tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61257103783448036172024-03-04T20:06:45.040-08:00Kendrick WorksJulie Kendrick: The Original Cast AlbumJuliehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15422187892371994929noreply@blogger.comBlogger235125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-9142624444767296922018-10-11T06:36:00.002-07:002018-10-11T06:38:10.102-07:00Come out! Be happy! Have a National Day!<h4 style="background-color: #ffffe6; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0.25em 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 4px;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Seemed like a good time to revisit this one. My behavior has not improved one jot in the intervening years.</span></h4>
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Your Welcome: The Grammar Vandal Strikes Southwest High</h3>
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Yes, officer, I did deface that poster in the halls of my daughter’s high school. But no jury in the world, as least one that knew the difference between possessives and contractions, would ever convict me.</div>
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Here’s what happened: Mary Katherine and I were killing time at intermission during a play. We saw a lovely four-color poster for National Coming Out Day (October 11! It just seems to come earlier every year. And I haven’t even wrapped my National Coming Out Gifts, or finished hanging the festive National Coming Out Day garlands!)</div>
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The poster encouraged everyone to celebrate that day by wearing a “name badge that identifies you’re orientation.”<br />
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Of course you can’t blame me for whipping out a ballpoint and changing the “you’re” to “your.” And yes, I did add just a teeny bit of editorial comment: “Good grammar is appropriate for all orientations.” Golly, that will learn ‘em.<br />
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Mary Katherine, by the way, thought all of this was great. It reminded me of one of her favorite games when she was small, which she invented and named, “Playing Hurdmans.” She’d loved the play, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” and she was especially taken with the smoking, cursing, bullying delinquents of the piece, the Hurdmans. We’d finish Sunday breakfast and she’d beg, “Let’s Play Hurdmans.” The game involved her acting out crimes – setting fire to the cat was a popular one, as I recall – and me reacting with shock and horror. Even then, this girl knew that villains get the best parts.<br />
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So there we were in the hallway, me feeling like a cross between a pinch-faced librarian and Zorro, her laughing and egging me on. The minute I’d finished with my egregious act of vandalism, she turned to me, eyes shining. “Let’s deface something else before Act Two!” she urged, grinning wickedly. Turns out her orientation has been a closeted poster-defacer all these years, and it took this one bold move for her to come out.</div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-20211485126568888362018-09-08T07:00:00.001-07:002018-09-08T07:03:34.952-07:00The day I bought that jacket for a stranger<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I didn’t walk into the Savers thrift store on Lake Street this past Tuesday with the intention of entering into an act of civil disobedience. I had no plans for a grand gesture regarding the way we treat immigrants in our community. And I certainly didn’t think I was going to be spending $8.99 on a sport jacket I would never wear. But that’s how life goes sometimes. We think we’re witnessing a passing moment, but instead we’re being presented with an opportunity. On my favorite day of the week (Senior Citizen 40% Off Day), I was presented with an opportunity.</div>
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I first saw the guy as I was cutting through Menswear on my way to Books. He was a tall fellow, dressed in a long tunic and a cap (I’ve since looked it up; it’s called a thobe and a kufi). On top of this, he was wearing a tan sport jacket, clearing modeling it for another guy, a doughy fellow dressed in a golf shirt and khakis (I did, barely, know the names of these clothes, sartorially challenged as I am). “Khakis” was kneading the top of the jacket’s shoulders, as the man swiveled from one side to another, in the universal gesture of “how do I look?” He offered an opinion: “I think it fits you pretty well.” And then, responding to a murmured question: “No, I don’t think the shoulders are too puffy.” I headed off to Books, my head dancing with visions of delightful Senior Day Discounts.</div>
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A few minutes later, I was waiting in the checkout line when I noticed the thobe-and-kufi guy ahead of me at the register. The cashier was addressing him loudly, and her voice was getting angrier with each statement. “Cause I told you. You don’t have a Senior ID. You aren’t a Senior. You can’t have the discount.” She started to look around, trying to draw some Senior Shaming to get this guy to move away. He picked up the jacket. He backed out of line. He moved slowly past me, still looking at the jacket with what seemed like deep regret.</div>
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It was just a tan sport coat, but I got the sense it had already become his Lucky Jacket. “Khakis” had told him it looked good. He’d had confirmation that the shoulders were not too puffy. I had no idea what he wanted this jacket for—a job interview, an important meeting or maybe just for sitting around the house, looking like a 90s-era middle manager. One thing was clear: This man was so clearly strapped for cash that the extra 40% meant the difference between getting the Lucky Jacket and putting it back on the rack.</div>
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And this is when the voice in my head began: “DON’TGETINVOLVEDDON’TGETINVOLVED,” it told me. “JULIEIMEANIT,” the voice added, firmly. So of course I lifted my finger and beckoned to the man. I pointed to the jacket. Then I pointed to myself. “Give it to me,” I said quietly. “I’ll buy it for you.” He looked at me with soft, sad eyes. “I am the wrong age?” he asked, clearly confused about what had been barked at him by that rude, rude woman.</div>
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I looked into his face. That face. Right, honey, I wanted to shout over to the clerk, he’s not 55: He’s One Hundred and Fifty-Five. This guy had clearly lived plenty of years--enough years, at least in my opinion, to qualify him for a few bucks off a jacket so vintage that it’s probably still got an empty packet of Marlboros in one pocket and a few pink “While You were Out” slips in the other. “I’m the right age,” I told him, pointing to my wrinkly old face, for which I was, just at that moment, supremely grateful. “Give me the jacket and wait here.” I pointed firmly at a spot on the floor, as if I knew the exact Constitutionally designated location for sport-coat-related disobedience. He handed me the jacket and I moved back in line.</div>
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When I reached the clerk, I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to strike a blow for courtesy and customer service and giving someone a damn break every once in a while. I wanted to announce how I, little old lady, had single-handedly thwarted her dastardly scheme to separate a guy from his Lucky Jacket. I wanted to make her cry so hard that her ridiculous false eyelashes fell off like wooly caterpillars and ensured us all a milder winter. But I could tell that grandstanding was not my guy’s style. He had not gotten this far, lo these 155 years, by making a spectacle of himself in public. He was a master of blending in, I thought, just as I noticed that he’d already glided to the exit as she was toting up my purchases.</div>
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I decided to try something new for once in my life. I kept my mouth shut. And when the clerk told me to Have a Nice Day, I did not snarl or protest, but moved quickly away from the counter with my precious purchase. Outside, my guy took the jacket from me with one hand and reached for his wallet with the other. I shook my head and waved my hand, as if it would be ridiculous for him to pay me, as if everyone knew that part of life in Minneapolis was the existence of a crazed band of wrinkly old ladies who roamed the greater metro, buying menswear for deserving but impoverished chaps. I gave him a quick smile and trotted off before he had too long to think about it.</div>
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From my position behind the driver’s seat of my car, I saw him gather himself together. So many things about life in this country must be confusing, and here was one more baffling moment to add to the list. One thing was clear, though--ten minutes ago he didn’t have a jacket, and now he did. He slipped it on and wriggled around, adjusting it. Khakis was right, I thought--those shoulders aren’t too puffy, they’re just right. Walking away from the store, my co-conspirator tugged on a scarf, pulling it from his thawb and adjusting it jauntily around the collar of his Lucky Jacket. He flipped one end of the scarf over his shoulder with such élan that he might have been walking down a cosmopolitan thoroughfare in Paris or Cairo or Mogadishu, so elegant and natty did he seem.</div>
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I found myself wiping my eyes with the back of my hands. The forks in the road that take us from a rotten day to a blessed one can be so small that we often don't notice they exist. And there I was, the means by which his fortunes had shifted toward the good. I wished him luck, luck, nothing but luck, as he strode off down Lake Street to face the rest of his day. </div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-28864223940992278362018-07-31T14:59:00.001-07:002018-10-11T08:58:52.032-07:00Still in love after all these yearsI've been doing a project for some folks in Golden Valley, so it seemed like an opportune moment to resurrect this blog. My worship of all things Betty is, if anything, deeper and richer than ever, like the chocolate-y, creamy center in that Tunnel O' Fudge Cake.<br />
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I Heart Betty</h3>
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<i><span style="font-size: xx-small;">1965 Betty, the St. Paul resident of my dreams</span></i></div>
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To say that I admire Betty Crocker, or that I'm fond of her, does not begin to plumb the depth of my feelings. Offering the thought that I would gladly burn incense sticks and joss paper while prostrating myself in front of her portrait at General Mills headquarters (assuming that security guards would let me, which is unlikely) might be getting a little closer to the heart of the matter.</div>
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As I write these words, I realize it seems as if I think Betty Crocker is a real person.</div>
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Of course she’s real; what do you think I am, stupid? I know that Betty lives and breathes and cooks warm and tasty desserts somewhere, and now that I think of it, I even know where that place must be – St. Paul. How could she live anywhere else? I picture her house, a darling cottage on suitably adorably named St. Paul street. None of those big-city Minneapolis number-and-alphabet streets for Betty. No, she lives in a tree-shaded glen on Juno, say, or Juliet. </div>
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I imagine going to visit Betty. Of course I end up being late, because how can Juno follow right after Juliet? <i>You can't have two J's in a row!</i> <i>Can’t they lay out the streets in any rational order in this god-damned city?</i> Okay, calm down, breathe deeply and stop cursing, I tell myself. Betty is waiting, right behind that perfectly painted door with the two charming pots of traditional geraniums on either side.</div>
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She lets me in, pretending not to notice my sweaty and typically Minneapolis-frantic demeanor, because Betty is a Perfect Hostess. She leads me to the kitchen, which is appropriate but not over-the-top. No Aga for Betty, just a perfectly good Hotpoint, thank you very much. It might even be Harvest Gold, which, to Betty, still is a swell color, no matter what those hipsters in Uptown have to say about it.</div>
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Is Betty wearing her trademark red suit and pearls? Hmmm, I’m stumped there. It seems a bit formal for a casual afternoon entertaining a sweaty woman from Minneapolis; that suit is more like what she might wear when applying for loan at the bank or posing for a box of brownies. I hit upon the solution: Over the one outfit she seems to own, Betty wears an apron, something vintage-looking that she whipped up herself in the downstairs sewing nook. (I’ll bet Betty’s house has a lot of nooks, just saying.) As she pulls a pan from the oven, I notice that her oven mitts match her apron. Of course they do; duh, she’s Betty Crocker.</div>
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And then she places a dish of something warm and chocolaty in front of me, and offers me a glass of cold milk. Milk! I haven’t had milk in 25 years, but yes, Betty, I’d love some!</div>
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…. and, as I lift the glass to my lips, my reverie ends, and I’m back in Minneapolis, home of many orderly streets and very few Harvest Gold Hotpoints. And not, as I look in front of me, a warm, chocolaty dessert anywhere in sight.</div>
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Which causes me to wonder, <i>honestly what is my deal</i>? Why I am so taken with a woman who is (to some naysayers, I have to admit) an <i>imaginary</i> spokesperson? It’s not like I wish I could shake the hand of Uncle Ben or poke the avoirdupois of the Doughboy. My heart belongs to Betty, and I think I know why – because my mother loved her, too. My mom was a housewife in the 1950s, when it truly was a miracle to toss an egg into a bowl, add a mix, and whip it all up in the Sunbeam mixer for three to five minutes on medium speed. For my mother’s generation, packaged food was <i>always</i> better, and Betty Crocker was the symbol of the perfect housewife who knew how to please her family with reliable packaged goods. </div>
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As I look back on what must have been my mother’s own cooking history, I’ve realized something – our mother’s mothers were, most likely, terrible cooks. In my own poor mother’s case, her mother died when she was seven years old, so I can’t imagine that she had many well-cooked meals. And, oh yeah, the Depression, which hit when she was nine. So of course she loved Betty Crocker. Not only could she afford it, but the food tasted the same way every time, and no dim-witted big sister or dopey dad could mess it up.</div>
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I’ve been doing some writing for General Mills the past few months, and recently I pitched a story to the editor of BettyCrocker.com. When she accepted my idea and gave me an assignment, I was happy beyond all rationality.<i> I was going to be writing for Betty herself. </i>If I couldn’t get over to her house in St. Paul (And, let's face it, I could never find my way around there, anyway), I would at least be writing <i>f</i>or her, which didn't even involve trying to figure out the GPS.</div>
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I wished the thing I always wish when something nice happens to me. I wanted to call my Mom and tell her all about it. I could almost hear her, wanting to celebrate with me, but also eager to cut the call short so she could call all her girlfriends: <i>Hey, Thelma, Eileen, Mary -- She's writing for Betty! My own little girl, the one who used to insist on adding brewer's yeast and bran flakes to every sodden, leaden thing she baked! Finally, she has seen the light and will be worshiping, one egg and a half-cup of water at the ready, at the altar of Betty. </i></div>
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If there's a way to eat package-mix brownies in heaven, I hope my Mom is having a little celebratory treat right now. And here's a glass of milk raised to my gal Betty -- long may she reign.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-88244112884059929692018-06-12T07:42:00.000-07:002018-06-12T07:43:53.647-07:00Tilly falls down. I apply a Band-Aid.The first bike accident of the season is always a moment of mixed emotions--I'm sorry it happened, but I'm happy to be around with the band-aids. Last night I was on the porch, lost in a book but happened to look up just in time to see a little girl crash into the municipal garbage can. I shouted over offers of help, and the bedraggled family appeared on my steps. Tilly had a big scrape along a bony knee, and an older brother who wanted to tell me how much he'd suffered when he stubbed his toe while getting into bed the previous night. Men.<br />
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I'm starting to feel like an EMT (mini-sized Parkway version), because nothing the rattled mom said came as a surprise: "We just had dinner and decided to take a ride." (Got it; you weren't planning on an accident, no one does.) When she started berating herself for not carrying band-aids on her person at all time, I put a hand on her arm. "That's why I'm here," I told her.<br />
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It reminded me of my favorite accident victim of all time, Theo, so I dug up this blog to mark the occasion.<br />
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SUNDAY, JULY 14, 2013</h2>
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Living at the Bottom of the Hill</h3>
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I live at the bottom of a hill. More specifically, my front yard faces the base of one of the steepest slopes in what’s called “The Grand Rounds” of our municipal bike path. On uphill cycling journeys, the sight of this hill generates gritted teeth, groans, and, often, the decision to hop off and push the bike up on foot. On the downhill side, the swift ride to the bottom seems to demand an exclamation from even the most taciturn Scandinavians -- “whee” being the standard utterance for someone who is letting go and letting gravity take over on West Minnehaha Parkway.</div>
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One of the happiest harbingers of spring is on that first Saturday afternoon when it’s warm enough for the windows to finally be open all afternoon, not just for a brisk morning airing. With the open-windowed house facing the path across the street, I’m once again connected to the community that’s passing by my door – the wisp of a baby’s wail, being shuttled past by an exhausted parent, the jingling of a heavily tagged dog trotting by, launching my dogs into an agony of “no trespassers!” warning barks.</div>
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But when I hear the first exultant “whee” from a cyclist flying down that hill, then I know in my heart that spring has finally made its way to Minneapolis. People cycle on these paths year-round, but it’s only in spring that the “whees” return.</div>
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With every joy there is a sorrow, and, mixed in with all those happy-faced, delighted encounters with terminal velocity, there are also a goodly number of brutal examples of the essential vulnerability of our mortal selves as we combine machines, speed and gravity, fancy bike helmets notwithstanding. When you live at the bottom of a steep cycling hill, you not only hear a lot of “whees” – you see a lot of accidents, too.</div>
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I always have big band-aids on hand, and gauze, and ice packs that I can hand off -- for the woman who broke her ankle when a teenaged boy, racing his friends, decided to take a shortcut on the pedestrian path and plowed right into her last August, or for the boy who tipped over his handlebars, cut his lips badly with his own braces, and lost his eyeglasses in the underbrush a few years ago. Ambulances have been called. Seriously bad things have happened, right outside my door.</div>
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By those standards, what happened on Tuesday night, even if it resulted in twelve stitches administered to a tiny, but valiant, chin, was pretty mild. I had just stepped outside when I heard a boy’s cry, then looked across and saw the telltale signs – a bike lying flat, a Mom kneeling down over a small figure, an older sister standing by. “Do you need ice, a towel or a band-aid?” I called out, my usual First Aid Menu, here at the Accident Cafe. The mother’s face that appeared, her head snapping up at the offer of help, was wide-eyed, beautiful and worried. “A towel,” she called back, “and thank you.”</div>
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By the time I’d raced into my own house and come back out with a dampened towel, the trio had made their way into my front yard, as the injured often do. Bikes were tossed in the grass, the boy sat on the curb, and the mom began to dab at spots on his arms and legs. “Do you think he’ll need stitches?” she asked, tipping his chin up and revealing a very deep and ragged gash. I was conscious that both of them were looking right at me, so my first reaction -- "For the love of Jesus! Don’t show me that! Now I have to go upstairs and lie down; goodbye!” didn’t seem like such a good idea. I tried to keep my face neutral, because I could tell the boy was watching it closely. “Tell you what,” I said, “Let’s put a few band-aids on it and see what happens.”</div>
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The older sister began to assert herself. You can’t be five years old, the ordained boss of a younger brother, and not begin to let everyone present become aware of your opinions on the matter. “This would be his<i> fifth</i> set of stitches,” she archly confided, in a tone that indicated that she was hoping for some tsk-tsking on my part. I just nodded, noncomittally. This is a man, I thought, who leads with his chin.</div>
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Once the sting from that first hard slap of reality had begun to wear off, the practicality of dealing with the aftermath of an accident began to emerge. The question is always the same -- what happens next?<br />
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“Do you think you can ride your bike home, Theo, or walk it?” the mom asked, in a jolly of-course-you-can manner that fooled no one. Let’s just say here that “Theo firmly declined this offer,” and draw a veil over the actual words that transpired.</div>
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“We can drive you home,” I suggested, “and put your bikes in the back of our car.” She thought this over for a moment, then looked up at me with her big, lovely eyes. I could tell I was talking with a woman who had read every single brochure in the pediatrician’s office, twice. “But you don’t have car seats in your car,” she said. Right.<br />
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Finally, it was decided that she would run the four blocks back to her house, get the car (<i>with</i> the car seats, thank God), and drive the kids home, then figure out how to have that chin stitched up. As she started to go, she realized that the one hitch in this plan was that she was forced to leave her children with a complete stranger, and she looked back to me for mother-to-mother comfort. “We will not leave this spot,” I promised, patting the very safe-looking grass of the front yard. She hesitated, then turned and ran off.</div>
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And that’s how I got to spend some time with Flora, age five, and Theo, age three, who, while a bit battered by recent events, were really the nicest part of my afternoon. “The first order of business,” I declared, “is Fruit Roll-Ups and some glasses of water.” Flora’s eyes got very big. “I’ve never had a Fruit Roll-Up before,” she confessed. As I handed over the shiny little packets, their eyes gleamed with the zeal of kids who have seen a lot of baby carrots in their day. I almost said, “Let’s not mention this to mom,” but quickly realized the folly that lay down that particular rabbit hole. Instead I cheerily declared, “First time for everything,” and watched the two of them ravenously gobble down the little packets of sugar and dye. Top that, baby carrots, I thought.</div>
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“I think Theo’s teeth are bleeding, too,” Flora said, peering in at him, but closer inspection revealed a gummy chunk of roll-up between a crevice. She was used to looking at him very closely, I realized, probably out of the corner of her eye, when she didn’t think anyone else noticed.<br />
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For his part, the injured party was having a pretty good time. I had an ice pack on his knee, and I kept applying fresh band-aids to a chin wound that can only be described as “gushing.” In the meantime, he busied himself patting the small dog and looking at the big one.<br />
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“I think that big one looks like Scooby Doo,” I told Flora. “We’ve never watched that, but I’ve heard about it,” she told me. Oh, you darling children, you've been raised on PBS and baby carrots, and now here you are at the witch's gingerbread house, I worried. Well, they'd have a lot to talk about at dinner tonight.</div>
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Theo, I noticed, was wearing a bead bracelet, which spelled out, it was revealed, “Worm.” Asked why, he declared matter-of-factly, “Cause I wuv em.” Flora’s bracelet, appropriately, said “Love,” and she hadn’t forgotten the silent “e” when she’d spelled it, either.</div>
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We talked about school, about what books they liked to read. Theo told me he loved a series about pirates who wore “dirt perfume made out of dirt,” and Flora was compelled to tell me, “that’s not a real book.” “But it could be,” I said, “and maybe he’ll write it.” She thought about that for a while, as Theo continued to bleed bucketsful onto one of my kitchen towels.</div>
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I wondered what it was that seemed so remarkable about these children, and then I realized: they were relaxed. Even though something bad had happened, their mom had told them she was going to fix it, and they were going to be okay. They were spending time with a stranger, but, based on their lived experience to date, strangers turned out to be pretty nice, with sugary snacks and dogs to pet. No matter what had happened so far in their short lives, it was clear to me that they have always had a place they can lean into for a bit of rest and comfort. So far at least, there has always been a set of loving hands to hold them up and give them peace.</div>
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“Mom should be here soon,” Flora said, and lo, there was mom, hustling up the sidewalk. You have a need, and the answer appears. What a good way to start out a life.</div>
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I hugged the kids goodbye and told them to wave the next time they rode by, but carefully, please. As they walked away, I could hear Flora telling her mother, “I have something to tell you. She gave us Fruit Roll-Ups.” I hustled inside, quickly, put away all the band-aid papers, wash off some spattered blood, and said a small prayer of healing for Theo’s battered chin. </div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-12899316250870267112018-05-07T04:59:00.001-07:002018-05-07T04:59:07.706-07:00You can stop using the "B" word now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
Perhaps you promised to get those edits to me overnight, and now it’s next week, and you need the final story an hour ago. Or maybe I asked you to participate in a service project with me, or attend a fundraiser for a cause I care about. It could possibly even be several days after some social gathering I hosted, to which you’d RSVP’d, but did not show up.<br />
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In any case, I know the magic word you’re going to lob in the air, one that will float over to me and instantly extricate you from further discussion or repurcussions. You know it, too. It’s your all-purpose pass for ignoring, forgetting and blowing off anything, everything and everyone.<br />
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<i>“I’m just so busy.” </i></div>
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<i> “I’m crazy busy.” </i></div>
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<i> “It’s insane right now.” </i></div>
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<i> “You have no idea how busy I am.”</i> </div>
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You’re right. I don’t have any idea how busy you are. Even if you’re a very close friend, I don’t have an opportunity to observe how you order all your days or fill your time. But you don’t have any idea what’s happening on my end of the exchange, either, and, to be honest, I’ve never noticed you asking.<br />
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That’s why, lately, whenever someone wails about their “crazy busy” life, the more I hear something else – “I’m the busiEST. I have the most jam-packed schedule, and my life is way bigger than yours. And, now that I’ve invoked the “B” word, you are hereby obligated to murmur sympathy and offer condolences on my lamentable busy state. All eyes, please, on poor, poor me.”<br />
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So, yeah, I’m starting to feel the weight of that a little bit – to be tugged down by the crazy-busy-ers who seem to fill up the airwaves all around me, competing for space and sympathy. I don’t even know if <i>I’m</i> busy or not, because it’s so hard to hear myself think above the drone of everyone else’s hyper-full lives.<br />
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But here is what I do know – I’m not going to tell you every detail of my obligations, my burdens and my deadlines, even if that’s all I can really think about right now. Instead, if you ask me to do something or be somewhere, here is what I will do. I will look at my schedule and make a silent decision about how I can and want to allocate my time, and then, with all due haste and as little drama as possible, I will tell you: “Yes, I can come to the party, or help you paint that room, or sit with you when you're getting the next round of chemo. When should I be there and what can I bring?” Or, “No, I can’t be there, I’m sorry, but what else can I do to help?”<br />
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And then, my friends, I will shut up about it. So you can have some more time, bless your heart, to tell me about how crazy, crazy busy you are.Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-69301225575069699212018-02-08T16:18:00.002-08:002018-02-08T16:18:54.722-08:00<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-color: #ffffe6; color: #215670; font-family: georgia, serif; font-size: 18.2px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0.25em 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 4px;">
Food Valentines that Missed: The Yam, the Herring and the Abused Cow</h3>
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In addition to writing about college professors and clinical research studies and the latest innovations in fireplace design, I also write about food. I write about chefs and restaurants and trends and recipes, and I never get tired of it, although I sometimes get very, very hungry.<br />
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This Valentine's Day, I went off searching for some vintage Valentines that might be fun to share. I found a blonde mermaid insisting that there was “nothing fishy” about her love; sledding kids declaring there was “snow doubt” that they wanted the recipient to be their valentine; a pony-tailed teen, lying prone, telephone in hand, somehow rhyming “yak” and “it’s a fact” that she wants U to be her valentine. I was in heaven.</div>
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Then I found the food valentines, but the really odd ones -- clearly made the day the office staff went out for lunch and had too many cocktails, or perhaps when one of them just snapped at all the unmanageable rhymes for garrulous adolescents. Perhaps the artist was simply a victim of her own success. One day, feeling hungry, she came up with giant, romantic fruits, declaring they’d be “a peach of a pair.” She followed that up with a bowl of salty snacks and the line, “I’ll pop a corny question and ask you to be my valentine.”</div>
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Perhaps those cards were huge hits. The public loved them. The boss demanded more food-related valentines. The artist was stuck. Then, in a fit of desperation, she created this:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNm6rXU_R-_CJZXuM_NfQh6qUPQlFKZsxG40JbpWDx0B6D8T0nz1yJuwjglLkS9WPbqeYZfiBPDVQcYtbGCxd6ZOBBKq0kyf7meTKHsBmnsgArCtaCPwuaLiyekilH03XYVqBpE0P-MBE/s1600/Yam+Valentine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #999999; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNm6rXU_R-_CJZXuM_NfQh6qUPQlFKZsxG40JbpWDx0B6D8T0nz1yJuwjglLkS9WPbqeYZfiBPDVQcYtbGCxd6ZOBBKq0kyf7meTKHsBmnsgArCtaCPwuaLiyekilH03XYVqBpE0P-MBE/s320/Yam+Valentine.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(148, 15, 4); padding: 4px;" width="315" /></a></div>
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An orange-fleshed tuber in a valentine? Hey, it worked with the bowl of popcorn. For those who think Mr. Yam is wielding spud privilege with a menacing cane/weapon, I will state that I believe it's more of a walking stick/accessory. This yam is probably best buds with Mr. Peanut. When he isn’t sweet-talking lady yams, he and Mr. P. probably take long strolls down the boulevard, stunted arm in stunted arm. I imagine the yam has been saving up for a monocle.</div>
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But back to our desperate artist. The boss accepted the yam-entine, grudgingly, so now where should she turn? Why, to Omega-rich oily fish, of course:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghv7dX08fV6S8cOn62O1ZWLiFC4Uc0iIR-P-6dhE4FcaloezlITxl30hfgDHW2gG0kkIObDKxlydKxWQy1Z5m-nCyqMNAHlG1Qu1S6UM6HR-Doi45jHMTd0bm2BlJpYaZe5zFJ7QBMHfg/s1600/herring+valentine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #999999; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghv7dX08fV6S8cOn62O1ZWLiFC4Uc0iIR-P-6dhE4FcaloezlITxl30hfgDHW2gG0kkIObDKxlydKxWQy1Z5m-nCyqMNAHlG1Qu1S6UM6HR-Doi45jHMTd0bm2BlJpYaZe5zFJ7QBMHfg/s320/herring+valentine.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(148, 15, 4); padding: 4px;" width="219" /></a></div>
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Our love can be pickled, our love can be smoked, but it will last forever, said this genius card.</div>
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By this point, I imagine that the boss was getting angry. No one wants a valentine like this, he shouted. Go back, literally, to the drawing board. And then, our artist created it: a valentine that combines cruelty, red meat and love in a perfect trifecta of Valentine’s devotion:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiov3D8omKAzH5aYlCG3Nw76lOyD2AZNSOSJVkRaJm-p6P3O4F7DfVZVnfiYNLa32rK8GXorT-yhpyC7-5NeMiJaYFv717_MVeemaNoSvAOX8njXAhumMaj9p_dQ-qUt7CSLGhdfihlqiU/s1600/Veal+valentine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="color: #999999; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration-line: none;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiov3D8omKAzH5aYlCG3Nw76lOyD2AZNSOSJVkRaJm-p6P3O4F7DfVZVnfiYNLa32rK8GXorT-yhpyC7-5NeMiJaYFv717_MVeemaNoSvAOX8njXAhumMaj9p_dQ-qUt7CSLGhdfihlqiU/s320/Veal+valentine.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(148, 15, 4); padding: 4px;" width="320" /></a></div>
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Did the boss fall for it? I like to think that the artist was carried around the office on the shoulders of her adulatory co-workers, and that she eventually took over the company and sold it to the Japanese in 1965 for one million dollars.</div>
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Or something like that. Happy Valentine's Day, by the way.</div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-30138741813477589672017-11-22T17:49:00.001-08:002017-11-22T17:49:21.439-08:00This Thanksgiving, I’m trying micro-gratitude<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A mother of young children recently
shared this story with me about her favorite part of the day, and it certainly
wasn’t what I expected to hear. “When I strap both my kids in their carseats, I
close the door and walk to the driver’s seat, and that’s it, that’s what I try
to enjoy. Because everyone is safe and secure, and I get to walk those few
steps knowing that they’re okay, but really, really, enjoying the quiet.”</div>
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At first, I thought her story was
just about the saddest thing I’d ever heard. How long does it take her to walk
around that minivan – 15 seconds? And that’s it, this tiny moment, that’s her
highlight? This is just something that’s too small to be grateful for, I decided.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And then I thought again. I
wondered about myself on my grumpiest, crabbiest, most entitled-acting days, and
thought it was likely that I didn’t spend even one second being grateful, let
alone 15. I thought about how this young mother had managed to find the tiniest
moment of blessing in an otherwise raucously chaotic life. <o:p></o:p></div>
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On second thought, I realized, this
wasn’t a sad story after all. Once I knew that, it was clear I needed to find
my own moments of what might be called micro-gratitude--moments that seem so insignificant,
and pass by so quickly, that I had barely noticed them before.<o:p></o:p></div>
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This season, as trees have been
laid bare and the days have gotten darker, I’ve been trying to pay attention to
those slivers of sacredness that are right in front of my eyes. Instead of the
rote repetition of the headlining gratitude all-stars--family, friends, food,
blah, blah blah—I’ve tried to fix my eyes on split second wonders of
just-for-now blessings. It might be something as fleeting and mundane as lugging
a few more books to fill up the Little Free Library I received as a birthday
present in September. As I stack up the spy thrillers and chapter books and
knock-knock joke compendiums, I imagine the joy on the faces of people who will
revel in coming across just the title they needed most, without ever realized
it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Or, as I walk along Minnehaha Parkway
on my way to errands or exercise class, I’ve been forcing myself to stop—a
full-on, no-fidgeting-allowed stop—to watch the creek, forcing myself to count
to ten. “Pay attention,” I tell myself. “It’s all going by as fast as this
water is passing, so spend ten seconds to take it in.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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If your family is of the sort
that’s inclined to go around the table and say what each member is thankful for
this holiday, I urge you to follow the lead of that young mom and split the
atom of gratitude to its finest possible point. Do it until you can come up
with the tiniest, most precious parcel: on the family’s newest member, the
crescent of an infant’s thumbnail; the one perfect spoonful of your mom’s most
delicious dish; the warmth of the dishwater on your hands when you volunteer to
be the one to clean up this year, no prodding needed. </div>
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All those milliseconds of
gratitude might not add up to any great insight for you this Thanksgiving, but
they might help you get a little closer to the truth: all we have is today, and
all we can be grateful for is what’s happening this very second, and that’s
reason enough. <o:p></o:p></div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-4555731854285358262017-10-21T12:44:00.002-07:002017-10-21T12:44:07.867-07:00I really thought this post would be outdated by nowSix years ago, I wrote about how Anita Hill's bravery had improved my own personal working situation. But, you know, not enough. Here's a repost. Hope it's the last one.<br />
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THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2011</h2>
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“Dear Ms. Hill” An Eighties Survivor Offers a Long-Overdue Thank You</h3>
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It’s been twenty years since Anita Hill told the Senate Judiciary Committee that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. In a recent interview, she mentioned that she’s received tens of thousands of letters since then, and that reading them inspired her to write her new book, <i>Reimagining Equality.</i></div>
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I could claim that my letter to Ms. Hill was lost in the mail (remember mail? It was all the rage twenty years ago), but, the sorry truth is, I never wrote one. At the time, I didn’t realize the importance of her testimony, nor did I understand what the impact of that testimony would be. So here’s my belated letter, delivered with many thanks:</div>
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Dear Ms. Hill,</div>
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I started working when I was 16. I’ve worked in a public library, an all-girls’ high school and several advertising and marketing agencies. Except for my stint at the school, where every employee was female (except for the janitor), there was never a time when there were not men at my place of work who took every possible opportunity to engage in smirking innuendo, smarmy double entendre and blatant sexual discussions. The culture of the time dictated that everyone should laugh at, and pretend to enjoy, this talk, for to do otherwise was to be labeled “uptight.”</div>
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There was always at least one female in each of these work groups who indicated that she loved this sort of thing, and whose giggles and sidelong looks always encouraged the men to even greater feats of Hefner-esque blather. I noticed that these were usually the girls with the very large breasts. I suspected that if I also had very large breasts, I might think that the guys were just as funny as these girls did. In fact, I thought the men AND the girls were stupid, but I tried not to say so. To be uptight was a terrible thing, back in the eighties.</div>
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After working at a number of perennially failing local ad agencies (profits were low; cocaine costs tended toward the high side), I landed at a regular, mainstream marketing services agency, the largest operation in town. I was assigned to provide support for the all-male sales staff located in our Detroit region, where, I was told, women would need “a thick skin” and be able to “take it” from those rugged guys. I realize now that big breasts would have helped me a lot more than a thick skin, but I possessed neither, so it was, as one of those Detroit geniuses used to say, “a mute point.”</div>
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Since you’ve worked at law firms and universities, Ms. Hill, I suspect that you might not have met any men like these in your professional life, or at least until you ran into Justice Thomas. In any case, let me paint a picture for you of my world at that time, the time before you testified, using one fellow as an example of the archetypal behavior in that Detroit group. We’ll call him Bob, because that was his name, and we’ll skip over a detailed description of his beady eyes, his protruding jaw, or his tiny, mean mouth. We’ll just head right to some scenes that pretty much sum up my working life with him.</div>
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<i>Scene One: During a Presentation</i>. We are gathered in a conference room, poised before flip charts (remember them? They were like cumbersome and unchangeable PowerPoints, just a step up from carved stone tablets, and even heavier). I am the only female present. Bob circles around the table, introducing each of “the guys.” He pauses a beat at me, then moves on. “What about her?” the customer asks. “She does the typing,” Bob spits out, looking very, very pleased with himself. </div>
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<i>Scene Two: After a Presentation.</i> We are packing up the slide trays and the flip charts after a presentation to GM Body Parts, and discussion begins about where we will be eating our celebratory team meal. I am the only woman in the group. Bob studiously avoids looking at me as he says, “Let’s go to the Men’s Grill at the Detroit Country Club.” Steve Maritz, a prince among these swine, points out that this will mean that I will be forced to eat, alone, in an anteroom. Bob’s shrug indicates his lack of concern for this eventuality. I have heard, in fact, from other women upon whom this stunt was pulled. Joyce Irwin, a kind-hearted and creative member of the measurement team, told me that she once ate her entire dinner, alone, outside the confines of the Men’s Grill. “It was sort of fun,” she said, without a lot of enthusiasm. Steve suggests that we go somewhere else instead, and, mostly because his family name is on the building, we do. I never do see the women's anteroom, nor do I eat in it. But Bob continues to suggest it every time dining suggestions are being entertained.</div>
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<i>Scene Three: During a Rehearsal.</i> I use this term loosely, because “rehearsing” for an upcoming presentation to one of the big three auto manufacturers would seem to warrant an occasion for review, discussion and practice. At this company, at least back then, it was time for rushing out of the room on urgent phone calls, wandering around the office anxiously, and issuing graphic threats to the salesperson, who is frequently reminded that his genitals will be "on the chopping block," should the business not be won. By this time, I am used to the Betsy Ross craft work of making changes to the hefty flip charts, and rechecking the million-dollar budgets on a calculator. During this particular rehearsal, for GMC Truck, it becomes known that one of the salesmen in the office has accepted a job as a Regional Manager in the San Francisco office. This is a cause for great gales of homophobic hilarity. San Francisco, <i>get it</i>?<br /><br />Bob tells the man, “Better not bend over to get the soap in the shower,” and everyone guffaws. Then Bob uses the speakerphone to share the news with several colleagues, always making sure to include his soap/shower warning. By the time the day is over, I have heard this remark dozens of times.</div>
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I keep at my work and I keep quiet. After a few years at this company, I have made a good friend. He is gay. I’ve always known that this talk is stupid, and I'm sure that, on several levels, it's just wrong. But to consider that what Bob is saying is <i>illegal </i>-- that people in business should not be allowed, by law, to be talking this way? It’s not a concept I can even entertain.</div>
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<i>Scene Four: October, 1991</i>. Cue you. I watch every bit of the hearings. I know you are right. I suspect that you are brave in ways I cannot imagine. And then I have to get back to work.</div>
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<i>Final Scene, One year later.</i> I am back in Detroit, preparing for another presentation, this time for Pontiac. The group has grown weary of running around the room and threatening the safety of each other’s genitals, so we’ve gone out for lunch. There are maybe eight people at the table. I am the only woman. Sometime during the course of the lunch, the smarmy freelance consultant says something. The funny part about this memory is that I cannot tell you what it was that the man said– it must have been so like what I heard every day from these characters that it became background noise.<br /><br />But the moment we rise from the table and start to leave, the Regional Manager rushes over to me, smarmy consultant in tow. “Don didn’t mean anything offensive by what he said earlier,” the man says, “and he’d like to apologize.” The man then apologizes. To me. Because, he says, he hoped that what he said didn’t offend me. At first, I want to tell them that I don’t even know what they’re talking about, but I decide to keep that to myself. Grimly, I say, “I won’t report it. This time.”</div>
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When I see the relief on their faces, I feel as if the earth is shifting beneath my feet. I am in Detroit, a place where I have been demeaned, devalued and dismissed over the course of many years. And, Ms. Hill, because of you and what you were willing to do, these vermin are worried enough to behave politely towards me. Not because they have suddenly sprouted souls, of course, but because the company’s corporate counsel has painted them a grim picture of how expensive a lawsuit from a mouthy, small-breasted bitch like me could be.</div>
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Work changed. It changed at that moment, and it changed every day after that. I’m not naive enough to think that these men are any different than they ever were. When you put a lid over the sewer gas in a conference room, it just leaks out in different places, like talk radio, or Fox News. But, at least in the conference rooms I frequent these days, they have to watch their mouths.</div>
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And for that, Ms. Hill, I can only say – Thank You. </div>
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God Bless You,</div>
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Julie Kendrick</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-91694343229990864332017-08-24T09:25:00.001-07:002017-08-24T09:25:02.254-07:00Barefoot againEveryone is back in school, and I'm well shod at all times. Still, I miss those barefoot days some times. A blog post repost.<br />
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Give Me Your Shoes</h3>
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“I have to be there [<i>quick look at clock]</i> five minutes ago. Take them off, now.” When your 17-year-old warrior-to-be is pointing at your flip-flops with this level of intensity, there’s only one thing to do. Take off the shoes. She slips them on and runs out the door. (<i>Oh, no need to close it, honey, I think it’s much better to blast air conditioning into the backyard; it keeps the squirrels calm</i>.) She squeals out the driveway. As the car vanishes, it's time to ask, as it often is with Emma: <i>what just happened?</i> </div>
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As best as I can piece it together from the soon-to-be-issued Coroner’s Report, Summer Happened. Here in the dog days of the official <i>When Does School Start</i>? season, I have found myself living with a couple of teenagers for whom the term “of the moment” seems a little too well-thought-out. Planning ahead? Devoting a brain cell or two to the concept of what might be needed for the journey that lies ahead? That’s not the way we roll. It’s so much more fun to race back to the house after a dashing departure, panting, flapping and screaming out a litany of lost objects in tones of rising pitch: <i>Phone! iPod! Money! Shoes!</i><i>Cranium!</i></div>
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Gosh, it’s all so … hmmm, I think “impromptu” might be a good way to put it, don’t you think? At least, that’s what I’ll call it after I pop another Xanax and have a moment to lie down.</div>
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It wasn’t always like this around here, I’ll have you know. I used to start the dinnertime drill every night promptly at 6 p.m., thus allowing for two hours of full-bore mommying and four more hours of Fielding Complaints, before defeat was declared and sleep won out. This household was a haven of order and ritual and a big old boatload of beginning-with-the-end-in-mind, none of which seems to have made the slightest impression on either of them.</div>
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Exhibit A is the Car Meal, a recent trend that gives me the whim-wams, but who’s asking what I think. The Car Meal is a result of the inability to count backward in any credible way. Let’s say, for example, that you are a peppy little ingénue who is currently in rehearsal each night from 6 – 10 p.m. Your ride usually arrives at 5:30 p.m. When, then, should you enter the kitchen, with a plan toward preparing an evening repast that will sustain you until you return home at 11 p.m.? If you said “4:30” or “5:00,” take a look in the mirror right now. You Are Old. Not<i>Good for your Age</i> or <i>Well-Preserved</i>, just Old. Here’s why -- the correct time to start thinking about dinner, when you have a 5:30 p.m. ride coming, is 5:25 p.m., and not a minute sooner. </div>
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Here’s the procedure. Swan into the kitchen and look around, beseechingly, at all the appliances, as if a fully cooked meal might be popping out of one of them at any moment. Sigh and say, “I guess I ought to have some dinner,” pausing for a long, sad look at mom. Watch her spring into action. Think to yourself that there’s a little pep in the old girl yet.<br /><br />Four minutes later, leave the house with your Car Meal in tow, and make sure it’s a good one. Fiala girls do not go for foldover bologna sandwiches or spotty bananas. Insist on nothing less than a freshly baked ciabatta with thin-sliced turkey, or perhaps a perfectly warm bowl of pasta with homemade pesto. What about a hot-off-the-griddle batch of potstickers, along with a container of dumpling sauce?<br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
I watch more cutlery and pottery head out my door each day than a Steak ‘n Shake car hop. It’s only a matter of time before they begin demanding white tablecloth service, all delivered on a little lap tray. <i>“And mom? Those votive candles were getting a little dim last time, so try to use fresh ones tonight.”</i></div>
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I’m not quite sure how this happened, how I ended up with children so behind-schedule and lacking in vitality that the thought of running upstairs to get one’s own shoes is purely unthinkable. But here I am, barefoot, just counting the days until the first day of school.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-38815871061947644632017-03-17T14:15:00.000-07:002017-03-17T14:15:02.390-07:00How to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, according to Katherine Clifford KendrickThinking today of my mom, she of the Clifford and Dalton clans. Here are my thoughts from a few years back on this St. Patrick's Day.<br />
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SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 2012</h2>
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And the Rest of the Day to You</h3>
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It wasn’t until twenty minutes into Zumba that I realized today was St. Patrick’s Day. I noticed how many green shirts there were in class and had to cogitate on that for a few moments (to be fair, I was doing a tricky salsa step at the same time) before the light dawned.</div>
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I asked my mother, wherever she is, to forgive me.</div>
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<br />It was not a holiday to be taken lightly in my house. I can still remember my mother giving me a shamrock-covered handkerchief, one of her best, to take with me to school on St. Patrick’s Day. “You can always tell a lady by her handkerchief,” she would say. She had a whole drawerful of handkerchiefs, all beautifully pressed and smelling of Chanel No. 5 and the sweet, pre-smoked tobacco of her Chesterfields. I don’t think I ever saw her blow her nose in anything but a Kleenex, but that was beside the point. To her, the epitome of ladylike behavior was the holiday hanky, the one that showed you were not only Irish, but classy.</div>
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I can also remember her teaching me little bits of Irish lore that she thought I could share at school. She had a misinformed idea of what happened at Buder Elementary, but I appreciated the effort. The hayseeds and crackers with whom I spent my grade school years were more interested in pinching people who weren’t wearing green than in hearing a rendition of “Harrigan” that my mother had taught me that morning, “H-A-double R-I, G-A-N you see, it’s a name that no shame ever has been connected with, Harrigan, that’s me.”</div>
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Of even less usefulness was her insistence that I learn the proper way to greet someone on St. Patrick’s Day: I should say “<i>Top o’ the mornin’ to you,</i>” and the person was to reply, “<i>And the rest o’ the day to you</i>.” She suggested that I try this ethnic charm on my teacher, who year-to-year, was a harried and sour child-hater just slightly above the cracker class herself, one who gave wide berth and the occasional fish-eye to a neurotic little twerp like me.</div>
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I never did of the things that my mother suggested.</div>
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Instead, I came home in the afternoon, hanky still pressed, song unsung, greeting undelivered. I suppose we ate corned beef and cabbage, yuck, but I don’t really remember that. My Aunt Fran was said to serve only green food on St. Patrick’s Day, including mashed potatoes. My mother thought this was disgusting, as bad as a cake with blue frosting. She trotted out the yellow food coloring to mix in her watery, Miracle Whip-y potato salad, but there was no need to get carried away. I thought green food sounded wonderful and exotic, but I never got to see it for myself.</div>
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The most enthusiastic Irish celebrant I ever knew was my godmother, Thelma Kelley (“k-e-l-l-<b>E</b>-y!” she would spell, showing what sort of Kelley she was, and separating her from the déclassé "y-only" crowd). There were two St. Patrick’s Day Parades in St. Louis, the product of a feud between the “true Irish” Hibernian society, whose parade was always on March 17, and the sellouts from the suburbs, who held a big parade on whatever Saturday fell before the holiday. There was a great deal of finger pointing between the two groups, and dark mutterings about IRA connections, but Thelma rose above the fray. She attended both parades, arriving early with a lawn chair, and, in later years, her walker.</div>
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As for me, I’m not fond of crowds, so I usually pass on the parade action. I think beer tastes like liquid Wonder Bread, and I’d be happy to drink whiskey instead, but I’d need to do it five feet from a place where I could lie down quietly as soon as I did. So the holiday has waned in importance to me, especially since the values I love most in the Irish – garrulousness, eccentricity, the ability to laugh at oneself, and a willingness to look people in the eye – are all in somewhat short supply where I'm living now.</div>
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Still, I thought about Thelma today, and my mother, and the song. I sent out a silent “<i>Top o’ the mornin’ to you</i>” to both of them. And I swear, just under the salsa music, I could hear them wishing the rest of the day to me, too.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-83532635974499055122017-01-15T15:28:00.003-08:002017-01-15T15:30:21.329-08:00Impermanent permanence, and other thoughts on food<div class="MsoNormal">
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I write about food. I also write, at least lately, about family farms, Oriental rug merchants, and a Somali refugee who became a college professor. Writing about a bunch of different things is the lot of a freelance writer, after all. But I always come back to food: what’s trendy, what’s delicious, what’s better for you, what’s deceptively easy to make but impressive-looking enough for the potluck, what’s the next formerly exotic global cuisine that’s about to take all your refrigerator shelves. Just about every week, I interview a food trend expert or a hot new chef or someone who just opened up a storefront to sell sriracha-vodka-infused doughnuts, or something equally off-the-wall.</div>
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Because I write so much about food, and talk to so many chefs about their work, people assume that I must love, love, love to eat in restaurants. I recently interviewed a celebrated food reporter over lunch at a local spot. She tossed out name after name of popular eatery, wondering if I’d liked the toast stacks at Bachelor Farmer before they stopped using the toast racks, if I preferred Nashville Hot to traditional fried chicken at Revival or if I had, like her, simply swooned over the Vidalia onion tortellini at Spoon and Stable. I am often stupidly honest, so I found myself saying, “Sorry, haven’t been there” to each of her increasingly frustrated queries. Finally I confessed: I don’t eat out, not really. She looked at me as if I’d just confessed I was one of those “Twilight” vampires who doesn’t eat at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“What do you DO?” she asked. “I eat at home, I eat stuff I cook, you know … I just eat. I pretty much prepare everything I consume, usually from scratch, and a lot of stuff I’ve grown in my garden, things I’ve fermented or brewed …” I trailed off. She looked taken aback, as if I’d just confessed that I shot a bear every October and ate off it until it started to rot in spring. I shrugged.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s not that I don’t like food, because, take a look at me, it’s clear that I do. But all the fuss and bother and theater of eating out is wasted on me. I don’t particularly like being waited on. If I’m eating a meal in a restaurant, I’m usually wondering what’s going on in the kitchen, which always seems like the more fun place to be. And I can never really get myself away from thinking that I’m spending quite a bit of money for something I’d probably enjoy more if I made it myself, and for something that – let’s be honest here – I’m going to digest and excrete in not too short a time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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My interviewee’s frustration got me thinking. Most people eat out quite a bit, or eat food that’s been prepared for them, and that’s their “food experience.”. For me, it’s something different, and it often has very little to do with the ingredients themselves or the way they’ve been prepared, but with the intention behind them.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Here’s an example: a couple years ago, one of my children fell upon some hard times. A guy, a rift, a stumble … suddenly the world got very dark for her, and she ended up back at home, healing. In the early days of this crisis, I had dropped by a friend’s house on a quick logistical errand – returning a pot, picking up a book, something mundane. Standing at the front door for the thirty-minute chat that could never occur on the sofa because I was “in a hurry,” I told her about the very rough patch currently being navigated at our house. She responded with kind words, a hug and a promise of prayers. I left, momentarily buoyed. Then she got out her soup pot and went to work.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The next day, I had encouraged and prodded and cajoled my girl enough to extract a promise to “talk to someone,” who had blessedly fit us into her schedule. She opened the front door for an appointment that was filling both of us with dread. She stopped short and turned around. “There’s something here,” she said in that flat, toneless voice. We looked. It was a basket worthy of Red Riding Hood. Inside was a tureen of chicken noodle soup, fresh bread, a box of calm-inducing tea. There was an encouraging note from my friend. My girl looked at me in wonder. “She hardly knows me. She cooked me food.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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I blinked away tears and tried to explain. “She’s a good person. She’s a mom. Also, she was 19 years old once, too. She remembers what that can be like.” We brought the basket in the house. We went to the appointment. My girl felt better, having been listened to by someone wise. We came home. We ate the soup. Sitting together, my girl kept peering into her bowl. “She chopped these vegetables for me. She cooked these noodles.” Her amazement was complete – that someone had thought she was worth the effort, that someone had sent love to her in such a practical and nourishing way. Yes, she was digesting it already, and it would move through her body and be gone, but the love would stay. Impermanent food, made with care and delivered at the right time, had taken up a permanent place in her broken and battered soul. She will never forget her wonder when she discovered that basket on the front porch, and she will always feel the warmth of that broth filled with goodness.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s what food can do. And that’s why I write about it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-87580650167552957512016-10-24T12:42:00.002-07:002017-01-16T09:56:37.377-08:00That can't have been three years agoMy very good friend Olivia asked me to write her a letter of recommendation for the Common App for college. While I am absolutely positive that she can't be a day older than five, she seems to think she is 17. Worse, she somehow believes she's old enough to go away to college.<br />
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I struggled through my shock at this turn of events and relied on a writer's best friend -- self plagiarization. I cribbed heavily from the post below, which I wrote three years ago, from her recommendation for high scool. I wrote a new ending, though, and I'll share it here: <i>"Do I need to say it? I suppose I will. Any college which accepts
this young woman is getting a gift. She’s not a sparkly, overwrapped gift that
promises much and delivers little. She is a wonder, a delight, and a gift that
will make your campus a better place – truer, deeper and wiser. Lucky you, to
spend four years with this amazing young woman."</i><br />
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2013</h2>
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To the Admissions Office at De LeSalle High School</h3>
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<i>One of my favorite people in the world, Olivia Louise, asked me to write her a recommendation for high school admission. Once I got done, I realized that I wanted to share it, because she really is a person worth knowing, and should probably enjoy a wider fan base than she currently does. So here goes:</i><br />
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I still can’t remember the first time I met Olivia. It’s as if she materialized in our house, went off to play Barbies with my daughter, and, in many ways, never left, thank goodness. Over the years, I’ve served her thousands of dishes of mac and cheese, gone to see her performances in school plays (always stellar), noticed when her teeth fell out, sympathized when she got braces and celebrated when they came off. I’ve ferried her all over town, to day camps and drama classes and in between one sporting event and another (she is seriously sporty). Olivia has spent a lot of time being a passenger in my car, and that alone is a testament to her strength of character.</div>
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The hands-down best times she and I ever spent together were when my daughter, who is six months older than she is, was already in half-day kindergarten, and Olivia, still a preschooler, would walk up to the grade school with me to pick up my daughter for lunch and playtime. Olivia would get to hold the dog’s leash, all by herself, and she would walk by my side, telling me what was on her mind. I loved, really loved, hearing what was on her mind.</div>
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A part of me, the big, dumb part, or maybe the hopeful part, believes that these walks happened just a week or two ago, and that Olivia is still waiting across the alley for me. All I need to do is walk up the cowpath she and Mary created between our two yards, help her on with boots and mittens, and we’re set for our walk up to school.</div>
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But of course this isn’t true. She is taller than me, and smarter than me (always was, I have to admit) and ready, now, for high school. Despite all those changes, she is still someone whose company I enjoy just as much as I did on what I now must admit were long-ago walks.<br />
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Last year, our family went to Beijing to visit my oldest daughter, who was studying there. It was an arduous journey that none of us particularly wanted to make, and one of the few things that made it bearable was that Olivia came along with us. The truth is, we are a high-strung, excitable bunch, even worse when we’re all together, or when we’re traveling, and Olivia calms us down. She is the still, strong center to which we cling, whether we realize we’re doing it or not.</div>
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It was a better trip, because of her – her clarity, her observations, her willingness to do crazy things like fling herself in a metal sled down the side of the Great Wall of China. It was an outrageous thing to do, and Olivia and I, both Olympic-class worriers, were probably equally afraid of such a stunt. We’ve both spent our lifetimes thinking about all the things that can ever go wrong, and then working very hard to prevent them from happening. The difference between Olivia and me is that I rode back down on the babyish gondola, and she picked up the sled and went down the side of the Great Wall. That’s how brave she is, and that’s one of the many reasons I admire her so much.</div>
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Three other reasons I admire her (and these are just the top-of-the-head ones, I could come up with dozens upon further reflection): 1) She sees everything, I mean <i>everything,</i> but she doesn’t feel a need to comment. She just knows, and that’s enough. And I know when she knows, and sometimes that's kind of fun and sometimes it's a little bit scary. 2) She has been through a lot, more than the fair share for an average eighth grader, and, perhaps because of that, or just because she’s wonderful anyway, she is one of the most resilient people I know. 3) She does not toss away her smiles and laughs for free; they must be earned. This makes me try even harder to please Olivia, and when I do – whether it’s by pulling the banana bread out of the oven at the exact moment she wants it, or by getting all the logistics right and getting her to the place she needs to be at the precise instant she needs to be there – I feel as if I’ve earned a medal, and it’s not in Worrying, but in something really worthwhile, Olivia-Pleasing.</div>
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In some ways, she’s been a grown-up ever since I’ve met her, and it’s been interesting to watch her get older and become more of a fit with her actual outside self. She was one heck of a wise five-year-old, and she’s a wicked-wise fourteen-year-old. She’s the sort of person who won’t necessarily get any smarter or wiser as the years go by, because that would probably be impossible. Instead, she’ll just become <i>herself,</i>more and more, and that will be an amazing thing to behold.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-10590280257526917682016-10-11T07:01:00.003-07:002016-10-11T07:01:50.703-07:00Coming out & correcting grammar: Your WelcomeMy mother was a high school graduate. My father was a high school dropout. We were not -- in any sense of the term -- educated people. So when a close cousin of the Clifford clan made it through college and got an English degree, it was Big News. Her graduation was followed by the equally big news that she had become, in just four short years, the smartest person in the room, at least any of the rooms located in Ferguson, Missouri. Twelve years older than me, she took to interrupting my grade-school self at family parties, pointing out my incorrect use of a singular pronoun or a plural verb. I retreated to my room, thought dark thoughts, and planned how I'd do things differently if I ever managed to escape Missouri, and her.<div>
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Part of that plan is still in place today: I don't correct anyone's spoken grammar or pronunciation, ever, purely in recognition of my own basic humanity and the awareness that I, daily, am heaping up a pile of error that reaches to the rooftops. Even when someone asks me to proofread something they've written, I aim for a good mix of kindness to go with the accuracy.</div>
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But like so many people who, faced with anonymity, go a little bit rogue, I have to confess that I've penciled over typos in library books, written "Caesar!" in Sharpie on laminated menus, and defaced more than a small number of school and work posters. My inner Delinquent-Grammarian strolled the halls of Southwest High School a few years ago, and this was the result, all in support of Coming Out with the proper possessive. Happy Coming Out Day, by the way, and keep your pencils handy.</div>
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2010</h2>
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Your Welcome: The Grammar Vandal Strikes Southwest High</h3>
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Yes, officer, I did deface that poster in the halls of my daughter’s high school. But no jury in the world, as least one that knew the difference between possessives and contractions, would ever convict me.</div>
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Here’s what happened: Mary Katherine and I were killing time at intermission during a play. We saw a lovely four-color poster for National Coming Out Day (October 11! It just seems to come earlier every year. And I haven’t even wrapped my National Coming Out Gifts, or finished hanging the festive National Coming Out Day garlands!)</div>
<br />The poster encouraged everyone to celebrate that day by wearing a “name badge that identifies you’re orientation.”<br /><br />Of course you can’t blame me for whipping out a ballpoint and changing the “you’re” to “your.” And yes, I did add just a teeny bit of editorial comment: “Good grammar is appropriate for all orientations.” Golly, that will learn ‘em.<br /><br />Mary Katherine, by the way, thought all of this was great. It reminded me of one of her favorite games when she was small, which she invented and named, “Playing Hurdmans.” She’d loved the play, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” and she was especially taken with the smoking, cursing, bullying delinquents of the piece, the Hurdmans. We’d finish Sunday breakfast and she’d beg, “Let’s Play Hurdmans.” The game involved her acting out crimes – setting fire to the cat was a popular one, as I recall – and me reacting with shock and horror. Even then, this girl knew that villains get the best parts.<br /><br />So there we were in the hallway, me feeling like a cross between a pinch-faced librarian and Zorro, her laughing and egging me on. The minute I’d finished with my egregious act of vandalism, she turned to me, eyes shining. “Let’s deface something else before Act Two!” she urged, grinning wickedly. Turns out her orientation has been a closeted poster-defacer all these years, and it took this one bold move for her to come out.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-1666434831360827662016-08-12T05:48:00.002-07:002016-08-12T05:50:04.456-07:00Sixty years, more or lessToday would be my friend Joel's 60th birthday. Or perhaps he would have started lying about his age, so perhaps it would just be his 55th.<br />
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When he was alive, he was always full of surprises. And he still seems to have a few tricks up his sleeve around this time of year. I'm waiting for my annual "random" outreach from someone who loved him and wants to talk (see last year's post below). In the meantime, I'll try to do some Joel-like things today: laugh so loudly that other people turn their heads, make some wonderfully barbed observation to a pal, or just look somebody straight in the eye and not be afraid, not one little bit.<br />
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FRIDAY, AUGUST 21, 2015</h2>
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Birthday greetings (from the afterlife)</h3>
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The first time it happened, I thought the timing was well, intense. But when it happened again this year, I just had to smile. If there was ever anyone who could have the sheer life force to keep popping up two and-a-half years after his own death to remind me to wish him a happy birthday, well, it's Joel Hershey, my now-gone but still-and-always friend. I used to tell him he could arrive on the moon and run into someone he knew, someone who loved him. One of my strongest memories is being interrupted as we walked together or stood in a lobby. "Joel Hershey," someone would shout, then trot to catch up with him. I can see myself standing to the side, watching him fling his big wide arms around yet another person who loved him and was happy to connect with him. They always thought it was random. Honestly, I'm beginning to wonder.<br />
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What I know for sure, after this week, is that he's still connected, he's still reaching out, and he's still driving me (just a little bit) crazy.<br />
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His birthday is August 12. He died October 23, 2012, in a way that was sudden and dramatic (like him), but also a little bit boring (very much unlike him). At the bottom of this post, I've included what I wrote and shared when I first heard the news. It's the post that keeps on giving, because it's the one that keeps popping up in Google searches whenever someone goes looking for him. And then they look for me. And, guess what, it just happens to be mid-August.<br />
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The first message showed up in my inbox on August 15 last year. It was written by Dave R., who said, <i>"Hi Julie, I'll start off by saying you don't know me. But since moving back to San Diego early 2013, I had wondered a number of times why I hadn't seen Joel around. I figured he met someone, fell in love and finally left the area. I couldn't imagine any other reason why I wouldn't have run into him at the places I'd seen him regularly in the past. So in my half-stupor of just waking up this morning, he popped into my head, and I decided to Google him. And then the news appeared. I'm here a few hours later, still somewhat in shock that he's gone ... Denver, the summer time I think it was, I happened to run into him, of all people. He was staying at his brother's place, and I think his mom had moved there not too long before, if I remember correctly. That was the first time we really talked about his family or much about his background. He showed me pictures of his mom and her new cat. Things that we never would have discussed before. It was a nice change, to talk with him from the perspective of two middle-aged guys instead of whatever we'd spent time discussing 20 years earlier. </i><br />
<i><br /></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 20px;"> "</span><i>I told him I was thinking about moving back to San Diego after I finished school, and we said we should get together again if that happened. Which is why I'd been wondering why we never bumped into each other again. And here I sit at my computer, writing to you, because your "Darling" post was really touching, and it gave me a taste of the Joel that the people he was closest to knew. Thank you for posting that. It was almost like a nice way to put memories of him back up on the shelf and let them go. It's funny how fate happens, how I was allowed one more time to run into him in a place that was not home to either of us, for one last, meaningful chat. Now I wish I'd gotten to know him better. I'm really sorry for your loss. Thanks for listening."</i><br />
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And then this year, on August 17, I received this message from Sheryl G.: <i>"Dear Julie, I went to Wash U with Joel Hershey. We had not been in touch for years but some weeks ago I found myself thinking of him and did the Google thing. I was horrified to realize what had happened. I kept roaming around on Google and came across your blog. Thanks so much for the great photos. I could remember easily what it would be like to be near Joel, I heard his distinctive laugh, and his voice making a smart-ass but on-target crack. I am not sure how we lost contact, he moved so far away and in my twenties I was not as mature as he was in a lot of ways. I loved that he was reliable and steady. I don't remember contacting him when my mother passed away in the early 90's, but he showed up at our family home in Columbia Missouri, unannounced, after the funeral during the lonely time when the friends and relatives have just left. He spent the day, he was helpful, he was diverting. He was Joel. I hope you are doing well. Thank you again for the wonderful post."</i><br />
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I'm not quite sure what to make of this, so I decided to write about it instead, always a good plan for me when I don't know what I think. This has, for me, been a year of letting go. I've lost a number of things I thought were important to me. Ways in which I've always defined myself have vanished, and relationships that were a true place of comfort have shifted and suffered inexorably. I am looking around and wondering what's next, and it's not at all clear.<br />
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And then I get an email, and I think about Joel. I hope that perhaps I am not as alone as I feel right now, appearances to the contrary. And all I can say is, Oh Darling.<br />
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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2012</h2>
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Darling</h3>
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I’m holding my own personal Irish wake tonight, cheap box wine and all. Like most wakes, it has less to do with the deceased than with my own specific experience of loss. And for that, I know, my friend Joel Hershey, who died yesterday, would forgive me. “You and your Irish and your self-pity,” he would snarl. “Didn’t you have a great aunt a thousand years ago who was a professional mourner?”</div>
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Well yes, as a matter of fact, I did.</div>
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For all the time I knew him, I was always a little bit afraid of what Joel was going to do, and I guess that’s why I stuck so closely by his side for twenty-five years. I wanted to see what would happen next, even as I was holding my breath and squeezing my eyes shut and peeking through my fingers. He was, and always will be, my bad boy, and that’s just one of the many reasons I loved him.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Maritz Motivation Company Picnic, July 1987</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Annual No-Hope Dessert Classic Miniature Golf Tournament, 1991</i></span></div>
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We met in the most sterile and confining of corporate environments, back when he wore a tie and I wore pantyhose, and yet he found a way to poke his fingers through the bars of our cages and cause mayhem of the sort I could not resist. I followed along behind, the rules-obeying girl who finds herself swept away in naughtiness. And, as it turned out, in goodness. Jesus, that man was good to me – when I was heartbroken, when I was frightened, when I was unemployed – there were many nights when Joel was the thing that kept me from the edge. And now he’s gone over that very edge himself, and I keep wishing I had one more night to stand in line at the TKTS booth with him and hear him argue with the clerk about which are, actually, the best seats in the house. Him and his first balcony, center -- just try to get him to sit anywhere else.</div>
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These days, I am a nondescript woman who lives a nondescript life in a nondescript part of the world. I am invisible on good days and contemptible on bad ones. I am reminded, sometimes hourly, of all the ways I will never Be Enough. And yet, when I was with Joel, I unclenched enough to just be myself, the one who could never follow directions or understand how to split a bill or say no to that next drink at the happy hour. Lost or dumb or drunk, it didn’t matter to him. Or if it did, he loved me anyway.<br />
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The past two summers, we’ve met for a totally illicit and utterly impractical week of New York theater together. This picture below is from this past July, the day I dragged him to see the taping of the Seth Rudetsky radio show in midtown. I normally take a terrible picture. I tense up and worry that I’m going to ruin it for everyone, that my frozen, frightened and mud-ugly face will forever make the picture unusable. Look at how relaxed and happy I am, next to him. O Joel. </div>
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The last meal we ate together was at Zen Palace on 9th Avenue. We'd met Mary Katherine at her Acting Workshop and were heading towards the neighborhood of the Brooks Atkinson, where we'd see our show for the evening, Peter and the Starcatchers. <i>See our show.</i> For us, that was the phrase that brought everything into focus, and made us giddy with the thought that we were about to slip out of the grim fantasy of daily life and tumble into the true reality, the one that can only be experienced with a <i>Playbill</i> on one's lap.<br />
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It was time to pay the bill, and I extracted a few sweaty dollars from the recesses of my cargo shorts. "Figure out what I owe you," I'd said, handing them over, and he repeated what he always said to me when we were splitting a bill: "Darling, it would be so easy to cheat you, but you'd never even realize it was happening, so what fun would that be?"<br />
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I am angry with myself right now, because he called me from the road, and I missed his call, and I kept meaning to call back. All this past weekend, as I stood at the edges of playing fields or stood still in traffic or stood at the stove grinding out yet another meal I wasn’t at all interested in eating myself, I was thinking, “I have to call Joel. Maybe he’s in Pocatello, Idaho, and we can sing about the Princess Theater, like the last time we did when he was there. That’s next on my list.”<br />
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I never got to the next thing on my list. I never called.</div>
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And he died in Boise, not even in Pocatello.</div>
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I’m also angry with him for going out like such an establishment tool, just quietly passing into the next life while he was puttering away on his laptop in this one. How respectable. How boring. How unlike him. Me, I plan for my body to be found with a 20-year-old pool boy with whom I have been romantically linked. I want everyone, everyone, to be buzzing with gossip at my funeral, in between enormous gulps of champagne. I want to make a scene.</div>
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But I’ll be somewhere else by then. I’ll be with Joel. He and his friend Jon Prel, long ago dead from AIDS, used to talk about how they hoped there would be good lighting in Hell, how we naughty kids could sit up front, fanning ourselves and continuing to make catty remarks about everyone we knew.</div>
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Get some extra pink gel on that follow spot for me, Joel. And do save me a seat in first balcony center, darling.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-10290676741286925112016-07-08T13:33:00.001-07:002016-07-08T20:05:03.382-07:00When the grownups weren’t watching <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I went to the theater last week. There were no tickets and no playbill. The audience was, entirely, just me and two other people. This wasn’t a mistake about
the date or time, or a marketing/pr failure on the part of the new intern.
Everything was perfectly fine. In fact, it was a little bit more than fine. The
evening was, I’d have to say, one of the purest theater experiences I’ve ever
had – full of heart and soul, bursting with youthful energy and generously
sprinkled with theater magic.</div>
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This underground performance took place in the “wine box” theater
(it’s painted a nice merlot instead of black) at Minneapolis’ Youth Performance
Company (YPC). This was a farewell mashup--an unauthorized final presentation by
the cast of YPC’s Young Artists’ Council “25<sup>th</sup> Annual Putnam County
Spelling Bee.” The nine-person cast, mostly high schoolers and a couple
college-aged young people, had rehearsed the show for six weeks and had just finished
presenting it for the past three weekends. Their final show had been Saturday,
and they’d already struck the set. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But, even after the last show, it seemed they didn’t want to
be done. So they Snapchatted, texted and arrived at a solution--a one-night-only
version that would require each cast member to move one chair over, into the
part of the person who’d been sitting next to them during the show’s fanciful
depiction of a middle school spelling bee. The young man who played the
unhinged principal became a neurotic pigtailed blonde with a speech impediment.
The beefy parolee doing community service became the prim woman running the
show. The girl who’d played the “I Speak Six Languages” whiz kid now became the
Little League Pitcher whose unfortunate arousal at the sight of an opponent’s
dishy sister both sealed his doom and set him up for the funniest song ever
written about—well, if you know the show, you’ll know what I’m talking about. <o:p></o:p></div>
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My 18-year-old daughter, who had been loving her role as the neurotic,
lisping obsessive-compulsive, was now going to be performing as the
home-schooled goofball boy who falls out of his chair, can’t keep his hands out
of his nostrils, and who falls into a trance whenever it’s time to spell the
name of another exotic rodent. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When she had told me she needed the car that night, and when
I heard about the plan, I asked if this was something which might require a bit
of an audience. Could I come? “Sure,” she shrugged, “up to you.” By 7:30 p.m.,
the audience had swelled to three: her game-for-anything father and one of her
friends (“I told her I was bored, so she picked me up on the way to the
theater”), arranged on folding chairs, facing the cast. It soon became clear
that this entire “audience” would be needed to fill in during the early-show
audience-participation section. We gamely agreed, and so we began with all of
us “cast” facing empty chairs, ones we returned to when we were disqualified
for not being able to spell words like “hemidemisemiquaver.” Or, in one case,
“cow.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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I struck out early and moved back to my seat, an audience-of-one
observing the great switcheroo they were pulling off. Since they’d already
returned all the show’s costumes, they dressed for their new parts themselves,
some with great care (the new Little Leaguer seemed to have found a uniform),
and sometimes not (the former Barfeé, now a spelling-whiz girl, tied a shirt
around his legs to indicate a skirt). I had gotten to know these kids over the
past weeks, and it was a wonder to see them doing something fresh with material
they knew so well. Seeing a 6’3” deep-voiced young man pull at his imaginary
pigtails and lisp convincingly was amazing. I noticed that the kid who’d played
the wholesome straight arrow had unleased dark reserves of weirdness to play the
lugubrious, tortured Barfeé. They weren’t only <i>as</i> <i>good</i> in their new roles as well as their old ones, I realized.
These kids, undeterred by physicality or gender or even common sense, had range. <o:p></o:p></div>
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What I loved most, though, was how persistently they kept at
the task they’d set out for themselves. They were knocking around this small
merlot-colored space, with no adults telling them what to do, and they were
focused beyond measure, occasionally policing themselves when a few inevitably
lost focus. “You are not as important as this song right now,” the music
director, who’s heading to Boston Conservatory in the fall, sternly told them
when the chatter got out of hand during a solo. They all shut up. Well, most of
them, anyway.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A few points became evident as the show unspooled: probably
in spite of themselves, they had each learned how to spell the crazy-difficult
words they’d memorized with their original lines. If the newly cast actor
messed up a spelling, there was a quick and aggrieved “It’s ‘ie, not ei!’” from
the “old” actor. Also, they clearly had been watching each other closely. Some
of them, it seemed, had been harboring ideas about how certain roles should be
played, and they, in the parlance of sports, left it all on the floor in their
attempt to find something new in a character. Voice, dance, acting, interacting
– they were ready for an audience much bigger, but seemed unphased by the
six-palmed applause they were receiving from their tiny but appreciative cadre of observers. What impressed me most was that our presence seemed utterly
superfluous. They were doing this for themselves and themselves alone, because
they loved the show, they loved each other, and they just weren’t yet ready for
their final rendition of the misspellers’ exit song, “Goodbye.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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It was the sort of utterly ephemeral last word that could
only be rendered by the young. Imagine famous Equity actors gathering in a
toasty-warm, third-floor space on a beautiful summer night, acting out something
that would never be seen by critics or industry connections, just to please
themselves. Sure, these kids had the marvelous surfeit of time that grownups
envy, and they weren’t currently worried about babysitters, mortgages, low back
pain, or any of the million other things that, we adults tell ourselves, keeps
us from living out our passions.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I found myself admiring them, and envying them, just a
little. There aren’t many things I do purely for love, solely for the mere joy
of doing them. These kids had taken it upon themselves to find a way to keep
the magic going a little longer, and damned if I didn’t find myself tearing up,
along with them, when it came time to sing “Goodbye.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-37285631121414305402016-06-10T14:27:00.001-07:002016-06-10T14:29:51.149-07:00Swedes on the subway<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I had a quick trip to NYC this week and as usual, I got at least one great story from it. Heading on the 1 train downtown, I noticed two ladies with Scandinavian accents, looking confused. Asked where they were heading and they told me sweetly: Harlem. Um. After explaining they needed the 2 or 3 uptown, not the 1 downtown, I asked where they were going & they showed me their 7:15 p.m. reservation for Red Rooster (310 Malcolm X Blvd, between 125th and 126th).<br />
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Hearing this, other passengers chimed in about how they should wait to change trains at 42nd Street, not 59th Street, so they wouldn't need a new fare. We chatted about the Marcus Samuelsson memoir ("Yes Chef"), which I recommended, and then I pointed the ladies out the door at Times Square.<br />
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The passengers of the car held our collective breaths as we watched them hesitate, then head up the stairs in the ostensible right direction. I found myself wondering about them all night, hoping they'd found the restaurant and had ordered the fried yardbird (dark meat, white gravy, mashed potatoes, bread & butter pickles for $28). And had gotten home, wherever that was.<br />
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God, these Swedes can break your heart, right on the downtown 1 train.</div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-34935917582617602632016-05-03T14:00:00.001-07:002016-05-04T05:16:55.176-07:00Breaking up with Bill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I won’t be using my Topsy Turvy® strawberry planter this
year. Even though inventor Bill Felkner insists, in caps and upper case and with
a TM, no less, that it’s the “World’s Easiest Way to Grow Strawberries!”™, I
just don’t have the heart for it. This is even despite the instruction booklet’s
superhot beefcake shot of pudgy, combovered Bill, posing in front of his
kitchen cabinets, wearing a manly pullover and proffering a basket of giant red
fruit. Are those strawberries? Dear God, they look like softballs. But still, I
must turn away. They are not for me. Why? Because to move past the Topsy Turvy’s
colorful cover and read the actual growing instructions inside is to enter into one
man’s personal shame spiral, and I just can’t take it this year.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I picked up my Topsy Turvy at the thrift store and gave it
to myself for Mother’s Day (don’t ask). The first warm and sunny day
this spring, I headed out to let the “easy growing” begin. “Laissez le bon
temps rouler,” I hum to myself, full of happy, strawberry-colored
anticipation. But those easy promises and trademark symbols, I’m sorry to
report, turn to an onslaught of pointed fingers about mid-way through “Bill’s
tips for success.” I should have grown suspicious when Tip #1 instructed me
that I’d need to get myself “in the proper mind-set right up front.” By tip #3,
Bill is all-caps castigating my possible cheapskate choices of soil and
demanding that I use only GOOD Canadian Peat-based potting soil. He rants: “Bargain-priced
potting soil is NO BARGAIN. Please trust me on this one.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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Standing in my backyard, holding my tips in one hand and my
planter in the other, I start to feel a headache coming on. Bill’s tone is
so, well, judgy. Not that he wasn’t right, of course. I’m just the sort of idiot
who would try to pull off Bill’s miracle with NO BARGAIN soil. It is as if he
can see inside my soul, um, soil.<br />
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After the opening salvo of Tip #3, the remaining tips contain mostly three things: capital letters, exclamation points, and pre-emptive
blame. Bill seems sure, given the cheap nature of my soil choices, that I’ll be
skimpy in my watering habits, as well. He whinges on for quite a while about that
one. And if I watered frequently enough, dear God, this man is now criticizing my
speed. “No matter how you add the water, do it SLOWLY,” he growls.</div>
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After 10 shouty tips, is he done? No, he is not. He has an
all-cap FINAL NOTE in which to tell me that if I were willing to give my planter
just a reasonable amount of time and attention, it would provide my family “with
homegrown berry goodness.” My head is really throbbing now, and I wonder what he means by “reasonable.” I'm beginning to feel, well, shackled to this
stupid ™ planter, and now, sweet Jesus, there's a P.S. I never knew P.S.'s were a thing in instruction booklets, but that rapscallion Bill is hard to stop. “It’s just a PLANTER,” he sternly postscripts, “No more, no less. So it is
entirely up to YOU to regularly water, feed and tend it.”</div>
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And with that, he signs off, with a signature that I bet is consistent with a homegrown sociopath who has ready access to a trowel and an all-caps
function. Seeing his signature, with what I take to be the catch phrase he
shares with his millions of shamefaced fans (“Now THAT’S what I’m talking about!”), delivers the final swipe at my self esteem. I have had enough. Bill’s
brochure goes in with the worm composter, and his planter is tossed in the trash. I’ll
let the bunnies nibble away at exactly two-thirds of each single berry I grow this year, just the
way they do every year. At least rabbits don’t have access to exclamation
points. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-31980550069411508402016-04-07T07:03:00.000-07:002016-04-07T07:03:19.276-07:00Losing my job and liking itI got an out-of-the-blue email from a friend yesterday, and not only was it good to hear from her, but the message was practically fan mail. A friend of hers had sent her a blog post about the end-of-year scramble at school. As she was reading it, she reports, she kept thinking, "This is funny; I'll have to send this to Julie," and then she reached the end of the post, and I'd written it. Ouch ouch ouch, that's the sound of my arm being twisted to repost my musings on the secret benefits of looming job loss, so here goes.<br />
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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2015</h2>
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The last bake sale</h3>
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“I’ve never known so many people to be concerned about my mental health as the year my daughter left for college,” a friend confided to me recently. “After a while, I started thinking that I probably <i>should </i>have a nervous breakdown, because it seemed as though people were expecting it.”</div>
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I’m losing my job next August, that full-time mom-on-patrol stint that’s made up the last twenty one years of my life. I’ve moved from not being able to safely leave a room occupied by a conscious child (“Was that crash on Spongebob or in the dining room?”) to facing an autumn when both of them are in college.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, it’s not exactly a “My work here is done” situation, clear to anyone who deals with the enormous emotional swells of older kids. “The bigger they are, they bigger they fuck up,” a straight-talking mom at the Catholic grade school once told me. True that, sister. But it is a year that’s marked with many “lasts” of my mom gig, and I’m beginning to notice.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have laid down firm household rules on this topic. I’ve watched too many friends drive themselves crazy in this last year not to be aware of the warning signs. My vigilance began before school had officially started. The senior-to-be was nursing a late-August cold, and I suggested she stay home on day one: no one really needs to go to school on the first day, anyway, I reasoned. After a mighty nose-blow, she looked up at me pleadingly and said, “But mom, it will be my<i> last</i> first day."<o:p></o:p></div>
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“And that shit ends here,” I declared, realizing that we would be tying ourselves into a group knot if we allowed every single moment to be declared “The last Tuesday, October 3 ... ever.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Re: Re: Re: yourself, toots</b></div>
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After we banned talk of “the lasts,” I had a bit of mental freedom to consider the positive aspects of being made redundant, as the British call it when you're summarily canned. After receiving an email message with the subject line: “URGENT: cupcakes needed for dance concert fundraiser!!!!” I dutifully turned the oven to 350 degrees and began to whip up a dessert. But I hummed happily at the thought that I was closing in on my last bake sale ever. The night of the concert, I found the Mommy in Charge and went through the ritual gratitude and inevitable instructions from her bossiness: “Don’t put it in that corner. That’s where we’re putting the items with sprinkles.” I walked away with a lighter load, and not just from the brownie dropoff. I was reaching the end of the time when some Martha Stewart wanna-be could offer me remedial instructions in brownie placement, napkin fluffing, or any of the countless other topics in which I've received schooling, all while keeping my lips drawn upward and feeling my stomach clench.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And Mommy Emails! I happily realized they were coming to a blessed death, too. Before the next committee meeting on whatever it is I go to committee meetings for, as I scanned the slew of “Re: Re: Re: Re: Tonight’s agenda” messages, I realized I would soon be able to absent myself from the land of Reply All Nitwits, too. Another “plus” went in the “no kids in school” column.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Three leaves and a rock</b></div>
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I thought back to elementary school. Not much to regret there, either. No more summers spent worrying over whether my child would be placed in the class with the functional alcoholic and the baker’s dozen of Mean Girls, or the room with the certified sadist and the pack of stick-wielding, uncontrollable boys. No more notes demanding three fall leaves and a rock, to be delivered with a jar of decoupage by 7:30 the next morning. No more middle-of-the night three-panel posterboard runs for the ruined Science Fair project. No Science Fairs, oh dear Jesus, no more Science Fairs at all.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I reached an apex of appreciation after hosting a cast party for the fall play this year. During the day, I had fielded phone calls from earnest parents who wanted a complete run-down of my security plans, with blueprints, if possible. I was sorely tempted to answer: “Just a minute, let me put down my loaded gun and light a cigarette before I think of an answer.” It was one of those nights that was doomed from the start, because by the end of the evening, I’d had to call for parental pick-ups of two drunken girls and their half-empty bottle of spiced rum. As I shut the door behind the last future Hazelden resident, it dawned on me that it had been the sort of night that made a person glad to be nearing retirement age.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Good luck, girls</b><br />Put your hand in a bucket of water, pull it out, and see how irreplaceable you are. My place will be taken by women made of sterner stuff than me. Standing right behind me is a long line of fresh-faced mommies, lined up in alphabetical order and ready to “reply all” to every email, whip up sprinkle-laden snacks, and host the best-darn cast parties ever. They have shapely figures, clean aprons, and the ability to sniff out spiced rum at sixty paces. Youth, and stupidity, are on their side. Good luck, girls. I wish you all the best at that next bake sale, and let me know if you ever need to borrow my Bundt pan. God knows I won’t be using it.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-87566557171139233672016-02-26T06:19:00.003-08:002016-02-26T07:04:28.391-08:00Was Earl right? Reconsidering the crazy man who said there was a microchip in my daughter's brainWe celebrated Emma's 21st birthday this week. Possibly I'm a bit worn down, but I'm beginning to wonder if Earl had a point.<br />
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MONDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2011</h2>
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The Communist Microchip in my Daughter’s Brain, or, what I learned about Sino-U.S. relations from a guy with a topographical sculpture of Hawaii on his office wall</h3>
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Back when I'd let my subscription for <i>Ms</i>. magazine lapse and picked up twelve issues of<i> Fast Company</i> instead (plus bonus tote bag!), I worked as a corporate drone in a totally made-up sector of American capitalism, euphemistically referred to as “business services." (Or, when the computer geeks tagged along, “consulting.”) An essential part of these "services" involved going to lunch with out-of-town customers, usually with a ratio ten of us to every one of them. We really liked that power-in-numbers thing. Also, floppy neckerchiefs and big earrings, but just for the women.<br />
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At lunch, the ten of us would take turns spouting marketing department aphorisms like, “It’s the people who make the difference at our company” and “When customers hear about all we can do for them, they say, ‘I had no idea.’” The other nine of us would nod along in time, solemnly. I realize now that what the customers were actually thinking was, “When can I get the next plane out of this burg and back to my glass-walled cubicle at the RenCen?” But I was too earnest to figure that out. In fact, I think I even wrote the script for a promotional video called, obviously enough, “<i>I Had No Idea</i>.” It had a great deal of footage of puffy white guys shaking hands at the foot of the two-story, twisted staircase in our new red-brick headquarters, the one our owner’s brother had designed. I’m not twisted enough to make this stuff up, so you have to know it’s true.</div>
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It was at a ten-to-one lunch that I found myself seated across the slightly sticky table from someone I'll call "Mr. Travel." He ran our Incentive Travel Group, which, back in those fat 'n happy times, mostly required deciding which of the hundreds of possible “Fam Trips” to go on next. (If you don’t already know what a Fam Trip is, don’t ask; it will just depress you and make you miss the nineties, something you probably never thought possible.) That day when I sat down to lunch, I knew three things about this guy, and I was about to learn one more.</div>
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<i>Thing One,</i> he had served proudly in the Marines for a number of years, a fact which came up in every conversation I’d ever had with him, no matter how brief. <i>Thing Two,</i> he had a gigantic copper-glazed sculpture that took up one full wall of his office. It was a topographical depiction of the Hawaiian Islands, each one of which he had visited hundreds of times, on those Fam Trips you weren’t supposed to be thinking about. He sat with his back to the artwork, the better to allow visitors to gaze on its splendor during meetings. It made me think of dentist’s offices, and work-related road trips to sad factory towns, when I had to stay in Holiday Inns with exactly this sort of sculpture in the lobby. Every time I left a meeting in his office, I was thinking about root canals and New Jersey, and I wouldn’t be be able to do my best “I Had No Idea” work for days. <i>Thing Three</i> about him was that he liked to walk around the office with both his hands stuck down the front of his pants. Did I mention that all this was happening decades ago, or is that beginning to become apparent?</div>
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So there we were at lunch, drinking ice tea (mid-nineties, not mid-eighties, big difference). Back then, I only had one topic I felt was worthy of discussion – my adorable baby daughter. Had I mentioned yet how cute she was? Did I show you the latest pictures? Did you want to hear more about her? No one ever did, but that didn’t stop me. I babbled on about the baby, hitting hard on the extra-specialness and super-de-duper wonderfulness of every aspect of her, mentioning a minimum of once every five minutes that she’d been adopted all the way from China. I really did love the kid (still do), but I’m sure I made it sound like she was some sort of imported olive oil or antique chiffarobe, not a human being. My apologies to everyone who had to listen to me between June 1995 and July 1997, when I got hit so hard with the pregnancy stick (daughter number two) that I pretty much shut up about my damn kids altogether.</div>
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So there I was, ignoring the <i>I Had No Idea</i> customer at the other end of the table, babbling about my daughter. Mr. Travel took his hands out of his pants and leaned in, close. “Did you ever think,” he said to me, “that the Chinese government has put microchips in all those girls’ heads, and that they’re just waiting for them to get a little older and stronger and then set them loose to destroy you? And ...” (significant Marine Corps pause) "... all of us?"</div>
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Well, that shut me up about the baby. And helped me to realize <i>Thing Four:</i> Despite the sculpture and the Fam Trips, and possibly because of the Marine Corps, (and potentially hinted at by the hands-in-the-pants thing), this man was completely insane.<br />
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My husband and I had a good laugh about it at the time, as we put our daughter to bed and then went downstairs to watch videos of her that we'd shot during the day. (Yes, pathetic, and yes, I realize that now.) "A destructive microchip intended to ruin our lives? Ha ha," we cried, merrily.</div>
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Then the years dragged on. The many, many sleepless years. And, every now and then, locked in some epic battle for survival with the strongest life form on earth, my daughter, I would think, suddenly, of that comment about the parent-destroying microchip. <i>Was</i> he crazy? Or the sanest man at the ten-to-one table?</div>
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Last week, Emma called home four times in three nights. From Beijing. Long after midnight, our time, each time. Her reasons were perfectly good, at least in the cold daylight of her tomorrow, which was still our trying-to-catch-up-on-lost-sleep yesterday. One time, her debit card wasn’t working. The next time she called, two hours later, guess what, it still wasn't working, and she needed to buy an Asian Miracle Bra, and how was she supposed to do that without a debit card? The last time, she called from a wedding, and wanted to let us she was having a good time, in case we'd been worried. That "good time" on a Beijing Saturday afternoon was midnight in Minneapolis, so it was a little less "good time" and more "nightmare that will not end" from the perspective of our time zone.</div>
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After the week we'd had, I suppose it was natural for one of us to let our sad, tired minds return to Mr. Travel. My husband brought it up first. With his head lying on the kitchen counter and his bleary eyes rolling around, unfocused, in his head, he croaked out his new mantra, “He was right!”</div>
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“What did you say?” I asked. And then he told me his theory, the kind that can only come with sleep deptrivation: she’d returned to her homeland for a fresh recharge of her capitalist-pig-destruction batteries. That, he concluded, was the motive behind the Gitmo-level sleep deprivation campaign she'd been waging. “If none of us can get any sleep,” he muttered, “then they’ll be able to flatten our economy even more.”</div>
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“They’re doing a pretty good job of it already. Too bad I don’t have an important job, or one with national security implications,” I said. He agreed. “All you do now is nod off during ‘I Had No Idea!' videos." </div>
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“And order a lot of coffee at ten-to-one lunches,” I reminded him.</div>
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Mr. Travel, wherever you are right now, I apologize.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-30438590634003622322016-02-04T05:44:00.000-08:002017-01-22T15:46:07.785-08:00Shame Cupcakes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I work for a very nice corporate client who was celebrating
a recent business success. To mark the occasion, they created a lovely spread of
cupcakes in the employee cafeteria. I was on campus covering other stories, and
I wanted to get some photos of the event. And then I got sidetracked into an
afternoon’s worth of ruminations on shame, joy and how hard women can be on
themselves.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I saw a woman approach the table and take two cupcakes. I asked: “Would you mind posing for me by the ‘Congratulations!’ poster,
looking happy and holding your cupcakes?” She looked at me aghast, as if I’d
asked her to remove several items of clothing and lay herself out on the
catering table. “No!” she said, scurrying away.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Undaunted, I wandered into the cafeteria, noticing a woman who
had just returned with a plate of the cupcakes for her friends. As she doled
them out, I approached: “Ladies, would you mind holding up your cupcakes and
smiling for me?” Again with the quick and horrified refusals. Sensing my
dismay, one of the women had a suggestion for me. “If you want a picture, go to
that table,” she said, pointing at a five-top of guys about 20 feet away. “I
bet they’ll let you.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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And lo, it came to pass. The men happily hoisted their
treats and smiled obligingly into the camera. They looked as though they were generally happy fellows, possibly extra happy about getting a
free cupcake at work. I got the sense that more than one of them might help
himself to seconds, if he felt so inclined. If their lips turned blue from the lurid frosting, I doubted they'd care. Cupcakes were
happy food, and they were happy about having them. And that was clearly as much
thought as they’d given to the entire matter. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I looked back at the table of women, none of whom was willing
to have photographic evidence that she had ever, ever eaten a cupcake. Their
treats were not going to taste very good. It might as well have been
frosting-covered mud pies those gals were wolfing down. And if they wanted a
second cupcake, they’d have to sneak down when no one was in the cafeteria, and
eat it all in one bite. At least no would have a picture of them doing it, thank
God.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I write a lot about food. I write about trending ethnic
cuisines and demographic shifts in snacking and what spicy condiment is about
to knock Sriracha off its throne. I write about the importance of probiotics to
create a happy climate for gut bacteria, the role of fiber in avoiding
blood sugar spikes, and why just about everyone needs more magnesium in their diet. But I never
write about joy, and I think it’s time I do. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s okay to eat food. It’s okay to let others see you
eating food. And it’s even okay to eat a cupcake, as long as you savor and
delight in every single morsel. If you end up with blue lips and a three o’clock
headache, so what. I am not sure where we women lost track of this, but it’s
time to reclaim the simple, goofy attitude of the guys at that table: <i>Oh boy, free
cupcakes. Don’t mind if I do. </i> </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-45545876546027164702016-01-19T10:37:00.002-08:002016-02-04T15:14:09.207-08:00And now the mitten is frozen solid ... Whenever I am stuck in an interminable line at the DMV or trapped in delayed airplane, I tell myself one thing to make myself calm down: at least you aren't doing this very same activity with a two-year-old. <br />
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The recent cold snap (and really, isn't it a bit more than a snap, more like a cold compound fracture?) has me sending some beams of comfort to all the parents out there who are, this very minute, trying to put a snowsuit on a back-arching toddler, preparatory to a brisk trot in subzero temps to the just-as-cold car. <br />
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Then I remembered my post about the millionth mitten, and thought I'd revisit it here.<br />
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The Millionth Mitten</h3>
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I was leaning back on the one bench they’ve provided at my newly renovated Y, grateful for an unwobbly place to switch out my shoes, and content to watch the passing show. Mid-mornings have a unique flavor at a health club in early February – the stalwart elderly, proud to be out the house, the new-resolution types who are clogging up the parking lots and forever turning the wrong direction in yoga class, and, always, the mommies.<br />
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I see the mommies trudging along in the parking lot, holding one child in arms while commanding the second to grab her leg and not let go. I see them in the bathroom, having long conversations about how <i>yes, the toilet is loud, but no, it will not swallow you up, just go, please. </i>Mostly I see them fighting the good fight in the Battle of the Mittens, insisting that it’s cold outside, we need to bundle up, just stick your arm out and Mommy will do the rest.</div>
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This particular day, as I sat on my bench, the mother next to me had already undergone a couple skirmishes and a full-scale retreat, and she had only gotten as far as boots and coat. From the corner of my eye, I noted a children's hat that looked very itchy, and featured big ear flaps, and I felt for her. Minnesota parents are a noble lot, nowhere more clearly evidenced than by their ability to bundle up, debundle and rebundle their progeny several times a day for six months of winter (or is it nine?). By January, it starts to get wearing, and by February, it’s positively exhausting. Back in my Mitten War days, I used to think of all those California parents, and their easy lot in life. By March, I’d come to truly despise them. How hard is it to be a good mommy in California? “Be sure your flip flops coordinate with your sunglasses, dear!” Ha.</div>
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I remember that gloomy mid-March evening, years back, when I finally lost it. I only had two children, but two, by my reckoning that evening, was feeling like Two Too Many. I sat at the kitchen table, trying to unsnarl the knot from a wet pair of pink Sorels, and I let it rip: “They will NEVER grow up! These children will stay little forever, just to Spite Me!” My daughters, ages six and three, stopped their argument about whether brown hair was prettier than yellow hair, and stared at me with wide eyes.</div>
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“I’m sorry,” I said, not really feeling very sorry at all. “I just think the winter is getting to me.” They gave me the fish-eye for a bit and then resumed their discussion with vigor. Stupid Mommy. How could winter be so hard? There was sledding and there were snowmen and maybe, if they were lucky, they might even live long enough to see a Snow Day declared in Minnesota.</div>
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I thought of that night as I sat on the bench at the Y and watched the exasperated and exhausted mother struggle with the mittens, one more time. It’s never just one mitten that causes a Minnesota parent to go over the deep end. It’s the parade of mittens, the unending string of them, culminating in the Millionth Mitten, the one that leaves you screaming nonsense about how your children will never grow up, just to spite you.</div>
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In a few weeks, my girls will be celebrating their 17<sup>th</sup> and 14<sup>th</sup>birthdays, one day apart and half a world away from each other. They put their own mittens on now, or usually don’t, and they need me for very little these days. I don’t have enough distance on those early years, at least not yet, to say that I wish I could go back to the Winterwear Wars. And I knew enough to keep my mouth shut around that young mother. She didn’t need to hear any advice from me, or accept my admonition to Cherish Each Moment. She just needed to get the damn mitten on and get home before naptime.</div>
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So I stayed quiet, but I tried to help. I made a crazy face at her child, behind her back. It startled him so much that he allowed some genuine progress to be made. I pulled my lips back with my fingers and stuck out my tongue, and his boots slipped on. She never saw the shocked look on his face, because she was too busy hustling him out to the minivan. I’d given her the only gift I had to give that day – a crazy lady’s distraction to help her get on her way. Someday, maybe she’ll do the same for some other poor soul, sitting on a bench at the Y.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-87913186767677597052015-12-31T13:20:00.000-08:002015-12-31T14:04:15.601-08:00The last bake sale<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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“I’ve never known so many people to be concerned about my mental
health as the year my daughter left for college,” a friend confided to me recently.
“After a while, I started thinking that I probably <i>should </i>have a nervous breakdown, because it seemed as though people
were expecting it.”</div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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I’m losing my job next August, that full-time mom-on-patrol stint
that’s been a significant part of my adult life. I’ve moved from not being able
to safely leave a room occupied by a conscious child (“Was that crash on
Spongebob or in the dining room?”) to facing an autumn when both of them are in
college. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Of course, it’s not exactly a “My work here is done” situation,
clear to anyone who deals with the enormous emotional swells of older kids. “The
bigger they are, they bigger they fuck up,” a straight-talking mom at the
Catholic grade school once told me. True that, sister. But it is a year that’s
marked with many “lasts” of my mom gig, and I’m beginning to notice. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I have laid down firm household rules about this topic. I’ve
watched too many friends drive themselves crazy in this last year not to be
aware of the warning signs. My vigilance began before school had officially
started. The senior-to-be was nursing a late August cold, and I suggested she
stay home on day one: no one really needs to go to school on the first day,
anyway, I reasoned. After a mighty nose-blow, she looked up at me pleadingly
and said, “But mom, it will be my<i> last</i>
first day. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“And that shit ends here,” I declared, realizing that we
would be tying ourselves into a group knot if we allowed every single moment to
be declared “The last Tuesday, October 3 ever.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Re: Re: Re: yourself, toots</b></div>
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After we banned talk of “the lasts,” I discovered some
secret treasures. After receiving an email message with the subject line: “URGENT:
cupcakes needed for dance concert fundraiser,” I dutifully turned the oven to
350 degrees and began to whip up a dessert. But I hummed happily at the thought
that I was closing in on my last bake sale ever. The night of the concert, I found
the Mommy in Charge and went through the ritual gratitude and inevitable
instructions: “Don’t put it in that corner. That’s where we’re putting the
items with sprinkles.” I walked away with a lighter load, and not just from the
brownie dropoff. I was reaching the end of the time when some Martha Stewart
wanna-be could offer me remedial instructions in brownie placement, napkin
fluffing, or any of the countless other topics I’ve taken in, lips drawn upward and stomach clenched.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And Mommy Emails! I realized. They were coming to a blessed death, too. Before the next committee meeting on whatever it is I go to
committee meetings for, as I scanned the slew of “Re: Re: Re: Re: Tonight’s
meeting” messages, I realized I would soon be able to absent myself from the land
of Reply All Nitwits, too. Another “plus” went in the “no kids in school”
column. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Three leaves and a rock</b></div>
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I thought back to elementary school. Not much to regret
there, either. No more summers spent worrying over whether my child would be
placed in the class with the functional alcoholic and the baker’s dozen of Mean
Girls, or the room with the certified sadist and the pack of stick-wielding,
uncontrollable boys. No more notes demanding three fall leaves and a rock, to
be delivered with a jar a decoupage by 7:30 the next morning. No more middle-of-the
night three-panel posterboard runs for the ruined Science Fair project. No
Science Fairs, oh dear Jesus, no more Science Fairs.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I reached an apex of appreciation after hosting a cast party
for the fall play. During the day, I had fielded phone calls from earnest parents who
wanted a complete run-down of my security plans, with blueprints, if possible.
I was sorely tempted to answer: “Just a minute, let me put down my loaded gun
and light a cigarette before I think of an answer.” It was one of those nights
that was doomed from the start, because by the end of the evening. I’d had to call
for parental pick-ups of two drunken girls and their half-empty bottle of spiced
rum. As I shut the door behind the last future Hazelden resident, it dawned on me that it had been the sort of night that made a person glad to be nearing
retirement age.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Good luck, girls</b><br />
Put your hand in a bucket of water, pull it out, and see how irreplaceable you are. My place will be taken by women made of sterner stuff than me. Standing right behind me is a long line of fresh-faced
mommies, lined up in alphabetical order and ready to “reply all” to every
email, whip up sprinkle-laden snacks, and host the best-darn room parties ever.
They have shapely figures, clean aprons, and the ability to sniff out spiced
rum at sixty paces. Youth, and stupidity, are on their side. Good luck, girls.
I wish you all the best at that next bake sale, and let me know if you ever
need to borrow my Bundt pan. God knows I won’t be using it. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-67898402647376888642015-12-15T14:22:00.001-08:002015-12-15T14:23:20.484-08:00Five years, one week, a couple of lifetimesI took a client out to lunch yesterday, stopping by to see her agency's swell new digs downtown, and happy to troop through the skyway system with a gal who clearly knew how to navigate Macy's in a Christmas-crowded flash. Stepping into the IDS tower, we heard a kids' choir earnestly yelping away on carols, while proud grannies raised phones for snapshots, and office workers raised the decibel level of their conversations, just a bit. "Wait a minute," I thought, "I've been here, I've done this before -- but when?" Today I dug through a (virtual) dusty stack of posts and found this keepsake of a wonderful day, five years and one week ago.<br />
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THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011</h2>
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The Extraordinary Ordinary</h3>
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I think the magic started with the Cinderella-shoe, strangers-on-an-escalator moment at the IDS Center, but there was so much about that day that was purely extraordinary-ordinary. We look back now and say that it was a “great day,” but it wasn’t even close to being a full 24 hours of something special – more like five hours and change. It was just enough, though -- not only to make us happy at the moment, but to turn itself into a snow globe memory that we’ve been picking up more and more in this current, very different, holiday season.</div>
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The particulars: December 10, 2010. Emma had a performance with the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphony, to be held over the lunch hour at the IDS Center downtown. With the sort of what-the-heck laxness that my children will probably use as Exhibit A of my poor parenting choices when they’re older, I told Mary Katherine that she could skip school in order to hear her sister play. We bundled ourselves and the cello into my Beetle, no small feat, and I managed to get us to the right spot downtown.</div>
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Everyone in our little group was carrying something – Santa hat, purse, cello, music stand. It's understandable that, as we arrived at the escalator to part ways with Emma, who was heading to a basement-level green room, that she had already begun to descend before Mary Katherine realized she was still holding the black heels that Emma needed for the performance. “Emma, your shoes!” she called out, and we saw a swivel from that dark, shiny head, as she considered how to get back to us. The escalator was thickly populated with lunch-hour-ers, and it was impossible to turn back. </div>
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And then our heroes arrived. Two young men, just stepping on to the escalator themselves, turned back at the sound of Mary’s cry, and reached out their hands in unison. “Toss ‘em here; we’ll get them to her,” one of them said. Mary lobbed one shoe into each outstretched hand. They arrived at the bottom and dutifully turned the shoes over to the lovely young woman, dressed all in black, standing patiently beside her cello. “Here you go, Cinderella,” one of them said, and they headed off without another word.</div>
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During the performance, Mary Katherine and I sat on a balcony and looked down at the orchestra We were cozy on the floor, flattening our cheeks against the acrylic guard, feeling the sound drift up. Afterwards, with the cello safely stowed back in the car, we tooled around Macy’s, trying on hats, squirting each other with perfume and wandering happily, and aimlessly, from department to department. I was able to make my favorite parenting statement of all time: “Take your time; we aren’t in any hurry.”</div>
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Then we ended up on the seventh floor, waiting to see the Great Man. They were the oldest kids in the Santa Line, and by several years. And because it was a weekday afternoon, they were the only kids who could see over the railing, write their names in cursive, or take themselves to the bathroom. I had told my girls I wouldn’t buy them lunch unless they sat on Santa’s lap. “Have you been good?” he asked, a bit ironically, and I held back the urge to try a full Bette Davis retort: “Santa, you have no idea.”</div>
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They’d done what I asked, so I bought them lunch at the Sky Room. We sat together at a small table, looking out at a snowstorm brewing over the late afternoon skyline. And we laughed together, over nothing, just happy to be together and to have no agenda, schedule, tournament, rehearsal or competition to attend, just this once. After Emma had written all over her cup, and the bus boy had been truly terrorized by our loud hoots, we gathered up our things and found the elevator to the first floor. A quick stop at Candyland for ride-home treats, and we headed home. </div>
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And that’s it. Those were small things we did that day, not momentous ones. We attended a performance, sat on Santa’s lap and laughed together over a meal. But one year later, it seems that the day is still sending us a clear, strong signal, reminding us that we really do matter to one another, and that we have a bond which time, distance and circumstance can’t break. </div>
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For many families, their traditions seem rooted in the rigid belief that if anything is ever allowed to vary from the approved script, everything will fall apart. If all my kids remember of our traditions is that we had a lot of fun one December day in the Sky Room, watching the snow as it fell over the city, that’s good enough for me.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-81429654541846127092015-11-25T15:46:00.000-08:002015-11-25T15:46:10.237-08:00Still a secretIt's the day before Thanksgiving, and I pulled out my mom's "secret" recipe today. Thought it might be a good time to revisit my in-depth expose of three years ago.<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #999999; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 10.14px; font-stretch: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 1.5em 0px 0.5em; text-transform: uppercase;">
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2012</h2>
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Secret Recipe</h3>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Those aren't tears that I spilled on the recipe. It's just Karo syrup.</i></span></div>
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My mother lacked for many things in her life, especially material ones, but self confidence was never among them. Robust self-regard was as natural as breathing for Katherine Clifford Kendrick. She held firm convictions about the star quality of her solo at the St. Gregory Church Mothers’ Club Variety Show (proffering a clipping from the local paper whenever the occasion arose, as it often seemed to). Decades after the last bite of chicken a la king had been eaten, she delighted in remembering her “Three Coins in the Fountain” centerpiece for the annual Ladies’ Guild Luncheon. (She had used Madame Alexander dolls with little coins glued to their palms, thanks for asking.)</div>
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It only made sense that, as she would be the first to tell you, she was a marvelous cook. She would describe the nuances of the giant pieces of carrot in <i>her</i> Irish stew, sniffing at those chumps who offered finely chopped carrots chips to their families. Because she hated mustard (to ask her about it was to receive a wee bit more info than was really pertinent to the question at hand), she insisted on using yellow food coloring in her potato salad. I believed for years that adding yellow food coloring to any recipe immediately elevated it to the status of “gourmet.”</div>
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She swore by her pies. They weren’t just good, they were unique. No one could create a strawberry like hers. “<em>Myyyyy strawberry pie</em>” was the leadoff of the story, as if she and the pastry had been romantically outed in Jerry Berger’s column in the <i>St. Louis Post-Dispatch.</i> Her pecan version, she told anyone who was still listening, was from "My Secret No-Fail Pecan Pie Recipe.” Once she'd finished a lengthy discussion of its secret nature, she would write out the recipe for a friend, using her best Palmer method penmanship. Some secret.</div>
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When you raise a child in this way, several things can happen. In my case, it was a strong veer in the opposite direction. I decided to shut down the p.r. firm and live a life without press clippings or superlatives. I function under few delusions about the superiority of my talent, my decorating skill or my cooking prowess. I long ago decided that the only thing that matters in motherhood is Showing Up, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for 17 years. So far, the reviews have been adequate.</div>
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So, when the great Thanksgiving Teenaged Cook-Off was being planned at our house this past week (Three adults, 11 kids aged 21-and-under), and someone asked for pie, preferably one that featured pecans, I volunteered. Hey, I had a secret recipe. And it could not fail.</div>
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I will admit that I first turned to alcohol.</div>
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For the crust, that is. I used Christopher Kimball’s famed vodka pie crust recipe. And then, crust in place, I turned to my mother’s “no fail” promise and began to mix the super-secret ingredients. Sugar. Eggs. Vanilla. When I reached into the cupboard for the dark Karo corn syrup, I’ll admit I was already a little bit suspicious. Nothing I’d been doing so far had struck me as very foolproof, or very stealthy. So I read the pecan pie recipe on the back of the blue bottle. Each ingredient matched up exactly with the one from my recipe, except – <i>There! There it was!</i> -- she called for one teaspoon of lemon juice, and those corporate tools at the Karo corporation did not. </div>
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A teaspoon of lemon juice? That’s the only thing standing between me and imminent pie failure?</div>
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Oh mom.</div>
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I made the pie, but with trepidation. I had unmasked her secret, or lack thereof. As it baked (60 minutes at 350 degrees, when a knife inserted in the center comes out clean, you’re done), I thought about how someone could copy a recipe from the back of a bottle, add a teaspoon of lemon juice, and then somehow convince herself, over the years, that she had created something that deserved its own Trophy Case in the Pie Hall of Fame. </div>
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That was my mother, a woman who convinced herself more than she ever swayed anyone else, but who remained unfailingly upbeat. In truth, her potato salad was always watery, no matter how garishly yellow it was. And her Irish Stew required another ten minutes of work with the table knife, just to chop up all those oversized carrots.</div>
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The pie turned out fine. The recipe page went back in my cookbook folder. I smiled to picture some grandkid getting hold of it one day, thinking she really had a priceless secret recipe from the past.</div>
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Just don’t read the back of the Karo bottle, kid. It will break your heart.</div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6125710378344803617.post-64806615505526076252015-10-21T11:07:00.001-07:002015-10-22T13:22:06.300-07:00I don't do that anymore<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhQ8obJDamEuE5OBe-L81IvwPRj5lkzffugZmh7LhA9lVPeLqmQZcB6zn0m1-bCoZufipWaI57la3YbXH454R8Gz8p9nwsX0FZviabPUJGExOpoPFL7WO6JJJEw0lFz5XRyO7C583R-Yw/s1600/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAI7AAAAJDViYTczMmM0LWYzMTktNGU5MC05ZTA1LTZiYTE1YjMwMjQwMA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhQ8obJDamEuE5OBe-L81IvwPRj5lkzffugZmh7LhA9lVPeLqmQZcB6zn0m1-bCoZufipWaI57la3YbXH454R8Gz8p9nwsX0FZviabPUJGExOpoPFL7WO6JJJEw0lFz5XRyO7C583R-Yw/s320/AAEAAQAAAAAAAAI7AAAAJDViYTczMmM0LWYzMTktNGU5MC05ZTA1LTZiYTE1YjMwMjQwMA.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I got my first job when I was 16 years old, and I haven't stopped working since. I’ve never
had to wash dishes, wait tables or clean bathrooms for a living, and for that I’m grateful, because I'm not that good at cleaning and my sense of balance is awful, so I would miss spots and drop things, surely. I started working in the olden times—when, with several scholarships and
a smidgen of luck, I was able to pay for my own college education. And I did it
by working at, get this, the local public library.</div>
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After graduation, I taught freshman English at an all-girls’
Catholic high school, was an editor at an ag services publisher, and then turned
my sparkling eyes to the low-pay, high-stress world of professional copywriting.
I worked at a long list of agencies – direct marketing, advertising and a couple
in that shadowy realm called “performance improvement.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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I worked at places that had angry partners, disgruntled
employees and a complete lack of creative inspiration. I’ve been locked down in
dingy conference rooms while the VP of the moment (a guy who looked like
Fred Flinstone, wearing a Miami Vice blazer) told us why the American Express
Gold Card was man’s greatest creation, and how we need to come up with something
equally as good for the crappy HMO we were pitching. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I moved up to bigger conference rooms at different agencies,
with people who were dressed more nicely, but I was still subjected to more lengthy
lock-downs at “kickoff meetings,” where I was harangued by more suits, who
demanded brilliant ideas to help that pillar of American industry, General
Motors, sell more car and trucks. I’ve sat, pantyhose cutting off my
circulation and big earrings tugging at my earlobes, while some former college
football star accessed the deepest regions of his concussed brain all over the
nearest flipchart page with a dried-out, de-scented Mr. Sketch marker.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Because I was usually the lowest-ranking female, often the
only female, in the room, it was my job to transfer the ex-jock’s finished
sheets to a clear spot on the rapidly filling wall, and to pretend to
transcribe his notes, with great interest. Feigning enthusiasm used to be a big
part of my day-to-day job. “Aren’t you excited about this Chevy pitch?! Are you
ready to get to work??!” some jugheaded state-school grad would enthuse at me, and
I would be expected to pull a credible joy-face while considering the prospect of pounding the Macintosh keyboard late into the night,
entering the Big Ideas of our “program.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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There are a lot of things I don’t do anymore, and posting
someone else’s flip chart pages on a bare wall is, thank God, one of them.
Expressing unbridled going-to-Disney-World level enthusiasm over work assignments
is another. These days, I’m a fixer, and fixers aren’t usually required to be
enthusiastic, just effective. In my role as a freelancer, I’m no longer another
cow in the barnyard stall. I’m much more the no-strings busy-bee,
cross-pollinating from project to project, agency to agency. I see who always
starts their meetings on time, who is afraid of impending layoffs and, vitally,
who serves the nicest complimentary beverages.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Freelancers are treated differently than regular employees.
No one ever calls me in when there's happy client, a functioning team,
and plenty of time to meet the deadline. They call me when someone forgot something
important, when the client screamed at everyone during the weekly review call, and
when no one has any idea how this damn thing will ever get done. I often pick
up the faint traces of a sniffle when someone calls on Thursday night (prime time
for freelancer booty calls) to ask, weakly, “Are you available for a quick-turn
project?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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And I like it, I like it a lot. I like the flitting, and I
like the fixing, and I like doing quality work for places and people and topics
that can only be described as “varied.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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That’s why a couple recent unpleasantnesses have reminded me
of how generally smooth my freelance path has been. The first bump in my road was
in a meeting that would have been unremarkable, except for the presence of man
who clearly had fallen in love with the sound of his own voice the day he hit
puberty, and has been unable to shut up ever since. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I was the one new person in the room, so he decided to tell
me everything that had happened on this account since the beginning of time. And
I get it, I really do, that everyone thinks their own product is very
complicated and involved. I’ve been in meetings where people who make pens feel
the need to begin by describing how ancient Egyptians used ink ... and then go on from there. This particular day, I
was taking notes and paying attention, but then I noticed that this guy had Become
Displeased. “I can’t tell if you understand me, because you keep frowning at
me,” he growled. I looked around the room. The other man in the room wore a
serious, paying-attention look. The other two women were baring their teeth in
rictus smiles. Aaaah, this is a place where the girls need to grin like chimps, I realized.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“I’m paying attention,” I told him. He continue his
narration, then stopped for a breath. “Do you like doing this? Are you excited
about this?” he barked. I wondered, dimly, when the last time had been that a
smile-demanding suit had asked me this question. A very long time ago, I realized. “Yes,” I
told him, deadpan. “I am so, so excited.” And then, when the meeting was over, I
gathered up my notes and left, the flip chart pages still dangling from the
walls. Goodbye.<o:p></o:p></div>
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That evening, I was back at my office, finishing up some
copy, when the phone rang. The caller interrupted my “hello” to tell me he’d
been recommended by a friend of mine. “He SAYS you’re a writer; do you even
have a website?” The sneer came through the line, and he interrupted me before
I could spell out the URL. “My agency is writing blog posts for me at $300 per
post,” he grumbled. “Well then, I would charge <i>more</i>,” I said, evenly. “Tell me why you’d be better than my agency,”
he shot back. And I took a breath. “No, I won’t tell you that. You can look at
my website and read my work, then decide for yourself. But I’m not going to
pitch you on why I’m a good writer; I have plenty of happy clients who think so.”
He started a long ramble about how writing got easier the more you did it, and
once I’d written a few blog posts for him, I could crank them out in mere minutes. “There is no volume discount,” I said, catching his drift. And then, breaking the
fourth wall I usually keep between work and my real life, I added: “I’m leaving
for yoga class now. Goodbye.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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Some people are dissatisfied at their jobs twice a day, or
twice an hour, or just all the damn time. I figure that being truly miserable only
two times in the past few years is probably a pretty good average. With that in mind, I’ll try to keep at this as
long as I can, happily fixing and pollinating. The flip chart pages, the dried-out markers and those pasted-on smiles are, blessedly, not part of my job, not these days.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Julie Kendrickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12590673850760953264noreply@blogger.com1