Sharing the World with the Undead

I hate kale juice.

Ahhhhtttt guhhl dyuhzzzz.

I reread my last few posts, the ones written just before I faded off into the night. The zombie virus seems to creep up slowly on some people. Rereading my posts, I discovered a huge clue.

Remotes can serve as canaries in the undead’s mineshafts.  Our remotes are guides to more than a list of programming. Readers, is the remote getting harder to handle? Do buttons take you to places you had not planned to visit? Are you staring mindlessly at turquoise jewelry, Judge Mathis and random Bar Rescues? Are you watching Law and Order because you can’t find that tiny silver box — again — but you finally stumbled on the the TVs “ON” button?

TV can make zombies of us all. TV can also help us to identify humans on viral overload. If your remote has you flummoxed, you need to scour the internet for cures for the zombie virus. Try http://zombieresearchsociety.com/archives/8101, for example.

The truth is out there. Your problem will be sorting through all the misinformation and disinformation in search of that truth, Desperate times call for desperate measures. Drink gallons of kale juice for a few weeks. See what happens. See how you feel. If you don’t get sick of kale juice, you will know something is wrong.

Any nontoxic, potential cure is worth a shot.

A zombie-free reminiscence:

The biography jar strikes again. Did anyone selecting these topics ever think to include a nice, short slip of paper  like, “What is your favorite kind of jelly?” Or even which Dr. Who was your personal favorite and why? No, I seem to be picking long topics from the jar.

I remember all my grandparents in greater and lesser degrees. I vaguely remember my great-grandmother Grass, a woman who captured my interest for a short while when I was a toddler. If memory serves me, she was a buxom woman, strong-jawed and slightly heavy-set. She wore those floppy, slightly-wrinkled, plaid cotton dresses that I associate with grandmas.

My grandmas lived in the time when June Cleaver wore pearls and smartly-tailored dresses to vacuum.  They never remotely resembled June Cleaver. Like so many other rituals of the time, they only paid lip-service to fashion, in tired, wrinkled cotton dresses with bobby-pins to hold thinning hair in place. None of them shopped for a hobby, I’m sure.

I am beginning to unravel a bit myself. A few days ago, I walked the dog wearing Sam’s old middle-school softball pants, soft, tie-dyed green cotton with SOFTBALL on my rear, Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer socks, and my XL Worf Star Trek t-shirt that I sometimes sleep in. I’d dressed for comfort when I got home from school and I didn’t see why I had to change to walk a dog. I looked in the mirror before I left, laughed, and grabbed the leash.

Memories of my Grandma Grass remain hazy, though. Topics like this one remind me that I’m not a naturally observant person. This fact has handicapped me in the classroom. I seldom know where the damn paper wad began its trajectory and I know students sometimes like to see just how weird they can act before I acknowledge their efforts, finally pointing out that trying to put your foot in your mouth is unusual behavior and please put your shoe back on and go get hand sanitizer right away. A favorite from last week: Two students took tape off their desks and put the tape over their mouths. I caught this oddity immediately since the tape is bright blue. Asked to reflect on why that was unacceptable classroom behavior, one boy wrote, “I didn’t safely put tape in my mouth.”

My age and grandparent illnesses affect my memories greatly. I only vaguely remember my Grandma Adele who died young from breast cancer. She was another buxom, slightly heavy set grandma in floppy cotton dresses, with brown hair that was often tightly pulled back. When I was little, I spent time with her often and I remember playing with grandma, climbing all over her and all the furniture in the tiny house in Lakewood, not far from our own house. Like my eldest daughter, I was a natural climber. I ate donuts and candy and drank pop at the gray, formica table in the kitchen. No one seemed too worried about nutrition in that house. (No one seemed too worried about nutrition during my childhood, a post for another time.) I probably exhausted grandma, but she always seemed happy to see me.  My grandma Adele was my first real loss in life, somewhere in early elementary school, but I sense that parents buffered that loss as much as possible. We did not talk about her passing. I’m sure mom and dad must have talked about her often, but not in front of the children.

Memories of my Grandpa Bill are also hazy. He had a series of strokes when I was young and my final memories of Bill are sad, watching Grandma Velma coax him to eat while he sat mutely at the kitchen table. I don’t know how she managed. She was a small woman, somewhat crippled by polio herself, and he had significant mobility and speech problems at the end. When I was little, I remember him on ladders. I watched him build a house that burnt down not long after he finished it. He had studied engineering at Vanderbilt and I am sure he had quite a story, the Depression story that led him into farming in Pleasant Valley, Washington. I did not know Bill well, though, since even when he was healthy, he always seemed to be on a ladder or walking around with tools. I don’t think he was a kid person, although possibly other grandchildren knew him better. I am told that I was a handful, a bundle of endless climbing and nonstop talking energy. If I’d been quieter and able to sit for awhile, my memories might be different.

I do remember my Grandpa Orlie, my dad’s dad. We saw him often when I was in elementary school. Grandpa was fun. He always had junk food and soda and he enjoyed kids. I remember him with his cigarette and shot of bourbon at the gray, formica table. He talked through a stoma, having lost his vocal cords to cancer, a throaty, deep whisper that could be hard to interpret. He’d slide the shot of bourbon over toward me. Mom would say, “Grandpa!” The bourbon slide was a regular family joke. The Lakewood house was near a school playground, so Steve and I could go to the playground while adults talked about mysterious adult stuff that didn’t interest us. Back in that time, no one felt they needed to watch children all the time. I have a sense that my mom was at the playground sometimes, probably to get away from all the smoke, but other days we were left alone to explore around the school and neighborhood. We lost Orlie while I was still in elementary school, a real hole in my childhood.  He went quickly from a heart-attack.

My Grandma Velma was a force in my life and a force in the life of all her grandchildren — especially my cousins, Guyle and Melody, who lived with her for some years — and I was blessed to have her to visit until I was in college. We often went to her house in Mineral when I was young. The family would pile into the car on the week-end, stopping at Gilbert’s store for our Mountain Cones, three scoops of ice cream that would be running down my wrist in the car on hot days. I’m pretty sure my parents never worried much about car interiors.  Some summer weeks I stayed with Grandma Velma. I read, wandered the small mountain town, visited the swimming hole and relaxed the way only kids can, knowing the most important parts of the day are visits to the tiny store for candy bars  or chocolate-covered, ice-cream bars, and the later walk-skip along the curving, hot, black asphalt to the swimming hole. Grandma Velma didn’t push. Like my mom, she seemed to regard reading as a perfect excuse to get out of domestic chores. She couldn’t cook, but she gave her grandchildren stories about the horrors of beet greens, funny reminiscences now that the beet greens are ancient history. I did love her hot potato rolls and cooked rhubarb. I liked that pat of butter she put in the oatmeal, too. I loathed the stupid roosters who chased you as you entered and left the house, but for some reason Grandma Velma kept roosters for awhile.

I am going to stop here, but this story runs much longer and I have left out many parts that helped shape the person I became. At some point, Parminder needs to enter the blog, since he entered the family through Grandma when I was in my teens. Of the strange tales of our childhoods, I would have to include the tale of the wandering Sikh who was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin and ended up trying to hitch a ride out of Mineral, Washington. Grandma guessed how well that might work  out for him and told him that if he got tired he could stop by her house for — was it milk and cookies? Parminder remains family to this day.

More zombie-free reminiscences:

The slip of paper from the jar says to tell about holiday traditions. I’ll start with Halloween, a holiday that has mostly faded from view since the children grew up. We used to costume shop, shop for candy and buy decorations for the house which we sometimes managed to get up, a lame display of spider web on bushes, a few carved pumpkins on the porch and maybe some plastic spiders thrown in to add to the less than scary effect. For a few years, until the cardboard disintegrated, we had a few plastic-covered, cardboard gravestones that said stuff like “RIP” and “Izzy Dead.” Once or twice, I hung cute Halloween lights in the windows. We paid lip service to the Gods of Holiday Decoration, for my part in order to make the kids happy.

I’ll admit I always enjoyed throwing on a cloak and witches hat. We need more dress-up days generally. My hats and cloaks are bored in my closet. Come May of this school year, I may see if I can create a few unholiday nontraditions as I free the denizens of my closet.

One regular ritual came after the holiday. Albert wanted to throw the “extra” candy away because he thought there was too much. I objected. Throw away perfectly good candy? He wanted the children to eat more healthfully. I figured they had gone out to stalk the wild chocolate beast and they should be allowed to eat their kill. I’m pretty sure he tossed some candy, but I defended the bags as best I could. I always enjoyed the careful emptying and sorting of the bags, the thought that went into creating various piles for future consumption. I also knew, even if Albert didn’t believe it, that the girls had a pretty good idea of exactly what their haul had been.

The truth is, we have always been the poor relations of decorations in our neighborhood, a burb filled with elaborate displays of scarecrows in chairs and bodies hanging out windows onto roofs. I take after my mom who took the minimalist approach to holidays. She sat and read while the world swirled on around her, making sure her children had costumes and she had candy for kids at the door. If I had not lived in the land of motion-activated haunting machines, I’m not sure I’d have even bought the cobwebs, except for the kids.

When the children could be trusted to go alone, for a few years, I did join a friend who would sit outside by an outdoor heater, drinking wine and watching children pass by.  As traditions go, I’ll recommend drinking wine with friends as the sun goes down on Halloween night. I had to stick Albert with candy duty for that one, though.

Currently, I hand out sugar while trying to calm down the dog, who goes nuts from the repeated doorbells. Oct 31st has become Dog Whisperer day. “It’s OK, sweetheart. Stop barking. Stop barking. That’s enough. Stop barking. Will you please stop barking?” She stops.

And then the doorbell rings again.

P.S.  I reread this and think maybe I lost a bit of flavor in my fatigue. Halloween carries memories of tiny vampires, Pink Power Rangers and girls in silver space helmets. Proud children marched around Grove Elementary School while parents followed them, taking pictures. I marched in the evening, following children through neighborhoods on lengthy journeys.  They were dauntless, my children. I had a great time and, in the end, managed to lay claim to many small packets of Whoppers.