Humor

God in the checkout lane ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 5 Comments

In case anyone’s interested in making a pilgrimage, God is currently working as a checker at Schnucks grocery store in Carbondale.

I don’t know his full schedule, but he definitely works Tuesday afternoons. He is older, tall, and African-American, which is germane because he has a rich baritone (or bass?) voice with a timbre I’ve only heard in black men’s voices.

This man sounds more like God than Morgan Freeman does. The first time I met him I didn’t realize he was God. I asked him if he was a singer. Naturally, he is.

Yesterday I met him again. As I was taking my receipt he said, “Now don’t mess up that hair.” I thought he was being sarcastic. My hair was dirty. I was tired and sweating. Even my hair was sweating. “It’s already messed up,” I said. “Naw, it looks good,” he said. “Now don’t mess it up, hear.”

If I could have leaned across the checkout counter I might have kissed him. People simply don’t say this kind of thing to me. Ever. It made my day. Absurdly, I heard myself say, “I’ll try not to.”

If only he’d given me my marching orders when my hair was clean, I could have tried to comply. Really, I could have.  But…I had to wash my hair eventually. Right? So I did. Now it resembles one of the Monkees’ hairstyles, only not cute. Kind of smooth and spherical.

The next time I go to Schnuck’s I’m going to have to avoid God’s checkout lane. I can’t bear to hear a reprimand in a voice more authoritative than Morgan Freeman’s.

What is all this stuff? ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

In giving my nightstand and bathroom cabinets a thorough clean-out tonight, I’ve made some interesting discoveries. For example, I’m relieved to know that I need not fear death by a thousand cuts—at least not if I’m at home—because I own more boxes of Band-Aids than a small hospital, or even a pre-school. I have them in all sizes and shapes, too. Why I own so many Band-Aids is a mystery. I just now opened one whose wrapper was so old it was virtually transparent, and guess what? The adhesive still works.

My Band-Aids will outlive me. What a legacy.

Upon reading the fine print on a never-used bottle of lemon eucalyptus mosquito repellent, I discovered that this benign-sounding concoction is only slightly less alarming than nuclear waste. Warnings abound. Do not so much as wave the box containing the bottle of repellent anywhere in the vicinity of a small child. (I’m paraphrasing.) Wash your hands before, during, and after use; wipe all of the repellent off your arms and legs after you come inside; dispose of any unused repellent at a hazardous waste collection site. (The same place I’ll have to ditch the mercury thermometer I was unaware I still owned.) Could the warnings on a can of Deep-Woods Off be any more dire? Lemon eucalyptus sounds so harmless, but can you say “volatile organic compounds”? No, plants are not always our friends. They gave us aspirin, but they also gave us hemlock. Remember that.

I’ve been picking at this Band-Aid for the last several minutes while I’ve been typing and the damn thing won’t come off. Ouch. There. Do some adhesives actually get stronger with age?

(Regarding mercury thermometers: Really, you don’t want to mess with these. When I was in college, I broke one while trying to shake it down. Hundreds of tiny mercury globules buried themselves amongst my blankets and rolled across the floor. I was aghast. After much labor I corralled them all in a dustpan or something and then disposed of them. But how? I DON’T REMEMBER. There were no hazardous waste collection days back then. Heaven help me, I may have committed water pollution by mercury. Surpassing my astonishment that so many droplets could come out of one thermometer was my fear that I’d die within the week from mercury poisoning. I was an accomplished hypochondriac in those days.)

Beyond the usual collection of expired stuff, I’ve found other oddities. There is, for example, a single condom, which seems to reflect a lack of ambition on my part. It looks lonely; perhaps it’s longing for its natural habitat, a teenage boy’s ratty wallet. It’s hard to tell how old this condom might be, since its packet bears no expiration date. It certainly is nowhere near its prime, but then neither am I. Both of us have outlived our original raisons d’être, I suspect.

I did find an expiration date on my bottle of Chigger-Rid, but I’m not falling for it. Chigger-Rid can’t possibly lose its potency. I mean, it’s basically nail polish sans the truly toxic ingredients, like toluene. No way am I getting rid of Chigger-Rid. It’s worth its weight in gold, and you can’t count on finding it in stock when you’re itching so badly you’d knock over a child on crutches to procure a bottle. You’ve got to have this stuff ready to go as soon as the misery of a chigger bite begins to dig its way into your consciousness. If you wait, you’re courting insanity. (For more on chiggers, see Calvin Trillin’s many anti-chigger screeds, but also this article with a superb double lead I wish I’d written.)

In going through my travel bag I rediscovered a little plastic digital travel clock/alarm that I’ve owned for at least 30 years and that I used on many, many vacations. The display is still working, and working accurately. Yet I know for a fact that I’ve never replaced the battery, which is a Sharp. From what I can tell online, Sharp doesn’t make AAA batteries any more, but if I ever see any, I’m stocking up. (Although my diligent little alarm will never be famous, it puts me in mind of the famous Livermore Light Bulb, the world’s longest-lasting, which has been burning for 113 years and has its own guestbook, website, and webcam.)

Speaking of light bulbs, I found in my nightstand drawer something that I cannot fathom. It’s a cardboard rectangle with a little blister pack containing two tiny things. Each of the tiny things resembles four minuscule beads stacked atop a metal prong. Apparently they’re the world’s tiniest light bulbs, for the cardboard says “2 Bonus Lamps.” It seems quite confident about this. The packaging, which bears only the logo of the American Red Cross, assures me “Belt Holster Included” and “Emergency Preparedness Checklist Enclosed.” Naturally, I found neither a belt holster, nor an emergency preparedness checklist, nor anything into which one would conceivably insert such tiny bulbs (including a belt; indeed, the promise of a belt holster would seem to presume the existence of a belt, but for what?). If anyone can shed some light—a very, very small bit of light will do—on what these bulbs might be for, please let me know. They’re haunting me, and I feel terribly unprepared.

Please stand by ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

To Higher-Ups:

The Technical Team has noted serious technical difficulties with Blog entitled “Vapor and Flow,” with no forward (or backward) movement observed since mid-January. Blog is currently parked in the Driver’s front yard, where it seems to be accumulating trash. Driver has not yet had it put up on blocks, but Technical Team is on alert.

Team suspects a problem with the fuel injection system, though without hands-on investigation it is impossible to tell whether the gasoline tank might simply be empty. Team had noted some juddering of the steering wheel, accompanied by slightly erratic driving, in December and early January, indicating the need for immediate tire rotation and rebalancing. In addition, tires should be checked for wear. Driver has done none of this.

Driver herself, rather than repairing the Blog or addressing various ethical quandaries in her life at the moment, has become obsessed with the dog urine stains in her carpeting and the possibility of replacing the carpeting with something that can simply be hosed down. She daily repeats a monologue that always begins the same way (“I can’t stand this! What am I going to DO?”) and ends the same way (“But how would they move the piano?”). Technical Team estimates that said piano, a tall, ancient upright, weighs slightly more than a Volkswagen Beetle, flower holder included. Unlike a Beetle, the piano would probably not float, although Team finds this an intriguing question and would very much like to be notified of the results of any experiments along these lines. LOL.

Excuse us, that was unprofessional on our part. To continue, Driver also appears obsessed with a new personal best in Scrabble: her highest-ever non-bingo word score (GAZEBO, 84 points). While interesting numerically, this is judged by Team to be a rather trivial achievement in the grand scheme of things and recommends that Driver should just Get Over It.

Excuse us, please ignore editorial comment. Finally, Technical Team notes that on multiple occasions recently Driver has stated that she “dodged a bullet” because the voice student portion of a recent music recital was cancelled. This comment has been flagged for further analysis, but Team can only assume that someone slated to attend said recital was prepared to use firearms in the event of Driver singing. Team has insufficient information to gauge (pun! LOL) the appropriateness of the posited firearm use.

Excuse us again; Technical Team is fatigued and too easily amused. Team judges that Driver is currently earning A’s in Reading and Scrabble (quantity only), D’s in Physical Therapy and Caregiving, and F’s in Voice Lessons (lack of practice), Problem Resolution (dithering), Diet Remediation (inaction), Photography (inaction), and Blog Repair (inaction and negligence). Given this poor functioning, Driver’s hair looks better than might be expected, although Team is not well trained in assessing such matters.

In conclusion, Technical Team advises continued close monitoring of Blog and Driver, with future updates as necessary.

—Submitted February 23, 2014, ungodly hour of the morning
(Technical Team wishes to note that it has worked overtime on this report and would like to be duly compensated. Thank you.)

Steve ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 3 Comments

Note: This is a very long post, but for me it is a necessary tribute and a necessary corollary to an earlier post. A handful of Facebook friends will have read parts of this essay on the FB memorial page I set up for Steve.

In my post Into the Confessional I talked about the death of my second husband from alcoholism and my responsibility for his death. But “alcoholic” carries such profoundly negative connotations that it obscures the person who suffers from the disease. I would hate for anyone to think “Steve = alcoholic.” He was smart, funny, creative, nice—and a true original who had more peccadillos than an armadillo (one of our favorite animals). I’ve never known anyone like him.

Steve was the type of person who always stopped for road-crossing turtles and moved them where they were going, no matter how much peril this entailed for our own car. He loved animals, all animals. In his last few years he became a vegetarian, a choice that perplexed his parents and took them about three years to accept. He had a multi-volume animal encyclopedia that he often browsed through, and he’d frequently show me a picture of something like a naked mole rat or a fennec and insist, “I need one!” I liked the animals he showed me too, but I had to tell him no, which made him pout.

Steve, age 32

Steve, age 32

In the early 1980s Steve co-managed a used-record store in St. Louis and then one here in Carbondale. He was an expert on rock, jazz, and avant-garde classical music in particular. As a young man, he worked for a time as a janitor; with a St. Louis friend, he recorded three albums under the name The Janitors. He came to believe that Bach’s cantatas were the most sublime music ever written, but he also loved the Beatles with almost equal passion.

Most people seemed to recognize right away that Steve was a good-hearted person. Here was one act of generosity: Once when he was at the vet’s with our dog Sammy, a young client discovered she had no money to pay her bill. Steve offered to cover the charges. Our vet didn’t let him, but she often speaks of that gesture. On the other hand, Steve was capable of crimes against humanity, or at least music browsers. He was fond of telling me about the time at the St. Louis record store when he played Yoko Ono’s screechiest LP at top volume for 12 hours straight. Apparently not too many people browsed the bins on that day. It’s a wonder the store stayed in business, but it did well with Steve in charge.

Taken together, these two anecdotes epitomize the fact that Steve was a paradox. He was kind to people, yet he generally didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought about his actions. Nor did he mind making people feel uncomfortable or even driving them temporarily insane. In music, he had a tremendous capacity for loudness, dissonance, and the avant-garde. In his personal life, it was just the opposite. The modern world was too “noisy” for him—too many aggravations, impediments, hassles, and impositions for him to easily endure. He frequently said that he was born a few centuries too late.

He could never have been married to a normal, talkative, high-energy person. Whenever I became somewhat animated or enthusiastic in conversation, he accused me of “fizzing and popping.” I’m not sure if I ever pointed out that many of his LPs consisted largely of fizzing and popping, but he knew there were certain ones that he could play at top volume only when I was out of the house. These LPs stressed me out, but Steve enjoyed them and I think they helped him cope with stress.

Steve also used The Weather Channel as a calming agent—this in the days before the endless sensationalistic series it now favors. Often The Weather Channel was on at our house for hours, yet neither of us ever seemed to know the forecast. One morning we blearily watched the “Local on the 8s,” then looked at each other and said in unison, “Did you catch that?”

Steve was not materialistic. He bought used books and used records and little else. Eventually he did start amassing a CD collection, which burgeoned when he began an endeavor to Acquire Every Bach Cantata Ever Recorded (more than 200 are extant). He meticulously kept track of this project on sheets of graph paper. After his death I kept the papers, but let most of the CDs go. The sheer number—more than 80—was just too overwhelming to deal with in the midst of the hundreds of other CDs, LPs, and tapes he owned.

Steve liked the fact that he was born on the same date that Shakespeare was (probably) born. April 23 also is World Book Day, which seems appropriate. Steve loved books. He used to buy arcane, ratty old paperbacks—nonfiction, usually on history, philosophy, or art—for a quarter or so at the library book sales. If he spent more than a quarter, you knew it was something that he really wanted. Kurt Vonnegut was the major exception to this thriftiness. Steve would spring for a hardback when a new Vonnegut book came out, if I hadn’t already given it to him for a present.

Steve, age 48

Steve, age 48

Some other people and things that Steve liked: Bertrand Russell, Douglas Adams, Monty Python, Star Trek, Nick Drake, Eric Dolphy, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Jan Garbarek, Glenn Gould, chopped garlic slathered on thin-crust pizza, Sriracha Rooster hot sauce, desert boots (remember those?), black T-shirts, Asian paintings, African sculpture and masks, found objects used as art objects (I’ve kept a small green sewer lid he found before we were married), “Barney Miller,” “The Andy Griffith Show” (and its theme song, which he recorded onto a tape loop), Woody Allen, independent and foreign films, really bad movies (he called these “Liberty” movies, after the decrepit Liberty Theater in a nearby town, which showed mostly really bad movies for a dollar admission), “High Plains Drifter,” Sophia Loren, Heath Bar Blizzards, pocket watches instead of wristwatches, minimalism in almost every area of life, porches, trees (he couldn’t bear to see a tree cut down), and National Geographic, especially the maps they sometimes included.

A born nature lover, Steve had his happiest times during high school and college when he and his friend Perry hiked all over southeast Missouri and southern Illinois. Certainly Steve and I had our best days during vacation trips. I loved showing him places that were close to my heart from family vacations, but even better was traveling where neither of us had been before—like Craters of the Moon National Park, in Idaho, or New Hampshire’s Kancamagus Scenic Highway in the fall. Steve’s favorite states were Maine and New Mexico, along with the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The remoteness was part of their appeal, I think. Had we ever made it to Alaska, I’m not sure I would have gotten him back to southern Illinois.

Fully half of Steve’s utterances to me came from other sources. Many of his favorite expressions were used by a subset of guys his age who were smart, deeply weird, and lovers of Monty Python and early Saturday Night Live. Some expressions were Steve’s own, and some I never have found sources for. Whenever I’m talking with someone, Steve-isms constantly fly out of my mouth, as if I’m channeling him. Here are just a few of the things that I heard a lot:

  • “Well, I can go to bed now, I learned something today.”
  • “I wasn’t expecting a sort of Spanish Inquisition!”
  • “Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!”
  • “Evil, wicked, mean, and nasty.”
  • “42” (said to me with infuriating frequency whenever I asked him a question; Google it if necessary)
  • “Make up your feeble mind.”
  • “My hovercraft is full of eels.”
  • “The wrong side of town” (i.e., anything across the railroad tracks from our house, since that meant he could be caught by a train when running an errand there)
  • “Brrrr cold rays!” (when it was cold outside)
  • “I win!” (the sum total, start to finish, of Steve’s favorite game was simply to say “I win!”)

One original expression of Steve’s that I found hilarious was the time he referred to dog food as “proto-poop.” (Perhaps you had to be there.) Another time our neighborhood association was discussing the party noise coming from a rental house and Steve said to a friend of ours, “Maybe we could burn a boogie deck on their front lawn.” That still makes me laugh.

A quotation often directed at me was “Are you talking Pig Latin? What do all of those words mean?” (from the Dilbert cartoon in which Dogbert is answering the phone at a call center). Any number of circumstances could trigger that one. A saying that I came up with myself (to the best of my knowledge) was “I don’t have to talk to you and I don’t have to not talk to you.” Steve adopted this one immediately and later attempted to claim authorship of it. He was also very much into saying that he was going to copyright the word “the” so that he’d be rich and wouldn’t have to work anymore.

I miss all of this nonsense tremendously. Steve kept his private thoughts just that—private—so to a large extent these and a hundred other like expressions WERE Steve for me.

Academically, Steve was a psychology and philosophy double-major, and he was a special fan of Greek philosophy. This nearly crippled our marriage. One of the most exasperating things about Steve was that I couldn’t get him to discuss problems or to work through fights. Such “conversations” quickly derailed, with Steve heading one way, making intense, incomprehensible statements about Plato, while I headed another, usually trying to persuade him that he needed to take more initiative about things.

Steve’s tragedy was that he didn’t know what to do with his life. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. Instead, as a master’s student, he racked up what probably still stands as the highest number of incompletes in the history of SIU’s philosophy department. So he worked as a secretary (a high-stress job, as anyone who’s ever been a secretary knows). When he hyperventilated on the way home from work one day, I suggested that he take a year off work and paint, which is what he really liked to do.

He knew a great deal about art, and though few people saw his work, he was an excellent painter of abstract compositions. So he quit work, painted a great deal, and eventually submitted some slides to a top Chicago gallery. Unfortunately, this was equivalent to a writer shooting for publication in The New Yorker right off the bat. He was rejected, but the gallery owner wrote him a note saying that he found the paintings interesting and to let him know if Steve was going to be showing his work in the Chicago area.

This outcome was kind of like winning second prize in the lottery: not what you’d hoped for, but pretty damn good. I knew this from my days of sending out poetry manuscripts to little journals (not The New Yorker), and I told Steve he had netted quite a compliment. But Steve never sent slides to a gallery again. When I began entering photographs in juried art shows in the region, I encouraged him to do the same. You need to build up a résumé to approach major galleries, I told him. No dice. Rejection, I think, just felt too risky to Steve, and it was easy for him to get his back up—especially when he knew his work was good.

And it was good. I still have two big Hollinger boxes full of Steve’s paintings (his medium was undiluted watercolor on paper). His parents took what I call the Rorschach approach to abstract art. Confronted with one of Steve’s paintings, they complimented it but would try their hardest to find something in it that resembled a real-world scene or object. In her mid-70s, Steve’s mom took a watercolor class and quickly showed a lot of talent at representational painting. So a few years after Steve and his dad died (both in 2008), I hauled the Hollinger boxes down to her and let her choose any paintings she wanted to keep. She may not like abstract art very much, but on some level she gets it. Damned if she didn’t pick some of the very best ones.

Steve, age 49

Steve, age 49

A much better cook than I was, Steve made great omelets and an excellent chunky marinara sauce with green peppers, mushrooms, and onions. But some things eluded him. He made several attempts at homemade pizza, but the crust never came out right. One Christmas his parents gave him a bread machine, which led to a couple of near-disasters, which led to the giving-away of the bread machine. And as many times as he tried, his homemade hummus never tasted like the kind in restaurants. But most of what he made was delicious.

Steve was less attentive to his appearance than just about anyone I’ve ever met. When his parents expressed their disapproval (“Why don’t you take some pride in how you look?”), he reminded them of what the Bible had to say about pride. (He was an atheist, but couldn’t bring himself to tell his Southern Baptist parents.) Steve felt he was unattractive—I never could convince him otherwise—and I think he just trained himself not to care. In the profile picture I posted on his Facebook memorial page (see above), his beard is neatly trimmed, but in the early years of our marriage it was long, skimpy, and scraggly, so that he looked a bit like an underfed Scots-Amish farmer.

The profile picture also shows Steve’s beloved hemp hat. He found these hats at the Neighborhood Co-op, and I bought one too. He loved this hat so much, he would have slept in it if he could have. He wore his winter and summer, outdoors and indoors, day and night, virtually 24/7, for years, until the sweat stains made it look as if he’d spit tobacco juice over the whole thing. Then holes developed where the brim attached. Finally even I couldn’t stand it, and I gave him my own hat, which I seldom used (too warm). He wore it sometimes but frequently reverted back to the Hat From Hell. The hat made Steve instantly recognizable on campus and in Carbondale generally.

On the rare occasions nowadays when I see a tall, thin guy wearing a similar kind of hat, my heart stops momentarily. I’m thinking it always will.

The cheesecake ~

/ Marilyn Davis / Leave a comment

My second husband and I started dating in February 1984. By the time Steve’s birthday was approaching a few months later, I knew that he wasn’t a big dessert fan but did love cheesecake. So I borrowed a spring-form pan, determined to make him an authentic New York–style cheesecake.

As soon as that notion solidified into a definite ambition, my radar should have been on alert. I had once tried to make a special dessert—special only in the sense that I didn’t really bake, so everything was a challenge—for my first husband. We had married in January 1979 but hadn’t been able to live together until May. I had no obligations until graduate school started in August. But FH had to work that summer so that we had money to live on. Figuring that it was my responsibility, in return, to fix our meals, I spent a lot of time browsing through cookbooks. (This despite the fact that I’d never liked cooking or shown any natural talent for it.)

At some point I’d learned that FH liked custard pies. I looked up a recipe and saw that I had all of the necessary ingredients except for nutmeg. Since FH needed our car to get to work, I was without transportation. But I didn’t want to wait, and I wanted to surprise him. So in the summer heat, I walked a mile round-trip to buy nutmeg at the nearest grocery store.

Mixing the pie filling seemed to go well. When I poured it into the ready-made pie crust, it was almost brimming. (Yes, ready-made pie crust. Even as an ambitious new wife I wasn’t crazy enough to tackle pie crust.) No, I didn’t forget to put in the nutmeg. And I’d been careful to preheat a cookie sheet along with the oven. With high hopes, I slid the pie onto the cookie sheet and went back into the living room to read.

Shortly thereafter I heard a sonic-boom–like sound and knew immediately what had happened. Despite my precautions, the cookie sheet had flexed. I opened the oven door a crack and peeked. The pie was now sitting at a jaunty angle, with the filling touching the outer edge of the crust on one side of the pan and at low tide on the other side. Absurdly, I couldn’t figure out anything to do about this. I knew if I touched the pie the filling would spill. So I decided to just leave it alone.

When the pie was done baking, it resembled something a three-year-old might concoct. The surface slanted crazily, with a huge, nearly burnt surface bubble covering half of the pie pan and almost all of the custard on the other half. FH was game enough to eat the thing, or try to, but it wasn’t the pie of his dreams, unless he was having nightmares.

Consequently, I should have been alert to the potential for future baking disasters. But I’d forgotten about the custard pie incident in my determination to make Steve a cheesecake.

I didn’t have to walk to the store for anything this time, which was just as well. I was both a novice and a klutz, and making cheesecake turned out to be an aerobic exercise. For one thing, I didn’t have a stand mixer. My hands, which were scrawny and weak, almost didn’t survive the experience.

I also am a slow person in the kitchen. It took a ridiculous amount of time, something around 2 1/2 hours, for me to assemble the nascent cheesecake. Pressing the crust alone seemed to take half of the afternoon. I was afraid the ingredients would spoil before I got it into the oven. Just how long could that cream cheese mixture sit out without going bad, or at least surly? But I was too deep into this project to turn back. I ignored my concerns, pressed on, and finally got the damn thing into the oven.

What I ended up with was, by golly, a New York–style cheesecake. Except…heavier. The finished product had the approximate weight and density of a neutron star. Flung like a Frisbee, it would have been a deadly weapon.

Surprisingly, it tasted pretty decent. But it was so thick it took some effort to eat a slice, and so rich that I’m surprised it didn’t kill us on the spot. I kept thinking of Woody Allen’s line, written in reference to eating a slice of cheesecake, about feeling his aorta congealing into a hockey puck. We couldn’t even finish it. This marked the first time for either of us that we actually threw away part of a cheesecake—something that normally would have been unthinkable.

I had learned my lesson. From then on, Steve got bakery cheesecake for his birthday. (All gratitude to Cristaudo’s, our wonderful local bakery.)

I’ve dated a couple of guys since Steve died, but both were diabetics and had to go easy on sweets. Even if they hadn’t been, I never would have been tempted to make them some special dessert. Depression is mostly a bad thing, but it does help you thwart unrealistic ambitions. In fact, I’ve been living in my current house for three years, and I don’t even know if the oven works. I’ve never turned it on.

The woman and the wasp ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 3 Comments

One of the many bits of wisdom parents perpetrate on their children is this one: “If you leave it alone, it’ll leave you alone.”

This is a blatant lie, especially where stinging insects are concerned.

It is true, of course, that you’re at much greater risk of harm if you provoke a bee or yellow-jacket or some related critter. When my sister was about three years old, she was riding her tricycle down the alley when she tipped it over directly into the path of a bee, thus simultaneously bagging two highly improbable achievements. The bee, of course, promptly stung her, but who could blame it? It was just cruising along minding its own business. A bee doesn’t expect a tricycle to suddenly come toppling into its flight path.

My sister soon got her revenge, though. One early summer evening my dad called me and my mom to the back screen-door of our house. Our tiny lawn was filled with clover, and hence with bees. My sister, who was forced to wear heavy orthopedic shoes when she was young,  had discovered that she could kill the foraging bees by stomping on them. Very possibly Dad suggested the idea; if so, she carried it out effectively and ruthlessly. She was stomping with glee; Dad, delighted and impressed, was snickering with approval; and Mom and I were staring at both of them like they were crazy.

Our family had no more run-ins with stinging insects until several years later, when I was a teenager. In the early 1970s Mom and Dad bought five acres of land with an old two-room house on it. This was just outside Perryville, Mo., the town where my grandparents lived, and it was intended as a weekend retreat. The house had electricity but no running water. There was an outhouse and a cistern, a small yard with an old wire fence, a chicken shed, and an enormous dump. (The ancient farmer who’d owned the property had just chucked all of his trash, from food cans to rat poison, over the backyard fence. For years. But that has nothing to do with this story.)

The cistern, it’s important to mention, didn’t last much longer. Two miles away, blasting for Interstate 55 was taking place. As most dedicated cavers know, Perry County is basically a huge chunk of limestone riddled with caves and sinkholes. One weekend we arrived at the house to find a big, deep pit at the back corner of the house where the cistern had been. Dad didn’t bother to fill it in or cover it. I think he may have put up a token sawhorse between the side door and the cistern hole, in case someone had to get up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse.

Anyway. The house itself came equipped with virtually nothing except wasps. It had a narrow, fairy-tale–like door that gave onto steep steps that led up to a small attic. Up there lived a veritable wasp society, possibly composed of multiple colonies. But this menace could be dealt with by simply never opening that tight-fitting door. The real problem was the porch, where an especially aggressive colony of red wasps had set up housekeeping in one corner. These wasps would come after you if you so much as looked their direction, and often if you didn’t. Unfortunately, whether you were inside or outside the house, you couldn’t get to the car or the rest of the property without passing the porch.

No matter how much I pleaded, Dad wouldn’t get rid of the colony. I gave these wasps as wide a berth as possible. “If I leave them alone, they’ll leave me alone,” I would chant to myself sardonically as they made threatening forays.

One day the wasps apparently had had some sort of bitter family dispute, and they were more pissed off than usual. I was walking cautiously in the yard toward the front of the house, so far away from the porch that I was practically scraping the rusty old fence. Maybe 12 feet away. Maybe 15.

It wasn’t far enough. One of the wasps zeroed in on me at warp speed and landed in my hair, which was extremely thick and long. I started running when I saw the wasp coming, but I didn’t have a chance. When I felt it tangling in my hair I flailed around with my hand to try to get it out. Instead, I accidentally closed my fist over it. In the midst of this mayhem, I had time to be impressed by the stone-like solidity of its body. Then a needle-sharp heat shot through my palm.

Meanwhile I was still tearing around the house. As I rounded the back corner, the cistern hole suddenly loomed directly in front of me. I’d forgotten about it. Like a palsied football player, I leaped sideways with a graceless lurch and almost ricocheted off the chicken shed. Still running, I managed to fling myself through the side door of the house. Somewhere along the way the wasp had escaped to live another day. Thank god only one of them had gone on the warpath. Since, unlike my sister, I’d never been stung by so much as a honeybee, I was unprepared for the amount of pain a wasp sting can cause.

That was some 40 years ago. My wasp phobia has abated somewhat. For a time, in my mid-twenties, I lived alone and therefore had to deal with any wasp problems without help. I lived in the second story of a house—essentially a large, finished attic, which had some little doors leading to unfinished storage spaces. Wasps lived in those spaces, and periodically one would squeeze through into my territory.

A coward to the bone, I didn’t know if I was more afraid of the wasps or of the toxic bug spray I needed to kill them. So I invented a different solution. Whenever I spied a wasp, I grabbed my bottle of 409, set it to “Stream,” and hit the wasp with a jet of liquid from as far away as possible. My aim, focused by adrenaline, was pretty good. The detergent in the 409 would gunk up the wasp’s wings, disabling it just long enough for me to move in with a blunt object for a safe kill. Then it was simply a matter of wiping up the 409. (My apartment was unusually clean in certain sectors.)

Anyone who’s afraid of wasps—or bug spray—is free to use this method. You’re welcome. Use at your own risk, however. Remember, it only works on one wasp at a time. Don’t try to wipe out a nest with 409 or everyone will deem you an idiot, assuming you live to tell the tale. And if for some reason you fail at this method, or if wasps have evolved a detergent defense over the past few decades, don’t sue me.

Also, when it comes to wasps, don’t ever tell your kids that if they leave it alone, it’ll leave them alone. Tell them to leave it alone and get the hell away.

Doggerel no. 4: Dating sites ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 3 Comments

Over the past four years or so I’ve become an old pro at dating sites. I’ve tried OkCupid, Match.com, OurTime, and eHarmony (the worst!). I recently gave Match another half-hearted try because of a half-price deal. But I’ve become aware that dating sites have a dark underbelly that I can no longer stomach.

It isn’t the danger of encountering sexual predators or other psychopaths. You can protect yourself pretty easily if you heed the recommended precautions. No, the danger is psychological: if you aren’t popular, you must be thick-skinned enough to cope with rejection every single day.

You must be especially thick-skinned if you’re thick-bodied. I garnered considerably more interest on dating sites when I was considerably thinner. Now, after six years of depression and relative immobility, I’m nowhere close to the body type or fitness level desired by 95 percent of the men out there. Over and over I read “Slender; Athletic and toned.” Sometimes a generous guy will include “About average,” whatever that is these days. Let’s just say I fall much closer to the other end of the spectrum.

I’ve passed by many interesting profiles because of this phenomenon. As for my own current profile (which does not specify “Slender” or “Athletic and toned”), it seems to be floating in an unpopulated sector of cyberspace. Occasionally I wonder if it has in fact been rendered somehow invisible to everyone but me.

When you experience rejection every day, you begin to hear the echoes of a hundred No’s in your head. Over time those echoes grow louder, until your self-esteem is shot and you yank your profile from the dating site in disgust. Nothing much to do about this humiliating experience other than write some doggerel.

Zip, Nada, Zilch; or Those Dating Site Blues

“Slender, average, athletic and toned”
Is all that the guys on the dating sites seek.
Even the chubby men, even the grubby men
Don’t want an overweight woman in reach.
What about intellect? What about heart?
I can make sweet conversation an art.
Yet most of the time, a fleshier gal
Is completely rejected as even a pal.

I try to be patient and just let things be,
But all of the silence discourages me.
Is this natural selection at work in my case
To keep my potential from reaching first base?
I’m still on the field, but I’m pretty done in.
Might be time to give up and leave love to the slim.

It takes a village ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 2 Comments

I don’t know about raising children, since I haven’t had any. My family was so insular, I don’t think I had a village growing up, unless you count my teachers and my pediatrician.

But I do know this: It takes a village to sustain a late-middle-aged, debilitated, single homeowner who’s clueless about fixing things. My village comprises a great many support people, by whom I mean people that I pay to help me keep my life in order.

All of us lucky enough to live above the poverty line have some people, of course. We have doctors and dentists. Some of us have shrinks and even more of us have therapists. Most of us have car mechanics and hairdressers or barbers.

Oh, for the simple life. The other day someone knocked on the door. It turned out to be My Realtor, bearing a beautiful large poinsettia. She sold my last house and helped me buy this one. Neither transaction was big enough to warrant the poinsettia, but I’m guessing realtors in this town are having a tough time as university enrollment keeps going down. I’d long ago decided that if I ever sell this house I plan to use her again. So, astonishingly, I have a realtor.

I also have a housekeeper. Probably hundreds of people around here have housekeepers, but most of them work or are over 70. I’m just weak. So when I have to refer to this person in conversation, you’d think I had a chicken bone stuck in my throat. How it comes up in conversation when I find myself in so few conversational situations is a mystery, yet it does. Often I find myself referring to T. as “the woman who cleans my house for a couple of hours every other week,” which is an awfully long ride on the merry-go-round. Yet to call her My Housekeeper sounds so…possessive. So elitist. So needy.

That’s not all. There’s also My Lawn Guy (who doubles as My Gutter-Cleaning Guy), My Tree Guy, My Garage Door Guy, My Handyman, My Electrician, and My Piano Tuner. The last three would have no idea that I consider them in this vein, since it’s been two or three years since I called any of them. But I intend to use them again, so there you go. I recently acquired My Carpet Cleaner (a man, not a machine) and My Snow-Shoveling Duo (a young man and woman much friendlier than the tough-looking guys in scruffy pickups who usually drive in from the country to shovel driveways after a snowfall).

Then there’s My Roofer. He has probably repressed the memory of me and my last house, which developed a series of bizarre leakage and mold problems that required patches, eventual re-roofing, a ridge vent, and a specially designed series of vents around the chimney. (I will write about this house someday when I’m sure I can hang on to my emotional equilibrium. I’ve referred to it elsewhere in this blog as the house that hated me.)

When I was working, I had My Massage Therapist (who was also my friend and a former co-worker). For well over a decade he kept me able to work despite painful tendinitis in my wrists and elbows. Eventually he talked me into acquiring My Rolfer, who also helped a great deal. But My Massage Therapist abandoned me to head the local community college’s massage therapy program, and after I quit work I could no longer afford My Rolfer. For three weeks last year I had My Personal Trainer, until I realized that he was going to kill me. Not on purpose, but still. It turned out that I was already too debilitated for My Personal Trainer’s lowest level of assistance. So far I’ve avoided needing My Caregiver, but I figure that’s next unless I can be my own personal trainer.

I have no need for an accountant, but I like My Lawyer, although I don’t like her law firm’s fees very much. Soon I may gain My Financial Consultant, whom I hope I won’t have to consult very often. Once would be enough, really. I can’t see the fabled one percent through a telescope from where I sit, but because I had to retire early and because my sister is disabled, I need to be fiscally prudent.

I even have people for after I die: My Funeral Home. Last summer I was getting things in order so that my death would cause my sister as little burden as possible. I’ve been terrified of death since I was a little girl, so when I decided to move on this, I did it fast. Within the space of an hour, I realized that I needed a “pre-needs” contract, called the funeral home, found that I could meet with them immediately to set up a contract, did just that, and returned. It may have been the fastest pre-needs transaction in the funeral director’s experience.

It was one of those days when I’m always on the verge of tears, and on such days I usually behave strangely. More strangely than usual, that is. I kept stressing that I needed a contract immediately. The assistant, a skinny, prematurely wrinkled woman with jet-black hair and several layers of makeup (practice?), summoned the funeral director, to whom I again stressed the urgency of the situation. They seemed surprised that someone so young wanted a contract. I knew I just wanted (pardon the language) a bare-bones agreement, no service, no urn. A fast reader, I blazed through the cremation contract, had them make a couple of changes, thrust a check at them, gave them my prewritten obit, and made sure my sister wouldn’t have to do anything.

As the assistant guided me through the labyrinth of rooms to the front door, the tears started in earnest. She asked if I was all right. For some reason I cannot train myself to simply answer this question with “Yes” or “I’m fine.” I seem to have a sort of hyper-honesty genetic mutation that results in some unfortunate, peculiar, or embarrassing answers. “I’m not well,” I said stiffly, and made a break for my car, undoubtedly leaving the woman convinced that I had a terminal illness and that they’d be firing up the furnace any day.

So I’m pretty well covered. I feel bad that I’m so incompetent and that my village is so big. On the other hand, it is pleasingly amiable and few of its members get called upon very often. I comfort myself with the thought that there’s an entire ritzy support tier that I’ll never have to have, nor could I afford. I don’t have a gardener (or a garden), a pool guy (or a pool), or a horse boarder (or a horse). I don’t have a chauffeur, an interior decorator, a party planner, a social secretary, or a chef (I need one). Although my friends may regret it when they see how I’m dressed, I don’t have, god forbid, a personal shopper.

And I don’t have, I’m happy to say, a ghostwriter. For better or worse, where this blog is concerned it’s just me on the loose taking a walk outside my village.

Doggerel ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 1 Comment

I’ve decided to delete my Doggerel page. Since it doesn’t allow posts, no one ever knows if I’ve added anything there. So I’ll just incorporate poems as posts on my Home page. Here are the three poems I had on the Doggerel page. I shouldn’t call it doggerel; it’s really light verse. Both share an emphasis on regular meter and rhyme schemes, but doggerel is clichéd and usually saccharine. Light verse, at its best, is exemplified by Lewis Carroll and Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker, masters whom I could not begin to approach but whose cleverness I greatly admire.

––––– Aug. 28, 2013
I posted a link on Facebook to an article about pufferfish and the beautiful circular patterns they make in the sand. After a friend admitted having eaten fugu (pufferfish), I wrote this.

On Fugu

I understand the pufferfish
Will make a most delicious dish.
But if your chef is none too swell
And cuts that fish up none too well,
You’ll soon find that your lovely lunch
Will pack a fatal-istic punch.

––––– Aug. 28, 2013
This poem was written for a plant biology professor after his return from a research trip to Romania.

On Romania

Romania’s a lovely place
With Vlad so long deceased.
But Hollywood, with sex in mind,
Won’t let Drac rest in peace.
A vampire here, a vampire there,
And soon you’ve got a coven.
The things they do sure seem to be
Some bloody twisted lovin’.

––––– Aug. 28, 2013
I originally posted this poem to my Facebook page; hence the title and the jargon.

Facebook Fantasia

Some knight on a quest may encounter my wall.
He’ll scale to the top, though it be very tall.
He’ll sure-foot each solid and each wobbly brick,
Take note of each petroglyph, cranny, and nick.
Oh my, he may think, even at my ripe age
I must friend the woman who fosters this page.
We’ll happily share all our ones and our zeros
And pledge to be each other’s sweet cyber-heroes.
I’ll let my fantasies take me this far,
For love at its core is a binary star.

My brushes with celebrities ~

/ Marilyn Davis / 5 Comments

Most ordinary folks, meaning non-wealthy, non-paparazzi types, probably have had brushes with famous people—unexpected sightings of celebrities, the chance to shake a president’s hand, that sort of thing. Probably not many ordinary folks, however, have come close to inadvertently assaulting a famous person.

Embarrassingly, I am one of the few. I’m not proud of it.

Many, many years ago, Steve and I were in Washington, D.C. on vacation. One thing we did was to go to the Phillips Collection—a small museum in a large brick house—to see an exhibit of Bonnard and Vuillard paintings (if you don’t know ’em, it’s worth your while to look ’em up). The museum was deserted, with just one or two other visitors browsing the rooms. I tend to be a somewhat aimless viewer at times, and for some reason in that uncrowded setting I abruptly crossed a room to reexamine a certain painting.

Somehow I found myself virtually shouldering aside an older, stouter, taller woman who seemed rather put-upon. This near-collision happened very quickly—where had she come from?—and I excused myself amidst an impression of white hair, pearls, well-tailored clothing. As I moved away, I thought, “That woman is a dead ringer for Barbara Bush.”

Then I noticed that black-suited men wearing discreet earpieces had materialized at the doors to the gallery, and I looked more closely. Holy crap. I had damn near knocked down the First Lady.

How did I feel, besides clumsy and stupid? Lucky, very lucky, not to have been tackled or tasered by any of the black-suited men. (Actually, tasers probably hadn’t been invented when the first George Bush was in office.) How did the Secret Service guys know I was harmless? Despite the apparent beeline I had made toward Mrs. Bush, I must have seemed too obviously oblivious.

But the fun wasn’t over. It quickly became clear that the director of the Phillips Collection was giving Mrs. Bush a personal tour of the exhibition. Once I realized what was going on, I stayed well away. Steve, however, chose to deliberately interpose himself between Mrs. Bush and a painting she was looking at. His position was that he was just as important as she was. Well, of course he was. But my position, which I hissed at him after I witnessed this scene, was that, regardless of social equality issues, he was being rude. Also reckless, given the presence of the men in black.

All in all, it’s amazing that we weren’t both promptly escorted out of the building. The Secret Service rose in my estimation, since they somehow intuited that Steve and I were merely annoyances and not threats.

I have had one other brush with celebrity, but that brush was strictly figurative. I thought this one would have made Steve envious, but it didn’t. John Waters, whom Steve semi-revered, came to talk at the SIU Student Center. Waters’s movies aren’t my thing, but I figured he’d be entertaining. So I went while Steve, inexplicably, stayed at home.

I was almost late, and I took a little-used front entrance at the end of the building. This entrance doesn’t lead to the ground floor; it leads to escalators going up to the second floor, where all the ballrooms had been opened up for the talk (a large crowd was expected). No one else was around at this entrance; I was alone. But as I walked to the escalators, I noticed a little niche where an exit door from an auditorium was inset, and there was John Waters, pacing and smoking a cigarette. Illegally, of course. Well, the pacing was legal.

He was alone as well, with no handlers or Student Center staff protecting him. He was wearing a brown suit and bright orange leather shoes in some sort of alligator pattern. He looked nervous, reclusive, and not particularly happy to be where he was. Our eyes met very briefly. What an opportunity! Me and John Waters, by ourselves. I could have told him that I liked his writing (true). Or asked for an autograph. But I couldn’t bother the man two minutes before his talk, and what really could I say that would matter to him? “My husband likes your movies so much he owns a John Waters comb” (a PR item obtained for Steve by a close friend)? No. I think I nodded slightly. Then I just went on.

The cigarette did him good; he pulled it together before he took the stage. I had a seat in the far reaches of the ballrooms, so I couldn’t see if he still looked unhappy. But he was very funny in his wonderfully snarky way. And I’m very proud of not having come close to injuring him.