RED

          There’s a triangle of red on the J key of my ergonomic keyboard.

It isn’t blood, it’s nail polish but it looks like blood that has had a chance to dry - burgundy, maroon. The rare times I decide to paint my nails I can’t sit still long enough to let them dry completely.

          This red reminds me of the perfectly round drops of blood on worn wood floors of my apartment on

Pacific Coast Highway

. No matter how hard I tried squeeze my innards as I made my way, half-asleep, from bed to bathroom, the drops escaped. I remember the “th-wump” as the tampon fell out of me, completely saturated. I’d have to grab hold of the slippery string to keep it from falling into the toilet and plugging up the pipes. 

          How much blood did I lose, in my thirties, the prime of my life, my sexual peak?  I remember the day I was in Fireside Market, leaning on the shopping cart with cramps so bad I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand upright in the checkout line. I’d bought a paperback of The World According to Garp. This was before the movie with Robin Williams which I believe is one of the rare occasions when a movie does justice to the book.

          I came home from the market, retreated to Earl’s enormous king-sized bed which nearly filled the bedroom in that little noisy apartment where cars whizzed past twenty hours a day. In the few quiet hours, between 2:00 and 5:00 AM, if I happened to get up to pee, or change a tampon, I could actually hear the ocean, I could hear waves breaking on the sand. 

          The only other time I remember quiet was that winter it rained so much the highway flooded, whole portions of bluffs simply melted onto the highway, like chocolate cake batter. Jane and I had to work, one Monday, to get the payroll done.  She parked in Santa Monica Canyon and walked to the Club and I simply walked from my apartment past the Nugent’s house, through Tee’s parking lot. We spent a couple hours adding up time cards, filling out the ADP sheets. Then we literally went out and stood right in the middle of the closed highway. The sun was out by now and maintenance crews hadn’t yet arrived to clean up the mess.     We stood in the silence of that sparkling January day, taking in the beauty of the Malibu mountains, the wide white sand, and an ocean that was slowly calming, like a baby recovering from a crying fit.  The beach was littered with all sorts of driftwood and debris and we, two young blondes, strolled down the highway feeling as if we were the first white people to ever set eyes on that magnificent bay.

PET PEEVES

          I gave my adult students the assignment to write about a pet peeve. I find that I have a whole menagerie of peeves and find it interesting that so many of them are traits or habits possessed by my husband.

          Why did I choose to marry someone who would constantly get my hackles up? The simple answer is I was lonely, horny and tired of being single, so when I met a nice-looking, employed man, my age, with a clean car, I was drawn to him like a meat bee to a picnic. 

          So you won’t think I’m totally heartless, the deal was clinched when I met the rescued cat he brought from Texas in a U-Haul. And when he got tears in his eyes talking about his daughter . . . I was a goner. 

          However, if we hadn’t gotten married after only knowing each other four months I wonder if we would have gone through with it. At first I found it so charming that we had different tastes in food, I took a picture: his whiskey, my tequila; his steak, my tofu; his mayonnaise, my hoisin sauce; his potato chips, my dried seaweed.  I was forty-one years old but as excited as a seventeen-year-old thinking how marvelous it would be to change his diet, in effect, change him.

          Of course it never happened.  Twenty-years later one cabinet holds his nuts, crackers, chips and coffee creamer while across the kitchen another cabinet is my Asian pantry.  The refrigerator crispers hold green, orange and red vegetables he never eats.  And yet, I continue to let myself be irritated by his diet and worry about his health.  When he dips a fork into the mayonnaise jar and spreads it on a saltine, then tops it with a slice of summer sausage my whole body trembles.

          Then there’s the dishwasher.  I have this “thing” about order. I love to open drawers and see everything placed like a puzzle, in individual compartments I’ve devised from various sized boxes. This is the case in my desk, my dresser, and all the drawers in the kitchen. Every item from a roll of tape to a shoelace has a place and everything sleeps peacefully until I need it.

          So, it follows that when I put dishes in the dishwasher, I place like with like, dishes with dishes, glasses with glasses, forks with forks, etc.  This not only presents a pleasing picture when I revisit it, but makes putting away more efficient.  Perhaps I over anthropomorphize – but how can I not? When I hold the cup Katherine and I purchased together on

Montana Avenue

twenty-five years ago, I remember that day. Everything I own has a story behind it. I didn’t create the story.  I’m not that crazy!

          Now, before I tell you this, I want you to be sitting down and preferably holding on to something: when I open the dishwasher after John’s cleaned up the kitchen here is what I see: chaos, the aftermath of a tornado, or what would happen if a super hero tossed everything in the air and let it land willy-nilly.  Sometimes small glasses are actually upside down.  He prefers the top rack, so he doesn’t have to bed over. This means it’s overcrowded with plates, cups, spatulas, knives, all going in different directions, some diagonal.

          He does use the basket for flatware, but flings them face down so that fork tines are inevitably wedged in the basket and have to be forcefully yanked out. Plus, I never know which is a fork or spoon because upside down they all look the same.

          I’ve made it a habit to clear the dishwasher when he’s not within ear shot, so I can apologize as I take all the items out and position them back in drawers and cupboards.  I imagine how happy they must feel being reunited.  The stack of salad plates, a nest of bowls, that lone hand painted Chinese bowl with the adorable children in their little caps!

          John is not going to change. Neither am I.  If I want something done my way it’s up to me to do it.  If he does it his way I live with the results. As he says, “the dishes got clean, didn’t they?”

          I nod in agreement as he walks back into his off-limits office and closes the door.  When I do the laundry I’ll deposit his clean socks on the stack of banker boxes that line the hall, the stack he was going to take to storage three weeks ago.  But that’s another issue. . .

         

         

RINGING IN THE NEW

          Because I’m really a cat, I have a problem with this whole time thing. To me every day starts with the day growing light, having to pee, reluctantly drawing myself out of the dreams that entertained me through the night. Then I’ll remember there’s a dog who needs a walk.  My morning companion will put her sweet little face next to mine and let me inhale her feline sweetness before letting me know she wants to check out the day.

          And so it goes – breakfast, lunch, dinner, conversations, laundry and other satisfying household chores, forays into literature or interesting articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Kerrville Daily Times.

          Some days are hot, some days are cold. Some days are both. Perhaps because I’m myopic, I concentrate on what’s immediately in front of me and let the blurry future spread out in big, expanding circles 

without trying to focus on what may or may not lie ahead.     

          So, when it comes to the end of the year I don’t really set goals, make resolutions, and let go of the past. I do, however, read through my Daily Reminder before I place it on the shelf along with all the others, going back to 1973.  I transfer major events to my Master Chart, which goes back to the beginning of my life and add the books I read to my ongoing list. 

          It used to be I saw a lot of movies, when I lived in Los Angeles, in the 1980s. I had a lot of sex then, too. My life was concerned with finding a husband and having a baby but due to karma, or fate, or an inability to distinguish love from lust, the husband and baby eluded me.

          Now I have a husband who tolerates my quirks, checks on me when I’m napping to make sure I’m not dead. Instead of grown children I have cats and a stinky dog who, on our afternoon walk, found a dried up lawn to roll in.  Following behind him as he pulled me along the sidewalk I couldn’t help but find it endearing to see how happily he pranced along, glad to be “in disguise,” and found it hard to stay mad at him.  Before coming in the house, he loved the rubdown I gave him.  I carefully avoided the shiny black growth on his leg, now big as a ping pong ball, and the “little warty thing” on the top of his head. I saw how white his muzzle has become. 

          He doesn’t know it’s January 1^st. Nor does my cat, lying on the couch with her stomach full. She just let out a big contented sigh.  I can hear John bringing the plants back inside after two weeks on the patio. He says it’s going to be twenty-nine degrees tomorrow morning.  I’m prepared. My long-johns and thick socks are folded on the end of the bed. 

          As usual I’ll reluctantly bid farewell to my dreams filled with a cast of interesting characters and steep mountains and/or ocean views. I’ll be one day further from my birth and one day closer to my death. I’ll try to be graceful as I traverse the high wire of my life, keep my balance and not look down.