[Bloganuary is hosted by WordPress. A new topic is presented each day during January.]
I gave up making New Year’s resolutions a long time ago. Maybe because I never kept them any better than the resolutions I made at any other time of year. I also don’t stay up until midnight anymore. The arrival of the New Year finds its way without my shouts of “Happy New Year,” and when I wake in the morning it will still be January 1.
But I have an ongoing list of ways I try to improve that I keep in mind throughout the whole year:
Be kind, as much as I can, to both people I know and strangers I don’t know.
Move around more and eat better.
Socialize more. Because I’m an introvert, my first inclination is to stay home, content in my own world with just my dogs and husband for company.
Revise and polish some of the rough drafts of stories and essays that I’ve written.
Share.
Understand and use commas better.
Remember that it’s okay to make time to do the things that I want to do.
The New Year gives us a chance to reflect and start again, to make resolutions and become better people. But any other day of the year can be a good day to reflect and start again, to make resolutions. So, Happy New Year throughout 2023, for today and any other day that you may need it the most.
[“Show and Tell to Remember” was originally published by the Bacopa Literary Review 2022. It earned an honorable mention for humor.]
Inside my dress pocket, I had the best thing for show and tell. In 1964, I was new at Pleasant View Elementary, and having started in October instead of September, I was an outsider. My kindergarten classmates were going to be impressed. The popular girls would envy me and ask me to jump rope with them during recess. The cute boys would elbow each other and try to sit by me at snack time. My pretty teacher, with bouncing brown hair that flipped up in a long continuous curl around her neck, would look at me with approval.
“Vickie,” the teacher said, “it’s your turn.”
I snapped out of my daydream, rose from the floor, and stood next to the teacher who sat in a chair. My dress was clean, my saddle shoes were polished, and my unruly hair was combed into pigtails. It was my moment. I slipped my hand into my pocket.
“I brought a balloon,” I said. “Each one comes in its own wrapper.” My classmates leaned forward. My teacher turned toward me for a better view. I opened the package and pulled out the balloon.
“Let me see that,” my teacher said. Her hand clutched the balloon and its wrapper. She told me to sit down then called on the next student.
My face burned. At five and a half years old, I had enough sense to know I had done something wrong. But what? I wanted to ask for my balloon back, but I didn’t dare.
Me, circa kindergarten
After show and tell, I saw my teacher on the phone and heard her say my name. I was in trouble, but I didn’t know why. Too embarrassed to ask her what I had done wrong, I waited for a punishment, which in my imagination grew in magnitude as the afternoon dragged on. My graham crackers and milk didn’t sit well in my stomach, and naptime wasn’t restful. Usually, I rode the bus home, but at the end of the day, my teacher told me my mother would pick me up. My classmates left without me.
Mom arrived shortly after the buses rolled away. The teacher invited her to sit in the chair next to her desk but told me to wait in the hallway. They would talk about me, find me guilty—of what I didn’t know—and punish me forever. It had to be bad, very bad, but they didn’t talk long.
“Where did you get the balloon?” Mom asked after we got in the car.
“From your dresser.” Lying would’ve made it worse. My mother always seemed to know the answers to the questions she asked me.
“Don’t go in my dresser again. Or your dad’s dresser. Understand?”
I nodded in agreement. That was it. Not a word about punishment. No “wait until your father gets home.” This confused me because Mom had been called to school. My classmates said nothing about my show-and-tell offering either, and my dreams of popularity remained buried in the playground sandbox.
Because of the eerie silence that followed my kindergarten show and tell, I never forgot about it. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school that I realized I had taken a condom to school, and that Mom had said nothing more about the “balloon” because she didn’t want to explain condoms to her five-year-old daughter.
After I figured it out, I never asked, “Hey, Mom, remember when I thought I took a balloon to kindergarten for show and tell and the teacher called you?” Like any other teenager, I didn’t want to talk about birth control or sex with a parent. The where-do-babies-come-from talk Mom and I had when I was nine, still made me squirm with embarrassment.
After I had children, I appreciated that my kindergarten teacher and Mom handled my show-and-tell blunder with the calmness of an air traffic controller communicating with a pilot as he makes his final approach to a busy airport during a raging thunderstorm. But they never knew how much I suffered that afternoon.
Years later, I wondered if Mom might have been embarrassed because my teacher called her to school to discuss why her five-year-old daughter had a condom in her pocket. If Mom was mortified, she hid it well. She was twenty-four and had three daughters ages, five, four, and one. She may have been more horrified by the wasted condom than my taking it to school. Our family didn’t have the kind of lifestyle where condoms grew on trees.
Having graduated in 1958, Mom was six years out of St. John’s, a catholic high school, from which she almost didn’t graduate. She had written an essay scolding the pope and the Catholic Church for banning the use of birth control by its members. If she had, instead, written an essay describing her struggles with her Catholic faith and questioning the existence of God, the nun who taught the religion class may have said, “God expects his followers will experience a crisis of faith now and then. Keep praying.” But questioning the pope’s stance on birth control was sacrilege.
The school threatened to withhold Mom’s diploma, but she refused to rewrite her essay. She stood ready to see her high school diploma burned at the stake for the right of women to use birth control without fearing God or Hell or nuns who taught religion classes.
But Mom was also practical: She called the Wisconsin Department of Education, who made it clear to the school’s administrators they could give Mom an F in religion, but they couldn’t deny her a diploma because the state didn’t require a religious class for graduation.
For Mom, having to talk to my kindergarten teacher about my birth-control-show-and-tell balloon was probably child’s play. She had already taken on the pope and the Catholic Church and St. John’s High School and a perturbed nun. Besides I went to a public school, and no one threatened to keep me from graduating kindergarten.
[The Bacopa Literary Review 2022 can be ordered by clicking here. To read the complete list of winners and honorable mentions in humor, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, click here.]
A dusky morning in Michigan, Ziva and Cabela, December 25, 2022
Christmas morning used to be about the children. I would hope they’d sleep in longer than they did on school mornings, but they’d wake up and be ready to open their presents before any school-morning alarm clock would’ve rung.
This Christmas morning it was my two dogs, Cabela and Ziva, who woke me up around six o’clock. They weren’t interested in presents–they wanted to go outside in the windy, windy snowstorm and pee. After we came back inside, my mother’s dog, Bogey, wanted to go outside, so back out I went, but I left Cabela and Ziva in the house.
I never take all three dogs outside at the same time. Doesn’t matter what the weather is like or what time of day it is. Bogey tries to run down the back hill through some bushes, hoping to reach the golf course and look for golf balls. He’s not put off by the snow. He plants his nose into the white fluff and comes up with a golf ball. He can smell them under the snow. And Cabela tries to exit the front yard and trot down the road. I have no idea where she thinks she’s going, but something wild in the air calls to her. I can’t chase Bogey and Cabela at the same time in different directions. Bogey won’t listen unless I’m right next to him, saying, “Stay here.” Cabela can’t listen because she’s mostly deaf. Ziva never tries to leave the yard. She keeps her eye on me.
After the dogs had a chance to make yellow snow, I decided to do some writing. The other humans were still sleeping and Bogey went back to bed. I turned on my computer and sat at the kitchen table. My dogs began pacing around the kitchen on the hardwood floors, clickity clack, clickity clack. It’s amazing how loud dog nails clicking on a wooden floor sound when a house is predawn silent. While pacing, both dogs stopped periodically and looked at me, as if to say, “Let’s go back to bed.” I tried to ignore them, but they can be relentless. They wanted to be with me, but they didn’t want to lay on the hardwood floor, not when there were couches to sleep on.
I gave up on writing and joined the dogs in the living room. I curled up on a large stuffed chair with a soft ottoman. Cabela and Ziva commandeered opposite ends of the couch, and we all went back to sleep for an hour. Then I got up, but my dogs kept sleeping.
I gave Bogey his Christmas present, a colorful stuffed octopus. He played with it for a bit, then napped with it on the kitchen floor. With all three dogs in the house fast asleep, I made coffee.
I’m in Petoskey, Michigan, just thirty miles south of the Mackinac Bridge. We came over on Wednesday, threading the needle between stormy weather in northern Wisconsin and stormy weather across the Upper Peninsula. It was a smart choice. We had nice driving weather for our nine-and-a-half-hour trip. It was, however, bitter cold, which my dogs didn’t appreciate during their potty breaks.
On Thursday the temperature in Petoskey rose to 35°, the sun shone, and the Lake Michigan winds kept their breezy nature tucked away. My husband and I took my mom out for a drive in the morning because she wanted to do some shopping. After we dropped her off, my husband and I went to lunch and did some shopping, buying gifts for her, a bread pan for me, and caramel corn for him. Although a winter’s day, it was beautiful for walking in and out of shops in downtown Petoskey. I reminded my husband about the last time we had such beautiful weather for pre-Christmas shopping in Petoskey. Shortly after nightfall, temperatures sank; thick, wet snow blanketed trees, power lines, and the ground; and winds whipped into gale force strength. We lost power at 2:30 in the morning.
Cabela
Once again, the nice weather we had on Thursday was the calm before the storm. By 7:00 p.m., the wind revved up its motor, the temperature dipped fifteen degrees, and the snow flew in horizontally off Lake Michigan. Fortunately, we haven’t lost power, but the water in the toilets sloshes back and forth and side to side like we’re on a ship in rough seas.
Each time I take the dogs outside, including walking my mom’s poodle, Bogey, I bundle up from head to toe–hat, goggles, down coat, long underwear, and boots. Yesterday morning I walked Bogey, and we had to trudge through knee-high snowdrifts. He likes to walk to the cul-de-sac to poo. He has a favorite spot. Sometimes as we walked the wind would gust, stopping me in my tracks and shoving me a step or two backwards. Later in the evening after dark, we repeated our trek through knee-high snow drifts, the wind pushing us around again. I thought about Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire.” I have a fine sense of the dramatic. But mostly, I wondered why anyone would set out for a long walk in subzero temperatures or blowing blizzards. I wasn’t going any place where I couldn’t see house lights.
Ziva
The snowstorm bellowed all through the night, and the winds blew harder. This morning the snow is lighter, but the winds continue to roar off Lake Michigan. This weather front isn’t forecasted to loosen its grip until after Christmas Day.
So, it’s inside entertainment. I’ve watched a little bit of football, lost two games of cribbage, finished a five-hundred piece jigsaw puzzle, and I’ve done some reading and writing. Last night my mom and I watched Flawless, a movie starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine, which we both liked a lot. Today I wrote this blog while sitting in a second-story window seat, watching the white caps on Lake Michigan, listening to the whooshing winds, and being chilled by the cold air leaking through the windows. The winds are gusting at 45 mph. The snow is still falling. And because I’m very cold now, this blog must be done. I need a cup of hot cocoa with whipped cream.
Last week a snowstorm moved through our area, and school was cancelled three days in a row. I took care of my youngest two grandsons for two of the days, which included a sleepover.
After the first day of the storm, there was a lull in the evening before part two of the storm hit. So, on a beautiful, warm winter evening dressed in fresh snow, my grandsons bundled up in their outerwear, and my husband gave them headlamps to strap around their hats. I leashed the dogs, and we went for a walk.
My happy grandsons ran down the sidewalk, mesmerized by the bouncing lights shining from their headlamps. They laughed and played games as they ran. My dogs and I trailed behind. The dogs ignored their antics, but I remembered my sisters and I as young children and our fascination with flashlights. We’d heist a flashlight from the kitchen junk drawer and hide it in our bedroom. After dark, we used it to create animals with our fingers on the walls of our bedroom. We had such fun–until my father, days or weeks later, opened the junk drawer to find his flashlight missing when he needed it.
My father’s voice would boom: “Where’s my damn flashlight?” My sisters and I would exchange glances, then fetch it from the bedroom and place it in his hand.
“I can’t have a damn thing around this house!” he’d spout. My father, a master of hyperbole, turned every problem that impacted him into an all-or-nothing event.
In reality, there were only two things my father couldn’t have around the house–flashlights and tape measures. Considering he was a mechanic with an amazing array of tools in his garage and a junk drawer full of household tools, he could’ve fared worse. My father’s booming voice didn’t deter us. Eventually, we’d hijack the flashlight again, always with a plan to return it before he noticed it was missing, a plan that usually failed.
At some point we discovered tape measures were fun, not because we measured stuff, but because the metal tape could be pulled out and locked in place, then with a flick of a finger, unlocked. And ZING, twenty feet of metal tape would dash into its case with satisfying speed and a snappy sounding CHING. Of course, we often forgot to return the tape measure.
One day, one of us, I think it was me, pulled the metal tape out too far. Nothing we tried would fix it. Next time my father boomed, “Where’s my damn tape measure?” we wouldn’t be able to retrieve it and put it in his hand, unless we handed it to him with its innards spilling onto the floor.
We did the only sensible thing we could think of–we placed the broken tape measure in a paper bag and carried it into the field of tall grass behind our backyard. We left it there, hoping no one would find it.
I don’t remember if my father or mother ever found the bag. And I don’t remember what happened the next time my father boomed, “Where the hell is my tape measure?” I asked my sisters and they didn’t remember the event, although they were part of the caper and cover up.
Sometimes I think I have a vague memory of it being discovered, but that my father made no bigger deal out of it than to repeat his usual “I can’t have a damn thing around here” lament, a tirade that probably lasted only a minute or two because being a busy guy, he had other things to do. He also had tape measures in his garage.
My father could at best be described as a curmudgeon, but for all his bluster, he was sentimental. Once we all grew up and moved out, I wonder if he ever went to his junk drawer and felt a bit sad to find both his flashlight and tape measure undisturbed.
Dad and me, before I started playing with his flashlights and tape measures. Dad was 22 years old, and I was ten months old.
Watching my joyful grandsons with mini flashlights strapped to their heads made me smile, and I offered up some words to my father who passed away six years ago. Dad, I know our love of your flashlights and tape measures drove you crazy, but thanks for being a good sport about it–in your own way. And I told him that my grandsons are crazy about flashlights and tape measures, and if they lived with him, he’d find those things going missing once again.
The Spider, most likely a species of cellar spider, September 2022
This is the spider I could not kill. It spun its web along the outside curb of the shower in the finished basement of my mother’s house.
When my husband and I visit my mom, we stay in that basement, an elegant suite with a large bank of windows, a beautiful bathroom, a spacious living room, and a large bedroom.
But I’ve killed other spiders, many times, in that same place. I can’t fathom where they come from or why they like the spot on the outside curb of the shower in the elegant basement.
I discovered this spider a couple of days after my mother had quadruple bypass surgery in September. But I did not grab a piece of tissue paper, I did not squish it, and I did not flush it down the toilet. The spider in the bathroom and my mother in the hospital reminded me of an O. Henry story called “The Last Leaf.”
The leaves
In the story a young woman with pneumonia believes she will die. Dailey, she watches leaves drop from a vine outside her window and believes when the last leaf falls, she, too, will expire. And so, because I read a story forty years ago, the spider stayed. I wanted to believe as long as the spider existed, my mother would recover.
I visited my mother in the hospital. I walked her dog at home. And when I took a shower, I was mindful of the spindly spider. Its existence or extinction would not impact my mother’s recovery. But I remembered the old painter in “The Last Leaf” who paints a leaf so realistically on the wall outside the dying woman’s window, it fools her and she recovers.
And so, the spider stayed. Not because I believed it would guarantee my mother would get better, but because it was all that I could control.
My mother is three months into her recovery, and doing well. I’m not sure about the spider. But the last time I saw it in October, it still commanded the corner along the outside curb of the shower in the elegant basement.
When I left work yesterday, I noticed a crow on the curb near the parking lot, which was unusual. I wondered what he was doing, and as if to answer my question, he bobbed his head to the ground, stuck his beak in a small red bag, and pulled out a tidbit of food. He chewed the morsel and plucked another one out of the bag. Someone had dropped the food, and crows are opportunists. I stopped at the side of the driveway and watched, trying to figure out what he nibbled, but I couldn’t read the words on the shiny red package.
“What are you eating?” I asked. Yes, I said it out loud. Of course, I looked around first to see if I was alone.
If the crow could’ve talked, he probably would’ve said, “Move on, lady. Nothing to see here!” He kept bobbing, pecking, and munching.
But I wanted to know what he was eating, so I stepped toward him. He grabbed the bag with his beak and flapped his wings, taking flight. He landed on the roof of the building. The crow’s whole I-can-fly-and-you-can’t maneuver made me laugh at myself. Because he was right, and because what made me think he’d let me get close enough to read the label on the package. Up on the roof he continued to eat, safe from me and my prying eyes.
“I wasn’t going to eat your food,” I told him, again out loud. The crow might eat food he found on the ground, but I wasn’t going to.
I got into my car and started it. The radio came on. National Public Radio was airing a story about a drought in a country, whose name I’d missed. Not an ordinary drought, a drought brought on by global warning, said a man. Crops had failed, and hunger was growing. People were starving.
And I thought about the crow eating food off the ground that I would turn my nose up at.
And I thought about books. Because that’s what I do, I connect to stories.
Young Elie Wiesel in a concentration camp with other prisoners, all starving, becoming bones, eating scraps riddled with mold and bugs.
The starving North Koreans in the 1990s described by Barbara Demick in her book Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. One-fifth of the North Koreans perished. Others survived by eating anything they could, stripping the land of edible vegetation. Their bodies deformed from lack of nutrients, forever announcing the hunger they endured.
Lev and Kolya, characters from the novel City of Thieves by David Benioff, imprisoned in Leningrad, awaiting execution, but given a chance to save themselves by finding a dozen eggs needed to bake a cake for the wedding of the daughter of a Soviet colonel, while thousands of Russians are starving, eating pigeons, dogs, cats, and eventually leather and glue from the binding of books.
I think about the crow eating junk food he found on the ground, something I claimed I wouldn’t do. I think about wars and drought, and crop failure, and food shortage, and hungry people. And I realize crow and I are lucky–crow because he lives in a land where people drop food and can afford to leave it on the ground; me because I live in a land where I don’t have to challenge a crow for scraps of food found on the ground.
Finally, I think about the Ukrainians, who last year at this time didn’t have to worry about food or heat or shelter. About the Pakistanis and the floods that decimated their crops. I think about people living through droughts and disasters. And I think about people in our country who go hungry. I remember an eighth-grade girl from years ago, who was caught stealing packaged cupcakes from the grocery store and arrested. Turned out she’d been stealing food from the store to feed herself and her little sister because the only parent in their life was an alcoholic who often had no money to buy groceries.
And I wonder . . . what I might eat or steal if disaster upended my world.
Ziva, November 29, 2022, home after our evening walk
Snow began falling around 8:00 a.m. today. The forecast predicted a trace to one inch, but it snowed all day, and four fluffy inches covered the ground, roads, trees, and cars. Snow can be that way, making weather forecasters look foolish.
This isn’t the first snow of the year, but today’s snow has a good chance of staying on the ground, making it a white Christmas. That’s why I call it the first real snow of the year.
I loved snow as a child, and I haven’t grown old enough yet to resent or fear it. The first real snowfall of the year evokes childhood memories of snowballs, snowmen, snow forts, and sledding. Swaddled in snow pants, jackets, hats, scarves, and mittens, our joyful shouts, squeals, and laughter bounced off the trees and houses.
I love to walk my dogs, Ziva and Cabela, in the evening after a fresh snowfall when the air is still. My dogs love the first real snow too. They prance. They stuff their noses in the snow, tossing it in the air or eating it. Sometimes the snow tickles their noses, and they sneeze. Even Cabela, who’s now fourteen-and-a-half, becomes youthful. When they were puppies, the first snowfall of the year gave them the crazies. They pounced and dashed and rolled in it, creating doggie snow angels. They reminded me of a gaggle of children unleashed into the first good snow of the year.
Perhaps snow sparks something primal in my dogs and myself, something that lights up ancient places in our brains, something that is more complex than our happy memories of youthful frolics in the snow.
My husband likes pumpkin pie. I do not. For more than twenty years we cooked a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for a big group of people. But not pumpkin pie. Someone else always brought pumpkin pie. I baked a cake or cheesecake.
This year we’re having a nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner. No turkey, no stuffing, no mashed potatoes, no pumpkin pie. There will be four of us. We’re having a roast, baked potatoes, and green beans (not mixed with cream of mushroom soup). I’m making a chocolate peanut butter chip cake. My husband is happy to skip the turkey and other fixings, but he mentioned twice that he was going to miss the pumpkin pie. Yesterday, I decided to bake him a pumpkin pie before Thanksgiving.
I called Aunt Coralee. She bakes smack-down, grand-champion, blue-ribbon, best-of-show pies. I asked her how she makes pumpkin pie. She starts with a homemade crust. Her crusts are flakey, tender, rich and golden brown, and if her pie filling mysteriously evaporated, her crust could carry the day on its own. I told her that was an art form I did not have time to master. She told me to buy a premade crust at the store. All I had to do was unroll it and put it in the pie pan. No rolling pin required. I could do that. She told me to use canned pumpkin and follow the recipe on the back of the label. I could do that, too. Off to the store, I went.
My second call to Aunt Coralee was from the grocery store. “Do you bake your pie in a glass or tin pan?” I asked. She uses glass or ceramic. “Cool,” I said because I had a glass pie dish that I used for quiche.
“Don’t forget the whipped cream,” Aunt Coralee said.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I’d thought about whipped cream in produce, but breezed by the dairy cooler in pursuit of refrigerated pie crust. “If you want to see a grown man cry, just hand my husband a piece of pie without whipped cream,” I said. Aunt Coralee and I had a good laugh–everything’s funnier in a grocery store when you’re buying ingredients to bake a pie you’ve never made before.
Back home I unrolled the pie crust and placed it in the glass pie pan. I mixed the filling and poured it into the crust. Baking time: fifteen minutes at 425° then thirty to forty minutes at 350°. Thirty to forty minutes! That’s a big spread of time, like across a few time zones. The instructions said the pie would be done when a knife inserted into the center came out clean.
After thirty-five minutes at 350°, I did the knife test. It came out clean, except for three tiny, wee specks of pumpkin. That had to be considered clean, but the center of the pie was jiggly. I baked it another five minutes. Then tested again. Just a few tiny, wee specks of pumpkin, but still jiggly in the center. I was up to forty minutes but decided the pie needed five more minutes. When the timer binged, I pulled the pie from the oven and set it on the stove. The center was still a little jiggly. I called Aunt Coralee for a third time.
I worried the pie wasn’t done but also worried I’d cooked it too long. Aunt Coralee assured me it would be fine, that I couldn’t really overcook the pumpkin by adding an extra five minutes. But she explained the center of a custard pie will be jiggly when it’s done cooking and will set up as it cools. The pie did look lovely as it cooled and the center set up.
After work my husband discovered his pumpkin pie on the stove, he smiled, and stated the obvious, “You made me pumpkin pie. Thanks.” He kissed me on the cheek. Smart guy.
Next year I’m going to make him another pumpkin pie. I’ll stop baking it when the knife comes out clean, and I’ll remember the center will be jiggly. And even though I won’t eat a slice, I’ll admire it as it cools on the stove.
. . . when you squat down to get a frying pan out of the cupboard and rip your one-and-only pair of awesome flannel pants (which you’ve had for fifteen years) from mid-shin to mid-thigh, a split so long and jagged you can’t mend them, sending you on a search for a new pair, but only finding fleece (so second-rate) or flimsy flannel (so short-lived), then your husband joins the quest, and after searching online he announces that the outdoor retail store where you bought your awesome flannel pants still carries them, so you drive to the store and purchase a velvety-soft, blue-plaid pair; returning home, you slip out of your jeans and into the softest caress of flannel, and you know true love isn’t a bouquet of flowers, but a husband who wants you to have dreamy flannel pants.
Writing Near the Lake 