Mid-Winter Reflection; or Is that Brownie Batter on your Lips?

It bores even me to say it, but dang.

It’s cold.

It’s always been cold. 

As is common for my people at this time of year, I’ve clean forgotten the sodden heat of a Minneapolis summer; the brisk, clear skies of fall; the loamy, promising fragrance of a spring day. 

All that is, and ever was, is the possibility of an icy death.

It was eight below zero at the bus stop this morning.  I mention this not by way of bragging or inspiring your pity but simply so that I can then say this:  It’s going to warm up over 40 degrees by Saturday, all the way to freezing.

And don’t think that we don’t get a perverse pleasure out of saying things like that, out of pointing out to lesser, softer beings, that we regularly experience 100-degree swings in and out of our comfort zones.

Because we do get a perverse pleasure out of saying things like that.  This is what keeps us warm:  the knowledge that we are special, if not in our ability to “keep on keeping on” then in our ability to meet the bright, hectic look in our fellow Minnesotans’ eyes as we clap each other on the back whilst declaring “Ha!  Only nine more Mondays until spring!”

It is here where we shut our eyes, ever so briefly, and envision going home, whipping up a batch of brownie batter, and giving up, just laying in the tub hoping our absence at work goes unnoticed until the thaw.

It’s warming up 40 degrees this weekend.   

Only nine more Mondays until spring.

Just Do What The Hand Tells You to Do

Because I spent yesterday with plumbing issues (the house's, not my own) and didn't save time for writing.  And because it was seven below zero Fahrenheit this morning at the bus stop.  

From November of 2014.  Enjoy!

My father drove the 600 mile round-trip every weekend.

“It was 1960,” he says, fiddling with the woodstove.  “Mumma and I had been married a couple of months, and 600 miles a weekend is small potatoes when you’re 21 and in love.”

He pokes at an unruly log, steps back to consider the flames.  The darkness presses against the windows of their garage/extended living room, a clean, comfy space with carpet-remnant flooring and hand-made, wood-scrap cabinets.  I pull the crocheted afghan closer.

“Chandler, Minnesota, was down in the southwestern corner of the state – over by Pipestone? – an area far too far from my bride, but what could I do?  Uncle Sam needed me.”

He sighs.  “Highway 23.  Every weekend, Highway 23.”

He chuckles.  “Of course, I had to be careful.  We’d go out on the weekends, sometimes I’d even play in that little three-piece I was a part of in them days.  I’d be lucky to get more than five, six hours of sleep the whole weekend.”

“Paul!” my mother shouts from inside the house.  “Are you telling stories again?”

He winks at me.  “No, mumma,” he calls.

My father wanders over to the fridge.  “So anyway,” he says, “come January, I think it was, I get caught in a blizzard.”  He looks over at me, visibly calculating my age.  “You want one?”

I nod, and he grabs two beers.

“This was a real blizzard,” he says, popping the can open and handing me one, “back when snow was snow and the roads weren’t always plowed.”  He takes a deep pull from the can and frowns.  “My 300 miles back to the Air Force base – a trip that should’ve taken maybe four hours in that Rambler I had – was pushing on to seven.”

He takes another drink from his beer.  “Eventually,” he says, “I was forced to stick my head out the window, just to keep myself awake.  Of course, then I was pulling icicles from my eye lashes, but it beat the alternative, if you know what I mean.”

I do know what he means.  I nod and take a drink. 

“Of course, you can only stick your head out the window so many times before even that doesn't do the trick; and I’m realizing that I haven’t seen another car in almost six hours when up ahead of me, way off on the horizon, I see a shape.”

He wanders over to the woodstove, opens its door.  "I see a shape," he says again.  A roaring fire lights the bottom part of the room.  A cat wanders in and flops on to its side, yawns lazily.

He pokes the fire, throws another piece of scrap wood in.

“This shape,” he says, shutting the door, “is getting larger, and I’m thinking ‘what is this’?  I mean, it doesn’t seem like a car or a truck to me.”

He sits down in his chair, a recliner, puts his feet up, retrieves the beer can he left sitting on the end table. 

“And it gets larger and larger, until suddenly I see what it is.”

There is silence.  The fire in the woodstove crackles energetically. 

“Well?”  I say.  “What was it?”

“It was a hand,” he says.  He looks at me, eyes narrowed, nodding.  “A hand.  A hand shot down the center of the road, palm out, and commanded that I stop.”

The cat leaps into my lap.  “A hand,” I say.

He nods.  “A hand.”

I smile.  “So what did you do?”

He slaps his thigh.  “What did I do?!  Well, I did what you do when a hand flies down the center of the road at your car and demands that you stop!  I stopped!”

It is silent again.

“I pulled over,” he says quietly.  “Turned the car off, pulled a blanket over me and slept.”

He takes a pull from his beer. 

“Slept almost an hour,” he says.  “Too cold, of course, with the car off, but you can’t sleep in a driving snow with your car running, it’ll kill you.”  He stops.  “You know that, right?  That you can’t sleep in a car while it’s snowing with the car running?”

I smile.  “Yes, Dad,” I say.

He nods.  It is his duty to remind his middle-aged daughter of the dangers of covered tailpipes, of un-refrigerated potato salad and of playing with matches. 

He stares toward the wood stove.  “That hand saved my life.”

I smile toward the wood stove.  “It wasn’t an actual hand, though, surely,” I say.

He turns and smiles at me, taps the side of his nose in acknowledgement of the softball I’d just tossed him.  “It was an actual hand,” he says.  “And don’t call me Shirley.”

Bath Tub Surprises

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  I do like a bath.

And that’s where I was, Sunday night, when I had the strangest experience. 

Aside from what you may have heard, I’m not accustomed to strange experiences in tubs.  True, I once bathed in oatmeal – not sure I did it right, as I needed a brisk shower afterwards.  I also once took a quivering, ice-cold bath after a quivering, ice-cold motorcycle run.  Didn’t warm up until morning.

Outside of that, the tub and I have a good relationship. 

So there I was, Sunday night, fingers slowly pruning, my toes pushing up through bubble kingdoms.  Hot, steamy, relaxing – and the thought bursts forth: “Oh, no!  My watch!”

My watch?

That’s sobering. The last time I wore a wristwatch it was 1992.  It disappeared during a vacation, after a friend decided that I had checked it one too many times. 

She asked to see it, I handed it over, and she threw it into the ocean.

That Cheryl. 

And now, many years later, the ghost of this watch appears in my bathroom.

Holy Hannah.  What is it time for?

That Reminds Me: Pick Up Chicken Wings for Dinner

Wait long enough, and there she is.  You see that?  Twelve o’clock, as my dad likes to say, right there in front of you.  It’s 28 degrees outside – four degrees cooler than required to, say, generate your own, artisanal ice – and she’s got short sleeves.

At this time of year, you know, you don’t see many short sleeves on the bus. 

And that’s because they are under layers upon layers of rich, satisfying fabric.

Fabric!  Nature’s way of saying, You, over there!  I shall award your foresight in covering yourself with one more day of life.

She boards the bus, tight jeans, leather boots, a short-sleeved tee and a fashionably slouch-y wool cap.  Practically embryonic with youth, her pink face flush with color – perhaps fever related – she and a friend search for a seat while those of us of a more practical bent view her with hooded, content eyes.

We are warm, and she is not.

Take that, adorably shivering female.

Somewhere in my head, of course, in a corner I reserve for random, spiteful thoughts, I am hoping that the bus will break down and that, partially frozen and struggling toward an awaiting bus blocks and blocks away – perhaps to be warmed and presented with complimentary firefighters and squirming, squealing puppies – she will fall, her smooth-soled footwear failing her, to come up dripping with salt-laden slush.  Tearfully, she will proclaim, “I’ve been so foolish!  I will never, ever dress without regard to weather conditions again!”

You know.  Like I did. 

Every day, of course, I am proven wrong in one form or another, and today is yet another example of this winning streak.  Tiny, frozen female does not actually freeze, and there are no complimentary firefighters waiting at the end of the line offering to throw me over a thick, uniformed shoulder.

Perhaps I am riding the wrong bus?

That Time I Ditched The Car

A number of years ago, back when I was invincible, I felt it important that I drive from one tiny town to another during a blizzard.

Why would I do such a thing?  Well, one, there was the invincibility thing I had going on and two, there were beers with a friend waiting!

Do they have blizzards where you are? They don’t? Blizzards are a combination of cold temperatures, snow pushed from one serpentine drift to another, and yet more snow coming down, sometimes horizontally.

Consider it a test of your fortitude, your driving skills, your imagination, and your intelligence.

Can you handle the stress of not seeing more than a couple feet in front of you?

Can you keep the car on the road?

Can you see the road? Can you see the exit?

What in the world are you doing out in a blizzard, anyway?

All of your abilities will be tested – some of them just by getting in the car in the first place.

Believe me when I tell you that the majority of the time there’s no where you need to go during a blizzard except to the closet for another blanket.

Or perhaps to the fridge.

But like I said: I used to be invincible.

I was invincible right up to two miles outside of town, when my ’74 Ford LTD, a car you and seven of your best friends could sit in easily, slid, ever so slowly, off the side of the road and sideways into a shallow ditch.

Huh.

Now, when you find yourself with your tail pipe in the snow, you also find yourself seeing the beauty in what you should’ve seen earlier and you turn everything off and sit in the cold, gray silence.  You consider the possibility that you may be a bit slow on the uptake and that those closest to you, for some reason, have been reluctant to say so.

You think about how the sun is setting and how there’s a friend waiting just eight miles away.

This is sometimes the part in the story where you proceed to read of the writer’s slow and painful demise, how they found her body, the way her last words were recorded on the interior of the car in lipstick.

Either that or it’s the part where a large red pick-up comes down this same deserted county road and how four large, corn-fed Wisconsin boys in seed-and-feed caps pull over, jump out in jeans and sweatshirts and head towards your car.

“Ma’am?” says the biggest one, holding his arms out.

Yes, yes, please! I open my car door and hold my arms up for Farm Boy #1 and he lifts me, easily, out of the car and out of the ditch, and places me inside the cab of the truck.

My feet never touch the ground.

He shuts the door, and Farm Boys One through Four step down into the ditch, each of them taking a corner of my car. They lift the LTD as if it is hollow, step carefully up the shallow ditch, and place the car back on the road.

And then they refuse to take my money.

And I drive on to Paula’s house, where we drink beer, play Scrabble, and go out for breakfast in the morning.

I just love Wisconsin. If you’re going to slide off the road, I suggest you do it there.

The View from the Bus

It is 6:47 on a Tuesday morning. 

You can imagine my excitement. 

It’s true I made it through Monday with minimal trauma, but when you wake up on a Tuesday morning wondering if it’s Friday yet, you’re in trouble.

Frankly, every time someone says something derogatory about Monday, Tuesday laughs silently, its bright eyes crinkling in amusement.

I’ve foregone my usual iPod diversion on this day.  It is too cold to pull it out of my purse, the mercury reaching an anemic 9 degrees Fahrenheit; and even if I wanted to take off my gloves to work the touch screen, somehow, at this temperature, the earbuds will just fall out of my ears anyway.

Tuesday. Tuesday in the winter. 

The bus is warm, though; and after coughing asthmatically into my elbow for a bit, I close my eyes. 

And when I open them, a couple stops later, I look out the window.  There is a man there.  Hatless, gloveless, an unzipped, thin cotton jacket his only protection against the wind that Canada insists we share in. 

Hey.  The man spreads his arms wide, grinning.  You lookin’ good.  What you doin’ later?

Well that’s different.  I don’t think I’ve ever been hit on through a bus window.

Wait. 

I turn my head, look around the bus.

Yep.  He’s talking to me. 

I turn back to the window, spread my hands, mouth my response.  Dude, where’s your coat?

The bus pulls away.

I close my eyes, smiling.

I still got it. 

Monday Morning: or My Bus is Bigger Than Your Bus

Six-thirty-something a.m.  Minneapolis is a cold, dark place, a place where, 150 years or so ago, a band of dour Norwegian bachelor farmers stopped their oxen, looked around, and muttered, “Oh, vell.  Vhy not.”

And lo these many years gone by, we continue, both the Norwegian and your standard Wegian, to look around, shrug, and mutter “Oh, well....”

These are the thoughts I have on this, a Monday, the 17th of November.

The bus arrives, as the bus is wont to do, and I step, gratefully, into its warm, utilitarian embrace. I wave my bus pass in front of the doohickey until it beeps, then proceed to my favorite seat, the seat I will always take if it is available, the seat up those last two steps at the back of the bus, next to the back door and the dark, domed lens of the video camera.

Rest assured, people, that should anything felonious/interesting happen to me on the bus, it is my fondest wish that it be videotaped.

Seated, I leave the rest of the commute to the bus driver.  O, how I love him/her.  Their chosen occupation leaves me free to file my nails, place random texts to friends I suspect are also up at this hour, stare out the window at other buses…

The light turns red, and we come to a stop as another bus pulls up, also stops.

I find myself staring out the window at the passengers on this other bus.

I turn back to my bus.  We have 20 people, not including the bus driver.

I turn back to their bus.  I count 18 people.

And just like that, I am wondering if we can take them in a fight.  That one guy up front, the one with the cane and the shaky walk, I’m willing to bet he can swing that thing when called upon to do so.  The black pony-tailed Hispanic gals – how much Spanish do I know, anyway?  We’ll have to pantomime the whole “I’ll go high, you go low” bit, but they look sturdy.

I look over at the other bus.  Pffft.  Three of their guys are sleeping, heads against the glass!

I smile, nod to myself as the light turns green.

Yep.  We could totally take that bus in a fight.

Wherein My Father Relates the Tale of the Hand

Because it is snowing (11 inches expected), and because I drove to Lutsen and back (500 miles) this weekend. 

Enjoy!

My father drove the 600 mile round-trip every weekend.

“It was 1960,” he says, fiddling with the woodstove.  “Mumma and I had been married a couple of months, and 600 miles a weekend is small potatoes when you’re 21 and in love.”

He pokes at an unruly log, steps back to consider the flames.  The darkness presses against the windows of their garage/extended living room, a clean, comfy space with carpet-remnant flooring and hand-made, wood-scrap cabinets.  I pull the crocheted afghan closer.

“Chandler, Minnesota, was down in the southwestern corner of the state – over by Pipestone? – an area far too far from my bride, but what could I do?  Uncle Sam needed me.”

He sighs.  “Highway 23.  Every weekend, Highway 23.”

He chuckles.  “Of course, I had to be careful.  We’d go out on the weekends, sometimes I’d even play in that little three-piece I was a part of in them days.  I’d be lucky to get more than five, six hours of sleep the whole weekend.”

“Paul!” my mother shouts from inside the house.  “Are you telling stories again?”

He winks at me.  “No, mumma,” he calls.

My father wanders over to the fridge.  “So anyway,” he says, “come January, I think it was, I get caught in a blizzard.”  He looks over at me, visibly calculating my age.  “You want one?”

I nod, and he grabs two beers.

“This was a real blizzard,” he says, popping the can open and handing me one, “back when snow was snow and the roads weren’t always plowed.”  He takes a deep pull from the can and frowns.  “My 300 miles back to the Air Force base – a trip that should’ve taken maybe four hours in that Rambler I had – was pushing on to seven.”

He takes another drink from his beer.  “Eventually,” he says, “I was forced to stick my head out the window, just to keep myself awake.  Of course, then I was pulling icicles from my eye lashes, but it beat the alternative, if you know what I mean.”

I do know what he means.  I nod and take a drink. 

“Of course, you can only stick your head out the window so many times before even that doesn't do the trick; and I’m realizing that I haven’t seen another car in almost six hours when up ahead of me, way off on the horizon, I see a shape.”

He wanders over to the woodstove, opens its door.  A roaring fire lights the bottom part of the room.  A cat wanders in and flops on to its side, yawns lazily.

He pokes the fire, throws another piece of scrap wood in.

“This shape,” he says, shutting the door, “is getting larger, and I’m thinking ‘what is this’?  I mean, it doesn’t seem like a car or a truck to me.”

He sits down in his chair, a recliner, puts his feet up, retrieves the beer can he left sitting on the end table. 

“And it gets larger and larger, until suddenly I see what it is.”

There is silence.  The fire in the woodstove crackles energetically. 

“Well?”  I say.  “What was it?”

“It was a hand,” he says.  He looks at me, eyes narrowed, nodding.  “A hand.  A hand shot down the center of the road, palm out, and commanded that I stop.”

The cat leaps into my lap.  “A hand,” I say.

He nods.  “A hand.”

I smile.  “So what did you do?”

He slaps his thigh.  “What did I do?!  Well, I did what you do when a hand flies down the center of the road at your car and demands that you stop!  I stopped!”

It is silent again.

“I pulled over,” he says quietly.  “Turned the car off, pulled a blanket over me and slept.”

He takes a pull from his beer. 

“Slept almost an hour,” he says.  “Too cold, of course, with the car off, but you can’t sleep in a driving snow with your car running, it’ll kill you.”  He stops.  “You know that, right?  That you can’t sleep in a car while it’s snowing with the car running?”

I smile.  “Yes, Dad,” I say.

He nods.  It is his duty to remind his middle-aged daughter of the dangers of covered tailpipes, of unrefrigerated potato salad and playing with matches. 

He stares toward the wood stove.  “That hand saved my life.”

I smile toward the wood stove.  “It wasn’t an actual hand, though, surely,” I say.

He turns and smiles at me, taps the side of his nose in acknowledgement of the softball I’d just tossed him.  “It was an actual hand,” he says.  “And don’t call me Shirley.”

Eueueuchchch; or The Monkey Loses This Time

Right off the mat, as one might say, if one were to say such a thing, I can see that this guy’s gonna be special.

It’s yoga time.

There he is, pre-class, legs spread.  He swings his arms back and forth, back and forth.  Uh-uh-uh, he grunts.  He twists his torso to the right, then to the left:  Uh-uh-uh.

I lie back on my mat and close my eyes. Surrounded in my new job – at least by my ears’ understanding – by far-flung malenprops and four-to seven-spindled farquardts running about three clicks below harmanfletcher, the hour I spend at yoga is my buffer between work and home. 

I leave everything, as we like to say, on my mat.

The monkey in my head, the one that makes fun of women in five-inch heels and regularly suggests that I go ahead and eat whipped cream by the fists full, has other ideas, however, and is already slapping his big heavy palms against the inside of my skull.  Get a load of this guy, he chortles.  How you gonna ignore this galoot?  This guy’s gonna ruin your whole class!

I wave the monkey off. 

I don’t come to yoga to talk to monkeys.

But the monkeys, apparently, have come to yoga to talk to me.

Aside from rhythmic, steady breathing, and the sounds of music and the instructor’s voice, the room is silent. 

“Oh, hell,” the man whispers. 

“Well I can’t do that,” he mutters.

I twist from one position to the next, sometimes looking at the front of the room, sometimes the back.

“Eueueuuchhh.” 

I shudder.  Someone has just either cleared a long-standing clog, or the man on the mat to my left and back a couple feet has a sinus condition.

“Eueuuchhhhhh.”  The next position moves me to look back, in his direction, and I do so in time to see the woman just behind him give a look of revulsion.

She sees me. 

Our eyes meet, and we grin.

The monkey in my head had hoped, of course, for so much more.  But like I keep telling him: Yoga is not a competition. 

But if it were a competition, that woman and I just won.