Morning of the Living Vegan Dead: Reflections of a Healthy-Foods, Electromag-Skeptic, Pacifist Mom

It can get lonely out in front, ahead of the curve, where I have lived much of my maverick life. Exhibit A:  Vegetarian Teenager. I became a vegetarian as a teenager, back when no one was a vegetarian, when no one even knew any vegetarians, when people didn’t even know what “vegetarian” meant. (Is it your horoscope sign?) Some people thought it meant I liked vegetables and some people thought I would eat nothing but vegetables. Perhaps some people thought vegetables ate me. Some people thought I would eat fish but not chickens or chickens but not cows or turkey only on Thanksgiving. I wish I had a dollar for every time I found myself cornered by a know-it-all “grown-up” hell-bent on convincing me that my hair would fall out, my skin would dry up, my sex drive would disappear, and my teeth would explode if I didn’t eat meat immediately. Doctors badgered me. I wonder if any of these people and these great white physicians, who nowadays have read the research on the benefits of a plant-based diet, remember with remorse those tirades they aimed at a girl who could see so clearly into the future, beyond the consolidated animal feeding operation door. Probably not. They are probably all dead from eating too many junk-meat hamburgers.

I was more than vegetarian; I also believed in eating nontoxic, high-quality, real food, such as whole grains and fresh eggs from chickens that wandered in the yard and played dominoes. While in college, I baked my own bread because I couldn’t find anything in the stores in the 1970s that resembled actual bread. All of it was stripped skinny with no wheat germ or bran. I used to bake two loaves every other week and freeze one of them. I made a sandwich for my lunch every day with my good bread. I was the only grad student in my department who didn’t buy pizza slices and soda at the student union for lunch. I quit baking bread when I met my husband Ron, who would eat one of my fresh-baked loaves within 24 hours and make short work of the other one in a few days, all the while exclaiming “Wow, what is this stuff?” He was raised in the ghetto on Wonder Bread and other delicacies of the culture of poverty (such as government-issued blocks of frozen chili). You may recall that you could take a slice of Wonder Bread and roll it into a pellet the size of a pinto bean. The advertising geniuses in the back room came up with the slogan that Wonder Bread “helps build strong bodies 12 ways,” which leads me to believe it was a Styrofoam vitamin pill blown up into the shape of bread. Ron loved my real bread so much that I couldn’t keep a loaf in the house with him around. So I baked much less often, for a treat. I didn’t have the time to invest when it disappeared so quickly. In my grad student days, I could buy enough food to last me a week at the Soulard Farmers Market in St. Louis for $10 (it’s still there). That must be why we call it our “salad days.” Ron missed the bread, but he also enjoyed my vegetarian cooking.

Things got tricky when I embarked on parenting. When children are small, they don’t know much outside of what we do at our house, so I could get away with feeding them all “health food.” They ate yogurt, fresh fruit, tofu, soups loaded with veggies, beans and rice, veggie-cheese burritos, and broccoli quiche. I banned sugar at the door of my home. Instead I baked treats with honey. That lasted only until the children got old enough to figure out what I put in those homemade desserts. When they discovered that I put pureed stewed tomatoes into my chocolate cake they refused to eat it. Sadly, children want what their peers are having. They wanted birthday cake from a cake mix out of a box with sprinkles and they wanted hot dogs. I would cook them delicious gourmet vegetarian meals, and they begged for tater tots and pizza. My daughter once said, “I’ll eat tofu if you promise not to tell anyone I eat it.”

Now, as adults, my children gleefully exaggerate the organic healthy foods diet on which I raised them. They distort the truth so much that I sometimes wonder if they even remember what I actually fed them. Or have they obscured the truth with their imaginative exaggerations of what I cooked? They’re lucky I didn’t know then what I know now or I would have been even more careful about what I let them put into the sacred little temples of their bodies. Recently, my daughter sent me a photograph of a sign in a café selling vegan cookies. She said that nowadays those honey, oat, butter, and flaxseed cookies I baked for her when she was a little girl would sell for $15 each in L.A. That chocolate cake with the honey, stewed tomatoes, and rich cocoa powder in it would be a delicacy today. But back in their childhood, my children rolled their eyes and groaned. They dreaded their mom’s turn to bring soccer snack. However, all of them (and their partners too) are “foodies.” They love to cook and they love to eat excellent homemade food. Theirs may not always live up to my high standard of purity and nontoxicity, but often it does, and I’m glad they enjoy the slow process of cooking a delicious meal together. Just last week my youngest son and his girlfriend cooked me a super-delicious lunch largely made from ingredients they had procured at the local farmers market, which the girlfriend manages and promotes (it’s her day job).

As the new century bulldozes forward, my desire to live a nontoxic life has extended beyond food and into my environment, which suffers further infiltration every day from electronic energies and electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Thus Exhibit B. From smart meters to cell phones, I live in an inescapable soup of invisible detrimental forces. My older son thinks I’m deluded because I turn off the internet router in my house at night so I don’t expose myself to the router’s sleep-disruptive (in my opinion) EMF. I like to sleep in a room with nothing glowing, emitting, flashing, humming, buzzing, chomping, hollering, pounding, debating, yowling, pulverizing, revving, slurping, ringing, kvetching, or generating energy. Sometimes when people complain of tinnitus, I wonder if they have nothing at all wrong with their ears, but instead they have internalized the hum of their refrigerator or the buzz of the streetlamp outside their window. I like to sleep far from the reach of phones, tablets, e-readers, marching bands, zombies, and computers. I switch off my bedside lamp when I finish reading and the room goes dark; and it’s peaceful. There is no bulletproof research yet about the impact of EMFs on our sleep, but I guarantee you there will be. Just as it took a while for the benefits of a plant-based diet to emerge and reach into the general consciousness, it will take time for science and our knowledge of the functioning of technology to “discover” the impact of all this radiation and electromagnificence on our health, mood, cognition, sleep, and wellbeing. Meanwhile, I must endure my son suggesting that I wear a rubber hat to bed instead of turning everything electronic off. The way he makes fun of me, you would think I was suggesting that the government spies on me through my microwave. (No, I’ll leave that fantasy to the national press secretary.)

It was challenging for my children to act like everyone else when they had a health-food mom, who talked to the vegetables growing in the garden, wrote “love and gratitude” on their water bottles (alà Hidden Messages in Water), packed them teriyaki tofu for lunch, considered watching TV the eighth deadly sin, and eyed technological advances with animosity and suspicion. Furthermore, Exhibit C, I am a pacifist, who would not accept toy weapons as gifts for my children at their birthday parties, returning Ninja swords and toy guns to the baffled gifters. (My boys made guns out of Legos and pretended to zap one another dead with laser beams from sticks they picked up in the forest in which we lived.) Pacifist-mom could not handle horror films either. No movies for me with violence, torture, deranged robots, slimy aliens, dangling guts, gore, and overly suspenseful music. They had to watch that stuff with their dad. They still try to convince me to watch certain films in the horror genre. “C’mon Mom, it’s so campy. The blood is so fake. It’s funny. You’ll laugh. That’s not a real chainsaw. It’s plastic.” They coax me and I flatly refuse. My attitude surely contributed to my older son recently imagining the kind of horror flick I would make up. He said it would be called Morning of the Living Vegan Dead, and the opening scene would depict a living vegan dead grandmother carrying her baby grandson around the back yard and showing him all the fruit trees. I’m down with that kind of horror movie. When my baby grandson was last here with me, I did take him around the back yard and we did talk to all the fruit trees together, which my son thought was sweet and also another example of how his mother is nuts, and that it would make a good opening scene for Morning of the Living Vegan Dead. In the next scene, I imagine hordes of vegan dead would sweep through a sleepy rural community like locusts and eat all the cabbage, tomatoes, and other veggies out of everyone’s gardens because that must be what vegan dead eat. Losing the summer’s vegetable crop is pretty horrifying in itself without resorting to aliens and gore.

I sinfully hope that all those doubters and naysayers who harassed me over the years, as well as relatives and friends who have lovingly “humored” me with a condescending pat on the head and jokes about seaweed smoothies and my brain bursting into flames from too many magnetic impulses, that they all live long enough to discover that science proves me right on all accounts. I have been right with my prescient ideas about organic produce, plant-based diet, no harm in eating eggs from properly cared-for chickens (oh those cholesterol vigilantes make me livid), detrimental aspects to microwaves, dangers of demon sugar, acid rain, recycling, importance of eating good-quality fats, ag soil preservation, environmental toxins (and the evil corporations that manufacture them), big pharma poisoning us with dangerous medications, pure water, cat energy, burning sage, walking in the woods, thinking positive, caring for the planet, and so forth. Science is still trying to catch up with me, but I have a long stride. One day I’ll be proven right about electronic gadgets and invisible electronic impacts. I’ll probably be long gone by then, but my descendants will hopefully find me in cyberspace on my blog and will laugh at my silly humor, even if it has become dated and obsolete. I imagine with glee a beneficent artificial intelligence (AI) version of me giving the orchard tour to my great-great-grandchildren. Robot Safta (Grandma) Amy will take them outside to commune with the trees. You can bet that I will remind them to turn Robot Safta Amy off at night so as not to disrupt their sleep patterns with my magnetic or electronic emissions. The possibility of Robot Safta Amy gives me comfort. Morning of the Living Vegetarian AI Safta.

Here is the image my daughter sent me (she put the "just like mom used to make" title on it). 

I think it should say gender-neutral instead of genderless. But that's just me.

This Is Not a Drill

A few weeks ago, the people of Hawaii received the following emergency alert text on their cell phones from the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency:  Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii. Seek immediate shelter. This is not a drill. It took 38 minutes for HEMA to “revoke” the alert and announce it was an error. This incident prompted a conversation with my husband about what we would do should we receive such a warning. The warning says to seek shelter. The best shelter we have is probably that old metal wheelbarrow in the garage, which seems to withstand anything. But I don’t think it’s up to the task. We can’t both fit under it anyway. And, while we’re resourceful people who own a lot of dusty power tools we no longer use (but must keep because said husband might get a wild hair and decide to build a gazebo or an ark or something), we couldn’t build something capable of sustaining a nuclear blast in 15 minutes from the materials we have on hand. Although the label doesn’t say it, I have a hunch that duct tape is not resistant to nuclear explosions. We have a basket of ornamental acorns in the front hallway, but not nearly enough of them to build a bomb shelter, and definitely not enough glue. So we’re kind of stuck exploding. Which takes us back to the original question about what to do in our last minutes of life.

“I suppose,” I said to Ron, “that if we’re lucky enough to be at home together, and we know the end is coming momentarily, the thing to do would be to go to bed and have sex.” Ron replied, “Oh, wow, no pressure.” I could see his point. “Well then,” I suggested, “we could make ourselves some really, really good sandwiches.” He was down with that.

The week after the Hawaii false alarm, a false alarm happened in Japan, which now begs the question “how do we know if an alert is real?” Actually, it’s likely that I would have no inkling of an impending nuclear blast, real or imagined, if the best communication emergency services can produce is a flimsy text message. Sending an end-of-the-world communication via an electronic device is kind of like writing that you are having a heart attack on the bathroom mirror with a marker. I want to hear an astonishingly loud warning signal emanating from the fire department. Or else have a hysterical woman call me on my landline and scream the news as if her shoe collection is on fire (a robocall might be OK depending on the quality of the screaming). If our emergency alert people send a text with such a warning, I will remain oblivious to the danger because I don’t have a smart phone, and I don’t turn on my dumb phone more than twice a month (unless I’m traveling), and even if I do turn it on I’m too deaf to hear it beep or ring or whatever it does (I have no idea because I can’t hear it). On the off chance that I had my phone on at the moment that such a text went forth, and that I glanced at it and noticed a text had come in, and that I read the message, and believed it, then, hypothetically, what would I do? I would take shelter under a graceful old tree because it would comfort me to be blown to bits in the company of such a wise and ancient soul. I happen to have such a tree in my backyard.

I come from a generation that has been there and done that with this nuclear bomb nonsense a long time ago. I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, after which my father built a bomb shelter in our basement. I sat and talked to him every evening while he piled the cement blocks on. It was a good place to store bicycles in the winter, but it wouldn’t have resisted a nuclear blast any better than duct tape and acorns. At elementary school, we learned how to duck under our desks to assume the nuclear holocaust safety position. (What were those desks made out of, and where can I buy some of that material?) If I had had the spunk and defiance as a child that I have as an old lady, I certainly would have refused to crawl under my desk. Deluded lunatics hold human survival in their hands; and the imbeciles who think they can survive a nuclear bomb under a desk or in the high school basement voted those same deluded lunatics into positions of power. Pass the Swiss cheese and mustard.

How infuriating to still be having this discussion. This is, and always was, a no-brainer. But the men with the nuclear codes have no brains. Sigh. I went to jail to protest nuclear weapons in the 1980s. I was righteously outraged, but truly all I accomplished with my arrest was a slight personal weight loss since prisons didn’t provide anything a vegetarian eats in 1983. The biggest reason why I won’t participate in nonviolent civil disobedience today is that the thought of eating prison food gives me a panic attack. Yes, I realize that people generally don’t go to prison to experience fine cuisine. But if a nuclear bomb may drop at any moment, the last place I want to spend my final 15 minutes is in prison, far from a decent kosher dill pickle.

I like to imagine that I live a more protected existence here in northern Cali because it would not serve Kim Jong-un to bomb one of the places in the U.S. that is the most resistant and opposed to our present disastrous government and predator-in-chief. Although he might choose to bomb us simply because we are one of the places he can reach from his launchpad. On the other hand, I do not rule out the possibility of having my own government bomb northern Cali by accident (either really by accident or by-accident-on-purpose-cover-that-up to halt the resistance). Or my own government bomb us because the nuclear bombing systems are controlled by robots and computers and other nonhuman mechanisms, and therefore highly vulnerable to hackers, infiltrators, saboteurs, and Hal taking over for no fathomable reason. If this sounds like 60s paranoia or Cali-minded whim-wham then let me disabuse you of that notion – chalk it up to PTSD from the Cold War. Bay of Pigs. Cuban Missile Crisis. I was there. I ducked and covered, assembled in the gymnasium to the tune of a screeching siren, watched a bomb shelter get built in my basement, saw televised mushroom clouds, and read a lot of post-apocalyptic sci-fi of the zeitgeist. I grew up in the shadow of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I spent years up to my neck in the fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons before throwing in the towel and turning my attention to more immediate concerns where I could make a concrete difference. Homelessness. Environmental protection. Sustainable food systems. Health equity. Raising children well. The all-clear siren will never sound in my lifetime. Since life is not a drill, and since we live under constant threat, the best course of action is to love well, have wondrous adventures, promote joy, appreciate trees, be kind, build a life that inspires gratitude every day, and eat a lot of really good sandwiches (no pressure).

Grilled veggie and goat cheese sandwich. Yum.

Fury and Humor. Let's Eat.

Anger is not a useful emotion. It breaks things. It does not serve me well. I do not wish to keep it. Yet, as 2017 comes to a close, I find myself unable (or unwilling) to let go of my fury. Perhaps my fury is what’s holding me together. My amusement at political jokes and cartoons has an angry edge. If it was an emoji, it would be a grinning sledgehammer. Perhaps I could sell that concept to someone at corporate HQ for Walmart. Imagine Walmart shopping bags depicting a demonic grinning sledgehammer that read “Have Another Day.” Another day of tamping down the fury in an effort to stay positive.

Warning:  political content and questionable Jewish jokes ahead.

I regularly contact senators and representatives (i.e., congressional reps) via phone, email, and postcard to speak my mind. While I do occasionally contact my own congressional reps, I usually lean on the ones most needed and most likely to make a difference with their vote. Honestly, I’m not angry at my own congressional reps, so why holler at them? I want to holler at the imbeciles who actually make me furious. At the same time, I want my actions to have strategic impact. So I carefully choose Republicans who are wavering on key issues and I don’t tell them I live in Cali, I just give them a piece of my mind in the hope that I will help tip the scales when they vote. I also regularly call the handful of most vulnerable Republican congressional reps from Cali during off hours when no one is answering the phones and leave them spit-flecked messages saying “you don’t speak for me and you are not my voice in Congress and we are going to vote you out of office,” even though I can’t actually vote them out because I don’t live in their feeble-minded district, for obvious reasons. I don’t want to live somewhere that people actually vote for these morons. This is my blog. I’ll say what I want. Don’t judge. It’s the fury speaking.

On weekends I write postcards and make calls to leave messages on machines at congressional offices. I wonder if the aides who answer the phones on Monday morning even listen to my entire message. I should probably throw in something to get their attention, such as, “Do they sell kosher salami anywhere in Kentucky?” Thus one of my improved call scripts would be something like:  “Vote no on this tax legislation that gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations and will devastate the lives of everyone else, all of us seniors, the middle class, hardworking people, elves, Redwood trees, waffle irons, and polar bears. The only things that will trickle down to us from increased corporate profits are toxic chemical-laced food, dangerous prescription drugs, deranged store-bought politicians, yet more creative living situations for the impoverished, and tweet-lies. Do the right thing. Vote no.” (Well, they didn’t, so I need a tax accountant who is also a qualified therapist.) Actually, the polar bears will now be devastated for real since somehow the GOP has recategorized drilling for oil in the Arctic Refuge as a tax issue. How they managed to lump this into tax legislation baffles me, but they wrote it into the margins at one o’clock in the morning and jammed it through. Since polar bears don’t vote, and would probably be disenfranchised even if they did (because, let’s face it, who is going to shuttle polar bears to the nearest polling place, or should I say poling place?), the GOP can’t pass out cigars fast enough to celebrate turning the Arctic Refuge into the Arctic Refugee.

I’m not looking forward to Al Franken leaving Congress, despite my disappointment in his inappropriate behavior. The Dems are throwing him under the bus to take a moralistic stand and make a point. But not one Republican pedophile or rapist is going to resign as a result of tossing out Al. It hurts me to lose Al, who has been a strong voice for me and my beliefs in Congress. Not worth the sacrifice. He should stay. He just can’t run for president, since apparently now committing sexual assault is required to qualify for that office and Al doesn’t have the credentials for that. Sigh.

I plan to change my activist tactics in 2018. It appears that delusion and mayhem work better than truth and reason. It works for Mitch and his cronies who map out how to increase homelessness on dinner napkins in the middle of the night and it works for the Predator-in-Chief to advance his catastrophic agenda. Here is my new plan. I will call Republican congressional reps and leave Jewish jokes on their answering machines. They won’t have a clue. While the percentage of Jewish congressional reps has risen in recent years, almost all of them are Dems. There are about two Republican reps who self-identify as Jewish, but I suspect they are simply confused Mormons. So, with Jewish jokes in mind, here are some I have up my sleeve. If you are not Jewish, you will probably think you get these jokes, but you will probably get them at about 60%. Enjoy as much as you can decipher. As for Jews, have fun. I am contemplating leaving these on the answering machines at the DC offices for the most morally corrupt, mentally deficient, and malicious lawmakers. This should confuse them, perhaps distract them, and, in my fantasy future, derail them. I live more and more in my fantasy future these days. Everyone there is compassionate, considerate, and helpful.

A Jewish man is on his deathbed and he whispers to his daughter, “I think I smell your mother’s delicious kugel.” The daughter confirms that he does because her mother has baked kugel. “Please bring me some to taste for one last time,” the father gasps. The daughter goes away and comes back empty-handed. “Where’s the kugel?” her father whispers. She replies, “Mom says it’s for after.”

This one from Jewish comic Billy Crystal (not a Jewish joke, just a Jewish comic’s sense of humor):  “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.”

Four Jewish women are eating lunch and the waiter comes to the table and asks, “Is anything alright?”

The Jewish comic London Lee said he once had a German shepherd as his pet until it found out he was Jewish and bit him.

A Jewish grandmother comes across a beggar in the street who holds out his hand to her and says, “I haven’t eaten in four days.” The grandmother says, “Force yourself.”

All Jewish holidays can be explained as “They tried to kill us but we survived. Let’s eat.”

A Jewish grandmother is at the beach with her grandson. As she watches him at the water’s edge from a beach blanket, a huge wave comes and drags him out to sea. The woman raises her fists above her head and shouts at God, “How can you do this to me? I’m a righteous woman! I obey all your commandments! Why have you taken my darling grandson?” A huge wave comes in and when it leaves her grandson is sitting on the shore unharmed. The grandmother looks at the heavens and says, “He had a hat.”

Finally, a true story about the Jewish comic actor Walther Matthau. He and his wife were on vacation in Europe with the Jewish comic couple Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. Stiller relates that one night, he and his wife heard the Matthaus arguing loudly in the hotel room next to them for quite some time. At breakfast the Matthaus were clearly still fuming at each other. The two couples went to Auschwitz with a tour group. After walking through the museum at Auschwitz, Matthau’s wife turned to him with tears running down her cheeks, and said, “This puts everything in perspective and ought to make us both realize how foolish we are for fighting.” Matthau replied, “Now you ruined Auschwitz for me.”

I imagine that after weeks of receiving Jewish jokes on the congressional office answering machines, there will be a rash of resignations by congressional aides and office workers. If I can gut their staff, maybe I can force a few Republicans out of office. You never know. They have tried to destroy us before, but we survived. Let’s eat.

  *******

If you have stayed with me through this year of fewer blog posts and the necessity to dig deeper to find humor then I thank you for your loyalty. I try my best to raise a few laughs and keep hope alive. It isn’t easy, and getting harder with each passing day. I would like to imagine that these difficult days are actually the first tumultuous years of a better world being born. In "Laudato Si," Pope Francis writes:  "May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope." The pope is a hard act to follow, but let me say that I wish you much hope, much joy, much wonder, and the shelter of peace in 2018. We will continue to care for one another and lift one another up despite the heartless and greedy machinations of this incomprehensibly mean government. Remember to keep laughing. Blessings to you and those dear to you in these stressful and uncertain times.

  

Image of a better world from Hao's Blog.

Communication Conundrum Resolved

The moving day communication conundrum began when the Russian movers arrived. Expository interlude ahead (possible spoiler alert). My son and his wife decided to move from SoCal to NorCal. (My son has a portable profession.) They sold their townhouse in SoCal and asked if they could move in with us while they explore communities, schools, housing prices, etc. in NorCal. My son wants to bring my five-month-old baby grandson to live with me; and he asks me if that’s OK? Seriously? How long has he had a Jewish mom? The answer was written in the Talmud hundreds of years ago. We have a win-win situation here. They get a landing pad while they regroup, and my husband and I get a baby. They had commitments in SoCal to finish up before making the exodus. Hence the moving van, with their belongings to stash in storage, would arrive in NorCal before them. Ron and I agreed to meet the movers at the storage unit to unlock it and keep track of the inventory during the load in. We recalled loading stage scenery on and off of trucks and in and out of theaters during our salad days as theater techies, and Ron went off in search of his adjustable crescent wrench.

Moving day dawned dark and stormy with sheets of rain pouring down. The movers, scheduled to arrive at the storage unit early in the morning, would call from the road one hour before anticipated arrival to give us a heads up. We roused ourselves at a demonically early hour on a morning made for lolling around in bed reading and listening to the tap-tap of raindrops, and stood by for the call, like Neo in The Matrix. Except when the call came, we did not get transported from one reality to another, like Neo. It only seemed like it.

We met the movers, Vladi and Andrei, at the storage facility. I told them right away that I’m hard of hearing, that I wear hearing aids, which help but aren’t all that, and so I would probably need to ask them to repeat what they said through a megaphone. Vladi, the lead mover, told us right away that he and his coworker Andrei are Russian and that he could speak English but Andrei was still learning. These guys were not throw-the-election-and-sabotage-America-so-it-loses-all-credibility-and-influence-on-the-world-stage Russians. They were simply your garden variety of hardworking Russian immigrants. Vladi walked us through the paperwork, which, fortunately, was in English. We and the movers each had a numbered inventory of every item on the truck. Each item had a magic green sticker with a corresponding number on it. Andrei lowered the elevator-tailgate and prepared to unload in the drenching rain. Luckily, only a few feet separated the truck from the hallway leading to the storage unit and the green number stickers seemed waterproof.

The storage unit did not have any lighting; but Vladi produced an excellent flashlight that Ron held up so we could see into the depths of the 10x10 unit. Ron has less than 20/20 vision, especially in dim light, so it was a good thing for him to control the flashlight so he could sidle up close to any object and look at it from three inches away to make sure it didn’t bite. The situation was shaping up as a potential comedy sketch in my imagination:  the woman who can’t hear, the man who can’t see, and the Russian movers unload a truck full of mystery objects in the pouring rain and stash them in a dark 10x10 space guided only by numbered green dots.

“I didn’t load the truck,” Vladi informed us worriedly, “so I don’t know how much I have here. I hope it will fit in that storage.” Our children’s belongings were not the only items on the truck. After unloading for us, the Russians would drive another 100 miles to unload the rest of the stuff for someone else. I tried to reassure them that my son knows what he’s doing and everything would fit. Vladi still looked skeptical in both Russian and English.

Necessity breeds invention, and we figured out a system for unloading and inventorying. Vladi remained on the truck and moved items to the tailgate (marking them off on his inventory list) while Andrei carried them into the storage. Vladi got to do this because he was the boss. Andrei did most of the heavy lifting. Ron said he felt like a supervisor (he even started to swagger a little). I looked for the green numbered sticker-dots while Andrei called out the numbers as he carried objects in. He had a Russian accent and didn’t always speak up so sometimes I understood him and sometimes I didn’t. If I didn’t hear him, and missed seeing the number, then the failsafe was Supervisor Ron, who made use of the flashlight to spot the numbers (often from two inches away) and repeat them to me or point them out to me. I marked off each number as it went by, which was a super-satisfying task for a Virgo, and I had to restrain myself from humming.

Andrei did his best to stack things sensibly to get the most out of the space, but in no time at all Supervisor Ron was moving things around and restacking them more efficiently when Andrei was out at the truck. Andrei didn’t seem to mind, or perhaps he didn’t notice the rearrangements. It’s interesting watching someone else’s possessions get stacked in a storage unit. I’m not judging, mind you; but I have to wonder why the kids have so many snowboards. The one I bought for my son was stolen from his room at the frat house when he was in college, so maybe he’s overcompensating.

When they had unloaded about half the items, Vladi came off the truck, looked into the storage unit, and panicked (in Russian and English). He didn’t think it would all fit. I talked him down off the ceiling (in English) and convinced him to keep unloading. I had faith in my son’s judgment. If he said it would fit, it would fit; and as we neared the end of the inventory, sure enough, it became apparent to Vladi that it would indeed fit. When he declared the inventory unloaded, Vladi and I compared notes about which items we had checked off our inventory lists. I had two things still missing and he swore he had unloaded them. One of them was identified as “framed pictures.” We had no framed pictures in the storage unit. Because the customer is always right, Vladi went back to look in the truck and he found both of the missing items. One of them was the framed pictures (camouflaged because they were wrapped in a protective pad). We almost wound up with a small plastic tub belonging to someone else, but Andrei caught it at the last minute and took it back to the truck. It didn’t look like something my children owned since we could see that it contained a mess of photos (of people we didn’t recognize), small tools, cat food (they don’t have cats), papers, and rubber bands randomly thrown into it. I could not imagine my well-organized daughter-in-law “packing” that disorderly box. Besides, it had no snowboards in it.

As the movers removed the padding from the last few pieces of furniture, I noticed that Andrei had a small, bleeding cut on his hand. I ducked into a nearby phone booth and emerged wearing my Jewish Supermom outfit and wielding antibiotic ointment and a bandaid, which I happened to have in my handbag, because that’s how Jewish moms roll. I ran an X-ray on the wound, tested it for mercury, reset the bone, doused the hand in antibiotic ointment, and bandaged him up. He was astonished. As I recall, Russia threw out all the Jews, so he probably had not yet experienced the awesome energy of a Jewish mom.

Before hopping on their truck and riding off into the pouring rain, Vladi showed me photos of his beautiful multiculti children on his phone. His wife is Korean/Russian. He has a little girl and a two-month-old son. Although he was supposed to remove the moving company pads from all the items and take them with him, he said he was leaving my children’s crib wrapped in the pads to protect it because he has a baby too. How sweet. I asked the Russians to teach me how to say “thank you” in Russian. Spasibo. Diversity rocks. I remain ever grateful for the goodness and kindness that I find everywhere around me in the many different people who touch my life.

Halloween Scrooge

I’m relieved to have survived another Halloween. I’m a Halloween scrooge and I don’t care who knows it. Surely my quarrel with Halloween has roots in trauma I experienced as a child from this holiday; trauma that has nothing to do with the undead and everything to do with myopia. I am comically nearsighted and, as a child, wore glasses with lenses thick enough to burn bugs. I have had contact lenses since the age of 16, but during my trick-or-treating years, I wore glasses. It doesn’t require rocket science to understand that when you put a plastic Halloween mask over a pair of glasses, they fog up. For this reason, I spent many a Halloween night stumbling over lawn furniture, falling in birdbaths, arguing with garden gnomes, and attempting to hack my way out of labyrinthine hedges and shrubbery with a plastic fairy wand. As my friends with 20/20 vision leapt joyously down the street, I was left in the dust extricating myself from the obstacle course of yard accoutrements and crawling through petunia beds retrieving my candy, which had spilled.

It took me years to wise up and wear costumes that did not require a mask. I’m not sure why I bothered to trick-or-treat anyway because I got to keep very little of my candy. One of my brothers has Celiac, and in order not to traumatize him alone with the unfairness of not being able to eat most of the loot we hauled in, my mother traumatized all three of us by restricting us to the same candy that my brother could eat, namely pure chocolate. So when we got home with our bulging bags, we poured the full colorful array of candy out on the kitchen table, separated the paltry few pure chocolate items from every other blessed treat, and got to keep that and that alone. My mother took our discarded candy to the local children’s rehabilitation center and gave it to the bedridden children who couldn’t go trick-or-treating. Now, all these years later, I appreciate my mother’s beautiful altruism and her brilliant system for preventing her own children from ingesting pounds of toxic junk. But as a child, I could not get on board with the good deed of treating all the little children at the rehab center to my hard-earned candy. I wonder how the nurses felt about Mom’s kindness since they had to deal with all those children jacked up on sugar who were stuck in bed. You can only play so many games of Parcheesi.

These days, as a nutritionist, I know that sugar is the devil’s brew, one of the most toxic substances in the universe, in the same league with radioactive waste and tweets from the Tyrannosaurus in the White House. Halloween is my personal nightmare on Elm St. When my children came home with their candy, I told them to throw out everything they didn’t like. “It’s not food,” I told them. “It’s garbage, so if you don’t like that kind of candy throw it away.” They sat at the kitchen table with a trash can and discarded at least half the loot because it was stuff they didn’t like. For a few years, when they were very little, I got away with telling them to choose a small selection to keep and that the rest was going to disappear to appease the candy ghost who would come during the night and look for candy to snatch instead of snatching little children. I managed to pare the stash down to a dull roar that way. But that didn’t last long because my children quickly figured out there’s no such thing as a candy ghost. They each had a bag of goodies and every evening after dinner for weeks they chose something for dessert. I couldn’t wait for those bags to dwindle. Unfortunately nothing keeps like sugar. That’s probably why dinosaurs had such bad teeth. Thousands of years from now, when humans have become extinct, candy will rule the Earth.

For a few years I handed out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters. They looked somewhat confused. Only I could turn Halloween into a dental holiday. One year I gave out tangerines. I have a friend who worked as a doctor in a low-income community and she told me that she gave out condoms to all the teenagers who came trick-or-treating at her house. (I hope the teens didn’t try to eat them.)

The fact that I don’t like dressing up in a costume definitely poses a serious stumbling block for me when it comes to surviving Halloween. Weird and unfamiliar clothing makes me uncomfortable and self-conscious. I can never come up with good costume ideas anyway. My costuming efforts are too obscure for others to understand. One year I dressed in green and went as chlorophyll. When I told people what I was, they looked perplexed. One guy asked me if that’s an energy drink. I told him plants use it to conduct photosynthesis. He excused himself to talk to a woman in a revealing bodice about their favorite King Kong movies. It creeps me out to see other people looking strange in their get-ups. Too hallucinogenic.

The final nail in the Halloween coffin for me is that scary things actually scare me. I can’t watch horror movies because they give me nightmares. I can’t even watch normal movies with violence and torture in them. I hid under the table whenever the Wicked Witch of the West appeared in The Wizard of Oz, until I was eleven years old. My daughter watched every minute of that film at the age of two and laughed her head off (not literally). She couldn’t figure out why her mom cowered behind the couch whenever the flying monkeys appeared. I went to see the 1978 remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers because it was filmed in San Francisco and a lot of people I knew in the tech theater biz worked on the sets. Big mistake. I spent almost the entire film hiding my face in my husband’s shoulder and asking him what was happening. Some guy behind us finally told me in exasperation, “Just look at it, lady.” I had nightmares for weeks from listening to the soundtrack.

I don’t see the humor in fake blood and gore. It looks real to me. Zombies terrify me and I can’t understand what everyone else thinks is so funny about beyond-dead creatures. Space aliens better look benign because if they look like inside-out people then I am so not watching. When someone comes to my door with a pretend axe in their skull and fake blood dripping down, I run screaming to hide under the bed, even if it’s a fourth-grader and the fake blood looks like congealed BBQ sauce. Even if it actually is BBQ sauce. Even if it’s organic BBQ sauce. I don’t mind the fairy princesses and bumblebees, but the ghouls and serial killers terrify me. Masks creep me out. So if you come to my house on Halloween, you will find all the lights out. Perhaps a small pumpkin will grace my front porch; uncarved and still edible, later to be made into a pie sweetened with honey (not the evil-demon sugar). I will be nowhere in sight. Life is already scary enough, and getting scarier by the minute, without purposely finding more ways for us to scare ourselves. My costume for this year? Bacteria. Invisible to the naked eye. (Not an energy drink FYI.)

Benign picture. Not scary.