Life’s a Funny Old Dog, or Two or Three

Oct15

Dogs have always been integral part of my life. The few times I was between dogs, I marked the days until had one again. If I’m not careful, I find myself preferring the company of dogs to people. They don’t lie, they don’t complain, and they’re always overjoyed to see me come home, even when I’m just returning from the bathroom.

My husband and I love big dogs, and we had three until a few years ago. Eventually, our home turned into an assisted living facility for geriatric dogs. We coaxed them into living another day, each day, until they creaked into their sixteenth and seventeenth years. The dogs weren’t in pain, just very, very old, and we didn’t want to say goodbye. But finally, when they could no longer stand up, we bowed to the inevitable and had them put down. The first time I saw my husband cry was when he came from work to the vet’s office to say goodbye to Smokey, our coffee table-sized old friend.

We didn’t know it at the time, but that marked the beginning of a new dog era for us. On that day, we accidentally switched to small dogs. The first was my mother-in-law’s dog, which came to us when Mom went into a nursing home. Angie, age 15, is an endearingly unattractive little brown dog. She has an overbite and an overbite and eyes that remind me of Yasser Arafat. She actually came to us in the last days of the dinosaur-dogs, and she seemed so little!

Before long, we rescued two more dogs from a bad situation with a relative. Annie, age 14, is an affectionate piece of fluff, mostly shih tzu, not terribly bright but totally adorable. The only male in the group is Taco, age 4, a black-and-white Chihuahua with a Napoleon complex. Angie, all seventeen pounds of her, was promoted to Big Dog, and she glories in her status. The other two are still duking it out for second place.

Admittedly, it’s like living with the Marx Brothers. These dogs provide the comic relief and chaos missing since our kids grew up and left. They are perfect children. I don’t have to worry about turning them into responsible citizens, no one cares about their politics or religion, and they’re always sorry when they mess up.

Angie, Annie, and Taco are impressed with my opposable-thumb adroitness and relative mental superiority.  If they notice my slower step or creaky joints, it just makes them love me more. They know the old girl unintentionally drops more food on the floor these days. My dogs don’t care that my ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower, or that I can’t trace my lineage back much farther than theirs.

The point is, life’s a funny old dog–not pedigreed, not a show dog. Mine resembles Annie and Angie more than Lassie, Taco more than Rin-Tin-Tin.

And I like it just fine.

 

Politically Incorrect

Oct6

I’m fed up with politics. Everywhere I turn are people telling lies and half-truths. I have to check with PolitiFact.com before I can believe anything any politician says. One candidate says he didn’t mean anything he’s said for the past five years. One says if he can raise as much money as his opponent he can win. So, we buy public office now? I’m no innocent. I know you need money—lots of money—to win a campaign, but I’d like to see a few ideas thrown into the pot, too.

My father had no respect for politicians. He defined elections as the process by which we “take some rascals out and put some rascals in.” I always suspected he cleaned up that aphorism a bit for my benefit. He always told my brother he could be anything he set his mind to, except a politician. (We girls were to get married, learn to cook really well, and raise kids. It never entered his head that one of his daughters might go into politics.) My mother never said much about it, but I think she would have disapproved of my becoming a politician for the same reason she disapproved of a career in nursing: I would see naked people. She was inordinately concerned about that.

You know things are bad when you look back with nostalgia at the election of 1960. I was just a kid then, but I could understand the Kennedy-Nixon campaign. It made a lot of sense that some miner in Appalachia asked John Kennedy if, as president, he would obey instructions from the Pope even if he thought they were bad for the country. We were much less politically correct in those days. Today, only a barbarian would question a candidate’s religion, race, or birth certificate. Right? (The Birthers don’ t scare me much. They will, eventually, find out Hawaii is a state, too.)

Politics is inherently full of pitfalls. Nixon lost a lot of ground after his debates with Kennedy, because he looked like a crook on television, which, as it turned out, was type casting. George (Daddy) Bush lost points for what the media called “the wimp factor.” He came across on television as a milquetoast. Frankly, as a former head of the CIA, he certainly had backbone and was dangerous. If you go all the way back to the campaigns of Eisenhower and Stevenson, Adelai Stevenson lost the 1952 election because he came across as too smart, an “egghead.” Only in America are you denigrated for being too intelligent. (At least we seem to have put that issue behind us.) And considering Richard Nixon made the “egghead” comment, we should have been forewarned.

So, when I can’t stand another minute of today’s rhetoric, I’ll remember the good old days and a presidential campaign that was cogent, dignified, incisive, and even inspired memorable poetry:

Since Kennedy says “cawf,” then Johnson must agree,

That a Texas calf is now a “cawf,” as any fool can see.

So when you go to the market, do not snicker and “lawf.”

Just go in and say, to be quite genteel, “Please give me hawf a cawf.”

Twitter-pated

Sep30

In my never-ending quest to catch up with the 21st Century, I attended a Writers League of Texas workshop this weekend, and it was great. “Social Media 101” was taught by author Shennandoah Diaz, who is smart, funny, and not condescending. She raised my technology comfort level in a way unequalled since Carl Sagan almost managed to explain relativity to me on “Cosmos.”

My career spanned years of breathtaking technological advances for the masses. I was amazed when copiers nudged out carbon paper. Then my IBM typewriter lost out to a personal computer and WordStar. Although fearful of change, I had to make a decision: would I get kicked to the curb of the Information Highway and left for dead, or would I pull up my old lady panties and try to keep up?

Fortunately for me, I took up with my husband at a time when most people thought computers were more voodoo than advance. He was a “systems analyst,” which I spent several years defining for friends and family. First he had to explain it to me, and I dutifully memorized his words and repeated them mechanically when necessary. It didn’t really matter that I didn’t understand what he did; very few people did.

Years passed and technology took over: computer terminals, pc’s, copiers, faxes, scanners, laptops, netbooks, smart phones, and above all, the Internet. As a technical secretary at a high tech research consortium, I encountered the Internet before my husband. At that time there was nothing much on it but researchers and academics sharing esoterica. It’s not like you could turn to it to find the location of the nearest chili dog stand or anything of real importance.  For about fifteen minutes, I was actually ahead of my computer-jock husband on matters technical. That wouldn’t last.

Fast forward to now. I’m a writer. It’s no longer enough to write words for the ages; you have to build a media platform. I heard the other day that some employers won’t consider an interview if you don’t have a Facebook page; Shennandoah said there are lots of publishers who look for your Facebook page before they read your manuscript. If you don’ t have a presence on social media, your work of genius gets tossed, because they want writers who have the wherewithal to sell their books, and nowadays that means Facebook, Twitter, and whatever else rises to the top of the media bog thirty minutes from now.

I feel like someone turned up the speed on my treadmill and left me to fend for myself. If you’re reading this, you know I have a website and a blog. I also have a Facebook page. All of these wonders are courtesy of my daughter, who set everything up for me. Well, after all, I taught her to cook and use the bathroom, not in that order. Turnabout is only fair.

The next step will be Twitter, just as soon as I can deal with the idea that I tweet. It may take a while.

Blue and Gold and Shades of Gray

Sep23

My 45th high school reunion is scheduled for the last weekend of October. Aside from the irony of holding it so close to the Day of the Dead, I find the thought of attending somewhat daunting. The last reunion I attended was the tenth.

I’m glad I went to that reunion. Most of the Ugly Ducklings had turned into lovely swans, whereas most of the Popular Kids looked like they’d been drinking heavily for the past ten years. Hmmm. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere.

I attended Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio, the old Blue and Gold, home of the fighting Mules. Cheering for four years for that mascot was equaled only by my next four years when I tried to ignore the TCU Horned Frogs.

I don’t have the kind of high school memories that trigger wistful smiles. My life started at college, and high school was just a prerequisite purgatory. The people I’ve stayed in touch with from that time in my life can be counted on one hand, and still have enough fingers left over to crochet.

There are three factors pushing me to attend. Firstly, the pictures of alumni I’ve seen show benign-looking grandparent-types. How scary can a roomful of senior citizens be, assuming you don’t favor cutting Social Security and Medicare? Secondly, I’ve reached that precarious perch in life where the certainty of being around for the next one is a bit more uncertain. And finally, I won’t get any better-looking from here on out, so I need to let them see me while I’m riding this crest of disintegration.

Sure, I have a few good memories, such as: transforming Dairy Queen slushies into daiquiris by adding ill-gotten rum; getting an invitation to attend Georgetown University, even though I was too afraid to go that far from home; scraping together all the snow deposited in my front yard by a rare snowfall to make a two-foot-tall snow lady, and taking pictures of white-white snow on my very-red Malibu SS.

For the most part, however, I was nerdy and unpopular. I was in some sort of larval stage, waiting for the fun to start. Do I really want to revisit those days? On the other hand, I may go this year and never again. I definitely need to put those years into perspective, deposit those bones in an ossuary and inter them forever in the past.

Now all I have to do is decide whether to ask my long-suffering husband to attend, too. On the one hand, I’d be much less likely to find a comfy corner and stay there. On the other hand, going to someone else’s reunion is second only to watching whale poop settle to the bottom of the Marianas Trench on the Scale of Fascination.

I’ll have to let you know how this turns out.

Droughts and Druthers

Sep16

I’ve been enjoying the latest spate of rainfall. There will always be a part of me, buried deeply under the years, which breathes a sigh of relief every time it rains. Even if we’re in the middle of El Nino plenty, it still looks good to me.

I grew up in Texas during a drought that began in the Fifties and lasted, to the best of my memory, well into the Sixties.  Now when we slip into even a dry spell, much less a bonafide drought like now, something stirs in my brain, and half-remembered images and snatches of overheard adult conversation come back to me.

We weren’t exactly farmers living in a soddy on the Plains. We lived in comfort in San Antonio, but my father was a gentleman farmer and rancher. In Texas, that meant we had “a place” about an hour outside of town that we visited most weekends. My father would hunt, fish, and eventually meet with Felipe, his foreman, to see how the crops and cattle were coming along. During that long, dry time, the cattle herd got smaller and the crops had to be irrigated just to keep them alive.

Not that I worried much about it, since it had no apparent effect on my little life. I was just aware that Daddy got up even earlier than usual, made the first pot of coffee of the day, and doodled numbers on more pages than usual on the Yellow Transit pads his brother gave him. Uncle Charlie was a salesman for YT, having the family gene for selling ice boxes to Eskimos, and replenished my father’s supply when he hunted at the ranch. I could never understand my father’s notes, but when he stopped writing numbers and started drawing boxes filled with criss-crossed lines that resembled the struts of oil derricks, I knew everything was under control, and he would soon start the second pot of coffee that day.

I remember so clearly when that drought broke. I was away at college and had heard on the news that it finally had rained in Central Texas. I called Daddy to congratulate him. It was always good to hear his laconic voice.

“Yeah, it rained three inches down at the ranch. But now we’ve got another problem,” he explained.

“Oh, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Well, the grass has grown up so tall, we’re afraid it’s going to lift the cows up off their feet, and they won’t be able to walk to water.”

If I could see him and read his face, I could usually tell when I had wandered into one of his minefields. But over the phone, he drew me in every time. I heard him chuckle just a bit, and then my mother groaned. She never really appreciated his sense of humor nor his gift for laying verbal booby-traps.

I inherited his sense of humor to a great extent, but I can never quite bring myself to make jokes about that topic. Rain is still very serious business to me. Rather than make a joke, I’m much more likely to smile and whisper, “It’s raining, Daddy!”

Moon, June, Tune

Sep8

I’ve been writing a long time. I used to type up original scripts for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” on my portable Royal typewriter. There are a number of giveaways in the previous sentence showing how long ago that was. Over the intervening years, I’ve written business letters, software user documentation, newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, and even a paean to Benbrook, Texas, that came close to qualifying as fiction. The one genre I’ve studiously avoided is poetry.

I am not a poet. (Picture Richard Nixon striking his pose before boarding the Marine One helicopter to oblivion.) It’s true. Whenever I’ve tried, forced by optimistic English teachers who until they ran into me thought there was a poet in everyone, I failed dismally. No Robert Frost nor Paul Simon am I, nor even the guy who composed the roadside Burma Shave ditties . My poetry most closely resembles limericks and the graffiti in the ladies’ restroom at the House of Pizza in Ft. Worth.

I always had a hard time understanding and interpreting poetry, too. It never said to me what it was supposed to say. A poem, supposedly a statement on the condition of humankind, to me was a commentary on fishing out of season in Bexar County. I dreaded each year when my teacher’s fancy turned to poetry. The poetry test always screwed up my average.

Therefore, it was with resignation I approached last week’s meeting of the San Gabriel Writers League. Our speaker, a poet. I had to be there to take the minutes, so I couldn’t plead a 24-hour case of bubonic plague. I went, determined to make the most of it and just wait for the bell to ring—er, I mean, wait for the meeting to be over.

Instead, I was blown away by Thom Woodruff, aka Spirit Thom, aka Thom World Poet, a somewhat less-than-sane Aussie who proceeded to tear down all my preconceptions about poetry and replace them with a new admiration for those who can put words together in that special way. Before I could hide behind my dignity, I was mimicking his gestures and repeating after him like a Moonie at a revival. It was fun, and more than that, I understood most of his poetry. It is cogent, clever, thought-provoking, and liberating.

Thom performs his poetry. In another time, he would be the storyteller, relating tales worth remembering by firelight, holding his audience in the palm of his hand. The lucky attendees at our meeting were just as rapt, sitting with eyes wide, mouths slightly agape, laughing, gasping, and applauding.  No wonder he’s also known as Thom the Circus.

This wasn’t exactly my first literary rodeo. Yet I was blown away, totally, by this one man’s poetry. If you get a chance to see and hear him, drop everything, put the hamburger meat back in the fridge, and get there as fast as your little feet will go. He’s a must-see, can’t-miss fandango.

http://thomworldpoet.blogspot.com/

 

 

Granny Vigilante

Aug27

As men age, they tend to mellow out, becoming less aggressive. As muscles turn to mush, anger turns to grouch, until they rarely get “all het up” about much of anything. Women, on the other hand, tend to become more aggressive, drawn to violent sports and true crime shows, especially if they contain an element of comeuppance.

If I looked at the demographics for smack-down wrestling and the Murder Channel, my husband’s generic name for the cable channels I often watch, I’d find them chock-full of peri- and post-menopausal women. This is no new phenomenon.

My grandmother and I used to watch wrestling, “live from the Wrestlethon in San Antonio, Texas,” rooting for her favorites and booing the villain of the week. She really got off on the violence. Of course there was little if any real damage done to the wrestlers, and she knew it was all for show. I was only in kindergarten, and we hadn’t studied psychology yet, or I would have pondered her deep-seated anger and explored what caused it. Now I kind of understand.

I only watch true crime shows in which the miscreant is caught and punished. I can’t watch “America’s Most Wanted” for a couple of reasons.  First, I’m left very unsatisfied knowing the criminal is still out there somewhere having fun. Second, everyone I see at the grocery store reminds me of someone featured on the show.

As men chill out, women develop a taste for payback. If you want to hunt down a deadbeat dad, a bank robber, or a war criminal, put an old lady on the trail. Being a bounty hunter, vigilante, or crime-fighting superhero weren’t career choices I remember having when I was young. As a matter of fact, my mother believed there were only two proper occupations for a woman: being a teacher or a nurse. She vetoed nursing for me before I even considered it, because I would come in contact with naked people. She was convinced that if a woman worked at it, she could go her whole life without ever seeing a naked person. I still wonder about that.

Sometimes I think I should start a second (or third or tenth) career as an outside-the-box crime fighter. I like the idea of tracking down despicables, giving them a fair trial followed by a first-class hanging. I can see making “Granny Vigilante” a valid occupation, worthy of its own number for the IRS 1099 form’s occupation box.

First I’d go after the Nazis still living in South America. They aren’t getting any younger, and I think I could catch them in a fair chase. Then I’d go after terrorists and traitors and make them confess. I’d have no need for waterboarding; I’d just schedule a colonoscopy and they’d sing. Finally, I’d hunt down the sadist that brought back pointy-toed shoes. The possibilities are endless.

So move over “CSI” and “NCIS”, and even “Law and Order,” in all its incarnations. There’s a new sheriff in town: Mad Maxine, Granny Vigilante.

An Ounce of Pretension

Aug23

Tennis ball and racket with broken stringI had a near-death experience today. Okay, maybe not near-death but it was definitely unpleasant déjà vu. For a few minutes, I was back in my over-privileged childhood, drowning in a sea of chic I would never achieve. Some people go into anaphylactic shock if they eat peanuts or shellfish. I am vulnerable to yuppie poisoning.

This morning I had to go to the Domain, that self-important shopping center + condos where Austin’s nouveau riche can embrace life on a reservation. Every need is at one’s fake nail-adorned fingertips. From morning latte, to nouvelle cuisine lunch, to popping into Louis Vuitton and Tiffany’s before heading for your pied-de-terre, a condo just a Cadillac-length away, you need never experience the real world. I didn’t see one this morning, but surely a funeral home is in the works.

I grew up in San Antonio, in the Hills of Terrell and the Heights of Alamo. For those of you not from around these parts, that’s where you find Lifestyles of the Rich and Shallow in San Antonio. My parents moved there to guarantee us kids a good education,  still a good reason for living in 78209. But life in ’09, as the natives call it, also guaranteed initiation into a hardcore sense of superiority I never quite bought into.

I had to go to the Dough-main this morning to get something at the only Apple store on my side of town. Actually, I was impressed. The store teemed with customers, or at least personal shoppers for wealthy clients who couldn’t be bothered. I guess if you build it at the Domain, they will come.

Dressing in my usual attire, pants, a Laurel Burch t-shirt with cats, matching LB socks–also with cats–and black canvas mary-janes, I even took a minute to put on make-up and run a brush through my hair, but the people there didn’t seem impressed. I felt I should wear a sign, “I washed me face and ‘ands before I come, I did.” Feelings of kinship with Eliza Doolittle aside, I grew itchier by the moment.

I thought of my father, a self-made man who accrued and lost several fortunes in his lifetime. (The roller coaster unfortunately ended on a down note.) He delighted in wearing khakis to the bank for a meeting or to Gildemeister’s to buy my mother an expensive piece of jewelry. It tickled him when an uninformed clerk or young banker treated him like some hobo who had strayed from his element.

Today I understood my father a little better. There is something beguiling about looking down on people who consider themselves superior. It took a few seconds to clear images of cotillions, Bass Weejuns, and Amory Oliver dance lessons out of my head, as I turned my Kia toward home, gratefully exchanging that idyll for my real life in less fashionable, friendlier digs.

One of my favorite lines from “Steel Magnolias” is, “An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.” Daddy would have approved.

A Chance Encounter

Aug21

Writers with a Sense of Place ClassI recently attended the Writers League of Texas Summer Writers Retreat in Alpine, Texas. This was my second retreat at Sul Ross, and they just keep getting better. Last year Karlene Koen taught me I DID have a book in me and that fiction is not a four-letter word. She is a dear mentor and friend. This year I took Joe Nick Patoski’s class, “Writing with a Sense of Place.” He gifted me with a boost in self-confidence as a writer and the knowledge I really do have a writer’s eye. He is a treasured new friend.

During the week of the retreat, he gave us several writing assignments, and one of my favorites was to write about a character we had met in Alpine. Here is mine.

Every time I come to Alpine I meet what I consider typical characters of the area. I usually meet older people, middle-aged to elderly, just your general grown-up. What makes this trip different is the young man I met on my way to class yesterday.

I work sometimes at an Austin high school, so I’m no stranger to the young’uns of our breed in their adolescent Blunder Years. As I approached the building, I caught sight of a strapping giant of a kid, obviously an undergraduate-type but with the face of a little boy. He looked like a balloon figure of an eight-year-old boy, blown up out of all proportion like the balloons in Macy’s parade. This man-child could have floated easily between Bullwinkle and Popeye on Thanksgiving Day.

He was neatly dressed in the ubiquitous, painfully blue West Texas jeans, definitely not stonewashed Levi’s, and a polo shirt, tucked in, of course. Instead of a backpack, he toted one of those shiny, aluminum briefcases. At first I thought it might hold his lunch, being the appropriate size for a lunch this boy would consume, but I soon realized it was on more serious business.

He got on the elevator with me, although he looked like he could build a staircase, much less use one. I smiled at him, to let him know I wasn’t one of those crabby old ladies, and he immediately grinned back and said, “Good mornin’, m’am.”

I smiled again and returned his greeting. He looked very pleased with the way the conversation was going.

“Are you taking classes here, too?” he asked, a touch of disbelief in his voice.

I explained I was here for a writers retreat and that I had come over from Austin. His face lit up, and he looked like he was going to wag his tail any minute.

“Oh, I’m from San Antonio!” The nascent connection solidified as I told him I grew up there.

The ride up one floor didn’t last nearly long enough, and soon we were wishing each other a good day. As he went down the hall, he looked as if I had made his day, meeting someone from “home” and all. He certainly made mine.

 

Welcome to the Soapbox

Aug15

Janet KilgoreI have lived a long time and hopefully learned a little something from my mistakes. I like to think I learned from the times I got it right, too. One thing I know for sure, the time between achieving wisdom and your death is fleeting. This is why so often a person’s last words are, “Well, crap!”

For several years, a friend and I shared a humor column in a county newspaper. We had a near-perfect venue for observations (rants) on any topic that struck our fancies, and our fancies were constantly under attack. I didn’t appreciate the soapbox until the editor kicked it out from under me. Seems my liberal opinions finally crossed the line and I was history. Admittedly, it didn’t take much; that line lay about two inches from my foot the whole time I wrote for them.

I took a long and torturous route to enlightenment. The first time I could vote for president was 1972, Richard Nixon’s second run for the roses. Within two years, I learned my maiden vote had been squandered on the worst kind of crook, one not smart enough to keep the fact under wraps. I remained traumatized, dubious of my ability to make an intelligent choice, and didn’t vote again for several years.

I awakened from my political sleep about twenty years ago. While I snoozed, many of my fellow citizens had moved politically slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. There was a noisy bunch in my neighborhood hell-bent on banning books at the local high school. They wanted veto power not only for their own children but for everyone else’s. Seems they thought themselves better judges than the teachers of what was age-appropriate literature for the students, even though they had not actually read any of the books in question. Figuring the next stop was a bonfire of books out on the practice football field, I stood up and fought.

I’m still fighting. The issues change along with the fractious factions, but I seem to spend ever-increasing hours fighting the barbarians at my gate. So, with my very first blog I offer you my musings and welcome you to The Soapbox.