A Shred of Dignity

I spent most of today going through 14 years of documents; is it safe for me to throw away 1995's tax returns? What about copies of angry emails to exes? I'd hate to forget what I was mad about eleven years ago.

I got curiouser while writing this, so I looked it up. According to the IRS.gov website:

Note: Keep copies of your filed tax returns. They help in preparing future tax returns and making computations if you file an amended return.

1. You owe additional tax and situations (2), (3), and (4), below, do not apply to you; keep records for 3 years.
2. You do not report income that you should report, and it is more than 25% of the gross income shown on your return; keep records for 6 years.
3. You file a fraudulent return; keep records indefinitely.
4. You do not file a return; keep records indefinitely.
5. You file a claim for credit or refund* after you file your return; keep records for 3 years from the date you filed your original return or 2 years from the date you paid the tax, whichever is later.
6. You file a claim for a loss from worthless securities or bad debt deduction; keep records for 7 years.
7. Keep all employment tax records for at least 4 years after the date that the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.

I sort of love #3.

It started with my firebox. It got so crowded that Annie had to get her own. Ridiculous. What could be so important that I need an entire firebox to document it? And I'm not talking about standard file folders in a cabinet. I'm not talking about them yet. Just the superflua from the box.

Good news! This stuff is not worthless!


If you've done this recently, you remember that it's not emotion-neutral. The handmade Mother's Day cards, the certificates of achievement, my late-in-life college diploma, letters from absent friends. I'm talking serious poignancy, people. Those things aren't in the kitty nest.

I guess I only need one copy of the divorce decree. What will Social Security want from me if I decide to claim his benefits instead of mine? [This is not entirely rhetorical - comment if you know.]

The filing cabinet yielded (yelt?) a huge box of discards that I don't have to shred, and a small box I must. Remember when Social Security numbers would never be used for identification? I don't, but I've read stuff.



Check this out! Our cats would love this. What would work that isn't $210? I have no woodworking skills, so the curving of the wood is right out. Suggestions solicited.

Outfit to be Tied.

My mother has a very tidy mind. I don't mean to say that she is a clear thinker, or a deep one. I mean that it is swept clear of distracting details, bits of ideas, or fragments of plans. She thinks in themes, in motifs, and in monochrome.

When I was a child, she never bought me clothes, she bought me outfits. Before I was old enough to protest, my outfits matched not just themselves, but hers. In a photograph I unearthed this week, I am fishing with my father while I am wearing a dress. With a fish appliqued to its front. Because she stayed behind at home, I don't for one moment believe she was wearing a fish dress herself. My mother believed in costuming.

In 1975 she bought beautiful lacquered Korean furniture from a young military wife who was tired of reminders of her old life and wanted new American furniture. So, my mother acquired enough furniture to fill our house. The new shiny black hutch held colorful bridal dolls from Seoul. Our intricately-inlaid dining table stood thirteen inches high, and we sat on satin pillows to eat. She did her makeup at an extravagantly lovely vanity piece that also needed a pillow on the floor.

I didn't mind this; I agreed it was exquisite. Then the accessorizing began. The carpets needed to be red or black. Throw pillows, blankets, plates, cookware - all had to pass chromatic muster. Because she knew of no Korean cat breeds, she brought in the meanest Siamese she could find, and hoped the thematic disruption wouldn't be noticeable. It's unclear how the Pomeranians and I escaped the western purge.

Once, she decided to decorate her bedroom in orange, and so any item - useful or not - was welcome as long as it was the right shade. The right shade was orange. Look at the fruit. Books, lamps, curtains, rugs, picture frames, perfume bottles, knick-knacks of any kind. A gift needn't be useful or fun in any way, it needed only to be orange. A still-life for her dresser? Oranges are the only fruit.

Photographic evidence suggests I carried on the tradition into my first marriage. My clothing continued to be outfits. Skirts in suits, trousers in pantsuits. My kitchen was done in strawberries. A well-meaning friend gave me an apple cookie jar - a tragic misinterpretation of the theme - and I proudly displayed it on my counter until she left.

Today, the pendulum has swung to the edge of its arc. I struggle to match shirts and pants in cases of dire necessity (weddings, funerals, job interviews). They don't pass as outfits, but, I hope, as tastefully coordinated separates, thrown together in an appealing, devil-may-care recklessness. Roxanne is always thinking about more important things than her clothing. Go on - ask her about Spinoza's God!

Neither can I be accused of having anything like a tidy mind. I'm no clearer a thinker than my mother, but I do harbor mental shelves full of bits, fragments and distracting details. I keep them around in case I can make them into an outfit.

Watkins Glen marina

Watkins Glen marina, originally uploaded by ¡Vizcacha!.

Slogging around like a tourist, wearing clothes to match.

Dressing to kill

I used to think about my clothes a lot. You will be surprised to know that I still do. That’s enough surprise – now you’re just judging. Now I think about whether it’s time to throw away the Provincetown t-shirt I got during Women’s Weekend seven years ago and have worn twice a week ever since. Or, I wonder if I should make it a dusting rag, but who am I kidding.

When I was 20, I made myself a dress designed by someone named McClintock. The dress was pink and had many layers of lacy frills and satin ribbon. It had an unforgiving set-in waist panel so that I looked lovely but felt miserable. So I wore punishing high-heeled white sandals with it, the ones I wore in my sister-in-law’s wedding. That’s a bonus triple misery score.

I must have looked fabulous, though, because Nancy made one just like it in white. Hers was two sizes smaller, looked just as good and caused her the same pain.

I got these pants at K-Mart for $5. I never buy new clothes (it’s my way of interrupting the flow of consumption), but they were $5. I think someone wore them and brought them back – a workman’s prom with tags tucked inside – so they don’t really count as new.

I bought a beautiful dress from a catalog when I was 24. I loved it so much on that willowy model. Pale Sahara-brown flowers on a creamy background, and when I put it on I was a mortified pig in a blanket. The Pillsbury dough boy in a wraparound. I didn’t send it back because it wasn’t the dress’s fault and another ten pounds would certainly solve the whole problem.

I always buy my underwear new. I know what I said before, but there are limits. Panties’ demise aren’t easy to predict, either. Not like socks. You see it coming with socks. My favorite ragg wool socks strove to live up to their description, until I could feel the floor through the threadbare parts. Come on. Just be a hole so I can move on with my life, but the socks just got thinner until I had to make the hard choice.

But, underwear is stealthy and hides its infirmity until you are on a job interview and they begin a southward migration. Oh job interview panties! How you have betrayed me!

I used to own body smoothers. I wore them so my real body could not be seen beneath my fitted ivory dress. They worked, of course, until I actually needed my liver or a lung. Those were the days I wore high-heels because a look that hot should never be marred by comfort. I was a body-smoothed, mincing size 10, but fashion doesn’t follow the Geneva Convention. We drove past Laser & Brewer last Sunday, where a sign shouts WE HAVE SPANX! DO YOU? I muttered to Annie, “Fuck Spanx.”

True Fact: If you wear pantyhose tight enough to “slim and support” you, your inner thighs will actually extrude out through the knit and rub together anyway.

I still think about my clothes, but now I think “is this shirt clean?” and “can I trust the elastic in these underwear?” Today I’m thinking, “Did that workman get lucky in these pants?”

Footnotes

I knew a man who was afraid of feet. I wondered, for a while, if it wasn’t just revulsion, but no. It was fear. His close friends teased him by putting their own bare feet near him, but I thought that was better left to them, since frightened fists aren’t in control, and then there’s the trial. “Your Honor, I invoke the Piggy Defense,” and then I would have to show my feet to the jury so they could understand his terror and acquit. I hear he has married. His bride agreed, before God and these witnesses, to wear socks at all times when they were together. His own feet he just pretended were not there, the way I avoid my face in the mirror in the middle of the night.

My son’s feet started out miniatures of mine, broad chubby things with fat toes attached higgledy-piggledy. A little pigeon-toed, so I bought him white high-tops until the bird stage flew past. Fat feet stuffed into tall shoes; he became sturdy and fast. Those feet grew into his father’s feet and beyond, and today he is proudly stylin’ in his 13s.

I can’t pass by baby shoes without comment, and filled with baby? Irresistible. Shoes so tiny Annie says they should hang from a rear-view mirror. I admire the sneakers, so short and broad that they’re round. She favors the work boots. The wee Mary Janes are sweet, but I’m alarmed by their slick soles and inferior athletic potential. Send a child out in patent leather and she will not make the track team.

When my husband relaxed, his feet were perpendicular to his legs. Ninety degrees of bone and tendon. I teased him, commanding his foot to point; his toes contorted as though they intended to manage with or without the foot. Later he didn’t think it was funny anymore, and I started to see him as one big, rigid ell.

I’m fond of my own feet – my toes are cute. I don’t decorate them, though, because they are shy and avoid attention. They perform well whenever they are needed. They remember dance moves I’ve forgotten. They walk around like champs. When I swim, so do they. I don’t turn my back on a friend, so when one started to hurt, I bought them both the best arch supports the aisle at RiteAid had to offer. No excuse was too flimsy to wear Birkenstocks. I installed insoles inside my fluffy slippers. All this and more I would do for my feet.

I can’t remember owning a pair of high heels after 1986. [I first wrote high hells. This is the degree of my animosity.] My son was born, and it seemed as good a time as any to take the vow. When you’re carrying something plump and unpredictable, like a baby or a slippery Virginia ham, the more rubber on the road, the better.

I heard a story about a chicken who had no feet, so I stopped feeling sorry because I had no shoes. His owner wraps his feet so he has better traction on his stumps. I learned a lot from that chicken, and now I’m satisfied if my own stumpy feet are wrapped for traction, if not for style.

Postscient

It didn't shift in an instant, not like the tungsten glows, then extinguishes. Falling out of love is not just the opposite of falling in. The flash of recognition, the nights spent dreaming with wide-open, starry eyes. The element of surprise. "Falling out" is slow, sneaky and wily, and you often don't know you've fallen until you feel the thud. Then you understand the gravity of your situation.

So, in just that insidious way, I have fallen out of love. My beau leaves me cold, bored and unsatisfied. I work with his friends, and that's awkward. In fact, they're not just friends, these people. They are all in love with him, too. He has so many lovers, and just as many haters, but few ex-lovers. These people won't understand. Not at all. I'll lose that crowd in the divorce.

How will I replace him? A ridiculous question, when the real question is how to leave. I want us to stay friends. I'll still read his letters, some of them. I can't forget him; he's all around me. I'll always remember when he showed me Fibonacci's number. What is more delicious than the feel of Avogadro against my molars? He gave me that first - I was only sixteen. The voltage! The resistance! Ohm my God. I had all of that with him, and mho.

I can't even say it was a childish passion, this parabolic rise and fall, this astronomical, meteoric flight through variables and constants. Let x= whatever it wants to be - he was my x-axis and I never asked y. You can't calculate the factors that made me love him. The rithm, the log of my obsession was natural, both real and irrational. It was a sine, not a tangent. I didn't need a proof.

I'm no fool. I know I can't live without him. Neither can you. I just know I can't be his mistress any longer. I must unwind myself from the double helix of his devotees. The bonds have loosened. The resonance is gone. I have to leave his house to be real, but he has always paid my bills. What new lover will take me in when I have divorced Science?

Everybody must get

Sharon Stone
Stone Phillips
Chris Rock
Kidd Rock
Rock Hudson
Rock of Ages
Like a Rock


It traveled the earth never leaving its own Pangean neighborhood, the way I travel the solar system at home in my bungalow. Maybe it heard the news - Plates Shift! Families Separated! or maybe it lay like a stone waiting for something to happen to it. Silly stone. Pack a bag and take a trip, before you're sand! You were a mountain once, a continent; you've got to see where this is going! Another billion years will be gone before you know it and you'll be just an eroded shadow of the You you are now.

Taking nothing more than the dirt it could grab, it finally had an adventure. A rolling stone gathers no moss. You eased yourself into the slipstream of glaciers. You stop when they stop, where they stop. Were you disappointed to stop in Ohio? It's not a bad place for a stone to spend a few millennia, not a bad place for a girl to spend seven years. Were we the first of our kind you ever knew? A man and a girl, on a sunny hillside in the spring. A story about glaciers in the heartland, cycles of Ice Ages and global warmings, a little stone taking a trip and getting buffed along the way. Another story about a man, a flood his boat and a poop deck. A girl can't choose both stories, and a rock doesn't care, knowing its own truth but keeping mum. The man has no particular credibility and the other is a mother's story - infallible.

The stone didn't stop in Ohio. There are too many other sights to see inside a cedar box. It isn't fair for a stone to have seen such things and to have been tumbled and polished, and then land in a box without a view. I should have at least put it in th9e windows of the nearly thirty homes I've had since then. And maybe, like me, the stone is ready for another journey.

As Heard In Our RV™ (Roxi)

If this trailer's rockin' ... come on in and help us tear out carpeting.

The Sow of Pooh.

Thanks, BoingBoing.

In the Pink of an Eye

She had very rigid standards for other people. At first I thought it was cute, endearing, charming, but I was a prisoner in the Kingdom of Poor Judgment. I was falling in love.

Pink disgusted her. Made her need to vomit. I almost didn't notice I had stopped wearing it; when I felt strong and independent I would slip on a pale pink t-shirt. Nice shirt she'd snarl, but didn't want to seem rude so she'd say she didn't mind it as long as it was mostly covered. When something pinkly-pigmented crept into her own wardrobe, she'd clarify that it was mauve. Dusty rose. Salmon. All names for Butch Pink.

In parting, the correct phrases were "goodbye, see ya, take care, be careful." God help anyone who said bye-bye. "Bye-bye?? Did you just say bye-bye???" Apparently, the idea was to train everyone she met, and I was an able student. No hon, silly, I said "Fuck you!" Have a good day!

I suppose we should have known it was over that shopping day. I unloaded bags, boxes, bundles. Pink socks, pink boots, pink slippers. Seven pairs of pink panties, all embroidered with Any Damn Day I Please. Not a molecule of rose in the lot. Mauve? For pink-lovers who are still in the closet. This was straight-up, in-your-face, Mary Kay pink, and I had come out.

The garish pink rose swag went up in the living room, over the bedroom door. Just a reminder that through this door lies a lot more pink. "I hope you sleep well on the pink sheets. Bon Ton was having their yearly Pink Sale."

"Oh hon, you feel nauseous? Let me get you some Pepto-Bismol. A Canada mint? Cherry Rolaids? Strawberry Starburst?"

I came home one autumn day, just after noon. She was sitting limply on the Candystripe slipcover, shielding her eyes from the suffuse glow of the Baby's Breath Pink wallpaper I'd hung from three walls. The fourth was a tasteful Ice Pink accent paint (from Sherwin-Williams' "I Adore Pink!" collection). "I tried to start dinner," she mumbled faintly, "but the cookware made me feel weak."

"You have something against Cooking For the Cure?" I sniffed.

"No, I just ..." and she pulled the opalescent throw pillow over and curled into a fetal position.

I suppose it was foolish to have installed the new Petal Pink bathroom fixtures, and I did feel a little guilty later when she had to be sick in the petal-y bowl. "Poor dear," I cooed, "think of the toilet as Dusty Rose."

One night, as I brushed my Didi Conn-pink hair she asked, looking away, if she was sensing hostility. "Don't be silly, dear. Tell me if my Hello Kitty jammies match my Cotton Candy bathrobe."

She seemed to be growing more fragile, and one evening she barely managed to climb the stairs. She unlocked the door and fell onto the Peppermint Stick carpeting, tossing Jungle Pink seat covers onto the Ice Cream Shoppe Formica tabletop. "I ... can't ... use these. It was a ... nice ... " and she rested there a while until she found the strength to get up.

"That's okay, Gumdrop. Just relax until supper is ready. We're having borscht."

By the start of winter, she could barely rise in the mornings, and would have stayed home, I suspect, but for the healthy glow of the bedroom. Personally, I liked it.

Just after the New Year, she begged me to meet her at a sports bar. "Which one, Hon?"

"It doesn't even matter," she said, "but … could you wear Syracuse orange?"

When I arrived, she began. "I've been thinking we're not getting along. Too many of my needs aren't being met. I don't think my standards are unreasonable, and if you can't meet them, maybe I should go."

"Go? Really?” I bit the tip of my Pink Passion pinky nail.

“It’s really for the best. Our relationship isn’t good for me.” She handed me back the rose gold band inlaid with Forever Pink cubic zirconia. I saw it had burned her finger.

Tears formed behind my Swiss-made fuchsia contact lenses. What else could I do? I hugged her and dropped the circle of pink Kryptonite into her back pocket. She’d be dead by morning, if she didn’t find it first.

“Well, then, Bye-Bye!"

Before

I am born and there are vaccines for everything and I am safe. I get measles, but everyone gets measles and that's okay. I get strep throat and then scarlet fever which reminds me of Gone With the Wind - such a pretty name.

But, before that, my parents were married twelve years, and did they wait until it was safe? My mother never talked about polio, or parents dreading summer or staying out of the water or hearts in mouths when a child stumbled. And today, right now, I wonder if polio viruses still frolic in streams and ponds and wonder why no one respects them anymore. Or, did they vanish into laboratories to live forever in a cell in a bottle, giving smallpox the idea? I had a teacher who survived polio, but she was so old I thought it was a Civil War disease.

But, before that, what did my grandmother worry about? I know some things about her, but they're not about her, they're about my mother. I know the picture of my grandmother, Vera, whose caption is "Mom at 212 pounds." I took a snapshot in my head yesterday at the doctor's scale: "Me at 213 pounds." A family history of chub, a genealogy of our war with numbers. My mother's numbers are small; she stands in history between fat women.

I know Vera had high cholesterol because she liked the fat from meat. I don't know why I have it. I know she died from being 212 pounds. But, fifty years later, my father's siblings die, round and 90. They didn't get the memo.

Before me, before my mother's first makeup or first date or first husband, Vera was a Spiritualist in Freeville. She saw things and read tea leaves and divorced her husband and broke his nose. He was not 212 pounds. She built a house and raised wild children and ran a business and took no shit. She got married twice and lost a young husband who laid down sick one day and died the next, one of Tioga County's flu statistics. Her second husband lasted longer.

I didn't meet these people and I don't know any true thing about them. I know what my mother said and the stories, but those stories belong to her. I am writing down stolen lives. But, before me, Vera had a boyfriend and the kids didn't like him. There is a story about pudding and X-lax that ends and he never wore those pants again.

After that, my mother and I visited the nursing home Vera ran; the current owner was pleased to show us around. Oblivious to possibilities, she showed us a tiny attic room painted midnight blue, and who would paint a room that color? But, before us, Vera would.

Now I make Vera what I want her to be, because I can, because my stories belong to me and so does she. Four dozen years I've looked for me in my mother's face, but I'm not there because she doesn't belong to me. I have to look past her, through her, to the other side. Biology insists I have half her genes, more or less, but which ones? I don't say this in scientific company, but I think Vera bundled hers in a sack and tossed them to me, right over her daughter's head. Monkey in the middle.

But first, Vera was a lesbian. [This is my story.] Sure, she married a man or two, but I made the same mistake seventy years later. It's okay Grammy, I get it. I never broke his nose, but I broke his heart, which was just about as gristly and hollow. I see things, like which way the wind blows, and I read signs, like writing on the wall. And now, I tell stories and they're as true as yours, as true as they need to be.

Fooled again

His pharmacy sells Yankee Candles and Gund stuffed animals and Precious Moments figurines. Such a handsome young man, and I think about my single friend John who is also cute, and would they hit it off? and it's none of my business really, but I can't help thinking. The pharmacy is small and the Yankee Candle smell is everywhere at once, Apple Pumpkin Spice Pine French Vanilla Pie. He flashes that beautiful smile at me and the gorgeous woman behind the counter is his fiancée and I'm stunned. The candles lie.