Looking back with Lot's Wife

This year, in the middle of my search for the perfect doll for my six-year-old granddaughter—do I want to get her an American Girl doll pretty much like everyone else in her California village of Santa Monica, or do I want to spend way too many bucks for a Madame Alexander doll like mine which is still tucked safely away in my bottom dresser drawer. The problem with Madame Alexander is that while you can get a doll for $35, what you really want after examining the web site, is the $329.99 special edition bride doll which just makes your mouth water. Anyway, the last thing my husband said as he left for work this morning was, “She doesn’t need a doll that costs that much.” And he was looking at the $35 doll. Humph. Amid this crucial decision making process came an e-mail from Diane saying how much she was missing her dad this year. In fact, she had spent most of the morning, “sitting and crying and typing.” Richard, her dad, died last year right after Christmas and naturally she i...

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...

National Public Radio presented a piece last week that was probably sponsored by Walmart. Apparently, some of the most important Americans spent most of their lives deeply in debt and died in reduced straights, so to speak. For example, towards the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson petitioned the governor of Virginia to allow him to sponsor a lottery to relieve his debts from his addiction to botany. He couldn’t stop spending on plants. In addition, he had catalogued every single one of his expenses, I’d like to point out to my husband, and he was a founding father. Mark Twain continued to invest in venture after venture even after some of the businesses went belly up. In fact, it seems that having Mr. Twain invest money in your project was almost a guarantee of failure. The gist of the story was that the greater the person, the more forgivable the debts. I may be a bit optimistic here in assuming that’s what the reporter meant, but what better time of year to feel va...

My granddaughter Madden asked me where Jesus was today, and to my eternal embarrassment (pun intended), I didn’t know. We had been reading a church magazine and there were pictures of the apostles and prophets, all the people who worked for the Savior, but no picture of Him. And she wanted to see what He looked like. We used to have a picture of the Savior in the kitchen but with the new paint job and the kids moving out and me updating things, it had migrated. There’s an “Out of Africa” look going on in that kitchen corner now. I suddenly realized I had no idea where our picture was. Now, we’re Mormons, but even if we weren’t, we would be the kind of people who have a religious picture somewhere prominent. It could be the Pope, or the Dalai Lama, or Buddha, but it would be a picture of who or what we believed in. It would be there to teach our kids and to let people to know who we were and what our beliefs were. We would especially want it if the Mormon missionaries came by so...

I have this weird thing I like to do when I’m tired or just have a minute. I like to take a snapshot in my head of where I am. I look around at what I’m doing and think about all the implications of it, where it stands in my life. I take a sensory inventory of everything I can see or smell or feel: the air temperature, the season, the color of the sky. I try to take about five minutes to soak it all in. Then I frame it as a picture and hope I can call it up again some day. I actually can recall many of my snapshots, partly because I’m self-conscious about doing it and partly because they seem to stay longer than other memories. I started doing this a few years ago when for some reason, I was having vivid dreams about the house I grew up in. My mom told me once that as she got older, she forgot some of the things that had happened to her as an adult, but that the memories of her childhood became more alive. She especially remembered the house she grew up in. She told me this a y...

Halloween was the only holiday my mom really got into because she didn’t have to cook, it involved chocolate, and it was an easy way to actually make kids happy. I really like Halloween. We had a gate up to our front porch and to my horror, my dad propped it open one year with my entire collection of Nancy Drew books, which were stolen. But in spite of that, I still love Halloween. My dad would swing the front door open and the light would flood out on the porch. He smoked a cigar and he was tall and loud and jovial. Little kids would cower in fear, but he gave full size candy bars, so it was okay. The crunch of leaves underfoot as kids in crazy outfits wandered around with their dad after dark, meeting the neighbors under different, new, exotic circumstances. The magic of the warm, spooky glow of houses half hidden in the shadows, not completely lit by the porch lights. I loved the thrill of getting a peek inside people’s living rooms when they invited you in to pick your can...

Richt now, I'm sitting on our front sidewalk trying to write because my two-year-old granddaughter, Madden, has just told me that the two rocking chairs on the porch are "MINE!" Okay, go ahead and be snotty and criticize, but I've been babysitting since eight this morning and I no longer remember what is normal for me and what isn't. There are tiny plastic farm animals all over the kitchen floor, which you know I'm going to step right on that pad under my toes where it really kills; and most of the petals are off the three flowers we had left in the front. We've had poppy diapers, which I stuck my finger in, and the only thing I've been able to get her to eat is a leftover packet of roasted almonds from a Wendy's salad bowl. Let's just say she's two and let it go at that. Being a babysitting grandma is a hydra-headed monster--one minute everything seems so circle of life, and the next, it all feels like a babysitting job when you were 13 an...