and women choosing their roles, deciding what works best for them.

If we all look at it from that perspective, how can anyone be against equal rights? Having asked the question, of course, I know how. Too many people believe their rights are more important than the rights of others, because the others are a different gender or race.

I have no idea how to wrap this up. There are no quick answers. And people have been the same since the beginning of time.

Maybe the only thing to do is sigh. Walk away from the keyboard. And have a little chocolate to console myself.


There are some Malley's chocolate hearts around here somewhere...

Overloading the Circuits

Here is a typical conversation at our home:

Mr. Ginley: "Have you seen the letter opener?"

Me: "I haven't touched your letter opener."

Mr. Ginley: "I know you don't use it, but have you seen it?"

Me: "No. Try looking for something else, and you'll find it."

This happens frequently, with one or the other of us in search of some minor household item that has gone astray.

Often, it only takes a moment. I start to head out the door, for example, and I set down my keys. After completing the task that distracted me, I pick up my purse and realize my keys are now gone. I retrace my steps and find that, against all logic, I left them in the freezer when I pulled out the package of hamburger for dinner.

One of the most common items to go missing is my phone. I can't give you a precise number of the times I've asked my husband or son to call me so I can follow the ringing to its hiding place. Of course, this is a fine trick for phones, which are able to tell you where they are, but for most things, there's usually some tearing out of hair that occurs before the object is located.

Young people will smirk and tell you that it's an age thing. But I've witnessed enough episodes with my 20-something son to know it's not.

I choose to believe it's because there's so much going on in my cranium, I've become absent-minded about the trivial stuff. The trouble is, sometimes the trivial becomes not so trivial. For example, if I've got something in the oven and I turn off the timer because it's almost but not quite done, then I walk away, and before I know it, it's too far beyond done.

Or when I go to get something out of the refrigerator that I'm absolutely positive I purchased at the grocery store, only to discover it in the trunk of my car, where it's been sitting for two days in 80 degree heat.

There's an old Disney movie called The Absent-Minded Professor. Fred MacMurray invents Flubber, but he forgets to show up for his own wedding. I feel like that some days. Except, of course, I'm not responsible for discovering anything that will rock the world.

I think I need a plan. Maybe I'll start wearing clothes that have big pockets so I can carry all of the essentials with me. Or pin notes to myself. And get clips for my gloves so I can attach them to my coat, the way my mom did when I was little. I could start to carry a timer with me so I don't lose track of time (although I'd probably forget why I set the timer in the first place).

Or maybe I just need to be more mindful. Hmm. That's probably the best idea of all. I think I'll write that down.

Now, where did I leave my pen...