The one who likes all our pretty songs

My first favorite song was the background music in a furniture commercial. I would press my toddler ear against the console television to separate the jingle from the droning of the pitch man and listen like my little life depended on it. It got where my mother would automatically hush anyone in the room when the ad came on. I also loved the singing grapefruit on Sesame Street, but this song from the furniture commercial was different. It was something special. A catchy, lovely little melody, heavy on piano. It was … I don’t know. Mine.

I had a record player in my bedroom by the time I was 3. By the time I entered kindergarten, I was listening to my mother’s Janis Ian albums in my bedroom. And by first grade, I’d been handed down the old Magnavox stereo from the family room. My record collection was substantial, for a 7-year-old.

Then I set my sights on something a little more portable. Something with a tape player. So I saved up birthday money for God only knows how long and bought what we in the White Flight suburbs called a jam box. I kept my vinyl collection, but I transitioned over to tapes. I consumed music like it was life-sustaining calories. It was in the earliest years of my life that I got into the habit of spending pretty much all of my disposable income on music. Even now, every other Thursday night, when I know my paycheck is going in the bank, I start going through my iTunes wishlist.

As a young kid, it didn’t really matter so much what kind of music your friends listened to. But it’s funny how, at least for me, music kind of segregated us as we got older. So it was really difficult being in junior high during the New Kids on the Block craze and truly not giving a rat’s ass about them. I loved new wave and punk, even in elementary school. I loved metal and I loved some of the stuff I’d lifted from my parents: Santana, Janis Joplin and The Eagles. I cut my teeth on the Beatles, so when my friends at school were sleeping on New Kids on the Block bed sheets (yes, a real thing), I was exploring the John Lennon/Yoko Ono records. I loved The Clash, and Big Audio Dynamite. And like I said before, it was all I could do to keep my musical appetite satisfied.

On Sunday nights I would listen to guest DJs on KABF, the community radio station in Little Rock. The sets would go on and on, but I hated to to miss anything. Someone might play something I’d never hear otherwise. And they did! Normal people from all over town would haul in their records or CDs and play what they wanted to hear. I knew there had to be more than what Casey Kasem was shoveling down my neck every Sunday morning, and I felt I deserved to know about it. (Note: I found KABF’s Web site and was delighted to find I can listen online now. I was greeted with a little Iris DeMent, which I would have most certainly not listened to 20 years ago. But I’m a better person now.)

This week is the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” Hard to believe. I remember where I was when I first heard Nirvana. While my affection for the music has waned, the importance of it still has a place in my heart. It may mean something different to an actual music expert, but for me, well shit. “Nevermind” blew the lid off of my middle-class suburban world. It changed everything by making the thing I was searching for accessible. This was a voice for the rest of us. And in the days before Google, living in the smack-ass center of a place like Arkansas was not exactly the way to be the first one on the scene, if you know what I mean.

“Nevermind” opened a lot of doors for me musically. Yes, it was everywhere. And yes, everywhere is where I usually don’t like my music to be. But, for the first time since the furniture commercial, “Nevermind” felt like mine.

These days I lean more toward Gillian Welch, The Avett Brothers, Beth Orton, The Old 97′s. But I know how I got here.

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

 

The love that let us share our name

My mother is the youngest of four daughters. Their father died in 1970. My mother was 14. Their mother died in 1986. My mother was 30.

From the day my grandmother died, my association with that family was brittle. I was only 10, but the grief of the four orphaned girls splintered into jealousies and resentments that were kept under wraps during my grandmother’s life. She, my sweet grandmother, kept us together with a gentle hand. But after she was gone, I saw that her daughters were not happy as children or adults.

It’s a lot of ground to cover, for sure. I think the things I learned while observing my mother and her sisters shaped the way I relate to women. Which is to say, I have a hard time with it. I’ve always preferred boys, for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. And women have always been hard for me. Scary.

Anyway. I miss my grandmother. Even 25 years later. And I miss my mother’s family, such as it ever was. Most of the time, I can measure the distance from my family in miles. Distances created by petty grievances are not as easy to measure.

No one in my mother’s family has spoken to any of us since before The Bandito and I got married. I don’t know why. And I’m not sure anyone else knows why. There was just an agreement made by some of the sisters. It’s a game with rules.

But this afternoon while I was getting my social media on, I did a search for my youngest cousin from my mom’s side of the family. I saw her last at my brother’s wedding. She always reminded me so much of myself — cut from the same snarky cloth. She was 22 at my brother’s wedding and still kind of awkward. Shrinking violet. But I adored her. Talking to her was like talking to myself. It was the wittiest, cleverest, meanest conversation I could have.

My brother’s wedding was legendary. April in an apple orchard. A cider house reception. Live bands, a maypole. Most of my brother’s friends camped with him and his new wife that night in tents under the apple trees. Everyone was happy.

Except, I later found out, my mother’s two sisters. And that was the end of an already strained relationship.

I don’t even know or care why. Sometimes people just aren’t happy unless they’re unhappy. But how does that have anything to do with me? Or my cousin? Why should we lose our ties to each other?

So I sent my cousin a friend request and a note. I told my mother what I had done, and she told me not to get my hopes up. I went out to pick up lunch. And when I came back? Friend request accepted! And she had written a note back. Turns out, we both missed each other fiercely.

I scrolled through her photographs and my heart ached with happiness. She’s not much like I remember her, Kate. She is beautiful. She’s married now, too, and has a pouty-faced daughter. Kate’s father died, but she blossomed. I wanted to go to her, where ever she may be, and just look at her.

I’d sent her an invitation to my wedding, but no one from my mother’s family — not a single soul — attended. We’ve missed so much from the other’s life, but I didn’t want to miss anything else.

I’m going to spend the rest of the day bawling hysterically. I’m just that happy. And I’m also genetically wired to act crazy.

As I wait on the row for the man to test the rope

Inbox

From: Mom

WM3 released tomorrow

Received: Thu Aug 18, 4:45pm

I left work an hour early on Thursday to pick up my new glasses. I wasn’t too thrilled about it. At my appointment on Monday, I felt the nurse was rushing me as I chose from a paltry selection of thin metal frames. Still, my glasses had come in earlier than expected, and it was as good a reason as any to sneak out early.

It’s funny how little things like whether you totally, totally love your new designer eyeglasses can make or break your whole day. But as soon as I parked at my eye doctor’s office, I got a text message that made all my sufferings really make me feel like a jackass. The day I’d waited for for, what? 15 years? had come and here I was, pissed that I didn’t 100% love my new glasses.

I remember when the bodies of three little boys were found in West Memphis. I remember when arrests were made. I remember the convictions. And then I remember nothing else about the case for a couple of years until my mother, whose confidence in what is right always astounds me, handed me a VHS tape and said, “You have to watch this.”

“This” was Paradise Lost, the first in what will soon be a trilogy of documentaries about The West Memphis 3. I remember saying I didn’t want to watch it. I couldn’t stand to watch a documentary about three boys my own age who had murdered three little boys, right here in my own home state. “They didn’t do it,” my mother said.

In theory, I support many causes. Our dogs are rescues, we spay and neuter. I support local merchants, The Bandito drives a hybrid. I’ve raced for the cure, I buy cookies from fundraising neighbor kids. The Bandito has volunteered at a local shelter for abused children and I did a year of service with the Boys and Girls Club. But there has been, for the past 15 years, a cause I would take a bullet for. In fact, the first time I ever even heard of paypal, it was to donate money to WM3. I did what I could, and I did what the men needed for support. It was still inadequate, I know that. But I know it means something to these three that I believed in them. That I continue to believe in them because this isn’t over yet.

As a supporter of the three imprisoned men, don’t think I have forgotten about the boys who were killed. No. For a long time I’ve said that six lives ended that day. And, sadly, nothing will ever change the outcome for Stevie, Chris or Michael. How can justice really ever be served for those three? All we can do is keep working to find the person or persons who committed these murders and clear the names of those who did not.

That said, I would also like to say welcome back to the world, Damien, Jason and Jessie. It’s probably not as you remember it, but hopefully it’s a little nicer. Without having met any of you, I can say that I care deeply for each of you. And as difficult as it may be for you to think of Arkansas as home, I don’t know of anyone living here who wouldn’t be happy to have you as a neighbor.

If you’ve got some sugar for me

The heat this summer has been paralyzing. Early on, just when the grass started to need constant mowing and the sun stayed up until nearly bedtime, I bought one of those folding lounge chairs, borrowed a copy of The Help and planned to spend my weekends laid up on the patio. When I was little and roamed the neighborhoods in packs of kids whose only cue to come home was the street light coming on, my dad would chuckle at me and say, “Why you’re as brown as a biscuit!” And as gauche as unprotected sun exposure is these days, the region where I live is known for its mild summers and I was by golly going to spend from May to October outside.

And then. It got hot. Hot like it never even is at home, the place I grew up, which is always hotter and more humid than where I live now. It dragged on, days and then weeks, and then I started to get desperate for relief. Our electric bill was higher than it’s ever been. By a whole hell of a lot. I started putting ice in my bra when I left work to go to lunch every day.

It seemed, too, of course, that I couldn’t get enough to drink. I know there were other places that were hotter this summer than we were here in our little slice of heaven, but we were competing with Death Valley. (That may not be a fact, but you get the idea.)

My whole life there was really just one beverage in our house. Of course, we had water and milk, but we drank sweet tea from morning until night. If someone poured the last of it into their cup, my mother washed the pitcher while the kettle was boiling for another round. I miss sweet tea. The way the sweat beads on the glass, the way it tastes after sitting in the refrigerator overnight. But, two things about The Bandito: First of all, he’s diabetic. And second of all, while I grew up in the city and he grew up in the country, he does not like sweet tea! I have a hard, hard time with this. The Bandito, he is smart and gorgeous and madly in love with me. But he’d just about die of thirst before he’d drink sweet tea. Maybe he’s not so perfect after all.

Aye.

Weirdo!

In the heat of the summer, I pined for sweet tea. But I didn’t dare let myself make any. Because to have some in the house would just mean that I would drink the whole pitcher myself, and then I’d make more, just like at home growing up. So I’ve deprived myself, which is what you do when you’re 35. You think of reasons you can’t have what you want. Gaining weight, enjoying yourself, being happy. All bad to people approaching middle age.

What’s worse, I think, than not having sweet tea now, to see me through the most brutal summer of my life, is that there are people who don’t, maybe, have it at all. I’ve heard tell of places in the uncertain, non-descript North where sweet tea is practically unheard of. Worse yet is the stories I’ve heard of weary Southern travelers actually tracking down sweet tea in the North only to find that those poor, uneducated Northerners have no idea what they’re doing.

Well, I’ll tell you. This is how you do sweet tea.

First of all, you have to boil some water. For a while, when I was a kid, we used a regular old saucepan for that. Come to think of it, I don’t know why I think I’ve got to have a kettle now. Especially not the Williams-Sonoma one I knocked off the stove and chipped the hell out of. But a kettle is fine. Or a pan. I make a lot of tea now, but it is unsweet and I boil the water in a ragged-looking expensive-ass tea kettle. So, boil some water.

A note about Southern cooking, whether it’s sweet tea or fried chicken: We all learned this stuff from our mothers and grandmothers and nobody measures a damn thing. Eyeball it. Just keep in mind when you’re making tea, you will have to transfer it to a pitcher, so you don’t want to boil a stockpot full of water. Two or three cups should do it.

When your water boils, turn off the heat and add your tea bags. I use three to four of the small bags. The directions on your box of tea will tell you to let the bags steep for 3-5 minutes, and you can do what you want with your tea, but I don’t give mine anything less than 15 minutes. Usually more. I go by color. Eyeball it.

While your tea is getting brown as a biscuit, add sugar to your pitcher. My mom had these Tupperware scoops she kept in the canisters, and I know that two solid scoops of sugar (one staggering cup) was perfect for our blue gallon-size tea pitcher. You’ll just have to eyeball it. But it’s very important to add the sugar first and then pour the tea over it while the tea is still warm. Still warm, but brewed to the preferred strength. This will help the sugar dissolve. I’ve seen my friend Sarah make a syrup, but I think my method works just as well and saves about fifty extra steps. Once you’ve added your warm tea to the sugar, give it a good stir. And then, if you need to or want to, add water or ice cubes to your pitcher. We always added the water, but The Bandito prefers the ice method.

Then you just find your favorite cup, glass, jar or whatever, and fill it with ice. If the tea is still a bit warm from the stove top, the ice will crack and pop as you take that first long draw. Oh gaw, sweet tea is an experience I hope everyone will have.

Cruel Summer

I’ve spent half the year avoiding this here whatchacallit. No particular reason, really. Actually, no. First it snowed like, I don’t know, like it snows in places that have snow. We don’t have snow. So when we got two feet of snow in February, I spent a lot of time in a hotel close to my job.

Let’s see. After that it rained. Like, OMG, we’re all gonna die behind it. In a matter of weeks we got more rain than we usually get in a year. And I said, “I AM WORRIED ABOUT SUMMER.” And people said, “Pffft, we will not have a summer.” If we still had our sauna, I would have spent the past few weeks in there trying to cool off. Because this summer ain’t fucking around.

I also bought myself a new computer. I convinced myself I would never remember the password allowing me back into this site, so I left it to sit a while longer. I got a sort-of promotion at work and I’m starting back to school in a couple of weeks. Actually, I’m taking biology online, and that doesn’t really count as going back to school. I’m considering perhaps eventually taking a board exam for a specialized thing we do at work. Maybe.

The Bandito is well. We just had a few days off together last week for the first time since October. We took a weekend in a city about four hours from home. The Bandito is quite a bit less sentimental than I am, but I still know each of us is thrilled to be married to our best friend. Gross, huh? Now we’re looking forward to a trip in the fall to see a band I like.

I hope to come here more often, but I wish I had more of a theme. I love reading “about” things. Food and baking especially. With all the irons The Bandito and I have in our little fire, it is sometimes difficult to devote extra time to any one thing we’re doing. I made a big batch of homemade lotion yesterday, but so little of that process is interesting to look at. No sense in photographing it. It was still blistering hot yesterday, too, so I was not too keen on standing over a hot stove.

If you’ve ever tried a homemade lotion, nothing else will ever do. And the reason I had to make lotion yesterday is that all my mother’s little friends are hooked on my lotion and I was tired of getting the menacing text messages from my mother. There are countless recipes and formulas floating around out there, but I use this one because I can make as much or as little as I need.

It is the only recipe I have ever used. The recipe itself never fails, but sometimes I do. A couple of times I have been guilty of not blending the mixture enough, which has led to separation and — ultimately — cooking up another batch. I would not lie to you, this is the best lotion in the world. Period.

Now. I like to use essential oils, but a lot of people like their lotions to smell like stuff you can buy at the retailers. Fair enough. Some of my fragrances come from etsy, but the majority come from Brambleberry. That’s also where I have bought glycerine and preservatives, although glycerine is pretty readily available elsewhere. I buy my emulsifying wax in a 7-pound box from Soapers Choice. Everything else you can get at your craft store or health-food coop.

I like to use aloe vera juice as my liquid. It’s not too terribly expensive at your local grocery or drug store. I was short on aloe juice yesterday, so I just added spring water to make up the difference. And I’ve found that a 50-50 blend of coconut oil and olive oil is juuuuuust right. Coconut oil has a melting point of like 76 degrees, and yesterday it was already in liquid form when I took it out of the cupboard. I’m telling you, it was hot. Use the oils you like best. I actually like sesame oil, but I tend to save that for small batches because of the cost.

Once everything is melty, the lotion takes on a milky appearance. That’s when I pour it into a bowl and blend with a stick blender we use only for soap and lotion. The mixture may become frothy, and that’s OK. Just keep the bubbles in mind when you fill your containers. A good shake should set things right. I also add the fragrance while blending.

Yesterday’s batch was 50 ounces. I had more than one fragrance to make, so I tried something I hadn’t done before. I added the fragrances to the bottles before I poured the lotion. I made myself a peppermint lotion (because, I don’t know if you heard, but it is HOT), and three others and everything turned out spot-on. I just shook the hell out of the bottles before stowing in them in the fridge to set up.

I buy jars and bottles here and there, sometimes online. Sometimes not. I fell back on my graphic-design skills and came up with a simple little label, printed right on frosty address labels from the office store, but most of what I make is for myself or my family and I ain’t puttin’ no fancy-ass label on that. You can store your lotions in just about anything, as long as you remember to sterilize first. Fruit jars, Rubbermaid containers, whatever. Be as fancy as you want.

A word about making lotion: The residual waxes in and on your utensils will leave a dull white film all over everything in your dishwasher if you don’t give everything a good scrub with soap and water first. I use an old dutch oven for cooking lotion and keep it in the laundry room between batches to make sure The Bandito doesn’t use it for a cereal bowl or something. We also keep quite a supply of spatulas, spoons, funnels and whathaveyou for soaping so there’s little chance of getting a wad of emulsifying wax  in the mac’n cheese.

And that’s basically homemade lotion. Try it!

Decide what to be and go be it

When Christmas was over and done, and we were still strung out on turkey and cookies and chocolates and sweet tea, my parents — who have recently bought a weekend home in the area in order to be closer to my brother’s kids — and The Bandito and I went to the casino. Afterward, we went to my parents’ 80-year-old farmhouse for more turkey. And that’s honestly the first time it occurred to me that I will be 35 in the spring.

Which means that this time five years ago, I was completely bereft after a once-and-for-all ending of a fucked-up relationship with a guy who had been stomping a mudhole in my heart for 11 consecutive years. I was on the verge of an unforeseen promotion at the paper, which would ultimately come to an equally unforeseen layoff two years later. In February of 2006, the year I turned 30, I drove to Omaha by myself to mend my heart in the company of my friend Nat and her family. Best friend doesn’t quite cover it. Nat is something more on the lines of a Hallmark card, the same kind that would make us gag. But at the end of four days, I went back home feeling better. In March I drank green beer in the pubs with Ashley, another better-than-best friend. In April I took a long vacation from work. The first weekend of my vacation, I sat on an old quilt in an apple orchard as my brother married my friend. And the next weekend, as I recklessly celebrated my 30th birthday, fate kicked me in the ass. As I was leaving a bar, a friend introduced me to a friend who was just entering the bar. The Bandito.

I turned 31 two weeks before our wedding. I turned 32 three weeks before we found out I was pregnant. I turned 33 while we were on furlough from our jobs at the paper. I turned 34 just two days after The Bandito was hospitalized for his diabetes.  But each year has been better than the last, despite how it might look on paper.

But this year, it’s going to be about me. My 30s are halfway done. Five years ago my birthday present to myself was the laptop I still use today. This year, though, my gift to myself is to lose 40 pounds. (AKA 38 pounds now, sucka!)

This year I am going to see The Old 97s at a local bar. Even though they have a song that mentions my town by name, they seldom played here. I saw them in July and I’ve already got my ticket for the February show.

This year I’m going to finish reading the Little House books in time for the spring opening of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum, which I plan to visit in March.

My birthday is in April. I’m considering a big fancy party at my parents’ farm. I’m also considering nothing at all. My birthday is also a marker of time with The Bandito. And no one is more thrilled at the thought of a whole half decade together than I am. Really! I totally love that boy and he likes me back!

I’ve also decided to give up on tomatoes in my 35th year. I don’t like ‘em. Unless they’re ketchup or salsa or marinara, in which case more is definitely more. But I’ve had it up to here with you, raw tomatoes. I’ve spent 35 years trying to develop a taste for you, but I am finally old and confident enough to say I outright do not like you. Not in salad, not on a sammich, not fried and green.

And I vow to have more adventures. Of the sane variety, not the drunken rampages of my 20s. For instance, I drove nearly an hour today to see a portion of Route 66. There was a Target, so I bought some tea bags. Which … doesn’t sound too adventurous right now. But the free trial of satellite radio I got with the new car I bought in October ended somewhere around the halfway-there point of my trip, so that caused a lot of wailing and moaning. And subsequent shelling out of many dollars for a full 12-month subscription when I got home.

I’ve also been meaning to see Natural Falls State Park, partly because it’s close by and partly because it was in a movie about a boy and his dog. And those kinds of stories get me every time. And hopefully, on a more macabre note, The Bandito and I will be invited to Villisca, Iowa,this summer.

I’m not making resolutions for a new year ever again. I’m getting too old to keep punishing myself. So I think we should make it all about rewards. About doing something just for ourselves, whether that means losing weight or giving up cigarettes or cutting back on p0rn. Do what makes us happy, for reasons that make us happy. And keep having those adventures, even if you have to justify it with a sensible purchase like tea bags.

Lord the house looks like a rummage sale

While I was out flittering here and there like the butterfly I once was, The Bandito had the smarts to buy a house many years before we ever met. For the most part, I lived alone during my singledom, but he had roommates.

About a month after the final roommate moved out of his house, The Bandito decided, more or less, that it was time to bring a new person into the household. So he bought her a diamond ring and here I am, hating the paint on the walls in the house I used to visit only under the cover of night.

I moved in on a Christmas Eve. The Bandito’s friends and even his former roommates found my determination for cleanliness in this house quite hysterical. But I showed every last one of them.

I’d still love a backhoe and a dumpster to help themselves to the garage, but I’ve done a lot of good things around here.

Today, though, I bought a notebook. I intend to keep a list of improvements that need to be made around here, and a list of cosmetic improvements.

Today I told him we are not doing a vegetable garden next summer. We planted tomatoes again this year and didn’t even pick any. Too hot, too tired. Next year our garden space will become a patch of herbs, which require no care or maintenance.

We also need some sort of back splash thingy in the kitchen. I can’t even begin to describe our kitchen sink. Stainless, hot and cold water. But it faces into the living room with absolutely no sort of back to it. Of course, there’s a cabinet underneath where I keep cleaning supplies, but water is always splashing out onto the dogs or the floors. And if you have to use the sprayer to, like, rinse something? Forget it. The living room, the hallway, the dogs and the 10 pairs of shoes I have stashed next to the liquor cabinet are all getting soaked.

When I told The Bandito that I wanted to build a back splash, I think he heard what he always hears: Bandito, I want *you* to build a back splash RIGHT NOW, oh my god why are you just staring at me like you don’t know what a back splash is?

Actually, I’d rather hire someone to do it. I just want a little ledge there behind the sink, maybe something with a shelf so the dish soap wouldn’t always be falling into the sink or, you guessed it, into the living room. It seems like it would be so simple for someone to do. Doesn’t it?

Of course, then I’d need a new faucet and then new light fixtures above the sink and in the dining room. And then a new stove and new cabinets and new tile because the one tile in front of the fridge is cracked and I still think after four years of living here that it’s not a crack, but something on the floor so clearly we need to just start over on that. And we might as well paint while we’ve got the floors torn up and I’ve always wanted a new front door, something a little less late-1990s green and without a big-ass window in it. And as long as we’re replacing the door, we should update the bathrooms and get new carpet in the bedrooms. Maybe replace the Pergo in the rest of the house with something a little less … laminated. Of course, the porch and garage lights will have to be replaced and the patio enlarged …

And this is probably why The Bandito’s eyes glaze over when I start to talk about what I want to do around the house.