A Night at the Opera

We went to the opera last night. I thought it was too hot to really get dressed up, so I wore a kind of beachy-type long skirt, navy floral with a jacket. A lot of other women weren’t so done in by the heat and I enjoyed the sight of lovely ladies decked out in fabulous little dresses and incredibly high heels. I was especially intrigued by the gals with the long silk shawls across bare backs that then wrapped elegantly at the elbows. I don’t think I could wear a long shawl. I’d probably get it caught on something and hang myself.
Which might have been an act perfectly at home in TOSCA, Puccini’s tragic love story. I am new to opera. It is more Bill’s thing than mine. Not a lot of opera was being performed around my hometown (Oilton, Oklahoma) when I was growing up. And somehow in the busy years getting on with my life, college, career, kids and finally writing, I just never got around to it. I attended my very first performance maybe five or six years ago.
I like it. Who wouldn’t? Beautiful music performed by a live orchestra and amazing young people whose voices can make sound that just melts your heart. Add to that all that fabulous sets and incredible costumes and wow. It’s great.
Being unlearned in this area, I wouldn’t presume to judge Puccini on his art or his music. But I came away very sad. If you haven’t seen it, I hate to ruin the story, but basically everybody dies in the end.
A lot of people really like that. It’s almost as if they don’t get enough opportunity to shed tears in the normal activity of their day.
Some people really like to be frightened. They read Dean Koontz or Stephen King and just get thrilled to have the wits scared out of them. And they sit through all those terrifying movies with alien creatures or serial killers behind every door.
Now, I’m not truly bothered by people who look a things a little differently from me. But I do wonder about this sort of thing. Is the world not already frightening enough for Stephen King? Did Puccini not see more than enough suffering in the lives around him?
I am, without question, a happily-ever-after kind of person. I want things to turn out well in the books I read, the movies I see, the stories I tell.
Following the same logic as above, that must mean that I have not experienced enough happiness. But I know that’s not true. I’ve had my share of frightening moments and devastating tragedy, but I look at my life and see that I’ve mostly been happy.
So why are some of us attracted to thrillers or tragedies while others, like myself are more into Pollyanna’s "glad game"?
I would imagine that some very bright and enthusiastic graduate student is conducting brain studies at the very moment to determine if such things are hard wired or learned through experience. We’ll have to wait to find out.
In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the sight and sound of opera and maybe make up alternate endings that more suit my taste. Like maybe, when Tosca tells Cavaradossi that the firing squad is a farce and he should fall down and pretend to die, he answers. "I’m no actor. I could never pull that off. We’ve already got the letter of safe passage. Let’s sneak away while the guards are off stage." The two make a break for it and race toward the approaching army, where they are received with welcome. And news that Tosca has murdered Scarpia makes her a heroine to the French, lauded in song and story for decades to come. She and Cavaradossi move to Paris. He becomes a great painter. She is a virtuoso performer and they marry and have four bright happy children.
Now really, isn’t that better than throwing yourself from the parapet?

Refrigerators I Have Known

This has got to be one of the more unusual choices for blog comment, but I bought a new fridge this week and I’m excited about it. We remodeled our kitchen about two years ago and, at that time, I picked out the perfect refrigerator. However, our old refrigerator was still working fine and it seemed wasteful somehow to buy a new one when the old one had no problems.
So this week my sister’s "garage fridge" went out and she was looking to buy something used and I said, "Take mine. PLEASE, take mine."
I’ve had several of these big, hulking indispensable appliances over my lifetime. When I lived with my parents, my mom’s still required defrosting. A task that was less than fun, but gave me such a feeling of accomplishment when all the ice build up was finally gone. Not so much that I’d want to do it again. I’m sure it’s one of those tasks, like childbirth or writing a novel, that only seems more interesting in retrospect.
My very own first refrigerator was bought as the Scratch & Dent sale. My husband and I moved it in ourselves. We’d just closed on the house the day before and we owned a bed and the new refrigerator. That was enough to get by for quite a while. The box it came in went into the dining room, covered with a nice cloth, it was our first table. And it worked very well.
The thing about refrigerators, if you think about it, is to keep things fresh. Without them the milk sours, the meat rots and the vegetables have to be eaten when you cook them or you throw them out. Now we just stick it all in the fridge and we have problem free leftovers, potential breakfasts, lunches and dinners always available. Not to mention the cold glass of iced tea on a hot summer’s afternoon.
I wish that if was that easy to keep our jobs and our relationships fresh. Wouldn’t it be great if we never got stuck doing the same things, saying the same things, arguing over the same old ground?
I remember when my dad broke his leg, I was forced into a pretty rigorous schedule of daily care for both my parents. It was amazing really, how quickly my mother and I got back to exactly the same patterns of interaction we’d had when I was sixteen. She would criticize the things I did, because it was not the way she would have done them. And I would seethe with silent resentment. That was definitely a relationship gone very stale.
I’m not big on confrontations. I hate blow-ups, especially family ones. But sometimes I think you’ve just got to do something, anything, to shake things up.
For us, well my dad got better and my folks were back on their own again. Without the daily contact, Mom and I were able to have a more reasoned, amiable mother/daughter thing. By the end of her life, I think we were okay.
I wish I could call her and tell her about my new refrigerator. She’d be excited too. And she’d want to hear all the details.

Bird watching

This spring I’ve been doing some bird watching. Not the kind where you hike into nature with binoculars, more the kind where I lounge around on the porch swing or the back deck and watch the activity in our bird houses.
We have a lot of bird houses.
Last winter, Bill decided that he wanted to do some building projects with the little kids in our life.
Now, a lot of guys would have just bought some wood and maybe a plan and went with it. But, Bill, being Bill, had to do some research on bird habitat, try some experiments and produce a prototype or two before coming up with exactly the right project for three to six year olds.
He did and the kids had a great time. Everybody got to hammer something, turn a few screws and slap on primer or paint or both. The kids took home the birdhouses that they made, souvenirs of an unforgettable afternoon in Mr. Bill’s workshop.
We, of course, have all the prototypes and trial runs still here. So Bill put them up in different spots around the yard and they’ve been very successful. We’ve had wrens and tufted titmouses (titmice?) in the back and English sparrows out front.
The English sparrows got their house a little dirty and Bill suggested that’s because they are English. My heritage. I guess German sparrows would have been on their wings and knees every morning scrubbing around the perch!
Watching the mom and dad fly in to feed their screaming little nestlings over and over again is very addictive. But you know those parents must get sick to death of it. Here’s a worm. Fly away. Fly back. Here’s a worm. It doesn’t matter how exhausting or monotonous it gets, that’s what they’re supposed to do, so they do it.
That got me thinking about human families and all the things that we are supposed to do and somehow manage to do it.
I hardly remember a time when my mother didn’t work. Even back in those days, when most mom’s were stay-at-home, mine was not. It was partly economics. My dad made decent money as a laborer, but my mom’s paycheck meant more than pin money. And she really liked working. She was a practical nurse and a very good one. She took a lot of pride that. Pride she didn’t have in her haphazard housekeeping, messy sewing and brown thumb.
So with that example and all the time and money it took to get my education, it seemed pretty unextraordinary for me to have kids and a job. Until I managed to support myself with writing, I worked as a professional librarian.
Not that I would recommend it. Parenting is hard enough just by itself. Adding career on top of it, is probably crazy.
I remember very clearly what it was like. I’d finish my day at work and be just exhausted as I dragged myself through the parking garage to my car. Then I’d worm my way through traffic to the freeway which would be crowded to near bursting point. All I wanted was to get home.
Then the reality would dawn on me. Home was no quiet refuge or place of peaceful respite. The hours between my arriving home and the kids’ bedtime were the busiest of the day. Everyone would be grouchy and tired and hungry, especially hungry. I was supposed to monitor homework and referee sibling disputes while creating something hot, tasty and nutritious in the kitchen.
There would be laundry piled up and mold growing in the bathroom. I would have, unbeknownst to me, been volunteered to send twenty-five President’s Day cupcakes to school the next day. And there would be a very annoyed message on the answering machine from the receptionist at the orthodontist’s office because I’d forgotten our appointment again.
My husband helped, but he was tired too. More often than not we’d snap at each other. That is, if we got a chance to talk at all.
So as my commute continued, my mind got clearer. Approaching my exit, I confess, there were many days that I thought to myself, "What if I just kept driving?"
I could skip my exit, keep heading north and eventually I’d end up in Canada. Maybe they would never find me.
But every day, I clicked on my blinker and eased right onto the frontage road.
I did it, because that was what I was supposed to do.
Here’s a worm. Fly away. Fly back. Here’s a worm.
I guess that English sparrow and I have even more in common than I thought.
And I would venture to say that neither of us have any regrets.

Okay, I've decided to write a blog

For years now I’ve resisted the impulse, knowing that nothing I have to say could add much to public discourse in the digital age.

“But your readers miss you between books!” I am told.

The answer to that is that nothing I come up with about my life is ever going to compare with a novel. Then again, I think we’ve all had days when we say to ourselves, “I should write a book!” Of course, knowing the publishing market as I do, I realize that real life can be so busy and complicated that if you tried to make it fiction, nobody would believe it.

“That’s crazy, it could never happen.”

It could. It did. It does.

Anyway, what the blogmeisters tell me about this is that I should take something that happened in my real life and write about it and just allow my train of thought to take over and to then follow that rabbit trail for fifteen minutes.

I have a plastic kitchen timer sitting here beside me. Let’s see how it goes.

Last night, as my eyelids were getting very heavy, I threw on my old ratty nightshirt from a Valentine’s Day long past and was getting ready to brush my teeth and don my plastic nightguard when my husband, Bill, came into the bathroom and said, “Come with me.”

Normally, I would be cautious of such an invitation, but it was late and I was tired and we are legally married, so I went.

Outside he sprayed me with mosquito repellant. (It’s always good to put on a coat of poison before going to bed). And then he led me out to our hammock which hangs in the backyard between the big red oak and the multi-family birdhouse.

It was a great night to be outdoors. The moon wasn’t full, but it was plenty big enough and there was a hole in the tree canopy above us so that we could see it perfectly, except when the breeze stirred the leaves.

I lay there with him soaking up the comfort and wondering why we didn’t sleep outside all summer.

That stirred a long ago memory from my oilpatch childhood.

I remembered, in the days before air-conditioning, that people did sleep outside. In fact, they put their beds out in the yard to catch the night breeze. How they dealt with bugs or skunks or possums, I don’t know. Because, of course, my parents never did that.

But one summer our neighbors down the street did have their bed next to an old shed in the backyard. I don’t know why they put it where they did, but it was perfect for our band of young hooligans. In the afternoon when that mom and dad were hard at work, we propped a ladder against their shed. Then we took turns climbing up to slide down the tin roof and land in their bed.

No amusement park ride was ever more fun.

Bill and I have often talked and laughed about our childhoods. He was a Maryland boy and I am from Oklahoma, but our memories are similar because we were both what we like to think of as Free Range Children. Our mothers always worked and from a very young age we were mostly responsible for ourselves. People don’t do that now, and for good reason, I’m sure. But it does make for a lot of smiles looking back.

So should we sleep out on our hammock for the rest of the summer? Well, first I want to find out about those skunks and possums.