Goodbye little garage

 It's a deal.  Ten months and three bids after dreaming of having my own studio, Hebert the contractor is making it happen.  The garage will be sliced in half.  To the left the lawn mower, to the right yours truly.

The price is right, the stars are aligned; I will have a room of my own with a big table, shelves for my pencils and books and dictionaries.  Those walls won't mind being tacked with newspaper clippings or whatever else will strike my fancy. 

D-day is this Saturday.  Herbert has promised it'll all be done by the end of the weekend.   I need to pick the AC unit and the lights.  He'll take care of the sink.  I've spent the afternoon cleaning up the garage.  Stan will help move the rest later.  Five days to go.  Five!

I'm too excited to be writing.  Expect the full report next week.

Last move

I spent all of yesterday helping Stan pack his mom's belongings.  After two months in the hospital, Susie is transferring to an assisted living community.  She won't be coming home to the stack of books that she kept next to her recliner, won't need the article she'd clipped from the Wall Street Journal, won't use the beige satin sheets she'd just ordered from the Company Store.

We bought two new sets of extra-long twin sheets to fit the hospital-type bed we had ordered for her new room.  The salesman at the medical supply store was helpful who gave us a crash course on wheel chairs and commode transfer frames, explained the intricacies of medicare reimbursement.  We picked the best mattress we could find, hoping it would make a difference.

We tagged Susie's furniture with post-it notes for the movers: her blue recliner wth the matchin pillows, the two night tables, the dining room chair with the back pillow.  We measured the card table to see how it would fit into her room and selected family pictures for the walls.  We wrapped up the tile that reads 'Never do today what you can postpone until tomorrow' and stuck the pencil mug in a box between pillows.  And there was the funny business of trying to remember which housedresses we'd seen her in, which shoes, which twin sets. 

- "Do you think she'll need notecards?" Stan asked. 

- "We can always come back for it if she does."

And for the begonia on the window sill and perhaps the pink bathrobe in the closet.  We double-checked the content of the boxes against the list that the retirement home had provided: blankets, sheets, towels, etc... This was like sending our children to camp or college, minus the prospect of an exciting return home.

Stan called me today to tell me he'd heard from his brother John who'd been taking care of Susie while we were packing. 

- "John says she's cranky," he said. 

- "I would too if I were in her shoes."

- "I know."

- "How's the new room?"

- "It's looking good.  I hung the pictures and the new sheets fit the bed."

- "How about the quilt?"

- "It looks awesome."

We bought one with embroidered blue flowers.  Blue is Susie's favorite color. 

Junk withdrawal

When I left my last job, my old work e-mail was forwarded to my personal hotmail address in case 'something important' got lost in electronic la-la land. 

This made perfect sense.  I had held a position of responsibility for eleven years, my name was permanently etched as the main contact person on (I liked to think) hundreds of mailing lists and rosters.  How would the world go round with myself gone from the bright center of this little universe?

Sorting mail didn't take much time.  Twice a day, I would sift through my inbox, discard the junk and respond to the legitimate requests by informing my correspondent of my change of employment and forwarding the content to the appropriate recipient at my old company.  Done.  After six weeks, there was more discarding than responding.  After three months, I discarded 99% of the time.

Last week, I called the IT department:

- "It's time to cut the umbilical chord," I said.  "I'm tired of all the junk mail.  By now it's all junk mail."

And I was tired of the endless sifting and discarding. 

But now my inbox has shrunk from an average of ninety e-mails to perhaps less than ten on a good day: my daily bank alert, my subscription to the writer's almanac and a handful of Facebook updates.  Not nearly enough to feed half-a-circuit of a healthy blackberry.  I've been checking my hotmail account several times twice daily in hope of juicy correspondence. Nothing.  I've been so starved for pseudo-attention I have opened two e-mails from Amazon.com, read the newsletter from the City of Houston and printed the coupons from Central Market. Slim pickings.

- "I was gone one day last week," someone at work shared the other day. "And when I came back, I had over two hundred e-mail messages.  Can you believe it?"

I could.  And my ego was a little bruised at the thought of my own meager mailbox.  What kind of universe is this where no one courts me for Labor Law posters or communication seminars?  Am I so unimportant that I shouldn't be informed of 'Special Offers', the 'Important Legislative Changes' and the '10 tips to breast health'?  Shouldn't I be begged for my signature on the petition to Free Tibet?  Don't I deserve the luck that comes with the Pink Prayer chain? 

What center of the universe receives three emails on a Saturday morning, two of which are from her mother? (Thanks for the pictures mom.)

I am taking it one day at a time.  I've been tempted to subcribe to a couple of newsletters and to give my e-mail address to the Gap store.  But I've resisted so far. 

With all the junk noise gone, I am making friend with a near silence that is scary and strange. 

Empty

Summer is over.  My daughter is going back to college.  My son will follow next week.  What am I going to do with this strange empty nest that I have dutifully warmed, cleaned, made and remade for twenty one years? 

Seven thousand six hundred and sixty-nine days of uninterrupted motherhood are coming to a fizzling end.  How did this happen?  How am I supposed to fill the void left by the school lunches, the loads of laundry, the phone calls, the night fevers, the sprains, the heartbreaks, the missing socks, the flat tires, the lost needles for the ball pumps?  Are the tuition checks and a Thanksgiving turkey truly all that will be required of me for the months to come?

Should I start going to midnight movies?  Take art classes?  Enjoy leisurely walks with no one home demanding dinner? 

Should I get excited or weep at the swiftness of life?

I feel that I have ran this very long marathon, parts of which were exhilarating, others tiring and repetitive.  And it's over.  I am reaching this odd finish line but the only spectators are a small group of fellow middle-age mothers, and there are neither podium nor flowers. 

Stranger yet, there's a new path beyond but I am not sure where it leads or what it is about.  I am urged to enjoy life but I've been following the well-scripted road for so long, it is so familiar to me, how am I supposed to invent my own path all of a sudden?  And will macrame classes or a shiny new car really do the trick?   (I could do with the new car.)

It have no idea and it's too early to tell.

All I know is that tonight I am eating all the vanilla ice cream with all the cherries and the last of the lemon cookies.  Why not?  I don't have to set an example any more.  That's a small start.

Adieu Cheri

 If you are a woman of a certain age, the only reason to go see Cheri is to gawk at Michelle Pfeiffer in her 1910 gowns and stunning hats.

If you are a man of a certain age, the only reason to go see the movie is to sit next to the woman who's brought you there. 

Based on a novel by French author Colette, Cheri assumes that a 19-year old boy can make an adequate pairing for a 40-something high-class prostitute on the verge of loosing her business to the damages of age and late-night champagne.  This is a very silly plot for which Colette can be forgiven.  She was married to a man who would lock her up in her room until she'd written the required number of pages each day.  Any of woman in her right mind would have written herlsef out of that hell-hole as fast as she could have.

Director Stephen Frears cannot be forgiven so easily.  For all I know, no one is locking him into his room, so what is the matter with him?

Why is he fooling us with empty promises of 'a wicked game of seduction'?   Pfeiffer might be dressed up  but she has nowhere to go.  Cheri is as insipid as bowl of cafeteria-issued mashed potatoes left on a stainless steel kitchen counter.   The sex scenes are straight out of a Harlequin novel, complete with chandeliers roaring fire, ten seconds of well-mannered moaning and many, many yards of white sheets.  Cheri, played by Rupert Friend, is so well-kept you know he flosses after every meal.  His young wife is still wearing the wool socks from her days at the convent and she refuses to gouge his eyeballs with a silver spoon no matter how mean he gets (which is not very much at all).  The only pickle in that dish is Kathy Bates in the role of Cheri's mother: a villain at last!  Why couldn't she be in every scene?

I held out to the very end hoping for a shocking nugget.  Fat chance.  Here is all that Cheri has to offer:

1. Loose women - even those who look amazing in hats the size of small coffee tables - cannot hope to hold on to the love of insipid young men twenty years their junior.

2. Women of a certain age don't look so hot upon waking up in the morning.

There.  I saved you $8 and 120 minutes of boredom.  Now go on and make better use of your time and money.  Go buy youself a tube of sunscreen and a lovely hat.  You'll thank me twenty years from now.