Tag Archives: husband

It’s All a Blur!

etc., family, funny things, health, humor, , ,

My history with eyeglasses goes way back—over 60 years, in fact. That being the fashion at the time and me being even then the opposite of a fashionista, I wore many pairs of cat-eye glasses.

My husband, Dan, was only a little older than I was when he got his first pair of glasses. Unlike me, he’s near-sighted. (I’m cross-eyed and far-sighted.) He always tells the story of how, once he had glasses, he said to his mother, “Look, Mommy. Those people on television have faces!” (Although we have different diagnoses, we both require Coke-bottle prescriptions. But I digress.)

By the time I was in high school (when I had at last graduated from cat-eye to aviator frames), all my classmates were wearing contacts, and losing them regularly. I was unable to follow suit because of being cross-eyed and, more importantly, because I can’t bear to even think about anything, including me, touching my eye. I recoil whenever there’s a commercial for a drug that requires an eye injection. (That’s true to this day—both the wireframes and the horror of anything touching my eye. But I digress again.)

When I was a child, I had an ophthalmologist, Dr. Saunders, who was the epitome of gentleness and kindness. When it was time for me to select my own eye doctor, I wanted someone with the same vibe. So of course, I went to Dr. Gary, whom I knew from being in the same martial arts class. (I figured that if he needed to touch my eye for any reason, he could at least subdue me first. But I digress yet again.) When I first visited his office, his partner glanced at me and exclaimed, “You’re a hyperope!” which is the technical term for far-sighted, I learned.

Over the years, both my husband and I have been through increasing thicknesses of eyewear and various styles of frames. After all these years, I still prefer wireframes and Dan has come around to my way of thinking. Bifocals were an eventual necessity and I opted for computer glasses as well, since I spend so much time online.

We’ve had a few eye-related emergencies over the years. Mine occurred when I set off a flea bomb in the house and accidentally bombed my face. Fortunately, my glasses offered some protection and there was a bottle of distilled water nearby. Suddenly, I wasn’t so worried about something touching my eyes as Dan held them open and poured.

Dan’s extreme eye occurrence happened when he was driving. All of a sudden, he saw a flash in his right eye, and the vision in that eye became blurry. The next day, he had small, dark pinpoints in his right eye’s field of vision.

A quick trip to Dr. Gary seemed necessary. Dan learned that he had experienced an age-related phenomenon that affects the vitreous fluid in his eye. This information gave me the willies, of course, but Dan took it all in stride. The flash didn’t return and Dan named the largest of the floating points in his eye. He called it “Freddie the Free-Floater.” (Any Red Skelton fans out there? But I digress even more.)

I’m preparing myself for the day when I also see that flash and the dark points in my vitreous fluid. I don’t think I can come up with a better name for them, though. Dan surely wins on that count.

Learning From Mistakes (Or Not)

etc., family, humor, , ,

When I was young, I was supposed to learn from mistakes. Other people’s mistakes, not my own. My parents were devotés of the “No one is so worthless that they can’t serve as a bad example” school of thought. (This, combined with the Girl Scout Law, produced fodder for my innumerable therapy sessions. I thought that only bad people (like my cousin Callie Jo) had to learn from their many mistakes or serve as bad examples. I wasn’t supposed to make mistakes to learn from. Did this make me a Goody Two-Shoes? Yes. Yes, it did. But I digress.)

Since then, I’ve learned through years of psychological treatment that this school of thought is BS. The only way that anyone, good or bad, learns is by making mistakes. Now that I’ve learned that, though, I’ve made some whoppers. I’ve taken up with the wrong boyfriends. (Including one who my parents said proved their point about no one being so useless that they couldn’t serve as a bad example. He was a tow truck driver and knew all the secluded spots where people had run off the road. That wasn’t useless. It proved handy for al fresco entertaining, which my parents didn’t know about. But I digress again.)

Marrying my husband, however, was not a mistake. But, I must admit, I’ve learned from Dan’s mistakes. Sometimes I’ve learned that I’m right, even on subjects that he’s supposed to be better at, like spatial reasoning. When there’s a piece of furniture or a mattress that needs to be transported from one place to another, he continues to rotate it on every axis several times and shove it into the car, while I watch and say, “That’s never going to fit.” When I prove correct, he says, “Well, I had to try.” I reply, “No, you didn’t. You could have listened to me.”

Another time I had to bail him out was when he was fixing to put cement in a hole in the lawn destined to hold something decorative in place. He had to mix several cups of water with the cement. Unfortunately, he used a coffee carafe to measure the cups. I pointed out that those weren’t the same kind of cups that a measuring cup measures. He was flummoxed. I had to do some quick math (including a visit to my study for computer consultation) to determine how many ounces Mr. Coffee thought was a cup and how it compared to a regulation cup. Then I had to figure out how many actual cups of water he needed to add to what he had already put into the hardening cement.

Not that he’s the only one who makes mistakes. In addition to the boyfriends one, I’ve forgotten that we asked the contractor to put in an extra half-step leading up to the front door because the sill is too high for my increasingly unreliable legs. Just the other day, though, I forgot all about it and stumbled over my own feet, only narrowly averting potentially bloody disaster by catching myself on the railing we also insisted they install. (The half-step was necessitated by a fall I suffered during the construction, which I wrote about in “Gravity Is Not My Friend,” a post from 2020. But, being a mensch, Dan didn’t rub my nose in my awkwardness. He said, “Be careful, honey,” (I don’t know why people only tell you to be careful after you’ve taken a fall. But I digress some more.))

But the topic (way back there somewhere) was learning from mistakes. So, what should we have learned? Well, in Dan’s case, it should be: Listen to Janet. (Though I’m afraid that will never truly sink in.) For me, it’s: Avoid complicated men (or so my shrink said). And watch your step. (I’m afraid that hasn’t sunk in either.)

But there are plenty of fresh mistakes to be made, and I’m sure we’ll make our share of them. Or more, more likely.

Go. Be Funny.

funny things, humor, etc., writing, , , ,

Once the boss editor gave me an assignment. “Go,” he said. “Be funny,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” We were preparing a calendar with amusing sayings and odd observances on various dates.

Now, most writers would be daunted by this sort of thing. I know I was. But in an hour, there I came, quips in hand. “Is this job too easy for you?” he asked.

Actually, writing funny stuff is not easy. I was just feeling quirky that day. (“Dying is easy. Comedy is hard” is a quotation that’s been attributed to any number of those shuffling off the mortal coil, from actors Edmund Gwenn to Jack Lemmon to Peter O’Toole to Meryl Streep (who, not having died yet, almost certainly didn’t say it on her deathbed). But I digress.)

The geniuses of Monty Python certainly seem as though they created comedy easily. And I know a man who can write a funny song, a la Weird Al, in 15 minutes or less. But for most of the writing world, humor is the hardest form of writing. (Except possibly the sestina. Or the humorous sestina, come to think of it. But I digress again.)

How do you build up your humorous writing muscles to the point where you can flex? I recommend hanging out with silly people, like the aforementioned songwriter. (If you’re tempted to use AI, forget it. I asked ChatGPT to write a joke about a cat. It replied, “Why did the cat sit on the computer? Because it wanted to keep an eye on the mouse!” Asked for a joke about a dog, it said, “Why did the dog sit in the shade? Because he didn’t want to be a hot dog!” Apparently, ChatGPT writes at the level of a five-year-old. And when I asked for a humorous sestina, it created one about a knight named Sir Guffaw and his tap-dancing horse. But I digress yet again.)

My next piece of advice is to have a cat or a spouse. Cats are not dignified, contrary to their reputations. One of our cats tried to escape from the vet and bonked her head on the glass door to freedom. And my spouse does and says funny things, or prompts them from me. For example, I once took a picture of him in a tweed cap and turned it into a meme (seen here, as you can no doubt tell.)

You can also turn trauma into humor. I once found myself having to get rid of a dead possum, which certainly traumatized me. Another time I almost offed a friend with a bay leaf. Those alarming events worked their way into killer posts, so to speak.

Reading humor can help, too. Think David Sedaris and The Bloggess. For irreverence, there’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. For vintage humor, there are James Thurber and Erma Bombeck. (Given the example of Thurber and Bombeck, being from Ohio helps too. But I digress some more.)

Then there are humorous movies. Personally, Airplane can still make me LOL. (So can Zero Hour, the film from whence Airplane‘s plot and many lines of dialogue came, only deadly serious. It’s impossible to watch without flashing back (or forward, since Zero Hour is the older movie). But I digress yet again.)

But for myself, I like a good catchphrase that didn’t come from a TV show or movie. It came into being because I wanted to write little asides and put them in as footnotes. But I couldn’t figure out how to make WordPress do that, so I turned to my grammatical friend, the paren. (Not really my favorite mark of punctuation, which is the semicolon. But I digress for the last time this post. I swear it.)

Saint Dan

etc., family, funny things, humor, travel, , ,

Once upon a time (as all good fairytales begin), a coworker of mine started referring to my husband as “Saint Dan.” I regularly told tales of how he treated me with love, understanding, humor, and sensitivity. (This was not in the immediate runup to our marriage (during which we had been disgustingly romantic, to the extent that our friends claimed they needed a jolt of insulin when we were around), but after we had been married for years. But I digress.)

Some of Dan’s displays of love seemed to my friends to be extravagant. For instance, when I went on a business trip, he left little notes of love and encouragement in my belongings—not just in my suitcase or pockets, but everywhere. There was even a note under the cap of my deodorant. (There was also a piece of paper with a few cat hairs taped to it, to remind me that the cat loved me too. But I digress again.) My travel roommate was somewhere between impressed and unbelieving. And possibly nauseated.

Another example is the story of how Dan once walked upstairs behind me and said, “Those jeans are loose on you. You should get a new pair.” “I hope you turned right around and gave him a big kiss,” my coworker said. Given the difficulty of turning around and bending over to kiss on the stairs, I waited until we were both at the top.

Dan is also great at giving presents. When he was in charge of the budget (It’s my responsibility now. We have different ways of approaching it that appall each other, so we take turns. But I digress in the middle of what I was going to say.), he used to follow me around at stores and conventions, making note of anything I expressed an interest in, then going back later and buying it for me. Once he noticed that I liked a certain dress, managed to slip away, buy it, and hide it in the trunk of the car before I noticed he was gone. Another time he bought me an amber carving of a rabbit that took him months to pay off, so I had forgotten all about it by the time he gave it to me.

He has a sense of humor, too. Sometimes he even gives me a perfect straight line. Once, the movie Gunga Din was coming on and he innocently asked me, “Honey, do you like Kipling?” I almost choked to death as I gasped out, “I don’t know. I’ve never kipled.” He can pick up on a straight line, too. Another time, we went to a Japanese restaurant for our anniversary. I complimented him on how well he was using chopsticks for the first time. “Jan,” he said, “I’m a compulsive overeater. If I had to learn to eat with my elbows, I would.”

Of course, Dan is far from perfect. Once I had to say to him, “Please don’t use power tools after I’ve gone to bed.” (It was one of those things you never expect to hear yourself saying, then one day there you are. But I digress some more.) And he’s not good with directions. When I draw him a map to somewhere (he can’t use a GPS), I have to draw another map on how to get back (he can’t reverse directions either).

(As I was writing this, it occurred to me that there might be an actual Saint Dan. A quick visit with Mr. Wikipedia revealed a few possibilities, the most likely of which seemed (to me) to be St. Daniel of Padua, feast day January 3rd. Possibly of Jewish lineage, he was martyred by being dragged behind a horse. He is called on by women whose husbands are away at war and is often depicted carrying a towel, which might make him the patron saint of Douglas Adams fans. So now that’s something we all know. And I have digressed pedantically for the last time this week. See you next Sunday for more stunningly useless info and digressions!)

In the Garden

etc., family, humor, , , ,

My mother’s favorite hymn was “In the Garden,” and my husband’s favorite place to be is in the garden. Every spring he goes wild ordering seeds and saplings from catalogs and truckloads of dirt and mulch from local purveyors. (Actually, he is already poring over the catalogs and asking me when we’ll have enough money for dirt and mulch. And rocks. He adds assorted rocks to fancy up his gardens. There’s a local place where he can take his pick and load them up in the back of our SUV. It doesn’t run terribly well with that much weight in the back. But I digress.)

When he lived near Philadelphia, Dan had a small greenhouse that was attached to his parents’ house. I think it got heat from the dryer vent. He moved away from there over 40 years ago, but I know he still misses it. (Sometimes, when he’s feeling grandiose, he describes himself as a former greenhouse manager. One Christmas long ago, I bought him a do-it-yourself plastic greenhouse kit, but he’s never used it. But I digress again.) But now he has a big yard in the front and a woods for a backyard, and he gets his ya-yas out there.

Most of the time, he plants native wildflowers and assorted trees, including fruit and nut trees. He tries to eradicate invasive species and propagate plants that are good for pollinators, particularly butterflies. He also has birdhouses and birdfeeders (yes, multiple) on the property.

Dan gardens to refresh his soul. He also gets some exercise there, digging and pruning. (He also gets gardener’s butt burn when his pants ride down and his shirt rides up. But I digress some more. Graphically.) He gets much less exercise in the winter and gets the opposite of the Summertime Blues.

When he doesn’t have a shovel or rake with him, Dan always takes a walking stick with him in anticipation of falling down, which he sometimes does when the earth turns to mud. He has multiple walking sticks, some of which he bought in Gatlinburg and Ireland, and others he’s rehabbed from random branches. He also uses them when he tours the backyard, which is still suffering from tornado damage, or the slope on the side of our property.

Am I involved in his endeavor? Not much. I find my ya-yas in other places. Oh, sometimes he asks me where he should plant something, or which color of clematis I prefer, what I want to be planted by my study window, or where to put the aforementioned rocks. I go out, studiously look over the landscape, and offer a completely uninformed opinion. I also look up plants for him online—how big they get, whether they’re good for pollinators, how much it costs to buy them, and so forth. (He’s annoyed that many of the seed places are putting their catalogs online, which makes it harder to flip pages. He did buy some sassafras trees because he knows I love sassafras tea. But I digress even more.)

Of course, Dan’s gardening is an investment in someone else’s future. At our age, he knows that he won’t be around to see the oaks and pines grow to their full height or maybe even the apple and plum trees bear fruit.

For now, though, he’s got his happy place, and he doesn’t have to go to a beach to find it. It’s right outside the door.

Thoughts on Editing

etc., funny things, humor, language, writing, ,

When it comes to language, I used to be a prescriptivist, telling others how language ought to be used. Now I am a descriptivist, recording how language is used in practice.

Oh, I haven’t entirely given up my mission to get people to use proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I still feel that writing “correctly” can be important to the meaning of whatever it is you’re writing about. And I still cringe when someone (usually my husband) says “foilage” instead of “foliage” or “nucular” instead of “nuclear.” But that’s speech, which is very different than writing.

Of course, an editor can’t really edit spoken English aside from pronunciation. Well, there are malapropisms and misplaced modifiers.

Malapropisms occur when a speaker substitutes an incorrect word for a correct one. One headline that makes the rounds on Facebook is about an “amphibious” pitcher, when “ambidextrous” is meant.

Misplaced modifiers are descriptive phrases in the wrong place in a sentence. The classic misplaced modifier is Groucho Marx’s “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. What it was doing in my pajamas I’ll never know.” (A misplaced modifier is often confused with a dangling modifier, which happens when an introductory phrase modifies the wrong subject in a sentence: “Painting for three hours, the portrait was finally finished.” Who is painting for three hours? We don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t the portrait. I once worked with a man who described any kind of grammatical mistake, even a subject-verb agreement error, as a dangling modifier. But I digress.)

One of the places I often encounter “faulty” grammar, spelling, and punctuation is on social media. I have to think twice before I share memes with errors in them because I’m afraid someone will think that I don’t know the difference. (I know Lizzie Borden’s name isn’t spelled “Bordon,” but I couldn’t resist the joke: “If you get any messages from my parents, don’t answer them. They’ve been hacked.” But I digress again.)

Speaking of memes, I once saw one that said one shouldn’t look down on someone who mispronounces less-familiar words. It means they learned them from seeing them in print rather than hearing them. One of my dear friends treated the word “sarcophagus” that way and came to me to learn the proper pronunciation. I was happy to oblige. (I’ve also heard of the phenomenon going the other way. Another guy I knew had only ever heard the name Sigmund Freud spoken. He wrote it down as “Froid,” a fair guess based on the sound, but outrageously inaccurate nonetheless. But I digress yet again.)

When it comes to language I do like, however, I love new additions to English. “Portmanteau” words are particularly fun. They’re made up of two words or parts of words smashed together to mean something new. One that everyone knows (but don’t realize is a portmanteau) is “smog,” which comes from “smoke” and “fog.” (I say I like them, but not the ugly portmanteau words that crop up, especially during the holidays. Nothing is simply a sale. It’s always an “aganza,” “palooza,” “bration,” or “thon.” The first million times someone did that, it may have been clever, but the shine has long worn off. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, back to editing. I hereby apologize to everyone whose infinitives I unsplit and whose prepositions I moved away from the end of sentences. I’m really sorry. My bad. Think of me as a recovering prescriptivist. Maybe not fully recovered yet, but I try.

The Whisker Jar

cats, etc., family, funny things, humor, pets,

Cat whiskers are wonderful things. They’re early warning sensory apparatus that let cats know what’s close by. They sense vibrations that indicate changes in air currents, revealing the size, shape, location, and motion of objects or creatures in the cat’s immediate environment. Other sensory organs at the base of the whiskers keep the cat aware of where its body is in space and what’s around it. They supplement the cat’s eyesight. They help keep small particles away from their eyes as well. And their length corresponds to the cat’s shoulders, indicating the width of spaces that cats can get through.

But we know what’s really important. Cat whiskers are adorable. (So are cat eyebrows. Not as prominent as the whiskers by the nose, the eyebrow hairs are wispier. Their function is probably to help protect the eyes but also to give the cat a variety of darling facial expressions. But I digress. I was talking about whiskers.)

Our cat Toby has brittle whiskers. Just when the white appendages start getting long and magnificent like a respectable cat’s, they simply break off, leaving little inch-long stumps. They do grow back, but for a while, he looks like a pincushion instead of a mighty hunter. I guess Toby is just a little less than respectable. (It wouldn’t surprise me. The little dickens.)

We have had cats with properly impressive whiskers. Shaker, a tuxedo cat, accessorized with thick, long vibrissae (to be correct and pedantic). She was very proud of them and clearly thought they were one of her finest assets. They didn’t break off the way Toby’s do, but every now and then, she’d shed one, leaving a fine, thick, easy-to-spot whisker lying on the carpet. Ordinarily, we’d pick up the whisker and store it in a little ceramic pot we called the Whisker Jar. (No, I don’t know quite why we did this. We didn’t do anything with them, like voodoo spells. They just seemed too magnificent to dispose of, and we wanted to see how many we could accumulate. But I digress again.)

Once, however, we decided to have a little fun with one of the whiskers she had shed. We took one of them from the whisker jar and placed it on her head. It stood straight up, protruding from her sleek, black head like an alien antenna. Inspired, we started making boop-boop noises.

Shaker was deeply offended. She was a cat with a great sense of dignity. (Except when she rolled over and showed her fluffy white belly, inviting a belly rub. Then she looked like a chubby black-and-white kitten, which I suppose she used to be. (We got her as a full-grown cat. But I digress some more.)

Anyway, Shaker clearly objected to having her aplomb assaulted in this fashion. She sensed that we were making fun of her (we were) and she expressed her displeasure—and not by leaving an unpleasant deposit somewhere for us to find unexpectedly when we were barefoot. Instead, she used the power of her remaining whiskers. They turned down in a disapproving manner, rendering her face a veritable mask of scorn.

Then we laughed uproariously, compounding the offense. Shaker retreated in high dudgeon, shaking her head indignantly and dislodging the whisker as she went.

We picked it up and put it back in the Whisker Jar. You never know when you might need another belly laugh.

DPF&P

etc., family, funny things, language, ,

“DBF&P” is one of the mantras that Dan and I have, and we have to use it often. As you may have guessed from the visual, it’s a football term. (Not that either one of us is a football fan. Dan isn’t any kind of sports fan (he asks me regularly if I mind that he isn’t) and I only ever watch Olympic gymnastics. But I digress.)

So, what does DBF&P mean? It’s a saying we use when everything seems to be going wrong. What are we going to do? Drop back five and punt.

It’s useful in so many situations. Don’t have enough money to pay a certain bill? Drop back five and punt. Don’t have any side dishes to go with the pork loin? Drop back five and punt. Don’t know what to tell Dan’s mom about our politics? Drop back five and punt. Can’t get transportation to a doctor’s appointment? Drop back five and punt. (In those situations, DBF&P might mean moving money around; finding the can of sliced new potatoes we bought once upon a time; discussing the weather and the cats; or calling Lyft. But I digress some more.)

Now, as to how we came up with this useful locution, I’d have to say its origins are shrouded in the mists of time. I don’t remember a time when we didn’t use it. And now I pass it along to you. Feel free to use it whenever you don’t know what to do.

What other sports phrases might you use when you don’t know what to do? Pick up the spare? Fake left and juke right? Bite their ear off? Play out the clock? Bob and weave? Take a shot? Tuck? Duck? Bunt? (That one’s actually pretty good.)

But we don’t stop there. Dan and I have other mantras, too. One of my favorites is “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” (Dan’s usual response to that is, “I knew you were going to say that.”) There’s also, “The cat did it,” “Ow, Toby!” and “I can’t get up. There’s a cat on me.”

We have separate mantras when one or the other of us loses something like our keys or wallet, sayings inherited from our fathers. Mine used to say, “I’m going to tie it on a string and hang it around your neck.” Dan’s father, who was sometimes more colorful, would say, “If it was up your ass, you’d know where it was.” Undeniable words to live by.

I suppose these aren’t really mantras since we don’t sit and meditate on them. Probably not affirmations, either, which have to be more inspiring. Generally, they’re preludes to action (except the one about the cat on the lap). Maybe they’re mottos. Catchphrases, perhaps?

One catchphrase we have is borrowed from a TV series. We always use it when we start singing a lyric and forget the next line. (We do this a lot. Both of us tend to sing somewhat-appropriate songs as part of conversation. If he says that we’re going to clean up the entire kitchen, I’ll burst into “To Dream the Impossible Dream.” If I say I’m going to get around to cleaning the kitchen, he’ll start singing “I Get Around.” But I digress again.) Anyway, when we draw a blank on the next line, we use Homer Simpson’s classic “D’oh!” (Homer himself once used it this way, when he was singing a song about what to do in case of fire. He ended it, “There is something you should learn. Something, something. D’oh!” But I digress yet again.)

I suppose we ought to pay The Simpsons royalties every time we say “D’oh!” I don’t know who to pay for DBF&P.

Hidden Tattoos

etc., family, fashion, ,

My husband and I are, if not addicted to, at least fond of tattoos. (I’m one of those people that no one, including me, thought would ever be likely to get a tattoo. But I digress already.) For me, it started with small tattoos: punctuation that had nonobvious psychological meanings, and a stack of books (guess why).

My first major tattoo was a tribute to my mother: A yellow rose on a compass rose (that thingy on a map that points N, S, E, and W). My mother and I traveled together a lot, to Rio, England, and many places in the US, and her favorite flower was a yellow rose. I thought it was appropriate. It’s on my left shoulder.

Dan’s first tattoo was a bear paw on his right shoulder. He identifies with bears, perhaps because he looks like one, especially when naked (no photos available). I’d say it was his spirit animal, and it did appear to him in a dream once, but I know that’s an appropriation of an indigenous philosophy. (I explained that to him, but he got the tattoo anyway, and it suits him. But I digress again.)

We had ideas for future tattoos all lined up too. Dan wants a tat on his inner forearm (one of the only places he’s deficient in hair) of a musical note, a heart, and a dove—for music, love, and peace, of course. (He’s an old hippie. What can I say?) My idea is to get a tattoo of Orion with the phrase “We are made of star-stuff” underneath on my right shoulder. (Orion is my favorite constellation, and I took Carl Sagan’s class when I was in college. He’s one of my all-time heroes. I’m not sure how it would look, but my tattoo artist has done Orion before, so that’s a good thing. But I digress some more.)

Then it came to me—the tattoo we both should get: tattoos of hearts over our hearts. We saved up our money and waited until the tattoo artist had an opening. A little research showed that it was a traditional tattoo: a heart-shaped locket with a keyhole in the middle of it. I also saw ones that included a key, like the one in the illustration for this post.

We had some difficulty communicating our idea to the tattooist. Her original sketch had the locket colored gold instead of red. Gold isn’t a great color for a tattoo. It tends to fade quickly. (My yellow rose could use a touch-up.) But she soon fixed it and made it red. And she came up with a great idea—keys underneath the hearts with little labels attached to them. Mine would say “Dan” and his “Jan.” (I agreed to Jan rather than Janet because that would have made the lettering impossibly small. But I digress yet again.)

I know that people say you should never get a tattoo featuring the name of a boyfriend or girlfriend because of the possibility of breaking up. But Dan and I have been married for more than 43 years, so that seems unlikely.

This is the first tattoo either of us has gotten on a place on our bodies that’s unlikely to be seen by others unless we wear bathing suits, which we don’t. (Or skinny dip.) But that’s okay. It’s a private, personal thing, which is why I didn’t include actual photos of the tattoos here. It’s enough for us to know they’re there.

That Hoodoo That You Do

arts and crafts, etc., family, humor, ,

Having the in-laws visit is a situation that is fraught with peril. There’s the frantic pre-cleaning cleaning, the cleaning, the post-cleaning cleaning, and the tidying up. There’s the delicate balance over what foods to stock up on and whether or not to go out for a meal or meals, and other aspects of potential entertaining. And, for those of us who don’t have the luxury of a guest room, there are the sleeping arrangements.

But the particular challenge that I want to discuss is when my MIL visited us.

We cleaned, of course, though perhaps not up to her standards. We loaded the pantry and the fridge with the mineral water, breakfast items, and snacks she preferred, plus more than our usual supply of staples, meat, vegetables, bread, fruit, and beverages.

No guest rooms chez nous, but at the time, we had a pull-out sofa bed. Being at least aware of one or two of the social norms, Dan and I would take the sofa, giving up the bed to Mom. We made sure there were clean sheets, blankets, towels, and such.

But upon seeing the sleeping arrangements, Mom announced, “I won’t sleep in that bed!”

“What’s the matter?” we asked, puzzled.

“That … thing. The one hanging over the bed. It’s a hoodoo. I can’t sleep under that.”

Now, Dan has been to Africa, where he encountered some shamans, and I have been to Jamaica, where I failed to encounter any voodoo priests, but in all our travels, neither one of us had ever acquired a hoodoo. (I did encounter lepers in Jamaica once (or persons living with Hansen’s Disease, as we would say now). (I was there reporting on charity work.) The residents’ cases were no longer active, but they lived apart in their own establishment (aka “leper colony”). They liked singing religious and folk songs, and when I asked if there was anything they needed, one man asked for new guitar strings. But I digress.)

At any rate, no hoodoos were acquired from anywhere.

The suspected hoodoo was a small wicker circle with various objects attached: a piece of red yarn, a bean from the castor plant, a cat whisker, a small bag of polished stone chips. It hung over my side of the bed.

What it was, of course, was a dream catcher.

I have nightmares from time to time. (I also have the usual anxiety dreams about being lost in a hotel, missing a plane, and not being able to find a clean toilet. Now that I think about it, as much as I love it, travel makes me anxious. But I digress again.) During one particularly bad spell, Dan made me the dream catcher. The items attached to it were ones that had special significance to me. The red yarn was a scrap from my mother’s crocheting. The stones were for my love of the semiprecious variety. The cat whisker—well, do I have to explain that one? (No, I never tried to kill anyone with a castor bean. It was a plot point in a mystery novel I was writing, though. But I digress yet again.)

It was a whimsical, tender memento that held no special power but that showed how much concern Dan had for me and how much he wanted to relieve my distress.

What it was not, was a hoodoo. (I’ve never seen an actual hoodoo, so I don’t know what they look like. I guess I can see how a dream catcher could be mistaken for one by someone who has no idea what a dream catcher is but is well up on hoodoos. But I digress some more.)

Our choice was obvious—remove the hoodoo or banish Mom to the sofa bed. It was a tough decision, but we removed the offending object (the dream catcher, that is) and Mom agreed to sleep in the bed. The dream catcher went right back up after the visit ended.

No sense wasting a perfectly good hoodoo.