A Gaulling Matter

Two years ago I had laser-scopic surgery to remove my gall bladder. For those out there who slept through junior biology, (or like me, spent the time in the back of the room finishing my Latin sentences for next period), the gall bladder is this tiny sack that acts as a back up system for the liver, siphoning off excess bile from the digestive system. The bile is used to digest fat, like the stuff that makes donuts, ice cream, nachos and pizza preferable to say fruit, broccoli, fish and tofu.

Because I as a loyal American ate more than my fair share of the former, the gall bladder dutifully stored up the unwanted bile produced to allow me to gain weight from my choice of diet. Then one day, I had an attack.

The official gall bladder “I quit!” resignation form had been sent to management.

The result of this painful episode was a trip to the emergency room, during which we discovered my little gall bladder was full of gall stones. A conservative estimate from the doctor at the emergency room looking at the ultra sound was that I had a Google’s worth had built up over a forty year life time of abuse via fresh fried chicken and big macs, Ben and Jerry’s and real butter. The only cure was a perpetual diet of no fat no flavor foods, or surgery. As I had additional extenuating medical conditions that made this not a run of the mill procedure, I was to strictly follow the diet until the specialist could fit me in his schedule.

For three months I ate oatmeal and tea for breakfast, broth based soup and dry toast for lunch, and diet coke and fish with cooked vegetables for dinner. Every once in a while I would dare a bit of variety but only at night, when my husband could hold down the fort as I crumpled in a ball from the stabbing pain of indiscretion. A glass of milk seemed innocent enough. Nyet. How about some rice at dinner? Not a prayer. Maybe some other meat like beef or chicken I thought hopefully. That experiment almost sent me back to the hospital. Nothing makes one disciplined like body crunching severe pain for the slightest infraction. One day I begged for a piece of chocolate and my husband quietly reminded me how much I liked weeping.

A side benefit of being unable to eat 90% of what one wanted was I lost 25 pounds in two months. The downside...well, if you are what you eat, I had the personality of beef broth and could generate about as much energy and excitement.

The date of the surgery arrived and the surgeon explained how they would make three cuts and slice up the gall bladder to remove it through the tiny incisions and then vacuum up any stones or bits of bile that fell onto other parts of my anatomy while the procedure was ongoing. “So doc, basically all of my gall will be divided into three parts?” I asked. It was then the surgeon cued the anestiaologist to proceed.

Six hours later, I nervously ate a hamburger and drank skim milk. Never has hospital food been such a gourmet experience. I even added mustard and ketchup for flavor. There had always been about a two hour layover prior to great pain when I ventured away from dullness. Two hours passed. Three. Four. I went to bed. No attack. No pain. No gall bladder. Huzzah!

I’d love to say I learned my lesson, but the instant I was free of the doctors, I started down my bad eating habit road again albeit at first cautiously.

Then one day, I got daring and ate fried chicken. There was a problem. Without a gall bladder to help with digesting fat, the liver does all the work. It can’t manage fried chicken without creating too much bile. Too much bile acts as a draino on the system. Enough said. Ditto for such treats as ice cream and baked goods that use oil. So while “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” I can no longer stomach a Caesar salad. My stomach and liver will override any foolish choices on my part. “Et tu Body?”

How to Stay Unpublished for Life

10) Avoid reading submission guidelines whenever possible, they take away valuable time from writing, which as we all know, is a craft worthy of pure devotion. Submit using the spaghetti approach. Your stuff is so gold, only idiots would not recognize the opportunity being presented.

9) Publically deride any newspaper or magazine that has rejected your latest offering. Send out a spam explaining your personal vitriol in this circumstance; be sure to link the publication to your blog and sig line in the email to guarantee they get the message.

8) Use clichés and metaphors like salt on popcorn. Write peevish emails to any editor that would dare alter or adjust your deathless prose. Reject their acceptance if they refuse to acquiesce.

7) Submit the same article to at least sixteen publications at once, cc the others in a group email to save time.

6) Resend the same articles to the same magazines using the theory of publication via erosion of editorial will.

5) Write a screed damning everything including young puppies. Make sure it is at least 5000 words long and hand written. Send with insufficient postage but with a personal post-it to the editor using his or her real name and possibly a term of affection.

4) Phone the editors on the hour to ask, “Have you read my piece yet?”

3) Phone them at home.

2) Repeat the process with potential agents. Consider moving into a tent at the park near his or her home. If anyone asks, explain you are doing “research” for a character or engaged in a civil protest. For added mystery, never give the same cause twice.

1) When receiving a rejection via email or letter, throw your computer or notepad or both into the trash, dump motor oil over the entire mess and set it aflame. Repeat as often as necessary while screaming and pulling out all hair, including one’s eyebrows, “I’m never writing again!” Continue until broke, the EPA arrests you, or becoming hirsute free.

For Experienced Non Published Writing Professional Hacks Only...
**Write a journal detailing how the world never understood your secret genius. Leave obvious clues in your will to allow relatives to eventually find this hidden opus. Be sure and tuck a few George Washingtons in the pages to reward them for their trouble.

When Mom Was a Kid..

What it was like when I was a kid

On Sports and Games

Growing up, we strapped metal wheels to our shoes and fell on our knees on bumpy concrete until we learned to stop falling. Turns were tricky so you either held on, or in my brother's case, got down on your hands and knees and crawled through the turn, or you decided you knew what you were doing, tried to make the turn and fell at least 50 times before you got it.

When we played on swing sets, teeter totters and monkey bars, they were made of wood and steel and sometimes gave us splinters, particularly when we would ride with two or three at a time.

Tag and hide and seek, dodge ball and freeze tag had winners and losers. We played them often. In fact, we loved them. Even when we were mad about being picked last, it just meant we hoped next time, we’d be captains or picked first, or at least not last again.

Sports had b-teams and sometimes, you didn’t even make that one. You only got a trophy if you won, and sometimes, you got skunked. People kept score but the teams for grade school and the like, were not posted in the paper. It wasn’t important. These were kids’ games.

On School and Education…

There were three channels on television if you didn’t count the educational one, which we didn’t.

The library was a place to check out books, a week in advance of the science project that was mandatory.

The science project was a big deal, complete with a hand written four page report and five references, none from the web. Everyone had to make a poster and a project. People would know if your parents did the art work, and you wouldn’t win.

We’d get pop quizzes at school and worksheets that had been freshly run from the ditto machine, and smelled like ink. We loved those, and I think sometimes, the ink made us dizzy.

You got grades. You got grades every day. Most of the time, it was a number or a letter. The grades included C’s, D’s, F’s and the less common, C-, D+ and D-. Your parents got called if you got these grades. Every time. Forging your parent’s signature got you in bigger trouble.

If you didn’t do an assignment, you got to do it during recess while everyone else was outside playing, which stunk.

They made us memorize Kipling’s “If,” our multiplication tables and say the pledge. We often had to read aloud or do problems on the board for everyone else to watch.

They showed us videos of “The Red Balloon,” and “Chicken Soup with Rice” as treats. We saw each every year at least once.

At noon, We’d get kicked outside to play, we had recess. It was after lunch and lasted a decent amount of time. It didn’t matter if it was hot or cold, muggy or raining, we were on our own after lunch for that half hour. Recess lasted long enough to form cliques, to organize a kick ball game, to braid hair or play a no prisoners game of speed solitaire.

On Grown Ups…

People disagreed on politics, as they always have, but it wasn’t acceptable to insult someone just because they held a different political affiliation. No one was considered heartless or brainless for being a Republican or a Democrat; these were party denominations, not the solutions to every problem under the sun requiring absolute religious fealty.

Being kids, we didn’t even know what politics really were until Mom caught us one day having uprooted all the political signs and repositioned them in our front yard because we thought they were cool. These Vote for…posts seemed like some form of mushroom that had sprung up overnight. We were busy dismantling them to make swords when Mom found us.

Television had a family hour which was boring and grown-ups watched the news, which was boring to us, but then the alternative was bed.

There were uber parents out there who made their kids compete in every sport and activity, but most of the grown-ups knew that these people were wrong and encouraged all of us to pick what we loved and do that first.

Grown-ups drank things like beer and wine, ice tea, diet soda and coffee, all of which tasted terrible. They also had weird clothing rules like no shorts after Labor Day and no white in the winter. They ordered foods with dressings and sauces on them and used “Sweet and Low.” They would make us eat the crust on breads, the stumpy parts of broccoli and occasionally, liver.

For Fun…

Swimming lessons and camp took care of maybe two weeks. The rest of the time, we were on our own.

We’d troll the neighborhood to amass as many at home minors as possible. It didn’t matter who, if you were a kid and you were home, we were knocking on the door asking, “Can you come play?”

Then, we’d ride our bikes until dark, no helmets. We’d pin cards to our spokes with clothes pins to sound like motor cycles. On a dead end street, we’d hold races all afternoon until someone announced they were thirsty. There would be a run on the hose, with each person jockeying to be later in line, so as not to get the first swig of heated by the sun water that came out of the end.
Then the beep beep beep of the mosquito spraying truck would be heard and everyone would clear out to their homes as fast as possible. We didn’t know DEET was poisonous, but it sure smelled bad.

When it was too hot, we’d play monopoly in doors until someone won or was called home. We sometimes made card castles, trying to use all 52 cards before the thing fell. We loved fresh boxes of crayons and coloring books. The coloring books were almost always of animals and never had stickers.

Come fall, we’d gather pecans from every yard, filling up two trash cans. Then we’d offer to rake leaves for a dollar all over the block and try to sell the pecans.

Every Christmas, we’d have a Christmas program. They never had plots, just grade after grade, alternating between secular and religious music, with the grand finale, always, Silent Night. Then most parents would reconvene across the street at the Carnation Dairy restaurant to praise our performances and buy ice cream.

Why am I telling you this?

So my darlings, you will understand some of the why I tell you often to turn off the television and the DDS and the DVD’s and the IPods and the cell phones and the computers.

I will shrug sometimes when you are not 100% safe and even encourage you to jump off the high dive, draw until you run out of chalk and drink a soda outside while reading comics in a hammock.

I will not rush out to challenge other parents to a duel to the death because your feelings are hurt, though I will offer you a hug and say I love you.

Life is always unsafe and unfair but worth living. Sometimes, it is even unsafe and unfair in our favor.

Skinned knees and even bruised hearts heal. Memorization, pain from learning to learn is part of the process, and not what you will recall when you get to be nostalgic about childhood. Like giving birth, we don’t recall the labor pain itself, only that it hurt and then it was over, and we had this person, and everything was light and wonderful and still is.

Happy Thank You for Making me A Mother Day! And Happy Mother’s Day to everyone out there who has been so blessed.

The Surest Sign there are No More Weeks of Winter

There is one bonifide signal that Spring has set into motion in earnest.

Last minute school projects.

Every parent has had that dreaded moment when they struggle between teaching responsibility for time management and the urge to become a Superhero and pull an all nighter with the child in question to ensure a decent grade. Most of the time, we wind up circling the wagons and helping the delinquent student to finish their work before 1 am, but not without occasionally morphing into the adult from the nether regions...if YOU EVER...I am NOT DOING THIS AGAIN...

The other day, I got a text message. "Need three fold before weekend!"

I ransacked my brain in the desperate hopes of having at some point purchased such an item that went unused. It would have helped if I knew what a threefold was. I text messaged back but before I got six taps in, I grew irritated and just phoned.

“Can’t talk. Turning off phone now.” was the response from my beloved teen.

Now, I couldn’t even text message. I knew a fishing expedition to the local office supply store was imminent.

We had just loaded up in the car from my second son’s baseball practice. It was 6:30. Dinner had yet to be served, showers and bed routines were being thrown out the window, and even microwave pot pies were looking like a time consuming chore.

Twelve year old to the rescue! She knew what a tri-fold was, I thought it was either a hat or a way to properly stow a flag. I had my atm machine card at the ready. We would go to the bank and then the art store. We could do this seamlessly if I booked.

Alas, the errand gods were not with us.

The ATM refused to cooperate. The drive thru had closed thirty minutes before we arrived. We also needed gas. Having experienced the engine light read “Low” before and actually run out, I wasn’t taking any chances, so we tanked up before proceeding with the poster hunt. It was now 7:24.

The art store was closed, but I knew of an office store still open, so I gambled, scrounging through my purse and the pockets of the car. Collectively, we found change amounting to$3.57. I did have to promise to pay the two toddlers back their respective 64 and 12 cents. It was 7:37 pm. They’d get showers the next day. For bed time stories, I handed a book from my satchel to my ten year old and instructed her “READ...aloud…expressively,” although I had to conceed, "Writing Query Letters that Rock!" wasn't my first choice for my children's night time supplimental literacy program. She abandoned it in favor of a discarded Avenger's comicbook. I was in no position to argue.

I drove at a not entirely state approved rate and we arrived at five minutes to eight. The twelve year old went in, I looked at the clock. We’d not get to dinner before 9 o’clock if I cooked.

I phoned the local roasted chicken establishment and placed an order for the family feast for four plus a few extra sides.

My daughter returned triumphant, carrying a poster board as large as herself. She had 17 cents left, so I paid back the 12 cents and listened to the other toddler howl at not receiving prompt reimbursement. For a kid who can't add or count past 15, he knew getting a nickle was getting stiffed. I offered to pay interest. He wasn’t moved. I handed him a credit card, but discovered he was a cash only kind of guy until his sister offered him a turn on the game boy.

We drove to the chicken store, but the cash problem still loomed. Five cents was insufficient to buy the family meal order I had placed, and I wasn't even sure my son would lend me back the five cents!

I took out the toddler rejected credit card and hoped my daughter could go two for two. In she marched, and returned. The card had expired one day prior. Maybe that’s why my son refused it.

I handed over another and waited. Driving in circles in the parking lot, hoping the restaurant would take it, hoping they would let her sign for it and go, the phone rang, but I was too stressed and distracted to deal with it. We saw my daughter waving with her hands full. I drove up, joyfully anticipating an end of the struggle.

Her sister went in to help bring back the bounty.

Driving home, while congratulating ourselves on a successful mission, I planned out bed time routine in my head. Then I got another text message.

“I tried to phone you. Project due Monday moved to next week.”