Little People

   
     After spending a week with three grandchildren under age five, I am still reeling.  Not from making mac and cheese at least once a day or losing fifteen games of Zingo (on purpose) or getting up when the little ones coughed through the night.  I am reeling at the wonder of it all.

     The two-year-olds motored their cars across the tile, then jumped off to tackle us behind the knees with unexpected hugs.   They squealed at the butterflies that flew around their heads at Butterfly World, at the misty waterfall they could run through, and at the birds that stayed on their hands drinking a sugar syrup.  They clung to the pole of the carousel horse, begging for another ride in their abbreviated, "NO GO, more please!" 

     Their four-year-old sister insisted on seeing every live show at Dreher Park Zoo, from the wild birds to the croc she could touch.  With bright sapphire eyes, pig tails, and an ever-ready smile, she stood to recite the pledge of allegiance at a Christmas concert and yelled good-bye to us at the airport, "I'll miss you, grandma and grandpa!" 

     It's not just innocence adults lose (and why wouldn't we?).  It's the resilency.  Kids bounce back - in minutes, if not seconds.  Scrapes on two knees hurt, but getting back in the pool was more important.  Aging makes the consequences of our actions more life-altering.  The lesson I learned from the kids:  get back to basics.
 
     Chelsea Cain's essay in the N.Y. TIMES BOOK REVIEW section December 2, 2012, talks about belonging to two writers' groups - one for distinguished authors and one for seven-year-olds.  She describes the process of writing (stories for the seven-year-olds) and then reading before the group.  In the case of the adult group, I can relate to the gut-wrenching that takes place before reading my piece.  In fact, more than once it has crossed my mind to leave before the leader called my name.

     Chelsea points out that the seven-year-olds, on the other hand, can't wait to read their stories aloud.  "They instinctively offer praise before going in for the kill."   Writing can be frustrating and demeaning.  Try bringing a memoir into a writer's group!  Kids don't know yet that everything they write is part memoir.  According to Chelsea, they cry "because they lost their pencil...or because someone wants to sit next to someone else."  About the important things - certainly not about their writing.

     Innocence, resilency, and perspective - I lost them somewhere along the way.  Spent a few days with the grandkids and found them again!

    

    

    

    

Smart Gate

     First there was Global Entry.  Now there's Smart Gate.  Not to be confused with Watergate, but if I thought about it for a few seconds, I'm sure I could come up with some similarities.

     After interviews and background checks, Charley and I were accepted for the Global Entry program.  It's supposed to eliminate our wait in lines at Immigration and Customs when we re-enter the U.S.  But when Charley inserted his hands in the fingerprint machine at Logan Airport, nothing registered.  His fingertips were too dry.  An ICE agent escorted us to a detention room, where we waited forty-five minutes with drug smugglers and black marketers until a central data bank gave assurances that we were do-gooders, not no-gooders.  "Put saliva on your fingertips next time," the agent told Charley.

     This week I got an email from DoNotReply@departmenthumanservices/usgovernment.  There is another quick-entry program Charley and I can apply for.  To Australia.   It's called Smart Gate.

     We've never been to Australia, and although it's highly appealing as a destination, we'll probably never make it.  Our days of being encased in a metal tube for twenty-four hours are over.

     The Smart Gate program is authorized by Australian Customs and Border Protection to allow TRUSTED U.S. citizens to use the Australian automated processing system.  Only under these conditions:

you've been accepted for the Global Entry Program, you travel on a valid U.S. passport, you're sixteen years or older.

       Is Charley with the dry fingertips trustworthy?

     The notification warns that this program is by no means an ENTITLEMENT!  What do the Aussies think Americans feel entitled to over there?   A brewery?   

     The email warns, however, that the eight cities in Australia that employ Smart Gate have limited gates and kiosks operational.  Others are under construction.   Australian Customs and Border Protection apologizes for delays this may cause.


    

    

    

    

    

Global Entry to What?

     Charley and I looked straight ahead.  The only peripheral peeks we'd gotten were as we entered.   To our right were guys with "hoodies" pulled low over their brows and tattoos all over their forearms.  To our left were burly guys speaking Russian through gold teeth, their necks wadded with gold chains.  None of them bothered to look at us.  We were misfits.

     "Wait here, please."  The agent pointed to the first row of chairs lined up like a classroom.  No-one sat in the next seven rows.  Could that many people really be detained at once?

     Charley was seething.  A Vietnam vet and former banker, he was brought in with thugs?  I slithered my watch and wedding bands off and heard them clink inside my purse.

     "Do you believe this?  We applied for that stupid thing so we'd have NO wait getting back into this country!"

     "I don't care about the wait right now," I said.  "I just want to get out of here with my limbs attached."

     Months before, the two of us had filed Global Entry applications so we could by-pass Customs and Immigration lines after travelling abroad.  We'd sent in  $100 each and passed background checks.  No arrests, no outstanding speeding tickets.  No problem!

     We'd  gotten a notice that we were OK'ed for the next step - an interview with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent at the nearest office, a terminal in the port of Ft. Lauderdale.  Down Interstate 95 we went.

     Easy questions, easy answers - always first responses.  If only the security questions for my online accounts were that easy!  I can't ever remember the passwords or pins and created a folder on the computer to help me.  I have to "minimize" the website I'm working on to open the folder, retrieve the necessary number of letters or numbers or combination (with or without capitals), then "optimize" again to enter my account.  By then I wish I'd  just made a phone call.

     The agent disappeared in Ft. Lauderdale, then came back and told us to stand in front of the camera.  We didn't know if that was a good or bad sign.  The photos weren't half bad, actually - nothing like our drivers'  photos.  Technology sure had improved!

     The next step was a hands-on tutorial with a duplicate of the machine that would grant us re-entry in airports.  We inserted our hands into slots like the blower in public rest rooms.  The machine read and recorded our fingerprints and stamped our passports.  We'd been cleared for landing!

     So why did we end up in a detention room at Logan Airport, while the rest of our plane went through the lines and retrieved their luggage?  Because my dear husband's fingers were TOO DRY!  Yup - the machine couldn't read his fingerprints to get a match with the database.  We'd by-passed a long line to be held up by an electronic wizard.  After forty-five minutes we were released with special instructions for Charley.  "Before you use the machine next time, you'd better put some saliva on your fingertips.  Or your wife could carry a little tube of oil.  Of course, she'll have to put it in a baggie to get through security."

     "What a waste of money," Charley kept saying.  Now we stand in line like everyone else.

     Let me hear your worst airport stories!  Write in the comment box and post. 

Humor from the Headlines

It has been a devastating week with unthinkable catastrophe along the east coast of the U.S.  Among the photographic and video horrors, I found some items that might provide brief distractions.

First, Paula Simonds (aka Lacey Wildd ) is getting more cleavage.  Not that she doesn't already have enough.  The single mom from MTV's "True Life" series has decided to increase her implant size from triple L to triple M.  Proud to be plastic, Lacey is charging $1500-$2000 per TV and event appearance (no porn or topless, though).  Her website sells sexy Lacey bobble heads (with bobbling boobs, too?).  In-between having her six children, she had six surgeries.  Then six more.  She hopes to put her children through college on the bobbling proceeds.

When Lacey sleeps, "it's like having two bowling balls in my chest," she said.  She has two torn vertebrae and can't have routine sonograms or mammograms.  An internal bra implanted in her torso is made of pigskin and her own muscle.  The implants can shift at any time and end up in her armpits or abdomen.  If that happened, would gawkers still shout "How big are they?"

Fans donate through PayPal for her surgeries.  While under the knife last time, Lacey added butt and tummy lifts. 

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Let's get it right!  Since the third and final presidential debate, residents of Boca Raton, Florida, want their hometown pronounced correctly.  It's "Rah-tone."  The city actually passed an ordinance in 1982 to put an end to mispronunciations.

What could they do?  Jail people who make it rhyme with "baton?"

The name actually comes from an archaic nautical term meaning, "rocky inlet."  Contemporary Spanish  translates the name into something like "mouth of the rat."  Well, that's possible, too, depending on the people you know from Boca.

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Newspapers reported on November 4, 2012, that billions in aid meant to help Japan recover from its 2011 earthquake and tsunami actually got diverted to other government projects.  Among those receiving the aid were a factory that produces contact lenses, prisons for job training, and activists who are opposed to the activists opposed to whaling.  More than half of the $148 billion has not been allocated at all. 

Meanwhile, Japanese art director and designer Kenya Hara announced a top-secret new project for fall.  Would it provide temporary housing for the inhabitants still homeless from the tsunami?  No, but it does provide construction for man's best friend, dogs.  Perhaps the easy-to-assemble structures, called "Architecture for Dogs," could be modified for humans.  I wonder if Mr. Hara received any of the $148 billion for his project?

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Finally, some levity from Senator Joe Lieberman, when interviewed by Mark Leibovich in The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, November 4, 2012:

"There's an older guy on the park bench, crying...Finally a jogger stops, sees the guy sobbing.  'What's wrong?'

"'My wife of 48 years died, and I was very lonely.  I went on JDate and met a younger Russian woman.  We liked each other.  So she's moved in with me, and she's wonderful.  She's attractive, she cooks well, she takes care of me and almost every night we have fabulous sex.'

"So the jogger says:  'Well that's a wonderful story.  Why are you crying?'

"The old guy says, 'I'm crying because I can't remember where I live.'"

Senator Lieberman added, "It will get funnier as you get older."

Airedale Mixup

     Our sons grew up with a docile female Airedale named Sandy.  She was small, so they'd often wrestle on the floor together till Sandy fell asleep with her head in one of their laps.  Airedales were bred for hunting, and she chased Canadian geese, among other things.  One winter she fell through the ice and had to be rescued in a rowboat.  After that we confined her to a very large area in the backyard, where she dug up every inch of the flower beds while chasing rodents and vermin.

     When we travelled, we took her to a boarding kennel closeby.  For a reason we couldn't fathom, she couldn't wait to get there.  She would actually wedge herself in the cracked car window when we pulled into the driveway.  The owner of the kennel was always there to greet us, and she practically jumped into his arms.

     This guy was W-E-I-R-D.  With long shaggy hair pulled into a pony tail, he was a throwback to the 60's.  In fact, he often left his sentences undone and our questions unanswered.  But he loved our Sandy, and she loved him.

     We joked that the owner's pupils weren't focusing and wondered what kind of brownies he'd been munching.  Or whether he'd made doggie treats for his boarders, which might explain why Sandy was always so excited to get there.

     She was certainly well cared for and never came home sick.  When she came home to us, that is!   After one trip we talked to a neighbor who also had a small female Airedale.  He told us that both dogs had been boarding at the kennel at the same time.  When he picked up his dog and took her home, she didn't respond to her name.  "I thought that was strange, and she certainly was playful," he said.  "Then I looked at her tag.  I'd been given your dog."

     We found another kennel after that.  Sandy hid on the floor of the car all the way over.

Yoko Ono Envy

     I wish I could be more like her sometimes.  She's had to deal with kidnapping, deportation, assassination, yet she absorbs it all and still says what she believes is true, not what will make her look good to the public.  She gave up the search to find her daughter after many years, believing that her daughter would come to her if she needed a mother.  "Mothers are not supposed to give guidance," she said in 1998.  "Children should do their own thing."  Seriously??  She let John "do his own thing" when he strayed, but he did come back.
     She believes in art for art's sake, without caring what anyone thinks of her as a woman and an artist.  Her work is disturbing and yet comforting.  It can't be figured out.  She makes us look at the empty space in her paintings and go outside just to study the sky.
     I have trouble following her path to inner peace.  I guess I am too "Type A."  I rest only when work is done.  I need to know where I am going on any given day, what phone calls I need to make, and how much writing I need to do.  I have been told that in getting my manuscripts published, I "dot every i and cross every t."  Is that a bad thing?  Only when I become so manic that I drive myself and Charley crazy.
     I just attended the Florida Writers Conference for three days.  I have a manuscript ready to be sold - A Survival Guide for Grown Children with Elderly Parents (Who Still Have Their Marbles).  I rewrote it twice over the summer and then three editors read it, each from a different perspective.  I tweaked it each time I got their suggestions.  In preparation to pitch to an agent at the conference, I prepared a bio, a query letter, a synopsis, a proposal, a flash drive of the manuscript, and a hard copy of the manuscript.  I practiced my five-minute pitch twenty times, assuming the other five minutes with the agent would be her questions.
     An agent takes an average of five new clients a year.  That's from among the 80-100 query letters he receives EVERY WEEK.  If he likes a writer's query letter, the agent will ask for a proposal for the manuscript or a partial manuscript.  If he likes the partial, he'll ask for a full manuscript.  Which doesn't guarantee representation.  But at least his request saved the writer on round two from becoming "slush."  This process can take many weeks.
     Experience made me choose a skirt, jacket, and low heels to wear to the interview.  I wanted to look professional, since I'd had a television interview in 2009 when Minor League Mom was released, and I'd taught back in the dark ages, when teachers couldn't stand in front of the classroom in shorts and sandals.  Outside the interview room I saw young writers going in to pitch in jeans and flip flops.  Why can't I be more like Yoko Ono? I asked myself.  It's my work that will speak, not my clothes.
     I stayed fifteen minutes with the agent I'd chosen, and we talked about a lot in common - sports in the family, teaching - as well as about my manuscript.  When it was over, I shook her hand and thanked her for her time.  Her other hand held my proposal and a completed manuscript.  Maybe it's better to be me.

               

The Kids Next Door

     Charley and I recently visited three of our five grandchildren.  Half a dozen kids came into the cul-de-sac to shoot baskets or draw with chalk on the asphalt.


     Older brother Sam admonished a younger sister for not retrieving the ball he was pitching to her.  "Jesus Christ, go get it!"
     "Where is he?" younger sister Nancy wanted to know.
     "Who?"
     "Jesus Christ.  I want to meet him when he gets the ball!"


     One of the mothers answered questions from her daughter. 
     "Mommy, how long have you been married to Daddy?"
     "For ten years."
     "Did you get me before you married him?"
     "No, I got Daddy first."
     "Did I cost a lot?"
     "Yes, and you still do!"


     One of our granddaughters pointed to the ball protruding from my right foot.  "What's that?" she said.
     "It's called a bunion.  A bone grew that way because I wore pointy shoes teaching for many years."
     "Will I get one?"
     "Not if you don't wear pointy shoes."
     "My mom wears them.  I think I'd better clean out her closet."


     Older brother Jack told his younger brother that classmate Aidan was no longer his friend.  "He said something bad about you," Jack told his brother.
     "What did he say?"
     "He said you were a sissy."
     "I'm going to kill him," younger brother said.  "But don't worry!  It won't be on school grounds."