In which Primo and I argue about whose parents have the right attitude about money

This is why pre-marital counseling is important. Because they make you TALK ABOUT THE MONEY. When you don't talk about the money, you marry someone and then find out that she hasn't filed a tax return for years. Or that she has never gotten a social security number for her younger daughter. Who is ten. Or that she really doesn't make any money at her allegedly fancy job. But now it's too late. You're married and you're stuck with her, even though if you had known these things, you might not have married her.

I'm not talking about Primo and me, by the way.

But you probably figured that out.

Well anyway. I don't remember exactly when this happened, but Sly and Doris' CD player breaks. Fortunately, for them, we have an abundance of CD/DVD players at our house. More CD/DVD players than we have TVs or stereos (but not as many as we have remotes) so Primo mails the extra player to them.

"Are they going to pay for the shipping?" I ask.

"Why does it matter?" Primo responds.

"Because it cost twenty dollars to send that thing."

"That's nothing," he says.

"It's not nothing to me," I say. I, who paid for my own college through scholarships, loans, and working 60 hours a week in the summer and 20 hours a week during the school year because my parents did not have the money. I, who took my lunch to work most of my career because spending $5 or $7 or $10 to go out was wasteful when I could spend $1 to make my own.

Primo says I was poor when I was a kid, but I disagree. We lived just fine, but just didn't have luxuries, like going out to eat. His parents had the money to pay for his college. He worked, but he worked for beer money.

Consequently, we have very different ideas about money.

When my mom and Dr J were here for our wedding, Dr J forgot some clothes in the guest room closet. My mom asked me to send them to her house. When she sent me money for my birthday a month later, she included $6.73 to cover the shipping for Dr J's stuff.

"That's just silly," Primo said.

"Perhaps," I answered, "but my mother would never presume to spend our money."

My mother is the not penniless but needs to be careful widow on a very fixed income and Sly and Doris are the comfortable pensioned retirees who can afford cable, a gardener, a maid, booze*, frequent eating out, and the private school tuition** for one of their grandchildren.

It is my mother to whom it occurs that perhaps Primo and I are not made of money.

And it is Sly and Doris who assume that of course we have money to throw at them.

Which we do not.

And even if we did, that is not how I would want to spend my money.



* A lot.

** OK, they are helping with the tuition.

In which Sly and Doris say the same old same old

Primo: Your mom sent us money for our anniversary. She didn't need to do that!

Me: I know.

Primo: She really didn't need to do that. She doesn't have that much.

Me: I know! I have had this conversation with her more than once. She insists.

Primo: My parents didn't even acknowledge it.

Me: [That's better than getting cheap Chinese pressed wood nesting tables with hummingbirds and hibiscus painted on them.]

Primo: That's their way of letting me know I made a mistake in marrying you.

Me: No it isn't. Their way of letting you know you made a mistake is to tell you that you made a mistake.*

* Which is what they did yesterday in their conversation with Primo when they opened the Complaint Vault and reiterated that

1. I should have figured out that they didn't like me and earned their approval and liking, although

2. there really isn't anything I could have done to change their opinion of me and it's too late now anyhow,

3. Doris has "reached out" to me on many occasions and I have rejected her, even though neither Primo nor I can think of a single example of such rejection, as I have answered every (seven) email she has ever sent to me and she has never called me on the phone,

4. they cannot believe I have a friendship with Stephanie because she and I are not intellectual equals because as everyone knows, intellect is the only important thing in a relationship, not niceness or common interests and

5. Primo made a mistake marrying me and he only thinks he's happy, but he's not really happy.

In which I kiss a married man but I didn't know he was married the entire time we were flirting over the phone at work

Before grad school, I worked in Austin for this company. This was back in the olden days when to conduct business with someone, you actually had to speak to that person instead of emailing him. As my company was an international company and even the domestic operations were wide flung, I found myself needing to talk to company employees in other locations about our mutual interests.

There was this guy in Oregon who was working on an account with me. He was very funny and we played off well against each other. (Are you sensing a pattern here? If a man is funny, I am willing.) We flirted and flirted and flirted because over the phone, everyone is good looking and everyone is interesting and these were the days when there was time to goof off at work because you spent half your time waiting for your secretary to type your darn letters already and wouldn't it be better if there were just a way to do it yourself so you weren't caught in this ridiculous loop of editing typewritten after typewritten draft as you struggled for the best way to tell someone your company was raising their premiums like 17%, which is a ton of money and nobody, I mean NOBODY wants to deliver that letter because most people don't like being the bearers of bad news. Unless someone is a heartless jerk, I promise you that he is not enjoying telling you about a price increase.

Back to - let's call him Sancho. Back to Sancho. We flirted and talked about our lives and where we had gone to college and what we liked to do for fun.

The one thing Sancho neglected to mention was that one of the things he liked to do for fun was to hang out with his wife.

Every year, my company held a big sales conference. If your sales were high enough, then you got to go and hang out with the other stellar sales people at a resort in Palm Springs where I thought my $15 per diem breakfast allowance would let me eat like a queen, but then I discovered that in Palm Springs, $15 buys you a bowl of oatmeal and leaves you just a tiny bit of change.

One year, my sales were high enough. Even though Austin was the smallest market in my division, I was in the top 30% of sales, not that I'm bragging or anything, but I was a pretty good salesperson considering I am one of the least salesy people you will ever meet. My boss, who is still my friend, could sell ice to Eskimos, but me? I was all about the facts, laid out objectively, along with the pros and cons and an explanation of how I would handle the cons because let's face it, no matter what, your company is going to screw up and your customer is going to be upset, so when that happens, how are you going to fix it and return your customer to her deserved state of happiness? Don't ever believe someone who tells you that his product or service will never have any problems. Everyone has problems. Will they fix them is the question.

Sancho attended the same conference. I didn't know what to look for, as I had not seen a photo, but I was eager to meet him. I found him that first day by searching nametags. My first words to him, after I 1. looked at his nametag and 2. looked at his left hand, were a blurted, "But you didn't tell me you were married!"

He mumbled.

There were parties every night. The first night, a bunch of us, including Sancho, were at the resort disco, dancing, drinking (this was back when I still thought tequila was my friend, which it is not) and having fun. My division's VP, Bart, was there, dancing to "Wild Thing." I thought he was too old to dance - he must have been in his mid 40s. Had he no dignity?

Bart complained of a headache. In my constant attempt to advance my career by sucking up to the higher-ups, I told him I had some aspirin in my room. I could get it for him.

"I'll come with you," he said.

I stopped, stymied. Bart had a reputation. He was known as a ladies' man. He was handsome, in that old man, mid-40's way, with his gray hair, periwinkle blue eyes and his old, mid-40s face. Sha. Like anyone that age still had sex? Gross.

He scared me. I didn't want to fool around with him and I didn't want to be put in a situation where my own reputation might be compromised. Remember this.

But he insisted on accompanying me to the room. We arrived. After I put the key in the lock, I turned to him.

"Stay here," I instructed him. I didn't want him coming into the room with me! What would people say? He had a reputation.

He stayed in the hall. I fetched his aspirin. Gave it to him. We returned to the disco, incident free.

There was Sancho.

Did I mention I had been taking tequila shots with my friend Elise? And that my judgment was impaired?

Actually, it's not judgment that gets impaired when you drink, is it? You still know right from wrong, but avoiding wrong just doesn't seem so important. It's like being on a diet and knowing that eating that second piece of pie is a bad, bad idea but it's a bad idea for the future and overall but right now it seems like a really good idea. So the judgment is intact but the desire to act based on good judgment is not.

Sancho. Tequila. He had been drinking as well. For some reason, we left the disco and ended up in a stairwell, where we started kissing. Even tequila'd up, I knew better than to take him back to the room.

"I shouldn't be doing this," he said.

Which was absolutely true and I hope that this one incident shamed him so much that he never strayed again. But in the meantime, we kept kissing and I am ashamed to say that it took a hotel security guard telling us to take it elsewhere to make us stop. If we went elsewhere, we would really be choosing to do wrong. An incidental kiss in the stairwell? Hmmm. But making a decision to continue the kissing elsewhere? No way to excuse that. Not even any way to excuse the stairwell kiss.

He avoided me the rest of the conference. And we didn't speak on the phone anymore. It was done.

In which Sly criticizes Paul McCartney's singing

Sly is a singer. Or used to be. We asked Sly and Doris if they would sing at our wedding and they declined. Oh, they were out of practice. Right. But I didn't really care. The request was about making them feel included, not because I really wanted them to sing.

I wanted to elope. If I had to have a wedding, it was going to be as no-frills or at least as no-Sly and Doris as possible. No music, no flowers, a simple red and white dress that I have worn again.

Sly considers himself quite the expert on singing and singers and he may well be. Well, he does know about singing. Classical singing. And classical music. Primo says there was no pop music in his house when he was a kid. Just classical. All the time.

Which might explain why Primo is such a pop music fan now. He even likes Britney Spears. How do I know that? Because early in our relationship, he played a Britney Spears CD. And he wasn't even doing it ironically. He really likes her. Our conversation went like this:

“Is that Britney Spears?” I asked in horror.

“Uh huh,” he answered absently.

Not even a trace of shame in his voice. Not one drop.

“You have a Britney Spears song on your CD?”

“Well, I didn’t make this CD,” he explained. “But I do like this song.”

“You like Britney Spears? You are admitting to this?”

“I like pop music,” he shrugged. “I have some Britney Spears CDs at home. Yes, I like her.”

“You know this means I have to break up with you, right?”

Rolled eyes. “It could be worse. I could like some headbanger band, like Crocus or, or, or….”

He couldn’t think of anything worse.

But at least Primo acknowledges that Britney can sing. His taste might be suspect (See: Primo and his flowered shirts) but he does not apologize for it and he does not try to diminish the talent of those who make a living singing.

Sly, on the other hand, cannot bear to see anyone be better than he. Or be considered better than he. He refuses to acknowledge that someone, somewhere else might have talent. What do you expect? He can't even take talent in his own son.

So when Paul McCartney came up in conversation one day, his dismissive comment was, "If only he could sing."

Right.

In which we try to figure out what Sly and Doris have planned for their cats

March 2010 At Sam's dad's memorial service, we discover that one of the issues Sam and his brother faced was what to do with their father's dog. Mr SD died. His dog did not. Fortunately, Sam's brother and sister in law decided to keep the dog. They already have two. What's one more? That attitude works when you are talking about nice pets.

Primo and I have been working on our wills. My big concern that my hard-earned money not go to Sly and Doris, which might happen if Primo and I die at the same time and we do not have a will. Well, I have had a will since I was 25, but Primo didn't have one.

One of the first things I put into some special instructions to my sister (our executor) was what to do about the cats.* And this was before Sam's dad died. You can't abandon your pets and you shouldn't make your executor find a new place for them to live. There are enough other things to deal with.

But when I read Sly and Doris' will, I saw no provision for their cats.

Primo is the executor of their will. They think it's a privilege. I think it will be a pain in the neck, given how much crap they have, although even if Primo weren't the executor, he would still probably be stuck cleaning out that house.

Their cats are awful. Well, one of them is. Medea, aka as "Puff" in another post, is a bitch. She bites and scratches and attacks. Snow, the other one, is just boring. They are both longhairs, which means lots and lots of shedding.

We already have two cats. Two gently, sweet cats who are half the size of Medea and Snow. Two cats who don't know how to fight. When they play fight each other, their claws are always retracted.

Medea would have them for breakfast.

We are not taking those cats.

I will give them to a shelter before I will have them in my house.

I ask Primo to ask his mom and dad what provisions they have made for the cats. "Make sure they know that we are not taking them!" I say.

Six months later, Sly asks Primo if we will take their cats. Now.

Primo says No way Jose.




* Give them back to the purebred cat rescue place where we got them along with $2,000.

In which I find out that Ted was kicked out of seminary for having an affair

You guys! I thought I had published all the Ted stories. But I just found a draft of another part of the saga. What a jerk he was. Sheesh.

If you don't remember him, click on the "Ted" label below to refresh your memory. If you don't feel like reading all that, then here is a summary:

Very charming guy I met at an alumni event. Clergyman in a denomination where dating and marriage are allowed, hence trustworthy, right?

He charmed me. We slept together once. And then he ditched me, very cruelly.

So here's what happened after he ditched me (other than my discovering he had been dating the woman he married a year later all along):

I make a list of all the things I never liked about Ted anyhow. He has bad taste in movies: he thought Runaway Bride and The Matrix were great. I thought Bride was stupid and I walked out of Matrix halfway through. He has bad taste in music. The radio stations he listens to play the worst of the worst.

OK. I realize that I am defining "bad taste" as "stuff I don't like," but isn't that how everyone does it?

I remember that he was rude to his mother the time I met her. She was asking him what I thought was a perfectly innocent question and he told her curtly to drop it. This is not a nice attitude toward women. Even if your mom is a jerk, at least be nice to her in front of other people.

Mary Linda called me one night shortly after Ted stopped calling. She said, "I'm not sure I should tell you this. I asked Mary Ann what she thought and we decided you need to know."

I braced myself.

"I was talking to someone who is a family friend of [Ted's parents]. She told me that the reason Ted was kicked out of seminary was that he had had an affair. Her comment was that he leaves women in far worse condition than he found them. And that nothing is ever his fault."

I was stunned. I didn't believe it. He didn't tell me he was kicked out. He implied he had chosen to transfer to the local seminary.

He had made a big deal of the fact that he considered honesty to be the most important factor in a relationship. His whole reason for breaking things off with me was that I had been "dishonest" with him. I decided I would ask him about it and let him tell his side of the story. But he didn't call.

The coup de grace is when I find out he owns a house. I surmise that he and his ex-wife bought it and that he has it rented out now. (It's amazing what you can learn on the internet.) I drive past the house to check it out.

It is in horrible condition in a neighborhood that is obviously all rentals. I know what he paid for it and am shocked at his poor financial judgment. There are a lot of things I can forgive, but mismanaging money is not one of them. Not only did he pay a lot for an ugly house in a run down neighborhood, but the house is in disrepair, so he is not even taking care of his investment.

Hmm. Could I really have spent a lifetime with someone like that? No, nein, nyet.

In which I get my bellybutton pierced so I will have a flat tummy but it doesn't work and all I do is pass out

Have I ever told you guys about the time I got my bellybutton pierced?

I was 39, I think, and saw my youth flashing before my very nearsighted, astigmatic eyes. I also saw photos of young women with pierced bellybuttons and flat, smooth bellies.

Obviously, the piercing caused the flat, smooth belly. I didn't get an A in probability and statistics for nothing. Correlation and causation are the same thing, right?

But I am not big on getting shots or being stuck. Almost every time I have ever had blood taken, I have passed out. This might have something to do with the fact that at the blood drive during my freshman year of college, which was the first (and the last) time that I gave blood voluntarily, I ignored the blood peoples' warning to eat breakfast before I had a pint of my precious bodily fluid withdrawn from me.

Oh that! I thought. They mean other people! I'm special. My blood sugar doesn't work the way everyone else's blood sugar does.

I merrily lay down, extended my arm, and then watched and felt as my O- blood passed through the tube lying on my forearm.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

That was the pulse of the warm blood. Passing out of me. Over me. Away from me.

I am getting a little lightheaded just writing about it. And this happened in 1982. Which, for those of you who are bad at math, was a long time ago.

I passed out.

When I came to, I looked up, panicked. I didn't recognize any of the faces. I didn't know what had happened. But even as the words left my mouth - "Where am I? What happened?" I thought, Don't say it! It's a cliche'!

That's exactly how I felt. Maybe that's how clichés get started: because they describe how something really is.

Ever since then, my body has reacted the same way almost every time, even with just a tiny amount of blood to be taken.

Blood goes out, so do I.

When I had blood drawn as part of my Peace Corps physical, I didn't pass out until 15 minutes later, as I was walking down the hall to the next exam. I stopped, leaned against the wall, then slid all the way down to the floor, my head falling down between my legs.

OK, not really because I am have no flexibility at all. I am hoping my yoga class will take me to the point where I can actually touch my toes without bending my knees. My head rolled down and I was slumped over, but I didn't look like a rag doll. I probably looked like a wooden puppet - bent over in some places but no graceful, elegant, flexible fainting.

I had a minor thingy done in my doc's office a few years ago. No blood involved, but cutting and scraping. I warned him I might faint.

I did faint.

He told me I had a very good vaso-vagal response.

I was quite proud.

I also fainted when I had my eye exam and they did the part where the machine touched my eyeball, but you can understand that: A MACHINE TOUCHED MY EYEBALL! Now I refuse that part of the test.

I faint. I am not squeamish about blood in or on someone else - if there is an accident, you want me around because I am the one who will perform CPR or call 911 or keep the motorcyclist with the head injury from wandering out in traffic.

That happened once: my boyfriend and I were stuck in traffic on Lamar in Austin and I noticed that the guy on the motorcycle next to us had just been knocked over. I jumped out of the car, ran to the guy, got people to help me lift the bike off him, yelled at someone to call 911, and then kept the guy from wandering off. I snapped at my boyfriend to do something and help me because the biker outweighed me by 80 pounds.

Do what? my boyfriend asked.

You're a doctor, I said.

I'm an optometrist, he answered. What should I do? Check his eyes?

Back to the bellybutton.

I had a little fainting problem.

But there would be no blood here! And the bellybutton was before the doc's office and the eye exam. I had no evidence that non-blood related pokings could cause loss of consciousness.

And the truly important thing was that I wanted a flat tummy that could be shown in public without fear of ridicule. If I got a belly button ring, my belly would be flat. It would not be slightly fluffy as it is now and was then. Flat, maybe even with some rippling abs.

A girl can dream, can't she?

My friends Leigh and Ilene accompanied me to the tattoo/piercing salon a mile from my house. The parlor was in an old Queen Anne in Cooper Young. Black light posters. Black lights. Tattoo designs hanging from the wall. Knick knacks on the mantel. Purple doors and trim. Not my taste, but not my house.

Leigh drove. Ilene provided the medical expertise, evaluating the cleanliness of the operation and giving me her doctor opinion of it. She and the piercer discussed piercings in places I had never heard of being pierced and really did not want to think about but ouch. Really? REALLY?

The piercer prepped. Washed his hands, put on gloves, got the needle and the ring out of the autoclave. I hope there was an autoclave. I don't think Ilene would have let me proceed with unsterilized equipment.

I lay down on the stainless steel exam table, lifted my shirt. He pierced. It hurt a little. But I was fine - on my back, looking at the black light posters on the ceiling. If such posters weren't there, then they should have been. Why don't docs put something interesting on the ceiling to read? Patients do spend some time on their backs and a little bit of distraction would be nice, although in my current doc's defense, he is pretty good at the small talk and launches straight into the Packers as his hands are messing around with my hoo-hah. I'd rather talk about football or any kind of sport than keep a "I'm not really noticing that a man who is not my husband has his hand up my hoo-hah" silence.

I sat on the piercing table for a while. Ilene and Leigh looked at tattoo patterns and talked to the piercer. I decided I was OK so we left. Got into Leigh's car. Three minutes and three blocks from the parlor, I fainted. Almost fainted.

"I think I'm going to pass out," is what I said.

Leigh stopped the car. Doctor Ilene jumped out of the front seat and opened the back door so she could see me. Did her doctor stuff and revived me.

Later told me she had never dealt with a fainting before. She's a pediatrician and I guess sick kids don't pass out so much.

Ilene insisted I take the front seat so I could recline. She got into the back seat. Leigh started the car again. Two minutes and two blocks after that, Leigh said, "I'm getting television."

"Tunnel vision," I corrected her. Didactic and a pain in the ass, even post almost fainting. Don't you love being around people who correct your grammar and word choice? Even when they know what you meant? But just want to point out that you made a mistake? Yeah me too. My only defense is that I was still a little woozy. I usually make corrections only in my head, not out loud. I have been working on it for years and am a lot better than I used to be. I'm surprised nobody ever slapped me before.

"Stop the car!" Ilene said.

Ilene can see the big picture.

"No, I'm fine," Leigh answered slowly as she waved Ilene away.

I thought about what Leigh had just said - the television/tunnel vision part - and realized what was going on.

"Stop the car!" I said.

"Yes, stop the car!" Ilene yelled.

Leigh stopped.

"I can make it home," she insisted. "I'm just a little dizzy."

Leigh was having a sympathy faint with me.

Ilene did her doctor magic and then threw Leigh into the back seat. "I'm driving," she announced.

Two fainters, one doctor. Pathetic.

The bad news - other than my inability to stay conscious - was that the piercing wouldn't heal. The waistband of my skirts rubbed against it. Every time I hugged my boyfriend, the ring hurt. I couldn't hug him close.

The baddest news is that my belly did not get flat, taut and smooth.

It stayed fluffy.

All that effort to no avail.

After six months, I climbed up to the attic where I kept my toolbox, found a needle-nosed pliers, and pulled the ring out.

I still have a fluffy tummy.

In which Primo cannot take advantage of a long boring drive to get the weekly phone call with his parents over with

Me: Did you make The [obligatory to Sly and Doris if you don't call us you don't love us and we will punish you but darned if we ever bother to call you weekly] Call yesterday [while he was on the road for 90 miles and had his fancy new phone thingy in the car to go with his new smartypants phone]?

Primo: No.

Me: Why not? It would have been an efficient way to get it over with.

Primo: It was close to when they have their Drink.

[Which of course is not a drink but the beginning of an evening of drinking such that they rarely remember conversations they've had once they are an hour into Drink, which means if Stephanie, my sister in law, calls them to offer to pick up things at the grocery store for them, they are 1. ugly to her and 2. accuse her the next day of Never Calling Them. Remember when they stayed with us for NINEDAYS at our wedding how they went through a half gallon - maybe a gallon? - of bourbon and a liter of brandy in six days and two bottles of wine a night? And yet they don't have the money for oh, someone to come in a few times a week to do light housekeeping and cooking.]

Me: So?

Primo: They don't like it when I call then.

Me: Even though that might be convenient for you?

Primo: Exactly. It's not about me. It's not about what might be convenient for me. It's always all about them.

In which my cleaning lady breaks bad on my white sofa but it's sort of my fault

I hired Esperanza, she who did laundry and cleaned windows, and things went well for a while.

I recommended her to my friends.

My friends liked her at first.

Then there were problems. Big problems.

Esperanza let my friend Holly's dog out, despite being told repeatedly that she had to latch the gate when she came in and keep the door closed. The dog got out, the dog got out, the dog got out - and finally, the dog was hit by a car. And died.

Which was bad enough, but Holly didn't fire Esperanza (it is very hard to find someone good help), who then left the door open and the cat got out. The cat was not killed, but that was when Holly decided ya basta. Esperanza had to go.

I should have fired Esperanza in solidarity. I would have gotten major friend credits (I fired my maid because she was a bad maid for you!) and my sofa would not have been destroyed.

My sofa. One of my first adult furniture purchases. I bought it at an estate sale in Houston. It needed re-upholstering but a person who is buying used furniture is probably not in a position to be paying for such fancy stuff. An old white sofa with great solid 1920's bones - I could throw a blanket over it and it would be fine.

For many years, it served me well. When I went to the Peace Corps, my friends Eric and Nancy stored it in their house after warning me that they had three cats who loved to claw on furniture.

"It needs re-upholstering anyhow," I shrugged.

True to the promise, the cats made short work of the sofa. When I moved to Miami, I discovered the wonder of little old Cuban men who worked in their garage and did great work for low prices. I found fabric remnants and a Little Old Cuban Guy (I also found a LOCG for my washer and dryer and for shoe repair - oh, how I miss Miami, home of the LOCG) who picked up the sofa from my house and then returned it a week later, looking almost new.

Then, when my employer told me my services were needed in another city, or, put another way, that my paycheck would now be delivered to Another City and that was where I could pick it up. The movers put a two-inch tear in the upholstery.

Hardly a big deal, but their insurance paid for the sofa to be re-upholstered yet again. This time, I got fancier and got much nicer fabric because well - because someone else was paying for it and that's just human nature. The sky's the limit when it's someone else's checkbook is my motto.

When my mother found out that I had picked white fabric (with a subtle jacquard weave of red and gold), she sighed and said, "I'm never going to be a grandmother, am I?"

Nope. Never really cared about having kids.

The new upholsterer had some tricks that even the LOCG didn't have and did things with the springs and the cushions that made the sofa comfortable for the first time. With the leftover fabric, he made four matching pillows. My sofa was complete.

So when I came home from work one day to find that someone had scribbled on one of the pillows with a black pen, I was not happy.

At first, I thought maybe my then-boyfriend or I had sat on the sofa with a pen in our pocket, but then I realized that the pattern was not that of an accidental, one-time pen leakage. Then I saw that another pillow was defaced in the same way. And the sofa itself – several lines about eight inches long right in the middle of the seat back and little circles in each of the buttons.

Three pillows. With ink stains. With the ink-stained side turned toward the back of the sofa.

The odds of that happening randomly are

1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/8 = 12.5%

That is, the odds of each pillow being turned with the ink side down are one in two. These are independent odds: the position of one pillow does not determine the position of another. To get the overall odds, multiply the independent odds by each other.

Oh man I hope I'm doing this right. It has been 20 years since I had probability and statistics. I did well (in grad school, when I actually attended the class, as opposed to college P&S, where I went four times and got only a C can you imagine?), but 20 years is a long time.

Whatever. What this number - 12.5% - tells you is that it is highly unlikely that all three pillows ended up ink side down by accident.

Conspiracy.

I called Esperanza. “Esperanza, I just found that someone drew on the sofa pillows with a pen. And on the sofa. I think it was Isabel.” Isabel was Esperanza’s two-year-old daughter.

“Oh, yes,” Esperanza said. “Don’t worry. I’ll clean it next time I come.”

“No!” I said sharply. “Don’t touch it. I’m going to take the pillows to the cleaners and see what they say.”

“OK,” she said cheerfully.

“You could have ruined it. It cost $1,000 to have that couch covered. I need to know the best way to do this,” I snapped.

“OK,” she said.

“I expect you to pay for everything,” I continued.

Silence.

“It was your daughter who did this,” I told her.

“OK,” she said again, not so cheerfully this time.

“Do not bring Isabel with you here any more if you are not going to watch her,” I said.

Here's a word problem: Your cleaning lady has caused $1,000 worth of damage. You pay her $60 once every three weeks. How do you recover your money, especially considering you probably don't want her to be your cleaning lady any more?

The dry cleaner shook his head sorrowfully when he saw the pillows. "No ma'am," he said. "Ah cain't get those stains out."

This was the last straw. Esperanza's cleaning had already slipped - she had gone from deep cleaning to maintenance cleaning mode. Yes, I wanted my windows washed every three weeks. I was paying what amounted to $20 an hour, which she may or may not have been declaring on her taxes. For 20 tax-free dollars, I want washed windows every time. Yes, I am a bitch that way.

Some of the things she had done that I don’t think someone should do if she is being paid $60 to clean a house included

• Leaving the pictures knocked askew after dusting them
• Leaving bookcases, cedar chests and beds five inches from their normal positions
• Leaving dirty rags on top of the radiator
• Leaving dirty rags in the kitchen sink
• Not cleaning the lint trap in the dryer
• Not bothering to put the trash in the trash can outside and leaving it against the side wall instead (my cleaning ladies just couldn't get that trash where it belonged)
• Dusting pictures so vigorously that the plaster crumbled around the nails, requiring me to re-plaster, re-paint and then re-hang the pictures
• Hiding the dishes (well, OK, maybe not hiding, but not bothering to put like with like, so I can’t find anything – if all the Tupperware is in one place, don’t you think that’s where you would put any other Tupperware?)
• Leaving a dryer full of clothes because she is in a hurry
• Not cleaning the cobwebs from the ceiling

Esperanza wasn't answering her phone and then she wasn't returning her messages. When I got a message from her that she was having problems with her husband, I thought, That's it. That's enough. I don't want any more drama. I hadn't wanted to tell her she was fired by answering machine, but when I couldn't ever speak to her, I finally left a message with her fifth grade son not to return and to drop the key in my mail slot. I was done. Any bad housekeeping in the future would be done by me, for free.

In which I get a new cleaning lady who does windows

I told you guys about Marisol, my cleaning lady in Chile. It was a few years again before I had another cleaning lady. It took me 18 months to find a job once I returned to the US from my Peace Corps stint. Companies were not begging to hire me. Something about the reputation the Peace Corps has for being a haven for chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies.

Sure, there are chain smoking, Teva wearing, kumbayah singing hippies in the Peace Corps, but not many: cigarettes are expensive for a Peace Corps volunteer! And is there any sane person who can hear that kumbayah song without wanting to punch someone? It reeks of Marty Haugen, Gather hymnal triteness. Protestants are lucky: they get the good music in church.

No, I was in the Peace Corps where we made brownies and went to the movies and talked about how we were going to frame our Peace Corps experience on our resumes. We were in it for the adventure and the career enhancement. If we changed or saved the world in the process, that would be great, but my great takeaway from my two years in the Peace Corps was that the world does not want to be changed or saved.

Back to the cleaning lady. It wasn't until I'd been back at work and saving money for a few years that I felt that I could afford a cleaning lady. I was at a point where I was going to indulge in major luxuries: fresh flowers, new underwear (including gym socks), and a cleaning lady. I was tired of living poor.

My real estate fairy godmother/landlady Mary Linda recommended her two cleaning ladies, who worked as a team.

Susan and Cindy were nice. They had thick Arkansas accents, which was logical because they lived on the other side of the river in Arkansas. They did a decent job - better than Marisol. Nobody was using my vegetable brush to clean the toilet. My house was surface cleaned once every three weeks: dusted, vacuumed, tub and toilet cleaned, floors washed. It was nice to have one weekend a month where I didn't have to do that stuff.

Then came the day when I patched the plaster around all the outlets I'd had installed when I bought my house. My bungalow had been built in 1922 when one outlet per room seemed extravagant.

Digression to related story:

When I was in Chile, several of the women from my group, most of whom did not have electricity or indoor plumbing in their country homes, went to Washington D.C. for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as exhibitors. One evening, they had supper at the home of the Chris, the woman at the Inter-American Development Bank who managed the grant my organization got from the IADB. When the women got back to Chile, they were telling the rest of us about all the appliances in Chris' apartment: a washing machine, a dryer, a microwave, a dishwasher, a TV, an answering machine.

"Wow," one of the Mapuche women gasped. "There must be outlets all over the place!"

End digression. Back to my house. When I moved in, I had an electrician install an outlet on every wall and a phone jack in every room. In retrospect, the phone jacks were unnecessary, but had I known that in 2001, I would be a rich woman today from my investments in cellphone stock.

The electrician was careless and had knocked holes bigger than necessary in the walls. He did not patch the plaster after he installed the plates.

I, being a complete non-confrontational wimp when it comes to holding people to the standard to which they should be held if I am paying $1,200 for a job because what if they get mad at me?, never said to him, "Hey. You need to finish this job and patch the plaster."

Nope. It was far easier for me to spend a few hours removing the plates, spreading wet plaster in the hole with a putty knife, waiting for it to dry, sanding it, painting it and re-attaching the plates than to tell someone to do his darn job.

I had finished the plastering etc. and had vacuumed the plaster dust from my beautiful wood floors. Oh how I loved that little bungalow. Loved it and would move back there in a second. I had put the vacuum cleaner, a mid-century Electrolux that the previous owner had left in the attic, back in its attic home. That's where it had to live: Old houses have almost no closet space and I sure wasn't going to waste clothes and shoe storage areas on cleaning equipment.

It wasn't until I was getting ready for bed that night that I noticed the plaster dust on the floor in the bathroom. I had forgotten to vacuum it.

Oh tosh, I said to myself. What a mess.

Then I remembered that Cindy and Susan came the next day. Cool. They would be washing the bathroom floor anyhow, so I would just leave it.

I was not in the habit of leaving my house in mess for the cleaning ladies. First, I am not a messy person. I do not like clutter. My house is usually pretty tidy, although marrying a man who descends from hoarders has made my life a little more challenging. Second, I did not want my cleaning ladies wasting time putting away my clean dishes and throwing away newspapers. I wanted them to do the stuff I really hate doing, like cleaning the bathroom and washing the floors.

I got home from work the next night and discovered that the plaster dust was still on the floor.

The normal procedure for cleaning a floor is to sweep or vacuum and then use a wet mop or a rag.

Cindy had neither swept nor mopped. Neither vacuumed nor ragged.

For $60, I can not clean my house myself.

We had already had a few incidents that I had overlooked, so much did I hate cleaning my own house. I came home from work one night to find the trash next to the back door in the kitchen with a note explaining that Susan couldn't get the back door open.

Yes, the key was tricky.

But - it was also possible to take the trash out the front door and carry it around to the trash can in the back yard. Going out the back door was the easiest way to the trash can but not the only way.

I fired them.

Only I did it the chicken way: I told them that I had to cut back on my expenses. I should have told the truth but then, I wasn't their manager. I wasn't responsible for their professional development.

Then I had a problem: I had become accustomed to the leisurely life of a woman who does not clean her own house all the time. I wanted that one out of three Saturdays back.

I asked around. My friend Maria Antonette recommended her cleaning lady. I had seen Toni in action cleaning her own house and I knew she didn't play. Her standards were high and her house was spick and span.

I asked Esperanza, her cleaning lady, to come in for an interview. We walked around the house as I pointed out what I would have her do.

She looked at my windows, which I think I had washed once since moving in and then only on the inside - the outsides were dirty - and asked me how I preferred her to clean them.

We were speaking Spanish, so I asked her to repeat her question, thinking I had misunderstood.

"How do you want me to clean the windows? With newspaper or with rags?"

I stopped. Turned. Looked straight at her.

"You do windows?" I asked.

She was as baffled as I was. "Isn't it part of cleaning a house?"

Wow. She hadn't been in this country long. I recovered quickly. "Yes, it is. Of course."

Then she asked me how I wanted her to do the laundry, explaining that her husband, who worked at FedEx, which was why I was pretty sure she was not an illegal alien, was very picky and she separated everything.

I asked again, in astonishment: "You do laundry?"

And again, I got her baffled response. "Isn't that part of cleaning a house?"

So yes, I hired her, even though she told me she would have to bring her infant daughter to work with her. How much trouble can a baby in a carrier be?

The first day she cleaned, when I came home from work, she was waiting for me. She wanted me to inspect to make sure she hadn't missed anything.

My house sparkled. The light reflecting from the inside of the windows made it look like I was inside a diamond.

I gasped. "It's perfect!" I told her. I was so impressed at how good the windows looked half clean that the next day, I got out the ladder and cleaned the outsides of the windows.

I had high hopes for a beautiful relationship.

Unfortunately, that was the high point. I should have fired her after she let my friend's dog get killed, if not just for solidarity then just because her toddler daughter never would have had the chance to scribble with black ink all over my newly reupholstered white sofa.

But I'll tell you about that later.

In which my cleaning lady uses a vegetable brush to scrub my toilet and the mystery of my frequent illness might have been solved

I know it seems like a rich lady, first world problem to complain about How Hard It Is To Find Good Help These Days, but that's not going to stop me. It is hard to find good help. It is hard to find someone who will clean your house as well as you would, that is, assuming you are a good housecleaner.

If you are a crummy housecleaner, it is pretty easy to find a cleaning lady who will do a crummy job. I have employed such women before.

 

It's not just a first world problem, either. It's hard to Find Good Help when you are a Peace Corps volunteer. I had a cleaning lady when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile.

Yes, you read that right. I was a Peace Corps volunteer with a cleaning lady. (I also had a gardener.)

Don't laugh. You, too, would get a cleaning lady if it cost you ten dollars for half a day's work and your alternative was to wash your clothes by hand in the bathtub.

Note I did not say your alternative was to take your clothes to a laundromat.

The only laundromats I ever saw in Temuco, my Peace Corps town, were the kind where you drop your clothes off and pick them up, clean, ironed and folded, three days later. It cost more than ten dollars for the service.

The theory of labor

For ten dollars, I could not only have someone come to my house and wash my clothes, I could also (in theory) have her clean my house.

Maybe you wouldn't get a cleaning lady for only ten dollars. Which, I might note, was four times the market rate for cleaning ladies in Temuco because I felt like paying someone only $2.50 for half a day's work was a bit much. Maybe you think hiring someone else to clean your house is exploitation.

I don't.

I think it is honest labor and that as long as you are not making your cleaning lady take daily photos of your nude, pregnant body or ordering her to get you a glass of ice water when or requiring that she pick up your dirty underwear off the floor (tacky), as the employer in the novel Minding Ben does, then your are not being exploitative. Cleaning is a job. Being a slave and a personal servant <> cleaning.

My grandmother was a maid before she got married. She worked in Chicago and in Milwaukee. Had a half day off on Saturday, which she would spend walking around town. She would walk to save the streetcar fare and spend the nickel savings on a candy bar, which was her meal.

My great aunt on the other side of the family was the head housekeeper for a wealthy Milwaukee family. Aunt Katy never married. She was in charge of a large household staff. Not too shabby for a woman who probably did not go past 8th grade.

My friend Julie has a cleaning lady. She says her friends are troubled by this - they think she is exploiting the cleaning lady.

What are the work options for an uneducated woman in this country? People don't become housecleaners because it's fun, but because they don't have many choices. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your house is unproductive. Feeling guilty about hiring someone else to clean your vomit? To clean your bloody underpants? To clear your clogged toilets? That's worth feeling guilty about. Clean up your own bodily fluids and pay a plumber to do the toilets if you'd rather pay $200 an hour than figure it out yourself.

But feeling guilty about hiring someone to do laundry and vacuum and dust and wash the floors? Dumb. Pay a fair wage, give her vacation pay once a year, be nice and move on. It's a job. That's all.

Washing clothes and why a laundromat was not an option

Back to my cleaning lady in Chile. I hired Marisol when I realized I did not want to spend my entire Saturday washing blue jeans, socks and underwear in the bathtub. Washing clothes in the tub is a pain in the neck. I was willing to pay someone, especially once I discovered that hanging out at the laundromat for two hours while my clothes almost cleaned themselves in a nice machine was not an option.

Which makes me think that perhaps a laundromat is a great business idea for Chile. Except it's not - who would go to the laundromat when she could pay someone to wash clothes in her house? Never mind. Capital is more expensive than labor in many places yet.

Although you do have to look at the total cost of ownership of bathtub washing.

What is threadbare?

Do you know the word "threadbare?" Have you ever tossed it off casually to describe your paint clothes or old gym socks?

You don't know what threadbare is.

Threadbare is when your blue jeans have been scrubbed on a rough pine board once a week for a year. All the blue has been scrubbed out and all that remains are the white vertical and horizontal threads.

There is a technical term that weavers use but it escapes me right now. The warp or woof or something. Anyhow, threadbare blue jeans can be see through. Yes they can. And socks only last a few months when washed on a board.

So when you are considering whether to take those clothes to the expensive wash service (that uses machines, I would expect), you need to include the cost of replacing the board-washed clothes frequently.

The other cost you have to include is replacing your gym clothes when they catch on fire because you have hung them to dry on the device that fits around the chimney of your wood burning stove.

Here's a story about wood burning stoves

1. Jamming a wood stove full of logs does not make it burn all the way through the night and provide for a nice, toasty house in the morning.

2. Jamming a wood stove full of logs just makes the fire burn hotter.

3. Which means that if there are gym clothes hanging right above the stove on the device that fits around the chimney, it is pretty likely that the clothes will start to burn.

4. Which means that you, who are about to fall asleep, smell something and think to yourself, "Did I leave the iron on? It smells like clothes burning."

5. And then you remember that 1. you don't have an iron and 2. even if you did, you would never leave it on so 3. what's burning?

6. It's the gym clothes that are burning.

You have to include all the costs when you are making a decision.

We hire a cleaning lady

My roommate and I hired Marisol. I thought it would be easy. "Marisol, please wash our clothes and clean whatever is dirty."

To me, the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling were perfectly visible. The grime on the walls and doors was visible. The dirt was screaming, Clean me!

It's not like there was clutter all over the place or a kitchen full of dirty dishes. I did not want her spending her time tidying. I wanted her to clean. I can tidy. Tidying is easy. Cleaning is a pain in the neck, which was why I was paying her to do it.

But Friday after Friday, I would come home to find the cobwebs intact. The walls grimy.

Finally, I started leaving her notes: Marisol, please clean the cobwebs on the northwest corner of the kitchen ceiling. Please wash the kitchen floor.

The day I left her the note to clean the grime around the doorknob and returned home to find an 8" circle of pure white around the knob and gray on the rest of the door, I realized I needed to be even more specific.

Marisol, I wrote, the doorknob looks great! Now please clean the rest of the door.

What I really wanted was a cleaning lady with initiative. One who would seek dirt and destroy it.

Perhaps her father had never played Seek and Destroy with her when she was a little girl. When we were getting ready to move out of our house in Spain, my dad gave me a bottle of 409 and a rag, explaining that my mission was to seek the dirt on the walls and destroy it with the 409. The house had to pass inspection or else. Or else I don't know what, but it probably wouldn't have been good for my dad's career.

I guess that's fair. Why should the people moving into the house after you have to clean your mess? I have adopted that attitude with every move, leaving every house and apartment spotless.

Alas, I have never moved into a house vacated by someone like me. I have never moved into a house being vacated by an air force brat. If I had, the house would have been clean.

Now we are getting to the main point of this story and I cannot believe I have never told it on this blog before as it is one of my all-time favorite stories.

I stay home from work because I am sick and observe that my cleaning lady does not optimize her work processes

One Friday, I stayed home from work. I was sick, which happened a lot when I was in Chile. Something about living outside your own culture that is really hard on the immune system. I think the culture shock in Chile might have been worse than culture shock in the middle of Africa. Chile looked western.

Looked middle class. I was in a three bedroom, two bath, brick tract house. My town had Mercedes dealership. On the main plaza there was a movie theater, a coffee/chocolate shop, two department stores, a bank, a church. I recognized everything.

But I recognized only the surface. This was still a foreign country and they did things differently. Every time I thought I understood what was going on, I discovered I had completely misunderstood. The popcorn was not salty, it was sweet. French fries were served with mayonnaise. (That was an easy adjustment to make, believe me.) Stores didn't take returns. Shopkeepers controlled scarce resources - why should they care if the customer was happy? Only really rich people had a checking account, so I had to go to the gas office and stand in line for 40 minutes to pay my bill.

I'm not saying that they do things wrong or badly in Chile, just differently (one benefit: the post office was open until 7 p.m.), and always feeling as if the ground is not solid under your feet* takes a lot of energy.

So I was sick a lot.

This Friday, I stayed home. Saw Marisol come in, start working. Wondered why she didn't do the laundry first so it would have more time to dry before the usual afternoon rains came.

My friend Paul wondered the same thing about his cleaning lady: She didn't seem to plan her activities with the critical path in mind. First you chop veg for the soup, then you get the soup started, then you clean the kitchen floor. You don't wash the floor and then do a lot of messy work in the kitchen.

I watched Marisol work and realized that she did more than I thought but there was still wasted activity. Whatever. As long as she did what was on the list, I suppose. I wasn't there to micromanage. I mostly just wanted clean clothes.

Marisol is cleaning the toilet with a hand brush

I returned to my book and only looked up again when I saw her kneeling next to the toilet, scrubbing it by hand.

Her hand was in the toilet. Even though there was a toilet brush behind the toilet. She was cleaning the toilet with a hand brush.

Why was she cleaning the toilet with a hand brush?

How odd. Marisol, I called. I didn't realize you brought your own cleaning supplies.

I don't, she answered, puzzled.

Then where did you get the brush that you're using?

This? she asked, as she looked at the brush. Oh, this is from under the kitchen sink.

From under the kitchen sink.

Marisol, I said slowly. That's the brush I use to scrub vegetables.

Oh! she replied cheerfully. Well, I'll put it back, then.

No, I told her. That's OK. I'm not going to be using it for vegetables any more.

And I didn't.

By the way, I have not been seriously sick since then. Just saying. It takes work to build an immune system.

* In little hotels, the bath mat would be turned so that the suction cups were facing upwards. I asked my friend Monica what that was about. "So you don't have to stand in the water!" she told me.

In which the cute English grad student/track coach kisses me and I leave because I am so shocked, then never get a second chance for another kiss

Sometimes, it's not so smart to google old boyfriends or men you thought were cute but way out of reach but who then kissed you anyhow and boy did that surprise the heck out of you.

Not because you find out horrible things about them, like they were really serial killers or child molesters, but because you discover that they have aged and gone bald in the 25 years since you last saw them and how can that happen? And if they have aged that much, what the heck has happened to you?

Where did that stupid gray hair come from? And how come your husband looks even more handsome as he gets gray/silver but you just look older? How come it takes forever to recover from a sports injury? Why doesn't all the extra fluid drain from under my eyes and the rest of my face until just before it's time for me to go to bed again?

These questions make my head hurt.

Back to finding old boyfriends. Old boyfriends and the guy you thought was a major hottie and your friends thought was a hottie and who took you completely by surprise when he kissed you because HE WAS A HOTTIE.

I stayed in Big Southern City for a few years after I finished college. Big Southern City, back then, was not a bad place to be as long as you didn't have to drive far and as long as you had air conditioning during the day.

It was also a good place for an employed but indebted young person to be as real estate was dirt cheap. I paid $280 a month for my cute one-bedroom apartment with the 50s-era teal bathtub, sink and toilet. I was two miles from work and didn't have to get on the freeway.

Back then, I didn't like the freeway because of the congestion and it was a pain in the neck. Now, I don't like it because of the congestion and THE SPEED! OMG THE SPEED!

I have become a little old lady hunched over in the driver's seat, my hands white knuckled as I clutch the steering wheel, hoping that nobody honks at me. I hate getting onto the freeways here because they are 1. crappy and 2. poorly-designed with 3. left-side entrances. Hello blind spot on my right.

I will take twice as long to go home from dropping Primo off at the airport if it means that I don't have to go on the freeway. I am 47 years old and I have almost become that person going 40 in the middle lane with my left turn signal blinking even though I have no intention of changing lanes. Oh the anxiety that turn signal causes in the people behind the signaler.

So I had this cute apartment in Big Southern City and was paying cheap enough rent that I could pay my student loans as well. $183 a month for loan payments, $280 for rent, $50 for car insurance, a hundred or so to my mom for my car payment, throw in some phone and electricity money, and even on $20,000, which did not go nearly as far as I thought it would once the government took its share - boy was that a shock when I got my first paycheck - I almost went to HR to tell them someone had made a big mistake, I had some money left over for food.

Peanut butter sandwiches, but that is food.

A few doors down from me lived Vincent.

Vincent was a hottie.

All my friends thought so. They knew him from having seen him on campus, where he as an assistant track coach. I probably didn't see him because I wasn't wearing my glasses. Also because I got nowhere near the track. Sports and I are not exactly friends.

He was a grad student/track coach. Brains + body.

A grad student in English. We spoke the same language.

I met him - How did I meet him? Probably because he was outside washing his 20 year old green Volvo, which is the car of choice for liberal arts grad students. Washing that car and working on it, which is a really sexy activity - a man who can fix things! The ability to repair household appliances and other items that have motors is even sexier than the ability to recite "Dover Beach" by heart.

Did I mention he was shirtless? And that the view was mighty fine?

That golden, muscled chest. Muscled from using his body, not from spending six hours a day in the gym lifting weights. Practical muscles, not show off muscles.

One of my friends was over at my apartment, recognized Vince and introduced us.

Vince decided he liked me. We would chat when we encountered each other in the parking lot. Occasionally, he would knock on my door and we would hang out and talk about writing and literature. He's the one who told me to read Harlan Ellison after I told him I was sick and darn tired of Literature and never wanted to read anything hard again. A summer of science fiction would do me good.

He's also the one who told me who Donald Barthelme was. Barthelme was in charge of the University's  creative writing program and Vince thought he hung the moon.

I have never read a word that Barthelme wrote, but it has been useful to have that name in my quiver for when I am around Serious Literati. I nod knowingly as they chatter about Meaning and Deconstructionism and Post Modernism, thinking, I know how to spell that name! and then I take the first break in the conversation to excuse myself and find the food.

I have to leave because in addition to thinking, I know how to spell that name, I am also thinking, Wow you are a pretentious twit. I'll bet you don't know anything useful, like how to fix a car or how to calculate how long it will take the rabbit to die if the poison is leaking into the room at the rate of x units/minute.

I like talking to other English majors sometime, but it is engineers and men who can fix things who rock my world.

Vince was the perfect combination of literary, intelligent, handy, and gorgeous.

Which meant he would have no interest whatsoever in me.

Why would a literary, intelligent, handy and gorgeous man be interested in someone as ordinary as I? I was going to say, Someone as ordinary and chubby as I was, but I was not chubby at the time, seeing as I had some money for food but not a lot. I had also discovered that if one runs the four miles around campus almost every day after work, one can eat almost anything one wants.

As long as what one wants is only what one can afford. And as long as one spends most of her day at her desk at work, far, far from her refrigerator.

I have learned since getting married and adopting my gold-digging lifestyle of not working that if one spends much of her day at her computer on the kitchen table in a house where her husband likes to keep frozen custard and cheese and potato chips, even if one goes to the gym four days a week and even if one is signed up for a half marathon for which she is halfheartedly training, one cannot eat all she wants without experiencing repercussions.

These are the benefits of aging: gray hair, puffy eyes and easier weight accumulation.

But apparently, Vince was interested.

I didn't have a clue. (Yes, I know this is a theme with me.)

He would come over and hang out. He wanted to spend time with me.

And then he asked me to the movies.

Only I thought he was asking just did I want to go to a movie with him because you know, he didn't want to go alone?

Sure why not.

I had no idea this was a date.

When I was a freshman, a guy down the hall - let's call him Bill - asked if I wanted to see the Tom Petty concert with him. I thought he just had an extra ticket that he didn't want to go to waste. Which was why I was so confused when he seemed to be trying to put his arm around me while Tom was singing that the waiting was the hardest part.

The rest of the evening went about as well. After the concert, we were trying to find Bill's car in the multi-floor parking lot. Despite what anyone might tell you, I have an excellent sense of direction and when left to my own devices and not nitpicked, I can find things.

But I kept going to the same spot and kept finding the car not there. "This is where it should be!" I told Bill in frustration.

He was already cranky because this had been a date and I just didn't know it, a fact he would later complain about to our mutual friends, although if I had been on a date with someone who didn't know it was a date, I think I might have kept that information to myself. His crankiness was not improved by our inability to find the car and my insistence that it was here. HERE!

And then we went down one floor.

And found the car exactly where I said it was. Just displaced by 15 vertical feet.

Poor Bill. If I had known it was a date, I would never have agreed to go to the concert. It hadn't occurred to me that he might be interested because I had no interest in him. Blesshissweatyhandedheart. You don't look for interest in others if you are not interested yourself.

I was interested in Vince, but in the theoretical, wouldn't it be cool if (then) Tom Cruise or (now) Denzel Washington or Daniel Craig dropped by and asked me out to dinner. In the "that's the level of reality I assign to this possibility" way and remember, I got an 'A' in probability and statistics. Although not until grad school. In college, I got a 'C,' which was entirely my stupid fault because what made something an easy A was that if you went to class and did the work, it was fairly easy to do well, not my method of, "I need only to go to class a few times a semester because this stuff is so obvious."

The good thing about having lived an oblivious, clueless life full of mistakes is that it gives one lots of material.

Where was I?

Oh yes. Vince asked if I wanted to go to the movies. I said sure. Why not?

We went. We sat next to each other. I had no, He likes me! vibes. None.

Not that I was looking for them because - Vince. Me. I was no fool.

We went back to his apartment. Sat on the couch. Talked about something deep and intellectual I am sure.

And then he kissed me.

What was this?

Where did that come from?

I was so shocked that I mumbled something about needing to iron a blouse for work the next day and went home.

Shortly thereafter, Vince went to England for the summer. He gave me his vacuum cleaner. He wasn't going to need it where he was going. He wrote me a chatty, funny letter about his experiences waiting tables under the table and visiting the Tower of London and Stratford on Avon. I read the letter and thought, Well that was nice, and then I thought no more.

While he was gone, I moved to Other Southern City. I took his vacuum cleaner with me. A sign of true love that I had overlooked? I give you my minor appliances. My cleaning tools.

That fall, I returned to Big Southern City for homecoming. My friends had advised me that perhaps Vince's kiss had been an expression of romantic interest. I had had time to recover from the shock and to think, Well this wouldn't be so bad.

Except for the part that I was now living in Other Southern City. He was back in Big Southern City.

They're not that far apart. Fourteen Dairy Queens on I10 between Big Southern City and Other Southern City and I know this because my friend Heather and I stopped at every single one of them on a trip to my mom and dad's one weekend. The bakery with the kolaches is halfway between Big Southern City and Other Southern City, shortly after you pass through the town with the bordello. There is food on the way and it's only a three hour drive. This could work.

I was in Big Southern City. I'll stop in and see Vince, I thought. Rekindle that flame.

I stopped in. He almost had to ask me who I was. Whoa. I guess I had aged in the six months since we'd seen each other. We chatted uncomfortably for a few minutes. I noticed his carpet was dirty. His doorbell rang. He gestured to the door. I have to go, he said politely.

The time had passed. The opportunity was lost. I had blown it.

In which I find out that the guy who visited me in Miami had a crush on me but I didn't have a clue but maybe our mutual friend was imagining things

When I got back to the US after my stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile ("Peace Corps lite," we called it because we were in large cities that had coffee shops and movie theaters and electricity), I stayed with various amazingly generous friends in Austin until I had a job and got a place of my own in Miami.

I stayed at Tom and Sherri's for a few months, then spent a month at their friend Cindy's place while Cindy was out of town on a business trip. Cindy had a roommate, George, who was a very nice, very quiet guy who put up with having a stranger live with him for a month. George and I didn't do too much together. We had nothing in common except we were friends with Tom and Sherri. But he was nice. We would chat occasionally, but we each really just minded our own business.

George is the main part of this story, so remember what I just said.

The one thing I remember from staying in that house was that there was dog hair in the bathtub because Cindy blessherheart used to bathe her dog and then not clean the tub. I can put up with a lot - it takes a lot to gross me out - but I am kind of particular about where my naked feet go, especially when they are attached to my naked body. I won't even take my socks off for yoga because the idea of putting my naked feet where others have trod bugs me.

Note that I will, however, put my naked hands on that same mat. I am not consistent. I don't know why. I will also happily buy used shoes at consignment, but only if they are odor free and in good shape. So there you go. I have inconsistent squeamishness.

That said, I don't think most people would be happy about a dog-hair filled tub. Lots of coarse black hairs that blocked the drain. Ick.

I am also not a fan of mildewy shower curtains and have just one word to say to people whose shower curtains are black and slimy: bleach. Just spray some bleach on it. You don't even have to scrub. You don't have to live in grossness.

Look. If I, who can pee in a hole into the ground in the "bathroom" at the La Paz bus station while an old Aymara lady and her granddaughter watch me because of course there are no walls or stalls and then not wash my hands because there is no sink, can be grossed out by something, it's pretty gross. My standards are really low. See heed me when I tell you to clean your dang tub.

Know that I feel a wee bit bad criticizing someone who was so generous to me. For what it's worth, this was over 15 years ago and I have changed all the names. I am indeed grateful that Cindy let me stay in her house. It was very nice of her. And maybe she was in a rush before going on her trip and just didn't have time to clean the tub and it's sure not like I had anything better to do and it was nice, actually, to be able to do something for her and make a contribution to the household by doing some cleaning. There. I feel better.

Then I moved to Miami.

What I discovered about living in Miami is that people in Miami have a lot more friends than people who live in cold places. As in, I have never had so many people want to visit me in the middle of winter in my life.

Which was fine. I had a guest room. I liked seeing people. Most of my friends are excellent houseguests, as in, they didn't leave their towels or the bed linens on the floor and didn't leave their trash all over my house. I made a few extra copies of my housekey, gathered a collection of information about local attractions, stocked the fridge, and told my guests I would see them when I got home from work. If it was the weekend, I said I'd meet them for dinner. No, I had no wish to accompany them or to take them to Miami Beach. I had done that. Been there. My Saturdays were not for being a chauffeur but for doing my laundry, going to my swimming workout, and grocery shopping. Stay at my house, yes. Get my services as a tour guide, no. I was working until 9:00 p.m. or later most nights. My free time was for me.

After I had been in Miami for about a year, Sherri emailed me - George was going to Florida to watch the shuttle launch and wanted to know if he could stay at my house.

Of course he could stay! I had stayed in his house for an entire month. I was delighted to have a chance to return the favor.

He was going to have a car - drive up for the launch on one day, then go to the Keys the next. Fine. Use me as a hotel. I don't mind. It's a little bit of work, cleaning the bathroom and making the guest bed, but again, George had been very generous with me and I owed him.

All went as planned. George arrived. Gave me a lovely hostess gift. (He has excellent manners.) Stayed one night, went to the shuttle launch, returned. While he was gone, I got a call from a Peace Corps friend, W., who had a long layover in Miami the next day on her way from Washington DC to Argentina. Did I want to hang out?

Sure! The next morning, I told George that I was picking my friend up from the airport to hang out with her and that I might not be home when he got back from the Keys.

He asked what W. and I were going to do. I shrugged. Go to lunch. Talk. Nothing special.

Maybe he could hang out with us? he suggested.

I was taken aback. "I thought you were going to the Keys," I said.

He told me it was too overcast to do that.

Oh sheesh. I had been looking forward to time with someone who knew me and whom I knew and I wasn't happy about incorporating a relative stranger into the mix. But what do you say? He was a nice person. A guest in my house. "No! I don't want you with us!" I didn't have it in me.

After I picked W. up at the airport, the three of us went to lunch. It was fine, but W. and I didn't have the conversation I had wanted to have - you know, where we talk about men and gossip about our mutual friends.

W. left that evening and George left the next day. Life returned to its sad normal of 13-hour days at the sweatshop of Ryder corporate finance.

A few weeks later, Sherri emailed me. How did it go with George?

Fine, I told her. He saw the shuttle. Whatever.

No, she asked. I mean, how did it go?

I still didn't understand.

Her exasperation came through the monitor. He likes you! That's why he wanted to go to Miami!

Well knock me over with a feather. Talk about playing it close to the chest - share a house with someone for a month and you don't have a clue that his interested in That Way. Was I clueless or was George too understated?

I am generally clueless, but George had given me no hint whatsoever. Coming to Miami did not count as a hint. I was a hotel. Not a destination in and of myself.

And of course George had said nothing. Not a word. There had been no flirting. No statement of intent. Nothing. I am not a mind-reader and even if I were, I would not have been looking for this sort of information in George's blesshisheart mind. Nice guy, but no chemistry and I had learned my lesson about ignoring my chemistry instincts after the disaster with the guy I dated right before I went into the Peace Corps.

There is no better way to ruin a perfectly nice friendship than to try to push it to romance. The kissing never gets better. Ever. It's either there or it's not and there is no sense forcing it. Your friend who says, Oh no! It can get better! is a liar - she left her husband three years after she told you that.

I had to tell Sherri that I was not interested. Which is something I hate to do because I always feel as if I have been forced into it because the guy involved has refused to properly interpret my signaling. As in, if I had been romantically interested in George, I would have given him some indication. You know - like asked if I could go to the Keys with him or tried in any way to spend more time with him.

Although - and this just crossed my mind - maybe George had said nothing to Sherri and she was trying to matchmake. That's better. I like that a lot better than 1. I was clueless or 2. I had to reject a really nice guy. He probably had no interest in me at all. Whew.

In which I make a severe miscalculation about my bladder capacity on the Bus to Cartagena (OK, not Cartagena but still to a place in Latin America)

Have I told you guys about the time I made the Mexican bus driver stop so I could run into the bushes and pee?

No. I haven't. Because I try not to tell the same story twice here.

And yes I know this is a pee story and some of you don't like that sort of thing but everyone pees. Everyone wants to know how the astronauts pee. The first exhibit I wanted to see when Primo and I went to the space museum in Huntsville was the one explaining how the astronauts did what had to be done when they were in space.

My mother doesn't like it when I blog about the toilets in foreign countries, but once you've exchanged a 1000-lira Turkish note for a piece of toilet paper about the same size as the note, which makes the thinking person wonder, Why not just eliminate the middleman and use the currency for toilet paper? and then managed the fine art of balancing just right over the hole in the ground (hint: butt should be lower than the knees), you are over your squeamishness. Now you just want to know what toilets are like all over.

After my stint in the Peace Corps, I was living in Austin, unsuccessfully looking for a job because apparently, employers thought Peace Corps = "Teva-wearing, dope-smoking, unbathed, kumbayah-singing hippie."

Which is definitely not me. Oh sure sometimes I don't shower every day, but that's because 1. I am lazy 2. my husband is stuck with me because he would be too mortified to go through a second divorce and 3. the air here is super dry in the winter. But I wear cute shoes. I might not shower every day, but I draw the line somewhere. I wouldn't be caught dead in Tevas or Crocs.

I was in Austin. Looking for a job. Couldn't find one. What a better time than when one is unemployed to hop on the bus to Laredo, then walk across the border and get a bus to Guanajuato? Great idea, huh? That's what I thought.

Buses in Mexico are easy. Mexico has good roads and the tourist-class buses are comfortable and have toilets in the back. I am not crazy about the practice of forcing passengers to watch whichever movie the driver feels like popping into the video machine, but earplugs can block a lot of car chases and gunfights.

On a 13-hour bus ride from northern Chile to Santiago, I was forced to watch Ghost, which led me to the very bad decision of getting my hair cut like Demi Moore's.

I look nothing like Demi Moore. I do not have her fragile beauty and her thick, dark, lustrous hair.

I am a sturdy gal whose ancestors gave me the gifts of a strong body that could give birth in a potato field, then keep harvesting once the baby was tied to my back. I have fine, flyaway hair that when it is not covered with Clairol #24 Clove is at best a mousy drab, only now it is graying mousy drab.

The Demi Moore haircut? Did not work on me.

Bus movies = evil.

Back to Mexico.

After I had wandered through Guanajuato's cobbled, colonial streets lined with thick walls broken by heavy oak doors and gone to the mummy museum where the disinterred, mummified corpses of those whose families couldn't keep paying the cemetery taxes are displayed, I got bored and decided I needed to go to Dolores, the small town whence El Grito de Dolores, the start of the Mexican War of Independence.

I walked to the bus station and got my ticket but still had 30 minutes to wait. I decided that Staying Hydrated (remember - this is the town where corpses mummify instead of decomposing) was important, so I bought a two-liter bottle of water.

And proceeded to drink most of it.

Before I got onto the bus.

Which, much to my surprise, did not have a toilet.

I was an old pro at Latin America bus travel, having just spent ten weeks returning from Chile, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, back to the US over land.

I took a bus from Salta, Argentina, to Asuncion, Paraguay. The ticketseller in Salta told me the ride was 12 hours and that the bus was air conditioned and had a toilet.

Liar.

The bus was not air conditioned. That would not have mattered so much if we had been going over 15 miles an hour and had generated a breeze, but it is hard to go fast when you are on a road that is mostly sand. We stopped for a break and I asked the driver to turn on the A/C.

He shrugged. "No A/C," he told me.

"But it says on the ticket! It says right here!" I demanded shrilly as I showed him my ticket, which did indeed say there was A/C, A/C that I had paid extra for as a rival bus company had cheaper tickets on non-air conditioned buses.

He shrugged again, drew on his cigarette and turned away from me. He didn't care. I could ride. I could not ride. All the same to him.

In a way, the lack of air conditioning was not so bad, because the heat that caused me to sweat out all my fluids so that the lack of a working toilet ceased to be a problem. The gap-toothed, sweating man sitting next to me who sucked down beer after beer never seemed to need a toilet, either.

Perhaps the high point of that trip was when the man behind me threw up in his seat and the driver refused to clean it up. It wasn't his vomit, the driver said.

When Lars, the Danish nurse who was sitting next to vomiting man and with whom I had bonded over our mutual discomfort in the northern Argentina heat and our mutual hatred of the noisy four year old sitting in front of me, asked the driver again to clean it up, the driver pointed out that the vomit was not actually in Lars' seat so what was the problem?

In Bolivia, the buses didn't have toilets at all, but we made frequent rest stops that really weren't for passenger convenience. They were beer breaks for the driver. My friend Kelly and I, on an earlier trip, took the bus from La Paz back to Chile. Only half an hour into the trip, the driver pulled the bus over at a cafe. "Twenty minutes!" he yelled over his shoulder as he got off the bus.

Kelly and I went inside the cafe to wait. Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Forty. We were looking for the driver. "Is that him?" she asked. "The guy over there? With the empty beer bottles in front of him?"

Yes, it was. Our driver. On his third beer. Ready to drive 11 hours on unpaved roads to the Chilean border.

On my overnight ride to Cochabamba (overnight is the only way to travel in Bolivia because you really don't want to see how narrow and twisting those unpaved mountain roads are), we stopped at a solitary cafe' on the altiplano. No toilets.

"Out back," a man told me when I asked.

I looked behind the cafe. I saw the mountains, looking flat in the moonlight. Small round shadows on the plains drifted and floated toward the mountain and away from it. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I realized that the shadows were Aymara women, squatting in their full skirts and petticoats. Squatting, standing, and leaving little dark circles in the dirt.

What was I supposed to do with my used toilet paper?

Air conditioning, indeed.

The next cafe' did have a bathroom. The toilets had no seats, which was common in South America, which makes me wonder if the toilets were sold without seats or if there is a strong secondary market in toilet seats down there and if so, what are those seats used for because it's certainly not toilets. There were showers but no bulbs in the light fixtures. The illumination came from candles stuck in sand contained in cut-off two-liter soda bottles.

I was used to traveling on Latin American buses.

But I hadn't planned appropriately for a Mexican local bus.

Two liters of water? In a half an hour? Before a bus ride?

Ten minutes into the ride, I thought, "Hmm. I could pee were the opportunity to present itself."

Twenty minutes into the ride, I thought, "I need to go now."

I looked at the back of the bus, seeking the toilet because of course there would be a toilet because how else would people pee?

No toilet.

No toilet and the road was getting bumpy.

Thirty minutes into the ride, it started to hurt.

I went to the front of the bus and politely asked the driver how far we had to go.

He waved his hand and said casually, "Not far! Not far!"

I smiled tightly and returned to my seat. I knew what the Latin American, "Not far!" meant. It is a synonym of "Four more blocks," which in Chile, was the substitute phrase used to mean, "I have no idea where this place is you seek but I am afraid if I admit such to you, I will seem either rude or stupid or both, so instead, I will lie to you and then we'll all be happy."

I tried to wait. I tried to think of anything but peeing.

When that didn't work, I started looking around for a bucket or an empty 64-oz Slurpee cup or anything that could capture and contain liquid.

Nothing.

I asked the driver again. "How much longer?"

Again, he waved his hand. "Not far. Not far."

I waited. I waited.

It's only 57 km from Guanajuato to Dolores, but in Latin America, you don't convert the kilometers to miles and estimate your time based on 55 miles per hour. Otherwise, you get too depressed. Instead, you just look at the number and ignore the units. That is, think of 57 kilometers as just 57. That's an hour. At least. Throw in the rest stop the driver makes a few minutes into the trip because you know he's tired and you're at an hour and 15 minutes.

A few minutes is a very long time when your bladder is about to explode. You realize that Einstein was right when he talked about that time stuff and how a minute with a pretty girl is not the same as a minute on a hot stove. Something like that. I just had to pee.

Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. I returned to the front of the bus and hissed at the driver, "If I can't pee right now, I am going to die."

Proper Mexican women do not talk like that.

Heck, proper American women do not talk like that.

His head swiveled, his jaw dropped, and he stared at me. There must have been some fierce determination in my face or perhaps desperation that made him take pity on me.

"OK," he said. "OK." He gently pressed the brakes. Stopped the bus. Opened the door.

I ran. There was a line of bushes about ten yards from the road. I scooted behind them, pulled down my pants, and squatted. As the pain left my body and well-being flooded me (honestly, that feeling of getting to pee when you have needed to pee for so long is almost better than [wxyz]), I glanced up and over the bushes to the bus. Every window had at least two faces pressed to it. As I pulled up my pants, walked back to the bus and returned to my seat, they all stared at me without saying a word.

"Thank you so much," I told the driver, my chin high. I felt great. I would not be daunted.

I would also not drink two liters of water just before getting on a bus again. There is only so much kindness you can expect from strangers.

In which the cute guy in my Portuguese class turns out to have sweaty hands and poof my crush is killed

When I lived in Miami, I didn't have a TV, so I needed things to do in the few short hours when I was not at work in the salt mines known as Ryder corporate finance. When a person does not have TV, she is forced to do things. Horrible things. Things to fill her time. Things like read. Like tutor algebra to high school students, which she thinks will be solving quadratic equations and factoring polynomials but instead turns out to be times tables and converting fractions. Like take violin lessons. Like go to Returned Peace Corps Volunteers parties.

Like take salsa dance lessons. Like learn to speak Portuguese.

It is far far better to own a TV than to be forced to entertain onesself. How on earth did I survive my adult life until I met Primo and married him and his big-butt TV?

True confession: I did have a TV when I was in grad school. I had bought it shortly before grad school so I would have something to distract me while I polished the brass candlesticks that my mother had "let" me keep when she and my dad moved to Saudia Arabia. I jumped on them because what 20something decor is complete without large Turkish brass candlesticks? That need to be polished? A lot?

Once I had the TV, I got into the 30something habit. (And yes, I am watching my library's website to see when they get their copy because I am not willing to pay $25.97 to amazon.com just for a fleeting pleasure. I could save that money for shoes! or purses! Although the dark and brooding Michael. So sexy. So whiny. Maybe he's worth $25.97.)

There were some other shows I had to watch. Me, who used to snicker at her grandmother for dropping everything to watch As the World Turns every afternoon, had become an addict and remains one to this day. I have become my grandmother and am an ardent Friday Night Lights, Downton Abbey and Glee fan. I do like me my soaps.

I even have Primo hooked (ha! Hook 'em!) on Friday Night Lights. At first, he didn't want to watch a

1. Stupid

2. TV show

3. about Texas

4. and football,

but five minutes into the first episode, I knew he would like it and forced him to watch with me. I used my usual "You only have to watch 30 minutes and then if you don't like it, we'll turn it off" tactic, which served has served me well for musicals (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) and some romantic comedies.

Here is the My Fair Lady strategy:

Me: Thirty minutes. That's all. If you don't like it after 30 minutes, we'll turn it off.

Primo: It looks stupid.

Me: Maybe, but it's Thanksgiving weekend and you don't have to work and you can spare 30 minutes to watch a movie with me.

Primo: Fine. [Grumble, grumble, grumble.]

Thirty minutes later. I grab the remote and turn off the movie.

Primo: What are you doing?

Me: I said only 30 minutes. It's been 30 minutes. Your suffering is over.

Primo: I don't know.

Me: What do you want to do? Should we put together a puzzle?

Primo: It's not that bad.

Me: No no no. I said only 30. That I wouldn't make you do more than that.

Primo: I guess I could watch the rest of it. It doesn't suck.

That technique has gotten Primo hooked on Friday Night Lights. Here is how hooked he is:

When we realized the library did not have Season 3, we bought it.

That's right.

We paid money for a TV show. We don't even have cable, y'all. If you don't count our property taxes and our amazon.com prime fees, we do not pay for movies and TV. We get them from the library and from amazon prime.

Where was I? Oh right. Hooked on TV shows. So I gave my TV to my brother when I went into the Peace Corps and never asked for it back because I wanted more out of life than vicariousness. Is that a word? I wanted to live my own life, not watch someone else's. Now, of course, I am perfectly happy to watch someone else's drama. As long as it isn't my drama, I'm happy. Vicarious is fine with me.

And now back to Miami and the Portuguese class and the sweaty-handed guy Claude.

Oh the Portuguese class. When I signed up, I thought I could go straight into Portuguese II because I already spoke Spanish, but the world-weary clerk told me that mami, in Miami everyone already speaks Spanish.

Then she would not take my registration form unless I completed the "race" box, which annoyed me to no end because seriously, Miami public schools adult education program? Does it matter what my race is if 1. I want to learn to speak Portuguese and 2. I am paying you money to teach me?

But the clerk, she does not care. She is like the clerk at the marriage license office when Primo and I applied for our license. I filled out my section of the form, ignoring the stupid "race" box because again, it's relevant to my marriage how? and pushed the form across the counter to the clerk, who was busy busy busy looking at her fingernails. She slowly looked at the form, then pushed it back to me, telling me that I had to answer the question.

I should have

1. told her to look at me and decide for herself what I was or

2. written "human," because is that not what we all are in the end?

Alas, I had not found my inner revolutionary at either point, so in both cases, I chickened out and wrote an answer, although who knows? Maybe I do have some other ethnicities in me of which I am unaware. People 300 years ago got around more than we think. I could be a little bit of everything.

In the Portuguese class, where I was slotted unceremoniously into the Portuguese I section and where it did indeed turn out that everyone in the class already spoke Spanish, which was not a problem except when the conversation turned, as it always does in Miami, to that maldito I spit on heem Castro, the conversation was no longer in Portuguese, which was what I wanted to learn, but rapidfire Spanish, which I already speak albeit not with a Cuban accent, which meant I had to concentrate very very hard to understand what the heck anyone was saying.

But I learned some Portuguese, enough to get by, and enough that when the teacher assigned us our end of class speech assignments, I could turn the tables on her.

Why do American men prefer foreign women? was the topic that she, a carioca, assigned to me.

Oh heck to the no. Uh uh. I was not going there. Betray my kind? No thanks.

Instead, I wrote about why foreign women preferred American men.

American men are not the most handsome, I noted. Italian and Argentine men are the most handsome.

They're not the most sophisticated. That's the French. Maybe. I don't know.

But they're the nicest. American men are the nicest. Sure, men do bad things to women in all cultures, but in the US, it is not socially acceptable to have a mistress.

After the speeches, a professora made us sing "Over the Rainbow" in Portuguese. I don't want to step on any toes here, but that is a vile song in English, much less a pretty language like Portuguese. I think she hated us.

But that's not what this post is about.

There was this guy, Claude, in my class, in both Portuguese I and Portuguese II. I spent all of Portuguese I trying to figure out how to get him to talk to me. In Portuguese II, I somehow succeeded. And I somehow convinced him to go to the Sunday evening salsa class in Miami Beach.

Gosh I miss Miami. In January, it is almost always warm there. It's mid April and we are having thunderhail here. It snowed three days ago. I have a space heater pulled up next to me. I can't get decent Cuban food here. My Spanish has gone to poop.

And finding a decent salsa class here is nigh impossible.

In here's defense, we do have killer bratwurst, cheese curds and frozen custard.

Primo has been promising to take dance classes with me for a couple of years. Yet he keeps loopholing out because of class conflicts with our theater tickets or travel or whatever. There are not enough salsa classes to overcome our other obligations.

But in Miami, there was a class every Sunday night in Miami Beach. The teacher's name was Luz. She was the best dance teacher I have ever had.

After the salsa class with Luz, I took a swing dance class that did not require one to sign up with a partner. I was the only unpartnered person in the class. The way the teacher is supposed to handle this situation is to have everyone change partners every few minutes. You're supposed to be learning the steps, not how to dance with a particular person.

But this teacher - "Bad Teacher," or "BT" for short - didn't do that. Instead, she told me to practice by myself.

Practicing alone is not a good way to learn to dance.

When BT would see someone doing the step wrong, rather than gently correcting that person, she would stop everyone, look at the ceiling, and announce, "SOMEONE is not rocking back on the two count."

We would all look at each other, at our feet, and at BT, wondering if we were the SOMEONE of whom she spoke.

Luz was not like this. Luz had us split into a line of men and a line of women to learn the basic step, then she would have us practice with each person down the line, correcting us as we went along.

I had told Claude about the class and he for whatever reason said he would accompany me. I picked him up at his apartment, which was not far from my cute little Coconut Grove WWII-era duplex that has since been knocked down so that a crappy condo can be erected in its stead.

We went to the class.

I danced with him.

Reader, he had Sweaty Hands.

I know, I know. How can I, a flawed human being, demand perfection of another human being? How can I demand dry hands when I don't even have slim, toned thighs and naturally curly hair?

But Sweaty Hands! Ick!

My crush, she was over. Finito.

I didn't think Claude was interested in me at all. I thought he just wanted to learn to dance.

But when I dropped him off, he asked if I wanted to come up to his place for a drink. I think he might have said "coffee," but at that time, I did not know what joy coffee would bring to me and so my first thought would have been, "But I don't drink coffee."

Actually, I think those were my words to him. "I don't drink coffee."

When Person A extends the Sweaty Hand of Friendship or Seduction to Person B, the proper response is not, "I don't drink coffee," unless Person B is not interested in Friendship or Seduction.

Or unless Person B is so darn rude, clueless and unsophisticated that she blurts out the first words that cross her brain.

The world's most sophisticated women are not to be found in the United States. Or at least they are not to be found in my car.

Claude looked at me, startled at my abrupt response/rejection of his Sweaty Hand of Friendship/Seduction. Um OK, he said. See you in class.

And that was the end of my Portuguese salsa dance adventure with Claude.