Thanksgiving...a day to rejoice! Primarily because someone else is cooking...for 43 years of my life that was the case. For the last 18 years my children have had their Thanksgiving-day dinners prepared by a non-Mom relative. We did the day with my folks for years, then my sister, then my brother...eventually after the divorce the kids would have turkey-day with their dad and then we'd all head down to my parents' home on Friday or Saturday after to celebrate with the family. Erin's birthday was always a part of the fun, too.
This year there was a death in the kids' dad's wife's family so she is out of town and my ex decided not to have the kids over for dinner. He will never cease to astound me in his callous disregard for his kid's feelings...oh well. Thus, for the first time in 18 years I am cooking a family Thanksgiving.
Yes, it's true, the turkey is precooked and all I have to do is put it in the oven at 300 degrees for 2 hours, but I do all the other sides. (Sweet potatoes, no marshmallows, greenbean casserole, cornbread stuffing, gravy and mashed potatoes) Erin wanted "real" mashed potatoes so I said she had to peel them. I ended up doing half. The pies were also store bought. But even so, damnit, I think I can take some credit for "cooking" Thanksgiving dinner.
I set out the good china and my great grandmother's silverplate flatwear...let the wine breathe...ahh...it was good. Amazingly nobody has taken a nap!
Now it's hours later, Erin is having turkey and mashed potatoes on King's Hawaiian rolls, Glenn is doing dishes, I'm looking forward to hot turkey and gravy sandwiches...that's the really neat thing about doing one's own Thanksgiving...Leftovers!!
A dozen kids sitting in Taco Bell on a Saturday at 1:00 in the afternoon. Not so unusual. Picture them all in formal wear and it gets a bit stranger. Take a more careful look...one boy is in a nice jacket and tie with black knee length shorts and thong sandals, one of the girls is wearing sneakers under her formal...ah, so is another in addition to the warm up pants under the thin gold lame gown. It's hard to figure out whether they're coming from or going to a dance...but look there's a pile of presents on a table in the center of the place. What's going on?
People come in and out of the little fast food restaurant. All of them do double takes, some smile, some seem bewildered. Every now and then one of the workers comes up to the counter area, looks at the group of teens and seems to think this is quite funny.
It's my daughter's 16th birthday party. It could have been anywhere but this is what she asked for. Her friends are all polite to me as I greet them, I chat with the ones I know fairly well. They are a group of kids with acting and singing and silliness in common with Erin. I know most of them, some I've known longer than others, a couple were in Erin's middle school choir with her, others are new High School friends. After most have arrived we all go up to the register and each one orders something, the final total is pennies over $40. This is the cheapest birthday I've done in quite a while.
My son and my boyfriend are also there, Matt has a suit and tie, Glenn has a nice shirt, tie and khakis...I'm really the only one not dressed up, I didn't expect Glenn to come and I was going to just fade into the background as it's Erin's day.
One of her friends, Antoinette, has been at every one of Erin's parties for the last 7 years. She brought a wonderful present that she made for Erin, a notebook filled with pictures, stories and several pages of greetings from Erin's friends. I know Erin will treasure it. Many of the presents represent homages to the group's "in jokes" and personalities...it's fun to watch them all interact.
I'm so happy that she has such a great group of friends, boys and girls in equal numbers...some are new friends, some, like Ant, old reliables. I hope she has friends and fun like this all her life.
What do hotels wash towels with? They are always stiff or rough. I shouldn't complain, I'm quite satisfied with my hotel. I'm in a Homewood Suites while staying in the Raleigh/Durham area and it is very nice. There's a kitchenette and free microwave popcorn every day. (Orville Redenbacher Butter) Each night is the Manager's Reception with a hot dish (Jambalaya, Swedish Meatballs, Lasagne, on the nites I was here to eat) along with veggies and dip, chips, cheese and crackers, fruit, cookies. I haven't had to go out for dinner yet although I did last night.
The little suite I'm in has two rooms, high speed internet and a comfy recliner! I was disappointed that the TV doesn't get WB, missed my Angel and Smallville this week. I'm ready to come home though, I miss my kids, my sweetie and my cats. North Carolina is lovely but home is better.
I've been in the Raleigh/Durham area of North Carolina since Sunday. I really did want to do a travelogue style series of posts but this business trip has been, well, busy. I'll just jot a few thoughts down now and more later.
There are a lot of trees around here. I got to my hotel around 8pm Sunday night and after I unpacked (more about that and the Department of Homeland Security later) I went to the lobby and asked the desk clerk where a nice place for dinner might be. He gave me directions with handy exit numbers and all so I figured I'd find may way there. My significant other will tell you I have a negligible sense of direction. It's a good thing I had some sense or I'd still be travelling the highways looking for the Homewood Suites.
Trees make it hard to see if there's anything out there beyond the highway. As I said there are a lot of trees around here. I couldn't fix on many landmarks and that's mostly how I travel. I drove about for over an hour, finally found a place to eat in a well lit and not deserted strip mall anchored by a Kroger's grocery. Ruby Tuesday was the place, the waiter was very nice and the food was just fine. I ate my salad and steak fajitas watched a closed caption episode of the Simpsons and headed home to Homewood Suites on exit 281 on I-40. Well not quite. I did circle around quite a bit but finally found it. It was quite a relief to see the lights of the hotel!
I had checked the extended forcast on Yahoo! before I left so I would pack the right clothes. It said that things would be cool, cloudy, chance of showers. No day over 65 degrees. Well we've had 2 sunny days over 70 so far and my heavy wool clothes are a bit warm. Thank goodness all the business stuff is going much better than my personal life!
More later, have to get ready to go in and do a presentation.
The skink is visiting downstairs. Skink belongs to my son. Skink freaks me out. I’m usually not confronted by this as my son keeps Skink in his room and I can avoid her. I grew up in the desert and lizards were small scuttling creatures, not big, blue tongued reptiles. I don’t mind the little lizards but Skink freaks me out. I know I said that earlier, but it bears repeating.
Skink shares a large glass terrarium with crickets. She’s supposed to eat the crickets but I think she likes the sound they make so she doesn’t eat them. Skink eats strained turkey baby food. Back to the crickets, our home often sounds like a meadow in spring. My son dumped out the terrarium and thought he had gotten rid of the crickets but they came back. I think Skink was saving some of the eggs in her hollow log for just this contingency.
So, my son brought Skink downstairs for an unknown reason and proceeded to freak me out by encouraging Skink to flick her blue tongue at me. Well, maybe he didn’t have to encourage Skink; I think the tongue flicking is instinctual. My daughter joined the fracas. Now Skink is climbing over my son’s shoulder and stretching out to climb on my daughter who at first thinks that’s ok. Unfortunately Skink’s claws go through her shirt and scratch. She pushes Skink back towards my son. Skink is finding all this rather distressful and has a small incontinent episode on my son.
“Eww, she peed on me” he grabs a kitchen towel and wipes himself off. My boyfriend now enters the scene.
“Damn, I just washed that” he mutters.
“Please don’t put that back with the clean towels” I ask.
“Well I just grabbed the first thing that was handy” protests my son.
“Fine, fine,” I say “Just don’t put it back on the towel rack!”
My son wraps the skink in the towel and rocks her like a baby.
“I don’t think Skinks really like that." I say. "They’re reptiles, not mammals and they don’t have the same need for closeness and comfort.”
“Skink likes it.” My son says.
How the heck you can tell what the damn lizard likes is beyond me…it doesn’t have expressions unless you count that flicking tongue. Ick.
Finally, wrapped like an infant, he takes her upstairs.
“I don’t think this is the kind of conversation you’d hear in any other apartment in this complex” says the boyfriend.
“Probably not anywhere in the known universe” I say.
I hope he doesn't put that towel back on the towel rack.
I've been thinking about Halloweens of the past on this day after Halloween. I don’t remember much of my own childhood Halloweens, I’m sure my parents saw that I had my favorite costumes and took me out, there’s just nothing memorable that I can recall. I do have some good memories of Halloween, just not from my youth. This particular walk down memory lane is kind of long so I'm using the "extended entry" function for the rest...
There was the first Halloween after I got married in September of ’79. I had moved down from Bakersfield that spring and my fiancée and I had bought a house in North Redondo Beach that summer before we got married . It was a little two bedroom place, almost a cottage, with a nice yard and an elementary school across the street. Boy did we have to fix it up…the kitchen for example had black cabinets and some weird sapling print wallpaper in black, brown and metallic bronze above a cheap dark wood paneling wainscoting. The floors were covered in filthy and mostly threadbare orange and yellow shag carpeting. When the realtor showed us the place the people who were living there had a Buddhist shrine in the living room, but they took it with them. They didn’t take the pile of old clothes with them from the master bedroom closet…apparently someone there was very, very large and had really bad taste. Aside from that, it was well inland from the beach (thus the North Redondo designation) and very middle class. As Halloween drew near I assumed there would be a lot of kids but didn't know for sure what kind of turn out we'd have. I bought tons of candy. I might have dressed up, I don’t remember that detail.
It must have been a Saturday Halloween because it was still daylight out and I was home instead of fighting the L.A. commute on the 405. I was putting the candy bowl near the door when I saw a young man and a small child coming down the sidewalk. The father stopped about 5 feet back and his tiny son came the rest of the way. So, I was at the door, candy bowl in hand, waiting for this darling to come get his candy.
He couldn't have been more than 4 and may have been younger. He held out his little bag silently. I put some candy in the bag and asked "what are you?" He was dressed in what I believed was a lovingly hand made outfit which had been covered in tinfoil and otherwise decorated; he could have been a mini-tin man. He looked back at his dad who smiled and nodded (kid already knew he wasn't allowed to talk to strangers) and said "I'm a ro-bert.” This was back in 1979 and I still remember that child as the cutest trick-or-treater ever...except of course for my own children!
My first child was born in September of '85 so that Halloween he was just a bit over one month old. We were living in Canyon Country (a bedroom community just outside of L.A’s San Fernando Valley now known as Santa Clarita.) We lived in a relatively new development full of young families. My son was born just one month after we moved into our new home and again we were new to the neighborhood. I had stocked up on candy as well as dressed up for the night. I had done my face in ghoulish white and black makeup and was wearing an floor length long-sleeved black dress with a cowl over my head all of which presented a pretty frightful picture to the small children, some of whom weren’t going to leave their mom’s or dad’s sides and come close to me even if I was holding a tiny baby and had a full bag of candy next to me. Of course that could have been because they were confused as to my intentions towards the baby I was holding. I could almost hear their thoughts: would I be eating it? Were they next?
The next year my son was 13 months old and had been walking for some time by Halloween. I decided to make his costume myself. Since I didn’t want him in a mask, so I was going do something I could finish with makeup. I decided to make him a panda bear. His room was decorated in panda bears and he seemed to like them, so why not? I put a white flannel “tummy” on a black sweatshirt and he wore that over black sweatpants. I made up his face in white base with a blackened nose and black circles around the eyes. I made a cap with ears for his head. First stop was his daddy’s office. Daddy is a lawyer. We walked around and chatted with a few of his colleagues many of whom had warped, cynical and sarcastic senses of humor. One of them asked me why I had dressed my son up as a dead Amish child. I guess I can see the resemblance when I look at the pictures. Of course time has gone by and my son’s taste in costumes has, umm, evolved. Last year he wore a totally authentic and really well made “Alex” costume – Alex from Clockwork Orange, eyeball cufflinks and all.
My daughter has had the usual assortment of little girl costumes, Disney princesses, etc. It’s lately as a teen that her costumes have been more interesting. She’s not one to dress up all ruffled and frilled, she mostly wears jeans and tee shirts. One year we get a long pink dress and I sewed white fake fur on the collar and hem; she carried a scepter and wore a tiara, my daughter the princess. This was the cause of much hilarity amongst her high school friends; apparently she is the last girl on earth to be imagined as a princess. Last year we put together the Can-can outfit, she was very fond of the film Moulin Rouge. The corset was easy but the skirt was challenging. And the shoes...goodness were they just awful with the clear acrylic platform and heel...it certainly turned looked otherwise authentic. This year’s was chronicled in my last blog.
Well, one of these days I will dress up for Halloween again myself…and someday (although I hope way ahead in the future) I hope to have grandchildren’s Halloween costumes to admire. Its too much of a fun holiday to keep missing out!