Saturday, December 26, 2009

Red and Yellow and Pink and Green

When I found out my 28 year-old daughter had morphed into an avid NPR-listener, just like me (she even quotes from it in casual conversation), I decided it was time for me to morph into her by turning back into a Fiestaware user, because ooh, la la, [they come] in colors everywhere…they’re like a rainbow.


What? You don’t know what Fiestaware is? Then, it’s time to check it out. We’re talking color here, from cinnabar to the newest hue, lemongrass. Today I restarted my collection with unmatched dinner plates, so I can pretend I’m on an LSD trip as I chow down my oatmeal in a plum bowl, lunch leftovers on a sunflower plate, and dinner on lemongrass and scarlet. If it sounds like I’m now channeling the game of Clue, I’m not. Instead, I’m honoring the brilliance of my daughter’s choice of mixing good, old (but new) colorful dinnerware, started by two strangely-named brothers (Homer and Shakespeare) from Ohio, back in 1871.


This morning I drove to Macy’s, where they were having a buy-one-get-one-free Fiesta sale, with an extra $10 off if I bought everything before 1 p.m. Since I was the only one buying, I had plenty of time to choose my 6 new dinner plates in 6 different colors. This was definitely a radical departure for me.


Travel back in time with me for a second, and meet me, a dyed-in-the-wool white-color lover when it comes to décor (all our walls are painted white, much to the chagrin of one of my color-loving friends). It’s 1984, and I want to replace our set of plastic Heller dishes with something more grown up. I have come late to appreciating the art and design of Fiestaware, but I am a scaredy-cat, so I only have the nerve to buy white, even though I know from a friend across the street who collects the original colors like green and pink, that there are better choices to be made. Since the originals are more expensive than my new lead-free replacements (remember, I’m a cheapskate), I don’t listen to her and scout out oldies but goodies. I do, on the other hand, become an instant convert, even though my new conversion is actually considered a bit tame by New England standards.


Jump ahead a bunch of years and meet my now grown-up daughter, also a convert (she quickly rejects my safe, white color choices, though). She asks me for my original, scratched white set, which I’ve replaced with a new all-white set of dishes from Williams Sonoma (yeah, I’m still a tighty whitey). She, on the other hand, psychedelically leaps and bounds ahead and replaces my original white dishes with a bouquet of colors (old and new, because she didn't inherit the cheap gene). They quickly take over her kitchen shelves, and alienate her future husband, who doesn’t understand Fiestaware obsessions. (But, wait - he’s no stranger to Chicago basketball and baseball obsessions – are you, T?)


After visiting my daughter in Seattle and eating off a different colored plate each meal, I decide to rekindle my Fiestaware obsession, replace white with color and morph into my daughter. Yeah, I’m a copycat, but so what?


From now on in, as I eat on my new plates and listen to NPR (Car Talk, Fresh Air, The Food Schmooze, Colin McEnroe, All Things Considered, or Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me), let it be known that I’m proud to share her obsession, act the part of her East Coast twin, and [eat] a rainbow.


White on (or should I say, white out?)!

Friday, December 25, 2009

Lovely Rita

Since I don’t celebrate Christmas, the way I’ve learned to deal with feeling left out and lonely is to play as many Beatles albums as I can from the minute I wake up on Christmas day till about 9 p.m. I crank up the volume and blast their music, singing along throughout the day and night until I’m so hoarse I can barely talk. Playing Beatles albums is my one and only Christmas ritual, and listening to them helps me forget about not getting presents, being apart from my kids, and not eating the yummy food that I imagine the rest of our Christmas-celebrating world is pigging out on (and I’m not).


This morning I sang along as I cooked breakfast, stopping to cha-cha and twist when the music moved me. I harmonized along with John and Paul as I segued into baking sugary desserts, mashing avocados for guacamole, and getting ready to take the food and myself to our early afternoon eat-a-thon at our friends’ house. This means I had to cut my Beatles-playing a bit short, but I didn’t mind, because I got to spend the rest of the day with my pseudo-grandkids, T and R, their aunt M, and both devoted (but exhausted) parents. I sat on the floor and played dinosaurs with T, kissed and hugged R so she’d sing and smile, and I swear, being with the smartest and most adorable pseudo-grandkids in the world made me one happy little non-Christmas-celebrating clam.


Speaking of clams, our friends cooked up a huge pot of paella, packed to the gills with fresh cherrystones. I’ve never had the nerve to make it from scratch, myself, but maybe it’s time to reverse that fear, because I’m a paella-lover from way back. I first tasted it when I was a student hitching through Europe in 1968, and I ended up in Madrid, because a friend of mine was an exchange student there for the year. I ate paella every, single afternoon at a tiny restaurant that made it to order. Since it took a loooooong time to cook, we’d drink sangria to fill the time, which means I was always more than tipsy by the end of the meal. After we’d finished stuffing ourselves, we’d stagger out and spend the rest of the afternoon lying around the swimming pool at the University of Madrid. I was usually so looped I can now barely remember whether I was sober enough to swim. But, my taste memory of that paella is still with me, thank you very much.


It’s past 9:30, I’m done singing and digesting my paella, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo are officially silenced for another eight-days-a-week year. To all you reminiscers out there - have a happy, healthy and merry.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Poetry in Motion


Reading your poems
filled me up
like a soda-shop milkshake
made from scratch,
with vanilla ice cream,
and chocolate syrup,
in its own silver
ice-cold
metal container.
It’s 1964.
The jukebox
is playing 45’s
in the background.
The booths are filled with
Haverford high schoolers.
Watch me delight
in my happiness
as I sip my frothy, cold drink
through a paper straw,
whose wrapping I’ve removed
and blown into the air,
so it can hit the friend
sitting across from me
square on the nose.
I duck
to avoid
her retaliatory missile,
so it lands
in my water,
and sends us
into loose-lipped
paroxysms of giggles.
Oh, oh, oh,
it seemed
easier
back then,
to slurp up
life’s
every, last
drop,
didn't it?

Monday, December 14, 2009

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

One of my first memories is standing next to a large, boxy record player and watching a huge, red, vinyl Babar The King record spin round and round, filling the room with gloomy hunter-killing-Babar’s-mother music. I grew up listening to my music on a different record player, a clunky, wooden Telefunken radio, and later, when I was about 7, a tiny transistor radio with one earplug. By high school I’d graduated to a white, plastic hi-fi/stereo, but today, I listen on my iPod Nano, Bose Wave radio, Sirius/XM radio (in my car), my computer, or. sometimes still, our old turntable.


I guess this makes me a tech-lover, but the problem with all this tech-loving is my 1948-engineered brain. The poor thing gets easily overwhelmed and challenged by the daily struggles I torture myself with as I try to master each new device I buy, thanks to planned obsolescence. Lately, I feel like I’m drowning in technology overload as I’m pulled under after each laboriously self-taught failure at instant mastery. This weekend I spent way too much of my time trying to tread water as I tried and retried to upgrade and re-configure.


I’m exhausted from this latest dive into the vast sea of gadget obsolescence after buying both a new Apple Airport Express base station (don’t even ask me to figure out how to get iTunes to come out of it) and a new point-and-shoot digital camera (I broke my old one last week). I had to re-learn all the ins and outs of pointing and shooting and reconfiguring Internet and printing preferences (tech support wasn’t answering the phone). Let’s just say I fumbled and bumbled my way through.


What upsets me is how big my learning curve grows, how much older I get, and how much vaster my gaps of ignorance are. My brain is packed to the gills with passwords and preferences, so I shouldn’t be surprised when I cannot, for the life of me, remember whether or not I turned off the water to the outside faucet so it doesn’t freeze and burst our pipes. There’s no more room at this inn, is there?


Today my daughter emailed me using her new Google phone. She said she wasn’t sure how to use it, yet, because there was so much new information to download into her formerly cellphone-based (with texting thrown in) storage depot brain. If she’s only 28 and she’s experiencing tech-brain drain, what are my chances of surviving?


Oh, all you Holiday celebrators out there – just make me an angel that flies to Montgomery and we’ll call it a day.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

I'm Stuck on U-2


Last weekend my husband and I flew to Seattle for a short-but-sweet visit with the newlyweds and our granddog. In my opinion, flying across the country is not for sissies or people like me with migraine and hunger issues. If you don’t come prepared, you’re doomed, which explains why I brought enough food to keep me alive for an entire weekend (or in case the plane was grounded), earplugs to block out the loud plane noises and the screamers in the seat behind me, books and two weeks-worth of New Yorkers to take my mind off the fact that I wasn’t on a train, but high above the clouds in a sardine-can state of discomfort, and gum to keep my Eustachian tubes from clogging. We had a good time hanging out with our newly married kids, and I did my best to be happy about getting dog hair all over my clothes and up my nose. As usual, I cried when we had to leave.

On our way back to Hartford, we met up at the Sea-Tac airport with my pseudo-daughter from Canada and my year-old pseudo-granddaughter, who were coming back to CT to visit sisters, aunts, and friends and help put her mom’s house in order so it can be sold. We sat in the same row of 3 seats, talking and paying attention to the baby – and for the first time in my short flying history, I didn’t notice that I was in the air. Instead, I was in the moment– connecting with my adopted family – so the flight flew by so fast that I didn’t experience my usual panic at taking off, circling, and landing. Instead, I talked, cooed, and marveled at the baby’s genius at figuring out how to do things like close the window shade and then force her mom to open it so she could close it over and over again. (You get the picture, I know you do!)

I’ve been back a week but I haven’t been able to do much, because I have had a series of skull-crushing migraines that keep me so down I am stuck in a moment [I] can’t get out of. No matter how many Relpax I pop, how much yoga relaxation breathing I do, or how often I smoosh ice packs on my head and neck, my migraines continue to come, one after the other. They are either triggered by smells, weather, food, or nothing at all, but whatever it is that got this round started, I was rendered useless by an iron grip so strong it was impossible for me to function like the human bean I am – the one who loves to read, write, talk, eat, exercise, watch UConn basketball. This week I hung out in bed and tried not to obsess about how much pain I was in.

A friend called yesterday to tell me about a new book by a migraine-sufferer that she read about in the Wall Street Journal, A Brain Wider Than the Sky by Andrew Levy. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to know that my friend was looking out for my best interests, since I’m definitely unable to, what with feeling vulnerable and incapacitated. Therefore, I didn’t run out and buy myself a copy, but I did put an online reserve on it at my library so I can read it when my head stops hurting. And I thank you, J…

Before I wind up this brief howdy-do, I’d like to shout out to all you music-lovers out there in Bloggersville to remind you that Elvis Costello re-started the second season of his fantastic show on the Sundance channel, Spectacle: Elvis Costello With…, which I faithfully watch and listen to. This week he interviewed and sang with Bono and The Edge (honestly, how can they keep straight faces with those silly names?). Next week will showcase Cheryl Crow, Neko Case (I saw her a few weeks ago at the Calvin Theater in Northampton), Ron Sexsmith, and Jesse Winchester. Later on Costello will interview Levon Helm – later still, Bruce Springsteen. Don’t miss this gem-of-a-show, because the interviews are fascinating and probing – and the music is outstanding. Plus, Costello wears weird hats and socks, which are fun to giggle about.

FYI: in case you didn’t know this little factoid, a fellow blogger taught me how to insert hyperlinks into my blogs. I don’t know if you ever click on those links, but in case you don’t, try ‘em, so you can peel back one more layer of my migraine brain to discover what’s going on inside my head, where songs are my helpmates who greet me each morning and get me through my live-long day. They’re my constant companions, therapists, friends, reminders, eye-openers, and headache-helpers. They are one reason I’m still ah – ah – ah – ah stayin’ alive.