In which I run over the neighbors' mailbox and nobody holds me to account for it

I was 16 and I was up late doing something with my college application. It was warm enough that I could walk out of the house after dark in just my nightgown. It was dark and it was a very modest nightgown. Now, of course, people go to church in their pajama pants, but 32 years ago, it was considered tacky to wear nightclothes and visible undergarments in public.

I went out to put whatever it was in the mailbox and saw a car come careening down the street, over the curb, and on to our driveway, where it smashed into my dad's car on the passenger side, completely destroying the passenger door.

I stood absolutely still, shocked and stunned. Then I started screaming and ran inside to get my mom and dad out of bed. They had already fallen asleep, so it took a minute or two to explain that someone had just CRASHED INTO THE CAR!

My dad ran out. Nobody was hurt, but his car was in bad shape. The crashing car had already backed up and was on its way when my dad came out. He got in front of them and made them stop. The driver was a young man and the passenger was a kid of about 14.

The man claimed his foot had slipped and he'd hit the gas instead of the brake. We knew there had to be more to the story because we lived on a dead-end street that was only two blocks long. Our house was in the middle of the two blocks. How does someone get going that fast accidentally? Although you don't have to be going very fast at all to damage a car broadside.

I don't remember if my dad called the police. I say he should have. He suspected that it had actually been the kid driving. Which may be illegal. I don't know. It is definitely unwise. When my dad taught me to drive, a very stressful experience for the both of us, as I maintained that the lack of a traffic signal in my lane meant that even though the light was red in the other lane, I still had the right of way.

Thank goodness it was late at night and there was no other traffic. I'm surprised my dad didn't have a heart attack.

I maintained that only once, though.

I don't think the driver had insurance. I definitely would have called the cops with that. The few times I have bumped bumpers with someone, the first thing I have done is write down my insurance information for them. Each time, the person has told me he would rather just get cash from me, but I'm all, "No way jose. Just deal with USAA. That's why I have insurance." Funnily, they never do. Which makes me wonder who was at fault, really. I know that the few times someone has hit me, I have been all over it, wanting my money from their insurance company.

The one time the guy did take my insurance information and called the police, the insurance company AND THE POLICE HAHAHAHA! said that the accident was his fault, not mine, so pay up buddy.

I had to go to court to get my ticket waived. When the cops first showed up, they gave me the ticket, even though the guy had been turning right from my left side. I took photos of the accident - this is why you always have a camera on you - and of the area around the accident. I took the photos to court, along with matchbox cars to re-enact the accident, only to discover they already had little cars there.

"Nobody has ever brought her own cars before," they said.

I wore a suit. I was the best-dressed defendant in there. I say that if you want the court to rule in your favor, it might help just a little if you don't wear baggy sweatpants and dirty tennis shoes. But that's just me.

Anyhow, when the administrative judge looked at my photos and heard my explanation, she said, "You couldn't have caused that accident" and cancelled my ticket.

The insurance company said the same thing.

I hope they went back and gave a ticket to the guy who hit me and then lied to the police about it.

My friend Leigh, who is five feet tall and 90 pounds, was hit once when the other driver, a big lady, ran the light. Leigh got out and asked the big lady and the big lady's friend for their insurance.

They had none.

"That's illegal!" Leigh hissed. A witness came and pulled Leigh away from the big lady.

"Just sit here and wait for the police," the witness said. "Let them deal with it."

So the driver didn't have insurance and my dad ended up getting a new door at a junkyard and doing all the repairs and body work himself. When my mom and dad drove up to see me perform with the Small Private School Marching Band at the Small Private School- Big State School football game (oh what a tradition that was - Small Private School vs big State School for the annual humiliation), the new door was still yellow with filler in it, a lovely contrast to the green of the rest of the car.

Good thing my dad grew up working on cars and knew how to do these things. He sure wasn't getting any money from the driver.

I say all that as preface to the real story, which is what I did to a neighbor's property late one night. And then didn't have the guts even to apologize to them.

I was late to driving. My dad taught me some when I was 12, when we would drive around empty parking lots. But when it came time to really learn so I could get my license, I was slow. We moved from Panama back to the US when I was 16. In Panama, you had to be 17 to get a license, so I didn't even take driver's ed. They might not even have offered it at my high school in Panama. I never paid attention.

I took driver's ed at my high school in San Antonio and my mom and dad took me out to practice, but then I failed the test my first time. I refused to take it again right away. I didn't need to drive: I took the bus to school and my part-time job was at Woolco, which was walking distance from our house.

That spring, though, my mom insisted I get my license. I had secured a summer job teaching swimming on base and I would need to drive to get there. "I am not going to drive you to work every morning," she warned me.

So I practiced and I got my license, even though I was and still am a very bad parallel parker. It's not something you need to do much in the south. There's enough parking there. And here, Primo does almost all the driving when we're together because he is a control freak who can't bear it if someone else is driving while he's in the car.

I was also, apparently, a bad backer upper.

One night, I backed into our neighbors' mailbox. I knocked it completely over. I didn't even see it. That's what happens when you don't look.

OK. That happens. That can be fixed.

But I didn't do the right thing.

I knocked it over and instead of leaving them a note or going to their house the next morning to tell them that I had knocked over their mailbox and I was sorry and I would arrange to have it fixed, I said nothing to them.

Nothing!

I wish I could write them a note of apology now, but they're dead.

It wasn't even like they were mean people and that they would have been nasty. They were a lovely elderly couple who were always nice to me. I didn't like being in their house so much because of the cigarette smoke, but they were nice.

I didn't tell them, but I told my dad.

He raised his eyebrow at me.

He should have told me to get my butt over there to apologize, and then come home and get ready to work.

I am now really curious about why he didn't do that. Maybe he thought that if he hadn't taught me the right thing to do by this age, it was too late.

A few hours later, I saw my dad across the street, digging a hole. He poured concrete down the hole and then stuck a 2 x 4 in it. Once the concrete had set, he attached the mailbox to the beam.

Nothing was going to knock that mailbox down. Perhaps my dad was thinking that he still had two other kids who would be driving and he might as well take care of the problem for once and for all.

He never said a word to me about it.

In which I lie lie lie to my boss

I finished college a semester early, in December, just so I could save one semester's worth of tuition, which would have been about $2,000. I was living rent free in the garage apartment of some very nice people who lived in a fancy neighborhood not far from the Small Private School campus. Their only request was that I occasionally babysit their nine year old daughter, but if I had something else going on, they would say, "Don't worry! We'll have the maid stay." They were just nice, nice people who had some space and hated to see it being wasted.

In January, I started grad school in English at Big State School.

What a mistake that was.

I hated it. It was boring. It was not challenging. There was no writing. I did discover I have a knack for reading Middle English out loud. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" rolled trippingly off my tongue, but I could not believe that I was in grad school and we were reading the text in class instead of discussing it.

So I dropped out. I just quit. But I didn't officially withdraw - I just stopped going to class. There was method to my madness, though. If I were not a full-time student, I would not be on my parents' health insurance any more. I knew this even though this was 1985 and I was only 21, which is why I roll my eyes at the people who are shocked, shocked that they can't get insurance once they let their coverage lapse and then discover they are sick. This information was not a secret even 26 years ago.

The result of my not attending class was that I got an 'F' in every class. Every class, that is, except the PE class I was taking - squash and racquetball. I got an 'A' in that class. Even though I attended only half the classes.

The other result of my not attending - and getting almost all 'Fs' - was that when I started at Ut's graduate school of business five years later, I was on academic probation. I didn't even know it. They admitted me, but put me on double secret probation. I found out a year later when I was talking to my advisor and he mentioned I had recovered quite well from my earlier academic misdeeds.

I had found a few part-time temp jobs while I was still in school. One job was working at the bookstore during the book buying rush. For those of you under 30, let me explain. In the old days, you would go to class the first day and get your syllabus. That was after you had already stood in line for a few hours (at Big State School, anyhow) to get into (hopefully) and to register for your classes.

On the syllabus would be a list of the books you needed. You would go to the bookstore and hope that your books would be there. Sometimes, they wouldn't have arrived. Usually, there were almost no second-hand copies and if there were second-hand copies, they weren't much cheaper than the new books. You collected your books and then waited and waited in line to pay for them. At the end of the semester, you would try to sell them only they always seemed to change the edition - as if differential equations changes so much from one year to the next - so you were stuck with a book you no longer needed.

But the bookstore job didn't last. Now that I wasn't a student, I really needed work. I wasn't out too much tuition. At the time, I think grad school tuition was about four dollars an hour. Maybe that was undergrad. Maybe grad was $12 an hour. I think I paid about $35 an hour for business school. Whatever it was, it was a lot less than I paid for college and a lot less than anyone is paying now. I think tuition these days is a big racket and college kids are getting screwed.

I somehow found a temporary - tax season - job at the IRS service center. It paid almost seven dollars an hour, which was almost twice minimum wage at the time.

The money was especially good when you consider that we spent a few hours during training assembling our training manuals. You know - taking hunks of paper and putting them into a three-ring binder. I calculated the cost to the taxpayer of our assembling the books. Thirty new employees/trainees x two hours x seven dollars an hour = $420.

The state school for handicapped children did this sort of work for one dollar an item. So not only were the feds overcharging the US taxpayer for this work, they were depriving handicapped children of the chance to be useful and to earn some cash.

A lot of my cynicism about government work started while I was working at the IRS. There was a lot of waste. For example, we had to complete timesheets every week, accounting for our time in six-minute increments. How to complete the timesheet was a big part of training. There was a work category on the timesheet for completing the time sheet, which I found rather metaphysical. Wait. That's not the right word. What's the word for when what you are doing refers to what you are doing? I think there's a word. Maybe it's German. Some of the best words are German.

If I had stayed there - as my supervisor asked me to do when I told her I was quitting, I would still have a job today and would have one until I wanted to stop working and then I would have a very nice pension.

It was an easy job. Kind of tedious, with some moments of comedy. I was reviewing 1040xs, which is the form you complete when you made a mistake on your taxes, like forgetting to include a deduction. It wasn't always clear what the taxpayer was trying to do, so I would call to ask.

There is a feeling of great power in saying, "This is the IRS."

That gets people's attention. Nobody makes you wait. They get the person you are calling for.

I tried to use my power for good, of course. I felt so bad when this couple wasn't allowed to take the deduction for the two foster children they were raising. I tried to find ways where people would get more money back. Legally, of course. If people made mistakes on their returns, I corrected them. Nobody should be punished for a math error on his 1040x.

It wasn't hard. I started on time and left on time. I got paid.

That doesn't seem so bad now.

Hours were 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Those hours were not a problem. Except for Friday. Not that I usually had anything going on Friday nights. My college boyfriend, Calvin, was still in Big Southern City. We didn't have the money to travel back and forth that much. Even with gas at 1985 prices, a 200-mile trip was daunting. 1985 prices went with 1985 wages.

One of my roommates was a drama major. She had a role in "Sweeney Todd" and my other roommate and I wanted to see her perform. I had listened when some co-workers and I were taking our break, drinking our cokes in the shabby little break room.

Taxpayers, you will be glad to know that although the IRS wastes money on putting together training manuals, they do not provide lavish break rooms for their employees. The whole office was grim, with a Brazil-like feel.

My co-workers were talking about their strategies for not returning to work Friday night after their supper break, which was an hour. "I'm just going to tell our boss that my car broke down," one said.

Another chimed in. "I have a friend who fell and hit her head in the shower once. I'll say that happened to my roommate and I had to take her to the emergency room."

In retrospect, there was probably no reason we couldn't have said, "Would it be OK to take the second half of Friday night off without pay?"

Actually, in retrospect, there was probably no reason I couldn't have gone to the play on Saturday night, instead. What was wrong with me?

But no. We had to be big fat liars.

I usually didn't leave work for supper. I usually brought something to eat and stayed in the break room. But the Friday that my roommate was in the play, I went home at supper time. I didn't leave anything at work.

And then I didn't go back.

I didn't even call.

Because my excuse was going to be that I had gone to take out the trash while I was home and had locked myself out of the apartment.

I have locked myself out of my car once in my life and I have never locked myself out of my home. Never. When I locked myself out of the car, I was lucky enough to be a college student (i.e., young and attractive enough to inspire gallantry) on the base where my dad was stationed. I walked back to the BX and asked one of the clerks to call the MPs for me. They came and unlocked the door. I owe you one, taxpayers.

But if I were locked out of my apartment (which I wasn't), then how could I call my boss to tell her that I wasn't returning to work that night? All I could do was wait for one of my roommates to get home and let me in. Oh the tragedy.

I went home. Met roommate #1. We went to the play.

I felt guilty the whole time.

As well I should have.

Shame on me. What kind of work ethic was that?

When I got to work on Monday, I found my supervisor and told her my lie.

She just looked at me.

She was no fool.

"I hope this doesn't happen again," she said.

I shook my head. "No, it won't," I promised.

And it wouldn't. I felt too guilty.

For the rest of my work life, I did not miss a day unless there was something genuinely wrong. I think I have taken five sick days in 14 years of corporate work. If I wanted to goof off, I just told my boss I was taking a vacation day. I don't lie very well.

In which I have a weird roommate who thinks the peeling tile in the bathroom is my fault

When I first moved to Temuco, the city where I lived when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I shared a house with two other gringas.

It took me a while to get used to using the term "gringa," i.e., female foreigner. In Panama, where we lived when I was in high school, it was a serious insult, on the level with the n-word. When I moved to Chile, I heard "gringo" and "gringa" bandied about casually and I flinched every time I heard it. I asked one of the Chilean Peace Corps trainers about it and she laughed, telling me it just means "foreigner" in Chile.

Not all words mean the same thing in all Spanish-speaking countries. When I was working in Miami, the company had marketing materials where they referred to one of the product features as a "pico." "Pico" means "beak," as in a rooster's beak, but in Chile, it is also slang for man parts. I tried to point out the error to my boss - they had had the translation done by a firm in Cedar Rapids because you sure can't find any translating agencies in Miami, but he just shrugged.

Back to Temuco. I don't remember how I found Bridget and Yolanda, my roommates. Bridget was a Scottish student majoring in Spanish and Portuguese. She was spending her junior year in Chile. Yolanda was American, working on her thesis in political science, I think.

Bridget and I got on like a house on fire.

Yolanda and I - not so much.

It was all three of us for the first month. The house was big and old, but had only two bedrooms. I had what was essentially a closet - a small room between the two bedrooms that didn't even have a door. I had a sleeping bag that took 2/3 of the width of the room. My feet almost touched the wall when I was lying down. I am not that tall.

I stacked my clothes on top of my duffle bag next to the sleeping bag. I had brought my boom box with me (why? why? why would I transport something like that all the way from the US to Chile by air?) and had some cassette tapes. That was the extent of my decor.

After the first month, Bridget left for a few weeks, so I got to stay in her room on an actual bed. Poor Yolanda. She was strange. I didn't help matters, though, by hosting a Peace Corps Christmas house party at the house. However, I was paying a third of the rent, so it was as much my house as it was hers. Still, having over a dozen people strangers - to her - in the house for three days was maybe a little much.

That was when I discovered that one can leave a turkey - a cooked turkey - out overnight and survive to tell the tale. We didn't have a refrigerator in the house - used appliances were hard to find and I sure wasn't going to buy a new one for a rental property. Yogurt, too, does not have to be refrigerated.

Yolanda and I didn't spend much time together. She creeped me out. When we would eat together, she would pick at her toenails, then reach for her food. With her fingers. I don't mind the picking of the toenails and I don't mind the eating with the fingers, but the two should never mix and they should definitely never mix when one is not eating alone. Toe picking is a solitary activity that should be followed by hand washing.

She had grody underwear. I know she didn't have much money, but I have never seen such dreary, gray, drab, elastic shot underwear in my life and I am known for my thrifty ways. But there has to be a line somewhere and that somewhere is underwear that looks like my grandmother wore it 50 years ago and then used it to wash the floor. Of the basement. After a flood.

But her nastiest habit was the way she wiped the bathroom floor with her towel. And then didn't hang it outside to dry. And then used it again. On her body.

We had a troublesome shower. It was completely inside the house, with no windows to the outside and no other ventilation. The showerhead sprayed water out of the shower and onto the bathroom floor, no matter how you had the showerhead adjusted. This meant the bathroom floor was wet after every shower.

I used a rag to wipe the bathroom floor, but Yolanda used her own towel.

Which, as I mentioned, she then left inside, where it did not dry but merely went from sopping to damp and then to horribly stinky. That bathroom reeked with her nasty mildewing towel.

I stayed in that house for about six weeks, then found new quarters. I didn't like living with Yolanda and once Bridget returned, I did not want to pay a full third of the rent to sleep on the floor in a closet. Bridget and I moved out to Maruja the Bruja's house and we were happy, except for the bedbugs and the shower that almost killed us, etc.

A few weeks after we had moved, Yolanda came to my office. She had moved as well, as she could not afford the rent all by herself. Her landlord was keeping her deposit to repair the peeling linoleum on the bathroom floor.

Yes, that is what happens when a floor is exposed to water for two years, which was the time Yolanda had lived in the house. The adhesive gradually loosened under the tiles and the linoleum curled up around the edges.

I would maintain that the landlord has the responsibility to ensure that the showerhead is directing water within the confines of the shower and not without, but if the landlord is not informed of the problem by the person who signed the lease and who has a financial interest in keeping the property as she found it, perhaps that problem belongs with the tenant.

Yolanda wanted me to pay for part of her deposit.

I had lived in the house for less than two months. She had been there for two years.

No, I told her. No way.

But it was my fault that the floor had gone bad, she said. The problem didn't start until I showed up!

I pointed out that the reason the problem hadn't shown up until recently was that it had taken two years of her getting the floor wet - without complaining to the landlord - for the problem to develop.

She was just like Crazy Carmen, the Washington DC landlady who blamed me for the leaky shower that caused the ceiling problems. I lived in Carmen's house for only a few months. I noticed that water dripped from the shower door onto the floor, so I bought a squeegee and squeegeed the door every time I showered. The other renter, with whom I shared the upstairs shower, did not squeegee. After I had been in the house for a month, the plaster under the shower became damaged. Carmen was convinced it was my fault.

Correlation is not causation, ladies. If I am squeegeeing the door and wiping the water off the floor, then I am not the cause of the problem. Or, better said, I have taken all reasonable steps to prevent the problem and the next step is the landlord's: repair the showerhead, re-grout the bathroom, whatever.

Yolanda claimed that it was me plus my many houseguests who had caused the problem. I laughed and told her that most of my Peace Corps friends were environmental education volunteers who did not believe in daily bathing. Even the business and municipal management volunteers were known to skip a day. Or two. Or three. It was cold in Chile! And we had to pay for the gas to heat the shower water. Nope. Not their fault.

Yolanda was furious, but I was not giving her $200 - of my $600 monthly stipend - to cover her deposit and her problem.

She had no way to compel me. I suspect that if she ever got into the subleasing business again, she asked for a share of the deposit up front. I would.

In which I don't let the popular boy cheat off my government homework

You know that we moved the summer before my senior year of high school. I went from a school full of military and embassy kids who were used to being the new kid and to having other new kids to a school with students who had known each other since kindergarten. Of the 648 students in my senior class, only two of us were new.

That is not a good formula for making friends, especially if you are a bit of a shy nerd.

But there were a few really nice people at school, so I wasn't completely miserable. Michelle W was so nice to me. She told me about the water safety instructor class she was going to take so she could teach swimming.

I was already certified as a lifeguard, which I think you had to be before you took the WSI course. I had done that in Panama, where I had my first lifeguard job and where I was either fired or chastised for reading on the stand but there was nobody in the pool! There was nobody at the pool except me!

Still, I will agree that my supervisor had a legitimate point - that reading on the lifeguard stand Is Not Done.

I wanted to teach swimming as well. It paid better than guarding. Guarding paid minimum wage, which was $3.25, I think, and for that money, not only did I guard but I also had to clean the poop off the floor of the boys' restroom. We had one summer where a bunch of kids thought it was really funny to defecate on the floor rather than in the toilets and we guards had to clean it up.

There is nothing like cleaning poop for minimum wage to make you think that maybe college isn't so hard after all.

The good thing about that job was that the snack stand sold Frito pie. Once or twice a week, I would treat myself to a Frito pie. If you don't know what Frito pie is, I feel sad for you. You slit open a small bag of Fritos - I have a large bag in my freezer right now that I bought as my Thanksgiving treat for while Primo was at his mom and dad's for Thanksgiving (as if not being with Sly and Doris wasn't enough of a treat) - pour chili on top, then garnish with chopped onion and shredded cheese.

If you eat that, you don't get hungry again anytime soon.

Michelle not only told me about the class, but she gave me a ride every day to class. I had neither a license nor a car. Then she got me the teaching job that I had for the next three summers.

There were a few other nice people - actually, I'm sure there were many nice people, but when you are a shy teenager who is one of the new people in school, everyone looks like the enemy. Better I should say that I did not make many friends and maybe part of that is because I didn't make the effort. Oh I hate to take any blame for anything, but this is a two-way street.

But I was new and I felt completely out of place - I hardly had socks! we had just spent three years in Central America! I wore sandals and flip flops to school every day. The fashions in the Canal Zone were not the fashions in San Antonio. Not that I had been fashionable in the Canal Zone, but there seemed to be more leeway in the Zone because there was such a big mixture of people: embassy kids, military kids, Zone kids, rich Panamanians, poor Panamanians.

I was academically out of sync as well. My high school in Panama had been staffed with teachers who all had masters degrees in their subjects. Texas teaching standards at the time were not so high. (Witness the yearbook advisors.) At the time, to be a high school physics teacher, I think the teacher needed only six hours of college physics. I had six hours of college physics and I was an English major.

OK, I was an engineer turned English major, but still. I would expect more than a college freshman knowledge of physics from someone who is teaching at the high school level.

I had already covered everything we were studying in Trig in the last six weeks of my Algebra II class. I should have taken calculus as my counselor had suggested, but I was scared of ruining my GPA. How dumb was that? When I got to college calculus, I didn't have a clue. Better to screw up in high school than in college.

My English teachers - I took three English classes that year - were excellent, though.

I didn't know how to be popular. I didn't know how to fit in.

And I did not help matters the day that I refused to let Kevin whoever cheat off me in government.

I always did my homework. I almost never had to do it at home because they just didn't give that much homework back then. I feel bad for kids now. They have all this homework and then they have to "volunteer." It was a lot easier to be a teenager in the late 70s. And the music was better. I think we can all agree on that.

It was a few minutes before class. The teacher was outside of the room. Kevin, who had never said a nice word to me and why would he? He was one of the Popular Boys - football player, etc - looked at me, looked at my homework sitting on my desk, and said, "Let me copy that."

I was not a fan of copying.

When I was in second grade, I let a classmate copy my workbook. The teacher found out and ripped my workbook in half. That will scare a little kid.

Still, despite my principles, I used to let Gerry, my 11th-grade physiology lab partner, copy my lab notes. We were dissecting the worm, the frog, and the pig together, so I justified it by telling myself it was joint work.

But I was really letting Gerry copy my notes and homeworks because I had a crush on him, not that I could admit it back then because my friend J had a massive crush on him and had for years, so she had first dibs.

But Kevin? I didn't have a crush on Kevin. He wasn't my friend. He hadn't escorted me to the stage at the National Honor society thingy even though Lisa S thought he should escort her and she didn't talk to me again after that, not that we had ever been friends. Even at our 20 year high school reunion, when I saw Lisa in the Ladies and said hi, she ignored me.

Bitch.

Kevin had never been nice to me. What was in it for me?

I put my hand over my homework. Kevin looked toward the door. "Give it!" he said.

I picked it up and pulled it toward me. "No," I said defiantly.

The girl behind me gasped.

His eyes widened.

"Bitch!" he hissed at me. His posse glared at me. I was dead to them.

The teacher walked in. I was safe. Kevin gave me one more dirty look before turning around. The rest of the week, he and his friends glared at me and whispered when I came in. Good thing there wasn't facebook back then. I did my best to ignore them, but I knew I had made myself a pariah.

The best I can hope for is that he ended up in prison.

What do you guys think?

Which pen name do you prefer? Helen Tennesen or Sylvia Stasek?

In which I am a fraudulent bridesmaid

The summer before my senior year of high school, we moved from Howard Air Force Base in the Panama Canal Zone to Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.

It was not an easy move. There was no base housing available and there was no room in the temporary housing on base, so all five of us lived in a short-term furnished apartment until my parents found a house. Five people, crammed into a small space. My mom had to drive us to school every morning - we heard Diana Ross singing "Upside Down" at least once a day - because the apartment was nowhere near the bus route.

The only good thing about the apartment was that it had a TV, which was something we had not seen since we had moved to Panama. We watched some old episodes of Happy Days. My dad loved the show - he had gone to college in Milwaukee. I did not understand, though, why he and my mom thought it was so funny when Potsi wanted to watch the submarine races with his girlfriend. That sounded boring to me - who wants to watch a dumb race? I had seen horse races and didn't think they were that great. Any kind of race = isn't there something better to do?

I was one of two new students in my class of 648 at school. The other new student, Belinda, was also a military brat whose father had been transferred from England to San Antonio.

We met because we both joined the yearbook staff as photographers. The other five photographers were boys and they wanted nothing to do with us. I don't know if they thought theirs was the photography kingdom or if they just thought we weren't cute enough. I have to say that my high school years were not my greatest, especially my senior year, when I suddenly went from being on the swim team and playing soccer to doing nothing because my new school didn't have either of those activities. I kept eating as if I were going to swim practice every day. That is not a good formula: eating as if you are exercising but not exercising.

Belinda was cute in a soft, sweet way. She was a tall, big girl with rounded edges and big eyes. She made most of her own clothes, just as I did. Homemade clothes + not thin = not pursued by high school boys.

I hate to say anything mean about her because she was so sweet, but her homemade clothes looked homemade: she didn't press out the seams or the hems and she decorated with a lot of rick rack.

My clothes were homemade as well, but they looked bad for other reasons. A green krinkle cloth (I loved krinkle cloth) jumpsuit with a belt made of the same fabric? Not exactly haute couture.

But my seams were pressed. The deal my mom made with me when I started sewing was that she would pay for half the materials if I did everything to her satisfaction. After each step, if she didn't like it, I had to rip it out and do it over or whatever the applicable action might have been.

In retrospect, I am thinking that perhaps it would have been nice if she had paid for all of it or at least said, "Because I am your mother, I will pay for $X of clothing a year. If you want to spend more than that, I will go halfsies with you."

My family is weird about money.

She did, though, give me a budget for my clothes for college. One hundred dollars. And I wasted it on - I am shaking my head in rue as we speak - a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, a green Izod (green? I look awful in green), and a madras plaid blazer.

What was I, a middle-aged male golfer?

Belinda and I became friends out of default. She was so nice. We banded together for protection against the other photographers and from the yearbook advisors, who I now realize were teachers not because they were really good at their subject and had a passion for it, like my English, biology, Spanish, and government teachers, but because there was no other job they could get. Yearbook advisor must be where the school sends the incompetent.

Mr R was creepy, with wet lips and a little goatee. The other advisor, Ms C, had wiry gray hair, chin whiskers and a belly that rivaled Santa's. They were both quite unattractive and their physical unattractiveness was made worse by their meanness.

The low point of the yearbook year was when Mr R informed me that I had to sell at least X ads to get an A.

There had been nothing about ad sales when I signed up for the class. I had been on the yearbook staff for two years at my high school in Panama and there were no ad sales.

I was new in town. My parents were not connected. I had no idea how to sell ads. I did not sell an A's worth of ads. I sold a C's worth, which I think was none. That is the only C I got in high school. Jerk.

Ms C accused me of not dressing properly to sell the ads. She may have had a point - I rode my bike to the shops and wore a pair of jeans that were too tight because I wasn't swimming any more and a purple krinkle cloth top I had made myself.

But considering Ms C wore doubleknit polyester tent dresses splashed with big flowers and her sweat, I don't think she was in a position to criticize.

The only assignment I remember Mr R giving us - the boys got all the sports - was to take photos at the homecoming dance. Neither Belinda nor I were invited to the dance. But we had to dress up and go to take photos. It's humiliating enough not to be invited to a dance, but then to have to go anyway without a date so everyone there knows you weren't invited - that's pretty bad.

I should have worn jeans out of protest, but I wore the white dress I had made for my National Honor Society induction ceremony. That dress, unlike any bridesmaid dress I've ever had, was worn again.

That dance was the only high school dance I attended except for the Sadie Hawkins dance my junior year that I went to with the guy who ditched me right before the prom. Not that I remember this stuff more than 30 years later. Not that I am still concerned with what happened to me in high school. Not that I haven't moved on.

Back to Belinda. We were friends. She didn't care that the high school boys weren't interested in her because she didn't waste time with high school boys. She went out with airmen from the base where our dads were stationed.

She even became engaged to one of them in December, then decided that she didn't want to be engaged after all. I had to help her return the ring. She drove us to his place, then I rang the doorbell and delivered the ring, which made me very nervous because he got angry. She had already told him on the phone that she was breaking up with him, but I guess he didn't believe her.

A few months later, they were back together. She asked me to be her maid of honor at their summer wedding.

Sure, I agreed, not realizing that being in a wedding is an expensive pain in the neck where you will probably be forced to wear lavender, a color that looks good on nobody. I was flattered to be asked to be in a wedding. Now, I am very happy that almost all my friends are married and that I will never have to go through that again.

And nobody - nobody! - ever gets to wear the dress again. Unless you do as I did and buy a Vera Wang lavender bridesmaid dress at the Junior League thrift shop to wear to a Halloween party, with the theme being, "See? I wore it again."

Which was almost as good as the blue dress that I wore with a Q-tip pinned to the chest back in the late 90s. I was a White House intern.

She told me I could wear whatever I wanted. I decided the perfect bridesmaid dress would be a Gunnesax off the shoulder gown made with blue krinkle cloth and lots of cream ribbon trim and beads.

I spent hours making that thing. Hours. Hours and hours.

And then she broke off the engagement. Again.

We graduated. I went off to college, she stayed at home and got a job. I didn't wear the dress. We didn't write. We didn't call. We had been friends of the moment and now our lives had gone in different directions.

In March, I got a letter from her. She was getting married. Different guy, this time. Would I be her maid of honor?

I didn't know what to say. I know now, of course. I should have said something to release her from what was surely a sense of obligation. I should have said that I would hate for one of her more deserving friends - there were three other bridesmaids - not to have the honor.

Only how do you say something like that tactfully? Even if I know she asked me only because she had already asked me for the other wedding, telling her I didn't want to do it seemed insulting.

So I said yes.

This time, she had fabric and a pattern picked out. A far simpler, more elegant dress than the Gunnesax dress. But still, another dress I would never wear again. Was it lavender? I think it was. That was when my hate affair with lavender began. I had to wear lavender in two other weddings after that. I never want to see that color unless it is on an actual lavender plant again.

She was five months pregnant at her June wedding. She looked lovely - blooming and blushing in a dress she had made herself.

But I knew nobody at the wedding except her. I felt like a fraud as I posed for photos. I should have had the guts to tell her no, I didn't want to be in the wedding. Thirty years later, she probably looks at her wedding photos and wonders, "Now who was that woman standing next to me?"

She had her baby after I had gone back to school for my sophomore year. I went to see her over Christmas break. She was living with her mom and dad because her husband had been posted overseas. She had taken down the Police posters that had adorned her bedroom walls. Now the room was filled with a crib and other baby stuff. He was a cute baby as far as babies go, but we didn't have that much to talk about.

I have not spoken to her since. I wonder what ever happened to her. I hope she's happy.

Welcome!

Hello readers from A Femme d'un Certain Age! My friend Tish very kindly invited me to post at her place today and last week. I'm honored to be there. Go check it out! You'll like what Tish has to say. She's fun.

In which we find kittens in the haymow

I have a photo from the summer of 1971, which we spent at my grandparents' farm in northern Wisconsin. We were living in Spain at the time, but came back for my uncle's wedding.

My brother and I are standing in front of a tractor, a hay wagon, and what appears to be a binder. I am wearing my Hee-Haw short overalls, which I loved, and my hair is a white blonde that will never again re-appear on my head, at least not without significant chemical interference. The overalls are too small and too short and are tight against my chubby thighs. I realize now that chubby thighs have always been with me and will always be with me. I guess there are worse problems to have than having too much to eat.

My brother, with his home haircut, which indeed looks like someone inverted a bowl over his head and cut around the edges and he looked like all the other boys - when did people start taking their kids to the beauty shop? did they do it back then and we were just out of it? or is that a new thing? - is wearing a gray t-shirt, barely tucked into his jeans, which are held up with a very thick black belt with a big buckle.

It was the early 70s, after all.

We are each holding a tiny black kitten.

We rescued those kittens.

Well, my uncles did.

We were at the farm for the summer. What a great place for a kid to spend a summer. I have always felt so sorry for people who didn't have farmer grandparents. What did they do when they visited their grandparents?

Primo's grandfather worked in a factory in a big city. "He taught me to play pool," Primo says. I suppose that's OK, but it's not the same as being on a farm.

We got to ride along on the hay wagon as my grandfather and my two uncles, who were still in high school, baled hay. One of the reasons that farm kids do well in non-farm jobs is that they have done really hard work their entire lives and they are used to it. After getting up every morning to milk the cows before going to school, after shoveling composting manure, and after baling hay in the hot summer sun, everything else is a piece of cake.

We went fishing in the creek on the south side of the farm. We picked wild raspberries. If you have ever wondered why raspberries are so expensive, I can tell you why: it is a pain in the neck to get to them in the tangled, thorny brambles.

We played in the attic where my grandmother had her bottles of homemade root beer. We watched cows being inseminated by the vet and calves being born. We got to wean the calves - you put your hand in a bucket of milk and let the calf suck your hand. You keep moving your hand closer and closer to the bucket and voila! the calf understands.

We played in the haymow, which was full of scratchy hay and dust and peacock poop on the crossbeams (I guess peacocks can fly), but my grandfather had installed a rope swing for us, so we would climb to the top of the hay, grab the swing, and jump, then release on top of the pile of chaff. Which is also very scratchy.

My grandmother welcomed help in the kitchen. Other photos show me and my siblings playing in the big drawer of flour. This was when I was only five, the year my dad was in Vietnam and my mom got an apartment not far from her mom and dad's farm. We spent a lot of time at the farm that year. My grandmother, who had to have been somewhat drill sergeant-ish to rear seven children and seven foster children, along with growing and canning all her own vegetables, baking bread almost daily, and sewing almost all the clothes worn in the house, was rather mellow by this point and did not seem to mind the flour all over the floor. I sure would, but she liked having kids around.

The farm was not big. The barn held only about 200 cows. There was a silo on the east side, a cooling shed for the milk on the north side, and a machine shop where my grandfather did all the work on the tractors, etc, on the west side. Across from the barn a granary. Between the barn and the granary was my grandmother's flower garden, which was glorious. When she and my grandfather sold the farm and built a small house in town in the late 70s, she took many of the flowers with her and planted them at the new house. When she moved into the nursing home two years before she died, my mom dug up all the iris bulbs. I have some of them in my garden now.

Between the granary and the house was the garage and the outhouse. They got indoor plumbing when my mom was 12, so the outhouse wasn't used any more.

Can you imagine having to use an outhouse in a northern Wisconsin winter?

I cannot. I do not want to.

I can sort of imagine, though. The year we moved back from Spain to the US, we spent several weeks with my grandparents, who were renting another farmhouse while their house in town was being built. They had already sold their farm that summer.

This was December and the house we were staying in did not have any source of heat, I don't think, other than the wood burning stove in the kitchen. My sister and I shared a bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms and we had to pile it high with blankets to get warm enough. In the morning, we got dressed under the blankets before we emerged into the cold, cold room and ran downstairs to be next to the stove. There was, however, indoor plumbing. It had to have been cold, though. How can you pee when you are cold? It's hard. I must have waited to get to school every day before I did anything. Yes, school. My parents enrolled us in the small Catholic school in town that my dad had attended when he was a boy. My cousins were there and we had a grand time. Lunch was made every day in the church basement by some of the church ladies, who fed us homemade bread and produce they had canned themselves. For a quarter. A QUARTER.

Now, everything is falling down. The barn is nothing but a pile of weathered planks. The silo has been gone for years. I get sick to my stomach every time I drive past the place and see the neglect. It's good my grandparents are not alive to see this. Three generations to build the place, three generations who got their living from this farm, six children who all died of diphtheria in seven days buried behind the garden - my great-great grandmother's kids, I think, and now it's rubble.

I have photos of my siblings and me in the bathtub in that relatively new bathroom. Pink tile. Hot pink tile. I liked it. I like bright colors. It goes with my love of animal prints. I had an apartment in Houston with a teal bathroom - teal tile, teal tub, teal toilet.

I loved it. What's wrong with a non-white bathroom?

The house was big enough, I suppose. The kids had to share a room, boys in one, girls in another. There was a spare room downstairs next to my grandparents' room. That was where my great-grandmother was living when I was little.

So. Back to the kittens.

There were always animals at the farm. There was always at least one big, gentle dog.

"No, not a working dog," my mom remembers when I ask her. There were no animals to be herded. The kids got the cows, not the dog. "They were decorative. And to eat the table scraps."

There is a photo of me at three, beaming as I reach up to put my arms around Captain's neck. Captain was a big collie and he was beautiful. I like big dogs. It's the little yappy dogs I don't like. That and any dog that sticks his nose where it doesn't belong. Manners, please.

There were barn cats. Not pet cats. But barn cats. They were working animals. The cats had a job to do: keep the rats and mice out of the hay and grain.

One day, as we were playing in the hayhow, my brother and I heard a lot of meowing. Desperate meowing. We couldn't find the kittens, so got our uncles involved. They tracked the sound to the west side of the haymow, against the machine shop wall, halfway into the hay. Looked like the mama cat had made a little nest deep in the hay.

That was when they remembered that they had run over a cat while they were mowing hay. It's not something you can avoid: the grass is tall and you can't see animals that might be hiding there. Rabbits meet their maker this way all the time.

They couldn't get to the kittens from the haymow, so they pulled out some of the boards on the machine shed wall. The kittens were frantic and wild, scratching and fighting as my uncles pulled them out.

They were tiny black fluffballs with razor-sharp claws. They had never seen humans before and were scared to death. But they were hungry, so lapped at the bowl of milk we gave them, shuddering as they drank and watching us in fear, even though we had made a nice box for them in the corner of the kitchen and thought we were staying far enough away. Kittens have a good instinct and know that human children are not always to be trusted.

We eventually got them calm enough that we could hold them, but they didn't really like it. They tolerated it, but were always planning their escape. They were wild animals and they knew it. Once they figured out how to get food on their own, they were gone. But we saved them from certain death.

In which I give my number to a man whom I don't want to call me

The only good thing about being laid off - other than getting a bunch of money and time at once, which is nice but not such a good strategy for long-term survival, is that you can put off dealing with unpleasant things like phone calls from people who never should have had your number in the first place.

By "people," I mean men who asked for the number and I didn't have the guts to say no to, although I suppose it was also a relief not to get any more phone calls asking to speak to the person in charge of making the waste disposal services purchasing decisions, as was wont to happen because Dun & Bradstreet had mistakenly printed my phone number as the main contact number for Acme, which, at the time, had over 100,000 employees. I knew the D&B rep and insisted that he owed me a box of really nice chocolates for all the phone calls I had gotten because of their mistake.

In August, before I got the news that my job was disappearing and I was supposed to disappear along with it, I was at Dinstuhl's, the fancy chocolate store in Memphis, buying chocolate for the customer service reps at the factories. I had no authority over these people, no way to make them do what I needed them to do, which was a lot of pain in the neck work with the customer and product data, so I used chocolate as a bribe.

Is that wrong?

I don't think so. I think "Whatever it takes" is a perfectly good motto when it comes to work and chocolate. As long as I had that corporate American Express and as long as my boss was signing off on my expense reports, which he always did because he never bothered to read anything I sent to him - he complained that I used "big words" that "made people feel stupid," although he could never give me an example of 1. a big word or 2. a person who felt stupid, then I was going to buy Good Chocolate.

While I was waiting for the clerk to wrap my 15 boxes of assorted truffles - as soon as her back was turned, I snatched another sample of the cashew brittle that was on top of the counter, I fell into conversation with a middle-aged man - more middle aged than I was at the time - who was also waiting for chocolate.

I’ll talk to anyone if I’m bored. He was nice enough. Dressed in a suit, which is something I always like to see, as I hate business casual.

We talked about our mutual love of chocolate, comparing brands and types of chocolate, and agreeing that Dinstuhl's had better chocolate than Godiva. He told me about how he had bicycled across Europe when he was in his 20s, sampling chocolate along the way. It was a nice conversation. I was not flirting. 1. I don't flirt because I am really, really bad at it. 2. I had no interest in this guy in that way. 3. I had just met Gomez the Moroccan Millionaire so my mind was elsewhere.

He asked where I worked. I told him. He told me he was a lawyer, handed me his card. I made some joke about keeping it in case I needed my one phone call in the middle of the night.

When I saw his name, I almost asked if he was my friend Nancy Jones’ dad. He looked old enough to be someone's dad. Memphis is a small place. Everyone is related to everyone else or at least they all know each other. He very well could have been Nancy's dad.

Instead, I asked if he was related to her. I didn’t want to insult him by implying he was dad age, which in retrospect is silly because there is nothing wrong with being dad age. Now I wish I had.

Then he asked for my card.

I hesitated.

Was he asking for my phone number? What should I do? I was not accustomed to men asking for my phone number. In fact, I think it’s happened maybe two or three times my entire life. What are you supposed to do if the man asking for your number is not a man in whom you are interested?

My sister, the man magnet, is a pro at this. She would have known exactly how to handle the situation. “Oh, I don’t have any,” she would have said breezily.

Somehow, I think this guy would have had a comeback. “Let me write your number on one of my cards,” he would have replied.

But Jenny’s trick to that is to transpose a few digits. “That way, they think they just wrote the number down wrong and their feelings don’t get hurt,” she explains.

But with a sinking feeling, I gave him my card. I didn’t want to go out with this guy but I didn't have the guts not to give him my card.

He didn't call.

And he didn't call.

And he didn't call.

I stopped worrying about it.

As days passed and the risk grew less, my relief grew. Whew! Off the hook!

Imagine pages flying off a calendar. Time passes. Time passes.

Now it was December. I had been laid off. I had met Primo and ditched Gomez the Moroccan Millionaire. My last day of work was going to be December 30.

On December 12, he called. I heard the voicemail: “Golddigger, this is Steve Jones. We met several months ago at Dinstuhl's. I never called because I lost your card but I just found it. I’ll call you next week. Maybe we can have a drink together.”

That call sent chills of fear down my spine.

Even if I hadn't met Primo and even if I hadn't ditched Gomez, even if I were all alone, I wouldn't be interested in dating someone who I thought was a friend's dad.

So I did what any rational person would do. I didn't answer any local outside phone calls. I let them all go to voicemail and then I screened them.

I did that for three weeks.

And he never called back.

In which Primo and I realize we have irreconcilable differences

When Primo and I first met, there was a lot of eating out. A lot of cooking fine meals. Indeed, on my first visit to his place in Fairview,* Primo made me a fabulous meal of steak and veg on the grill. It was December. There was snow. But that didn't stop him. He just went out on the porch in his flip flops, bravely ignoring the cold, and cooked with fire. Women like to see men flirting with danger. It's an aphrodisiac.

I cooked, too. I made waffles for supper one Friday evening, which is a perfectly fine meal if you ask me, but Primo was a little concerned because apparently, there is not a recommended wine for waffles. But waffles are fun and good and who has time to make them in the morning when you are really hungry and want something right now?

We ate out. Tried old and new restaurants. We ate in, trying new recipes: osso bucco, cream cheese bacon wrapped jalapeno thingies.**

Most importantly, we ate together. At the dining room table. Sometimes with candles. Always with cloth napkins. We use cloth napkins now. Even when we are eating in front of the TV.

Doris and Sly, the big environmentalists, use paper napkins. Wasteful. Tacky. Cloth is elegant, it feels better than paper, and it is certainly more responsible. (No, you do not have to wash your napkin every time you use it unless you are a complete slob. Primo and I are not complete slobs. Yes, we wash the napkins after we have company because nobody wants to use a napkin someone else has used, kind of like nobody wants to take a shower in the guest bathroom unless the tub has been cleaned. Who wants to stand in the dirt of a stranger? Not I.)

Then we got married. And moved into our house.

The dining room is in the cold part of the house. The section we keep closed off because our heating bill for the remaining part of the house is already $300/month in January and why would we want to heat part of the house that we almost never use? Are we made of money? Sly and Doris think so but they are wrong.

Man, they bug me.

So now, with the dining room closed off, we are reduced to using the kitchen, which has a table and benches, which would be fine, but that's not the real issue.

The real issue is that now that we are married, we have dropped our masks. I don't want to pretend any more that I like a big meal at night with long, intimate conversations and I certainly don't want to cook a big meal every day. While we were dating, I was trying to impress Primo with my wifely skills: cooking, cleaning, sock darning. But now, hahahahaha, we're married and he's stuck with me and I don't have to show off any more.

What I like to do is eat my main meal at lunch and then have an apple and cheese or an apple and peanut butter in the evenings. Which is exactly what I do when Primo is traveling, even though he complains that I am supposed to save the Good Cheese for when he is home. Yeah. Right. He's eating out at nice restaurants and I'm supposed to subsist on crummy cheese? We don't even have any Bad Cheese in our house. We have the Good Cheese and the Really Good Cheese and I'm not supposed to touch any of it because I'm supposed to share it with Primo.

But I don't even want the fancy meal when he is home. Well, I wouldn't mind the fancy meal, but I don't want to eat it at 8:00 p.m.

I'm hungry way before then. Primo likes to get super hungry before eating, but I like to maintain a steady state of stomach comfort. I see no benefit to feeling hungry. Isn't that what our subsistence farmer/hunter/gatherer ancestors worked to escape? Voluntary hunger is a concept that I just don't get, which is why I always keep Emergency Chocolate in my purse and in the car. I intend to avoid the tragedy of being hungy in public places if at all possible and if it means a few extra ounces in my purse, so be it.

So these are the essential eating problems:

1. Primo likes to eat late, I like to eat early
2. Primo wants a big meal at supper, I want it at lunch
3. Primo is the SLOWEST EATER IN THE WORLD

Let's talk about number 3. I like to eat - it's one of my main hobbies, which is why exercise has to be my other hobby because spending money on new clothes a size larger is definitely not a hobby - but I don't like to drag it out. Sit down, eat, leave. Or, when I am alone, open the fridge, pull out the container of Thai Basil Chicken, eat as much as I want from the container (with the fridge closed - Primo is the fridge door open leaver, which makes me nuts), return container to fridge, return to book.

I view eating as a necessary biological function.

Primo looks at it as a Major Social Activity.

I agree with him - when there are other people besides us involved. I love having supper with friends.

But when it's just us? No. I do not want to spend an hour eating supper. It takes me ten minutes to finish and then I am supposed to watch Primo eat, which (love you, honey!) is dull, dull, dull.

I am also supposed to watch him do his wine rituals, which involve swirling wine around in his mouth and sticking his nose in the wineglass. Maybe if I appreciated wine, I would understand, but from my perspective of a former diet Coke drinker, it all seems silly.

So we have these conflicts. And I don't know how to resolve them, because they are zero-sum.


* Where he paid for the ticket, unlike the Moroccan millionaire, Gomez, who was simultaneously cheap and extravagent at the first time - he didn't buy my ticket to Paris but we went Ferrari shopping. Gomez is one of those people who have never not had money and I guess it just never occurred to him that not all of us have inherited vast wealth and actually have to worry about what we spend. Primo has not inherited wealth nor is that likely to happen, but he works his butt off and does not spend unwisely, unless you want to count all the wine in the basement and the almost weekly bargains from Menards of things we do not need like plastic bags that are guaranteed to make produce stay fresh for two weeks or longer. We use our produce before it's two weeks old, I tell him. Please return the bags. But they are only $2 after the rebate! he argues.

** If you have not tried these, you do not know what you are missing. Make them right now.

In which we eat a lot of fish but not $35 worth

I think I've told you guys that Primo and I went to Morocco shortly after we met. I had been laid off from my job and had friends working in Rabat. He had vacation and frequent flier miles. The perfect combination of time + resources. The time was mine, the resources were his.

In retrospect, I should have been looking for a job rather than gallivanting around the world, but I was so confident that employers would snap me up that I thought I could delay the search a few months while I relaxed from the enormous stress of being employed and being able to pay my bills.

Employers didn't snap me up. I got married and stopped looking for work. Now I am discovering that a six-year gap on a resume does not entice employers. This is a problem. This is why I need to write and sell a bestselling novel - so I can contribute to the financial well being of this household and so Primo can quit his job, which has become a trial, and become a full time revolutionary or something like that. I have had my few years of staying at home. I guess it's his turn now. Plus I am bored staying at home. As a lounge around the house gold-digging wife, I have no reason to hire someone else to clean my house and have to do it myself and I hate cleaning house. If we were both working, we could pay someone else to clean the house, although the cleaning lady never cleans the house as well as I do, and not feel guilty and wasteful about it.

Anyhow. We went to Morocco the February after I was laid off. Then we went again a few years later - I was still unemployed - and got more adventurous. The second time, which I suppose was our honeymoon, as it happened one month after our wedding, we went off on our own to a small town on the coast. First, we spent the weekend with Steve and Megan and their kids at the beach. On Sunday, Steve and Megan went back to Rabat and Primo and I took the bus to Essaouira. We should have taken the Good Bus, but it cost a lot more (I think it was ten times as much) than the regular people bus. "I traveled through South America on local buses," I told Primo. "We can do this."

The problem with local buses is that they are filled with local people who sometimes do not have the same access to water to which we are accustomed and who are not spoiled with space as we are, which means that one is squeezed into a bus next to people who don't smell so good. I know. First world problem. At least we have indoor plumbing to go home to.

But the local bus was cramped and hot and slow and took forever to get Essaouira. The usual salesguy stood at the front of the bus and tried to sell us stuff. There was some sort of religious item he was pushing. When it made its way back to us and I took it to examine it, he snatched it out of my hand with some sharp words whose meaning escaped me but whose intent did not. I wasn't supposed to touch that stuff.

There is something about buses and bus stations that attracts vendors. A captive audience, I suppose. When I was waiting to board my bus at the La Paz, Bolivia, bus station, it of one of the nastiest bathrooms I've ever seen.

Oh now you want to hear about the bathroom. Of course. It's only natural.

The women's restroom consisted of a few holes in the ground. These holes were not separated by walls. They were right out there in the open. There was a wall around the restroom, but once inside, you did what you needed to do in plain view.

I was facing a long bus ride across Bolivia to Puno, Peru, and knew there would not be many chances to pee, so I did what I had to do. Not only did I do it - squatting over the hole while an Aymara grandmother and a little girl watched me, I did it with my big backpack on my back and my daypack in front of me. I did not want to put either of them on the floor. You know I am not that squeamish about that sort of thing (except for having to use a dirty shower), so you know that floor had to be in bad shape. I will say, though, that if I had to go through that every day, several times a day, I would have thighs of steel.

Oh. I didn't even tell you the main La Paz bus station story. This was the time that I saw the snake-oil salesman pushing snake oil and lizard oil. If you've ever wondered if snake-oil salesmen really sell snake oil, wonder no longer. They do. This guy had several buckets containing dead reptiles and snakes. (Is a snake a reptile? I can't remember.) He was touting the curative properties of the fat of these animals - good for cancer, back pain, liver problems, heat problems, skin, whatever.

He called for a volunteer from the audience. A man came forward and removed his shirt at the salesman's direction, then squatted. The salesman stuck his hand into one of the buckets and removed it after he had grabbed a hunk of rendered snake fat, which he then rubbed into the volunteer's back.

"My back feels better!" the volunteer exclaimed as the women in their full skirts and black hats surged forward to give the salesman their precious coins.

Maybe I should have bought some. Who knew it was so good for everything?

Back to Morocco. We arrived in Essaouira. Like other towns in Morocco, Essaouira is an old city with tiny, winding streets that don't fall into a conventional Midwestern planned city model. There are no right angles. It's all twists and curves and dead ends. Old stone and plaster walls, thick wooden doors adorned with the hand of Fatima and huge wrought iron hinges. It's really beautiful, but you better bring bread crumbs.

We hired a guy with a hand cart to take us to our hotel in the middle of the city and good thing we did or we never would have found it. He threw our bags into the cart on top of a few thick sheets of dried cod, a food like tripe in that I know how to say it in many languages just so I can make sure never to eat it, and pushed his way through the djellaba-clad crowd, yelling, "Balak balak!" which meant, "Get out of the way!" It was the human voice equivalent to the nasty beeping you hear in the airport when the cart is coming through with the old people.

We got to our hotel, which was a beautiful, elegant old building with a lovely rooftop patio that overlooked the ocean. The walls were bright white and accented with wrought-iron handrails and blue tiles. From our room, we could see into the narrow street and watch the women, heads covered with a scarf, bodies covered with a djellaba - Megan said that she liked to throw her djallaba over her PJs in the morning to run to the bakery - hurrying away.

We got up the next day and wandered around. Essaouira is famous for its fish and the fish market. On the south end of town, in a little square, the fishermen drop off their catch at about a dozen booths. Diners choose the booth, examine the fish, which has been cleaned and placed on ice, select the fish that they want to eat, and wait at the picnic tables while the cooks grill the fish.

We had noticed a sign in the middle of the square stating - in French, which I speak very badly but speak anyhow and Primo speaks well but won't speak because he doesn't speak it perfectly - that the fish was priced by the kilo and by law, the prices of the various fish and shellfish were x, y, and z. We had thought, Well, that's the price and that doesn't seem to bad.

We selected our fish, got a real Coke made with cane sugar (is anyone else sad that the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling plant has been acquired? maybe there are other places to get soda made with cane sugar in the US, but I don't know of them), sat at a table, watched the cats waiting for their share of fish, and then ate a delicious meal of fish, fresh baguette, and tomato, onion, and parsley salad. The sun was out, the ocean was beautiful, the sky was blue with puffy white clouds, the temperature was perfect. It was a lovely day and a lovely lunch.

Until we got that feeling.

You know that feeling. That feeling of realizing that you paid too much. I am talking about the tourist tax, of course -- the extra a foreigner pays because he 1) doesn't know how to bargain, 2) doesn't want to bargain because hello it is considered rude in our culture, 3) doesn't know what he should be paying and 4) doesn't speak the language so can't bargain even if he wants to.

We paid 300 dirhams, or about $35 for our fish. That doesn't sound like a lot (well, I think it's a lot for lunch, but I'm a real cheapskate), but consider we got two first-class train tickets for a 70-mile trip for $20 and that you can get a big schwarma (like a gyro) with lots of meat for $3.

It didn't occur to us to ask the weight of the sardines, langostine, and calamari we had chosen and do the math ourselves. It wasn't until after we left and saw the sign again that we realized that we had paid way too much -- that our lunch should have cost about $6.

When I was in South America, I became a master of bargaining, telling taxi drivers that I was foreign, not stupid, and that I wasn't going to pay the gringo price. Here, I was 13 years out of practice, I didn't speak French well, and I was dealing with Moroccan traders, who are master negotiators, as we had learned during our great Rug Purchasing Adventures. This chick from the Midwest didn't stand a chance against thousands of years of camel traders.

I was angry. It's not that it was so much money - although we never have $35 lunches at home - it's that I felt cheated. I don't like being taken advantage of. But what were we going to do? I complained and whined and Primo got tired of hearing me.

Then that night, we paid too much for spices. Our fault, I know. I should have known my prices. I should have listened to Megan, who told me to do all our shopping in Rabat because that's where we would find the best prices. Ha. Like someone who had lived there for four years would know.

The next morning, the guy at the internet cafe wanted to overcharge us. Sure, it was only a dollar, but by then, we were getting a little tired of the gringo target on our backs and the socialized pricing, especially with the internet thing because they had prices posted and I had kept very close track of the time.

They told us 20 dirhams for the computer time when it should have been 10. The guy insisted that Primo had spent an hour and five minutes on the computer, which would have thrown him from the ten dirhams for an hour into the 15 dh for an hour and a half.

I had worked 55 minutes, with ten minutes lost because my computer crashed and then the guy couldn't get the new one to switch to the English keyboard. (They were French keyboards, which are not easy to work in. There is a program that will switch to an English keyboard - not the actual keys, of course, but what letter shows up when you strike a certain key, which is fine for someone who is a touch typist but not so good for someone who looks at the keyboard when she types, but it was still better than having to seek the letters I wanted on the French version.)

I was loaded for bear. I was mad as heck and I was not going to take it anymore. Very politely but very firmly, I insisted that we owed them only ten dirhams. They rolled their eyes -- good grief, a woman telling us what to do, but I persisted. Again, politely but firmly. Very firmly. Until the guy gave us ten dirhams back.

Flush with victory, Primo and I strolled to the fish market. We found the sign with the prices and a phone number for consumer complaints. I wrote down the phone number and the prices, then we went to the stand where we had eaten.

I wanted our money back. We had been overcharged and I didn't like it. Primo, who will take items back to Target or Menards for a one-dollar price adjustment three weeks after he has made the initial purchase (not a special trip, but on his way to somewhere else), had suggested we just let it go. What's one to do when one is a tourist in a foreign language?

But a twenty-nine dollar overcharge? That was more than one should have to stand. That was egregious. I might have let the internet overcharge of a dollar go if I hadn't been overcharged by 29 dollars.

I had to try.

I marched up to the guy who had sold us our fish the day before. My lovely French sounded something like this: "Yesterday, one eats here." I showed the list to the guy -- "one eats seven sardines, four langostines, and of calamari. One drinks the coke. One has of the bread. One has of the salad. One takes not of the water. The price it should to be 50."

The guy insisted that as we had ordered off the menu, the list prices did not apply.

I persisted. "The sign there it say that the price she is fix. That is the price one should to pay."

No, no, no. A new guy came over. I insisted. "It must be done that one pays the price she is fix."

The manager surrendered. Fine, madame. You eat here today whatever you want and there is no charge.

We ate. It was delicious. And it wasn't until now that I realized that we still overpaid for the two meals put together.

In which we have our own Gift of the Magi with Sly and Doris

You have all been wondering, "How did Christmas go with Sly and Doris this year? What present could they give that would top a framed photo of themselves and a cast-iron cat?"

No present could top a framed photo of themselves and a cast-iron cat. But that doesn't mean they didn't try.

First, we had the usual birthday drama. My repeated attempts via Primo to kill all birthday gift giving have met with failure. Doris won't give it up. I guess I don't care about her giving it up as much as I care about us giving it up. Couldn't we please just stop sending things to people who already have more crap than they will ever need? Present detente, please.

She sent link after link to Primo, asking him if I would like this or that.

Primo has known me for six years. He knows my taste. He doesn't even need to ask me if the fuzzy scarf with the pompoms is to my liking. He knows. He knows I would recoil in horror.

After several turndowns, however, and after ignoring Primo's gentle hints that if Doris really felt compelled to give me a gift, perhaps renewing my Cooks Illustrated magazine subscription or giving us tickets to a play might be something I would really, really like, Doris made an executive decision that what I really lacked in my life was a $68 bud vase hand painted with butterflies and blue asters.

I am not knocking hand painted vases with butterflies and blue asters. Too much. Some people like that kind of thing. I like leopard print. Some people might rightfully call that tacky. I might even call it tacky. I do keep it under control by limiting it to my beautiful new Spanish shoes and to my gloves, but I would happily drape myself in leopard print from head to toe. Everyone has her thing.

Mine is just not flowery adornment on household items. I like things to be elegant, simple versions of what they are. (With the leopard print exception, of course.) I want a vase to be heavy crystal. I want a table to be buffed, rich maple. I want pearls to be lustrous and un-accessorized. It's just how I roll. I don't want hummingbirds and hibiscus painted on my tables. I don't want flowers painted on my vases. I don't want bunnies and pom-poms on my scarves.

And there is nothing Doris has ever seen of me or of my home to give any indication that I would like such a thing.

So she sent me the vase. And I had to write a thank you note thanking her for the gift and the thought without saying anything too complimentary about the vase so as not to encourage her.

Of course I sent a note. If nothing else, she took time, effort and money to try to please me. It is ungracious not to acknowledge that. Although you guys already know that I am an ingrate. I am, however, an ingrate with good manners. I always write a thank you note. Always.

Then I hunted through the entire unaallavolta website to find something that I actually would like. It was not easy.

Yes, I know I sound like a bitch. But Primo has tried and tried to get them to stop, to no avail.

I finally found a red evening bag that was not made with Chinese slave labor, but what I really wanted was a magazine subscription renewal.

Then came Christmas. Primo spent Thanksgiving with his mom and dad. I did not join him. That was Primo's gift to me. I have not been to Sly and Doris' for two years and it's been a great two years.

I know you think I exaggerate, but Sly and Doris were insulted that I did not go. Not that they wanted me there, but they want to be the ones to reject me. Doris told Primo that it was my job to "kiss [their] asses to be accepted," just as she had had to do with Sly's family.

I asked Primo if it wouldn't be a better reaction to say, "My in-laws treated me horribly so I vowed never to be that way because I want my son and his wife to want to spend time with me," but when someone drinks four ounces of bourbon every day at 4:00 just to get started, perhaps the capacity for rational thought disappears.

Primo spent ten days at their house this summer, doing their chores, and then five days at Thanksgiving.

When December rolled around, his mom asked him why he wasn't going to be there for Christmas. We had decided at the last minute to go to Spain so Primo could get enough miles to keep his platinum status for 2012. He got my ticket with FF miles and all the hotels with hotel points, so it was a relatively inexpensive trip.

"Florida is warmer than Spain," Doris noted in her email to him, "and just as glamorous and festive." She said we could rent her housekeeper's condo rather than stay with her and Sly.

Primo turned her down. In her Christmas letter, before she got to the part about how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, she noted that she and Sly were going to be lonely on Christmas because nobody would be visiting them.

Shocking that nobody wants to spend time with people who complain all day and start drinking at 4:00 p.m.

Where was I? This is not a post complaining about their drinking. I was talking about gifts. Which is something only an ingrate does so feel free to look upon me with disdain for even discussing this. I know it's poor form. But it's an addiction. I can't help it. I'm a victim.

Primo has been unhappy with the state of the pepper mill at Sly and Doris' for a while. "It's a crummy pepper mill," he said. "I'm going to send them a good one for Christmas."

We got them new knives a few years ago. By the time Sly and Doris die, we will have upgraded their kitchen completely.

"That's fine," I said. We had gotten my mom theater tickets to Jersey Boys - very good seats - so I didn't feel I was in a position to complain about a $40 pepper mill. Although I will note that the plane tickets and rental car to Sly and Doris' place - oh, heck, you know how I feel about all that already.

The day that the pepper mill arrived at Sly and Doris', we got our present from them: a gift certificate to a spice store in Texas.

Which is crazy on so many levels.

1. We live in the city where Penzey's is headquartered. Penzey's, for those who do not know, is one of the biggest spice stores in the country.

2. We do almost no mail order except for Primo's woot.com addiction. OK, we do mail order, but not for things we can buy at a store 1.4 miles from our house.

3. Who buys $50 worth of spices at once?

Not that the store sells only spices. It also sells cookbooks, including cookbooks for cat food, in case we should decide to start making our own cat food someday, which is highly unlikely, aprons, fish-shaped platters, bulldog bottle openers, storage canisters with chili peppers painted on them, and dog-shaped butter dishes.

It also sells the $40 pepper mill that Primo sent to his parents.

Which is the only item on the company's website that we might ever have been interested in buying.

Which we surely would have bought for Sly and Doris had we known, but for the first time in his life, Primo was early with a gift - we were not driving to the post office at 4:55 to drop off Doris' birthday card in a next-day envelope - and had it all taken care of in advance.

Does anyone want a bulldog bottle opener? I can get you a good deal.

In which I punch a neighbor in the nose and my mom is glad I did it

My dad was not a violent man. He was not quick to anger. I never saw him get in a fight or a major argument, although my brother surely tried his temper more than once.

He was quite fond of political debate, though, and argued, via my daily message service between them, with my seventh-grade Texas history teacher, Mr Wilson, he of the doubleknit polyester jumpsuits in many colors, about whether one votes for the party (Mr Wilson) or the man (my dad, a GDI). Mr Wilson tried to convince us seventh graders that we should affiliate ourselves with a party for that was the path to political power, but the only power I wanted as a junior high student was the power to transform myself into a popular girl with Farrah Fawcett hair, gauchos and a wraparound sweater, an event as likely to come to pass as the sun falling from the sky. And yet I dreamed.

I wondered why history was sooo boring, although Mr Wilson's drone as he talked about the battle of San Jacinto or about Santa Ana making his escape in an enlisted man's uniform or how Texas retained the right to divide into five states might have had more to do with the dreariness of it all than with the subject matter, which, now that I have read a lot of Texas history on my own, is not dull at all.

More than politics, the main complaint that my dad, a Russian history major, had with Mr Wilson, was that he (Mr Wilson) was making history seem boring. Texas history! Boring! Only the worst of the worst of teachers could make Texas history seem boring.

Yet even with all of that, my dad never found it necessary to hit Mr Wilson.

My dad did, however, teach me to fight. "Don't put your thumb inside your fist," he counseled. "You don't want to break it." He was a practical man. He showed by example that not punching other people is the better way to go, but he also understood that sometimes, a punch might be called for.

And indeed, I have found a judicious punch in the nose the appropriate solution in a few cases. Sometimes, war is the answer and anyone who thinks it is not is a hypocrite who is perfectly happy to rest on the blood of soldiers without acknowledging the necessity of their methods. Do you really want to still be an English colony? Do you really want the South to be a separate, slave-holding nation? Do you think Hitler should have been allowed to take over Europe and murder all the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals?

I have not punched anyone for decades, but most of the times I did, I do not regret. It wasn't necessary to stop a genocide or to protect my property, but it did feel good. Yes. Punching someone in the nose can feel good. As long as you are not punched back. That's the key. Hit first and then get away.

The first time I punched someone in the nose, I got in my shot and it was over. It was not necessary. I didn't need to hit this girl and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.

My best friend Lisa and I were maybe ten. Our families had gone out for pizza. Lisa and I were through eating, so we went outside to run up and down the sidewalk. Holding hands. For that is what little girls do with their best friends: they hold hands.

Some older girls saw us and started name calling. They called us "fags," which was a word that meant nothing to me as the concept of homosexuality had not yet been introduced to me. I knew all about fallopian tubes and vas deferens, thanks to the Time Life sex education books my parents had bought when I was in second grade, but the actual mechanics of sex eluded me and the idea that there might be so many variations was not on the horizon. I didn't know what a fag was and I will bet they didn't know what it meant, either.

I was ten. Back then, kids didn't have to learn about condoms and venereal disease and alternative lifestyles in fourth grade.

Yet I knew just from the way they were saying it that it was not a compliment.

We stopped in front of the name callers.

"If you don't stop saying that, I'm going to punch you in the nose," I said. (Advice: if you are ever in a real fight where you are truly threatened, don't tell the person you are going to hit him. Just hit him and run.)

The one girl bent over so her face was right in front of mine, then very slowly and deliberately said, "Fag."

So I punched her in the nose. And made her cry.

Yeah, it felt good. But yeah, it was completely unnecessary. Better to walk away from that kind of situation than to hit someone. Still, I'll bet she thought twice before she name called again.

The next time I hit someone, it wasn't necessary, either. But it still felt good, even though I didn't get away with it. That's the problem with hitting: it's so satisfying when done right.

We lived in a cul-du-sac in Lubbock. Nice neighbors all around us. G-mother and Alan, our adoptive grandparents with the candy drawer and the TV next door. We were not supposed to watch TV over there. The reason my parents did not have a television was not because we were poor, which is what everyone would ask when they found out. "Are you poor?" would be the horrified response, as nobody could imagine any possible reason for someone who could afford it not to have a TV.

Even though Primo maintains my family was poor because we ate out only about once a year and didn't go on flying vacations or to Disney World, which is crazy because in the mid-70s, only rich people did that sort of thing, we didn't have a TV because my parents didn't want us to waste time watching it when there were soccer games to be played and books to be read. When we were visiting my grandparents, we got to watch Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney, but as soon as Sonny and Cher came on, the TV was either turned off or we were sent out of the room.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents bought a TV. It was rarely on. We were allowed to watch Happy Days, which my parents liked, especially my dad, as he had gone to college in Milwaukee. My mom and dad would watch Mary Hartman Mary Hartman after we had gone to bed.

We had it for one year, then we moved to Central America. No point in having a TV when you live in a place with nice weather year round and the ocean a few minutes away.

This TV deprivation led me to some bad decisions as a college student and as an adult, when I would watch complete trash, just because of my earlier TV hardships. At the same time, I was not getting drunk every weekend (or at all) as a college student because if I ever wanted a taste of my dad's beer, he would let me have some. TV, not alcohol, was the forbidden fruit at my house.

The moral of this story is that you should let your kids have a little bit of everything so that they don't go crazy when they are on their own.

Back to our cul-de-sac. Next to G-mother and Alan was a family with three little girls. Then there was Renee's family. Renee was a teenager who wore halter tops, bell bottoms, and blue eyshadow and was an object of awe to us all. She smoked. She had a boyfriend. Who had a car.

And that's where the conflict was.

Renee's boyfriend liked to drive really fast in our little cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac with the three little girls who played in their yard. (This was a long time ago when children actually played outside. I miss those days. There are kids in my neighborhood, but I almost never hear them because after school, they go to after school care instead of going home and playing outside.) With my sister, who was in third grade - not a big kid - who also played in the yard.

My dad asked Renee's boyfriend to slow down. "There are kids here," my dad said. "You need to be careful."

The boyfriend did not slow down.

The next time Boyfriend was spinning his wheels in the cul-de-sac, my dad called the police. Who came, gave Boyfriend a talking to or a ticket or whatever.

Renee was not happy about this.

I was out playing in the yard (because even seventh graders played in the yard back then) when Renee was out one day. We started talking and she started talking smack about my dad calling the cops on her boyfriend and I said you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the nose and she didn't so I hit her and she hit me back and gave me a black eye.

Of which my mother has a photo. That she took after whispering, "I'm glad you hit her."

I was, too.