Pod People: The Mystery Continues
We have grown ever more worried about the vines and the bizarre pods that have taken over our yard. This is serious, folks.
I told First Born about the alien pod things growing in my yard.
“One of my blog readers suggested I cut it open and see what kind of vegetable it is,” I told her. “I don’t think that’s safe, though. What if I cut it open and something leaps out and sucks my face off?”
“What would it do with a face?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you watch horror movies? If I was home alone and cut it open, nobody would know what happened. The pod creature would escape and pick you off one by one.”
“Maybe we should cut it open together,” She suggested.
“Good idea! Go get a knife. Get one for both of us!”
“What if you cut it open and spiders come out?”
“Ewww. We better do this outside.” I got the newspaper. Jessie selected a pod.
Luckily, Joe came home at that point and was able to do the cutting.
I documented the whole thing with my camera. If we were all found dead and faceless, I wanted a digital record of our death.
Jessie stood ready with the extra knife. Since she’s no longer a teen, I thought it was safe to give her a sharp object. See how she’s poised to kill the pod creature if it leaps at Joe?
The Big Guy started screaming. “Oh Lord, the horror! The Horror!”
Neighbors came running. The police leapt into their cars. Helicopters hovered overhead, shining their spotlights on the scene.
Just kidding. It’s clearly a squash object with underformed seeds inside. This particular one does not hold a pod person.
But we’re really no futher along in identifying this squash. Anyone else want to take a crack at it?
Published by angelawd on August 20th, 2008 tagged Joyful living | 2 Comments »
The Sweetest Things
Friday was a low spot. It was Joe’s last day and we were hurting, crying, praying for peace and healing. And this weekend I experienced little sweet spots of God’s love and healing from the people he sent my way. I am blessed.
I was blessed by the friend who I haven’t contacted all summer. I told her I was just retreating from the world because I was hurting. Her reponse? “I understand.”
I was blessed to run into three friends who invited me to sit down with them for dinner. We didn’t talk about my troubles, and it was a relief to think about something else for a change. I soaked in their sincere love.
One of my oldest friends reminded me that she’d seen me struggle through many things before and she had seen how faithful God has been in my life. It was a wonderful reminder.
Another friend asked me how I was doing, and when tears came to my eyes, she caressed my face just like my mother would do.
We talked to a man who has terminal cancer, and he said he was looking forward to the future. He had a blessed life and thanked God every day. He said it’s easy to praise God when things are going well, and he was looking forward to seeing what happened to his faith when things didn’t go well for him. He was amazing - and put my own problems in perspective.
We listened to a gospel band on Sunday who reminded us that God is about to do something amazing in our lives. I believe it. And I know the blessings are in the journey, but I sure wish this particular journey was over and we were on a new road.
Published by angelawd on August 18th, 2008 tagged Healing | 5 Comments »
Scenes From A Mexican Kitchen
I wanted Mama Nona to teach me how to cook Fugi’s favorite Mexican foods, but it wasn’t that easy. Our cooking dates required elaborate pantomimes and long strings of instructions; as soon as I thought I understood just one word, she was already on the next sentence. Half the ingredients were completely new to me and even when I learned how to say “¿Qué es eso?” I didn’t understand her identification of the object anyway. And I learned to my dismay what trouble we could get into if I seemed to be engaging her in conversation.
I also learned that she generally didn’t measure anything. I know, I know, this is a measure of master cookmanship, but when you’re new to all of this, trying to estimate whether her hand held a half cup or a third was pretty difficult. The daughters used to say things like, “No one makes frijoles like Mama,” and of course they didn’t – they were using different-sized measuring equipment.
She did have very small hands, but a lifetime of cooking and cleaning did not roughen them. They seemed to always be as soft and warm as the dough rising for flour tortillas. Once she rolled out this dough, she could fearlessly flip the tortillas back and forth on a dry griddle. I always burned my fingers and I asked her how she could flip them without burning herself. “I do get burned,” her translator said. “It just doesn’t bother me anymore.”
Though she came from a hot country, the kitchen heat was often too much in an un-airconditioned old house. She wore thin housedresses sewn from old bed sheets and curtains. When it got too hot, she’d lift the hem slightly and flap it around her knees. She always had a towel nearby to dab her face.
The family came from the central plains of Mexico, from the state of Guanajuato; Fugi was one of the first family members to be born in the U.S. Most days they ate plain, poor-folks food heavy on beans, soups, corn, and peppers. On special occasions, all the women would gather to make Mole or tamales. When they ate meat, they ate everything. Once they ordered a whole pig roast from a Mexican store (the pig was obviously too big to cook at home). The raw internal organs were wrapped for later meals, and the children fought over the tail, feet, and eyes. Later that week, I came home from a job search and found a pot boiling on the stove. There was a brain in the pot. I convinced Fugi to eat at Burger King that night.
Growing up in rural America, I just didn’t have exposure to a variety of foods and cultures. My Mom, like many others, cooked quasi-ethnic foods that actual ethnic groups would never be able to identify. She used to make something called “Spanish pork chops” which were chops topped with rice, onion, bell pepper, and tomato. Her Chinese food came from a can of La Choy. We never even heard of “soft tacos”. So I was unprepared for menudo (soup with beef intestines), cow tongue tacos, and agua de arroz (sweet rice water). I wasn’t used to the two plastic margarine containers on each family’s table – one containing pickled jalapenos with carrots, the other containing the salsa of the week. These were eaten at almost every meal.
Mama Nona was Queen of the kitchen, so I didn’t discover a secret about her kitchen until she was gone on vacation. Fugi came home late one night and I went down to find something for him to eat. As soon as I flicked on the light, I saw brown blobs skittering everywhere – walls, floor, ceiling. I shrieked.
He came running down and I repeated the light trick.
“Yeah, cockroaches,” He said.
“The kitchen has cockroaches?” I hissed. “I don’t think that’s very sanitary!”
He shrugged. “It’s an old house. They have bugs.”
“No, no, no, huh-uh. There’s people who get rid of them.”
“Mami had an exterminator out, but he wanted too much money. All she’s got is Social Security.”
The next day, I had him drive me to pick up bug bombs. We used two rather than one, and avoided the house for the entire day. That night we came home to an unbearable chemical stink and piles of dead bugs on the kitchen floor. When we finished sweeping them up, we filled 2/3 of a tall kitchen garbage bag. Then we scrubbed every single thing in the kitchen.
Three days later, the cockroaches started coming back.
Published by angelawd on August 15th, 2008 tagged My Ex-Life | 1 Comment »
A couple of small announcements
Joe and I have officially opened a photo shop on Etsy! Check out Pearl Photo for gorgeous, quirky photo art - and check back soon for more pretty things for your walls. If nothing else, pop over there and have a look at how long and boring my hair used to be.
If you’re like me, and I bet you are, you’re trying to think up new ways to use up the tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, and herbs you planted this year. Joe has just the recipe for you! His Quinoa Tabbouleh (lemony vegetable and grain salad) is easy to make, cool on those hot summer nights, and full of fresh produce. Have a look at his recipe at Eat at Joe’s.
Dear Kalynne, the Philosopher Mom, asked if there’s any news in our lives. Oh heck yeah. Yesterday we were served with a certified letter from the IRS stating that Joe’s old employer misreported his income, and we now owe them several thousand dollars. And an iguana.
Show of hands, now - does anyone think our lives are starting to sound like a sad old Country-Western song? All we need is for the truck to break down and the hound dog to run away. If we had a truck and a hound dog.
I jest. Our job searches are going well, and I’m certain this bad case of hives on my back and neck will be going away soon. We still have Internet and toothpaste. We’ve been through much worse than this. I’ll be writing about THAT in the next few installments of the Gringa story.
Published by angelawd on August 13th, 2008 tagged Joyful living, Life With the Big Guy | 3 Comments »
Life and Times of a Little Gringa, Part 2
When Mama Nona came back from her holiday trip to Mexico, we announced that she was about to have another grandchild.
This was my second pregnancy. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage in the second trimester; it was particularly horrifying because I began to hemorrhage in my sleep and my mother, who was visiting, found me the next morning in a pool of blood. The hospital staff said that I might have bled to death if I was found much later.
So this time I went to the plant supervisor and asked for a less-strenuous sitting job. He was less than sympathetic and I found myself unemployed by the end of that day. Then I got to spend hours each week in the vast, urine-stinking Bureau of Unemployment, where I tried to keep my morning sickness under control while waiting for my benefits and proving I was looking for a job.
Since I was unemployed, I spent every day with Mama Nona. This terrified me. I was unbelievably shy and could never understand what she was saying to me, even with elaborate arm gestures. She’d get frustrated and say it again, louder, with bigger gestures. I’d look wildly around the room – what is she pointing at? Chair? Stove? Mango? Her voice would get more strident, until I’d say, “I don’t know! No - No comprende!” and run back upstairs.
Carmen and her two boys fled her abusive husband and moved in with us. Carmen and her mom shared a room and the boys took the third bedroom – Fugi’s childhood room. Laundry was one way I could contribute without having to know any Spanish, so I took on the washing for the family. And I was sorry I did.
You got to the basement through a door in the bathroom, one that I made sure was locked before ever taking a shower. Because as soon as you turned on the basement light, a terrible skittering noise would begin. Once it grew quiet, I’d carefully descend the old plank stairs. Two sides of the basement had old brick walls, but the other sides looked like they were carved out of sheer rock with a backhoe. City water and sewer pipes came through holes in the rock, and so did the city rats. Most of them hid when they heard humans, but I could see their eyes gleaming in the dark corners. If you were quiet for any length of time, they would begin creeping back. I made sure to bang around and talk loudly to myself whenever I was down there.
Mama Nona had no clothes dryer; we hung the clothes outside in nice weather and in the second chamber of the basement during the winter. This second room was entirely carved out of Illinois granite, rounded and womblike. This was also a storage room for boxes of dishes, old clothes, furniture that people forgot to claim, and housewares. There was even an old handcrank washing tub. She didn’t like to throw things away.
Fugi worked days at a factory that was an hour away. He got home in time to wolf down some dinner and drive to Mechanic’s school in west Chicago. I soon found that Fugi’s family severely disapproved of women having friends outside the family or of women going anywhere by themselves. Because Fugi had the car, I had to ask an English-speaking family member for a ride anywhere. My only friends became the nieces closest in age to me – the high school girls who taught me about Selena and Menudo and showed me how to achieve the stylized makeup look so popular among Hispanics. The rest of the time, I watched HBO, tried to crochet baby clothes, and watched my belly grow.
Fugi only got four hours of sleep each night. On the weekends, all he wanted to do was relax and watch TV. I was dying to get out of the house, but usually after a bowl of whatever Mama Nona cooked, eaten on the floor of our little room, he fell asleep. Sometimes I’d look out the window and down the quiet street, thinking that somewhere people were laughing and talking and having a good time together. The whole world was rollicking by while I wasted my life in a little room at the top of a house.
I was twenty years old.
Published by angelawd on August 12th, 2008 tagged My Ex-Life | Comment now »
Life and Times of a Little Gringa
Mama Nona was buried last week.
“Let’s move in with my mom,” said Refugio. “We can save up for a new trailer instead of buying one of the used ones in the Park.”
I was twenty. I’d lived in the country for the first seventeen years of my life; the only Hispanics I’d ever met were the migrants who whistled at us from the back of a flatbed truck while they rumbled down our dirt road. It was less than a year since I’d begun what my cousin refers to as my powder blue marriage, an event which I woke up from the next day realizing I had completely and utterly screwed up my life.
“Sure,” I said. “Will she take us?”
It so happened that his nephew Rigoberto and his fifteen year old bride, Esperanza, had just vacated the second-floor bedroom in search of more freedom in a southside duplex. Rigo was thirty-two and had just come from Mexico after marrying Esperanza in the traditional way: he kidnapped her in the night and then, because they had obviously had carnal knowledge of each other during their night together, were considered married in the eyes of God and her parents.
Since Fugi was the youngest of twelve children, his mother was two years younger than my grandma, and he had brothers and sisters older than my parents.
You may remember that our bangin innercity apartment had a living room so large that we fit three couches and two recliners in there; we had to distribute most of this furniture to friends and relatives the day we moved upstairs at Mama Nona’s.
She lived in a house at the edge of a ravine where gangsters used to hang and where, legend had it, the ghost of a murdered girl whinged around looking for souls to steal. On the other side of the house was an elementary school surrounded by acres of cracked asphalt and a small playset made of iron pipes. I’m guessing Mama Nona’s house had been built in the early 1900s and only new siding kept the house looking decent.
We moved our mattress, TV, and remaining couch off Fugi’s hatchback Mustang and into the front room. Mama Nona’s bedroom was curtained off from the living room. She kept birds in a cage next to the front door, but what with the Chicago drafts and the lack of sunlight next to the dark ravine, we were constantly buying her new canaries. They reminded her of the tropical birds that fluttered in the trees around her farmhouse in Guanajuato.
The second floor bedroom was a low-ceilinged room that, to access, required you to take a sharp staircase turn around an old brick chimney that probably once delivered coal smoke up into the sky. Around the staircase was a small balcony with half-windows, but this balcony was always so full of furniture and the debris of other households that even in the summer when I was desperate for a cross-breeze, I had to climb over mildewey couches, a portable clothes hanger full of Quinceanera dresses, and antique end tables to open those little dormer windows.
The entire house was panelled with a dark wood-like wall surface. Mama Nona was partial to the color blood-red, as evidenced by the heavy living room furniture, curtains, and carpeting. While I never asked, I believe that the carpeting and furniture were purchased after years of saving quarters and dollars from her husband’s Social Security benefits and the food budget. I believe this because the furniture was completely covered with yellowing plastic slipcovers, and the floors were criss-crossed with plastic runners that Mama Nona washed EVERY DAY with Pine-Sol. I would wake every morning to this smell.
“You’re dating a Mexican,” Mama Nona told me through translators, the first time I met her. “You need to learn Spanish.”
I wanted to say, “You’re living in my country. You need to learn English.”
But knowing which side of my tortilla was buttered, instead I took Spanish classes. Only half of Fugi’s family knew English, and whenever they got together, Spanish was the only language they used. I used to zone out a lot because I never developed the knack of putting Spanish words together into sentences. Sometimes, my only entertainment was watching Fugi getting drunk and translating my words to his family in English, and telling me what they said in Spanish.
“What?” I’d say to him.
“Que? Que?” They’d be saying.
After a couple of beers, I’d mix up my few Spanish words with my three years of high school French. “I’m sorry, babe, but I have no idea what you’re saying.” Fugi would say.
Mama Nona was never alone. If one of the daughters wasn’t there, a grand- or great-granddaughter would be there to watch telenovelas or help her cook or do the dishes. On weekends and holidays the men would come with coolers of beer and sit out on the lawn listening to old-skool Rap, Banda, or Norteno latin music, and speak their rapid-fire Spanish. The traditional Mexican radio stations all sounded like polka to me, with trumpets, accordions, and 3/4 time. After a few beers, everyone felt like dancing, except me. I didn’t know any of the dances.
At first, I worked at a factory with Ray’s sister Carmen; she worked in the skilled-labor area assembling cassette tapes, while I worked in the entry-level packaging area. Have you ever looked at those packages with a plastic bubble-like front attached to a cardboard back? Probably not. You rip them apart and take out your product. For minimum wage, I used to work on the machines that assembled those. From 8 to 12 I popped in the bubble, arranged the product, and then put on the cardboard lid before sealing the whole thing with a press of the heat machine. Across from me was a stranger whose face I saw every time we pressed down our sealers, but with whom I was forbidden to talk until our lunch period at noon. Then it was the same work again until 5:30 at night.
Near Christmas-time, Mama Nona and her daughters went to Mexico for a month; we spent Christmas with my Grandpa Williams. I don’t remember if R.B. lived in Dearborn or Troy, but my recollection was that he was the richest man I’d ever met. It was like being related to the Monopoly Man. His condo was along a golf course and there were pools and tennis courts right in the place where he lived. He smoked an elegant pipe and had cocktails before dinner. He offered us cocktails, too.
I overindulged. On the long trip home from Detroit to Chicago, I thought I was going to throw up at any moment. At first I thought I’d picked up the flu. By the time I got back to Mama Nona’s house, I felt sure there was something seriously wrong with me. Lacking medical insurance, we went to the Emergency Room. The horrific procedures they inflicted on my digestive system conviced all of us that everything was OK.
But the nausea and exhaustion didn’t quit.
Published by angelawd on August 9th, 2008 tagged My Ex-Life | 3 Comments »
Another Teen vs. Twenty Moment
Me: “Joe and I both lost our jobs yesterday, honey.”
Twenty (rubbing my arm): “I’m sorry Mom. What are you going to do?”
Me: “Look for new ones. We’re strong and healthy. There’s a lot we can do.”
Twenty: “I know I can’t help much, but if there’s anything I can do, please just ask me. I have a little money saved.”
Me: “Joe and I both lost our jobs yesterday, honey.”
Teen: “What are we going to do about school clothes shopping?”
Me: “We’ll go shopping once I get a new job.”
Teen: “Are you kidding me? School starts next week.”
Me: “Or maybe we’ll go shopping on Neverday.”
Published by angelawd on August 7th, 2008 tagged Mom of Teens | 5 Comments »
“We did it, honey!”
That’s the first thing Joe said after today’s 7 a.m. meeting with HR and Pastor F.
“What did we do?”
“We both lost our jobs within 24 hours.”
Joe lost his job as Ministry Director today. I lost one of my part-time jobs, and my biggest client, yesterday. Both losses were due to our employers “going in new directions”.
Honestly, we are in dire straits. Our daughter’s hefty medical bills this last year have eaten into our savings and emergency fund, and one of our businesses has not taken off as quickly as we hoped.
I don’t know what God is doing in our lives. But if it means that we become more faithful followers of him, and better people, then I am all for it. We are praising him for what he’s doing now, even though we don’t understand it yet. Our future is wide open and we are waiting on his will.
But of course, we are filled with pain. If you’re a praying person, we sure could use your prayers for us.
Published by angelawd on August 6th, 2008 tagged Joyful living, Life With the Big Guy | 10 Comments »
Cinci Scene
Last weekend, I traveled with the Big Guy to a convention for our financial services business. Given my recent stressors and my current emotional state, I was thinking that a weekend in a mental hospital would have been a much better choice than a weekend in Cincinnati. And if you’re laughing right now, you shouldn’t be.
It’s a measure of our troubles that Joe did not ask me if I wanted to go to the convention and I did not tell him I didn’t want to go. Since he has been more involved in our part-time business lately, and since I had a number of freelance writing deadlines to complete, I took the role of manager/handler while Joe attended workshops. This did not improve my attitude.
An Indiana highway ate my hubcap. It took an hour and a half to check in, while I sent Joe on with a sandwich and notebook. A modern hotel with no free wifi, only an ethernet connection; to me, ethernet is so old I didn’t even remember the last time I owned a cable, but to the elderly concierge, requesting a loaner ethernet cable was like asking my Grandma to build me a Flash video. And my Grandma’s dead.
However, we were in a gorgeous room on the 22nd floor with a view across Cinci and into Kentucky. I kept pretending the lacy iron bridges were spanning the Monogahela River just because I liked the name, but evenutally I conceded that I was looking at the Ohio river. Cinci looks like it had been in a long slow decline after maybe the Civil War but might be on the brink of urban renewal. There was juicy architecture and wonderful details I never get to see in soulless suburbia.
Navigating a 32-story hotel and the Duke Energy Convention Center tried my patience, especially when it took half an hour to catch a non-full elevator, and the nearest ATM was half a mile from the Grand Ballroom. Simple problems such as a malfunctioning toilet paper roll made my mind fill up with swear words.
But Saturday night I filled up on anti-anxiety meds and networked with the Big Guy. We make a great team. The VPs were all wearing tuxes, which meant that any guy with a satin stripe down his pants was someone we should spend time with. “There’s one,” I’d say. “What was his presentation about? What can you tell me about him?” Then I’d nose in and ask him questions related to his talk. We received some great information about business.
One successful leader told us how neither of us could be successful in our business if we didn’t support each other. He suggested reading a book on positive thinking and discussing it with each other. And then I realized how I thought I was supporting my husband, but how little I was actually doing it.
I imagined Joe as a boxer, fighting some guy in the ring, getting all bloody and sweaty while I stood in the corner doing whatever the coach guy does. Except that when the bell rings and both the fighters go back to their corners, it’s like I punch him, too. “You should do it this way.” “Why don’t you do that?” “I don’t understand why you’re handling things this way.”
No matter what happens, Joe and I are on the same team. We need to work together in different ways than we have up until now. Maybe this is a lesson that gets easier with time, as we’re married for longer than (almost) four years.
This revelation got us out of the hotel with a minimum of crabbiness (and let me just say I was not the ONLY crabby person in this particular marriage). I packed and got Joe coffee and brought the car around before the mad rush of 3999 conventioneers descended on the checkout desk. We worked well as a team.
And then on the way home, the hotel called to let us know I’d left the laptop and Joe’s briefcase in the room.
Published by angelawd on August 5th, 2008 tagged Life With the Big Guy | 5 Comments »
Is He or Isn’t He?
My loyal reader friends, you must be dying of wonder to know whether Joe is still employed or not…or wait, it’s probably only me that’s dying to know. Sometimes I forget, I’m not the center of the universe.
Well, we don’t know. But the rest of this post might be more fun to read if you imagine a little circus music going in the back ground. “Doot-doot-doodle-oo…”
Three weeks ago the Church Council told HR that they had to cut 2 and one-half jobs. HR met and discussed some recommendations, while the interim pastor (I affectionately call him Pastor F) interviewed each director and asked questions like, “What will happen if you’re not around to pay the bills?” and “What if we didn’t have music in church anymore?”
Last Thursday there was a meeting between HR and our Church Council to discuss the recommendations that needed to be made.
Monday the Church Council discussed the recommendations and requested to meet with HR on Wednesday.
On Wednesday they discussed the recommendations for four hours.
Next Monday the Church Council will discuss the results of that discussion and make a decision which will be presented to HR next Wednesday. Perhaps HR might discuss that with the winners and losers of the church job lotto next Thursday.
At this point all the fulltimers are saying, “Good Lord, JUST PICK ME.” And updating resumes and applying for other jobs.
Um, we may end up with a church with no staff at all. Except maybe the pastor, and he’s just an interim.