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Tom and I made a will when our boys were young and named a brother-in-law our executor and willed our children to them (Tom’s sister and her husband) should we fall out of the sky on a trip we were planning.  While my boys love Tom’s sister and her husband, they were always horrified that they might actually have to be raised by parents who were tough micro-managers while our parenting style was more a benevolent neglect. My youngest son, Sam, jokes that his second mother was Wendys, and Sharon Kamarath, (now his mother-in-law), Mary Ann Wright, and a host of other women who fed him, adored him, and took him on vacations to Bear Lake.  Sam always had a mother who owned a boat, a tennis court or a swimming pool.

Anyway, Ed, son number two, was here two nights this week and I was updating him on how we wanted to go out of this world and reminding him that he was executor now.

“Have you written this down?” he asks.  He has grown into a practical adult.

“ No, but we will.”  I think we’ve been saying this for a decade.

“You might want to write it down,” he says.

“And I want to be cremated,” I say.  “I don’t want morticians touching me.  “I want the family gathered around my body when I die, and then I want you to wrap me in a sheet and take me to the crematorium.”

“In my car?”  Ed cares a lot about his car.

“Well, yes.”

“I have a better idea.”  His look is smug.  “We should invite a lot of people over to see you when you die.  We’ll give them each a magic marker, and they can draw on your face and then have their photos taken with you.”

Unlike his aunt and uncle, whom I don’t think would have found this funny in the least, I break into five minutes of guffaws.  That’s the trouble.  I encourage this kind of irreverent behavior, and now my children don’t respect me.

I think about the time, a hundred years ago, when I was sitting at my parents’ table with my brothers and sisters in the kitchen, and my father was describing how hungry they were during the Second World War in Holland.  I probably had that same smug look on my face as Ed had, when I said, “Why didn’t you just go to the refrigerator and get yourself a HoHo?”

My father rolled his eyes and exchanged an exasperated look with my mother.

Sorry, Dad, wherever you are.  Hope you’re smiling at my overdue realization that what goes around comes around.

Louise

Tom and I were not experienced kissers when we began dating.  Our first kiss was slightly off the mark and one of us had tremors, although neither one of us knows who belonged to the tremors.  Lip seizures, I like to call them.  It takes about a minute and a half to learn how to kiss properly.  It takes even less time to learn the other moves, thanks to nature.

So it was a shock to learn years later that we were, in fact, not suitably matched for kissing.  We bought a small book called THE ART OF KISSING at the Frick Museum store when we were vacationing in NYC.  It was written by Hugh Morris and first printed in 1936.  He states boldly in the chapter entitled, “Kisses Are But a Prelude to Love,” that “ . . . it is necessary for the man to be taller than the woman.”

And I think he means more than a half-inch taller. Read the rest of this entry »

Louise

Like Wordsworth searching his “mind’s eye,” I’m returning to a sunny day of a few weeks back when Tom and I spontaneously decided on a car trip to Echo to view Utah’s oldest standing church (1870). It’s made of handmade bricks, built by Protestants, not Mormons. Tom took camera and tripod, of course.

While he set up, I walked to the small cemetery adjacent to the church and read the names of dead children: Gilchrist children, Keys children, their parents outliving them by decades. Behind the cemetery, red cliffs gleamed gaudy in the sun. I walked back to the car and pulled a cheap aluminum folding chair out of the trunk and took it back to a spot of gravel in front of the cemetery. I sat with my back to the grave markers and looked out over a green meadow with four large trees, black cows and a broken gate. In the distance, a train chugged on by and blew its whistle.

I sat in the sunlight for more than an hour melting into that calm landscape, content, wanting nothing but to be where I was at that moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturday night, Tom and I sat in bed and ate mixed nuts that were “a little off.”  Tom asked, “Are these nuts rancid?” 

I took some.  “Tastes good to me,” I said. 

Ask a dieting woman if something is rancid, and she will lie her face off. 

We ate the nuts.

I awoke at four in the morning with a wretched roiling in my nether regions.  I sat up in bed.  Tom lay groaning next to me, complaining of nausea and bowel distress.

“I don’t feel so good either,” I said, feeling an urgent need for a toilet.   I sat down to relieve my distress when I realized I also needed to vomit, which I did in the wastepaper can.  On the way back to bed I threw up in the sink.

Tom and I took turns running to and from the bathroom and then lay exhausted and sweaty in the great white marital bed, nauseated to our hair follicles.

“Do I have a fever?” He asked me.  What kind of annoying question was that to ask a wife suffering as I was suffering?

“No, you don’t have a fever!” I shot back.  Was he trying to out suffer me?

“I think I have a fever,” he said.

“You don’t have a fever.” I snarled. I touched his cold arm.  “You have a minus-temperature.”

I’m sure it is one of the rules of marriage that the members making up a couple cannot be sick at the same time.  There must be a designated soother, a designated nurse.

Neither Tom nor I was up for the job.

Then we ran out of toilet paper.

“Call for help,” I said.  “We must be dehydrated. I think I’m dying.  I hope I’m dying. 

Later, Charles (third son) arrived with Gatorade, bananas, soda crackers, bread, chocolate pudding, and toilet paper, which he set on the porch, not wanting to catch whatever it was we had. 

Not only did he save our lives, he saved the marriage.  Did you know that in birth-order theory, the third child actually does save the marriage?    Thought you’d want to know.

Louise

One of the best things about going to a Chinese restaurant even if the food is overcooked and writhing in monosodium glutamate is the fortune cookies.  They usually come bunched together on a tiny plastic tray with the bill.  I always wave my hand over them, hoping I can feel the energy of the fortune that is meant specifically for me.  I take my fortunes seriously.  I find them in pockets of various coats I’ve worn, in slacks that have gone through the wash, and in the bottom of my handbags.  Recently, I taped this one to the top of my Kitchen Aid:  “Your dearest wish will come true.” 

What irritates me is when I receive a fortune that is not a fortune but a statement of fact, such as, “You are not a person who can be ignored,” or “A kind word will keep someone warm for years.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

Years ago, Tom, Ed and I came up with an idea for unfortunate fortunes: dark fortunes, ominous fortunes, wrapped in dark chocolate cookie dough.  We were punch drunk at the time.  I wrote them down in frantic enthusiasm, three pages full.

I kept the list around for a while, and then we moved, and moved again, and still again.  I lost the list.  We tried reconstructing it later, but failed.  Last night, I sifted through a box removed from the garage, marked “Louise’s files” and found the list folded twice like a note in third grade.  Here is just a smattering of dark fortunes:

• You will lose a nipple in a freak accident in a shoe store.
• Some day you will live in Mississippi.
• Toe fungus is in your future.
• Watch out for your toaster.
• Your doctor is lying.  There is no cure.
• Don’t worry; you don’t need your thumbs anyway.
• You have no lucky numbers.
• You’re going to need braces again.
• Make sure you’re buried with a flashlight in the casket.
• Blood in your stools on Friday.
• Better take baby steps this week.
• Your father isn’t your father.
• Don’t open your door to anyone the last week of this month.
• All your children will look like Yogi Berra.
• Don’t bother counting your lucky stars.
• Dead man walking.
• You ARE the tooth fairy.
• Walk with a limp on Monday.
• Kiss all the princes you want, you’ll still be a frog.
• Go ahead—step on that crack!

Add your own dark fortune, if you like.

Louise

It is late and I am in a fog.  I have done absolutely nothing today except sit on my bed and read Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL. Like his other books, it is a puzzle to be solved.  I like puzzles. This one was thoroughly absorbing and entertaining.

When I say I did nothing else, I mean precisely that.  I didn’t bathe. I didn’t brush my teeth.  I never dressed.  I stayed in bed reclining on three pillows.  I drank Optifast, water and ate a piece of chicken and a tablespoon of chocolate chips, which is like injecting serotonin into my veins.

When I was on page 364, Tom received an email from our son, Ed, who had just finished reading the same book, to ask if we had read it.  I like this kind of synchronicity:  Ed and I reading the same book, he a little ahead of me.  It makes the world seem like a friendly place.  I imagine a lot of people were reading Dan Brown yesterday, enjoying it like I did.

I deserved this day off, because I have been full of “changing my life for good” kind of busyness.  More than a week ago, I decided I needed more structure in my life and I thought the only way I could do this was to make myself a chore chart and give myself sparkly stars for my good behaviors. It sounds dinky, but I find I will do anything for a sparkly star.

I will, for example, make my bed EVERY DAY, ride the stationery bike for a half an hour, lift free weights 3 X 10 EVERY DAY, stick to my diet EVERY DAY, clean up after myself EVERY DAY and anything else I write on my list of to do’s each morning.

Last summer (a year ago) I lost 40 pounds, and this fall I’m losing 20 more pounds.  I will be thin at Christmas and may, if I’m lucky, have visible elbows again.  My new saying is being old is better than being fat. Being a bit more organized is also terrific.  I am obviously storing nuts for the winter, when I go beserk. Surely those dark months will be easier if I am thinner and make my bed daily.

None of this comes easily. I know from long experience that I need plenty of down time, that I am slow in the morning, and that I don’t even pretend to multi-task.  Still, this week I subbed in the temple at six in the morning for a friend.  I gave myself an extra big star for that one.

Last Saturday, I was assigned my first bride in the temple, and I lost her.  I kept track of her until the very end when she disappeared from the bride’s room where she had been primping herself for photographs. I found the groom.  He didn’t know where she was. “I lost a bride,” I told everyone.  “Have you seen a loose bride about?”  Finally, one of the sisters came up to me and told me the bride was at the west entrance (the baptism entrance) and I went there.  Sure enough, she was sitting there waiting.  “How did you get here?” I asked.  And she pointed to a door that came directly from the bride’s room, a door I didn’t know existed.  Bride and groom were reunited.  I was absolved of all responsibility.

Anyway, I know myself well enough to know that if I’m going to be good with all my chores that I better plan in a vacation day for myself, or it will all come tumbling down.

Today was that day.  Tomorrow, it’s back to the chore chart.

Louise

Forty some odd years ago, when I was a teenager, I made extra money by babysitting.  One young couple, with a new baby, hired me on an almost weekly basis.  They were not Mormons.  I knew this, because my mother was an ad hoc membership clerk of our ward and they were not on her list.

Even more telling, was a pack of Salem filtered menthol cigarettes in front of the toaster in the kitchen.  They had no television, but they did have a wall full of bookcases filled with the latest novels.  This was better than TV.  If I got tired of reading, I pulled out a Strathmore Premium Sketch pad I had brought along and drew long, leggy women in beautiful clothes.

And if I tired of that, well, then there was always the bathroom mirror.  Theirs covered the whole upper half of a wall.  It was nothing like that little medicine cabinet mirror we had in our bathroom at home, which had to be shared with nine other people.  This mirror was a stage for great performances.  I made all my faces in it:  the haughty face, the laughing face, the sexy face ala Bridget Bardoe, the distraught face.  I strutted, primped, pranced, minced and tap-danced in front of that mirror.  I sang, “St. Louis woman with your diamond rings . . .” in a sultry alto voice.  I was a star.

One night, I decided to have a smoke in front of the mirror.  I pulled one of the Salems out of its pack, my fingers fluttered nervously.  I had never smoked before.  I was not planning to be a smoker, but on this one night I wanted to be Bette Davis for five minutes.  I lit upin front of the mirror, raised my eyebrows, looked down my nose and inhaled.

It was then that I remembered a talk I had heard in sacrament meeting. It was about a woman who was traveling in Asia and had been in a devastating automobile accident.  Her injuries were massive, and she needed thoracic surgery.  The surgeon asked if she smoked.

“No,” she said.

“I need to know if you have ever smoked even one cigarette, because if you have, I cannot perform the surgery.”

The woman had never smoked even one single cigarette, and because she hadn’t, her life was spared.

I blew smoke through my nose.  Too late.  If I were ever in a car accident in Asia, it would be the end of me.

In all, I smoked three cigarettes.  Later, when I was fifty-something I had to have surgery to have three small congenital holes in my lung stapled shut.

Last year, I couldn’t blow out seven candles.

So there you go.  I’ve written your next Word of Wisdom talk.   You don’t have to thank me.

I met my new visiting teaching companion on Sunday, just returned from a Hong Kong temple mission with her husband and it turns out she is “one-hundred percent Dutch” (her words). She was born in Amsterdam and emigrated with her parents to America in 1955 when she was ten.

I am one-hundred-percent Dutch as well, and in my excitement I may have tried to hug her, which is about the most anti-Dutch thing one can do. Emotion is an embarrassment to the Dutch. Fortunately, she was also a good humored woman and chatty, features I like about my fellow countrymen and women.

But there are down sides to being Dutch: you think you know everything, even what people are thinking. You don’t deserve a birthday party, unless you have it yourself and cook for all your guests. You don’t deserve anything, actually. Especially success. And there is that Calvinist guilt that we generate so effortlessly.

My new friend told me something I didn’t know. The old Calvinists had a rule that good people should not have window coverings. They had another rule: do not look into other people’s windows.

Well, of course. Trust the Dutch to come up with impossible rules. Here I thought those windows with the potted plants in them and a tiny rim of lace at the top were so friendly, so inviting. I loved gawking through them.

Turns out that gawking is against the rules.

I’ve been butting up against other people’s rules all my life. Perhaps the modern Dutch, with their ultra-progressive social programs, like me, are butting up against those Calvinist forefathers.

Am I on my high horse? Better get down before I hurt myself.

Thursday, I will go visiting teaching with my new friend and she will speak Dutch to me and I will be happy.

Louise

Tomorrow is my 67^th birthday.  The number alarms me, but I am happy to remain MYSELF in spirit, even if the body continues to disappoint.  It is tempting to say I’m the same person I was at seventeen, but that would be ignoring the bazooka explosion of experience I have survived and will continue to survive.  I’ve never liked fuddy duddies and hope never to become one.  Still, I recognize that I am part of a generation, who for the most part could care less about cell phones, texting and twittering.  I am on Facebook, but only check it once or twice a week.  I love email, because I don’t have to talk on the phone.  It’s made making visiting teaching appointments so much easier

But I am the only person my age, I know, who blogs.  Fifty-year-olds blog, but those closer to seventy do not blog or read blogs.  I have tried to get my friends to come on board but to no avail.  Only Sherry has read the Apron Stage that I know of, and she told me that in an email.  If war babies are reading, they are not commenting.

This year for the first time, two of my friends received Kindles as gifts and like them.  I imagine I will buy one myself one of these days, but I wasn’t ready for the tony Cushing Academy’s announcement that it was eliminating the stacks in its library and converting to a “virtual library.”  James Tracy, the headmaster, sees this “as a model for the 21^st century.”  They’re giving 20,000 books away.

I am too old to go virtually virtual.  Too old.  Ancient. Decrepit.

What happens when the electricity goes out?  I guess it’s like a snow day.

Given a little time, I’ll probably adjust, after I grieve over the loss of books as we know them and disappearing libraries.  In twenty years, my grandchildren will quack behind my back, “Her house smells like a tomb—all those books.  Aaugh.”  Or maybe by then, I’ll have gotten rid of the books as well.

This year, though, I hope I get a book for my birthday.

Louise

August was stressful.  A lot of it was good stress as when Mary Ellen came to visit for a week and I accompanied her to her 50^th high school reunion at East High.  She hadn’t been to one high school reunion, and like all of us, thought that she hadn’t had a friend in the world when she was a teenager.  I said that was wrong-headed and that she should come.  I bullied her.  She came, but then I felt RESPONSIBLE for her having a splendid reunion.  It went well, but like I say, it was still stress.

Next the Ed Plummers stayed for a week.  I didn’t cook once. Well, maybe once. It’s stressful being the non-cook.  I love having them around because they’re all enormously funny.  One night, I was standing by the kitchen sink to get a drink of water wearing my brown jeans with a matching brown t-shirt over a white-t, and Ed said, “I see you’re wearing your UPS uniform.”  Water spurted through my nose.

My granddaughter Anne left for Germany for ten months.  I keep thinking I see her in the neighborhood, but it’s only a look-alike Anne.  A fake Anne.

Tom and I had to do a three-minute spiel at the Freshman Honors Conference at BYU for the Study Abroad in Vienna that we are doing next Spring/Summer.  “It has to be funny,” Tom said to me.  “Funny makes the difference.”

“Do not try to be funny,” I said.  “You won’t be funny.  You’ll try too hard.  Just make the announcement.  Be the straight guy.”

“Will you be funny?”  He asked me.

“I don’t know.  Don’t you try to be funny, though.  Don’t even try.”

He did as I said.  He announced the Study Abroad in Vienna.  I interrupted him.  I interrupted him many times.  He played straight man perfectly.  At one point, he turned to me and said with a concerned look, “Are you on something?”  More than a hundred freshmen signed up for Study Abroad.

“You were hilarious,” Tom said afterward.  “I’d rather have a hilarious wife than one who cooks.”

What if one day I wasn’t funny?  Gag me.

I’d already forgotten the performance and was now worried about money.  We’re going to end up homeless.  I’ve always known it. We’re stupid with money.

We’re browsing in the Bookstore.  I will die of stress if I don’t get hold of it.  I will go into spontaneous combustion.

And there on the remainder table was a paperback copy of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh with those beautiful E.H. Shepard ink drawings for three dollars.  I stood and read about Christopher Robin and my old friend Pooh.  “Sing Ho for the life of a bear.”  I bought it and keep it in my bag and take it out when I’m waiting in line,or in the car, or for the movie to start.  I forgot that my life is rich with friends and relations, honey, balloons, and walks leading nowhere special.  I could still be surprised by a heffalump.