Critical Items

We haven't checked in on Virginia, our friendly neighborhood 95-year-old grandmother lately, have we?

I went grocery shopping for her today--I do it about twice a month.  It was so goddamn hot today--like 114 degrees in the grocery store parking lot, hot.  But Gigi needed some things, the same things she always needs:

• sourdough bread
• a box of Premium crackers (she likes them better than Saltines)
• a gallon of buttermilk
• a gallon of 2% "sweet milk"
• laundry detergent

At least four of these five things are pretty much always on her list, and I just now realized they're all white.  Weird.

When she called me this morning to give me her list, she said, "I might be calling you later with more, but that's all I can think of right this minute."  I went ahead and added "cat food" to the bottom of the list, because she always needs cat food.  For years I've suspected she survives on a stew she makes out of cat food and milk.

Anyway, we went to the movies today because what else are you going to do when it's hot like this? And apparently Gigi called about six times while my phone was silenced, as is her wont (if someone doesn't answer, call again! And again! And again!).

I called her back after the movie and she was all, "I left a few messages on your answering machine.  I need you to pick up some critical items I forgot to tell you about this morning."

"What are they?" I asked.

"I can't remember," she said.  "You're going to have to listen to the machine."

So I have this bad habit of never checking my voicemail, and the messages tend to pile up for weeks until it becomes necessary for me to sit down and listen to all 16 of them at once.  Which is what I did today in the Bell's grocery store on Hawthorne, which is where Gigi likes me to go because they sell gallons of Mayfield buttermilk--not just half gallons like they have at Kroger.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of listening to messages left on my phone by people trying to figure out where I was during the week of Paddle Georgia, I got to four voicemails from my grandmother, left today during a period of about nine minutes:

VOICEMAIL #1:  Jessie.....   Get me some cat food, will you? The raccoon got into it last night and ate the whole can.  Thanks, honey.  Bye.  [Note: Virginia keeps her cat food indoors--in the laundry room, which she calls the "back room." She keeps it in a small metal trashcan. The "raccoon" routinely finds its way into the back room and eats many pounds of cat food at a time.  It could also be a possum.  Nobody's really sure.]

VOICEMAIL #2: Jessie.  And get me some cookies.  I've been out of sweets for a month.

VOICEMAIL #3: Jessie, hey.  And if you're at Bell's, get me one of those lemon cakes from the deli.  I'm just dying for somethin' sweet!

VOICEMAIL #4: Jessie? I can't imagine where you are.  Get me a 6 pack of Hershey bars....With almonds. Call me back.

Critical items, indeed.

Ain't your Dog, Ain't your Chicken

Surely some of you enjoy perusing my dad's blog, which he created to set the record straight about any lies I might be perpetuating on The Internet, but which he now uses as a forum to discuss the subtleties of being a grouchy old hippie man. Well, a couple days ago, he wrote a post about something he doesn't know a whole lot about, which is minding his own business. He says that his wife Janice (of baby-wrangling fame) sometimes calls him to order when he gets in a dither about somebody else's personal life with the following admonishment: "Ain't Your Dog, Ain't Your Chicken."

Now, Janice is a woman of few pretensions and fewer words. She is from the for real Country--meaning rural east Georgia, meaning she cooks with Crisco and considers most stuff I do to be hipster nonsense.  Dad is fascinated with people who can mind their own business as thoroughly and heroically as Janice can, and I'm pretty sure they both know that she's providing 100% of his street cred out in Madison County, where Dad routinely makes himself ridiculous in front of the locals by speaking in paragraph form and publicly admitting to voting for Obama.

ANYWAY. "Ain't your Dog, Ain't your Chicken" is a bit of family lore associated with the time the Dove Boys, which are a family of ne'er-do-wells out in Danielsville who can also roof THE HELL out of a house, were re-shingling my grandmother's roof. Be it known that Virginia has chickens and she used to have a whole lot of chickens until she got Russ, who was, during his lifetime, the scariest German Shepherd of my acquaintance. Virginia was passionately attached to Russ, and as he was intimidating and aggressive, it was necessary for her to set up a pretty extensive scaffolding of delusion around him in order to maintain the love. For instance, he detested the UPS man and would riot whenever the truck came up the driveway. He bit several delivery men in his day and also bit Jane one time when she hugged me in front of him. But whenever anyone complained, Virginia would say "Russ has never bitten anybody; he sometimes just grabs at people with his teeth."

Anyway, Virginia also refused to believe Russ killed chickens. But as he was a chicken murderer in his heart, it was only a matter of time before he got caught in the act by someone who was not blinded by love. That witness ended up being one of the Dove Boys, who was hammering away on Virginia's roof one day when he witnessed Russ' attack and brutal disembodiment of a Barred Rock hen. Understandably, said Dove Boy felt it his duty to climb down from the roof, trudge into Virginia's kitchen and tell her about it. Unsurprisingly (to me, anyway), Virginia's response was, "Oh, it's fine. Russ doesn't kill chickens--he just plays with them in his mouth." In his defense, Dove Boy had no way of knowing that when it came to that bloody-muzzled dog outside, the old lady in front of him was harboring a severely distorted view of reality bordering on what one might experience during a trip on psychoactive street drugs, so his response was, "Yes, Ma'am, I just saw him do it--he's out in the yard eatin' its neck right now."

And this is when Daddy Dove Boy yelled down from the roof through the skylight, "David, get back up here, boy! Ain't your dog, ain't your chicken."

Very wise. Thank you, Daddy Dove Boy. And thank you, Janice, for the periodic reminder.

Astrologate 2011

Excuse me, but what the hell is going on?

You know what I feel like? I feel like Astrology needs a way better PR person because no less than SIX people have applied to me in the past two days in a dither about no longer being a Scorpio or whatever. ("I like being a Scorpio! Plus I have a Scorpio tattoo on my neck, so what now?") And I'm getting absolutely no support from the International League of Astrologers or whoever's in charge of this stuff.

So, if you haven't heard, we're all supposed to have different astrological signs now. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read this, or I'll just tell you: Basically an astronomer by the name of Parke Kunkle (that's right--get in line, ladies!) told a Minnesota newspaper this week that the whole astronomical premise for Astrology isn't even correct anymore (due to Earth's wobble, the sun no longer passes through the constellations of the Zodiac at the same time that it did when Astrology was invented eleventy-grillion years ago, blah blah blah), so each sign in the Zodiac is technically off by about a month. Also, the ancient Babylonians had this thing against the number 13, so they decided to leave the constellation of a man wrastlin' a python out of the Zodiac all together to make it more aesthetically pleasing, even though Ophiuchus the snake charmer is technically in the same band of constellations as Aries the ram, Taurus the bull, Gemini the twins, &c.

All this isn't exactly news to anybody--at least not to astronomers or astrologers--but something about this week and Professor Kunkle's statement and the alignment of the stars (har har) came together in just the right way to make everybody freak the hell out. So, my friends have been applying to me for advice on how to proceed as an Ophiuchus when they've spent their entire lives as a Saggitarius because I'm the only person they know who actually believes that stuff. Or rather, I'm the only person they know who freely admits to believing that stuff.

I do. It's true.

The reason for my undying loyalty to the astrological arts has to do with my grandmother's friend Judy Shaw. Judy went through a stage in the early 90's in which she dressed like Stevie Nicks and carried a pack of Tarot cards in her purse. I remember her coming over to Virginia's house one night when I was about 12, and as the ladies were talking, I sat in the corner and pretended to read a book while I listened to them gossip about people I didn't know. In the middle of their conversation, Virginia turned around to see if anyone was listening, and realized I was there. "THAT one!" she hollered. "THAT one' s been following me around this house all week! She won't play outside and she just reads Harlequin romances and listens to me talk on the phone!"(For the record, it's true--that's exactly what I had been doing.) Judy smiled at me and said, "She's a Capricorn--she's collecting data." And even though I had no idea what that meant, I was like THANK YOU! Because all of a sudden, after a week of being told to go play outside and to stop reading trash, and why did I want to watch soap operas anyway?, Judy defended me with my own personality. I thought it was brilliant.

So, now I'm the person that everyone applies to when they start dating an Aries or are about to give birth to a Cancer. Or when some guy with a telescope decides to break it to us that we're not the people we thought we were.

Well, I don't know what to say about Parke Kunkle' allegations, but I do want to say this: if Mick Jagger isn't a Leo, I have no faith in gravity or the multiplication tables.



Also, I've dated FOUR Pisces in a row, and I can tell you a thing or two about a Pisces. Call me. Also, Leos and Scorpios are always going to think it's a good idea to fall in love with each other, but it very rarely is. Additionally, try not to argue with an Aquarius, don't rifle through a Virgo's things because she'll definitely notice, and it's always a good idea to wait until he's over 40 to marry a Sagittarius.

And I'm not sure what to say about Ophiuchus. You're going to have to Google him.

The Men

The nicest thing anyone's ever said to me came from my grandmother, Virginia. A few years ago, I went grocery shopping for her, and when I walked in the kitchen door she came over to give me a hug. In the middle of that hug she said, "I don't love you as much as some of the others, but I miss you the most when you're not around."

Wasn't that sweet? Well, you're going to think it's really nice as soon as I give you some context.

Two points of clarification:

1. By "the others," she meant "the Men."

2. I know this doesn't sound like a compliment to get all misty-eyed about, but considering I was born a girl, that's absolutely as good as it gets in Virginia's family. Case in point: my dad took me to see Virginia's brother Red in Mont Eagle, Tennessee when I was eighteen. He was probably about 90 at the time and hadn't seen me since I was a baby. After talking to my dad a while, Uncle Red turned to me and said "You're plain," (and here there was a looong pause.) And about 15 seconds later, begrudgingly: "But there's something kind of pretty about you."

When Virginia got wind of this, she congratulated me heartily, and when I didn't seem all that enthusiastic about an exchange in which a very old man I barely knew acknowledged that the sight of me came just shy of making him want to barf, she scolded me.

"You know, Robert is used to Very Beautiful Women," she said.

"Well," I said. "In that case...."

Virginia grew up on a farm in rural Virginia, one of ten children--seven of them daughters. Her father died when she was little, so if you were a girl in that family, you weren't getting any special attention. The three boys--of which Uncle Red was one--were spoiled rotten. ROTTEN. I think Virginia fell in love with the idea of Men when she was very young, because to be honest, growing up in the middle of Attaway, Grace, Maud, Mary, Annie and Helen seems like kind of a nightmare. I am being serious.

So anyway, Virginia loves men--especially very handsome, tall, loud ones with PhDs who have served in the military at some juncture. But she also likes the ridiculous ones who are always teasing and the serious ones who always want to talk about serious stuff. She likes the ones who "work themselves to death," and the ones who collect books for a living. She even likes sort of pitiful men. She insists that she continued liking a man who once called her at 3 in the morning sometime in the 1970's to tell her he felt "like a painted ship upon a painted ocean," and could he come over? I don't remember the end of that story, but I don't think I could maintain respect for someone who drunk dials a respectable lady in the middle of the night, and all he can think to do is quote Coleridge. That's the saddest booty call I've ever heard of.

My whole life I've felt sort of bitter about Virginia and The Men. When I was a kid, she was pretty unapologetic about it, and when you're nine and your grandmother says to you "well, just because I love Jason more than you doesn't mean I'm not going to treat you the same," you get sort of...a complex. But then I got older, and I did some thinking about Virginia and the Men. And you know what? 1) She loves me at least as much as I love her, if not more, and 2) Virginia's thing about men ensures that she loves at least 49% of the earth's population unconditionally. Unconditional love, you guys!

That's kind of great, actually.

Textiles of the Rich and Famous

I love textiles, which is funny because I don't necessarily love clothes. Clothes come with some burdensome obligations:

1. A clothes item has to fit, it has to be season-appropriate, the color has to be flattering, etc.

2. It has to satisfy a multitude of other fashion criteria, many of which are complicated and extremely nuanced.

3. Clothes have to fit the occasion, so you need a bunch of different sorts of clothes.

5. If you like a clothes item and it looks good on you, you can't just wear it every single day because people think that's weird.

I know some of you are going to disagree with me about this, but clothes are not the topic of this post.

TEXTILES, unlike clothes, are beautiful, but they don't need to be worn, and therefore can just be admired without that admiration being conflated with the person whose head is poking out of one end of them.

So, I love sheets and curtains and quilts and rugs. And I just found the website for John Robshaw Textiles, wherein they sell all sorts of beautiful things made out of cloth.

And I thought to myself, "I could really use a new set of sheets..." So I found some that I liked, and went to see how much these sheets cost. And you guys.

THIS SET OF SHEETS COSTS $575!

I love textiles, but like Virginia always says, I nearly died.

Virginia in the Italian Alps

My grandmother and some cattle. 1971?

Today I'm doing a photo project. More about that later, but this is my favorite photo of today. Or any day.

Shingle Bells

So this is how it's going to be, is it 2010?

January 1st, 2010--the first day of this brand new decade--Bryan and I finished painting the front rooms of our house, Odessa started kissing the pictures of people she knows on the refrigerator, and...I GOT DIAGNOSED WITH THE SHINGLES. Yes, SHINGLES!

And as every story I've ever heard about the shingles starts with somebody's grandmama, make yourself comfy because I'm fixin'a tell you about the time my grandma got the shingles:

You guys remember Virginia right? Well, she got shingles in August of 1988, which was the summer she retired after 28 years of teaching English comp to each and every University of Georgia freshman ever to write a 5 paragraph essay drunk at 8:20 in the morning. And God bless her for it. Anyway, the freedom to watch The Young and the Restless every day and jump on her mini trampoline in her underpants while eating cottage cheese and talking to her friend Sylvia on the phone at 3 in the afternoon was such a shock to her system that she got shingles. Which my sister Allison and I called The Strangles because we were farm children and figured she had just contracted equine distemper.

At any rate, for reasons that mystify me now more than ever before, Virginia decided to carpe diem the hell out of those shingles and drive all five of her grandchildren to our antediluvian home in southwestern Virginia (that's right--Virginia is from Virginia; she's the eighth of ten children--most of whom were girls--so I reckon her parents were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel for lady names by the time she came along). In hindsight, the very idea of waking up at 4:30 and piling five profoundly unenthusiastic kids between the ages of eight and thirteen into a 1979 Ford Country Squire station wagon and driving for seven hours to a place so far in the country that the telephone lines don't even go out that far, and you being the only rational adult within fifty miles of your rotting old bee-infested house, and did I mention YOUR SKIN IS ON FIRE seems just loonytunebananas to me, but let this serve as Exhibit B of what a sturdy old broad she is. It was truly Virginia and her compromised immune system versus five belligerent children.

An anecdote: One day Virginia felt so bad, she put my cousin Jason in charge of the rest of us, which made him feel as if he was responsible for making sure nobody slid down the banister. So he found a can of Raid under the sink and liberally applied it to said banister, and Allison slid down it anyway, so Jason took it upon himself to spray her with Raid in the back of the head. Needless to say, circumstances ended with five children screaming at each other and running around on the the roof, and Virginia hobbling around from window to window, threatening us with all kinds of whumpings. Later that week, Jason got partly struck by lightning.

Anyway, so here are my blessings:

1. I am not 70, so perhaps my The Shingles won't be as bad as all that.

2. I'm not currently responsible for any preteens.

3. It's not likely the rest of 2010 could possibly be as bad as it's begun. Right?

Right?

Friday 13th

I am a very delicate flower. My immune system is like one of those rare and pathetic orchids that need to be misted with a tepid vapor exactly every 13 and a half minutes or else it develops a sort of putrid fungus rot. My grandmother Virginia is the same way. If she's within a barge pole's reach of someone with a tickly throat, she'll have the walking pneumonia by Wednesday. One time when I was at summer camp, I got sick and Virginia had to pick me up. She brought a supply of coffee filters and made me sit in the back seat of her Cadillac and hold a double layer of filters over my nose and mouth the whole way home. I used to think she was being dramatic, but now I think I would probably have done the same thing in her place. Bryan thinks I'm turning into Virginia. Time will tell, but meanwhile, I've got my own problems.

I woke up this morning at 7:15 with Odessa clawing a hole through my bottom lip and sucking on the end of my nose. I had just begun the process of dislodging a piece of her wee fingernail from my gum, when I tried to swallow and it hurt. That's when I became certain I had Strep throat.

I have two recurring nightmares. One is that the one guy who ever broke up with me (back in 1997) is mocking me in front of a bunch of pedestrians on a street in Manhattan and they're all smirking, but I can't understand what he's saying because he's speaking German or perhaps Dutch. The other is that I have Strep throat. There's a special burniness that goes along with Strep that unsettles me in a deep and profound way. I think that's probably what it feels like to have leprosy.

Anyway, in case you're interested, I don't have Strep throat. I just went back to sleep and felt fine when I woke up again. But what I'm afraid of in my sleep is basically what I'm afraid of when I'm awake: 1. Being made fun of my people who are smarter and thinner than me, and 2. Being sick.

At least I'm not afraid of vampires anymore. That would be tough these days--like being afraid of cell phones.

Happy Friday 13th!

Virginia's House

I spent this afternoon at my grandmother's house looking for a rotary phone. Never mind why I need a rotary phone--I didn't find one, not because there wasn't one there, but because I was looking in Virginia's house, where the tenets of String Theory apply more perceptibly and dependably than they do anywhere else in the Universe. I'm serious--they should send physicists out there to study her closets. If you know any physicists, I'm happy to give them her address.

When I got to Virginia's house, there was a fancy Volvo sitting in her driveway, which ended up belonging to a lady from the board of the public library who was interviewing her about the olden days. Virginia is 91 and has lived in this town since 1945 or something, so people are all the time coming by to ask her about the days when Highway 129 was a dirt track and she kept a cow in the well house and milked it every morning before sun-up.

As I was saying, I wanted a rotary phone, which I had called in advance to ask her about, and she said "yes, there are two in a plastic bag on the top shelf of my closet," which I took to be a good sign, but not conclusive. Virginia is sharp, but she is also inscrutable like the sphinx; I have known her for 31 years and have learned to get my hopes up about exactly nothing. The reason for this is twofold: 1. her house is a wormhole, and 2. she is inscrutable like a sphinx. And here we start with the circular reasoning. Let me stop there and let the remainder of my story serve as an example:

I got to her house and Virginia was having a great time because the lady from the library was recording everything she said, which she took to be her cue to talk about black people: pros and cons. Then Virginia repeated her allegation that there were two rotary phones on the shelf in her closet, and then she began to describe the phones and what color the plastic bag was, etc. And while the library lady chronicled all of this, I felt the probability of my finding the phones drain out of the room with something like a low sucking noise. It's just something I have a feeling for. And sure enough, when I got to the closet, I found the entire thing to be jammed to the top shelf with antique bedding in Hefty bags. On the top shelf, I found the pelt of a small fox, some sort of firearm, a garment bag full of table cloths and a tape recorder.

I spent the rest of the hour looking for the phones, but they are somewhere else now. I hope the people in whatever parallel universe they've ended up in can find a use for them.

Cooking Fancy

My grandmother Virgina is 91 and loud, imperious, opinionated and completely awesome except when you want her to keep a secret, and then you're like "No she did NOT!" Oh yes. She did.

Virginia doesn't cook much anymore, but she used to when I was little. She's got these great big leathery hands like a frontierswoman, and when she prepares food, she uses Serious Cooking Implements like the old meat grinder her mother used to use back in like 1890, with which she creates her signature orange cranberry sauce. This is done by feeding whole cranberries and entire oranges (peels and all) into the grinder, which she cranks with her big, muscly hands until it comes out the end looking like Brontosaurus puke. If you ever go to her house on a holiday, please heed this warning: avoid the orange cranberry sauce. It will CUT you.

All this is to say, my people cook like cave people. Spaghetti tossed in butter, granulated Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper. Blackeyed peas and collard greens on New Years. Cornbread made with that kind of crunchy yellow cornmeal--no sugar. Tomato sandwiches in the summer; in the winter, tomato-based vegetable soup with hamburger meat floating around in it. Nothing fancy.

Which is why I have a natural and completely lunatic disdain for "fancy food." Does it take more than a half hour to prepare? Does it contain more than 5 ingredients? Does it require a Cuisinart? A flour sifter? An electric mixer? Well, I bet you cook all your pet's food too, own a pair of bamboo underpants and you probably bought a $90 Patagonia fleece for your 3 month old baby last week, DIDN'T YOU?

See? I just snapped. That was me snapping.

Anyway, I need to get over it. Because I wish I had a pair of bamboo underpants (have you felt that bamboo fabric? It's like the most delicate meringue...), and I actually think cooking your dog's food would probably be pretty cool if anyone other than crazy people did it. Plus, I would totally put my daughter in a $90 fleece if it was like $20. And I love to eat fancy food. I love it, but don't want to cook it.

So, tonight, I'm bucking my heritage, girding my loins and making Cremini mushroom and gorgonzola privilege dumplings. Also known as Ravioli. With a pasta maker: a Swiss watch next to Virginia's meat grinder. Wish me luck.

PS. Hank Green took this photo of Virginia with her cane. Google him! He's internet famous!