SUNDAY MORNING VIEW

Ahhhh...Sunday morning on the patio. Digging my surroundings, reading the newspaper, slurping from a cup of hot coffee, and Big Bore bringing me out a plate of pancakes. And, yes, I dripped syrup all over my sweatshirt with the very first bite!

OLD FRIENDS

When I was semi-ready to finally leave college back in 1972, I took off for Dallas, Texas, with my polar opposite, known to those who loved her as Sexy Sandy, although she was born as Mary Sandra. How we ever became friends in the first place, let alone apartment mates, is beyond me. We both worked on the college newspaper staff. Sandy was a sorority cutie with big brown eyes framed by long brown lashes. She had wavy brown hair and a twisty little walk that basically said, “Yep, I’m sexy!” Whenever there was a campus queen contest, which was often, Sandy was always nominated. Me, I was the nondescript hippie chick on the sidelines taking pictures.

In spite of our impossible differences, though, we took off for Dallas in my ‘68 VW, grabbed the first furnished apartment and first jobs we could land, little Kansas girls in the big city. Sandy was determined to live large, however. Her employer had a credit union, so she immediately bought a slick ‘72 Olds Cutlass Supreme…in spite of the fact that we were rummaging through the Dallas Morning News each week looking for store grand openings that offered free food so we could save on our grocery bill.

Anyone who knows me knows I have always been low maintenance. Wherever it is I’m going, even a wedding, I can be ready in 10 minutes, 15 minutes if I can’t find a decent pair of panty hose. Sandy, on the other hand, would take a good hour just to get ready to dash out to the neighborhood market for a loaf of bread. She had this suitcase full of eye shadow, lipsticks, and nail polish that she had to match up with whatever she was wearing. I’d sit nearby, her captive audience, admiring how she could handle a mascara wand and cigarette at the same time. I was in awe of her.

In spite of our poverty, we joined a fitness club, Fabulous Figure (aka: “Flabulous Figure” for those of us who were hopeless cases), and Sandy insisted upon wearing high heels with her passionate purple leotard outfit (mine was basic black) when we went to this strip mall where it was located. You never knew who we might see outside in the parking lot, and Sandy wanted to accentuate her calves…just in case. Now I will give her some slack, though. She took off the heels once she got inside to exercise. After each session, we would laugh about how fabulous we looked…although we rarely broke a sweat.

Well, I only lasted a year in Dallas before I came running back to smaller pastures. Sandy remained behind, eventually marrying an up-and-coming Texas political aide/lawyer. After the birth of her first child, we eventually lost contact with each other. That sometimes happens when two friends move apart and become busy, especially in the days before PCs and emailing. Life happens.

Probably 15 years after I’d last had contact with Sandy, I decided to try to re-locate her when I noticed in a college alumni book that her name was not listed. I found an address, however, for her younger brother, wrote to him, and before long received a shocking response. Sandy, the vibrant beauty, had died of pneumonia at age 41. She left behind five little girls, including a set of twins. She would be 60 now. What a tragedy that she missed out on all the fun of raising her children…the school activities, parties, boyfriends, make-up sessions (oh, what a blast she would have had with those) graduation, marriages, grandchildren. She would have embraced it all in typical, fabulous Sandy style.

Do angels wear purple and get to strut their stuff in heaven? I can only hope so.

POLITICAL WISDOM

When Mama Bore called me last night, the conversation eventually turned to (blow your horn and toss the confetti) the Republican National Convention.

“Are you going to watch the Convention tonight?” she asked.

“Nah. I haven’t been watching any of it."

“Why not?"

"I finally know who I’m voting for and I’d rather go for a walk. I didn’t watch the Democrats, either. So, what do you think of McCain’s vice presidential choice?” (I love to dangle bait at her to get her riled.)

“I can’t stand her! I had five kids, too, and raised them all by myself and do you think that qualifies me to run the country?”

“Well, you did have to deal with conflicts and disaster.”

“And, (what’s more) she has this baby she’s dragging around to the convention hall and forcing it to have to be around all that noise. She just passes the poor little thing around. They need to leave it home with a babysitter! It’s child abuse!”

Now, Mama Bore has a point there. Subjecting a baby to all that hoopla can’t be any fun for those tender little ears. “Is the baby crying?”

“No, it doesn’t move. They say it has Down’s Syndrome, but that doesn’t make any difference. They shouldn’t be bringing that baby to that convention. I think she’s just doing it for sympathy.”

“Sympathy for what?”

“That she’s a mother!!”

“Well, you’re a mother of five. Don’t you sympathize with her?”

“Hell no! I wouldn’t have missed out on a minute of it.”

“So, who are you voting for?”

“You know I’m a Democrat. Who do you think I’m voting for?”

“Well, Obama had his daughters at the Democrat convention.”

“They aren’t babies. They were old enough. And don’t you just love his wife? Michelle. She is so pretty.”

“McCain’s wife is pretty, too.”

“He just married her for her money. I hear she’s loaded.”

(Sigh.) Will the first Tuesday in November ever get here?

CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO.....

Last week when I was at Mama Bore’s house, I uncapped a bottle of white-grape water I’d just purchased at Dollar General, and it erupted everywhere…I thought mainly on my t-shirt and the newspaper I was reading, but Mom also discovered the kitchen floor was a sticky victim. She dragged out a mop, filled a bucket with soapy water and proceeded to clean up after me, cheerfully refusing my assistance, which I think she feared would just create more problems.

Later, when she was relating my "mess-capade" to my big sis, they got a nice laugh at how I hadn’t changed over the years. Old habits die hard. Growing up, I was the slob child. My sister was a neat freak, forever cleaning the room she was forced to share with me, and Beans was meticulous about his appearance. He refused to wear the same outfit twice in a row unless it’d been laundered in between wearings. Me…my clothes either got “hung” on the door knob or stuffed under the bed for another day or two or three.

Having neat-niks for siblings was a big disadvantage because yours truly was always getting the blame, rightly, for disasters left behind. This was often in the form of a sticky refrigerator door handle or lids only halfway replaced on food cartons, an accident waiting to happen for the next person who happened to have the misfortune to follow me. “Oops! Sorry.”

Just now, Big Bore gently informed me that I forgot to screw on the cap to my peach water bottle. He bumped into it and the kitchen cabinet top took a soaking. "Oops! Sorry." seems to have become my mantra. I think it’s safe to say that the Clean Gene must have skipped right over me.

GROWING UP

So far, Big Bore and I have three pumpkin babies that have started to grow. There have also been a number of failed attempts…fertilized mamas that just didn’t develop beyond a cherry-sized “pump-kid” and pooped out. We’ve had an invasion from squash beetles, so BB has waged chemical warfare against them. They are nasty little varmints that hide on the underside of the leaves. I squish those squiggly scalawags every chance I get.

We’ve found some pretty surprises that we didn’t plant that are now growing in the yard. There's some coleus scattered under the zebra grass, morning glory among the green beans, and a lone purple petunia in the pumpkin patch. All three are annuals, so we have no clue how they managed to pop up. We have other varieties/colors of the three elsewhere in the yard but nowhere near where these have bloomed. Nature’s little gift to us.

MIND OVER MATTER

What is your earliest memory? One of my nieces claims she remembers the trauma of being born and squeezing out her mother’s birth canal. Hard to top that.

I’ve settled on age 3 when I had my earliest memory. I had measles, felt like hell, and Mama Bore was rocking me in a red vinyl chair in the dining room. I had a pencil in my right hand and was poking holes in the vinyl. Why that stands out in my mind is beyond me, but she has confirmed it. It’s so insignificant. I also have other early memories of throwing up at Christmastime and losing my two front, lower teeth, at age five, by biting my father’s hand. I recall crying at kindergarten class after a boy pulled my hair and then sitting in the large lap of the teacher, Auntie Hazel, with another cry baby, who is now the president of one of the banks back home.

My memory becomes much more vivid and positive in nature when I was in first grade, which I loved a lot more than the three days I lasted in kindergarten. I sat at a table between two 6-year-old hotties, J. L. and Monty, neither of whom pulled my pony tail, so I adored them. Now, I don’t remember what costume I had for Halloween, but Monty was a tiger. These guys became such good friends, I’d sometimes go to their homes to play after school. The light switch in J.L.’s bedroom was a clown’s nose. What an oddball memory to have.

What stays with the brain over the years confounds me. Some piddly events are permanently imprinted. Others are fleeting thoughts that fade, never to return. I can understand why we might easily recollect significant occasions in our lives, but why the minor ones? Why can I still watch myself chewing on Big Chief tablet paper, listening to Mrs. Hull, my 3rd grade teacher, read from Little House on the Prairie after lunch recess? Why can I recall going through my teen-aged big sister’s scarf box and falling in love with the blue scarf that had silverish keys on it? It makes no sense to have all these old, useless pieces of information on my mind when I should be shoving new, important facts into my head.

I think I may need to have my brain washed!

LABOR INTENSIVE

Today is Labor Day. Time for me to write about my worst job ever--cleaning the house of Mr. and Mrs. Superintendent of Schools once a week when I was 15 years old. Have you ever had a job for which you were just not well-suited? Well, housekeeping was certainly not my forte. About all Mama Bore ever made me do of a domestic nature, besides babysit with the younger sibs, was take out the trash and put away the clean dishes and laundry after she’d done the washing. I was ill-prepared, but I’d try anything for a few bucks.

The good news was: the Supers' children had flown the coop into adulthood. The bad news: it was a two-story house, with five upstairs bedrooms connected by a long hallway, all hardwood flooring that I had to attack with the dust mop, PLUS I had to take a dust cloth to ALL the baseboards. Downstairs I dusted furniture and the staircase. Maybe vacuumed.

There were also miscellaneous jobs, like polishing the silverware (at the Bore household, we were “stainless steel only”). I once had to do the Super laundry but couldn’t figure out how to get the damned washing machine turned on. I should have called the Mrs. at work to ask for instructions, but I feared her wrath and ridicule so much that I washed everything by hand. What a blockhead!

The absolute worst task assigned, however, was ironing…not so much the idea of ironing but what I had to iron that was the real turn-off here…Mr. Super’s boxer shorts! Hell, my brothers wore briefs and those went straight from the dryer to the dresser drawer. I’d never touched boxers before, let along ironed them. Why would they need to be ironed in the first place? Who was going to see them anyway? What a waste of my precious energy! And, I was certain that if Mr. Super knew a teeny bopper was ironing his undies, he would flip. After that day, I could never look him straight in the face…all I could do was stare at his crotch and envision those goofy checked boxers!

I can’t recall how long I lasted with this job. I think maybe I forced Mama Bore to call Mrs. Super and tell her I was needed at home…to count clothespins or something else of equal importance. I am happy to report that I have never since polished silverware, washed clothes out by hand, or, praise God, ironed boxer shorts. In fact, boxer shorts are not even allowed in the Flaming Bore household. There are no ifs, ands, or butts about it!