TREE TRIALS

 

One of  our cast of characters.
You've probably seen her picture at PetSmart under a sign that says WARNING.

It’s half past tree-decorating time. I have a collection of beautiful and delicate heirloom ornaments handcrafted to celebrate joy and reflect the beauty of the Christmas season.

In a box in the basement. 

Why?

Because nothing says Here Comes Santa Claus like shards of memories and broken glass scattered across the living room Oriental to impale the toes of random passers-by on their way to the kitchen for a snack. And with centuries of experience, the reindeer are finicky about landing on a roof that’s decorated in a festive pawprint motif. Santa is understandably anxious about a house that decorates with broken balls.

 A week ago, we decked the halls, shook out the tree skirt, and festooned the boughs and branches of the well-worn, but guaranteed to remain life-like, evergreen with symbols of good will toward men. The evergreen that has a permanent, cat-shaped hole in the middle.

The next morning the tree exploded. I thought the star had gone supernova.  

A black ball of fangs and fur flew past in a cloud of glitter and tinsel, and a tabby with a surprised and somewhat bewildered expression catapulted from the center of the Christmas tree, ricocheted off the La-Z-Boy, and careened into the hall, where it scattered laundry baskets like bowling pins. The vacuum cleaner succumbed to a change in air pressure and current and performed a magnificent backflip, neatly taking out a stack of newly washed towels on an end table. A black and white furball with years of experience grabbed a gold ball with a luminous snowflake pattern and headed downfield like an Olympian about to score a gold medal goal.

The tree was shredded like a delicate interoffice memorandum and teetered like a ballerina with sore feet before it crash-landed on the hardwood floor.The Pit Bull, who is leery of the cats' shenanigans and who learned emergency maneuvers during the last hurricane, hid under the coffee table with his favorite knucklebone for rations.

But within minutes the tree was up and re-decorated in its Christmas finery.

Its Christmas plastic finery.

In a move of inspiration and lightning-fast reaction to a scene of destruction in our living room years ago, Bill rushed out and snapped up all the dazzling, heirloom plastic ornaments that WalMart had to offer.

Of course, our tree looks like the toddler aisle at Toys R Us on Black Friday.

If our Christmas tree were a Muppet, it would be Miss Piggy.

If it were a celebrity (don't tell Miss Piggy), it would dress like Jennifer Lopez on Oscar night.

Where other homes have trees that reflect good taste and tradition, our tree is a reflection of our life choices. We don’t have family photos on our walls so much as mug shots.

Because sometimes Peace on Earth looks more like Earth in Pieces. It just takes a little love to keep it all together.

 And maybe some duct tape.

 Hold your loved ones together with whatever it takes.

 Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

Brushing Up

 

NOT optimal toothbrush organization.

We just passed the day of the year that is responsible for the biggest increase in bathroom activity of the year. Don’t be gross. I’m talking about Thanksgiving and toothbrushing.

Today while I was scrolling through Facebook catching up on the latest Black Friday deals and conspiracy theories, I came across an advertisement for a manual toothbrush. I realize we live in a world where patience is stretched too thin to wait for batteries to charge, but I had to stop and think. Isn’t a manual toothbrush a. . .

 Toothbrush?

 A regular, old-fashioned, hand-cranked toothbrush?

Even with the teeth I lost over the years due to my record consumption of peanut brittle, I’ve brushed a lot of teeth in my time. I’m old enough to remember the pain and suffering I felt when they boosted the price of candy bars from a dime to fifteen cents. But even then, my manual transmission toothbrush worked just fine, dealing with everything from Pay Days to Peanut M&Ms with cheerful efficiency.

That same dime bought me a nutty buddy when the Ice Cream Man, who was not a creep trying to lure small children into a lifetime of cheap snow cones, drove through the neighborhood in his specially outfitted freezer truck, selling Push Ups, Ice Cream Sandwiches, and chocolate covered vanilla popsicles. I’m old enough to forget the name of those, but they were delicious and cold on a hot, summer day even when your fingers stuck together from melting ice cream running down the stick.

Which reminds me that I’m old enough to remember when a Push Up was not an item of lingerie.

You can see I brushed a lot of teeth - not counting the times I brushed extra  because there was a tiny piece of chip from the Mexican restaurant down the street stuck in between my front teeth and I couldn’t find the dental floss because somebody had taken it to their room because their yoyo string broke or out back to tie up the tomato plants, so I’d try to wedge the bristles in between my teeth because it felt like all the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were jammed in there.

I even had an electric toothbrush when I was a kid. I used it to brush my coat’s fake fur collar that resembled a rain-soaked weasel, Barbie’s hair that resembled my coat collar, and the cat, but I didn’t use it to brush my teeth.  

A couple of gray hairs ago, my son got a new toothbrush to take on his trip to Japan. It had a USB port. I don’t know what they do for teeth in Japan, but I know they are very particular about personal hygiene and technology, so I guess Son the Second fit in just fine. I don’t know exactly what you do with a USB toothbrush. Does it find your molars on Google Earth? Track the path of your last stick of Juicy Fruit? Count how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?  All I know is that electronic toothbrush logged more miles in one trip than I have since I’ve been old enough to say “First Class, please.” Just kidding, I don’t even go to the mailbox First Class. 

When I saw the fancy advertisement for the new manual toothbrush, I beat a path to my computer and ordered one from the site that knows more about me than the doctor who carved into my stuffing to produce Giblet One and Giblet two three decades ago.

The toothbrush arrived faster than it takes to load Cool Whip onto pumpkin pie. It looked just like my last toothbrush. Except it didn’t fit in the hole in my ceramic toothbrush holder so I had to lay it across the part where the soap goes. When I tried to turn the water on, I accidentally knocked it with my elbow and it catapulted into the trashcan.

So the new toothbrush didn’t conform to standards, required a restructuring of equipment, and needed an upgrade to be functional. I assembled a Problem-Solving team to assess the feasibility of redesigning the toothbrush area of my bathroom to support the integrity of the new vision. Bill said forget it, he’ll buy me a toothbrush that fits.

So much for technology.

 

Happy Valentine's Day, Captain!

Dating for Baby Boomers is a lot different than dating for teenagers. Teenagers may say they're hanging out, but Baby Boomers really do. I should know—these days I spend a major portion of my life trying to cover it all up. To me, a belly shirt is something that rides up in the front when I pull the shirttail down in the back and is more an item I would wear to ward off would-be attackers than out to a seven-screen cinema on Saturday night.

When teenagers say they’re going to see a movie, they mean an action flick where the main action is blood loss. Baby boomers experience blood loss when we stand up too fast and all of our platelets stage an intervention around our ankles. Teenagers go to a Counting Crows concert and play air guitar. Baby Boomers count crows feet and go to see the Eagles farewell tour. (Unless we can find it on HBO. Then we watch it from our recliner, wake up at the end of the show and say, “Now THAT’S music,” as we gather our pillows and head up the stairs to bed.)

The younger generation thinks midnight is the new sunset. By the time the clock on the mantle strikes 12 at my house, I’ve been in bed long enough to have pillowcase creases on my cheeks. I realized the difference in mindset one wild weekend when The Captain of My Love Boat and I planned an adult extravaganza to keep the current flowing to the old spark plugs. Both of our teenaged sons were gone for the weekend, so with a hot date in mind and free access to the car, we headed out with high hopes and no curfew. Friday night we went to Wal-Mart and bought a box of those nose strips you put on at bedtime so you don’t sound like an asthmatic mountain goat.

We were going to go out to eat, but we were both so tired from the Wal-Mart excursion that we went home, had a peanut butter sandwich and went to bed, where we slept soundly until 2 a.m. when we passed each other in the darkened hallway during bathroom breaks. Thus rested, we were able to venture out to the mall Saturday night where we shared a combo meal at the food court, got a smoothie for dessert and walked to the electronics store to see if the batteries were on sale. Then we went home and went to bed. I woke Bill up about an hour later trying to put one of those nose strips on him without turning on the light. My aim must have been a little off because when I got through, he wasn’t able to close his eyes for the rest of the night.

So let the teenagers have action-packed movie dates at the mall. As for the two of us, we’ll always have WalMart. And a relationship where we stick together like a no-snore nose strip.

Bar None

Man was fearfully and wonderfully made. And God looked at man, rubbed his chin, and said, “Man is lonesome. He needs someone who can remember to put a new bar of soap in the shower.”

So God made woman. A helpmate for the man; someone who could find the mustard behind the milk in the refrigerator. And who could produce two clean, matching socks from dust mites in the air at 6:30 a.m.

And who would emerge from the shower with a $20 hot oil frizz-reduction hair conditioning treatment streaming down her shoulders to locate and unwrap a new bar of soap so that the next person would not have to shower using the last bit of dandruff shampoo as a body scrub.

Only God knows why a man, who can remember the quarterly scores from every Super Bowl from the dawn of civilization to present day replays, cannot remember to replace the soap when he leaves the shower. Somewhere between reaching for the towel and stirring creamer into his coffee, his priorities shift.

But while God is chuckling over the soap sliver bit, woman is in the kitchen raising her hands to heaven and crying, “Lord, never mind the soap. Why can’t man learn to put the twist tie back on the bread? Why does he have to do that twirl and tuck thing with the bread wrapper? You know I hate that.”

And God smiled. “He’s innovative.”

Then woman heads to the laundry room to bring new life to dingy whites and to zap spaghetti spots with her miracle stain remover stick. And she cries to heaven again, “Lord, why can’t he simply place his dirty underwear in the laundry basket? Why must he do that foot-flip snatch and grab act with his boxers? You know I’m expected to applaud every single time he catches them.”

And God nodded knowingly. “He’s creative.”

“Okay, God, I get it. Those little things that make me crazier than a salesclerk on Black Friday are the things he uses to make a better way in life. But just between you and me, God, what about that thing with the remote? Why can’t he leave the TV on one channel for longer than it takes to focus on David Letterman’s tooth gap?”

“Oh, that’s easy, God replied. That’s to keep you from having to watch three straight hours of How to Make Your Own Bait on the Fishing Channel.”

“You ARE wise,” Woman whispered. “Tell me, though. In heaven will he wake up every morning scratching his backside?”

“I’m working on that one,” answered God pensively. “The trouble is we have a problem with everybody staying clean.”

“In heaven?” The woman was astounded. “How can that be?”

“Well,” sighed God. “Everybody’s so busy watching television and looking for the mustard in the refrigerator, that nobody ever remembers to put new soap in the shower.”