Check me out with all my positivity and junk.

I've been meaning to write a super thought-provoking New Year's post, full of insight into what went wrong in 2010 (and oh hell there was so much where would I start?) and my high hopes for 2011. But then I didn't. Because two weeks at home with two pre-schoolers and I finally decided a successful day was one where no one ended up in the ER with stitches, not one where mommy got to write her manifesto.

You may or may not have noticed, but I've brought my alter-ego back. It was there that I started to construct a "that what I made in 2010" post, and only got so far as April before chucking it. Holy crap, I made a lot of stuff last year, and much of it was crap. I am definitely adding a goal of do not make any more crap to my list this year. Heh. I'll be so full of the awesome by the end of this year you all won't know how to handle me.

In putting together that post, I got to read a lot of my old posts. A lot. And that's when I realized, that's what this blog is good for.

If you're a blogger, you've undoubtedly had one of Those Moments. The moment when you think "why am I doing this? What is this all about anyway?" You start to get bogged down in the popularity contest instead of just enjoying what you're doing, and why you started doing it in the first place. It starts to feel like a chore instead of a joy. I think it happens to everyone at some point. When it happens to me, I step away from the keyboard. Luckily, my mojo has always returned and my fingers start tapping away.


It was in reviewing old posts that I had this AHA moment (no, I will NOT pay Oprah royalties for using that phrase). This blog has been the best diary, the best journal of what's happening in my life that I ever could have imagined. I'm so glad I added the LinkWithin widget, because now when I go to read an old post, I see pictures from even older posts, and suddenly I'm carried away to two years ago, when Griffin was just a baby and still in love with his toilet brush.

I won't lie to you. There were many tears wept over this walk down memory lane and many memories I wish I didn't remember. I cried a little for all the bad memories that came flooding back, but also for the fact that WE SURVIVED! I kept the band together! It's a small miracle considering what we had to overcome, but so far we've managed to do it and that is something.


So. I have no grandiose resolutions for this year. I hope to not spend as much money on marital counseling as I did last year because we don't need it. I hope there aren't as many dragons to slay this year. And I hope I stop and look back and smile a little more often than I did last year.

- H

The sweetest spot on earth

Is there a place in the world that holds a special spot in your heart? Maybe a place you took vacation when you were a kid, or the place you lived when you fell in love, or went to college.

I have a place that's super special to me. It's a little town, actually. Buried in the heart of this country, in the heart of the state of Nebraska.

It's called Hooper. But not pronounced like Cooper. Pronounced like Huhper.

My parents were both born and raised in Hooper. My dad on a farm where he walked uphill both ways in a blinding snowstorm to a one-room schoolhouse until he went to high school. No joke, except for the part where it was all uphill. My mom was from Town. That's what Hooper's like. When you're there, you're In Town.

My parents got married when my mom graduated from the University of Nebraska, and they piled into their car and drove to Peoria, Illinois for my dad's awesome new job at Caterpillar Tractor Company.

Then their lives took them to Vancouver, Canada, then back to Peoria, then over the pond to Geneva, Switzerland, and so on and so on. When they left Hooper, it was on two-lane highways. The eight-hour drive must have felt like a million to my grandparents.

Then we came along, the three of us. Caterpillar was great about sending us home on home leave, and home was Hooper. So we'd cross the big pond and spend a month in the summers in Hooper, playing barefoot and creating chaos wherever we could. My grandpa hung a rope swing. We biked around town on my grandparents sweet cruiser bikes, swam in the community pool and learned to golf on the par 3 course.

Everything good about being a kid happened in Hooper. There was a five-and-dime store that smelled like a five-and-dime should smell, that had creaky old floors you only see in turn of the century storefronts. There was an ice cream parlor on the other side of the highway, and since few cars ever came down the road you could cross it if you looked both ways. They had awesome ice cream sundaes.

When I was eleven or twelve Hooper hit the big time. The first super awesome rock star restaurant opened on Main Street called The Office. It was the first place I had a taco salad. And curly fries. It was the best, and still is.

We grew up. My grandparents got older. My grandma got ovarian cancer, and they moved from their bungalow on the corner across from the grain elevator to an easy-living apartment on the other side of Main Street that my mom's cousin Ron owned. We lost my grandma, and then my grandpa died of a broken heart. And then, then there were none. Nobody left in Hooper to visit a few times a year.

So you can imagine, right? You can imagine how it must have felt to have my mom send me this article in the New York Times about Hooper.

It felt really nice. Really really nice.

- H

Dear sirs....

Have you ever had a day or six months where you just feel like you need a pick-me-up? Something that's not crap that makes you smile?

Well, here it is folks.

This is a letter my mom wrote to her parents when she was nine or ten years old.

Enjoy.

Dear Sirs,

I don't like to say this persnol because I'm a little shy when it comes to money. I was wondering if I could have my allowance raised because it is time to get xmas presents for the family and cousins. The most I want is 10c more.

Your loving Daughter,

Gwendolyn

- H

My mom's hands (psst...a giveway at the end, too)

This post is a tribute to my mom, to all of our moms. I recently posted a DIY on how to turn a rugby shirt into shorts for my kid. My brother read it, and here's his comment:

Brett said...
Wow, it looks like Mom did a good job sewing those shorts. I know you'll claim them as your own, but just looking at those hands in the pictures, I remember seeing those hands playing the piano growing up. Those are Gwen's hands...ohh....are those your hands? Hmmmmmm....now I'm just confused....

I'm sure he was teasing me about my sixty-six year old hands, but I am choosing to ignore that part and focus on the positive. That I am like my mother.

It's weird, isn't it? That your mom was someone you didn't even meet until they were grown?

I didn't know this little girl, I didn't meet her for another twenty six years. This little girl is three years, nine months old according to the writing on the back of the photo. This was taken around the time her daddy went off to fight in the Korean War and her baby brother, Steven, died after only three days with his mommy. Just writing that last part made me cry for my grandma again.

These pictures were taken at her grandpa Fred's house on Easter Sunday. The back of the picture says she "has her mother's wedding hat and slippers on also her mother's purse." {original punctuation, or lack thereof, included}


And now she's seven years old. Look at that face! I can tell just from looking at it that her mom made her dress, complete with the fancy gold buttons on the pockets. I bet she borrowed the necklace from her mom, too.


I remember how her mom used to have a rack of necklaces hanging in her closet. There must have been hundreds of them.

She grew up, that little girl. She went off to college in a Studebaker, painted pink by her dad, especially for her.

She was in a sorority and she majored in music education. Her grand scheme was to have a gaggle of kids that she could have sit at the piano for hours on end each weekend, plunking away with little hope of ever becoming a concert pianist. Only one of us got a great singing voice like hers, and he doesn't really use it unless he's hiding his American Idol hopes behind his career as a CFO for an aerospace company. I for one can still play Fur Elise, I'll have you know.

I met her in the early seventies. I thought she was the prettiest woman on earth, I still do. There's just something about your mom that's captivating, isn't it? I also thought she knew everything. To be fair, she knew a lot (she was trained by another one of the most talented women on the planet, my Grandma Clare). But one day, when I was eighteen, I found out she didn't know where to add oil to her car's engine! I was crushed. And then I showed her where to add oil, so she was back to knowing how to do everything again. Whew.

So I bet you're thinking, long about now, what in the hell is this post about, Heather?

Thanks for your patience, kind reader. Mother's Day is around the corner. I think it would be great if every blogger and non-blogger out there paid some sort of tribute to a woman in their life that they hold dear. Maybe it's your mom or your grandma. Maybe it's your sister. Maybe it's you, and motherhood has changed you in ways you never saw coming.

Either way, write a little post on your blog for that girl. It's not mandatory or nothing, just an idea.

And leave a comment here, and you'll automatically be entered to win a custom a-line skirt, a la Heatherty Featherty! That's right, for your reading patience today I'm rewarding one lucky reader with the Great Mother's Day Giveaway! You could keep it for yourself or get it for your mom. Whatever.

Why a custom skirt as the prize? Because of all the things I've learned in my life, sewing is the one thing that has really tied me to my mom and my grandma before her. I spent so many nights in the sewing room with my mom, learning how to pay attention to the details I didn't want to learn, how to finish a project nicely instead of sloppily. I'm still working on that one. She taught me everything I know about sewing, and this is my tribute to her.

Either way, leave a comment by Friday night at midnight on this post, and you're entered to win! I'll announce the lucky winner on Saturday morning. If you're commenting anonymously, you'll have to at least leave your initials so I know who to congratulate.

Good luck, and I can't wait to read some stories about ladies in your life. And this will prolly be my last giveaway for a while, so get it while you can, y'know?

- H

Few things can make me cuss like tulle

I finished another skirt today, and it is exceptionally cute if I do say so myself. Either that, or it's totally hideous. Either way, it's on its way to its new home with my friend Marci.

I do hope it fits her. It's very stressful making clothes for someone else! I had her measurements but I'm not an exact match to her so I couldn't really try it on to see where I was right or wrong? Eegads. Luckily for me, Marci's mom can sew so if anything needs adjusting I'm hoping she'll do it.

Whilst making this beauty I shouted out quite a few saucy curse words. There's nothing like sewing to bring out the sailor language in me. I think it has something to do with being poked by pins? Take a long pin and randomly poke it into your hands (but the key is to be poked when you're not expecting it, that's the best part). Trust me, you'll be cussing too.

Then add to that the frustration that is tulle, and you have me earlier this evening. Tulle is a lovely thing. Once it's finished and attached to its final resting spot. Until that time, it's a gigantic pain in the ass. The skirt whipped up in twenty minutes. I spent the next sixteen hours gathering and sewing down the freaking tulle.

As I was struggling along, cursing regularly and rubbing my increasingly pained neck, I had a flashback to my mom making my prom dress.

I can't believe she did it. I was dating a guy my parents didn't like. And I wanted a dress from the Vogue patterns book (read: complicated) that was all pink fluffy sleeves, velvet bodice and tulley organza skirt. I can just hear my mom muttering her own choice curse words while she worked on that dress. God love her, she never said anything to me about it later in life. And we all know I've blocked out my high school memories so if she said anything back then I wouldn't know it.

I'm the gigantic pink poof in the middle of this picture of my high school girlfriends. Just in case you missed me.

- H

An interview with my brother {with pictures!}

Remember my post from yesterday? The one where I told the story of how my brother got lost in the forest of the Swiss Alps and hitchhiked home when he was seven or eight years old?

[This is us. Brett is on the right. Obviously, he was much younger in this picture but I thought it was cute. Plus, you'll see it again in a few days when I post a near lookalike picture of my son Griffin.]

Well, I sent him some interview questions about that adventure, and following are his answers. It seems both mine and my mom's memory of the story are somewhat (or completely) different from Brett's. I guess that's what happens when you let thirty years go by without writing down the details, huh? If only there were blogs in the seventies. Then we'd all be set.

Without further adieu, here's my bro:

Do you remember this story? I mean, do you really remember the episode?

Yes, I remember the story very well. Some parts were like they just happened, the feel of the wheat when I walked through the field, the Citroen car. But then some parts were, are, hazy and I either blocked them out or I was so emotional (read: crying, wailing and balling) that I didn't have the mental capacity to remember those parts. Like how I got from the business in France to our house on Impasse de Mon-Idee.

No kidding, I don't recall how old I was when this happened. I'm guessing 8 but it was anywhere between 5 and 9, as I turned 10 upon our return State-side.

[I'm assuming this picture was taken the winter either before or after this adventure. Nice how my brothers both looked totally rad while I am decked out in a freaking tulip snowsuit??]

Whoops, getting ahead of myself and as I see the questions you've submitted to me, I think I need to fill in some important parts. It started out as any other day where my stay-at-home mother shipped off her two oh-so-well-behaved boys and Heather to a day camp in order to save her sanity -- looking back and having kids myself, I better understand that mentality. The camp would then bus us to the foothills of the French Alps in France. I recall it being a very short bus ride, so I guess I assumed it wasn't that far away distance wise, not that a elementary aged school boy would remember details like time, distance or spacial relationships when goofing off with his friends on the bus.

So it was like the second week at camp and we'd managed to make an awesome fort out of a fallen pine tree across a little gulch with branches [interruption by Heather - I totally remember that part about camp], leaves and some junk found on the side of the road near a farmers pastures with cows. We even had a forbidden fire that we'd start when we got there in the morning and put out when we left for the day (read: left burning itself out most likely).
That particular day we'd gotten busted for the Nth time that week so the counsellors decided we needed to do something with the larger group as a whole because our Lord Of The Flies camping was getting out of hand.

So that day they split up the entire group after lunch for Capture the Flag. I was on the side that stayed put and the other 1/2 went down a ways in the wooded area to setup their flag. I don't recall, but I'm guessing the counsellors gave them a 5 minute head start and we started playing. Being the young Patton that I clearly was, I decided a wide right flanking maneuver would be best, so I made a huge right-to-left banana bend attack at where I assumed their flag would be stationed.

I walked and ran. Ran and walked. I kept going and going, knowing that my flanking move wouldn't have been protected by these novice Capture the Flaggers. I went about ten minutes at top speeds to capture their flag, end the game and get back to our fire! Yes, I was a pyro back then. [Another interruption by Heather - We were all pyros back then! I don't know why, but us kids really liked fires and firecrackers.]

Then I realized my ten minute attack was a bit too far and I may have outflanked myself, so I tried to turn around the way that I came although when you're young and in the forest, the trees all look the same and they were also my only landmarks I'd used, for example "that huge tree with green moss on the base back there", except for the fallen trees that I'd crossed occasionally which I'm guessing I figured were unique to that area of the woods in France. See how confusing and disjointed that last sentence was; same for my land navigation skills through woods back then!

I was now only walking but it'd been about ten minutes and I assumed I'd return to where we started but nothing looked right. Keep in mind, I hadn't seen anyone since they shouted "Go!" to start the game. So I kept walking 'cuz maybe I was close but just didn't go quite far enough.

A few minutes later I came to a clearing where there was a wheat field that slopped down to another patch of trees and what appeared to be pasture land off in the distance. But looking to my left -- again, thinking that my right hand flank was still in affect -- I noticed that the wheat field disappeared back up into the woods so I was going to head that way, cut into the wood, STILL capture their flag and we'd win.

By the time I walked maybe the 200 yards to where the field turned uphill to meet the woods, I ran across a fence stopping me from re-entering the woods. It was now that I stopped thinking about capturing their flag and being the hero of the camp. But thankfully I was still too naive to understand what was going on.

My plan was now to head down through the wheat field to the road on the other side of the patch of trees I thought I'd seen, follow the road up to where the buses drop us off & pick us up and I'd at least be back in camp. Panic had now begun to slowly creep into my mind because I remember running through the wheat which was about my chest height at that time of year and ran towards the trees thinking I had better hurry up or I'd get in trouble for quitting the game.

The trees were thicker than were we started playing capture the flag -- blasted stupid game, who invented this f*ing game anyway at this point in time -- and I had trouble getting through the thick brush, and I was getting tired, so I turned ninety degrees to my right to skirt the edge of the tree patch on my way to the road and the camp. But when I went halfway around what I remember from 20 minutes ago when I first saw the patch of trees, I was assuming it was the road, it turned out to be more wheat fields, so I decided that at this point walking down slope was much easier than sideways to get to the blasted road and camp...oh how I just wanted to get back to camp.

Who knows how long I walked before I finally hit a road, although I remember crossing a few dirt paths that farm tractors had created. When I hit the road I was now okay to find my way back - young logic at it's finest! But not knowing which way I should walk, I walked away from the mountains towards Geneva and home. Possibly because panic had completely set in and I was tired of walking and downhill was easier than uphill, I don't recall.

When cars would zoom past, I would stick my thumb out in the hopes of hitching a ride to base camp. Yeah, it was the mid-70's and hitching was still an option for the wanna-be hippies and dropouts....probably not suitable for kids my age, but I'd seen plenty of them during our trips around Europe, so what the heck. Did I know where I was? Nope. Did I know how to speak French well enough to ask the locals how to get there? Nope. Didn't matter, I was a little kid from the day camp and in my thinking, since I knew about the camp site, everyone in the area knew about it too.

A couple stopped in a Citroen car and picked me up. They only spoke French. I spoke English and a few words of French - but knowing "where's the bathroom?" or "check please" or other survival language skills were no match for their fast foreign tongues and my young American ears. So I resorted to tears - out of frustration, exhaustion and fear. But they put me in their car and drove me to safety -- not hitching on the side of the road. It wasn't far and I had hopes that by now they'd have heard of the American kid lost from playing Capture the Flag and they'd return me to my house. Almost with a "ta dah!" type of ending in my mind.

Alas, they dropped me off at some business near Geneva but still in France, in the little town across the border called Annemasse (could be just about any other small town across the border, but I remember Annemasse from my days of buying fire crackers [legal in France], shoving them in my sock & shoes, and then crossing the border back to Switzerland [very illegal to have firecrackers there]...good times, good times!

The business had a back office with a sofa where I sat and cried and cried and cried. I gave them my phone number in English AND French and even my address. The street address numbers now escape me in my old age, but I remember XXX Impasse De Mon-Idee, Thonex, Swiss.

[If you zoom into the map, you can see where our house was and where the border says France/Suisse. They have a pool in our backyard now, that would have been nice.]

View Larger Map
They called the number and it just rang, rang and rang (so I'm told). The three or four people there were nice but on a scale from 1 being crumby to 10 being awesomely nice, none of them could have gone beyond a 5 because they weren't speaking English!! That alone would have earned them 5 points without saying or doing anything else. I was so mortified and I just wanted to go home. Yes, they were nice but not communicating in English and they were not taking me home.My fear now got the best of me and it's foggy, nah, blank in my memory. Or who knows, I was tired and fell asleep.

Next, I was home and in my bed resting. Good grief that was a long day, but I was home and all was good now with the world.

When you stopped at the lady's house, did you speak French to her? How many people did you call?
Don't remember stopping at any lady's house. Might have been what I thought was the business. All they called was the one number I knew; home. It was the only number I knew. No one answered and it rang and rang and rang and rang. Eventually, the Anderson's cleaning lady came over and answered our phone (????), found out what was going on and 'fixed' the situation. I don't know. That's a question for adults who hopefully pieced this all back together when I was safe and sound. Mom?

What did you tell the truck driver who brought you back over the border?
One word: Fuzzy. No clue to the who, what, when, where, why or how I crossed the border. I could make crap up but I won't. Maybe in a fiction book I plan on writing someday, when I get around to it.

Did the border guards ask about you at all?
No clue. Hopefully they were understanding and knew that detaining me and my French or Swiss or whomever saviours were would have caused an International incident and roughly fourteen months of paperwork, press and investigations within the sleepy crossing on Rou de Mon-Idee. He was a young kid and the adults paper's were all in order, let 'em through.

Where did you go once you got off at the border? Mom said you went to Andrews' house?
I'll buy that for a quarter! Don't know. I thought the story went that the housekeeper came into France to get me. I don't recall. Maybe time for hypnosis at the Comedy Club to see if they can pull it from me.

If what you're asking is true, we lived about 50 meters (when in the EU, we used metric baby!) from the border, so I could have managed that walk without a problem.

Why did Andrews' housekeeper know what was going on, did the French lady call her?
My story, which at this point is very suspect in my mind, is how I described it above. She was concerned -- not just Wisteria Lane Desperate Housewife nosey -- that our phone rang and rang and rang for very long durations. Apparently the windows were open and she was a kind soul worried about the constant ringing.

I'm sure that mom can fill in more information, but that's what I know and how I remember that day. Much like falling from the tree in France into the creek border with Switzerland, I'm hazy on the good parts and remember the boring stuff like it was yesterday. Maybe my survival skill.


***********
So that's the story. Or wait, that's a completely different story than the one I told yesterday. So let this be a lesson to all of you who don't blog. You better start doing it or the important stories of your lives will be lost with the inevitable memory loss of time!

[This photo I included because I've always thought it was cool. Venice stinks. Literally, it smells kinda poopy. But it's super cool and you have to see it someday before it sinks into the ocean. Brett is on the right.]

If you're like me, your brain went to mush during all the walking and running and running and walking and wordy words. But it's still a great story! I hope he prints this and lets his kids read it, that would be cool.

Thanks for reading!

My brother is lucky to be alive

My older brother Brett is the middle child and by far the easiest of the three of us.

He's nice.
He's responsible.
He was an officer in the Marines.
He saves money.
He's a great dad.
You know, the kind of child a parent wants to have.

Except for that sticky part about how he was constantly trying to get lost or killed while we were kids. There was the time he was two and my mom was pregnant with me and he fell out of the car and lost all his hair. And the time he was eight or nine and fell out of a three-(or four)-story tall tree into a creek bed that luckily had ten inches of water in it (else he'd be a gonner). But this one's my favorite. Come back tomorrow, I have an interview with my bro in which he clears up and totally confuses many parts of this story, so that's cool!

The Incredible Disappearing Boy

When we lived in Geneva, my mom didn't work. She did Other Stuff. She taught English to students and au pairs who lived with us. She traveled with my dad occasionally and by herself occasionally. You know, she was busy. She had three crazy, busy little kids. My dad travelled almost exclusively for work so he was not there much.

In the summer, our parents sent us to Camp. In Geneva in the seventies, this consisted of a fairly Hippie-style experience, and one that included bus trips up into the mountains around Geneva {we affectionately like to call these mountains the Alps} to a campground where we'd play in the woods and go exploring.

I have vague memories of these days in camp. I'm sure my brothers have stronger ones. The most vivid for me were the two Swiss camp counselors who were clearly...um...dating, and who would show us how to french kiss and tie cherry stems into knots with their tongues at the same time. Kinda gross, huh?

Anyhoo, back to how my brother was trying to off himself. You know middle children. They're happy go lucky. Or at least my brother was happy go lucky. He'd go along with anything. My oldest brother usually looked out for him and I'm not exactly sure why he fell down on the job on this particular day except they were in different age groups.

The bus took everyone up into the mountains to the campsite. They played, ate lunch, got into trouble, explored, and loaded back onto the bus to go back to town. Everyone but Brett, that is. Brett was playing hide and seek with some friends and was hiding. Seriously, they loaded the kids onto the bus while he hid. They miscounted the heads while he hid. His friend Jeffrey told the counselors that Brett wasn't on the bus, but they didn't' listen to him. They drove off down the mountain back to the city while he hid.

I guess he finally figured out they'd left him at some point, and he came out of hiding.

Can you imagine? You're eight years old. You speak English but you're in the forest in the mountains of Switzerland...alone. The school bus with your counselors, your older brother, little sister and all your friends has left you behind. What would you do? Brett just did what Brett would do. He tracked back out to the road and started walking.

He stopped at the first house he came to and asked the woman who answered the door if he could use her phone. We guess that he spoke French, and he was able to tell her he wanted to call home.

So he dialed our number....it rang...and rang...and rang. Mom was at the grocery store. Nobody answered. Mom says he tried to call Andrews and maybe their French housekeeper answered the phone or maybe not, we aren't clear on the details of that one. Either way, he wasn't able to get anyone on the phone, so he left her house and started walking down the road again.

Guess what he did next, this little kid all alone in the forest of the Alps? He flagged down a truck and hitchhiked to the French/Swiss border, where he got out and came home. You see, our street was Impasse de Mon Idee and was right next to the border crossing in Thonex. In fact, the neighborhood kind of wound around behind France, if that makes any sense? So he was able to tell the truck driver he lived in Thonex and the guy let him out at our street.

Thank God for the truck driver who gave the little American boy a ride down to the border crossing.

Thank God for the Swiss woman who was frantic that this little American boy had taken off by himself and was lost. She kept calling our house and the Andrews until she got a hold of their French housekeeper and explained the situation. By then my mom was home. Shortly after that, Brett walked into the house. You can imagine how relieved my mom was to see him after hearing that her son was at this woman's house and hitchhiked with a truck driver!

My mom called the camp and they said they realized Brett was missing once they got back to town, so they had dispatched a driver to go back up to the campsite and find him. She was livid. Jeffrey had told them Brett wasn't there and they didn't listen. I guess the counselors were really shaken up, too, so that's better than not caring. Right?

So anyhoo, that's the story of how my brother Brett got lost in the forest of the Swiss Alps and hitchhiked home.

Crazy, eh?

So yeah, stop back by tomorrow for the awesome interview with said brother in which the details of this story become even more exciting and confusing and I even post some pictures of our childhood home and its proximity to the French border. Awesome.

A sad footnote: Jeffrey, Brett's friend, died in high school from a skiing accident in Vermont. He was a racer and was an excellent skier, but he hit a patch of ice in a race and crashed into a tree. So sad, so young.

Oh my God, I'm old

As I write this, I'm sitting in a booth at California Pizza Kitchen. I'm working. I'm on my computer doing computer works, which is a complicated formula of web-browsing and Excel spreadsheet-creating. Very complicated stuff, if I explained it to you you'd go blind.

I am also eating (if devouring can be considered eating, and I think it can) their Original Chopped Salad with avocado, not garbanzo beans. Which should be called chick peas because it's a cuter name.

But I digress. The stereo was just playing a song. In the booth in front of me are two girls and their grandma. They are probably nine and eleven? They were singing along earnestly to the song.

I had a sudden flashback. I was sitting on the gymnasium floor at Banner Elementary. Sitting next to my BFF Gretchen and singing my heart out to a new song by a new sensation who was so stinking cool we couldn't stand it.

Her name was Madonna.

The song CPK was just playing was "Material Girl." The little girls in the booth in front of me were me twenty-five years ago.

I wonder when they sing along to that song, is it like me singing along to a Motown song? Do they think it sounds old-fashioned, like the Beatles sounded to me when I was that age? I remember listening to "Hey, Jude" on the record-player, over and over and thinking it was so cool that I was into retro music.

Good Lord. I'm old.

Which means Madonna is like seventy-three years old, right?

Making new friends takes a lot of time

Check me out, inspecting my navel. Remember when you were in college, and making friends was easy? You could spend hours hanging out with your friends in your room or the library or wherever. You could stay up until two in the morning talking talking talking.

You'd pour your heart out, tell all of your life stories, find similarities and common interests. If you partied, you'd go out together from Thursday through Saturday (at the very least) and stay up until the wee hours of the morning. You'd meet each other's boyfriends (or girlfriends, whatever) and you'd share each other's clothes.

Then we graduated from college and people went separate ways. Some went together to big cities, others moved where they could find a job, some went home to live with their parents until they figured out what they wanted to do with their life.

Most of us got our first "job" during this time. Still single, it was still easy to make friends at work. We could talk around cubicles or across the aisle, email each other notes to make fun of our boss's lame suits or bad haircut. Some of us got married young and it was exciting to plan a wedding and have all the showers and parties.

Well...I'm well past that stage in life. I'm on the uphill climb to forty {uphill in a numerical sense, not in a negative way at all} and I just don't have the free time I used to have to make friends. I'm busy, but not in a bad way. It's just that every hour of the day is usually dedicated to something else.

I have two kids. I have a husband. I have a job. I have a house that needs keeping. In a fringe sort of way I have employees, if you count my cleaning lady, the daycare girls, and my dry cleaner, just to name a few.

I don't have hours in a day to talk to my old friends or make new ones. I don't work in an office anymore where I can talk to my co-workers over desks. I work out of my house and out of my car. I'm alone on the job, but ironically, my job is to go talk to people in different offices all day long. To be friendly, to be cordial, to be polite. But we don't make friends. We don't hang out on the weekends.

I've made some great friends through work, but they live in different states. Such is the fate of a salesperson who covers a large geography. The next person is pretty far away from you.

I've often said to myself I'd like to have more close girlfriends in St. Louis, but I don't have the time to cultivate them. Friendships are like gardens, they need tending. They need time and they take effort. They're wonderful when you have them and they're elusive when you don't.

I'm currently working on a new friendship with a girl who has a lot in common with me. She's a lovely person, we just don't have a lot of time to get to know each other! Hopefully we'll be able to get together more than once a year. That'd be nice, eh? And isn't it funny that no matter how old you get, you still call other ladies "girls?"

I've been lucky in my life to have some wonderful friends. Some old, some new. Some internet, some real. Whatever that means. Everyone is real, right?

I'd never trade those free hours I had in college for what I have now, though. I'd not trade the time it takes to care for my children or the time I spend with them for the free hours to stay up late on the phone making new friends. Obsessing over the latest mishap in my lovelife. Ordering Domino's Pizza at 1:00 a.m.

I love my life now. I just wish I had more friends.

Hedgehogs

You know, we don't have hedgehogs here in Missouri. I never saw one in Illinois, either. But we had them in Switzerland!

I don't know why, maybe hedgehogs are more of a European thing?

I was reading my daily dose of F*UP (warning: PROFANITY IN SITE NAME AND ALL OVER IT) and meandered to a link he posted about a little darling family of hedgehogs who lost their mom in a brutal truck accident but adopted a stiff bristled cleaning brush as their foster mother so everything turned out OK in the end.

And suddenly, I was six years old again, walking home from somewhere in Geneva. I have no memory of where I had gone (I was probably walking our neighbor dog Fritzy), but I do remember seeing a little hedgehog in the grass by the sidewalk. We called them porcupines back then, but I don't think that's accurate.

By the way, I used to walk Fritzy for pretzels. My mother must not have been feeding me or something.

Geneva was a fun place for a kid in the seventies. It wasn't dangerous for us to go out alone. After we moved out of our house, we stayed in a high rise hotel downtown for a week. I can remember my friend Katie coming down to visit me, and the two of us heading out of the hotel, alone, to go to Jouets Weber, the big toy store. Yikes, can you imagine doing that with your kids now? I was seven years old, I think.

And don't even get me started on the "Brett got left behind at the summer day camp in the Alps" story, that's a killer!

Speaking of which, when we were in Geneva, Strumpfs were very popular. We got back to the States and nobody had heard of them....until a year later, when this cute little cartoon popped up on the tee-vee. Only they called it SMURFS! So yeah, I was way ahead of that trend, thank you very much. I still can remember the smell of those painted plasticy rubber figurines. So cute! So stinky! Ah, Papa Smurf. Where've you gone, buddy?

Another trip down Ye Olde Memory Lane

Ahh, college. Remember those days? Yeah, me neither. But we were young, and energetic, and we could sleep until eleven.

Right before Christmas I had to deactivate my Facebook account because Facebook (or FB, as the usies call it) was suddenly sending me all sorts of weird emails from other "friends" and I think I caught the FB virus that was going around. So I deactivated and waited awhile, and then today I activated my account again.

And GUESS WHAT?? My friend Jane, who I'd been thinking about and looking for for a few months, is now on Facebook! Jane was my college roommate and friend, and I'd lost touch with her.

So in honor of Jane, I pulled out some old pictures I had of that time, and scanned them on my crappy scanner. Cause there's nothing more flattering than pictures of you when you had Big Hair and weird clothes that came up way too high on the waist, and you can't Photoshop the pictures because they aren't digital.

So here's a picture of Tami, me, Fumo, Kelli, and Dirks. I don't know what happened to Dirks. I mean, in life. I have no idea where she is now, except maybe she's on t.v. somewhere? I thought she wanted to be a television newscaster.


And here's another great shot. Jennifer, Kelli, me, JANE!, and Dirks. Dangit, Dirks is in literally every picture I have from college!

This picture makes me laugh every time I see it. Fumo and Jane, in our dorm at ISU. Fumo looks like she wants to punch Jane, probably because Jane just punched her? Or maybe she did something gross? I can't remember! But it makes me laugh.

My twenty-first birthday, with Tami and Fumo. Hey, at least our hair was getting shorter by then. And Dirks wasn't in the picture. In fact, by this time I don't think I even knew where she was? Did she move? I have no memory.

So it was a short trip down Ye Olde Memory Lane, but it's really good to know where Jane is again. She's one of those people I always like to know where they are, even if I don't talk to her as often as I'd like.

She has three beautiful girls now. I can't believe how big they are! Which means I can't believe how old I am! Yikes. These pictures were from at least fifteen years ago. Ye gawds! Time, she's an evil woman.

I love you, Jane! Good to see you again.