• I Never Learn

    30Jun
    Categories: Family life, Moving, My Daily Struggle Comments: 0

    Pretty much nothing went as planned today.

    We planned to go to my Grannie’s for the day, so I spent the morning packing swimsuits, camera gear and snacks, and straightening up my mom’s house so that it’d be nice for her when she got home. Then we didn’t go because it got a bit late to leave and get back before evening, and my sister was feeling the pressure of a number of things she needed to do but had sidelined over the last week because she was entertaining me. My mom was going into San Antonio for a haircut, so at the last minute I took the baby and tagged along with her.

    I fooled around in Half-Price Books while she got her hair cut, and then, because there’s no REI in San Antonio, we went to this incredibly crazy hunting store to look for London rain-gear for my chickens. I have never seen such innovative use of dead animals and animal skulls in my life. More “Texas Stuff” photos to follow—my friend badmagic-# may never, ever, catch up, even if I live in London for years to come.

    We ate lunch at the restaurant attached to the hunting store, but there were no suitable raincoats to be bought. Lunch was unexpectedly nice, though. The food wasn’t fantastic, but the restaurant was trying to be somewhat fancy, so we had a glass of wine and lingered over our food, talking and getting along. We shared a secret or two and laughed together—which is not a given with us. In recent years, because of circumstances far too complex to analyze here, we have become awkward, each worried about offending or upsetting the other, reading each other like tea leaves, trying to discern each other’s motives in every word and gesture.

    But today I thought it went well. I was enjoying myself with her, and marveling at it even as it was happening. It was the sort of time that keeps me hoping, over and over, that we may eventually be okay again. On the drive home I sat in the passenger’s seat and flipped through a book of Diane Arbus photographs that I had bought, occasionally reading excerpts from the introduction to my mother out loud. Then we were quiet for a little while, and she broke the pleasant silence with a question that she began, “Help me understand why you . . .”

    And I tried. But understanding was not really what she was looking for, I think, because within a few minutes, with very little input from me, she talked herself into being really angry, and she said things that even now, hours later, I can’t make any sense of.

    And I don’t know what the hell happened.

    And I would like to go and stay somewhere besides her house, but I don’t know where to go.

    And I am tired, so very tired, of this sad and ugly dance we do.

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  • She’s Always Listening, And I Never Know What She’ll Say

    27Jun
    Categories: Girlish, Stories, Texas Comments: 7


    That Meena, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

    My sister and I are daily juggling five kids: three of mine and two of hers. They are 7, 6, 4 and 3 years, plus the baby, 8 months. We are a traveling zoo.

    We are desperate for any downtime we can find, so last week they spent their mornings at Vacation Bible School; this week they’re at “gymnastics camp.” We discussed taking the three-year-old to gymnastics, too, but she’s not completely out of diapers yet, so they wouldn’t take her. The gymnastics camp hasn’t turned out to be as cool as it sounded anyway, but whatever, they’re exercising and occupied for three hours a day, right?

    On Monday morning, I left the house with all three of mine in tow. My mom is having a sprinkler system installed, so there was a rather handsome gardener in the front yard, working, as we tripped down the sidewalk, arguing about whether the caterpillar on the front porch might sting or not. Meena said hi to him as we passed.

    “Good morning,” he said, “Where are y’all off to?”

    “We are off to our first day of gymnastics camp,” I told him.

    He smiled. “That sounds like fun. You think I could come, too?”

    “I guess you could,” Meena said, climbing into the car. “As long as you’re potty-trained.”

    Tags:

  • Vacation Bible School

    25Jun
    Categories: Religion Comments: 0

    Virgin Marys in the Wal-Mart Parking Lot, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

    In Texas, summer means a lot of things: blasting the a/c, swatting mosquitoes, swimming in the river, watching the rodeo, and going to Vacation Bible School. Vacation Bible School, where they are kind enough to allow heathen children like mine to sing their songs and eat their cookies so that sinning mothers like me can take the morning off for a week.

    So, although the prospect of free babysitting for four weekday mornings won me over, I was conflicted about sending my children to Bible school. My sister suggested it, and although she is a lovely Christian, I think in this instance, it was mostly about the babysitting for her, as well. We didn’t discuss the religious aspect of it, as religion is a conversation we generally avoid. It bothers her somewhat that I don’t share her faith, as her belief in Jesus is central to the way she lives. I gave up Christianity many years ago, when I became completely incapable of swallowing the patriarchal mythology, and ultimately found my need for spiritual community better met in my yoga classes than in my sporadic church attendance. It turns out I’m the kind of person who more easily believes in a third eye than a virgin birth.

    What sort of spiritual upbringing children need (if any), is the sort of question that many intelligent parents grapple with, and everyone has to find their own way. So I fretted about whether to send them. I don’t intend to raise my children as Christians, so I worried I might confuse them by sending them to Bible school. Plus, although it’s been a while since I’ve been to church, I recall that they don’t talk about Jesus like I do—you know, mostly as a curse word when I forget something or find myself frustrated or annoyed. As in, “Jesus Christ.” Next to Goddamnit, it’s just about my favorite bad word.

    But I also thought that it might actually be good for them. I have considered that because I take the Lord’s name in vain without taking my children to church of any kind, I may be shirking my parental duty to provide them with some sort of spiritual framework with which to make sense of the world. I could probably manage a Unitarian Church or something, but when it comes to deciding what to do on a Sunday morning, I can almost always think of something besides church I’d rather do: the Farmer’s Market, a big breakfast, a walk by the river.

    My biggest fear was that it would be scary for them, somehow. My daughter especially. She is extremely bright, and I could easily imagine her engaged in conversation with some well-meaning Christian teacher about the prospect of eternal hellfire unless she accepted Jesus into her heart as her personal lord and saviour. Because that’s what I remember of Jesus-speak: “Have you accepted Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Saviour?”

    This is something I truly want to spare her, as I recall how I myself agonized over this as a child. Had I really and truly accepted Jesus into my heart? If I had, then why didn’t I feel any different? Did I do it good enough to avoid hell, or not? Whatever spiritual path my children might eventually choose, I would prefer that fear not be the vehicle of that choosing.

    Life Flight Pilots

    But I did let them go. I let them go because I remembered that Vacation Bible School was fun for me, this one had a helicopter landing on the last day. I decided that I am up for any conversation Bible-schooling might provoke, and I am capable of talking to my children honestly about my beliefs regarding God and religion. By doing that I will hopefully lay the groundwork for them to find their own way in it, as I have. I mean, I went to Bible school—and look how I turned out.

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  • Wild Wild West

    23Jun
    Categories: Moving, Stories, Texas Comments: 0

    Boy, Texas is a wild place. I’d forgotten all about that. To give you
    an example, this is my sister’s bank, where we went today to get a
    cashier’s check for my movers.

    Bank Display

    Don’t tell the lady that sits up front that I took this picture, because she told me I couldn’t take it. I took a couple others, just because she said not to.

    Actually, what she said was, “I’m sorry, but you can’t take pictures in here because we have video cameras.”

    This confused me. How, I wondered aloud, might my camera interfere with the video cameras?

    “Oh, it won’t,” she said. “They’re for security.”

    “Really?” I said, as if I found the idea of security cameras in
    banks a rather puzzling idea. “Are you afraid someone might
    steal the taxidermy?”

    Bankdecor_1

    Bankdecor_2

    So please, everyone, please don’t steal any of this bank’s taxidermy because you might get me in a lot of trouble, not only for taking pictures of the bank’s fascinating dead animal decorations, but probably also for tempting you to steal them by posting them on the internet.

    You’ll also notice in the pictures that there are an abundance of deer and deer antlers mounted on the walls. Texans have an uncommon appreciation for the decorative potential of antlers, and if I was an animal with antlers (or horns of any kind), then I would stay the hell out of Texas. But the deer around here aren’t as smart as I am; they roam the streets of town, just waiting to be mounted over someone’s fireplace or turned into a lamp. The other night, when I drove from my sister’s to my mother’s, I passed like–ten of them on a street in my mother’s neighborhood, which is cute, utterly populated, and right next to downtown. What I’m saying is it’s not rural. At all. These town deer were milling around in a church parking lot, grazing on people’s lawns, and loping across the road in front of me. I even saw—get this—a doe with twin fawns peeping out of some tall grass in a vacant lot. We stopped for that.

    “You should take a picture,” Meena told me.

    And the BIRDS, my god, the birds in Texas are the noisiest birds I have ever heard in my life. I sat in my mother’s backyard and recorded them, and if I can find my digital recorder plugger-inner-thingie (hopefully, I packed it in my bags and not on the moving truck), I will upload that for you to hear later. It was so raucous that Oliver, who was playing in the sandbox in the backyard, stopped what he was doing, looked up and said, “Mommy, what’s making that noise?”

    I actually noticed the birds when we first got here, but I didn’t remember that big-throated one that hoots and whoops. Maybe he doesn’t start doing his thing until the afternoon, when Ollie and I heard him. Anyway, that first morning we walked to the gas station to get milk for breakfast, and on the way back, Meena and I counted seven different kinds of birds we could hear. And underneath the birdsong, I heard the rise and fall of the cicadas’, buzzing like summer heat itself. It was—it was the loudest quiet I’ve ever heard.

    Ah, Texas, I’m remembering it now, you do have a certain charm.

    Tags: ,

  • Landed in Texas

    21Jun
    Categories: Food and Drink Comments: 0


    Landed in Texas, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

    I am here, in Texas, staying at my mother’s house. I am in limbo. There are loose ends to tie up, and I am trying to do that, but I am also just floundering a bit. I haven’t taken many pictures, haven’t gotten too much accomplished, and I fear I may be eating too much Mexican food. Assuming it’s possible to eat too much Mexican food. Which it isn’t.

    My mother, god bless her, is a physician, and has just about the healthiest habits of any person you’ll ever meet. She shuns anything with any kind of flour, sugar, or dairy in it, and she has an entire cupboard filled with vitamin and nutritional supplements. Since my children’s favorite food is macaroni and cheese, it’s hard to coordinate a dinner I can make in under two hours that both she and my children will eat.

    I exaggerate–but only a little. The good part is that—because of my mother—my kids are generally willing to eat salmon and walnuts and spinach with their mac & cheese. Mother’s been working for the last few years on the cutting edge of nutritional medicine—the idea that disease begins at the level of the cell itself, and that the foods we choose to eat can prevent or promote disease. She believes, and I tend to agree, that someday we will look back on this period in our history as a time when disease and obesity rose to alarming levels due to the overwhelming prevalence of mass-manufactured and processed food in the American diet. And I’m not just talking about the worst offenders, like McDonald’s, but about all that boxed and bagged and frozen food we buy at Costco, or Wal-Mart, or our local grocery.

    So I do my best, right? My kids eat eggs and flourless bread for breakfast, and they almost never get anything from a can or a box. It’s taken a few years, but I have convinced them that McDonald’s is disgusting. And yet, with all this to be proud of, whenever I’m with my mother, I’m totally self-conscious about what they eat. Feeling like I don’t measure up because I’m willing to eat cheese. My need for my mother’s approval runs much deeper than my superficial rebellions.

    So it bothers me. We have these tense little conversations around meal preparation and grocery shopping—like how to prepare the squash and what sort of oil to use in the stir fry. But what bothers me most is that we don’t share food like we used to. Tomorrow is Ollie’s birthday, and although there will be cake, she won’t eat it. If I make a simple pasta dinner tonight, she will fix herself a little salad or some nuts and soy yogurt instead. And although I’m sure she would say I’m crazy, it still feels like I’m disappointing her.

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  • Wrenching

    16Jun
    Categories: California, Family life, Me, Moving Comments: 0

    Everything In My House Is Gone, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

    I’ve spent the better part of the last three days in constant motion, moving through the rooms of my house, the streets of Sacramento, and the airspace over western part of this country. I have bagged garbage, mailed packages, and entertained three kids for eleven hours in the airport, trying to catch a flight to Texas on standby. I have left my home.

    On Monday, they packed us. On Tuesday, they finished packing and loaded up the truck. For two days I moved through the rooms of my house, sorting clothes and rescuing objects, trying to stay ahead of the movers. I bonded with Marvin, the foreman of our moving crew.

    I only left the house a couple of times for things that had to be done, like shipping all our photographs and memorabilia to Rod’s parents’ house for safekeeping and picking up the rental car. I returned from the post office Tuesday afternoon to find them nearly finished, down to a few boxes and the last few pieces of furniture. Marvin met me at the door, asking for socket wrenches. The bunk beds in Oliver’s bedroom had had to be put together inside the room—there was no way to get them out without taking them apart. I found the guys struggling with the beds in the doorway, trying to angle them out by opening the door and jamming one end of the bed into the furnace closet.

    “Stop,” I told them. “I’ll find you some wrenches.”

    “What about your friend?” Marvin asked me, referring to Tony, who’d been hanging around the house helping out, and who is, among other interesting things, a genuine rocket scientist. He definitely owned a set of socket wrenches.

    So I ran out the front door, dialing Tony on my cell phone and wondering how in hell I’d get back before they damaged the bed or the wall. As I crossed our yard to my rental car, parked in front of Gary and Ivan’s, it occurred to me that I would sure enough eat a set of socket wrenches if Gary didn’t own one. I passed the car without slowing, and bounded right up to their front door and knocked.

    The house was quiet, and I wondered if maybe they weren’t home. In my panic, I turned from the front door almost immediately, and saw Gary dragging something through the back gate. “Gary,” I called, already crossing their driveway. “Do you have a—“

    He turned to me, his face pure kindness as usual, and suddenly my throat closed up. “Socket wrenches,” I choked, “I need—“ And then, to my utter astonishment, I was fighting tears. Ivan had come out the front door, answering my knock, and I stood between them, fanning my temples with my hands and saying, “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

    They got me the socket wrenches, of course, and didn’t embarrass me by trying to talk to me about it. But it was so strange—so disconcerting—to find myself crying and not know why. So I’ve been thinking about it, and I want you to think about it, too. Please, take a moment for me, and think about your home and how much of your life takes place there. Think about what it means to walk away from the building where you sleep, work, make love, and tuck your children into bed at night. It’s where you keep your food, hide your stash, and invite your friends for dinner. Now, think about removing all your things from those rooms where you live, and what your life might look like when stripped to the bare walls.

    Can you see it?

    Now, go get me a socket wrench.

    Tags: , ,

  • Gary & Ivan’s Garage Sale

    10Jun
    Categories: Moving, Stories Comments: 1


    Gary & Ivan’s Garage Sale, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

    These are my next-door neighbors, Gary and Ivan.

    That’s Ivan on the left, and Gary on the right. But to us they’re always Gary & Ivan, not Ivan & Gary. Ivan is more reserved, often bustling around in the background while Gary stands at the foot of their driveway, holding court with one neighbor or another.

    Unlike us, with our noisy kids and generally disorganized existence, Gary & Ivan are the perfect next-door
    neighbors.
    Their yard is the most fantastic in our culdesac, a Seussian landscape
    of native California plants and a tumbled-rock streambed they
    constructed themselves. Ivan warmed up to me a bit last
    summer because my morning walks coincided with his morning gardening,
    and I often stopped to chat him up for a few minutes when
    I got home.

    Gary is the more gregarious of the two, and we got to know him earlier on. He’s the guy on the block who always has
    excellent information, like, how to get paid for recycling your moving
    boxes, who will haul away your electronics for free, and where to buy
    the best yellow lantana. They
    are the kind of neighbors that you aspire never to let down by allowing
    the paint on your gutters to peel, your grass to get too high, or your
    trash cans sitting on the curb too long.

    A month or so ago, when we had a garage sale before we put our house on the market, Gary and Ivan said that when we had the next one, we should let them know, because two garage sales are better than one in terms of attracting buyers. So this time around, I placed the ad for a two-house Saturday sale.

    On Friday, when that umbrella over Ivan’s left shoulder went up, Rod and I knew we were in trouble. Because see, that’s their sale up there, and um, this was ours:

    Our Garage Sale

    In my brief defense, I will say that this has been an insanely crazy time: Meena’s last week of school, pack-out day coming up on Monday, last-minute good-bye dinners and unexpected wine-drinking marathons with friends. But, honestly, it was so bad that one guy wandered into our garage early on, before we put that sad table out front, and said, “Are you having a sale, too, or do you just have your garage door open?”

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  • California Inking

    08Jun
    Categories: California Comments: 0

    Mosaictattoo_3

    So, my mother will disapprove, but I got another tattoo. And, with all the things I have to do and should be doing, spending Tuesday getting tattooed was probably not the wisest use of my time. But whatever. I’m transitioning. This is part of my process, a way of marking the occasion.

    And although I have always wanted to live overseas, I have realized in contemplating this move that I feel very at home in California–more at home here than anywhere else I’ve been. Except maybe Austin. But that’s Texas, my "where-I-was-born" home, so it doesn’t really count in the same way.

    California is the first place I’ve lived where I feel like I’m participating in the culture, rather than just observing it. I got along in Texas because I grew up there; I knew the landscape and understood the people out of our years of sheer proximity. But it was a one-way love, my Texas love. I never felt that Texas really loved me back. I never really belonged there–not in elementary school, when my mother caused a stir by  quitting her job and going to medical school; not in junior high, where I argued with my biology teacher about evolution (he refused to teach it), and certainly not in high school, where I was trapped in some sort of social purgatory for slutty pot-smoking honor students.

    But California loves a freak like me. Here, I fit in precisely because I’m a little bit different. Here, my tattoos and my biracial family are not really the norm, but they’re not anomaly, either. Californians are more than tolerant of weirdness–they embrace weirdness. I feel like I’m a part of what’s going on here. Californians are politically liberal (out here we say "progressive," which sounds more hip), ethnically diverse, and we like to get outside. And if you lived in California you’d like to get outside, too, because it’s the most beautiful state in the Union, and one of the prettiest places on earth. We’ve got Tahoe, Yosemite, Malibu and Death Valley. We’ve got San Francisco, one of the most aesthetically pleasing cities in the world, and Los Angeles, a hideous hag of a town, but wildly entertaining. And the weather–well, I suspect you’ve heard about the weather.

    When we visited London in April, looking for housing, we sometimes told people that we were moving over from California. On two separate occasions–a woman on the street and a student in the train station–each looking sort of mortified, asked "Why?" as if we’d just told them we were auctioning off our children on eBay. Seriously, they couldn’t have been more confused or horrified. And the second time it happened I realized what a shining little gem California is in the eyes of the world, and how lucky we are to have a home here.

    So, although I have always considered myself Truly a Texan, and I will always get riled when people talk ugly about Texas (as they are prone to do), I am offically and publicly declaring my undying love and allegiance to my more glamorous and popular home of California. As the Govenator might say:

    I’ll be back.

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  • 7 Days Until The Truck Arrives

    04Jun
    Categories: Family life, Moving, photography is amazing Comments: 0


    Packing, originally uploaded by texasgurl.

     

    So here we go. I am sorting and packing and selling, fighting the feeling that we are getting down to the wire with this. The current plan is so complex, so fraught with nuances of timing and circumstances, that I can only paint it in the broadest strokes here.

    We are leasing our house. We are having a final garage sale Saturday, and everything not sold, not going, and not staying in the house for our tenant will be hauled away. The movers arrive Monday to pack us, and Tuesday they will load the truck. Tuesday night the kids and I leave for Texas to spend a month with my family and visiting my friends, after which Rod will return to fetch us. He has a conference in New Orleans, where we met and where Meena was born, and so we are stopping by the Big Easy on our way to the U.K.

    And then we’ll be there, and hopefully it will be around that time that our things arrive. We don’t yet have a place to live–that’s Rod’s job while he’s over there for a month without us, and I can only hope that with the help of a digital camera and the internet, I can help him find something not too inappropriate. Actually, I should be more optimistic: he will find something just perfect. He will.

    Are you convinced? Anyway, here’s how I kill time while packing. I stage photo sessions with the useless crap I find and cannot part with.
    I Found Some Jewelry While I Was Packing
    So anyway, stay tuned for blogging from Texas and New Orleans, which will be fun, I promise. On the agenda:
    My Grannie’s House in Nueces Canyon
    My 20th High School Reunion
    My Friend Stew
    My Mom the Best Doctor in the Whole Wide World
    The 4th of July Rocksprings RODEO
    Kermit Ruffins at Vaughn’s in the 9th Ward

    And tomorrow–a surprise.

    Tags: , ,

  • Your Kitchen Sink: Advertising’s New Frontier

    01Jun
    Categories: Advertising, corporate mayhem Comments: 1

    kitchen sink, originally uploaded by bevcraigwhite.

    The latest disturbing thing I’ve heard about is “word-of-mouth” advertising. Apparently, consumers are no longer particularly swayed by traditional advertising. People see a television commercial, for instance, for what it is: an attempt to manipulate them into opening their wallets to buy a beer, a car, or a meal at McDonald’s. Throw in the fact that much of America scans right past those commercials on their Tivo, and it’s clear that advertising companies are facing some stiff new challenges.

    Enter “word-of-mouth” advertising. Now, advertising companies are hiring your friends and neighbors to chat you up about how much they love Clamato and Dunkin’ Donuts, and how much you’re gonna love it, too!

    That’s right, you heard me. Corporations are hiring ordinary people to talk about company brands “in casual conversation.” In a campaign for Dawn dishwashing liquid, word-of-mouth advertisers were advised to work Dawn’s brand name into conversations by talking about “how difficult it is to get kids to help with the dishes.” Naturally, the people who are willing to engage in these staged conversations about dish soap with their friends and neighbors are not obligated to disclose to those friends and neighbors that their newfound appreciation for Dawn may have been prompted by the fact that Proctor & Gamble sent them a case of it for free.

    Am I the only person who’s disturbed by this? Isn’t it a little bit—I don’t know—creepy to have your kitchen conversations being dictated to you from some corporate conference room? Do you think if we all promised to stop fast-forwarding through the commercials on our Tivos they’d let us have our private conversations back?

    NPR’s All Things Considered quotes Peter Kim, who analyzes the advertising industry for Forrester Research:

    Only 6 percent [of consumers] perceive ads as truthful. But what consumers do trust are their own experiences and the words of others. About 56 percent say they trust the words and recommendations of friends and family in thinking about products.

    Right. Well, I’m sure once word-of-mouth advertising really takes off, it’ll only be a matter of time before we can stop trusting our friends and family as well.

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