Happy Holidays 2015

Since I just spent more hours than I would like to reveal crafting my seasonal holiday letter, I’m too burnt out to write a blog this week. Fortunately, I can simply steal material from the holiday letter. So here are excerpts. (Yay for dual purpose news.) Be warned that I am dedicating the upcoming year to honing my comedy-writing skills. Comedy is hard and I always wonder if I’m giving people a laugh or if I’m merely giving them a wince. That said, have a hearty wince.

Ron and I went on separate vacations this year. He went to Chicago and I stayed home, where I found fun things to do by myself, such as having our ancient toilets replaced with beautiful efficient low-flush toilets, which I surreptitiously stroke in adoration when no one’s looking. (The plumber found a velociraptor claw in the plumbing, that’s how old my former toilets were.) I also refinished the kitchen table and had the kitchen chairs stripped (Ron refinished them beautifully upon his return home). I joined a gym, where I take a high intensity interval training (HIIT) class once a week and work out on the weight machines on a couple other days. My daughter pestered me about this for months because she said I need to build muscle mass. Since I joined the gym, I gained five pounds. Wow, muscle mass is heavy. Does anyone know what this stuff’s actually made out of? I think perhaps cheese. One of the women at my gym wears a T-shirt that says “Strong is the new skinny.” Works for me.

If you remember, we moved off the Ranch to live closer to emergency services because of Ron’s health issues. Since the move, our proximity to the emergency room (ER) has saved Ron’s life on more than one occasion. I count 2015 a good year since we only used emergency services for Ron twice. I have learned from experience that if you call an ambulance and they come and save you, then the service is free (here, anyway), but if they haul you off to the ER then it costs you a bundle in co-pay for services. They don’t take persimmon bread in trade for ER services. Also, when you get the ER bill, they refuse to break it down for you to see how they figured the expenses. ER billing services does not comprehend the words “line item.” They could charge you $400 for using the restroom and the bill would list this as “relief services.” They charge separately for toilet paper by the square. Anyway, armed with this knowledge, I make every effort to have the ambulance paramedics revive Ron from his occasional life-threatening low-blood-sugar episodes without dragging him into the ER. They have all the equipment and know-how right there in the ambulance and it’s free. You can’t say “no” to free resuscitation.

So when the health club phoned to say that they had called an ambulance for Ron because they found him unconscious, I screamed into the phone, “Don’t let them take him to the hospital. I’ll be right there.” The woman who called hung up on me. She couldn’t deal with a deranged spouse who seemed to have a perverse death-wish for her poor stricken diabetic husband. I arrived onsite just as the ambulance was about to pull out of the parking lot with Ron inside and I stood in the road in front of the vehicle. By the time I convinced them to open the doors and let me in to see him, Ron was stable and flirting with the nurse. “See,” I said, “no need to rush off to the hospital. He just needed some juice.” (Actually they had him on IV concentrated sugar.) When Ron began singing “just a spoonful of medicine makes the sugar go down,” they yanked his IV and threw him out of the ambulance. The health club staff was super amazing and they did a great job of getting help for Ron right away. They didn’t even call the police to report my frenzied command not to take him to the ER. In general, Ron’s health has improved this year now that he’s free of the stress of having a job. He’s doing astonishingly well for a man with so many health conditions and a wife who pitches a fit if the paramedics try to take him to the ER in an ambulance. There’s nothing like occasional IV sugar to jumpstart the old system.

           

A few weeks ago, Ron revived his Binford Tools T-shirt and replaced our garbage disposal because the old one had corroded and started leaking. For the installation, he cleverly built a winch out of nylon rope, a small length of plastic plumbing pipe, and his wife (that would be me). As a result of this maneuver, I discovered that I am now able to bench press a stainless steel garbage disposal, and that sucker is heavy. (Woo-hoo. Working out at the gym is awesome.) This realization would have changed my life had my husband not insisted that the garbage disposal belongs installed under the sink in the kitchen, and will not remain available for me to impress the neighbors or my children. Argh. He’s so mean.

He’s also a bit absentminded sometimes. For instance, he went around for a couple of days saying he needed to make an appointment with the eye doctor because he couldn’t see out of his glasses anymore and he thought he needed a new prescription. “I’m going blind,” he lamented. Then he realized that one of the lenses had popped out. He found it on the backseat of his car and when he put it back in the frame he could see again. I’m not seriously worried about his cognitive ability since he still does the NY Times crossword in record time and he figured out how to replace our garbage disposal. (Did I already say that I can bench press a garbage disposal?)

           

I enjoy celebrating both the Jewish and Christian holidays. Twice the opportunities to eat festive cheese. My daughter has promised to make tortilla soup for the family on Christmas Eve. We will have all of our children with us for Christmas this year. Plus the daughter of my longtime friend Helen in Scotland is coming to join us for the holiday. The last time I saw Helen, 35 years ago, in Fife (by Dundee), she was pregnant with this daughter, who is now studying poetry in grad school in Texas. She plays the Northumbrian Pipes and I look forward to a demonstration during her visit. Thus we will be the only household in America to pipe in tortilla soup and latkes on Christmas Eve.

I’m going to take a vacation from blogging for a couple of weeks over the holidays to bake gluten-free treats, eat cheese, and spend time with my astonishing children. Look for me on the blog again after the New Year, when I will continue to elicit laughter and winces. May you have health, happiness, delicious nutritious food, laughter, music, time spent with loved ones, a functioning garbage disposal, an abundance of things for which to be grateful, and lots of good cheese during the holiday season.

I was going to put a photo of an uninstalled garbage disposal into this blog 

but I couldn't find one with Hanukkah candles on it 

so I decided to show you this menorah instead. More festive.

First World Problems

Sometimes my husband says the most profound things. Earlier this week I was obsessing about a decision. Finally, as I ran down the pros and cons to him for the sixth or seventh time, he joked, “First World problems.” I laughed because he was so right-on. I have heard the expression before, but ever since he said it, I keep thinking about it. When I looked it up on Wikipedia I learned that the term first appeared in 1979 in G.K. Payne’s Built Environment. It turned into an internet meme in 2005, and it became a popular Twitter hashtag. It is generally used to minimize complaints about trivial issues by people living in the lap of luxury. The quintessential First World problem is slow internet access. In fact, the expression is frequently used with regard to electronic/tech problems. For instance, classic First World problems are 1) I don’t have access to wi-fi right now, 2) I lost the remote, 3) the PDF downloaded instead of opening, 4) my laptop power cord died, or 5) I dropped my iPhone into a pot of boiling spaghetti sauce. If you google “First World problems,” you will bring up links to heaps of funny examples. I just did this and wasted half an hour that I could have spent writing this blog chuckling over these examples. Wasting time reading things online is a First World problem.

Although generally First World problems, my problems still concern me. Here is a short-list sampling of some of my First World problems.

1. I have so much work right now that I don’t have enough time to do my own creative writing (including writing my annual holiday letter).

2. I lost a piece of cheese in my car.

3. I can’t decide whether to make pumpkin bread or persimmon bread for the holidays.

4. I don’t think my Christmas Cactus will keep blooming all the way to Christmas, so maybe I should buy another one in a couple of weeks? Or not?

5. I dyed my husband’s socks pink by accident washing them with a red dress.

6. Writing comedy is hard and I want to give people a good laugh.

7. Last week I played Dez Bryant in Fantasy Football but then Tony Romo broke his clavicle (again) and the backup QB didn’t throw any balls to Dez meanwhile I left Sammy Watkins on my bench and Dez made 5 points and Watkins made 27 and I don’t even like the Dallas Cowboys and I don’t know who Watkins is and I think I should play Charcandrick West instead of Watkins this week even though West had a hamstring injury and this is the final week of the regular Fantasy season and I am agonizing so much about what to do that I think maybe I should stop playing Fantasy next year and…. I need an intervention.

8. I keep getting robocalls from cardholder services even though I am on the do-not-call list so what is up with that? Argh!

9. I can smell a missing piece of cheese in my car.

9. I am not good with numbers and my math ability sucks.

10. Organic food is expensive.

11. I can’t interest any publishers in my unpublished books. I can’t interest any agents in representing my unpublished books. I can’t stop writing books that probably will never be published. I can’t stop kvetching about it. I need an intervention.

12. They stopped carrying my favorite chipotle habañero sauce at the natural foods store so now I have to buy it online.

13. I mortgaged my house to put my children through college and I have no retirement savings so I will have to work until I die.

14. My orange tabby cat sheds on everything.

15. I cry every time I watch It’s a Wonderful Life and my children laugh at me.

16. I can’t find a chemical-free air freshener that smells good to me. (So I don’t have a nice scent to spray in my car to counteract the lost cheese.)

17. I miss my cheese.

I would like to think that mostly my problems are not the silly non-problem problems of the oblivious privileged person, such as breaking a fingernail on the metal soy milk pitcher at Starbuck’s. My problems are the problems of a middle class person living in the First World, and I wouldn’t trade them for Third World problems. Even so, I do have some problems that I think qualify as All World (global/universal) problems, such as the fact that I am slowly going deaf, my access to clean food is compromised by profit-mongers, I can’t protect my children from the miasma of chemicals surrounding us (not least of which are the toxins in food), the damage to our environment threatens my safety and future (and that of my children and future generations), I don’t have easy access to health care that is honest and free of interference by corporate interests, and I am in constant danger of losing those I love to gun violence. Yet in the final analysis, my week of pondering the expression has led me to recognize that my problems are predominantly First World problems; and for this I am truly grateful, especially at this festive time of year when I anticipate being surrounded by friends and family and enjoying our First World bounty.

When I think about my problems from this perspective, I no longer feel nearly so stressed. Except maybe about that cheese. Why can’t I stop thinking about cheese? I’m hungry (that’s an All World problem). 

I googled "cheese in car" for an image for this blog post and this is what I found, which is perfect 

because it's not only cheese on a car but it's also a football image since it's a Green Bay Packers (the "cheeseheads") car therefore related to both my cheese problems and my Fantasy football problems.

Gluten Phobia

This conversation is dedicated to you folks who find it amusing to make fun of people who don’t eat gluten. And you know who you are. You touch a loaf of bread and shriek, “Ohmygod, I think I came in contact with gluten.” You tell jokes like, “What is the recipe for a delicious gluten-free brownie? There is none, bwahahahaha.” So funny. You show pictures on Facebook of dinner plates infested with bedraggled asparagus and a naked, gray burger topped with a vomit-green pickle slice and label the picture “gluten-free dinner.” You share YouTube movies entitled “How to Become Glucose Intolerant So You Can Be Like Your Friends.” You speculate about the gluten and non-gluten properties of pancakes, soaps, sweaters, Ferris wheels, crescent wrenches, hamsters, and BBQ grills. You delight in sharing the photo series of famous paintings with the gluten removed. OK, yes, those are actually pretty funny, like the Vermeer below, but what does that prove?

We are not as far apart on this as you may think. I have as much trouble as you do with the gluten-free fanatics who blame everything from the melting of the polar ice caps to the popularity of the Kardashians on gluten. These gluten-phobes believe that consumption of bread caused Donald Trump’s psychosis. They attribute the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s to German Chocolate Cake, the British colonization of India on scones, and the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas on wheat fields. If they could erase the amber waves of grain from the “Star-Spangled Banner,” they would do it in a heartbeat. I swear on a stack of cookbooks that I am not one of these people. They give ordinary everyday gluten-free people a bad reputation and make us lose credibility. They are the Westboro Church of the healthy eating movement.

Thinking about those breads, pastas, and pastries you adore, you may wonder why someone would choose to avoid eating gluten. Please, stay with me here. Listen to the logic. Give me my moment on the soap box.

First, I admit that going gluten-free has turned into a popular fad spun out-of-control, much as fat-free became a fad several decades ago. A lot of people who could eat gluten without a problem shun it as if allowing a sliver of wheat bread into their house would cause the foundation to give way and the house to collapse. I can see why you laugh at people with no understanding of nutrition, and no clue as to why someone might give up gluten, becoming gluten-phobic. I don’t want to appear to have no sense of humor. I confess that it amuses me in a perverse way to bake super-delicious gluten-free breads and desserts and to bring them to potlucks and tell people to let the gluten-frees have first crack at them. Everyone there instantly appears to become gluten-free.

While many people can eat gluten quite happily with no evil results, there a lot of people who don’t fare so well on the stuff. Obviously, people with Celiac can’t eat gluten because the nature of the disease is such that they lack the ability to digest it. Also, gluten is inflammatory, so anyone with an inflammatory disease, such as arthritis, would feel better off gluten. Heart disease, fibromyalgia, and gout are other inflammatory diseases aggravated by gluten. Also, autoimmune diseases can be negatively impacted by gluten. Some people simply have a sensitivity to gluten that causes them to experience allergic symptoms when they eat it, like clogged sinuses, skin rashes, or itchy ears. It’s quite amazing how different each person’s body is from the next person’s.

Someone in good health who has no problem eating gluten has no reason to avoid it. And even those who discover they have a mild sensitivity to it can usually eat it now and then with no ill effects. But, if you eat gluten, beware. Here’s the big catch for everyone, whether genuinely gluten-intolerant or not. Commercial wheat contains dangerous chemicals that can make anyone get sick. Wheat is generally harvested (not everywhere, but in most places), by spraying it with glyphosate to desiccate the wheat to render it uniformly dry for harvesting. Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Monsanto’s ubiquitous RoundUp, now banned in many European countries and proven to cause a host of diseases from Autism to cancer. So if you are good to go with gluten and you want to eat it, then only eat organic wheat, which, by definition is free of chemicals. The other issue about wheat, and all grains really, is that when they are refined they lose their nutritional value and become a burden on the human metabolism. Sugar and refined flours are the main cause of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and a boatload of illnesses. That sentence should be in bold italics and underlined about fifty times. If you eat wheat (or gluten), eat organic only and eat whole grain unrefined.

I don’t eat gluten because it makes me sick. I’ll spare you the graphic description and the interpretive dance version of the explanation of what happens to me. Each of us is a unique ecosystem, an organism that functions in its own way. What works for one person will not work for another. The person who can best understand how a body works is the owner of that body. Each of us must pay attention and notice what happens as we munch our way through life, adjusting accordingly. Avoiding gluten helps me keep my system in balance. I don’t feel deprived. I eat well. We had a full table at Thanksgiving and nothing on it contained gluten. We had gluten-free macaroni and cheese as well as pumpkin pie. I have learned how to cook gluten-free. So don’t pity me, don’t make fun of me, and don’t dismiss me. Not everyone who shuns gluten does so because it’s a fad. Some of us do it because we’re in tune with what works for us. I love my gluten-free life.

Jammy

A terrific British expression captures the essence of good luck. If someone has remarkable luck, the Brits describe that person as “jammy.” It comes from the idea that good things stick to a lucky person as if they’re made of jam. I just finished reading John Cleese’s memoir So, Anyway, which relates the story of his early life before he became one of the “Pythons” of Monty Python’s Flying Circus fame. As I read his account of his early career, I kept thinking that this man was about the jammiest comedy writer ever. The most astonishing opportunities dropped into his lap. I am jealous.

Cleese was a law student at Cambridge when he began acting and writing comedy sketches with the Cambridge Footlights, an annual revue put on by the Footlights Club at Cambridge University. He met Graham Chapman (another Python) at the Footlights, where they wrote comedy sketches together. Chapman was in medical school at the time. Shortly prior to his graduation from Cambridge, Cleese landed a job at a law firm, where he was supposed to start working after he graduated. But fate intervened for the jammy Cleese. Just before he started his new job, two executives from BBC radio appeared, took him to lunch, and offered him a job writing comedy at the BBC. They had seen his work with the Footlights and they headhunted him, offering him more than twice the salary he would have made at the law firm. How often does such a thing happen to a graduating law student let alone an aspiring comedy writer? It’s insane. Keep reading, he gets even jammier.

Early on, Cleese took a leave of absence from the BBC to go on tour in America with a production of the Footlights Revue (written during his last year at Cambridge), which was renamed Cambridge Circus. Days before the show closed, he received a call out of the blue from a producer putting together a Broadway musical called Half a Sixpence. He invited Cleese to audition for a role. Cleese found this hilarious since he could neither sing nor dance, and he went to the audition on a lark. At the audition, he informed them he could neither sing nor dance. They thought he was joking, but he reasserted, in all seriousness, that he was completely unmusical. They asked him to sing the British National Anthem and they stopped him several notes into his caterwauling because they couldn’t stand to listen to it. When he returned to his hotel room that night, he told Chapman he got the part, just to see his expression. The next day the producer called and offered him the part. He thought the producer had either had a nervous breakdown after hearing Cleese sing or was having him, on but he was sane and sincere. Jammy. The musical director assured him he could lip-sync the singing and that they wouldn’t put him in any dance numbers. (He was, in fact, expressly forbidden to actually sing during the production.) This leads me to ponder how excruciatingly hard real singers and dancers work to land a role in a Broadway musical while the tone-deaf, uncoordinated Cleese had a role handed to him on a silver platter.

Cleese’s jamminess continued through the chapters of his life. Approximately one day after Half a Sixpence closed, an editor at Newsweek Magazine invited him (yes, invited him) to take a job there as a journalist. They wanted to lighten up some of the articles and hoped he could turn his comic wit to the task. Soon afterward, David Frost (only the most successful comedian in Britain at the time) approached Cleese to invite him (yes, invite him) to work for him as a writer on The Frost Report. And not long after that, Peter Sellers, the funniest man in Britain, solicited Cleese’s comedic writing services. I mean, seriously? Cleese was a mere lad in his mid-twenties when all these invitations rolled in. Jammy, jammy, jammy.

Cleese certainly knows how to elicit a laugh, but a lot of excellent comedians who also have this ability have not had opportunities fall at their feet. The scandalously cheery Rhonda Byrne of Law of Attraction fame has made millions of dollars shaming us into thinking we aren’t trying hard enough to visualize success, to manifest good fortune, if we fall short of our aspirations. She is (pardon my French) so full of poo when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of achieving success. Success requires talent, hard work, and a touch of the jammy. The truth of the matter is that a lot of talented people never have the chance to fully utilize and reveal their talent. They may throw boulders of positive energy out into the universe and still not see any pathway to recognition, success, and the chance to use their talents to the max coming their way as a result. I think those who catch a lucky break often have no idea of the extent of their incredible good fortune, despite their efforts at summoning up sufficient gratitude. The universe is a mystery and randomness occurs.  

[Football reference alert.] At the risk of losing the interest of those readers who consider themselves above the plebeian allure of football, I wish to share one of life’s lessons inherent in this sport. As the season progresses (as it has at this particular point in time), and some of the hottest players go out injured, some of the replacements begin making their presence felt in a big way. This is how young men passionate about football, extraordinary athletes, who formerly remained hidden in the shadows, have the opportunity to step into the spotlight and shine. When a number-one player can’t play, and the coach sends in the backup, the fans wince collectively at the prospect of watching the backup get chewed up and spit out. But sometimes that backup defies all expectations and astonishingly takes our breath away with the outstanding ability he has within him, which has remained concealed from view merely for the lack of the opportunity to step up and show what he can do. I wonder how many tremendous athletes remain hidden in the shadows, kept from showing what they can do because the opportunity never presents itself.  

In one of his love poems, Kenneth Patchen compares his discovery of his beloved to “a boy finding a star in a haymow.” The more years I spend on this earth, the more I have found that nearly everyone is a star in a haymow. Some of us are jammy enough to get those lucky breaks that lead to recognition and opportunities to maximize the use of our talents. Others of us never get those chances. Some of us appear on a highly visible stage and achieve largescale success, like John Cleese and the football greats. Others of us forge our personal successes and count ourselves lucky to have the opportunity to do the things we love and the things at which we excel in our quieter lives in a small-scale way. Lately I find that I look for the passion in people like a heat-seeking missile honing in on a warm body (perhaps a bad metaphor since I don’t want to blow the person up, just hear them talk about what they love). If I can discover what a person feels passionate about, what gets them juiced, and then encourage them to talk about it then I feel like I have hit pay-dirt. I am dedicated to the narrative. Each of us has some time, some place, someone, something that was, is, or will be the great adventure of our lives. I yearn to hear the story of that great adventure. I search for that star in the haymow; and when I find one, I feel roaringly jammy.

Stork in the Birdbath, or Blog Interrupted

There are only two kinds of interruptions. The first is the good interruptions, those endearing surprises that jump out at us on the path of life, such as when my husband pokes his head into my study and says “There’s a stork in the birdbath, come quick.” (He’s obviously not a birder.) The second is the unwanted and unsavory intrusions on our mental flow, such as the cold call from the telemarketer selling corduroy frying pans. Although quite different from one another, both kinds of interruptions will successfully murder genius.

As we know, humans only use a limited percentage of our full brain capacity. Some of us manage to use a higher percentage of brain function than others. I use most of my functioning brain to obsess about who to start each week in Fantasy Football. I blame Fantasy Football for the fact that I am not the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I suspect that the most significant thing preventing humans from using 100% of our brains is interruptions. At least this is probably the case for women; whereas for men, of course, interruptions run second to the distraction of thinking about sex. Bad interruptions top my list of life’s aggravations along with landscaping featuring gravel, fruity air freshener, yellow post-its, weeds, cat hairballs, beets, sticky price tags on new drinking glasses that require a flamethrower for removal, and Paul Ryan.

I spend a large portion of my workday writing and this requires concentrated thought. When the phone rings, I could ignore it, but it might be a client with a question, it might be the health club calling to inform me that they are loading my diabetic husband into an ambulance because he has dangerously low blood sugar, or it might be my son calling from the grocery store to ask me to read him a recipe out of the Joy of Cooking. All of these qualify as bona fide necessary interruptions. But when it’s a scam robocall from Bridget at cardholder services with an offer to upgrade my credit line to six billion, my hair stands on end and my best thoughts flee. 

I started pondering interruptions this week after a conversation I had with my son the web developer (the same one who calls me to read out recipes to him while he’s shopping). He sent me the link to an article about why even a seemingly benign interruption can destroy the productivity of a web developer. Here is the link to the article if you want to read more. The gist of the article is that there are two types of deadly interruptions that ruin productivity for web developers:  the random interruption (like Bridget) or the planned interruption (like a staff meeting). A lot of what web developers do is in their heads. I identify with this since it’s the same for writers. Web developers (like writers) must keep a football-stadium-sized volume of information in their heads at once in order to rearrange it and organize it and sort through it. An interruption can collapse the entire stadium into a giant dribble of a pancake. The article talks about web developers building a “mental model” and how interruptions destroy the model. It can often take an hour or more to get back to that point in the construction of the mental model, depending on how invested in it the web developer was at the time of the interruption. Random interruptions (particularly a string of them) can be so disruptive to this process that they can ruin a full day’s work. Planned interruptions can also be very destructive to web developers depending on scheduling. The article explains that web developers generally need about two hours of uninterrupted time to complete a standard increment of work (to implement that model they are holding in their head). So if they have to attend a meeting that starts an hour after they arrive at work or an hour after lunch, even though they can plan for it, the meeting can make it impossible for them to effectively utilize the hour preceding the meeting because they need two hours of uninterrupted time. As a writer, I fully identify with this construct. It leads me to contemplate how managers can so easily diminish the productivity of the doers they manage when they don’t fully understand the nature of the work that the doers do. Lacking a grasp of this, they inadvertently cause destruction, havoc, frustrational aimless web surfing, and the melting of the polar ice caps.

Interruptions are perhaps the greatest challenge facing moms. Children, by definition, are interruptions. Good interruptions of course; but interruptions nonetheless. When my children were young and I had a nine-to-five office job, I would sometimes experience those nights when my slumber was so hopelessly interrupted that I wasn’t fit the next day for anything more complex than sharpening pushpins. As teenagers, my children had a knack for making popcorn in the microwave in the kitchen (next to my bedroom) just when I was in the process of attempting to fall asleep. I could salvage a night’s sleep with one interruption, but nighttime interruptions seemed to stampede in herds. By way of example, first one of the children would wake me up because he had a nightmare and I would lie down with him in his bed until he fell asleep again. No sooner would I have returned to my bed and started to drift off to sleep when the battery in the smoke detector in the kitchen would go belly-up and it would begin beeping. So I would have to climb onto a chair and remove the battery. After that I would lie awake for another hour trying to calm down. When I finally began to drift off again, another child would wake me up because he heard a ghost in the tree outside his window. We would tiptoe down the hall together to investigate and I would discover an owl perched in the tree by his window hooting. The hooting sounded like a ghost to my small child. I would don my boots and bathrobe and go outside with a flashlight to try to flush out the owl. When that didn’t work, I would put my son in his boots and take him outside to show him the owl before settling him back in his bed. By then I would be desperate to get in a few winks before dawn. I would just have fallen asleep when a skunk would spray in the driveway, waking me up with the stench. I often wondered why all these things would happen in the same night. The real kicker to all this is that my husband sleeps like someone hit him in the head with a frying pan. So he would snooze blissfully through all interruptions, especially if he had a calming jumbo mocha espresso right before bed to relax him. Go figure.

Children are the supreme interrupters. Mine know that they have priority over anything else I could possibly be doing. “Yes dear, I’m giving my neighbor mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but as soon as I save his life I’ll see if I still have your kaleidoscope stored in the garage, love you sweetie, will call you back.” Once my son called me from high school in a panic because his chapstick had broken. I talked him down. All of my children have interrupted me with phone calls to ask me to look up their checking account number for them. I am information central. Before Smart Phones, they would call me to have me google things for them, like what time the movie at their local cinema started, where was the nearest Jewish deli with authentic bagels, how much does it cost to fly to Vegas, what happens if you put olives in au gratin potatoes, and what will the weather be like at Newport Beach on Thursday. All of these questions obviously required an immediate answer. When I was on a retreat with a group of women friends at a remote beachside condo, my daughter called in a crisis. While my friends went for a sunset walk on the beach, I played therapist until my daughter figured out how to handle her situation. One peaceful Saturday morning while I was sipping a delicious decaf and writing my blog, my youngest son called because he had somehow tumbled out of bed, tripped (probably on clothing, shoes, soccer balls, musical instruments, collapsible clothing hamper, coffee mugs, blunt objects, raccoons, waffle iron, etc. sprawled across his floor), and fell into a mirror leaning against his wall, breaking the mirror, and cutting his leg. He wanted me to help him find an emergency room near his house in Oakland. Did I mention he was bleeding? It was a small cut and we found an ER as well as someone to take him there. Now what was I saying?

We live in a supremely interrupting world. I don’t give people my cell phone number precisely because of my aversion to bad interruptions. I don’t want people to have the ability to call me when I am in the checkout line at the Coop, going for my daily walk (seriously, why do people bother to go for a walk in the woods while talking on their cell phone?), driving, thinking, making a pie crust, welding a spaceship, or searching in the garage for a kaleidoscope. Actually, even if they had my number, people couldn’t call me because I rarely turn my cell phone on.

There are many interruptions on beyond phone calls to jar me out of my thoughts when I am trying to string words together to actually write something of importance. The neighborhood bully tomcat saunters into my yard and I have to run around chasing cats so he doesn’t beat up my girls and cost me a fortune at the vet. I have meetings scheduled when I would prefer to be writing. The power goes out. My obsessed neighbor who must control every wisp of nature in his half-acre yard spends two hours running his gas-powered leaf blower, which sounds like Apollo 13 landing in his yard. The refrigerator stops working in the middle of July and I have to move all the frozen food to the freezer in the garage (and, unfortunately, I have to eat all the ice cream, so sad). My oldest needs me to find a copy of her birth certificate, scan it, and email it to her by noon. My middle one needs me to run interference for a broken chapstick. My youngest trips over a turtle and sprains his eyebrow.

Honestly, as a mom, I don’t mind those interruptions from my children so much, no matter how ridiculous. I can live with them. Sometimes they make for a good story. The bad interruptions, which I hate, are stuff like the scam artist who calls me, interrupting my flow, so he can try to convince me that my computer has been hacked and he is going to unhack it if I just give him my bank account numbers and all my passwords, the perky lady conducting an opinion survey on the relevance of safety pins, or (and these are the worst) the call to inform me that I am eligible for an upgrade to my weed-whacker and someone will be with me shortly but for now I am on hold listening to Yanni perform a mellow version of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” and my wait time is twenty minutes but whoa didn’t they call me so why am I on hold? Wha-huh? I hang up. What was I saying?

The next time I sneak off to the beach without telling anyone where I went, you will understand why. Uninterrupted time to meditate, reflect, contemplate, and, dearest of all in Amy’s world, to write. Sweet. 

Stork