The Worm Entrepreneurs of Harriet Avenue

I’ve written a note to myself, in among the usual long list of deadlines and commitments, that says, simply, “Quarters.” It's a reminder to myself that now that the weather seems to be truly springlike, I need to stockpile quarters in my car so that I will be ready for every lemonade stand I see.  It’s not that I am such a lover of lemonade, and, truth be told, most of the stuff I buy is tepid and watery. It’s just that I promised my mother.

In the years before she died, when she used to make trips to see me, she made me promise this:  never pass a lemonade stand without stopping. I always stop, even when I’m on my way to a meeting and I'm pretty sure that I'm about to get lost. I stop when I drank six ice teas at lunch and am racing home to the bathroom. I stop even when the children look highly strung, or their mother overly pert.

Then, yesterday, when the temperature was hovering near seventy and the leaves on the newly planted cherry tree in the front yard seemed to be growing in fast forward, right before my eyes, I saw the best stand ever.

Only it wasn’t for lemonade. It was for worms.

I was, as always, racing from one thing to another. I’d been staffing the afterschool writing help desk at Southwest High School, and then dashing home to pick up Mary Katherine and her friend Maggie, to head back across town for their rehearsal. I’d already made my five-minute warning call home, because we were running tight on time, and I had no idea what the traffic would be like on 94.

I was coasting down the Harriet hill, seconds from home, when I saw three little girls and an indulgent grownup, seated around a sign proclaiming, “Addie’s Worm Store. 5 cents.” The girls were hopping and squirming and generally doing their best wriggly worm imitations.

So of course I stopped.  I talked over the sale with them. I told them that one time, after a freak spring storm, Emma and Mary Katherine had at first tried to sell, and then give away, bags of hail.  In a land so short on irony, they had no takers.

But worms, I said, worms are better.  They agreed.

They assured me that all the worms, which were arrayed in tins that were set on – what else? – doilies, were 100% organic. I told them I wanted five extra-wriggly ones and I handed over my quarter. They picked out the best candidates, sprinkled some dirt in a snack bag, and handed over my purchase.

Yes, Mary Katherine was a little surprised when, before she got in the car, I handed her a bag and told her to free the worms right under that increasingly leafy cherry tree, where they could do the most good.  And yes, Eli, her director, called her cell phone when we were already 10 minutes late and still crawling along University Avenue.

Of course she told him that she was late because her mother had stopped to buy worms.  Being a true theater kid, he didn’t skip a beat. “Just get here as soon as you can because we need to run through the opening number,” he said.   

And we did.

And the Rest of the Day to You

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.

I asked my mother, wherever she is, to forgive me.

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.

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.”

Of even less usefulness was her insistence that I learn the proper way to greet someone on St. Patrick’s Day:  I should say “Top o’ the mornin’ to you,” and the person was to reply, “And the rest o’ the day to you.” 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.

I never did of the things that my mother suggested.

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.

The most enthusiastic Irish celebrant I ever knew was my godmother, Thelma Kelley (“k-e-l-l-E-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.

As for me, I’m not fond of crowds, so I usually passed 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.

 

Still, I thought about Thelma today, and my mother, and the song. I sent out a silent “Top o’ the mornin’ to you” 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.

Nerves

The two things my mother always wanted to have were a suntan and a nervous breakdown. First, about the tan: she prized that peanut-buttery epidermis that, before tanning beds, required a great deal of leisure and money to acquire. “Look at that tan,” she would sigh as a woman strolled past her, and if the woman in question also had straight, blonde hair (hers was black and curly), she’d be even more envious. To Mom, a tan meant that you had the abundant leisure time to focus exclusively on yourself and your beauty, and that, clearly, was a mark of a superior sort of person.

Every year on the last day of school, she would tell me, “Why don’t you get a tan this summer?” Um, no. The only place in my unairconditioned St. Louis home that would have been more depressing than the basement (where the snowy black and white television got moved every June 1), would have the weed-choked backyard, where I’d be lying on a beach towel, gazing at the chain link fence and listening to “Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” on my AM transistor radio.

And as to the other item:  ah, how her voice would lilt when she described how someone she knew had suffered “a complete nervous breakdown.” (No one ever, in her telling, suffered a partial one.) For an Irish woman who adored all talk of illness, tragedy and misery, the CNB was the tops.

And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, they’re making a comeback, just like cooking your own food and saving money. In the article, “Time for a Good Old-Fashioned Nervous Breakdown?” Melinda Beck says that the term was never an official diagnosis, just a popular euphemism and convenient catch-all for the inability to function due to psychological stress. Clearly, she never met Katherine Clifford Kendrick, for whom “nerves” were a highly prized diagnosis. Whether it was her dipsomaniacal, narcissistic sister Loretto or my food-addled and raging father, she had an elegant explanation: nerves. In that one word, she managed to convey the idea that the behavior in question wasn’t really the fault of the jackass who’d done it.  They were suffering, she implied, from something marvelously exotic.

Bullshit, I thought, just about as soon as I could form a thought. But no one asked me, and even the slightest display of emotion in our household would be met with the hysterical offer to “rush you to the hospital” for your oncoming CNB. I never got rushed, so I wasn’t sure what exactly would have happened when we got there. As poor as we were, I’m sure I would have been sent home. Aunt Loretto had enough money to fund several stays in the local asylum, and my father was allowed to drop into bed for a week or so whenever his n-word got too bad, but I never tested my ability to drop out, and, like my mother, I’ve continued to solider on, while secretly, sometimes, wishing I could collapse.

Mom's schedule was always too busy to be able to pull off a CNB. Instead, she favored the havoc that being “high strung” could wreak on the human body. She would often proudly tell of the time when she had picked a big rut into the top of her skull. This discussion was always accompanied by a discussion of how the rut was as big as her thumb, with a wave of the thumb in question. (Health-related matters in my family always had a measurement, usually food-related. Tumors as big as grapefruits and black eyes as big as plums are two descriptions that I still, sadly, remember.) As soon as she’d displayed the thumb, she’d sit back in her chair and discuss how the woman at the beauty parlor had been so worried when she’d found that rut.  “And I told her,” my victim-mother would say with a little flourish, “it’s there because of … nerves.” That rut was one of her proudest accomplishments, the tangible proof that the world had mistreated her, and she was mistreating herself.

There was another thing she was proud of, and that was the year she got a tan. She spoke of how she’d scrupulously “sunbathed” every day, religiously applied baby oil and looked, well -- wonderful. Then my father lost his job that September, and she went to work as a secretary in an office. For the rest of her life, she looked, as she always complained, “as if I’d been dipped in a flour barrel.”

And me? No suntan. I fidget too much. And no CNB, either.  Like my mother, I can’t seem to find a way to fit it into my schedule. Not that the thought doesn’t seem tempting. Fourteen years ago, my mother died in my arms, on my front lawn, after mentioning that she wasn’t feeling so hot. I came back from the emergency room to a three-year-old, a nine-month old and a strong desire to crawl under the covers, Jack Kendrick style. Instead, I changed diapers, got up at two a.m. for bottles (Mary Katherine still wasn’t sleeping through the night), and answered Emma’s endless loop of questions about why she had watched her grandmother fall down, why no one let her save grandma because she could have done it, why, why, why, why.  

I confessed to my best friend, who was single and childless, that I was ready for a nice CNB.  “I’ve done that already,” she said, “and it really doesn’t make things any better. Plus, you get pillow prints on your cheek after a while. Just move on,” she said wisely. “Make lunch. Make the bed.” And so I did. And so I do.

Special Specialness

There are seven billion people on the planet now, and sometimes I feel as if I’m responsible for baking a birthday cake for every damn one of them.

My name is Julie, and I have a problem with special specialness. If last year’s “fill the house with balloons until Mom passes out” party was a hit, what about a color-coded scavenger hunt this time? Original sonnets for every party guest? Goody bags that rival an Oscar nominee’s swag bag? Sure, just let me slip on my comfortable shoes and I’ll get to work.

If I can't control my crazed event-related behavior, at least I realize I’m a victim of my gender. Garrison Keillor (a man) once said that Christmas, in its current over-the-top incarnation, would not exist if women weren’t around to perpetrate it. The same, I feel, goes for birthdays, book clubs and every grade school production ever mounted since Jesus was in First Grade.

Only women are willing to turn themselves inside out to please others, or at least to attempt to impress them. Don’t believe me? Exhibit A: High Heels. 

Exhibit B: The special specialness that turns up every February at my house, when my daughters celebrate their birthdays. The fact that one of them was studying in Beijing this year didn’t stop me. I drove myself crazy trying to come up with thoughtful gifts that could lie flat in a first-class envelope – a newly minted DVD of videotaped birthdays past, a hand-made accordion-fold card with recently scrounged and reprinted photos of her blowing out the candles on the specially special cakes I’ve baked her over the past 16 years. Just reading this makes me want to smack myself and go mix up a pitcher of martinis.

If something can be done with that magic combination of sickening thoughtfulness and insane exertion of effort, women will find a way. There's no point in blaming Martha Stewart, either, because I've done it to myself -- no one pulled that trigger on the glue gun for me.

I’ve been in a number of book clubs in my time, and every single one has started with a “wine and chips” motif that quickly escalates in one-up-woman-ship into a multi-course, sit-down dinner, served by a sweaty and stiffly smiling hostess, with every morsel themed to a chapter of the book in question. (Don’t even ask what my latest group did when we read “The Help”).

I know a woman who is an absolute marvel – the sort who hosts a meeting of the planning committee, gathers silent auction donations and bakes one hundred dozen cupcakes for the school Bake Sale, all before noon. I serve on a board with her, and, on a recent day, we arrived and walked in to a meeting together. I noticed that she was carrying a giant armful of agendas and reports she’d prepared for this deserving nonprofit. With grace and good cheer, she mentioned that she’d been at her child's school since early that morning, toiling at an event.  As we reached the door of our conference room, she stopped. “I just need to run back to my car and bring in the crock pot of jambalaya. I thought we all could use a snack, and today is Mardi Gras!” she said, brightly, as she trotted off.

I used to be a feminist. I subscribed to Ms. Magazine (remember that one?) I believed that some day I would be living and working in a world with total gender equality in pay, recognition and social status. And now I’m blowing up balloons, and she’s toting crock pots through icy parking lots.

I wonder if Gloria Steinem wakes up every morning and smacks her head against the wall. Possibly, but then she runs to the kitchen to whip up a batch of jambalaya for that board meeting tonight.

Strangest Valentines Ever: The Yam, the Herring and the Abused Cow

Mary Katherine’s junior high class decided to exchange Valentines this year. “Ironically, of course,” she informed me, but I didn’t care. I’ve always been a big fan of Kid Valentine’s Day.  Couple Valentine’s always seemed highly smarmy to me, all that dining out and acting happy, but I Love Love Love the children's version, including cutting out red paper hearts and finding the doilies buried under  the sprinkles, the cookie cutters and other seldom-used cooking supplies. When I was small, people were not jumbo-sized as they are now, and all we exchanged were paper valentines. Now, every card comes with candy attached, and that’s why none of us can squeeze into our desks anymore.

But I digress.

I implored Mary Katherine to let me research vintage valentines online, so she could be even more ironic than the average Scooby-Doo-Valentine-buying tween. She relented, I think just to please me, and we found some doozies: 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 ponytailed 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.

Then I found the strange valentines, the ones that were 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 stupid rhymes. Perhaps the artist was simply a victim of his own success. One day, feeling hungry, he came up with giant, romantic fruits, declaring they’d be “a peach of a pair.” He 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.”

Perhaps they were huge hits. The public loved them. The boss demanded more food-related valentines. The artist was stuck. Then, in a fit of desperation, he created this:

 An orange-fleshed tuber in a valentine?  Hey, it worked with the bowl of popcorn. For the record, I have to tell you that this yam frightened Mary Katherine, and she insisted that his cane was menacing. I retorted that it was a walking stick, not a cane, and that the yam was probably best buds with Mr. Peanut.  When he wasn’t sweet-talking lady yams, he and Mr. P. probably took long strolls down the boulevard, stunted arm in stunted arm.  I imagined the yam had been saving up for a monocle.

But back to our desperate artist. The boss accepted the yam-entine, grudgingly, so now where should he turn? Why, to oily fish, of course:

 Our love can be pickled, our love can be smoked, but it will last forever, said this genius card.

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:

Did the boss fall for it?  I like to think that the artist was carried around the office on the shoulders of his adulatory co-workers, and that he eventually married the boss’ daughter, took over the company, and sold it to the Japanese in 1965 for one million dollars.

Or something like that. Happy Valentine's Day, by the way.

My Funeral, Unplugged

My grandmother was a Dalton and my mother was a Clifford. I grew up surrounded by Kelleys and Morans and Meahans and Costellos. With this sort of ethnic background, it stands to reason that I’ve already given considerable thought to planning my funeral.

Funeral planning calls for the perfect Irish Stew of self-pity, maudlin focus on the negative and, of course, a big, loud party. My Mom’s friend Mrs. Koboldt (nee Mary Margaret Meahan) used to extract the same promise from her friends every time she’d had a few highballs: “Everyone has to drive separately from the church to the cemetery. I want a cortege so long that it’s backing out the gates and onto the street.” That someone would give this much thought to creating a traffic jam, even after death, offers just a glimpse into the interior life, such as it is, of the people I come from.

It’s a tradition that goes back a long way. My grandfather, Walter Aloysius Clifford, had a sister, Nanna, who had worked, in her youth, as a professional mourner. Back in the days when bodies were laid out in the back parlor of a shotgun flat, Nanna’s job was to sit with the deceased while everyone else sat in the kitchen for the wake. Nanna’s frequent sobs and moans were the perfect reason to offer yet another toast to the dearly departed, and everyone left the sad occasion feeling happy, usually very happy.

Last year, I went to way too many funerals to allow for denial of my own encroaching years (here’s another blog about one of them). When you start to bury your contemporaries, you’re getting old. But I used to love to go to funerals when I was a child. My mother was the youngest in her family, so lots of old Irish aunties were always being laid out for three-night visitations (the Irish believe that too much of anything is just about right).

I saw a lot of dead, embalmed bodies in my childhood, and learned that discussion of the “natural and peaceful” look of the corpse was perfectly acceptable conversation. The funeral parlors in which these shindigs were held achieved a level of elegance – fresh paint, fresh flowers and carpet instead of linoleum – that I never saw in my own home. I remember ladies’ rooms with fainting couches, cousins I got to see only at funerals, and uncles who gave me quarters to buy sodas from the Coke machine in the basement. What’s not to like?

I had a long stretch there, between childhood and last year, in which I went to very few funerals. So entering into the world of mourning again, after being away so long, was quite a shock. I suppose I should have expected it in an age where weddings have taken on the nature of long-running Broadway shows, but funerals have become glossy, technological Life Shows! After experiencing a few of these events recently, I’m not entirely sure that it’s a trend I welcome for myself -- not the table after table of artifacts and photographs, and certainly not the ubiquitous continuous loop PowerPoint of Happier Times.

When a beautiful and brave friend recently died, I was surprised to find myself receiving a telephone call from a woman who gave me a display assignment. I was to gather photos from an annual event in which the deceased and I had been regular participants. “30” x 40” foamcore,” she had told me crisply. “I’ve got the costume she wore at the opening night play, so see if you can find a dress form.”

Suddenly, I felt as if it were 1990 and I was working on the flip charts for the big Chevy presentation in Detroit. Or, worse, that tomorrow was the Science Fair and I hadn’t even conducted my first experiment. I sent out frantic messages to friends, trolling for photos, and visited Office Max for my presentation board.

As I pulled my display together, I felt a decided mix of emotions. On the one hand, this woman was an incredible source of light and love to anyone who ever met her. Paintings should be painted for her, poems written. I felt that my Science Fair offering, while well-meaning, was selling her a little short.

I wondered what she would have wanted. The funeral was the Saturday before Christmas, and I was leaving the following day for 17 days in China. I had a few other things I could have been doing besides wrestling with the double-stick tape. I could easily imagine my friend saying, “Really, don’t bother, just attend to your ‘to do’ list, and think a nice thought of me when you get a chance on that long flight.” But she deserved a memorial that was brimming over with intention and care, and I understood the desire by those who were planning it to create something tangible, and to ask the people who had benefitted from the joy of this woman’s friendship to contribute a tiny tribute, however homely and ineffective the effort.

When I arrived at the memorial service on Saturday night, toting my display, I found the proper easel and stood back, taking in the contributions from all the other people who had gathered their memories of this dear lady, all within the confines of thirty by forty inches. I understood the message, loud and clear: She mattered. She mattered enough for me to dig through the photo album, for you to make a trip to Office Max. She was worth a little hassle with the double-stick tape.

We pass through this world so quickly, and our departure, often, has the impact of a hand removed from a bucket of water. I can’t fault anyone for wanting to show that their beloved has left something lasting behind. I remember a sermon once where the congregation was asked to raise our hands if we knew our grandparent’s names. Then we raised our hands if we remembered the names of our great-grandparents. By the time the speaker got to great-great-great-grandparents, no hands were raised. “How quickly we are forgotten,” he said.

But still. Because I’ve worked in corporations most of my adult life, I think I’m just not the right person for the Life Show! experience. Those easels have held too many logos and scope charts and Venn diagrams of the latest thing we’ve been trying to sell somebody, for me to ever feel anything but itchy in their presence. I’ve had enough disasters with PowerPoint formatting, lenses, projectors and screens to forever fix that particular program in my mind as an Instrument of Torture, not a vehicle for happy memories. And, however therapeutic the simple act of creating a memorial board might be, I want my friends to take their time having a bubble bath before my service, and to spend time at my funeral lapping up champagne and gossiping relentlessly about the 20-year-old cabana boy with whom my body was found.

So, it’s official: I never, in life or death, want to be responsible for the creation of one more PowerPoint. Just take another glass of champers from the tray that’s being passed by that twinkly out-of-work actor, and relax for five minutes. When you think about it, raise your glass to me, and know that we’ll be seeing each other again, soon enough.

The Millionth Mitten

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 January – 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.

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 yes, the toilet is loud, but no, it will not swallow you up, just go, please. 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.

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. 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. Come 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.

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.

“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.

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.

In a few weeks, my girls will be celebrating their 17^th and 14^th 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.

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 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.