Looking back with Lot's Wife

Diane teaches second grade and each and every one of the little munchkins she spends her days with have all gone nuts with what she calls “Christmas-ness.” One of the symptoms of Christmas-ness, according to her, is rolling around on the floor in the aisles between desks. “Courtney, what ARE you doing?” she asked a tiny twirler last week. The answer, says Diane, is that there is no answer; it’s just Christmas-ness. Welcome to my world, Courtney. Christmas-ness in its adult form shows up at first when the victim begins to have grandiose ideas of Christmas past. This year’s celebration, she thinks, will be the one everybody will always remember, filled to overflowing with warmth and sugar cookies and holly and pine. Oh, if I could have just stopped then when I didn’t have all the boxes of decorations out on the living room floor shedding dust from the basement, where they live the rest of the year. (Have you noticed, this is what every good girl says after she gets in trouble, “If w...

There were these two enormous guys at the Grand Junction IHOP this morning who had sleeve tattoos, those tattoos that cover your arms. They were facinating, and best of all, people were staring at them. Like my husband's Uncle Ivan used to say: "Marry a fat woman and you can be warm in the winter, have shade in the summer, and if she has tattoos, you can see the movin' pictures." I was grateful they were there because I was with my handicapped son, Stephen, and we are usually the first thing that people stare at. Stephen's looks a little funny: one eye is a lot smaller than the other and he sort of gimps along because it gives him a firmer grip on the road to have one leg bent if he falls. He recognizes me because I have "the smell." Our family smells like caramel sauce that's been in the fridge for a while. I also wear the same perfume, White Shoulders, that I wore when he was little and lived at home. He moved to Grand Junction in 1972 to live...