Louise

I am fast becoming the queen of Scrabble. Tonight I beat Tom and Charles. It bothered Charles to lose. Oh, he was smiling and gracious, but he was taking a half an hour for each turn. In fact, he came in last because he took a shot in the dark with “da” running one way, “divvy” the other. I challenged him. “Da? Excuse me?”

“I’ll bet anything there’s a “da” in Webster’s,” he says. He gets up to get the dictionary. There is no “da” and he has to skip his turn; otherwise, he would have come in second.

Tom had nothing but vowels.

In fact, I have had a seven-day winning streak playing Scrabble with Tom. These are the “Q” words that do not require a “U”: qintar, qiyas, qaid, qat, qibla. My computer doesn’t recognize any of them, but they are all in Webster’s Dictionary and are Arabic in origin.

Charles was unable to play his “q,” and that’s a minus 10 points. Obviously, he knew not “qat.”

I like word games. I bought Bookworm and have had games that went beyond a million points.

Boggle, however, confounds me.. We played with friends who said, “Let’s not count words with less than 5 letters. I couldn’t see any 5 letter words. I couldn’t see any 3 letter words! Playing Boggle is like spelling: You either know how or you don’t.

There are games I won’t play anymore. I’m never playing Monopoly again, because there is always one lucky person, in my family it’s my sister, Janie, who always wins. There doesn’t seem to be any chance in the game. She’s the banker too. She buys everything and then she always has a lump of $500 bills in her lap. My brother-in-law, Bob, always wins at Monopoly. I’d like to see Janie and Bob play Monopoly together. I’d pay real money to watch that game.

I despise war strategy games like Diplomacy, where you go off with someone to a corner and negotiate power and then they boycott you or disappoint you in other ways. And there’s no time to talk about Tom Cruise’s tightening hold Of Katie Holmes and that he’s forcing her to have another baby.

You should be able to talk to each other while playing a game. I still like “Sorry” and “Parcheesi” where you can count and block your opponents and still mention that you just finished reading “The Brothers Karamazov,” and are thinking of framing a picture of Dostoevsky and hanging it above your desk.

Nor will I ever play checkers or chess again. Never win at those games. Never.

I still like Hearts and Golf (a card game) and Donkey after a big family dinner. You know, with the spoons on the table? Do you know how to play Donkey?

My favorite new game is Chronology where you have to place historical dates in the right sequence. Do you play games? Alone or on the computer? Or together with friends and family? If you were recommending one game to buy this year, what would it be?

It was a gorgeous day here today. I bought African violets, purple and light blue. They make me so happy.

]]> http://theapronstage.com/2010/03/18/playing-games/feed/ 52 Louise images http://theapronstage.com/2010/03/11/yikes-skypes/ http://theapronstage.com/2010/03/11/yikes-skypes/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:43:18 +0000 louiseplummer http://theapronstage.com/?p=3040 ]]>

Louise

Wednesday I had lunch with the high school gang at Marie’s house and celebrated the three March birthdays with cake and presents and laughter.  One of us has gone off to Tiberius on the Sea of Galilee in Israel for a couple of years and so we did the contemporary thing and skyped her.  The seven of us stood uncomfortably around the computer in Marie’s study, asking questions and watching our friend’s face digitally freeze up every few minutes.

In our own family, we have i-chatted with distant family members a couple of times, and I have to say that I find this form of communication awkward, and yea, verily, downright boring.  It feels contrived to be staring at each other on a computer screen.

We don’t even look at each other in real life. In real life, we sit in a large room and text each other.

I-chat feels a little like an-in-your-face pop-quiz, but not only do you have to answer inane questions, but you feel responsible to ask inane questions as well.  How are ya?  Whatcha doing?  Your hair looks nice.  Mom, you’re supposed to look at the camera.

All of this with a pleasant look on your face.

What’s more is that televised visits are impossible to end.  It feels rude to break away from a human face even when there’s absolutely nothing left to say.  Have you ever skyped anyone where it took less than forty minutes?

It’s worse than driving with all your loved ones in a station wagon to Yellow Knife.  (Maybe that’s where the Smylies will end up).

Okay, here’s the real deal:  I’m missing letter-writing.  I’ve been going through old letters, carefully written, with drawings in the margins or pressed flowers folded between the pages, letters with cartoons attached or scripture references.  Letters.  You could carry them around with you and read them again.  You could leave the imprint of your lips on the seal.  You could save the stamps from exotic locations.  You could read them aloud to friends, or not. Tactile, scented, papery letters.

I grow old.  I grow old.  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Louise

On the first Monday of each month, my sisters and I gather to play cards, tell stories, and howl and cackle at our own foibles as well as the foibles of others.

One of my sisters lives in a high-rise in downtown Salt Lake and is the Relief Society president of her ward.  The bishop of the ward also lives in the same high-rise.  He came to visit her after a bishopric meeting the other night, looking sheepish, hands behind his back and said, “I’m going to put a lei over your head.”

“Okaaaay,” my sister said.

He brings the lei from behind his back and puts it over her head.  “Now, tell me if you think the sisters of the ward would like receiving this as a gift on Mother’s Day.  Be absolutely honest,” he said.

The lei is knitted with a spiky green yarn. “It feels and looks like a caterpillar,” my sister said, guffawing.  Then she pulled herself together, and said, “No, they would not like this.”

It turns out that one of the counselor’s wives has offered to make a hundred of these for Mother’s Day for three hundred dollars.   The counselor could not say no to his wife, so he shifted it to the bishop, and the bishop now shifted it to my sister, his Relief Society president.

“They pay thirty dollars for one of these in Hawaii,” the Bishop said.

“I don’t live in Hawaii,” my sister said.  “And they wear funny shirts in Hawaii, and have you noticed that anything you buy in Hawaii doesn’t fit in your house when you get home?”

“Will you tell her?” the Bishop asked.

The sisters collapsed in shrieks over this story.  Someone might have said, “Oh tell him to grow a pair.”  My sister would never do this, of course.

So the morning after card night, I googled “knitted leis” to see what appeared.  Apparently, there are lots of busy hands out there either knitting or crocheting these spiked leis.

I think the problem lies with the word “lei,” which makes one think of fragrant, exotic and colorful flowers.  This is so NOT a lei.

What if you called it a scarf?  Could you accept it as a scarf?  There is no expectation of flowers in that word.  Or muffler?  But why would you be handing out mufflers in May?

Anyway, inquiring minds want to know if you would like receiving a knitted or crocheted lei for Mother’s Day in church, and would you wear it?  Say we call it a shawl?

By the way, this ward has for years handed out small boxes of chocolates on Mother’s Day, and no one ever complained.  Chocolate?  Knitted lei?  Knitted lei?  Chocolate?

Years ago, my sister was asked to clean house for a woman, who hadn’t straightened her kitchen cupboards in years.  She asked my sister to remove everything, throw out any suspicious packaged items, scrub down the shelves and put everything back in an organized fashion.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” my sister told us, her sisters.  “There were dead maggots in the corners.”

We all squealed and writhed and said, “You’re kidding!  Yuk.  Ooooh.”

Since then, my goal has always been not to be the woman with maggots in her kitchen cupboards.

That’s why we move every three years.

I have my own maggot story.  I can tell it without shame, because it wasn’t my doing.  The third year we were married we moved from Commonwealth Avenue in Boston to Shaler Lane in Cambridge.  Actually, Tom was in Germany leading a group of students for The Experiment in International Living.  I moved us.

The apartment was a horror.  I mean like someone had vomited on a wall and not wiped it down.  Stuff like that.  I hired painters.  When they were through, I attacked the stove with soap and ammonia.  I lifted up the top to clean under the burners and you’ll never guess what was under there!  Yes.  Dead maggots.  I turned and walked straight out of the apartment and upstairs to the VanWagenens.

“I can’t live in my apartment.  I’m going to have to move to a motel,” I said.

They asked why and I told them.

Richard said, “I’ll clean it for you.  We had worse than that in the army.”

And he did.  Richard was my hero.

Today, I decided to organize my pantry.  First I went to the library to get a CD of THE BROTHERS KARMAZOV, which is as long as it’s going to take me to do this job.  This was Day One.  My spices are in alphabetical order. (Sarah, we actually did have cinnamon!)  Various nuts are stored in plastic containers with labels in black magic marker.  Paper products are in plastic baskets.  Goodness, I’m so proud of myself.

Tomorrow is day two.  Dostoevsky is excellent company.

Next is the Laundry Room and then the linen closet.  Onward and upward!

I am not an enthusiastic spring cleaner usually, but I have this fantasy that someone will want to rent my house, furnished, for a year or two while we go off to nose around in other places.  If I clean now, I might have the nerve to list it in April on Craig’s List.

There will be no maggots or mice.  It will be sparkling. Seriously, do you have a maggot story?  (Dede found dead mice in our NY apartment when she and Ed came to help us clean ).

My college biology teacher told us on the first day of class that 98% of us had worms in our bodies.  It’s the only thing I remember about biology.

Speaking of worms, the SEARS CATALOGUE used to sell tapeworms, “easy to swallow” for dieters.  In fact, that’s how Maria Callas lost all that weight in the fifties.  Thought you’d want to know.

What I said today:

• I hate the dog.  I want to give her away.  You don’t take her out enough; she’s YOUR dog.  I would never get a dog.  See, there’s a little poop on the stairs.  See?
• I want to live in an assisted-living center where they’ll feed me. I don’t want to cook.  I wasn’t meant to cook.   All I need is a bed and a desk and a chair and someone to feed me.
• We’re going to die.
• We are the most fiscally inept couple I know.  Why didn’t we save?
• Let’s move to a third world country.
• Why is it so gray today?  Gray is my least favorite color.
• I made you some eggs and English muffins.  Here’s orange juice.  Okay, we’ve had protein, carbs and vitamin c and d.  Another day without rickets.
• See these shoes.  I want these shoes.  Oh, they’re Ferragamos.  Why do I always pick out the most expensive items?
• Do something, you lazy bag of loose skin.

What Tom said today:

• Would you like a hot bath?
• Here, hot chocolate.
• I’d like to stay in Vienna next year.
• I’m not worried.
• You can buy anything in this world with money.
• Kiss me.  Come on, kiss me.  I said, kiss me.
• Why don’t you read the scripture you taped to your computer?

Grrrr.

“Neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid. Sanctify the Lord of Hosts himself, and let Him be your fear, and let him be your dread. And He shall be for a sanctuary.”

Anything horrid come out of your mouth today?

Louise

Once I had a class of disfigured hands. There was Sean Z. who had no thumbs. There was a young woman, whose hands weren’t fully developed and a guy who had a hook for a hand. Any one of these in a single classroom would have caught my attention, but to have these three students in one class—and a writing class at that—that was a motif! It still makes me smile to have been blessed with this staggering coincidence.

A few years ago, I would have remembered all of their names, but the synapses aren’t too swift anymore, and Sean Z. is the only one I’ve kept in touch with.

Missing thumbs ran on his mother’s side of the family. She was missing one thumb. Her father had both thumbs missing and wore gloves all his life with the thumbs stuffed with cotton. Sean’s mother was disappointed when her first three children were fully thumbed, but more than delighted when Sean appeared thumbless. It was a tradition after all.

When Sean was twelve, his mother threw him a party inviting all of his friends and taped all their thumbs into the palms of their hands, so that they had to play all the games and eat the food with only four fingers. Sean said that they were biting the tape off by the time it got around to the birthday cake.

Here’s Sean’s response to this prompt, “When I have . . .”

WHEN I HAVE THUMBS
By Sean Ziebath

When I have thumbs, I will hitchhike everywhere
I will suck my thumbs
I will sit in the corner and stick my thumb in a plum pie
I will paint a face on my thumb and forefinger, like a
puppet and make it talk
When I have thumbs I will learn sign language
I will give everyone the “thumbs-up” OK sign
I will smash my thumb with a hammer
I will give people the bird, because I will finally have a
middle finger
When I have thumbs I will count to ten,
Snap,
Play the guitar,
Thumb wrestle,
And when it’s all over and I’ve done all those neat things that only five-fingered people can do, I’ll ask God to take my thumbs away, and then once again enjoy the frustration of opening the lid of a Yoplait yogurt.

My friend Kathy W. and I used to argue whether it was better to lose a hand or a foot. She never wavered from choosing the hand. “Even your right hand?” I would ask.

I always chose the foot. They can make great looking feet. Actually, they make pretty good hands too, but all that physical therapy on learning to use it and then there are the fingernails.

It’s a macabre question for February. If you have to lose one, which would it be?

Louise

Wednesday I met a friend for lunch at BYU and while I was there, I walked into a bookstore sale in that huge glass room in the Wilkinson Center. The books were laid out on long banquet tables and one table had a sign over it that said “Text Department: 95% off.”

That is how I came to buy GENERAL, ORGANIC AND BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY by H. Stephen Stokes.

I bought it because I like the artistry of the charts and formulas. Many of them look like the inside of a beehive coded with OH or CH2 as in the case of Formaldehyde-based polymers.

There were several copies of this text and, at first, I thought I didn’t want one that was too marked up with notes and underlinings, not wanting to be influenced by the previous reader.

As if.

In fact, I bought one that was quite marked up with charming asides like a big “Cool” and a smiley face and two asterisks in the margin next to a paragraph on Molecular Collisions. And another COOL!! along side the paragraph on Chemical Equilibrium. I wanted to meet the person who was as excited about Oxidizing Agents and Reducing Agents as I used to be about the poetry of Alexander Pope and John Dryden.

I wanted to meet the chemist/artist who drafted a portrait of Paco on page 217.

I guess what I’m saying is not only was I attracted to the strange graphs, language and formulas in the book, but I fell in love with the student who personalized its margins.

I think he was a guy, back from a Spanish-speaking mission—he’s written “mui importante” in a margin—handsome and slim, now in medical school somewhere, maybe St. Louis, with a wife who misses her mother and a baby boy named Cooper.

Such an entertaining volume for only $3.99

What cheap thing have you bought lately that makes you happy?

I know I shouldn’t be posting a picture taken with Photo Booth, and I know this is not in focus, but you get the idea of the state of my desk.   I worked here tonight and I will work here again tomorrow.

I have been making a tiny scrapbook for Tom for Valentine’s Day.  (Notice I did not use the word “scrapbooking,” which is an abomination, but who cares?) It is the most time I have ever spent on a gift for Tom (I don’t think it took me this long to knit him a sweater).  He is going to love every tiny detail of it.  My hope is it will make him cry with joy.  I love to make Tom cry.  With joy.

I haven’t made a scrapbook or a photo album since digital cameras took hold.  Whenever I ask Tom to run me a picture, it takes way too long, because he wants perfect photographs, while I only want snapshots.  He likes to run them off in large sizes.  I want them in large quantities.

I know, I should learn my way around Photoshop, or at least Iphoto, but I prefer my cutting and pasting with scissors and glue sticks.  How did we live before glue sticks?

Making this scrapbook has been like returning to elementary school art class, and I loved art class.  It has been one of the activities that has gotten me through January.

Other things that got me through were lunch dates with a myriad group of women, young and old, who like to laugh; the symphony, the theater, late night runs for Rittersport dark chocolate, exercising on the stationary bike, reading an inspiring book called SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA by Lynne Cox, playing Scrabble with Tom and working in the temple.  And, oh yes, going to the library to write.   Oh, and I got up late every morning and didn’t beat myself up about it.

Mostly, I refused to hibernate, which is my first instinct.

I only had one small melt-down one Sunday morning.  I had it after I was up and dressed, and after Tom and I had been asked to come to the church early before Sacrament Meeting, and after we were called to be family history consultants—we said yes—after that, but before Sacrament Meeting.  I had my meltdown.  It only lasted a day.

“I’m going back to bed,” I told Tom.  And I did.

But really, I have to say I got through January without much collateral damage.

How have YOU gotten through January?  Did you have a meltdown?

I am planning to drive to warmer climes the last two weeks of February.  Maybe Arizona.  I’ve never been to Arizona.

How will YOU get through February?

Louise

Notice how the gypsy is a crone and the woman who wants her fortune told is young.  Gahan Wilson, the cartoonist, turns 80 on February 18^th.

He knows.

He knows that it takes decades of living to see that cycle of repeated action that is yourself, longing to be the queen of the world, or just Miss Idaho or Ms. Senior Utah (there actually is such a contest); longing to run your own design business, be the perfect mother, teacher, the perfect daughter of God, the perfect hostess, wife, poet, supreme court judge.  The perfect size, whatever that is.

I will tell you your future.  Don’t touch the glass ball; it’s mine.  Don’t look so eager.

You will have a fulfilling life surrounded by people who love you, although there will be days when it seems the only friend you have is the dog.  And you don’t like the dog.

Your friends will love you and break your heart.

Your children will love you and break your heart.

You will develop your talents to your own satisfaction.  And when you do, it won’t be quite what you thought.

Your glass is half full and half empty.  You are the one with the attitude.

Your husband will be a good man and he’ll be even better when you actually tell him what you want.

Sometimes you will be completely alone.  Accept it as a gift.

You will get a standing ovation.

You will have pain.

You will get old.  You’ll still want something you can’t define.

You will hope for a miracle.

There’s a good chance, there’s a miracle out there.

Louise

When I’m sitting around watching dust particles in the light from the window, I often wonder how other people spend their time?  I’ve always been a bit of a lazy dog, slow to move in the morning.  I clean up a bit, resist writing anything at all, eat a carbohydrate, read a hefty book, resist writing again, play Bookworm online, watch BETTER OFF TED on Hulu, even ride the exercise bike.  One of my New Year’s resolutions is the ambitious, “leave the house once every day even if it’s just to walk around the block.”   This is a winter resolution, because in January, February and March, I want to unplug, disconnect, detach, disengage, disentangle—somebody stop me—I want to let the air out of my balloon.

I resist thinking; therefore am I?

I structure my life by belonging to a professional writer’s group, which forces me to continue working on my present novel.  I work in the temple on Saturdays.   I have symphony tickets.  I lunch with friends.  Occasionally I bag bread on Welfare Square.  I do my visiting teaching.  All in all, my life’s work is small.

Somebody wants Tom and me to do a radio show.  Sure, set it up, we said.  Just tell us when to show up.  I can’t think about this too much, because, well, I don’t really want to be THAT busy.

Issac Asimov wrote seven days a week and wrote so many books, he forgot he wrote some of them.  He said, “I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn’t, I would die.”

He died anyway.

I have kept a geranium blooming indoors since summer.  It’s been well worth my time.

What’s worth your time?