Par For The Course

I recently read an article about a mother and son who were kicked off of a Southwest flight because the child was unruly. What was most surprising to me wasn’t the crew’s decision to have the women ousted rather the reaction from people who read the article and posted comments. Most folks agreed with the crew but took it a step further and attacked the woman for allowing her two year old child to disturb others. Moreover, they expressed their disgust for passengers who show little if any consideration for the people around them. It got me thinking about all of the different times I’ve flown and the people I have encountered along my journeys some kind, some mean but all interesting.

My first flight was over thirteen years ago out of Dulles on British Airways. It had stormed all morning. The traffic jammed on the Toll Road leaving me with an anxious stomach and little time to get through the airport for my afternoon flight. I checked my bag and ran to the gate. Passengers were already boarding and my friend was restless waiting for me. “Finally,” she said. “I was getting worried.”

“Well, I’m here, so let’s go. Europe or bust!” I replied as my stomach turned.

We boarded our flight in very different states of minds. I was a nervous wreck and Em was calm. She was a seasoned traveler and wisely took Dramamine while waiting for me. As we settled into our seats, which were the middle two in a row of four, Em fell asleep. The rain continued and pelted the plane amplifying my anxiety. Forty five minutes later our flight ascended and the turbulence that followed turned my stomach against me for good.

No more than thirty minutes into the flight and I had filled up my barf bag and was searching for Em’s. She was fast asleep and unaware of my condition. The man next to me kindly offered up his bag. I smiled sheepishly and began to fill it. I wanted to crawl under the seat in embarrassment or at least get up and go to the restroom but the turbulence was so bad I couldn’t. The flight attendants weren’t even walking around. I just hunched over in my seat and cried. The kind man next to me rubbed my back and told me it would be okay. He was only a few years older than me and spoke with a British accent. And over the next five hours, he talked to me about home, travel, family and life and helped me get through my first flight.

The following Fall I moved to Charlotte and alternated driving and flying home. I also began to travel more with business, so flying became a common occurrence for me. It happened so often that I rarely got sick. Plus, the flights were short and didn’t allow much time for my stomach to attack. Closing my eyes and sleeping became my fail-proof remedy. One time though I sat next to a kid who had gas. It was the longest hour flight of my life. He didn’t say a word the entire time just smiled uncomfortably. If it wasn’t for the rancid stench coming from his direction, I would have felt sorry for the kid, who was about nine years old and travelling by himself. Instead, I did everything in my power not to look at him or utter a sound in his direction. I knew if I opened my mouth something embarrassing would come out. So, we both sat in silence.

In an attempt to drift away to another place, I closed my eyes. But the only thing in my mind was the scene from Tora! Tora! Tora! when the Japanese dropped bomb after bomb on Pearl Harbor. My eyes stayed open for the rest of the flight. My fail-proof remedy crashed and burned, and the short flight home was plenty of time for the boy’s stomach to declare war.

I eventually moved to Atlanta and flying became my only means of transportation home. There were planes of plenty in and out of Hartsfield-Jackson and they were always packed. I was flying back to Georgia from a long weekend with the family when a young blond woman asked if she could have my aisle seat. She said that her husband was sitting next to me and they were unable to get seats together. I agreed and asked where she was sitting. The woman pointed to a seat several rows back. I reached up to get my laptop out of the overhead as I was planning on using it in flight when she snapped, “Why do you need your bag? You’re just going over there. It’s not like anyone will take it.”

Several things ran through my head to say to her at that moment: I plan on using my laptop once we take off. I want to have my belongings near me during the flight. It’s none of your business. I’m giving you my damn seat, back off. I didn’t say any of them though. Instead I replied, “What does it matter?”

She barked back, “You don’t need your bag. You’re just going a few rows away.”

Why did this woman care so much about my bag? After all, she was getting what she wanted -- my seat. Did it really matter if I took a few extra minutes to remove my bag from the overhead? It wasn’t like we were taking off at that very moment.

My patience had faded and I regrettably retorted, “Do you want my seat or not?”

Her hands flew up in the air and she started yelling things I can’t recall. Her husband stood up and got involved. People were staring. I grabbed my bag and ran. I wasn’t ready for all that excitement. I just wanted to get home.

For the rest of the flight all I could think about was that woman and what happened. My stomach cramped from anxiety. I had sweat marks on my t-shirt. And I never opened my laptop bag.

Nowadays, I hardly ever fly. The few times that I do, I usually sleep or try keep to myself. When I do fly, I don’t want to be inconvenienced just as much as the next person but that is kind of par for the course. We can’t control what happens in the plane anymore than we can control the elements outside of it. You just have to go with the flow and hope the ride is full of sunshine and roses. Lots of sweet smelling roses.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33555007/ns/travel-news/

Columbus Day

When my son, Joel, was in elementary school, I was a working mom. That meant caretaking, meal making, housekeeping, homework battles, and bedtime stories after work. That meant shuttling the kids to choir, karate, gymnastics, or band after work. When permitted, I’d watch their activities—while paying the bills kept in my handbag. When not permitted, say by the director preparing choir for concert, I’d pop a wheelie out of the parking lot and squeeze in an hour’s worth of grocery shopping. Weekends and holidays were the same, except Columbus Day, my one day without work or activities.

Every year, I looked forward to Columbus Day when I had off while my husband worked and my kids went to school. For weeks, I’d plan the favorite thing I’d do that day, maybe book browse at Borders or shop at Pier I.

One Columbus Day I was home—feet up, sipping hot Lipton, laughing with I Love Lucy—when my second-grader’s school nurse called: “Your son has a fever and is complaining of a sore throat. Can you get him?” I rushed over. We went to the doctor, who prescribed Amoxicillin. After filling the prescription, we stopped for Slurpees. At home, he put on pajamas, and I read to him on the den couch until he fell asleep.

The next Columbus Day, I was on my way to Annapolis to visit the Main Street Gallery and sit on the pier to read a novel, when I got a phone call: “This is the school nurse. Your son has an upset stomach.” To my exasperated “are you sure?” she handed the phone to Joel, who begged, “Please come get me; I feel really sick.”

When I picked him up, he said “Can I get a movie from Blockbuster’s?” We rented the movie and bought ginger ale for his upset stomach. At home, after he put on pajamas, we watched the movie from the den couch, my arm wrapped around him.

The next Columbus Day, I didn't even remind my husband that I had off. Wanting to not jinx anything, I dressed in business clothes to drop the kids off at morning care. Later, I got the inevitable phone call.

Every year, the phone calls from the nurse got earlier and earlier. Eventually, I gave up making plans for myself and started looking forward to spending the day with my son. By the time he was in high school, all pretense was out the door and when I’d pick him up he’d say, “Mom, it’s a miracle—I feel better already!” At home we’d have naps, watch movies, and enjoy hot tea while reading novels on the den couch.

It’s Columbus Day. I rarely hear from him unless he’s read my cryptic text message: You still alive? Then, he’ll call and tell me the latest about sessions he’s teaching at Penn State.

"FIRE!"

The thing about emergencies is that there’s no hard and clear rule on when an “issue” escalates into a “crisis.”

A few months ago, a friend of mine and I were waiting for a table outside of a restaurant when we noticed smoke billowing out of a car. Watching it seemed only to fan the invisible flames, so I walked into the restaurant and informed the non-committal hostess of the event taking place outside. There, I thought, dusting it off my hands as I returned to my friend; not my problem. Yet that wonderful feeling of transference began to wear off as the minutes passed without a resolution. The restaurant was crowded, and as people began to take notice of the event, that sense of responsibility began to set back in. I mean, we did notice it first; didn’t that mean we had to take partial ownership, at least until the real owner of the car showed up?

My friend Jesse and I deliberated for a few minutes about what to do. “Do we call the fire department? It’s not very obviously a fire,” I said.

“I don’t even know the fire department’s number,” Jesse added.

“Isn’t it…9-1-1?” I pondered aloud. There is so much stigma associated with dialing the forbidden number that I hardly knew if we should have called. When the chef from the restaurant came out of the kitchen wielding a fire extinguisher and marched around the car scratching his head, Jesse however decided that it was time to phone in a professional. In a matter of minutes, the fire truck sounded its way over and with a shatter of broken glass and the gush of a fire hose, a car was destroyed along with the danger it posed. We never did get to see its owners, though. I wondered whether they stayed in the restaurant throughout the ordeal, whether from embarrassment or hunger.

And so a few months later, when I am moving into my new house and my father directs me to clean paint off the electrical outlets using steel wool and Goof-Off, I hesitate. Fire is bad. And real. And, I don’t know whether that sprinkler system actually works yet, and I’ve never much cared for finding things out the hard way. But this is my father speaking; surely, if there was any threat of danger, real or imagined, he would give me due warning. After a quick game of “are you sure? Are you sure-sure?,” I found myself mindlessly scrubbing away at the sage green paint residue on each electrical socket of the master bedroom. “What a lovely unexpected flash of light,” I thought, calmly, and looked down to find, in my palm, the homey glow of a flaming piece of Brillo. At least I had the sense to throw it down, and what amazed me more was what happened next.

As it sat on the brand new carpet, flaming higher by the second, I screamed “FIRE!” in the jazziest most soul-gripping voice I never knew I had. Of course, it was preceded by a string of obscenities, starting with holy and advancing to the opposite end of the spectrum, but that was requisite. At that moment, my mother ran into the room, demonstrating what can only be called a text-book example of the word “panic.” Before she could make a sound, involuntarily her elbows began pumping the air like a bellows (and, like a bellows, somehow made it worse), and her knees marched violently up and down like a redneck at a hoedown, but it was the look of shock on her face that startled me to my feet. Seeing nothing around that I could use to douse or smother the flames, I began stomping them with one Isotoner-clad foot. The flames licked upward and neared my hip, and I feared that my aged cotton sweatpants might ignite, so I ran to the bathroom in search of…?

A towel! I grabbed a towel, a slightly damp one at that, and spun around for the bedroom. I saw my mother, helplessly stomping at the Brillo with her foot, but three feet away from it. She had been stomping at bare carpet in her panic. Long story short, the towel sufficed where the sprinkler system, Isotoner, and panicking mother did not. The carpet looked a little worse for wear even after a good vacuuming; its singed tips had to be painstakingly trimmed, and the nap will forevermore be uneven. Yet somehow, the hardest part was after it was all over. “You ought to go downstairs and tell your father what happened,” my Mother said gravely.

Resigning to my fate, I solemnly walked downstairs to where my father tinkered with the garbage disposal. “Don’t panic,” I began, “but we had a little fire upstairs.” It took all my might not to laugh, and I quickly extinguished the vision of my Mother the Scarecrow that danced in my head.

“Oh, you must have touched the electrical screw with the Brillo and it arced out,” he responded flatly. “I thought about warning you, but then I didn’t.” Hours later, after he had surveyed the damage and heard the full accounts of the only two witnesses, he added, “well, that sounds a lot worse than I thought it would be,” which in Dad speak means, “HOLY FUCKING SHIT, FIRE!”

The death of long-form narrative?

Is what we're writing in our creative nonfiction class worthless in an age of text messaging?Will computer screens and Kindles lead to readers who won't read a 15-page lyric essay? Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post writes a piece well worth reading that pertains to the future of what we're practicing.

"A story curls back into itself," says writer Gary Smith in Achenbach's piece. "And you need a special time and place and setting and mode for that. If it becomes all one smear with your work life and checking your e-mail, your Facebook, it's lost all it's reason for being."

A Honey of a Lesson

“Honey fest or Ravens football game? Okay, son, which is more important, your children or the football game?”

Garrett (my son) fell back into the van with a look of such defeat that you’d think the Ravens had already lost the game.

Two Sundays ago, my husband Greg and I took our 3-year-old twin grandchildren (Amari and Ashad), Garrett, and our daughter Cassandra to the annual weekend Honey Harvest Festival at the Oregon Ridge Nature Center in Cockeysville, Maryland. We had planned the outing months ago. We could have gone either Saturday or Sunday and we chose Sunday. But once Garrett learned that the Ravens were playing the Patriots the same day, he had tried every angle to convince me that Saturday would be the better day to go.

“Mom, isn’t it supposed to rain on Sunday?” “What about church? Won’t you be missing church?”

Without hesitation, I replied, “No, it’s supposed to be warm and sunny and we’ll go to the early service.”

So there we were sitting in the van in the driveway again. Garrett was sulking in the backseat, while fiddling with his Blackberry to locate the game, and the rest of us sat quietly, like a volcano ready to erupt. We hadn’t gotten more than a block from the house and had returned for that one item the “other person” was supposed to have remembered to pack, but had forgotten. Apparently as wife and mind-reader extraordinaire, I was supposed to know that the camera needed batteries.

Finally, Greg returned with batteries in hand and we’re off. After taking a scenic route of hilly back roads, we arrived 50 minutes later at the Nature Center set at the end of a makeshift narrow road. We parked on a grassy mound between the trees. As we exited the van, the twins, seeing other children with their families walking up the trail, grew excited.

They started to run ahead. We called to them, “Come here, Amari and Ashad. You have to hold our hands.” As they ran back, their excitement spread among us. Even Garrett was distracted from his Blackberry and the game.

Our first stop along the trail was the bookstore. I bought two sticker books for the twins, and they “oohed” and “aahed” over the duck stickers the bookstore lady placed on their shirts. Next, we were off to the “petting” zoo. Thankfully, all the animals were caged.

Cassandra was in charge of taking the pictures.

Our first visit was with “Mr. and Mrs. Turkey.” Amari and Ashad were fascinated by Mr. Turkey’s prowess in displaying his feathers. We explained that this was his way of trying to get Mrs. Turkey’s attention. None of us had ever seen such a show. We were all impressed; however, Mrs. Turkey was not—she was quite stoic.


Next were the sheep. Amari was not the least bit afraid. She was practically climbing the fence to touch them. Ashad, on the other hand, was not so brave. He stayed a few feet behind just in case he needed to run the other way.
Oh my, Amari, look at the owl!

“He won’t hurt you,” the man explained. “This owl is called a ‘Barred’ owl, and he is one of the largest owls native to Maryland.” Ashad thought he’d play it safe, and stay behind NaNa (that’s me). No coaxing would convince him to come any closer.

Inside the Nature Center Museum, we found many displays of animals and birds native to Maryland: fox, bears, squirrels, ground hogs, hawks, etc. Other displays included several creepy crawly creatures such as frogs, snakes, toads, and insects. The bees were too busy making pollen to have their photo taken, but the cockroaches didn’t mind. Greg and Garrett asked the “bug” lady for a closer look. Talk about creepy crawly—they still give me shivers!

Hot dogs with lots of ketchup and hand tattoos of bees—what two better things to finish off the visit to the Honey Harvest fest?

As we walked toward the exit to the van, Greg and I watched our son and our son’s kids racing down the trail while Cassandra took pictures. I reflected on the day’s events and decided that my son may have learned the most valuable lesson that a father can learn:

“Honey fest or Ravens football game? Okay, son, which is more important, your children or the football game?”

The children will win every time.

What You're Writing

The newest Urbanite is out and "What You're Writing" this month is "Hard Lesson." Other upcoming deadlines:

Broke Oct 13, 2009 Dec 2009
Fresh Start Nov 9, 2009 Jan 2010

Flipping Through the Garbage

I've about had it with reality TV shows and the losers that have inundated the media as of late. I mean, are these producers scraping the bottom of the barrel with their auditions? Finding the biggest hot mess in the crowd and calling it a day? I don't get it!

 

 

There are a plethora of untalented reality stars out there, but the one that takes the cake—Jon Gosselin. He grosses me out, and that's putting it nicely. I don't think that there is anybody less deserving of fame and fortune than loserface Jon. He should be at home raising the eight kids that need him instead of whoring himself around NYC, Las Vegas, and my beautiful home state of PA.

 

 

While I, myself, am guilty of watching many reality shows out there, I can't help but think that this growing trend is taking away from the talented people that deserve to be recognized. Where is the next Julia Roberts or Johnny Depp? Are potentially talented starlets being jeopardized because market demand now calls for reality instead of sitcom? Sure there are those crazy Hollywood types (Lohan, Hilton, etc.), but imagine a world where Tila Tequila and Jon Gosselin are making movies, starring in lead roles, and walking the red carpet? I guess we're not too far from that happening when people like Dipshit-Father-of-the-Year is already being asked to host Vegas parties, model ugly t-shirts, and be followed by the paparazzi. And people like Kate (his soon-to-be ex wife)? She is also now appearing on talk shows, and get this, my favorite—writing books! And why? Because she is now a celebrity, what a joke. How should that make a grad student who loves writing and is actually getting their Master’s in the subject supposed to feel? Like she doesn’t deserve it, that’s how. Should I go get knocked up with multiples now to make it big as a writer?

 

I was never really bothered by any of this until Jon Gosselin came along. Bottom line—I think “celebrity” has taken a turn for the worse. I am starting to miss shows like Friends more and more, and hope that this reality phase that everyone is fixated on fizzles out.