After almost four years of weekly postings, Food For Thought is closing down.  This is the last entry.  The site will be up until the end of October when it will vanish into the Great Big digital ether.   Dad, you have this much time to make sure you've printed and archived all my entries.

Oh but it's been fun!

Food For Thought has grown from just two readers (Stan and my dad) in November  2005 to several hundred of you who are currently reading through Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn.  In the process, I have acquired a reputation as a blogger and my family has learned to worry about what might or might not be said about them on this site.  I have been writing articles for friends and businesses.  I've submitted stories to magazines and got my first acceptance a few months ago. 

Why stop now? 

It's time to give room to new ideas and new ways of seeing.  Food For Thought has been a collection of random thoughts about daily life.   My next project will be more focused.   If all goes well, in a few months I will be starting a new web site dedicated to the talents of ordinary people: the sculptors, coral growers, letterboxers, poets, musicians, paper doll artists,  cat lovers, ikebana masters and bakers among us.  I want to write about the dentist who turned photographer and the secretary who scribbled poetry under her desk.

I am toying with catchy names for the new site, making note of potential subject matter and will publish the new site as soon as it is up.

I am also avoiding browsing through the old Food For Thought entries, at least for now.  Four years is a long time.  If I keep looking back, I'll be too heartbroken to move forward.  Onward then.

A bientot.  See you soon.

Marie-Pierre

Not only is the woman's voice angelic; she is the embodiement of the The Great Fate Dream, the one in which Simon Cowell knocks at our door one morning, with four TV crews in tow telling us that our talent for macrame (or miniature train sets, or Baroque Opera) has finally been recognized.  We will be on television.  We won't have to show up at the office anymore.  Or worry about the light bills and the dog needing to be taken to the vet.  We've crossed over to the golden side of celebrity.

Not that I would actually compare Susan Boyle's talent to macrame. The woman is too extraordinary for that.

And the other endearing trait: her teeth are crooked.  We can't take our eyes off of her, our ears off of her, but her teeth are crooked worse than Edith Piaf's.

Which is why Susan is  the most endearing to us than any of the long string of undiscovered talents.  Not only is the woman telling us that fame can happen to any Susan, her recent transformation is demonstrating that - should one of us tumble into the limelight - she will be able to rely on a small army of hair dressers, make-up artists, fashion consultants, image consultants and marketing analysts to transform her into a pleasant-looking human being.

Never mind our carterpillar eyebrows, stardom awaits us.  Thanks for making the dream come true Susan!

I have been patching and sanding for four nights.  Everyday after work I return to find more cracks that need to be filled, more spots that must be sanded.  How come my eyes won't see the first time?

And there was the nasty business of sanding the ceiling, with a mask over my mouth and nose, and work goggles covering my eyes.  But the goggles kept fogging up and I couldn't breathe under the mask and all the mosquitoes in Houston thought I was an all-you-can-eat French buffet. 

My shoulders hurt, that one leg of the step-ladder was definitely shorter than the other three and it was a dumb idea to bring my cell phone in case of an emergency.  The only emergency was the dust that fell in my contact lenses in spite of the goggles. But my cell phone was covered in dust, as were my keys and my hair and the inside of my nostrils. 

I know, I know: I shouldn't have removed the mask.  I just thought I was the one person on earth who was immune to dust.  It's amazing how much dust can fit inside a human nostril, by the way.  It's even more amazing how long one can sneeze.

But enough whining.  The studio is coming up.  I am on my way to Home Depot to buy a filter for the Shop Vac.  Dust be gone.  This afternoon Stan and I will apply the first coat of paint.  Next we will install shelves and find a way to truck the old couch from his house.

I haven't drawn in two weeks and hardly written a line.  Impatient to move in.

That was almost twenty five years ago.  The suitcase is long gone, so is the tin box. 

And I own two cars, a house of my own, and books.  Lots and lots of books.  The books I bought for graduate school classes and the books I bought for fun.  Cookbooks.  Mysteries.  Thrillers.  Fiction.  Non-fiction.  In English, French, Spanish and Italian.  Half-price books.  Full priced books.  Slim books and fat ones.   So many books my shelves are bulging.

Time to offload.

Do you want books?  I have plenty.

Click here to see a list of titles available for the taking.  Drop me an e-mail or a comment.  Let me know what might please you and I will send it to you.

Perhaps you've been waiting to read about 'Ants at work' or you must have Charles Taylor's 'The ethics of authenticity'.  I have good books waiting for a new home and they all must go.

There's a trailer in the driveway.  A pile of hardiplanks.  Mysterious-looking things wrapped in plastic.  Boxes of nails.  Extension chords, ladders, rolls of insulation, wood, glue, buckets.

Herbert's hammer looks like a sci-fi weapon the size of a watermelon.  No one messes with Herbert's hammer.  The thing hisses like one mean little creature.

Oh but the work it does!

The walls are up. 

The doors are in.

Just need a window.

And a lock.

We bought the track lights at Home Depot and the Sears salesman was nice, who helped us pick the AC unit and promised it'd be loaded into the back of our car in less than five minutes (and it was true!).

 Herbert said the place would be ready tomorrow.

I should be moving my pencils in on Monday.

Yipeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

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. 

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. 

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.

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.