Looking back with Lot's Wife

The Perfect Grandma—That’s Me! My daughter appreciates it when I help translate what her daughter wants. “She’s crying because she needs a nap. Why don’t you put her down?” Or, “That’s what she says when she wants a cookie.” As a working mom, it’s nice for her to have someone be helpful like that. When I was a mom, I didn’t “work outside the home” and since she isn’t spending all day with the kids, like I did, it’s probably a big help to her. And I think she and my daughter-in-law really appreciate my clever household tips. For example, I was just looking for a sippy cup at my son’s last week and as I was going through the cabinets, I had a few thoughts. Why doesn’t my daughter-in-law keep her pots and pans in the cabinet right across from the stove instead of in the corner cabinet? Really, it would be so much easier for her if she’d move them. It turns out there are many, many strings attached to having a grandma who cares too much. A grandma like me. I try to be the best gr...

Currently my new trick is to be able to stand up from sitting in the grass or on the floor. You don't really realize how often you do this until your knees start to be a problem and you find yourself sticking your rear in the air and pushing yourself up with your hands and thinking, "Oh, please, never let anyone take of picture of me doing this and, most of all, please, never let me see that picture if they do." Because I'll kill myself. Occasionally I find myself looking at myself in the mirror thinking if I knew at sixteen what I would look like at sixty, I would have gone insane the next day and spent the rest of my life sitting in a corner, mumbling. Sometimes it's just plain embarrassing to be old! When I go on trips with my sixteen-year-old grandson and his friend, as I did this past week, I have resigned myself to the fact that it's funny late at night when I toot when I stand up. You can only resign yourself to having a sense of humor about those thi...

Airport Life The airports are full right now. So many lost souls wandering aimlessly around, looking for food, for relief from the discomfort of being in transition. I have been among those lost souls during the last couple of months, sitting and waiting during layovers and one missed flight that cost me ten long hours of my short life, and I have some observations. For one, men are terrible travelers. They no longer have any control over their lives: one wrong step and they will be held prisoner forever in the airport. Miss your plane? Can’t find your gate? Flunk security? Men posture, they look worried, they do what ever it takes to WIN the airport game. But they don’t read signs and many of them are unable to take care of themselves in even the simplest of circumstances, so they are doomed to fail. There have been several interesting articles lately about fact that men are more prone to cry on airline flights. Apparently the vulnerability of the experience leaves them wide op...

A Song for My Suburban Oh beautiful for spacious seats, For lots and lots of room, With places for eight children’s feet, Both friends and from my womb. My Suburban, my Suburban, I pledge my love to thee. The finest car where ere you are, And you back end can hold a tree. The lovely song above is to be sung, symbolically enough, to America the Beautiful, the essential American song for the essential American car, perhaps the finest vehicle to ever come off the Detroit assembly line. Yes, it uses too much of America’s precious carbon fuels. But who really cares how much gas it takes to run? Does anyone begrudge a perfect diamond a beautiful setting? Do we care if George Clooney wears make-up in his movies? No, some things just ARE the way they are. But oh, my ‘Burb with it’s sleek green sides towering above the piddling fuel savers milling about at mid-tire level as we make our dignified, careful way along the road of life. When you change lanes in a Suburban, there’s no reeling f...

What’s the point of old age? Inquiring minds want to know! Well, for one thing, it certainly makes being young look better. Even if you’re an ugly young person, doesn’t it make you feel better to look at a wrinkled old person and think, “At least I don’t look like that!?” As an old person, young people look a lot prettier to me than when I was one of them. Your face doesn’t have that saggy, baggy, brown-spot thing going on that mine does. So why bother having old people if they’re grumpy and lumpy and ugly? There are reasons, but honestly you have to look hard. For one, old people don’t have anything to do so they’re always glad to see you. Just kidding. They’re not always glad, but they should be because they should be grateful that anyone wants them anymore. But occasionally, if you’ve already read the paper and there’s nothing good on TV, it’s nice to see the grandkids. They are just so darn cute, and they remind you of yourself when you were young. It’s a good chance to r...

I think we’re a happy family. Happy families are unique in that they accept each other as they are. Sure, happy families have unhappy situations at times, but they plow through them and they keep going. In our happy family, we’re all a little mental about saying the wrong thing to each other. This is because we all have said the wrong thing several times over the years and have had to go through the many demeaning contortions it takes to convince someone you didn’t really mean it. So we’re careful about what we say. An example of the dynamic this has created just happened over the weekend. We were coming home from Texas, driving a 26-foot truck hauling a trailer with a car behind. As a result, we couldn’t back up without damaging the car. My husband was loving driving the truck. He, not unlike many men, feels driving a large truck ultimately fulfills what he was created to do, which is…what? I don’t know what, but I’ve seen enough men glow at the wheel of a huge truck to know that...

Becoming Jane is this lovely forested movie about repressed romantic longing, a chocolate truffle box of a movie, and there was a baby gurgling at the back of the theater; not crying mind you, just that happy, cute baby gurgle that they do when they’re playing with Mom. Man, I just about killed Mom and that baby. When did I become a mean person? When did I start forgetting that real babies are more important than pretend characters? When did I forget needing to get out of the house so badly that I brought the baby someplace I shouldn’t have and annoyed people? People like me are my pet peeve. Grumpy people. The people I absolutely hate (there it is, moms and dads, the “hate” word we don’t say) are the people who get mad at babies crying on airplanes. Where do they think we come from? How do they think we got started? When did we get so exclusive as individuals that we no longer have responsibility for the rest of the human race? There was an article about the notoriety of a woma...