Party in the Funeral Home

It might have been 1977, or 78.  It doesn’t really matter.  I think the men wore polyester shirts.  We were at that party in the funeral home.  It wasn’t all that unusual.  We belonged to a woman’s club, actually a Junior Woman’s Club (younger than 35 was the criteria) and the club president that year was Phylis.  Her husband, cigar-chomping, mustachioed, paunchy, and ten years older than most of us, with a soft touch to a lady’s bottom when they left his home, owned the funeral home  in town.  Naturally, it was the finest, largest Victorian house on the main drag.  Soft yellow, with white trim, complete with shutters and turrets and a portico to drive under with your car. 

The rest of us lived in the rural surrounding areas of the town, in ranches, bi-levels, and capes.  Phylis and her husband and two little girls lived on the second floor over the funeral home.  Their apartment was larger than our homes, with high ceilings, carved moldings, and traditional, almost opulent furnishings.  It looked like the home of a much older couple, paisleyed and brocaded, tufted and traditional and, well, solid. They were solid.  

We, the gals, had been to her home before, for various meetings, quilting, and crafty projects.  Phylis was very crafty.  She sewed all the clothing for her two girls, made bread, candles, and potpourris.  She was a quilting maven, and we had worked on a large piece to be raffled off for funds to go a local charity that year.   We’d heard that she was being trained to arrange the hair of the customers.  Ew, we all thought.  But mostly, we didn’t think about it.

Anyway, a bunch of us were invited to a Halloween Party at their place that year.  We were all game; our immediate group of eight. Except for Frank.  Turned out Frank was a bit weirded out by the very fact of being in the funeral home.   We drove together that night to the party, he and Lisa, me and Max.  “I’m tellin’ you Lisa, if that weirdo brings up anything about goin’ downstairs, I am outta there!” announced Frank from the back seat.  We chuckled, as we drove up the circular driveway to the parking lot behind the home.

The party was in full swing when we got there. Thirty people at least, milling about the well-appointed living room. In the dining room, the food was being laid out on the long table, a lace tablecloth hanging gracefully to the floor.  The host was making strong drinks and copping a feel whenever his unknowing, bespectacled wife was not looking.  Music was jazzy, old stuff.  Frank asked “What, no Clapton?” and Lisa wandered off to drink a little too much, while the rest of us broke off into small groups.  The evening reached that point where some couples broke off to “get something from their coats” in the bedroom, women cackled on one side of the room, men grouped in the kitchen to shoot the breeze. Luc, our host ambled about quietly re-filling drinks with a heavy hand, the ever present cigar clamped in his teeth.   No one knew what the time was.  The party had reached the level of noise and the preponderance of bright eyes that signified a really good time.  Luc strode to the center of the living room, cigar in hand, amber scotch on rocks in the other, to issue the invitation. 

“Before we eat, who’s interested in taking a tour of the downstairs facility?”   The man was proud of his occupation, after all. 

I swiveled my head just in time to see Frank’s face pale ever so slightly as he hunkered down in the wing chair. “Hey, not this time bud”, Frank said, his eyes shifting around to find Lisa.  Before we knew it, a small group assembled around our host, looking casually eager to tour the premises below. 

It was then I remembered the small, saran and tissue-wrapped package in my purse.  One of my nephews had slipped it to me at a barbeque during the summer.  “Hide it, its good stuff, but don’t smoke it alone”, he’d told me.  Smoke it alone?  I’d never smoked one at all.  I’d hidden it deep in my underwear drawer for months, knowing that Max, who frowned on such things, would have a fit if he knew. 

The group started for the stairs. The “prep” room was in the basement in a separate wing.  We’d be able to slip downstairs to the ladies room, clear on the other side of the building.  No one would miss us.  They’d think we went with the tour.  I found Dee, my blonde partner in crime, and told her to come with me.  I was Peter Pan that night, and she had come as Alice in Wonderland, those darned crazy red striped socks skipping down the stairs to keep up with me.  The ladies room was all pink and white and softly silent, its stalls empty, its ladylike chairs covered in beige silk.  We were giddy with excitement and anticipation.  What to expect?  We had no idea.   We’d spent the sixties working and then had babies. Time to break out!  Time to get wild! Experiment! 

We lit it, we puffed and puffed, not feeling a thing, but pleased with ourselves for being so rebellious.  Oh well, we laughed, at least we tried.  By the time we got upstairs, the group had just come back from the tour, slightly subdued but abuzz with words like metal tables and drains and sinks and apparatus.  Ewww.  Our mates had been on the tour, thinking we were upstairs all the while.  What subterfuge!  We got on the line to get some food.  But, it happened just as we reached the dining room table laden with casseroles, hoagies, large plates of ziti, and pot luck dishes galore.  Oh my god!  It hit us right then!  And my world became…hilarious! 

I began to laugh and then laughed harder, I couldn’t stop.  It was a snorting, suppressed laugh, with shoulders shaking.  I looked up and caught sight of Dee, her pink cheeks about to burst; eyes wide open as though in shock.  I could not contain myself, though Max whispered harshly at my elbow “What is wrong with you?  “Nothing, nothing.” I muttered as I maneuvered my way around the table, and then walked behind him as he made his way to our chairs.  I was a quaking, doubled over Peter Pan, my green velvet shorts and tan top crumpling as I walked, balancing my plate, keeping an eye on my feet as I watched them walking, as though they belonged to someone else, the cute brown suede shorty boots gliding across the burgundy Persian rug. They looked rhythmical, elusive.  I was captivated.  

I reached my chair, my stomach hurting from the belly laughs, sure that my cute painted Peter freckles were now brown streaks marking my face.  Max was fuming and snarling “Pull yourself together!”

Just then, our friend, mild mannered Gary, spoke to me from across the tray table “Is that all you’re eating?”  I looked down at my plate.  There sat a small round of coleslaw, with a few olives rolling around the bare plate.  Where was all my food I wondered?  Oh where was all my food?

Then I howled, a loud, very loud, side-splitting howl …damn that was good stuff!

 

A Christmas Story on December 19th or...

How I learned to decorate for Christmas from my friend Bea.

This was written last year (I am not that caught up now) and because I spied the little gold angel in the corner of the china closet this weekend that Bea sent to me some years ago, and because this very week she will undergo a procedure that has her very bright smile a little worried ( which I can see even in her email from several states away), I dedicate this very fond memory to her.

I found myself uncharacteristically and eerily ahead that afternoon in the scheme of Christmas planning and executions.  The tree was up and decorated, mostly everything was wrapped, almost all the baking done and stored away, and even my cards, which gave me so much trouble, what with the thirteen steps it required, and oh the glitter….well, there they were, done, written and stamped.  How odd, I mused. I needed to do more, like expand the chores to fill the available time or something like that.

I mentioned that I was intending to climb out on the ledge, twelve feet over the living room, in order to string a garland intertwined with multi mini lights, across the span.  And maybe I would swag it as well. I was met with an affirmative for the decorating idea, and the offer of some help with a ladder from down below.  Okay, so we did it.  I then made my way into the bedroom where I could escape the roar and thunder of the football game and the accompanying cheering and yelling, and I could quietly watch Miracle on 34^th Street for the third time that week.

And why wouldn’t I begin to utilize the extra lights – twinkling whites, and the three foot gold, fold out tree, made from some twigs or something that my friend Lisa gave me years ago when I was running the craft gallery and she thought I might be able to use it in the window sometime, which I did.  But I could see that it would fit nicely on the flat part of the built in’s behind the bed.  He probably would complain that it was too near his head, but I would tell him it’s only for a few weeks, and he burrows down  towards the end of the bed anyway.  The box of small gold and silver ornaments – some with glitter – god I love glitter, were perfect for it, ditto the gilded thin garland thing with gold leaves.  My old angel, who is too small for our big tree now, fit perfectly on top, and the tiny crèche snugged up under it just right. 

This still left me with the special string of golden lights in the shape of pine cones, that I bought last year.  Hmm – where to put them.  Maybe the downstairs bathroom, I had not ventured there yet.  But no, the yellow room, or as my granddaughter calls it – her room.  She would definitely love the lights.

I digress.  I was inspired, or was it compelled, by a phone chat that afternoon with my friend Bea.  Bless her heart, this is all because of her, I must tell you.  Many, and I mean many years ago, when we were both young mothers and our kids were small, with warm, sticky hands and high pitched voices, my idea of decorating corresponded to what I knew from my mother.  You put the tree up and hung the wreath on the front door.  You’re done.  Oh sure, there might have been some weird aluminumy, papery folded bells on a ribbon or something that she would hang on the dining room mirror over the credenza.  The extent of her baking was chocolate chip cookies and a fruitcake.  You’re done. 

So, as a young mother, I was pretty proud of myself that I had painted some wooden ornaments for my first child’s first Christmas and I made at least two kinds of cookies, and then we put up the tree, decorated it, and hung the wreath on the door.  I’m done, right?  This is where Bea comes in.  The first Christmas that we knew each other, we’re chatting on the phone, as we did so many mornings, and she proclaimed “I’m almost done decorating the house” and I’m thinking did she say decorating the house?  And so I ask “what do you mean decorating the house?” Ha ha, she laughs heartily. “Well no, I like to have things in almost every room” No way! I say.  This was unheard of, I couldn’t wait to see it!   

Was that year she had small sprigs of baby’s breath in her tree, and I saw small velvet ribbons as well?  And pine cones here and there in baskets. And wreaths everywhere, and Santas and snowmen and pillows, oh my.  Even little somethings in her bathroom.  She loved to tell the story of how she first learned the mysteries of a septic tank problem.  “And there was my Ho Ho Ho toilet paper coming up in the yard and I yelled to Paulie – do something!”  We loved that story.

The Brussel Sprouts War

The Brussel Sprouts War

They lingered over Sunday morning breakfast, since the sun had decided to show itself and now the rooms were sunny and warm.  With the last sip of warm coffee, she asked “could you pick the Brussels sprouts today, so we can have them for thanksgiving?”  Because of the sudden dip in temperature and the light dusting of snow on the deck, they knew it would be an optimum time to pick the Brussels. Thankfully, the late season deer –marauders had not taken a liking to the plants and so left them alone.

He headed off to the garden carrying a worn canvas bag and wearing the faded and torn winter work jacket that she longed to throw away. He was anxious to get this chore over so he could get the wood pile stacked and ready for winter. Strong winds ruffled the chimes from every direction around the house.  She busied herself with laundry and clean up, putting off the graphics job she had to do today to meet Monday’s deadline.

It wasn’t long before she heard the door slide open in the kitchen.  She walked out to find him standing there, dripping dirt and holding bundles of long, curved stalks, dark green with frost and laden with the tiny cabbages. He laid them on the floor.  They stood and stared down at the stalks, each lost in their own thoughts about the next step.  Quietly, she watched his nose drip onto the kitchen floor.  He suggested freezing them right away.  She felt resentment towards the damn things lying on the floor.  At the same time, they’d never had such a crop as this, and of course they must be grateful and not waste them. She went to google how to deal with “frostbit” Brussels. She heard him clomping upstairs. In five minutes time, they both reappeared, she with her printed pages, he with his advice from a site he’d googled.  “What?  Why? With all the things we both have to do, why would you go and look up the same thing?”   “So I don’t have to get into a pissing contest with you about what to do” he yelled loudly.  And then “you know what?  You do whatever the F you want to do.” And he stormed out the door. 

Later, as she soaked the baby cabbages in salt and water (as instructed, to draw out the dirt and worms)  she mused over Brussels sprouts.  There had only ever been one person in their family that seemed keen on “those baby cabbages” as he called them. And he wasn’t even family…or was he? And her Mother served them when he was there for dinner, usually accompanying ham.  While he ate them with gusto, her sister and she struggled, she gagging on the mushy, watery mouthfuls that smelled like skunks laying dead in the road.  At least thirty years or more had passed since a Brussels sprout entered her kitchen.  She never served them to her children.  Yet, her son in his adulthood years, had declared them his favorite vegetable, “those baby cabbages.”  Yes, had even used those words.  And then, last year they’d found their way into the garden, who knows why.  And she learned how the fresh incarnation is truly a world apart from the mushy mouthful, and she’d sliced the tiny first year specimens, and sautéed them in butter and everyone at the Thanksgiving table last year was delighted, though her son was not there, nor the long gone mysterious family dinner guest.

At dinner, they ate in silence, the bright green reminders of the morning’s ugliness glowing buttery in their bright blue bowl.  She thought of her son, and she thought of him.



In any given day there exists a dandy bucketful of words, a plethora, if you will.  If one has a love of words, one likes to hear good ones, savor them, admire, maybe even envy the utterer of the rarely used word.  But too often, we are trapped in the verbal panoply of  the mundane, the plain ole well-meaning words.  Sure, they are important, necessary, linking thoughts and deeds and compliments and retractions and contractions and subtractions. They are clearly, plainly, without a doubt (but rarely indubitably) necessary in the day to day.

I have a friend who says there are some words that are just plain silly, that make you laugh just to say them.  For the life of me, I can now recall only one......noodle.  Pause for laugh. 

I thought tonight as I poured a ruby red glass of wine to prepare to chop vegetables... Montepulciano.  I said it out loud to feel it roll....it's a word that fairly slides off the tongue. It's sultry, it's smooth, it has flair, I think it dances the samba. 
I say Flamenco, like the red flounced dress of the woman

painted on the side of the building that my walking chum and I went over to see today.  The sudden chill and wind whipped around us, as we craned our necks to stare up at the old brick building where the new mural had magically appeared  since the last time we walked there. 

The words of today began to drop from my memory onto the scrap of paper by the phone.  In-cog-nito.......said with a soft but definite emphasis on the T.  Foreign, intriguing.    
Ruta-baga, a word as strange and ugly as the brown, heavy, gnarly vegetable yanked from the ground, needing the strength of three men. With its tangled, hairy roots encrusted with dirt, and it's top end distended like an elephant's trunk, it is as visually formidable as it is gastronomically challenging.  A couple of weeks ago, I left a rutabaga in a friend's breezeway when she was away, feeling like the bad joke about the woman leaving zucchinis in unlocked parked cars in shopping centers. ( Like who leaves their car unlocked anymore, really) Unbeknownst to me, she'd taken a picture of it and sent it to the Master Gardener at a local university extension office, who, as the story goes, was stumped. I'd forgotten about it.

Words like brazen, and faker, and knucklehead. The list goes on, but so many stories, so little time.....

"The moon was so bright, we were playing soccer in the fields, me and my brothers and sisters.  It was one o'clock in the morning, I think I was about ten, I'll never forget that" he said. Not only was the image of that memory so crystal clear, but the look on his face as he told me, made the story all the more warm and fuzzy. It may have been almost thirty years ago, but his face lit up as though the moon were shining thru his eyes with the recollection. I felt a deep rush of warmth, like someone had just given me an unexpected gift, a treasure.

"My Father rented a van that summer and determined that we would see all of Ireland instead of just visiting my two sets of grandparents, like we did each year. That particular night he'd pulled over to the side of the road, tired from all the driving.  He walked up to the farmhouse, knocked on the door and asked the people there if he and his family could camp out in their field."  Of course, they'd said.  "We kids had a blast."

We'd met for a simple lunch to discuss some business, this  young man and I. He'd commented on my sweater, the knit, the stitches.  I told him I'd gotten it in Ireland just a couple of months before, when I visited with my family. Probably I had that same misty-eyed look when I touched briefly on where we traveled and how I loved it.  And then, the stories were swapped, and a link, like the linked stitches in my warm sweater from the Aran Islands, was woven.  And we laughed and smiled at the good memories that  we had brought forth and shared. It was a good lunch.

I have eaten about 62 mini marshmallows.  I feel my tongue now coated with the powdery residue.  And my conscience coated with guilt and disbelief.  Yet I could not stop popping the small, spongy pillowed squares into my mouth as I responded to that email...........argghhh.  Put it aside; don't allow any mental room for that to hang out in.......think of something else.............

Tonight I got a "bob" from my favorite, very entertaining hair cutter - he is SO much more than just a haircutter, and of course he will tell you that........I like how my hair feels - kinda swingy and carefree; Mark told me, as he was cutting away, it's "kinda hip, cool, retro, youthful...."  Who wouldn't want this?  Of course, I mentioned how I'd been looking up his phone # a few weeks ago (but never called of course; I just happened to stop by this afternoon as I walked thru town back to work).  And when I was online, I'd found several u-tube videos of Mark doing his "shtick".  "yeah" he says "it's like Lenny Bruce, you know?"  I had to admit, there was a foul, blue note quality to it, but I told him that I had split a gut watching one about an old geezer friend of his Dad's who had a poorly fitted set of false teeth and claimed to have made love to 10,000 women............lo and behold, mark started doing the "shtick"  right then and there.  Sitting in the chair, the black robe restricting my windpipe, my hair combed all forward over my face like cousin "It", darned if he didn't start the story , complete with the very realistic whistle and schloppy ss'sssssss that the old guy had.  I was shaking with laughter, and surprisingly not at all concerned how this might affect my haircut - especially when he got to the part - and I knew darned well it was coming - how the geezer insisted that he'd made love to 10,000 women, but he never, no never, went "south of the border, down mexico way."  It went on and on, and he asked if I'd seen the one where he talks about his great aunt and grandmother talking about their constipation - "cause that's what old folks talk about!"  he declared.  

Then, he told me "get up, bend over, shake your hair all around. Good, good!"
"You see, this is a science, and I'm really good at it.  I knew you were ready for this.  You can't keep doing that 'layer me up' thing.  You have to change, go forward...I have skills...........I've been waiting; you weren't ready before.  But tonight I knew you were ready.  It's a science."  Love you markie...

 

The Last Rose of Kingston

The last rose of Kingston

outside the conference room window
Pink perfection demanding attention
poised against the green sapling tinged with autumnal yellow
In here, all are black, or blue, dots, stripes, diamonds,
Black…or blue
monochrome
metronome, mercurochrome
astrodome
Outfits for a business day
But wait, one rosy shirt smiles in the back of the room
Perhaps in tandem with
the last rose of Kingston
Outside the conference room window
And then…beneath the modesty panel
One pair of dingy white socks
Rest comfortably
atop their black shoes.

Thanks Richard

This lavender prom dress is several decades old, as am I.  Richard, an old friend gave it to me.  One Monday morning, he came into my office in that downstairs yellow space with the French doors, and he handed me a plastic bag - "here, I thought of you when I found this", he said.  Looking inside, I saw a strapless chiffon-ey dress in a beautiful color - "Richard, what will I do with this,"  I asked. "You'll think of something," he said, with that slight chuckle and twinkle  in his eye.  I thought of Richard last  night, about midnight, as I lay  pondering what creation I could throw together for a Halloween outfit for work today.  I had already made the meat loaf shaped like a hand, and the Q-tip snacks - lollipop sticks with mini marshmallows dipped in a little peanut butter - ewww, you get the picture. 
But I remembered the dress, and jumped up to start ransacking the closet.  There it was - a vision from the 50;s - wrinkled and impressive in it's lines and color..........I had  my outfit.

Well, Richard passed about five years ago, but I couldn't help thinking of him quite a bit today, as fellow workers admired my "prom" dress, studded with brooches and pinned together at the side to allow for my burgeoning midriff...I had great fun spraying my hair with green color, and smearing gray, pasty make-up on my face and pinning the black crow to my birds nest of a teased hairdo............and I thought "You were right Richard - I did think of something...and Thanks."

Suppose

If you are taking a walk in November on the streets of Kingston and you find a plastic poinsettia blossom, this is good luck.  If you continue on, and you get a screw piercing thru your shoe, scratching the sidewalk so that you have to stop and lean on a tree to pluck it out, well then what is that? 

First you are flowered, then you are screwed?  But one continues on, chatting non-stop with your walking buddy, till several blocks later when you both hear “Ladies!”  And then there is the smiling man in the soft purple sweater, the very color of lilacs in the Spring, and he says “Would you like some roses?”  And he says he was going to have to throw them out anyway, and he walks you over to where they are, and he presents you each with a small bouquet, done up with wheat grass and rubber banded; one is dark blood red, the other peachy yellow.  You offer surprised and warm thanks, and continue walking, your moods elevated and belief in serendipity restored…if we hadn’t walked down this block at this time, etc….then of course, in the way of true buddies, you wrest the rubber band off, and share the colors – now…a true blending of the hearts.  So, things do come in threes of course…..and amidst the flowers, you may get screwed…………..

So, if on a particular Tuesday, one felt like employing the hair dryer to one’s usually flat, wavy style, and that someone came out of the experience with large fluffy hair and a slightly windblown look, is it professionally acceptable for that someone’s supervisor to comment that someone looks disheveled and is everything ok?