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

In which we find kittens in the haymow

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

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

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

It was the early 70s, after all.

We are each holding a tiny black kitten.

We rescued those kittens.

Well, my uncles did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I cannot. I do not want to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. Back to the kittens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he asked for my card.

I hesitated.

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't call.

And he didn't call.

And he didn't call.

I stopped worrying about it.

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

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

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

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

That call sent chills of fear down my spine.

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

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

I did that for three weeks.

And he never called back.

In which Primo and I realize we have irreconcilable differences

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

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

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

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

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

Then we got married. And moved into our house.

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

Man, they bug me.

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

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

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

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

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

So these are the essential eating problems:

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

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

I view eating as a necessary biological function.

Primo looks at it as a Major Social Activity.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until we got that feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had to try.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is crazy on so many levels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We stopped in front of the name callers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's where the conflict was.

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

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

The boyfriend did not slow down.

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

Renee was not happy about this.

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

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

I was, too.

In which I have not much to say

My chickadees, it has been a busy few weeks and I have not had much time for writing here. Many apologies.

However, I will leave you with a "You've got to be kidding" tidbit for the day.

After Doris' Christmas letter, which ended with an entire paragraph bemoaning the state of the world and the politicians and the evils of the Other Side and how the world is run by Old White Men (like the one she is married to? is she morally opposed to Old White Men?), she sent Primo an email on Christmas day that ended with these exact words. I promise this is a direct quotation:

Everything sucks and I get despondent.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you, too.

In which I find on facebook my high school boyfriend who didn't want to kiss me

You guys, I have to tell you about something that just happened that has made me so happy. Do you remember when I told you about my high school boyfriend, Ken, who later turned out to be gay?

He kissed me only the one time and when he did, he told me I tasted like macaroni and he didn't like macaroni.

But except for the not-kissing part, I really liked Ken. He would drive me to school and home from swim practice, which was great because nobody, I mean nobody at my school had a car. My dad was stationed at Howard AFB in the Panama Canal Zone. The military would ship one car per family. To have more than one car, you had to pay to ship it yourself, which was not cheap. Or I suppose buy one in Panama. I don't know what prices were like, but Panama had no auto manufacturing industry that I knew of, so these cars had to be shipped as well.


Not that it was hard to have only one car in the Zone. On base, everything was in walking distance. By walking distance, I mean within a mile or two because unless you have health issues, you can walk two miles. I was at a hotel in Miami for a job interview in 1997 and wanted to find someplace for lunch. "Is there anything I can walk to?" I asked the clerk. I wouldn't have minded driving, but the company had not rented a car for me, so I was stuck.


"No," the clerk said as she shook her head sorrowfully. "Nothing close enough to walk."

When the HR lady picked me up the next day, I saw a shopping strip with restaurants three blocks from the hotel. Which is certainly close enough to walk.

Off base, there was excellent public transportation. My friend Julie and I took the chiva bus home from swim meets all the time. The only problem was standing at the bus stop in our shorts and swimsuits, hearing the Panamanian men yelling, "Chica americaaaaaaaaa-na!" and making that weird sucking, kissy noise with puckered lips that is supposed to accomplish I don't know what because it sure wasn't attractive.

Ken's uncle sent him videos of U.S. TV shows. We got U.S. TV on Armed Forces TV, but a season or two late. Any time someone new would start at school, we would grill her about what was happening on General Hospital. All we knew was that creepy Luke with his ugly hair was chasing Laura. We were all shocked to learn that she broke up with Scotty.

Ken and I would watch Mork and Mindy and a few times, we played Pong, which even back then, despite its novelty, held no appeal for me. Now that I am a middle-aged lady living in the Midwest, I have even less interest in video games.

We would hang out at his house even when his mom and dad weren't home, which makes me think that somewhere, on some level, they might have known. With my next boyfriend, we necked at the movies and during lunch behind the chem lab and in his car on dates. We necked so much that I got whisper burn on my chin. All we could think of was necking. But Ken and I didn't kiss. I should have known there was something off, but I had never had a boyfriend before so I didn't know what was supposed to happen.

Perhaps the ideal situation for parents would be for their daughters to date gay boys because there would be nothing to worry about.

I liked him. I was less attracted when he shaved his head for ROTC Rangers, but I still liked him.
But he ditched me - more or less - right before the Christmas dance. The plan had been that he and I would go with Julie and her boyfriend, but then he never formally asked me to the dance and I guess we were broken up. We stopped talking and I met the new boyfriend with whom I necked during lunch and life was fine until the new boyfriend didn't ask me to the prom and went with that red-headed girl in my gym class. They spent the night in a Panamanian jail - I don't remember why - so it worked out in the end.

Ten years later, I ran into Ken and his parents, who had always loved me - I remember being at a party at Julie's house and Ken's mom circling Ken and me as we danced, taking photos - at the Seattle space needle. I had just quit my job to attend grad school and was taking a six-week tour through the northwestern U.S., a trip that included several nights of sleeping in my car at campgrounds in the mountains, which was not so smart of me because guess what? even in July, the mountains are darn cold at night, an idea that is almost incomprehensible to someone who lives in Texas and might pull out a winter coat in January.

A person who only uses her winter coat in January probably does not think to take a warm coat with her on a trip in July.

I know better now, of course. I travel with a blanket, a candle, a small shovel, water and food in my car. But that's because my dad ordered me to do so when I drove from Texas to Minnesota in December. The two Air Force Academy students had died in a blizzard either that winter or the winter before, trapped in their car. My dad said that the heat from one candle plus some blankets would have been enough to keep them warm. I have not verified this information with any other sources, as I trust my dad, who grew up in northern Wisconsin, to know what he was talking about when it came to surviving cold weather.

I was in Seattle. Had gone to the top of the space needle. Looked over, saw a nice-looking guy, looked twice because hey he was a nice-looking guy, then looked thrice because I thought, Wow! That man looks so much like Ken! How weird is that!

Then I looked four times. Then I looked at the two people with him. And those people! They look like Mr and Mrs KenLastName!

I looked again.

There was no doubt.

I walked over to them. "Ken?" I asked.

Startled, he stared at me.

I turned to his dad. "Mr KenLastName?" I asked. "It's the Gold Digger! From Panama!"

Their jaws dropped. Then they smiled. A little reunion! So far from Panama!

Mr and Mrs KenLastName insisted I join them for dinner. They were animated and chatty, Ken was withdrawn. But here was my chance. I took a deep breath, then plunged in.

"Ken, why did you ditch me right before the Christmas dance?" I asked.

He flinched. Thought. "I don't know," he admitted. "I was dumb."

I thought no more of it. A year or two later, I got a Christmas card from him telling me he was getting married. Then I heard nothing. Several years after that was when I googled him and found the posting on the gay athletes site. I knew it was Ken because he has a very distinctive last name and the post was about swimming and we had met when we were both on the swim team.

I was happy because I realized that his lack of desire to kiss me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him.

I googled him again recently and found him on facebook. I hesitated. Should I friend him? I didn't know. I didn't know if he would want to hear from me. I didn't know what the protocol was for friending former boyfriends. Facebook keeps suggesting I friend Calvin, my college boyfriend to whom I was engaged but then changed my mind. I do know that that one is not a good idea. FB can shut up with its stupid suggestions.

I decided not to initiate anything.

But then this week, I was working on the book that has to become a bestseller so Primo can quit his job and become a full time revolutionary, although he is not interested in camping or roughing it, so he needs to be a revolutionary with excellent financial backing so he can stay at nice hotels with good breakfasts and accumulate his hotel points. I included a scene about the character discovering her high school boyfriend was gay, blah blah blah and I started thinking about Ken again.

I went back to facebook. Looked him up. Sent him a message. Waited.

I got an immediate response, along with a friend request.

He wrote the loveliest note, telling me how nice it was to hear from me and that it was our conversation in Seattle that got things moving with his telling his parents and coming out.

It feels good to get that off my chest since I feel that I owed you an honest explanation.

I wrote back that I had discovered years before that he was gay, which was a relief to me, and that I was happy he was happy.

He answered that he had wanted for years to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me.

I thought you were a beautiful girl back in HS...I still think that you were back then and are still now.

It wasn't me. It was never me. And he knew it and wanted me to know it. Best of all, someone I liked with whom I share a common biography is back in my life. The End.

In which I get rid of a pain in the head

I don't think I've told you about my Medical Drama. Don't worry. It's nothing serious. Just annoying.

For years, I have had headaches. I finally went to the doctor and he called them migraines and I said, No, a migraine is when you throw up and have to be in a dark quiet room all day and he said, No it's not. He also told me there is no such thing as a sinus headache and the sineaid I had been taking for years not only did not help my headaches but probably made them worse.

He wanted me to see a neurologist but I thought $$$$$! and said, No, you fix it. It's just headaches.

He sighed, rolled his eyes, and said to quit taking so much OTC medicine because that causes rebound headaches.

When a friend at the gym suggested I try imitrex as a painkiller, I asked my doc for an RX and he gave me one.

When another friend told me about topamax, which is supposed to prevent headaches and which has the side effect of absolutely killing the appetite, I said, Sign me up.

My doc gave me the topamax, which did nothing to stop my headaches but did kill my appetite to the point that one day at work, I got dizzy as I walked up the stairs. But why? I asked myself. Then I realized that all I'd had to eat that day was half a cup of yogurt for breakfast and then three asparagus spears for lunch. The drug completely removed my desire to eat.

Within a month, I could actually see my abs, which up to now had always been covered by a fluffy Memphis Roll. All that good BBQ and corn pudding and cheese grits.

The muscles themselves were solid, as I had been exercising for a while, but I had never been able to see them before. It is possible to have muscles with a layer of fluff on top. That's what happens when you exercise + eat. I have discovered that it is not possible to exercise enough so that I can eat whatever I want. So I have made peace with my Memphis Roll.

But I had to stop the topamax because it wasn't performing the required task.

My doc sent me to an ENT for something else. The ENT did a CT scan of my head. No tumor. Then I gave up and went to the neurologist, who shook his head and told me to stop taking all the OTCs.

When I moved to [new town], my family doc refused to treat my headaches. "I don't do those," he said. "I don't know enough. You have to see a neurologist for that."

I went to the neurologist, who bills out at $800 an hour and I am not complaining about that because I would happily pay $800 never to have another headache again as long as I live.

She took a long case history, gave me a dozen photocopied pages that I glanced at and then tossed. I didn't get headaches after eating aged cheese or chocolate. I got them from glare, changes in barometric pressure, dehydration, and then sometimes just because. It was the just becauses I wanted to figure out.

We tried different preventive drugs, none of which worked to stop my headaches but all of which had lovely side effects like making my hair fall out in clumps or making me gain weight.

Primo and I visited my aunt Rita. I got an email from her the week after we left. "You weren't kidding about the hair loss!" she wrote. "I found hair all over the bathroom floor!"

I felt bad. I had cleaned the shower after I was through, but I didn't see the hair on the floor because I don't wear my glasses to shower.

I went through thousands of dollars of drugs and doctor bills. The co-pay - the CO-PAY - for the lyrica was $140. On the market, it would have cost me over $1,000.

I considered participating in a research trial where they put a little plug in your heart. There appears to be some connection between people who get migraines and people in whom that little hold between the chambers doesn't close at birth. But I decided I didn't want a tube run into my heart.

The neurologist gave up. "Try acupuncture," she suggested.

I found an acupuncturist near my house. When I got to the clinic, the clerk asked me for a urine sample. I looked around: the sign noted that I was in a drug rehab center.

"No, no urine sample," I said.

"But you have to," she stated.

"No I don't," I told her. "That's not what I'm here for."

I wanted to say, "Do I look like an addict?" but then I thought, Well maybe I do. Maybe there are addicts who aren't emaciated and have good teeth. Aren't there Hollywood addicts who go into treatment all the time in between movies where they look fabulous?

She shrugged. Whatever.

I sat and read the sheaf of papers. I had to sign a contract agreeing to keep my appointments. I rolled my eyes. Again, not an addict.

It reminded me of when I went to the dental school in Memphis for my implant. Note that's singular and at the dental school. We are not talking about implants, but an implant, as in a fake tooth to replace the tooth that had to be pulled after almost 20 years of causing me trouble, starting when half of it broke off when I was flossing.

My teeth have betrayed me my whole life. I have taken care of them, even paying for my annual cleaning and exam when I was in grad school and didn't have dental insurance, but they have done me wrong. Perhaps I don't have good teeth. Maybe that receptionist could sense how many cavities and crowns and root canals I had had. But I have good teeth in that not meth mouth way.

At the dental school, after I'd had the surgery to put donor bone in my gum, as my own bone was lacking - and I just read Stiff, which is about research on cadavers, and have a pretty good idea where that bone came from, the dental student was very insistent that I remember to return for my appointment a few months hence.

As he saw me write the appointment in my purse calendar, he looked at me: suit, heels, overall good teeth, decent haircut. "Maybe I don't need to remind you and remind you to come back," he said.

"No I don't think so," I answered.

I didn't sign the contract. I wasn't trying to kick a habit.

Not that I don't have habits to kick. I want not to reflexively, if internally, criticize misspellings when I see them online or at the grocery store. I want not to look with derision on sloppy dressers. I especially want that one, as I am in no position to criticize. It is 2:46 in the afternoon and I am still in my PJs and robe and have not even washed my face. I have, however, made a batch of homemade mustard - cross your fingers on that one - and gotten everything out to make the coffee snaps in the Joy of Cooking. Judge not lest ye, etc, etc. Plus you never know what someone's situation is. Maybe someone is staying with a sick child at the hospital and hasn't had a chance to do anything for days. You can hardly expect that person to spend an hour dressing to the max.

Or maybe that person is just lazy as sin, as I am. I go to the store in my gym clothes because the store is on my way home from the gym. It makes no sense to drive home, shower, change, and then return to the store, does it? Actually, it's because I am so environmentally sensitive. That's it.

I want to assume the best of people, not the worst, even of the people who get in the express lane at the grocery store with MORE THAN 12 ITEMS! "Can't you read?" I want to snap at them. Then I have to remind myself that sheesh! is it like you are in such a hurry that you have to get out with your cauliflower, half and half, and cilantro right now?

I looked around the clinic. I saw a man in a white lab coat hurry by me. He was wearing a yarmulke and he had those curly sidelocks. Then another man, also in a lab coat, also with a yarmulke and sidelocks. I looked at the door: a mezuzah was attached to the frame.

I glanced down at my shirt. It was rather low cut. As in, it showed the cleavage I do not have. Was this the wrong shirt to be wearing to a clinic run by orthodox Jewish men? Probably. I tugged my shirt up and my skirt down.

The acupuncturist, Seth, came to get me. He, too, was an orthodox Jew. An orthodox Jewish acupuncturist.

He waved his hand when I said I hadn't given a urine sample. "Not necessary," he said. Ha. I knew it.

Seth and I chatted. He asked me about what I ate. Here we go again, I thought. But when he told me to go a week without dairy - "Even though that's so last century," he told me - and then a week without gluten - "That's the food allergy du jour," he said and track my headaches, I thought, Well what do I have to lose?

He also told me to try yoga. Then he stuck a tiny little needle in the top of my foot and left it there for a minute. "I don't expect this to do much," he explained. "Acupuncture is not very effective for pain that is genetic in origin."

I went home and followed his instructions. A week without dairy. Which was hell as I love cheese. And half and half. And frozen custard. But I admitted to myself that it might be a fair tradeoff never to have another headache.

But the headaches didn't diminish.

I cut out the gluten. Do you know how many foods have gluten? Soy sauce has gluten! Soy sauce!

Still no change.

I returned for more poking, dressed more modestly this time. While the four needles rested in my feet and hands, we talked about Memphis, where he was going to be traveling to complete a PhD program. "Oh the barbecue!" I raved.

He looked at me. "I take my own food," he said.

"But Central BBQ is not expensive," I told him.

He shook his head. "Not kosher."

Ah! Of course.

"But Memphis has a huge Jewish population," I said. "Not one kosher BBQ restaurant?"

"I don't know," he said. "But it is a big pain in the neck to make BBQ kosher."

This was last summer. I read yesterday about a kosher BBQ restaurant there. I need to call Seth and tell him.

He pulled the needles out. I left.

And started to notice a decline in my headaches.

Which seemed crazy to me, because I don't really believe all that acupuncture stuff. Although I do have a friend who swears by it, so maybe it does work for some people. It just seemed nuts that a few little needles would stop my headaches.

What other explanation could there be? I examined the changes in my diet and behavior over the past two weeks.

One big change was it was warmer outside. We had the windows open. Could it be a weather thing? Would this be my excuse to move back south?

No.

I had been going to yoga, which is a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. Why should I be surprised? 1. I have been bit in the ass so many times by things I have thought, Well a high-school dropout can do this so why can't I? That's how I ended up with some (note that is more than one, which shows that I am incapable of learning from experience) really bad self-inflicted haircuts. 2. Have you ever seen a yoga instructor? They are in amazing shape. AMAZING.

It was a great workout, but I discovered that the downward dog, it does not work for me. As in, when I am in that position, the blood rushes to my face and into my eye sockets and the little capillaries around my eyes burst so that it looks like I have tiny measles just across the middle of my face. As much as I sort of enjoyed the post-workout pain of yoga, I don't want to have to wear a mask in public so that people don't think my husband is shooting my eyes with buckshot or whatever you call those tiny little bullets.

Could it be the coffee? I had cut back from two cups of coffee every morning to one. It was just too warm for more than one coffee.

Caffeine? I wondered. Nah, that was too simple. Too easy. If caffeine caused headaches, surely one of the many docs I had seen over the past ten years would have suggested I stop drinking it.

But it was worth a test. I bought some decaf and switched. I stopped drinking diet Dr Pepper in the afternoon.

My headaches stopped. Completely. I went three months without a headache. I used to have two to three headaches a week. I went three months. Without one headache. Then I had a few because there were some big weather changes and because I thought, This time, I can work on my computer without closing the blinds first! I'm just going to be a second. That's not enough glare to start a headache! Only it was. But that headache was my own stupid fault. So four headaches in four months is not too shabby.

Which made me happy and made me a wee bit mad, because if it was that simple, why on earth had somebody not suggested it ten years ago? I could have saved thousands of dollars in medical and drug bills and I wouldn't have had to deal with hair fallout. Plus I wouldn't have felt crummy several days every month from the headache or from the painkillers, which sometimes work but always have their own side effects.

The moral of the story is: try cutting out caffeine before you go to the $800 an hour doctor.

In which Yves' cheapness makes me not very sad when he breaks up with me

I know I just wrote about how wonderful Yves was when I threw up at the romantic cafe, or at what was supposed to be the romantic cafe, but he had a dark side and that was his cheapness.

Not that I don't welcome a good thrifty attitude. I myself, as you know, am from the Tribe of We Who Do Not Waste, and regard spendthriftness and financial mismanagement as about the worst things you can do outside of breaking the ten commandments. Murder and adultery are worse than wasting money or spending money you don't have. But not much.

A friend is doing an estate sale for a couple who is losing their $1.1 million house to foreclosure. He is a stocker at a grocery store and she used to be a mortgage broker.

"But how did they get a mortgage for a house that price?" I gasped.

My friend looked at me. "Are you serious? She was a mortgage broker! She got her own loan."

I was still confused. "But how did they pay the mortgage without enough income?"

"They have thousands and thousands of dollars in credit card debt," my friend said. "They just kept borrowing."

I could never live like that. I could never sleep knowing that I didn't have enough money to pay my bills. I already have sleepness nights worrying about my 401k and how it has not done a thing in the past 15 years and thinking that I better keep Primo healthy and happy for at least another 20 years because if he dropped dead right now, there would not be enough money from the life insurance to take me to 97, my expected age of death, and it's sure not like anyone wants to hire me.

But Yves took thriftiness to the next level. Washed his clothes in the sink because he didn't have a washing machine. OK, he was in an apartment and there wasn't room for a washing machine, but at least take the clothes to a laundromat or a cleaner! Kept track of all our expenses during the trip through the south of France on a spreadsheet. When he wanted to see me on a business trip to Memphis, after he had broken up with me nine months previously, he asked me to tell him quickly if I would see him, as there was only one more cheap seat on the Saturday flight from Paris to Memphis.

Mind you, this was a business trip. Not that I am saying one should be a bad steward of an employer's money, but he was making the arrangements for this trip two months in advance. Two months. I think there might have been other seats available.

Not to mention that there were so many ways that company wasted money that an extra $100 for an international plane ticket wasn't even a flea on the tick of management that was sucking the shareholders dry.

Not that I'm bitter about having worked -and been laid off from - a place so badly managed that in the six years since my layoff - and the layoffs of thousands of other employees - the stock price has not gone up at all. Not that I'm bitter that even though the CEO presided over a 34% decline in stock price while I was there (which meant I never got to cash in my options, even though it wasn't my fault that the stock market hated the company) and even though he presided over thousands of job losses and even though there was no improvement in productivity, he still got a $1.2 million bonus.

So yeah. Ask me if I care that Yves might not get the cheapest ticket.

But the main thing he did that annoyed me to no end was when he came to visit me in Cedar Rapids. He had been to Memphis for work, along with his colleague Hubert. A month before he came to the U.S., he called to ask if he could visit.

Sure! I told him. I would love to see him!

This was before he sent me the e-card for my birthday and then broke up with me a week later.

"Just tell me when to pick you up at the airport," I told him.

Oh, that wouldn't be necessary, he assured me. He and Hubert were going to drive from Memphis to Cedar Rapids!

"Drive?" I asked. "Are you sure? It's really dull. Just a bunch of cornfields."

I didn't know what I was talking about, he told me. He and Hubert wanted to see America and this was their chance.

I shrugged. "Whatever. Don't tell me I didn't warn you."

Hubert would drop Yves off and then go on by himself to Chicago for a few days, whence their return flight to Paris.

Yves would stay with me.

"Better check the Cedar Rapids-Chicago flights right now," I warned. "There are only a few each day."

A month later, on Friday afternoon, they arrived.

"What a boring drive!" they told me. "Nothing but cornfields!"

I just looked at them. Really? They had thought I didn't know my own country?

We went to lunch, then, as promised, Hubert left.

"When is your flight? I asked.

"Oh, I'm not going to fly from here to Chicago," Yves told me.

Mystified, I asked, "Then how are you getting there?"

I was thinking maybe he would rent a car or take the bus.

"I thought you could drive me!" he beamed.

"What?" I demanded. "What are you talking about?"

"You can drive me! I checked the fares and it's really expensive."

"You're not even paying it!" I shouted.

"It's so expensive." His voice trailed off as I shook my head.

"It's 250 miles to Chicago! Are you nuts?"

"But I thought you would want to spend more time with me," he said.

"It's TWO HUNDRED FIFTY MILES! That's FIVE HUNDRED MILES round trip!"

I was so mad. The last thing I wanted to do was to spend an entire day driving someone to the airport and then returning home.

But it was too late to change his plans.

"It's two tanks of gas," I seethed.

I don't remember what we did on Saturday. Probably watched the lint fall out of his wallet and then found a penny and stretched it into wire.

Sunday morning, we got up early. I had called my friend Lenore, who lives in Chicago, to see if we could meet her for lunch. We left Cedar Rapids and drove for five hours over VERY BORING TERRAIN to Lenore's house. We walked to a small pizza place by her house. When we finished eating, the waitress brought the check.

It sat on the table.

I waited for Yves to pick it up.

I know. What we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

I should have grabbed it. What was wrong with me? But Lenore beat me to it. Why didn't I offer to split it with her? What was wrong with me? I was probably distracted by my fuming that Yves The Self Proclaimed Millionaire wouldn't buy lunch for me and my friend after I had just driven him TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES to catch a damn plane.

I owe that woman a pizza.

I dropped Yves off at the airport and drove back home. Another 250 miles, for a total of 500 miles in one day, in case you're not good at math.

Six weeks later, he sent me the pathetic e-card. A week later, he broke up with me. My only response to him was, "You own me gas money for the trip to Chicago."

In which I get too busy and then can't pee and it's really awkward because I am with my boyfriend visiting his mother

Warning: This post involves bodily functions. If talk of such offends you, stop reading now.

Years ago, when I lived in Big Southern City, I met this really nice guy at work. We're going to call him Gerard. Not his name, but it will do. Gerard was sweet and nice and interested in me. I had broken up with my college boyfriend/fiance' and hadn't dated since, although there was the Disaster in Cincinnati where I thought I would be clever and sophisticated and witty with the older [31 to my 24] man when he bit a loose thread off his scarf and I asked sultrily if that was the only thing he could do with his teeth and suddenly everyone around me fell into shocked silence, including Older Man, who had known me for a month or two and had never seen this side of me, a side whose effectiveness was cancelled immediately by my fast and furious blushing as the full implications of what I was asking hit the front part of my brain. I mumbled something and backed away, wondering to myself where that had come from.

Fortunately, I was in Cincy only for a few months on a temporary job assignment. The Disaster happened the night before I was moving back to Texas. Whew.

I can't remember if the guy my boss set me up with was before Gerard or after Gerard. What I do remember was realizing that it's not really a good idea to get your honey where you get your money. Nothing wrong with working with someone you date. It's working with someone you used to date that's the problem.

And thank goodness there was no drama with the boss' friend. Salvatore was still in love with his old girlfriend and had no interest in me. There were some lackluster double dates with my boss, her husband, Sal and me, but it was really more Sal hanging out with his friends - my boss and her husband, and me hanging out with my boss and her husband, and we all happened to overlap. That could have backfired in a really bad way. But Sal didn't really care about me and I didn't really care about him, although I did care that he didn't care about me because who wants to be rejected by anybody? It is better for the ego to be the rejector than the rejectee.

Although being the rejector is no piece of cake, mind you. When you reject someone nice, whom you like, you get all the trauma of a rejection with none of the sympathy.

As it was, dating Gerard and then not-dating Gerard was not the best thing for me. Fortunately, I moved from Big Southern City to Other Southern City when we broke up, but I still had to work with him.

But all that aside - the story I want to tell you is about the time he took me to meet his family in Denver. He asked if I wanted to go home with him for the Fourth of July and said he would pay for half of my plane ticket, which seemed like a really good deal to me at the time and was very generous of him, considering we were both very entry level in our jobs with the corresponding entry-level salaries. No man had ever been so generous to me. I was easy to please.

My standards are higher now. When I met Primo, he paid for all my plane tickets to visit him. Granted, I was unemployed when we were dating and he had a gajillion frequent flier miles, although he often paid for tickets rather than redeem miles because he said the miles were worth more.

This was back before alimony when Primo had extra money. Now, he is paying alimony and we own a house, which means things like roofs and driveways and wet basements become money pits in orders of magnitude one could never imagine as a renter and make me long for the days when my biggest housing problem was the Crazy Laundry People Upstairs. Those were the days: no shoveling, no grass cutting, no home repairs. Just watch Bridezilla and What Not To Wear all day long. Freedom.

Primo was shocked and disgusted when he learned that the Moroccan Millionaire had not paid for my ticket to Paris for the Moroccan Millionaire Rendezvous. I had staunchly maintained that I was an independent woman who could not be bought and hence would buy my own ticket, but it would have been easier to maintain that stance had Moroccan Millionaire actually offered to open his wallet. That's the thing with millionaires - at least millionaires who get that way because a rich relative dies, not because they have earned the money themselves - they have no idea how hard it is actually to earn money. They think it's just there and that everyone has it and they don't have a clue.

But enough of that. Gerard very graciously offered to pay for half of my ticket and that's pretty much what clinched the decision.

So apparently, I can be bought.

Except I really liked Gerard. He was a very very nice guy. And he kissed just fine.

We flew to Denver. His sister, Evangeline, who lived in San Francisco, picked us up and we stopped at Gerard's favorite Mexican restaurant on the way back to his mom's house. I had never met anyone like his sister before.

She was a hippie.

You know: lived in San Francisco with her bearded Birkenstocked professor husband. Didn't shave her legs or under her arms. And even though Evangeline was already forty, her little girl was only four! ONLY FOUR! That meant that Evangeline had had a baby when she was thirty six!

To complicate matters, Evangeline wanted another baby. She was concerned, though, about being the only mom in kindergarten who was over forty. I was shocked, shocked, that someone that old would even think about having a baby. It was so old! She was right to be concerned, I thought.

But I kept my thoughts to myself.

Oh youth.

Gerard's dad was very ill. His mom wanted to get things settled with the will while Gerard and Evangeline were in town. She had laid out all the family silver and jewelry and anything else she thought Gerard and Evangeline might disagree about on the dining room table and about the living room. Her instructions to G & E were to figure out what they wanted now while she was there to referee, which is not a bad idea. Even when families don't have things that are worth money, they have things with sentimental value.

I could totally see my siblings and me arguing over who gets the yellow ceramic bowl that my mom used for making oatmeal chocolate chip (I never could figure out why my mom's cookies weren't like the other kids' chocolate chip cookies - I wanted the regular kind, without oatmeal, but oatmeal is a great extender) and for popcorn balls. It's just a regular ceramic bowl that you could get for under ten dollars today. But we all have good memories that go with it. We all also want the kitchen table. We may have to duke it out.

The rest of the time, Gerard and I got busy. We were in separate bedrooms of course because although Evangeline was a hippie, Gerard's mother was not and she knew what was appropriate and what was not. What's appropriate is separate bedrooms and then sneaking down the hallway at night.

Here's what happens when you get a little too busy - way more than you are used to because usually, you have a job and besides, you have a twin bed, which does not facilitate things: you get a little bit - um - bruised and then you can't pee.

I tried and tried and tried and I couldn't. Imagine having to go really bad and then you can't because it hurts. It is misery. I stopped drinking water. Still couldn't go. I sat and sat and sat in the bathroom, trying to distract myself, looking at the ceiling and whistling the "I'm not really here to pee!" song so my body would be tricked into peeing. Didn't work.

Finally, I said something to Gerard. Not that I expected him to be able to solve the problem. "Hello boyfriend!" you say. "Let me share something really intimate and embarrassing with you!"

That was back when I was 24, before anyone made a regular practice of farting in front of me. Some people take marriage as a license not to hold in the farts any more. That part was not covered in our pre-marital counseling.

But turned out that Gerard's dad was a urologist and Gerard, who was a biology major and pre-med in college, knew a thing or two himself after years of medical conversations with his dad.

"Sit in a tub of warm water," he suggested.

I didn't ask if I was supposed to pee in the bathwater, although that seemed to be the implication. You guys know where I stand on other people's tubs and showers. Sitting in a bathtub that had been used by other people and then polluting it myself? Oh gross.

Then there was the other issue of what the heck was I doing soaking in the tub in the middle of the day? How was I supposed to explain that?

Yet I was desperate. There is no pain like an unreleased full bladder.

So into the tub in the middle of the day I went. I took a magazine to distract myself, as the "I'm not really here to pee!" song had proven ineffective.

After 15 minutes or so (could be less, could be more - this happened 23 years ago), I felt a blessed relaxing. I scrambled out of the tub and did what Needed To Be Done. I did not pee in the tub. I have standards. Drained the tub. Got dressed. Rejoined G & E and the rest.

But I felt sure everyone knew what had transpired. What would the hippie think about what G and I had done? And my problem? I was so embarrassed.

The shame at what had transpired, coupled with my desire not to be reminded of that shame by seeing Evangeline or G's mother again, is probably not what inspired my breakup with Gerard. But it probably didn't help.

In which I figure out something technical that some of you might be interested in

One of my readers, Munira in Pakistan (yes I am international) asked me to set up an RSS feed, which was kind of like asking me to do my own brain surgery, but then I remembered The Google and I went to The Google, the source of all instructions, including how to repair my own Kenmore washing machine with a broken agitator and how much cake flour to substitute for regular flour, and found out that it wasn't that hard.

So if you are interested in having an email sent to you when I get around to posting here - I am in the middle of my first big rewrite of The Novel and thanks to all of you who gave me such great ideas on what to do with the in-laws at the end - just look at the upper right-hand corner of this page. All you have to do is enter your email and then some magic happens. Electrons are amazing.

In which I have a romantic lunch that starts with zucchini tart and ends with throwing up

Remember Yves, the millionaire boyfriend (he claimed to be a millionaire, but would a true millionaire not even have his own washing machine?) who proposed to me nine months after he broke up with me?

We took a trip together -before he broke up with me - through the south of France. It was actually a lovely trip. He did all the driving and I decided where we were going. We got to see little villages you can't get to by train and he knew that crazy French driving rule that you yield to the driver coming from the right even if you are on a major road and the other driver is on a minor road. When Primo and I were in France last year and drove from Paris to Mont St Michel, I expected death from the right the entire time on the road, which seemed like four straight days but was probably less. Which was probably oh one afternoon. But one afternoon on French roads can feel like an eternity.

We (Primo and I) also discovered the joy of driving up a hill in Rennes 1. without snow tires 2. during a snowstorm with 3. other drivers without snow tires. Yes, it does snow in France. The only time it snowed during our week there was the day we had to drive back from Mont St Michel to Paris. The rest of the time, we had cold rain. France in November. There's a reason it's easy to find a hotel room in late fall.

Next time Primo and I go to France, we are taking the bus. Let someone else worry about the rules.

But Yves and I had a nice time going through the little villages and small cities and up to the top of Les Roches. It makes it easier to travel when you are with someone who speaks the language and knows the rules.

The only sour note - apart from the time

WAIT! THIS IS GROSS! YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP IT! Start reading again after the last set of all caps.

apart from the time when we were in the hotel in Arles where the toilets used about four ounces of water each flush I AM WARNING YOU STOP READING RIGHT NOW IF YOU GET GROSSED OUT DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU

and we all know that sometimes four ounces isn't enough, which is why the hotel provided a toilet brush

YOUR LAST CHANCE TO STOP

which Yves DID NOT USE so when I went into the bathroom, I saw quite clearly that he was an evening pooper who ate a lot of fatty food and not much roughage.

And that's as far as I'll go except to say that cleaning someone else's poop was not what I had in mind for a romantic vacation. He didn't leave his towels on the bathroom floor, but this was far, far worse. Picking up someone else's towels won't make you gag.

Related story: I used to swim at the JCC before I would go to work. That was back when I had a job and some degree of worth in the open market. Now I am just a parasite, consuming without contributing. If Primo dies, I am stuck. There is not enough life insurance to last for the next 50 years of life I undoubtedly have left, at least if there is anything to genetics, and the marketplace has made it quite clear over the past few years that it has no use for my talents. I better keep that man alive and working.

I would go to the JCC at 5:30 a.m., swim, shower, then go to work.

One morning, I arrived at the gym. I put my purse and sweatpants in a locker, then carried my towel and bath kit to the shower to leave it. I opened the door to the showers and a smell hit me.

It was the smell of poop.

Which as everyone knows does not belong in a shower.

I tiptoed to the first shower stall - there were four - and pulled back the curtain.

Someone had smeared poop on the wall.

I felt myself start to vomit.

I backed away, grabbed my towel, and ran out to the front desk.

"Someone smeared poop on the shower walls in the ladies' locker room," I told the attendant.

Her eyes flew open. "Oh!"

"You need to have someone clean it up."

She nodded vigorously. I went into the pool, swam my lazy 1,200 yards, and returned to the locker room.

When I opened the shower room door, the smell was still there. The shower had not been cleaned.

I grabbed my towel again, wrapped my body for modesty's sake, and marched out to the attendant. "It's still there!" I said.

"I told them," she protested.

I returned to the showers, used the stall on the very far end, which was clean, got dressed and left.

I came back at lunch to use the weights. Out of curiosity, I checked the showers.

Still poop laden.

I couldn't believe it.

I found the attendant and hissed, "IT'S STILL THERE!"

She shook her head. "I told them."

"You didn't check to make sure it was done!"

"That's not my job," she snapped.

"Yes! It is! It is your job to make sure it has been handled! All you had to do was walk thirty yards and check!" I stomped away to find someone who would actually give a damn. For five hundred dollars a year, I wanted clean showers. Was I asking too much? I don't think so.

She was unconvinced. "Besides," she said, "Our cleaners aren't paid enough to clean poop."

I whirled back. "Yes, they are! I cleaned poop for $3 an hour. If it is your job to clean the showers, then you clean the damn showers." [I did, when I was a lifeguard during college and the boys thought it was funny to poop on the men's room floor and the City of Converse would not let us lock the bathrooms and require patrons to request the key.]

One of the coaches overheard me. I told him the story and he was appalled. He glared at the attendant and promised, "I will make sure this is taken care of immediately." And he did.

Wow. That's a lot of poop talk for a story that is not about poop.

GROSSED OUT PEOPLE RESUME READING HERE

No, this story is not about poop. It is about vomit.

So the only sour note was the time we stopped for lunch at an idyllic little cafe in the country. The narrow road was lined with elm or chestnut or whatever kind of tree it is that lines country roads in Europe. We don't have many of those - tree lined roads - here. Possibly none. My neighborhood's streets used to be lined with elms that bent over and met in the middle of the street, but that was before Dutch elm disease. Now I just have a maple that drops its leaves overnight three weeks after all the other trees on the street have dropped and two weeks after I have had to rake everyone else's leaves out of my yard. This year, I just waited for the wind to blow my leaves from my yard into the other yards and darn if it didn't work.

But in Europe, they have old roads lined with trees. The sun shines between the leaves and branches and casts dappled light on the road. It was a warm, beautiful day. There might have been cicadas humming, although maybe not as we took this trip in May and I think May is too early for cicadas. Not that I am a cicada expert or anything, but I think they are a late summer thing.

We pulled over and walked to the cafe. The garden was just starting to bloom. A few people bent over the outdoor tables, holding hands across the bread and butter. This was a romantic place. Good. I needed some romance to make up for the you know what. (I'm not going to say it for the sake of the people who skipped the gross part.)

We sat. Looked at the menu. The special looked fabulous: starter of a zucchini tart, then poached fish with asparagus, then a chocolate mousse. Yum. I ordered the special, Yves ordered the steak frites.

We were starving. We hadn't eaten anything since our very light breakfast of bread and cheese and that had been five hours ago. I don't like to go more than ten minutes between snacks, so I was ready to go.

They brought out my tart.

I ate daintily, as Yves and I were still in that stage where we were trying to show each other our best face. Or at least I was. Yves had apparently gotten over the "She must never know I have bodily functions!" horror.

Primo and I still do not pee in front of each other. Yes, we have seen each other naked and our bodies are not as pretty as they were 20 years ago. He has pulled a white hair out of my chin and I have cleaned his infected leg wound, but we close the bathroom door. Every time. There has to be some mystery.

But Yves was either clueless or far less modest than I.

I ate daintily. I finished my small slice of tart. Yves at his small appetizer, whatever it was. I was going to say a salad, but then I remembered that the French don't eat their salad at the beginning of the meal. Or so I've heard. When Primo and I were in Paris, we were not eating multi-course meals. We had a lot of bread and cheese and just one fancy restaurant meal at Le Relais de Venice with the birthday money my mom sent me. I think there might have been salad, but what I remember is the steak and the great sauce that came with it. I even ate the french fries, which I only eat about once a year, just so I could have more of the sauce.

We waited for the next course.

And waited.

And then my stomach started to rumble.

I started to feel - not well.

I started to feel like I was going to throw up.

I rarely throw up. I had food poisoning in Albuquerque in 1986 and again in Memphis in 2003. I threw up both times. I can't remember much more throwing up besides that in my adult life except for the time when I decided to go to Europe after grad school even though I did not have a job. I was so stressed about doing something so irresponsible that I threw up and burst all the blood vessels around my eyes, making it look like someone had given me a light beating.

I burst those same blood vessels again a few months ago after several minutes of Downward Dog at the yoga class my orthodox Jewish acupuncturist who works at a drug rehab clinic had recommended for my headaches. Yoga not only did not stop my headaches (turns out that quitting caffeine was all I had to do for that) but gave me more, plus that lightly beaten about the eyes look.

I am a Delicate Flower.

Point is that I rarely throw up.

But I knew what was about to happen.

"I have to go to the bathroom," I blurted to Yves as I ran. I got there just in time. Chewed tart hurtled out of my body. I kept retching even once my stomach was empty. I vomited so hard that my stomach muscles, which are rarely used, started to hurt.

I flushed twice, wiped the specks off the seat, flushed again, then sat on the toilet to rest.

Throwing up is hard work.

I washed my hands, then rinsed my mouth. I looked at myself in the mirror: I was pale and sweaty. Not a good look for me.

I walked slowly back to the table. Yves stood. "What happened?" he gasped.

"I threw up," I told him.

"But why?"

"I think the eggs were bad in the tart. It's the only thing I can think of. It's the only thing I've had to eat for hours."

He frowned. He looked up, raised his hand and summoned the waitress.

"She is sick because of the tart. We are leaving. Cancel the order. I pay for my appetizer but not for hers."

The waitress tried to protest, but Yves would have none of it.

He threw some bills on the table, gently took my elbow, and carefully guided me to the car, where he reclined my seat. "You just rest," he commanded. "You just feel better."

A few hours later, we stopped for chocolate. I felt much better. But no more undercooked tarts for me.