Before I get into today’s
nutrition lecture,
a little clarification on clothing stains, for the “Laundry Queen”, Riott, and the rest of you impeccable dressers:

This stained Disney shirt I love so much goes with a pair of longjohns (now so baggy on me that I’ve woken to find them around my knees a few times) to make comfy pajamas.  I’d never wear stained clothing out in the world.

I have an elegantly simple gray turtleneck tunic, bought new at (what to me seems) great cost.  It has long been my favorite “town clothes”.  Once, at Wal-Mart, a greasy hand-grip on a shopping cart made an ugly black smear on it.  I made such a fuss about having to go through my day’s shopping all besmirched that they gave me a new shirt.  I bought liquid detergent and pre-treated the stain as soon as I put on the new shirt.  I got the stain out. 

Another time, a taco shell broke and spilled orangey-greasy taco filling down the front of my gray tunic.  I got that stain out, too.  I can still wear that shirt to town, but if it ever gets a permanent stain, it will become comfortable home clothes and I’ll have to find a new town favorite. 

Wear stained clothes out of the house and yard (or this laid-back neighborhood)???  Mama would die!!!  …oh, right, she did that already… well, it’s just not done, anyway.  But I’m never as comfortably at-ease all dressed up for town as I am in some old holey, grungey thing that by rights belongs in the rag bag.  The reason for that is simple:  anxiety that I’m going to get “dirt” on my clothes.

---

AND NOW–
Meal-in-a-Muffin
This is version 5 or 6 of my gluten-free bread recipe, and I promised around #3 somewhere that I wasn’t going to continue the search for ever-better muffins.  That was true, but a few accidental discoveries and substitutions turned out to be improvements, so I’m sharing the latest recipe.

First– the gluten-free rationale:
Gluten is the sticky, stretchy substance in wheat, oats and some other grains.  It is an addictive substance (see nutramed.com/eatingdisorders/addictivefoods) and also poses problems for anyone in the “A” blood group or with a history of yeast infections.  Yeast (Candida) nests in it, it adheres to the lining of the gut, where the yeast feeds on the sugar in your food, robbing you of the carbo energy, and producing toxins.  Think of that the next time you enjoy a donut. 
**Ha!  If I can’t enjoy donuts, nobody should.**

Preheat oven to 425°

This recipe calls for a total of 3 1/2 cups of flour.  My preference is:

1 1/4 cup garbanzo bean or combined fava and garbanzo flour  (for protein and fiber)
1 cup sweet white sorghum flour (for flavor–yum!)
1 cup whole grain brown rice flour (vitamins, fiber, and combines with bean flours for complete protein)
1/4 cup tapioca flour/tapioca starch (It takes only a small amount of this to sweeten and lighten the bread.  A little touch makes a big difference.)

Whisk together flours and:

Up to about 3 cups “protein powder”.  I use:
2 cups non-instant, non-fat dry milk (You could substitute whey powder, or a greater amount of the bulkier instant dry milk, about enough to make 3 quarts of milk.)
1 cup soy protein powder (This was one of my lucky discoveries.  I had the vanilla flavored drink mix, but didn’t like the drink or the mess it made in preparation.  I only wanted to use it up and not waste it, but I loved what it did for the bread.)

1 teaspoon xanthan gum (Another small touch that makes a big difference:  it takes the place of gluten in holding the bread together.  Without it, you have a crumbly texture.  Be sure it is well-distributed in the flours.    Handle your batter quickly, because this stuff is instantly sticky, and the batter will rise a lot faster than a gluten dough would.)
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons Chinese five spice (This was another serendipity–I had been using cinnamon, but ran out.  I was looking over my spice shelf, sniffing this and that, thinking I would use up some of the older bottles I don’t use often.  Five spice smelled good, included cinnamon and ginger–two of my favorites– and was the oldest thing in my spice shelf.  The result was marvelous.)

In a separate bowl, beat:

2 large eggs,  and add:
1/2 cup vegetable oil (I prefer light-flavored olive oil.  Oil in the recipe is very important, especially for anyone with reactive hypoglycemia, insulin resistance, or any other blood-sugar instability.  Without the added fat, bread is too highly glycemic.  Less oil would make a prettier, more cake-like bread, but would not be as healthful.)
2 cups low-fat plain yogurt (This adds protein, calcium and other nutrients, and reacts with the soda for leavening.  Nonfat is too glycemic.  Use only plain, unsweetened yogurt.  The combination of yogurt with fruit, according to the naturopathic protocols of food combining, is to be avoided.  Fruit and dairy ferment toxically in the gut when combined at one meal.  Yogurt in the batter came about as yet another happy accident.  I found a 3# tub of it in the back of the fridge, out of date and needing to be used.  It made 3 batches of muffins over the course of about six weeks and I used the last of it today.)
1 cup water (The recipe requires 3 cups of liquid.  It can be all water, all milk, all yogurt, or any combination.  You could use soy milk or rice milk, etc.
2 tablespoons honey (optional)
2 teaspoons vanilla (can be omitted–not needed with my vanilla drink mix)

Bake in muffin pans that have been oiled or sprayed with non-stick vegetable spray, or lined with paper baking cups.

Bake in preheated oven at 425° for 12 minutes.

The recipe makes 2 dozen muffins.  I pack them in a big 3# coffee can with a tight lid, or they could be packed in a zipper freezer bag.  I keep them in the freezer and nuke  …umm, I defrost one or two a day in the microwave oven.

Today I was successful, for the first time yet, in baking a batch of these without eating too many of them as they cooled.  Until this time, I would munch down three of them hot and fragrant, get a glycemic response and then realize that I had overdosed.  I now know that 2 is OK, 3 is OD.

 

A few stray thoughts and Monday fluff…

I have had some interesting contradictions in my parental
programjming.  Daddy did greasy, dirty work and included me in
it.  For him, dirt wasn’t much of an issue.  He’d wash his
hands before eating, and that was enough for him.  Mama hated dirt.

This was rough on me becaue I’ve always been klutzy.  I tend to
wear my food.  On a waitress job once, my boss said that with me
around, the customers didn’t need a menu–they could just look at my
uniform.  Mama used to get very upset when I got stains on my
clothing.  One time when I was two or three years old, she made my
forehead bleed, trying to scrub off a freckle at my hairline.

My being a perfectionist just complicates things more.  I feel
awful when I watch the perfection of anything being spoiled through
damage or dirt.  I love the stains on the good clothes that other
people have tossed into the donation box, so I can find them in a
thrift shop.  Pre-stained clothing makes me more
comfortable.  I don’t have to worry about ruining something that
has already been ruined.

Whqt brought this to mind today was looking down at the stained
front of my spiffy Winnie the Pooh thermal undershirt from the Disney
Store.  I’ve been in those stores.  I can’t even afford to
shopLIFT there.  I have such a marvelous collection of spoiled,
damaged, soiled and busted stuff, it’s incredible.  During our big
7.9 earthquake in November, some Navajo stone carvings fell from their
shelf.  When I picked them up and saw the cracks and chips, I
breathed a sigh of relief–that’s just that many more things I no
longer need to worry about ruining.

On another topic entirely:

Doug’s being his freaky self, sleeping with his eyes wide open,
getting up and looking for stuff until I tell him, “Lie back down,
you’re still asleep.”  I just walked across the room where he’s
snoring, and his eyes followed me.  He made some remark that had
nothing to do with anything here, but in which I recognized some words
from the reality of his online games.  **sigh** 

 
Your aura shines Orange!

What Color Is Your Aura?

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Macbeth’s: Lady Macbeth – Macbeth’s wife, a deeply ambitious woman who lusts
for power and position. Early in the play she
seems to be the stronger and more ruthless of
the two, as she urges her husband to kill
Duncan and seize the crown. After the bloodshed
begins, however, Lady Macbeth falls victim to
guilt and madness to an even greater degree
than her husband. Her conscience affects her to
such an extent that she eventually commits
suicide. Interestingly, she and Macbeth are
presented as being deeply in love, and many of
Lady Macbeth’s speeches imply that her
influence over her husband is primarily sexual.
Their joint alienation from the world,
occasioned by their partnership in crime, seems
to strengthen the attachment that they feel to
one another.

* Which Tragic Shakespearean Heroin are You? *
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Playful

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Has anyone missed the ArmsMerchant?

About three months ago, after a three-week absence, Greyfox came back from totse long enough to post a blog entitled, “The day I Killed my Dog.”

Since then he has had several ideas that he mentioned as being something he would like to blog about.  But when he gets on the computer, he goes right to his email inbox and follows a link to a reply someone has made to some thread he started at the Temple of the Screaming Electron, and he is there until after midnight most nights.

A week or so ago, I was confronting him, giving him a hard time for taking liberties, ripping me off.  I was asking him what he was thinking, what might have motivated him to overstep bounds and take what was not his to take.  He said it made him “feel rich”.

I questioned whether it might not be better–better than just FEELING rich–to BE rich.  He immediately agreed, and went on sadly somewhat to the effect that it would be a hopeless pursuit.  I reminded him that he can WRITE, and that not too long ago, in geological time, he had had some ambitions, even some works in progress along those lines.

The Old Fart was kinda down anyway, with business woes and political shit before he had me on his case.  He mournfully moaned something to the effect that he had “nothing to give, nothing worth reading.”  I demurred.

I reminded him of things he has written before, and things he has intended to write, things he has talked about writing.  Then I remembered one of the brightest spots, one of very few bright spots in the first few years he lived up here:  The Continuing Adventures of Melody Andrewsdottir, Lady Shaman and Healer to the Rich and Famous.

Melody was a serial, coming out in roughly quarterly installments for the four years or so that Greyfox produced The Shaman Papers.  Readers wrote and told us of falling out of bed laughing at her.  Greyfox and I would crack up over and over as we edited the drafts.  Doug memorized long hilarious passages to the mystification of his friends and teachers at school.

Greyfox gave me permission (I’d have done it anyway; I have his password.) to transcribe Mel’s tales on his Xanga site.  I have done that with the first episode, from Spring, 1990.  Not everyone will get every in-joke, but even so, it is funny.  And if you think that one is funny, what comes after gets better and better.  This episode is like the humorous set-up to a screamingly funny running joke that will go on as long as there seems to be any reason to continue.

I have over three years of bound archival material at hand, and we have begun searching for the quirky and weird final year, plus the as-yet-unpublished last written episode… and there is no reason why that needs to be Melody’s end, because it ends in the usual cliffhanger.  Go meet Melody.  If you like her, leave a comment and let Greyfox know.  If you want to read more, let me know and I will transcribe the next episode.  It’s hard work, much harder than writing, but I think she and Greyfox are worth it.

 

Things are looking UP.

It really was quite a week around here.  One thing I deliberately neglected to mention before is that Wednesday night, after my long photo walk with the cats, I was hit by a big fibro-flare:  random pain like sledgehammer blows and pitchforks first here, then there, and me doing the Frankenshuffle, and walking bent over because waiting around until I could straighten out my back wouldn’t get me anywhere.  It even affected my eyes (I hate when that happens; it’s the absolute WORST of my symptoms yet.) and I couldn’t read or watch TV.  So, I slept.  Not a bad alternative, all things considered.

I didn’t mention the flare-up at the clinic yesterday, though it was still hanging on a bit even then.  I just couldn’t stomach any more of my provider’s, “You poor thing,” sympathy.  The poor thing seems so distressed at my pain, I find myself hesitating to burden her with it. 

**RATS!!  People like me, with a tendency to wear their food, should not eat at the keyboard.  I just had to stop typing and eating for a few minutes, to clean a glob of my hot cereal out of the keys.**

Greyfox tends to go to extremes, double Libra that he is.  His emotional scales do wild, wide swings.  He’s very cute and bubbly when he’s up, and the most pathetic abject wretch you’ve ever seen when he is down.  When he is “on tenterhooks” anticipating some possibly harmful change, such as when we were waiting to find out how the new zoning would affect him, he’s just not-here, vague, abstracted, distracted, GONE.

Yesterday, after having learned that nobody in Talkeetna wanted to buck the village powers-that-be and give him a legal space on private property, he went the other way, down the valley to Pittman, a cluster of businesses between Houston and Wasilla, at an intersection with the only traffic light for miles.  He had worked one day there before, at a roadside strip that’s like an open-air transient mall.  The owners charge $10 a day or $50 a week for a booth space.  It is a much longer commute, and the rent adds even more overhead, but he was running out of options.

Last night he came in cautiously optimistic.  The owners of the strip have a few cabins along the rear of the property and one was vacant.  For $200 a month, he could have a place to stay over and avoid the long commute, plus that rent includes a booth space.  The problem was that he was a little short of cash.  He could have scraped up the month’s rent required to get the place, but it would leave him with no money for gas, making change, or anything else.  He knew that Doug has his savings account and would probably let him have some money on Monday when the credit union opened, but the owners wouldn’t agree to hold the cabin for Greyfox without that first month’s rent.

I surprised him, with two crisp Ben Franklins out of my emergency stash.  He knew we had already spent the “secret stash” of holdout money I had put away last summer.  He didn’t know I had an emergency stash.  He was really pleased.  I love surprising him that way because it’s fun to watch his reaction.  He got into gear and loaded up some equipment and supplies last night.  Then he got up early this morning to get down there early, hoping no one had rented the cabin meanwhile.

I just got a call from him, maybe even happier now than he was depressed earlier in the week.  He now has a second home, his little cabin by the highway.  He won’t have to commute to work every day that the weather is good enough for working.  Instead, he will be coming up here on off days, mid-week when business is slow, or whenever it is too wet or windy to open the stand.  Before this, when there were rain showers he either wouldn’t go to work at all or would close early and come home.  Now he can just cover things up until the rain shower passes, and then reopen.  He is ecstatic. 

I had reminded him, after he got the boot in Talkeetna, that when the Highway Dept. had made him leave his original stand in the turnout across from the spring, the move to Talkeetna had been a big financial boon to him.  I remided him of that Yod, hand of God, pattern in his birth chart, that makes him benefit from all sorts of nasty things.  When I said that this move could also work to his advantage, he said that he had been telling himself the same thing.  Now he is convinced that it is true. 

What a week!

I think it was Tuesday that Greyfox came dragging in from his workday in Talkeetna.  The tone of his greeting told me something was wrong, so I skipped the usual, “How did it go,” or “How was your day?”  I just said, “what happened?”  He silently handed me a folded piece of paper and trudged back toward his room.  It was a warning citation for a violation of the new zoning ordinance.

Knowing that these work-related and financial upsets put him at risk for falling off the wagon, and that my addressing the addiction issue directly tends to make him feel embattled and threatened, I took an indirect tack.  Over the next day or three, I talked a lot about how I was feeling, how hard it has been lately to maintain my own abstinence. 

It has been very hard.  Doug baked pecan fudge brownies yesterday.  Greyfox has two half-cases of CocaCola parked in the hall outside his bedroom door, where I pass them a dozen times or more a day.  I may have eaten more tortilla chips than I really needed to maintain life, but I didn’t binge, didn’t get into the sugar.  I’ve been sugar-free long enough now that I can taste the natural sweetness of my gluten-free breakfast cereal.  Sugar has been the easiest thing to kick this time around.  Caffeine and capsaicin are turning out to be the hard ones, the things I’m still eating regularly that I’d be better off without… maybe.

I had a clinic appointment today.  My provider, a physician’s assistant (no doctors in this end of the valley) was impressed at my weight loss, even though my blood pressure was high.  She showed a bit of alarm when I told her I hadn’t been trying to lose weight.  She felt better when I explained about kicking the sugar, gluten and casein.  What really bothered her was my telling her I had tapered off the asthma meds and had been without any of them for four days.

She stammered a bit, started a couple of questions and stopped herself.  Then she excused herself, said she needed a moment to formulate the right question, and then came out with it:  “Why did you decided to taper off the meds?”

“Because I didn’t think it would be good to quit all at once.” I answered.

“Well… yes,” she said, “you shouldn’t quit suddenly.”   “…But, why did you feel you should quit taking your meds?”

“I don’t want to be taking drugs I don’t need and can’t afford.  I’m breathing okay now, since that cold has gotten better.”

She went through her spiel about these new long-acting, “preventive” leucotriene receptor antagonist drugs (though she didn’t use the big words), needing to be taken over a period of time, that they were ineffective for acute use–but she was still trying to avoid using medical terminology.  I don’t recall exactly what she did say.  I was translating it in my head as she went. 

I didn’t want to embarrass her, but I really couldn’t avoid using some big words when I explained that I am not sure I have ever had “classic” asthma.  I said that dyspnea is common in myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome.  I told her that mine had once been in remission for several years during my forties, and that I now feel it is in remission again.  I repeated that I have been breathing just fine since that cold eased up.

I told her it was a bad cold, and that I had temporarily returned to full dosages of all but the steroidal inhaler for a few days during the worst of the cold.  She asked me if I got through the cold without antibiotics.  I smiled at her and said that antibiotics are no good against viruses.  As she started to stammer out something about bacteria (I know she was headed toward the “opportunistic infection” explanation.) I saw something light up in her eyes, and knew she had finally remembered just which one of her crazy patients this one is.

We laughed together for a moment, and she said, “You’d come in if you needed to wouldn’t you?”

I answered, “Yes, and I know my immune system pretty well.”

When I told her about the problems I’ve been having kicking the caffeine and capsaicin, she said that both have been used to treat asthma, before they had all the unnatural drugs they have now.  I talked a little bit about the way I crave the coffee and salsa as soon as I wake up in the morning, and how tight and hot my chest feels until I’ve had those morning meds.  I think she has resigned herself to my self-medication.  She really has little choice in the matter.

Astrologically, this week has kicked my ass in interesting ways.  It hasn’t really FELT good, but it has brought me insights and deep personal change that feels great in retrospect.  The Sun and the Lunar Eclipse, backward running Mercury, Neptune’s retro station and its conjunction with Mars, all made aspects with that wild curse-blessing pattern in my natal chart.  I do love intensity, always appreciate it fully just as soon as I get my bearings after one of these phases hits me.

I’m affirming improved health.  I won’t be sick!  Illness is just about the only thing that could keep me from doing what I need to do on this benighted planet, so I WON’T HAVE IT!!  I don’t have it.  It may take more concentration and effort to move these myalgic muscles than it once did, but I can do it.  I can take deep, full breaths without wheezing or coughing (first time for that today, since I caught the cold from Seph last month).  For as long as “cure” or “healing” eludes me, “remission” will be enough.  I can work with this.

Enough Kansas for now, back to Alaska for a while…

This is what started it today.  I noticed that the chamomile seedlings were starting to get leggy.  I knew if I didn’t take some pics soon, the stuff would be all grown up, spread out, bloomed and gone to seed again soon and I would have missed another spring shot.

 

I was out there in the yard, talking to Greyfox as he inflated a low tire on my car.  He’s home on a fairly decent day because the new borough zoning ordinance ran him off the public right of way in Talkeetna.  He is waiting for word on some possible options, new locations to set up his stand.  He’s noticing things and fixing stuff.  I didn’t even know I had a low tire.  I did, however, notice things greening up.

This caused Greyfox to give me that worried look that tells me that some expression on my face has concerned or alarmed him… he’s very good at low-key alarm, controlled panic.  I just tend to look worried or mad when I’m only concentrating or spacing out.

I assured Greyfox that I was only wrestling with a not-momentous decision, whether to haul out the Fuji and all its lenses and get some closeups of plants and bugs, or grab the Kodak and get some good longer shots.  I brought up the battery issue:  the Fuji is a glutton.  But it really made more sense to get it out now that it’s warm enough not to freeze my fingers or void the Fuji’s warranty, get used to it, learn its limits.  So I bit the bullet and put an extra set of batteries in my pocket and started looking for fireweed shoots.  They’re red-purple, tender and sweet now.  When they get a little bigger and turn green they are coarse and bitter.

I found these and lots more fireweed shoots.  I shot these and one more big purple one.  I’m going to get a basket when I’m done here and go out and pick a bunch.  Then I will have a salad (with romaine) as soon as I get back in, and steamed fireweed (with something, probably something different for each of the three of us) for dinner.

I saw and heard some birds, but nothing that would sit still and let me shoot it.  Gotta learn how to make this thing do movies…  The first stationary wildlife I spotted was this spider.  Can you spot it?  I took three shots here, and all looked sharp, in focus on the digital display, and this was the closest to in-focus of them all.  I’m starting to get a sense of the camera’s limits.

A lot of leaves were bronzed like the spider’s leaf and this new growth on some lowbush cranberries.  We had a sharp frost last night, a new crust of ice this morning where it has been water for a week or more.  The combo of early thaw and late frost is giving the woods color that looks more like fall.  I like this shot, because it shows both green and bronze leaves, new flower buds, and last year’s berries still there for the birds that are migrating in.

This is Pidney, trolling for belly rubs as usual, showing her flashy side to get attention.  She is the one of our three cats who sleeps with our dog Koji and me.  I’m usually between them, but when I have a restless night they both get on the back of the bed and try to push me off the other side.

Muffin, the cat who picked Greyfox as her primate, was using him for furniture in his room while Pidney and Grammy Mousebreath were escorting me out the cul de sac.  Granny, whom their original primate Mark called Sassy, and whom we sometimes call Sassafrass the dancing cat, or Your Majesty, or the Catriarch, sleeps alone, but often curls up on Doug’s lap for companionship and warmth when he is here at the computer.  He’s hers, heart and soul.  Right now, he’s in couch potato heaven, stretched out under a blanket on the couch playing GTA3 and Granny is asleep on his shins.

In a part of the muskeg right next to the road, where ATVs have left deep water-filled ruts, I saw several mosquitoes skipping on the surface of the water.  I approached and they all went still to hide, so I shot this one.  Nothing else wanted to hold still and get its picture taken this trip.

Those spring-green birches in the distance look SOOO good to me.  And the spreading out and deepening color of the leaves will be happening so fast now, absurdly, obscenely green all at once.  It’s not dark at midnight now.  I noticed that a few nights ago when I was awake late reading.  Staying up later and later just sorta happens to me this time of year.  I keep waiting for the dark that never falls.

Out near the end of the cul de sac, I saw the hawk, winging out toward its roosting tree, far out in the muskeg away from both road and railroad tracks.  I hear a hawk almost every time I’m outside for much time, and last time I was out, I startled this one away from an area at the end of the cul de sac where there’s a lot of cover for small prey.  The cats like to hunt there.  Neighbors have dumped the stumps there when they were clearing land–now it is Voleville, Lemmingland.

I took two shots of the hawk, but my lens isn’t long enough and the shutter isn’t fast enough to catch it that high and moving.  One was a blob of pixels when I zoomed in just a little, and the other could have been a seagull for all you could tell by that image.  I either have to learn to lead the bird so I get the shot I want when the camera’s endless pause is over instead of missing it during the delay, or else I need to go back to using the 35mm SLR with a long lens and fast film.  I pictured myself a sort of demented subarctic suburban paparazza, out there roaming the cul de sac with the Kodak dangling from its wrist strap, the camera bag flopping against my ribs on its shoulder strap, and the Fuji and the Minolta rattling around on my chest as I search for the current shot and decide which weapon to use.

This shot, to the north from the road out to the circle, shows a scattered stand of beetle-killed black spruce.  This stuff is why many of us around here appreciate rainy weather.  Wildfire loves those dead trees.  I hear chainsaws sometimes, coming from several directions at once, now that the snow is all gone and the mud is starting to dry up.  We’ve had red flag fire alerts around here since mid-April.  There is one near the corner of our house that Charley has said he will cut down for me as soon as I get my chainsaw sharpened and tuned up, fueled and oiled.  It’s get-busy time, time also to take a look at the roof and try to decide what has to be done up there this year.

The cats led me back around the corner toward home, and waited restlessly as I changed lenses to get this shot of my favorite grove of trees.  The tall birch in the foreground is covered with long dangling catkin panicles, and a few leaves at the ends of some big branches are open. 

I keep thinking about this pile of beadstrands lying on my worktable, and the boxes of paired stones I picked out for earrings.  As soon as it stops freezing at night, I’m going to take the poly sheets down off the windows and put the screen in this window nearest my table, for ventilation so I can do the gluing.  I’ve got lots of beading to do, meanwhile, and some designs that came to me one day as I looked at the piles of components.  In a week, Mercury will be direct again.  Now comes the Full Moon….

Wow, Toto, we’re still in Kansas!

Almost as soon as school started that fall when I was in fifth grade, I joined Girl Scouts and 4H.  I already knew one of the scout leaders.  Mrs. Santee was a widow who was still running the hardware store on the corner of the next block of Main Street, that she and her late husband had started.  I had met her soon after we moved to Halstead.  She didn’t mind if I hung out there, and hardware stores always reminded me of good times shopping with Daddy.  I’d pick stray screws out of the nail bins and find where they belonged, and she seemed to appreciate my pickiness.

Another scout leader either owned or worked at the flower shop that was in a glass-paned greenhouse around the corner behind the variety store at the opposite end of our block.  My love of plants and my meticulous pickiness was usually welcome there, too.

In the middle of town was the Scout Park, and in the middle of the park was a stone building with a concrete slab floor.  The scout troops, boys and girls, and the 4H chapter, held meetings there, but my scout troop also met once a week for tea after school in the head scout mistress’s house.  It was like all my worst memories of Aunty Pat’s etiquette lessons and those inflicted on me at Eula Estrada’s house in San Jose, squared.   Stern admonishments about posture and manners were dispensed along with strong, nasty, unsweetened tea and Girl Scout cookies.  I actually liked tea if it had enough milk and sugar in it, but….

I had several friends in scouts.  Nancy Small and I used to go to the skating rink in town every Friday night.  Nancy’s best friend Barbara Call wasn’t allowed that much freedom, so I was Nancy’s Friday friend.  My best friend, Sharron Johnston (standing to the right of me in the group photo above) was the only other redhead in our class and since she lived at the opposite end of town from the school and passed by our store on her way home, we always walked home together.  The girl hiding behind Sharron has to be Marilyn Kay Berger, because little Marilyn was always hiding.

Marilyn lived on a farm within walking distance of town and I used to go out there and wander the cow pastures with her on summer days.  I recall sticking a prickly pear fruit in my shirt pocket on one of those trips and taking weeks to get all the tiny glochids (little stickers–the big stickers are spines) out of my skin.  I don’t think Marilyn was in Girl Scouts, but she was in 4H.

I got in minor “trouble” at my first 4H meeting.  It was fall, the first meeting of the school year, when we planned our projects for the coming year.  They handed out mimeographed checklists of available projects.  Some were impossible for me, like raising a calf or a pig, and I didn’t have a garden plot for any of the agricultural projects, but there were a bunch of things like canning and preserving, sewing projects and such, so I checked all of the ones I thought I could handle.  It was maybe twenty checks.

After we handed in the sheets, the adult up front looked them over and laughed at one.  Then he called my name, said, “Who’s this Kathy Douglass?”  I hesitantly raised my hand and he brought me a fresh checklist and said I could choose at most three projects for the year.  Darn!  That really made it hard.  Finally, with the whole group waiting for me to finish, I settled on one canning & preserving project, one sewing project, and a course in judging entries for fairs.

I put together an apron for Mama that she seemed to like, but which embarrassed me every time she wore it and bragged to anyone that I had made it.  My sewing skill has improved greatly in the intervening fifty years, thanks largely to a lot of practice when I was in the SCA.

I soon learned that completing the canning project would require some kind of food to preserve.  That was a problem because we didn’t have any fruit trees or vegetable garden, nor much extra cash to acquire raw materials at the grocery store.  But I’m good at improvising, I am. 

In the back of the store I had found an old mortar and pestle left over from a time when it actually had been a drugstore.  I had previously talked the man at the grain elevator out of a pocketful of wheat one day, and spent many laborious hours trying to turn my wheat into flour.  Then I had discovered that it was much easier to make peanut butter.

Each week, Mama discarded the out of date nuts from the hot nut display in the store and replaced them with fresh ones.  I salvaged a bunch of roasted salted nuts and mashed them in my mortar.  Within a few weeks I had a jar of chunky peanut-cashew-almond-brazil nut butter.  I think the major thing I had been lacking there was supervision, and I might have benefited from a little expert advice.

When we had our little local 4H fair, neither of my entries won even an honorable mention, but…  I found I had a gift for judging.  When we went to the regional judging contest–Topeka, I think it was–I won!  What better task could there be for a Virgo with OCD?  Sometimes when I’m complimented on my collection of blue ribbons and purple rosettes from the Alaska State Fair, with only a little sprinkling of red and very few white ribbons, I modestly explain that I judge my entries before I take them in.  If they don’t look like winners, I don’t bother entering them.

Our Girl Scout troop’s first project that fall was selling cookies.  We were handed order forms and told to mark down how many we thought we could sell.  I had no idea how many I could sell, so I only took one case, 24 boxes.  Most of the girls counted their parents, aunts, uncles and close friends, and put down that many boxes.  I found that out after I’d put in my optimistic order.

We picked up our cookie orders, and I spent a couple of evenings walking around town knocking on doors, cold calls, selling cookies.  When I called my scout leader to ask if I could get more cookies, she was happy to comply.  The second and third cases were sold mostly from a little stool I set on the sidewalk outside our store on two successive Saturdays.  I talked Mama into paying for a box for me to use as free samples.  Everyone who took a sample cookie bought a box. 

I got a fancy certificate from the state scout council for my extraordinary sales.  It was fun.  I sent in a postcard to a place that advertised in some of our comic books, and got a box of assorted greeting cards “on approval” and started selling them door-to-door.  The system was set up so that I could either keep a portion of the profits, or I could send all the money in and accrue points toward neat things like skates and bicycles.  I wanted a bike.  I think it was Red who pointed out that I could save up the cash and buy a bike quicker than I could accrue the points for one, so I started saving.

Red had told me how much a bike would cost, and so when I had that much money, Mama and I went to Newton, the county seat, where there was a bike shop.  There were a couple of bikes there that I could afford.  They were very basic bicycles, no fenders, nothing fancy.  I didn’t like them.  The one I liked was a turquoise blue Schwinn with fenders front and back, creamy white trim, plastic streamers sticking out from the handle grips that would blow in the wind as I rode, and an enclosed compartment between frame members in front that held the batteries for a horn and headlight.  That was the one I wanted.

I begged Mama for the extra money to buy it, but she couldn’t spare it.  I worked out a layaway plan with the man in the shop, and went back and sold more greeting cards for about a month, and then finally got my bike.  It was my first 2-wheeler, and it and Spooky and I explored our world that summer.  I’ll get to that next.

Still in Kansas, Toto…
1953-’54

My
cousin Red and his wife Blondie (the whole town of Halstead called them
that, but to their mothers they were still Eldon and Charlene) have a
red-haired daughter, Elizabeth, four years younger than I. 
In this pic from Christmas ’53, she was 5 and I was 9.  I received
the Chinese checkers set for Christmas.

  Several people played a few games with me, but nobody would
continue to play with me for more than a half dozen or so games,
because nobody could win.  When I complained to Mama, she said I
should let other people win sometimes, but she didn’t explain how to do
that.  The instructions on the box said how to play, but not how
to let others win.  I was accused of cheating, because I
didn’t know how to cheat.  I had a lot of fun with the game
anyway, sitting by myself in the back booth at the drugstore, making
those orderly arrangements that are diagnostic of obsessive-compulsive
disorder.

Elizabeth had been born in that town while her parents ran
the sundries store.  She was a cutie and the town’s sweetheart,
growing up on Main Street.  Because Liz wouldn’t let anyone call
her Granny anything but Granny, my aunt Alice was Granny to the town of
Halstead and soon became Granny to me, too.  It was a lot simpler
than arguing with Elizabeth.  My mother already called her Mom,
anyway.

Another gift for me that Christmas had been a little black plastic
Brownie camera.  Mama put strict limits on the amount of film,
flashbulbs and photo processing I could have, and I shot pics right up
to my limit all the time.  Most of my childhood photography, all
the negatives and the best of the prints, got away in ’69 when I went
to jail and our house was stripped by our friends.  The shots I’ll
be posting here are some that Mama and Granny kept and then returned to
me in ’79.

I have mentioned the magazines, comics, paperback books and jukebox
in the store.  We kept a paper cup beside the cash register, full
of nickels painted red with nail polish.  When the man came around
to empty the coin box in the jukebox, we got our red nickels
back.  I just had to make the cup of red nickels last between his
visits.  Once a week, a news service in Wichita delivered a bundle
of magazines, comics and paperbacks.  I would break the twine and
put the new stock out on the white-painted wooden magazine stand and in
the wire racks.  Then I would start reading.

My favorite magazines were Life, Look, Photoplay and Modern Screen,
but I read everything including Argosy and Esquire, even Mama’s
magazines:  True Story and True Romance.  She also read a lot
of the bodice rippers with the sexy covers from the paperback rack, and
I liked them, too.   I read all the comics, too:  the boys’
books like Superman and Plastic Man; the non-funny funny books Classics
Illustrated; Archie, Nancy & Sluggo, various Disney
funnies–whatever there was to read, I read. 

Among the paperbacks I read around that time, the most memorable was Asimov’s I Robot. 
For a few days, I got lost in that world of the future.  I already
knew how to handle books, so selling them after I read them was no
problem.  Mama made sure I washed my hands whenever I came in from
outdoors or finished the sweeping and dusting.

My compulsive Virgoan orderliness and my photographic memory got me
into a lot of work.  I was the one who got to unpack new stock and
put it on the shelves, and who counted everything for the year-end
inventory.  During the school year, Mama hired a series of high
school girls, one at a time, to help out in the store on evenings and
weekends.  When I was out of school, I worked there.  I got
paid an allowance of 25 cents a day for it.  Even when I wasn’t
working, if I was there doing my homework in a booth or reading or
watching TV in our little balcony room, and someone couldn’t find
something, they’d call me.  I knew what we had and where to find
it.

The balcony over the back of the store had a partition across its
front that went almost but not quite all the way to the ceiling. 
When we took over the store from Red, the balcony held his
desk, a filing cabinet and boxes of some of the bulkier but
light-weight stock such as paper cups.  I rearranged the other
stock in the back room that opened onto the alley behind the store,
made some room, and moved the boxes down from the balcony. 
Mama bought a pair of bunk beds for the balcony and we moved in there.

I remember finding several cases of very old castile shampoo in the
back room.  Red had stuck it back there because the stuff didn’t
sell.  I got it out, and made a big pyramidal display of it in the
middle of the store next to the greeting card racks, and it started
selling.  I think I helped it along by going back again and again
to shake up the bottles and turn the unattractive separated contents to
a satiny creamy consistency.

I remember getting my introduction to taxes, tariffs and
international trade around that time.  We sold Coty cosmetics,
imported from France.  A shipment came in from a wholesaler, and
it contained both imported and domestic items, on some of which Mama
had to pay excise tax or luxury tax.  When she asked me to
calculate a retail price that would cover cost, taxes and a 33 1/3%
profit, I asked her what an excise tax was.  She didn’t know, so I
went to the library to find out.  That was the start of something
big.

The hospital and clinic had earned Halstead a Carnegie
Library.  Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropic foundation
has contributed about as much as any other force or
factor, to my education.  I don’t recall the librarian’s
name, but I remember exactly how she looked and smelled, with her curly
blond hair and the floaty flowered silk dresses she wore, her open-toed
sandals, and the sweet Muguet des Bois perfume she
wore.  She sparked in me an ambition to be a librarian, which
I’ve fulfilled a few times in different ways, starting in junior high
school and continuing in prison.  The only thing of much value
still left in our old place across the highway here is my
library.  I wish I had room in this place for all my
books.

When the librarian had gotten to know me and I had nearly exhausted
her collection downstairs, one day while she was in the store having a
Coke, she asked Mama if she could have permission to let me browse the
stacks, the loft above the library where the “restricted” books were
kept.  Mama said it was okay with her. 

At the head of a steep stairway was a glass fronted bookcase filled
with leatherbound books with gold edges on the pages and gold titles
stamped on the spines:  Decameron by Bocaccio; Ovid; Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis; Darwin’s Origin of Species; Audobon’s Birds of America and
about sixteen feet of shelf space packed with a similar variety of
books.  I read all those listed above and a dozen or so other
less memorable titles from that case, and a lot of the other, less
costly books on the open shelves up there.

During the first summer in Halstead, I met a few kids whose parents
had businesses in those few blocks of downtown, and one boy, Leroy Coy,
whose father hung out either in the pool hall or the beer joint in
the next block north from ours on Main Street.  Leroy’s hands,
face and clothes were always dirty, and he reminded me of Mugsy of the
Bowery Boys (who had been my first movie star crush).  Leroy was
tough and quick and he noticed things.  He would act out hilarious
parodies of the twittery old maids who gathered for cherry phosphates
in our front booth every Saturday, and the bachelor wheat farmers
who showed up for cokes or shakes at the counter and to check out Mama,
the new single woman in town.

That fall, I got an earache.  Mama took me to Elizabeth’s
pediatrician, Dr. Stouffer.  He prescribed a new drug:  an
antibiotic, aureomycin.  As I got worse, Mama called the doctor
and he told her to double the dose.  I got worse still, with a
rash, higher fever and seizures.  The next time she called,
Dr. Stouffer was out and the on-call doctor, whom I eventually came to
call Dr. Bob, listened to the symptoms, figured out that I was
having a reaction to the drug, and discontinued it.

I survived, but I was very weak, shaky and incoordinated, and my ear
infection had gathered so much pus behind my eardrum that the eardrum
burst.  My muscles were stiff and sore.  I had a hard time
holding my head up because my neck was weak and sore.  I ached all
over and they told me it was growing pains.  “Growing pains” are
now recognized as early signs of ME/CFIDS.

That winter, I had mumps again, for the third time.  The
doctors at the world-famous Hertzler Clinic there wouldn’t believe that
I’d had mumps more than once, and I’ve encountered that same
incredulity from other doctors all my life.  I don’t argue. 
I’ve never known whether it was idiots in the first place misdiagnosing
me, or idiots later on not recognizing my immunological
anomalies.  Who knows?  All I know is that from my
perspective the diseases have been the same every time I’ve had
them.  Something changed when I was about twenty.  My
allergies changed, I got asthma, and stopped getting the “childhood”
diseases.

At some point that winter in Halstead, a doctor looked down my
throat and said that after they got the fever down a bit I would
need to have my tonsils out.  When I got better and went into the
clinic for the surgery, they looked down my throat and said I didn’t
have my tonsils any more.  They said they had “rotted away”. 
Yaay!  I’ve also been told that THAT doesn’t happen either. 
Who knows?

Greeting cards were a big portion of Mama’s business in the
store.  Halstead’s only real industry at the time, besides the
wheat farms surrounding the town and the grain elevator and farm
equipment store, were the Halstead Hospital and Hertzler Clinic. 
We had customers from all over the country and even a few from other
countries, looking for get well cards, sympathy cards, and such. 
The couple who were Mama’s wholesale card suppliers took a liking to me
and offered me the pick of the litter when their cocker spaniel had
pups. 

When the puppies were old enough to leave their mother, Mama and I
went to their warehouse in Wichita to pick out my puppy.  Mama
insisted that I get a male… no money for spaying and no room in her
heart or house for puppies.  The puppy I picked out (none of whose
puppy-pictures have survived) had curly black fur and ears so long they
dragged on the floor.  He blended into the shadows in our balcony
room.  I’d watch him go across the floor toward the little office
alcove at the back, and then next time I’d see him he’d be coming out
from under my bed, dragging dust bunnies on the ends of his ears. 
It was spooky.  I named him Spooky.

Mama spent a little money and joined a Lonely Hearts Club out of the
back of one of her romance magazines.  She got the first mailing,
a four-page catalog of singles ads.  She started writing letters
to the men she found there.  One of them came to visit, and then
another.  Neither of them looked much like the photos from the
ads, and one of them had an atrocious toupee.  Mama laughed it off
and joined two more Lonely Hearts Clubs.

We had a Saturday morning routine that spread to six days a week
after school was out the next summer–we were closed on Sunday, like
every store on our block of Main Street except the cafes.  We
would come down from the balcony-loft in back, unlock the front door
and bring in the bundle of newspapers, two quarts of raw milk with
cream floating at the top, and any other deliveries waiting by the
door.  Then Mama would start setting things up for the day while I
headed up to the bakery for half a dozen donuts, with a stop at
Millie’s Cafe on the way back, for a pint of coffee.

There on the stools at the counter, we’d share that breakfast. 
She would pour half of the coffee into a heavy mug to cool, and I would
add a scoop of vanilla ice cream to what was left in the white
cardboard carton.  We’d split the half dozen donuts between us and
drink our coffee, often finishing up between waiting on early
customers.  I can still smell the coffee with that overtone of
bleached cardboard.  The gooey mouth feel of a fresh glazed donut
has brought up those memories many times.  Oh, yum…  I gotta think about something else for a while, and go find something HEALTHY to eat.

Dammit, Toto, it looks like we’re still in Kansas.

To set the record straight, I love my mama.  It isn’t the respectful and/or dependent filial love of a daughter looking up to the superior maturity and wisdom of a parent.  My mama turned me into her caretaker when my father died.  Any remaining shreds of filial awe were dispelled when I was 25, homeless, just out of jail and soon to be on my way to prison, and she was 58 (my current age) and confided in me about her man troubles and asked for my romantic advice.

My love is not a euphemism for guilt or obligation or gratitude.  I don’t think I owe her a thing.  I consider our mutual karma balanced, null and void.  She wanted a baby, to fulfill her need to be a mother.  She stated that in so many words.  She tried before and bore another girl who lived a few hours.  I was her last chance at motherhood.  She could have adopted one or two of my cousins, but wasn’t interested in that, neither before nor after I was born, though my cousin Buddy and I were closer than many brothers and sisters.  Buddy and I both wanted him to stay with us, but just as she did with a long succession of dogs, cats and various love objects of mine, Mama wouldn’t have it.  It had to be her own baby, and only her own, and the baby was not allowed to have other love interests.

Mama and I didn’t bond properly when I was a neonate.  Both of us had separate surgeons working on us as soon as the obstetrician got my foot pushed back up so my butt could come out, and I managed to back into this life.  I don’t know how soon it happened, but Mama became the odd one out, unable to fit in the tight, companionable rapport between me and Daddy.  It didn’t help that she lacked the native intelligence of his family.  She was a little bit slow.  We both thought, talked and ran rings around her, laughing at her the whole time.  I think that after he died she decided to make me pay for some of that.

My love for mama is composed of empathy and compassion.  I know how hard she suffered for her errors and I know intimately the cultural and family history that led her into error.  I love her as I love all the rest of the people I know intimately.  It’s really just the same love I have for the entire Universe, only intensified by the intimate contact and knowledge.  The better I know someone, the better I love them.  And I know my mama very well.  I was her confidant, the one whose shoulder she cried on, whom she blamed when the latest man moved on, and who was sternly admonished when the next one started coming around that, “children are to be seen and not heard.”

I have made my peace with mama, though she never made peace with me.  I was a gross disappointment to her ’til the day she died, though she always spoke of how proud she was of me.  As paradoxical as that sounds, she did have both pride and shame in me, simply because she tried to own me, control my life and live through me.  To the extent to which she got her way with me, she was proud.  I was smart and pretty, brave and capable.  To the extent that I did not conform to her ideal, she was ashamed.  I was independent, irreverant, headstrong, and promiscuous, as precocious at sex as at the intellectual stuff.  She was mortified.

It drove me nuts and drove me out of her reach.  I don’t have to pretend that she was anything she wasn’t in order to love her because I love her unconditionally.  She was just exactly the mother I needed.  She showed me the error of hypocrisy, dishonesty and denial, gave me something worthy of rebelling against and made me who I am today.   

But that hadn’t happened yet when we ended up at my cousin Red Conners’s house in Halstead, waiting for Jim Henry to come back in his green woody, a wood-paneled station wagon, with all his worldly goods.  Mama was uneasy within the first day or so without a phone call from him.  In San Jose, after that first phone call they were talking frequently, amost every day for a while.  Mama always missed her men, and her sisters and brothers and friends and me, when we weren’t around.  She was always missing someone.  She missed Daddy right up until she died, she said.  She was obviously missing Jim there at Red’s house.

She kept looking at the phone, probably willing it to ring.  I saw her walk over to it a few times as if to pick it up, then tensely force down her hand and walk away.  There was no number to call.  He was supposedly on the road.  But after enough days had passed that she was sure he should have been there by then, she called his sons in Pine Bluff.  He was gone, they said, had sold off, doled out or packed up everything, headed for Kansas.  Then the police were called in.  I wasn’t privy to any of that.  The grownups dealt with it.

I knew only that Jim had “disappeared”.  Somewhere between Arkansas and Kansas, he and his woody and all his worldly goods had gone missing.  Mama was frantic.  She twisted hankies to shreds.  She did her little approach/avoidance dance with the phone all the time.  Time passed and I guess she grew numb.  She and Aunt Alice and Red and his wife Blondie discussed the possibilities.  Mama was going for the fanciful ones that had him just somehow delayed, while the other two women were horrified at the thought that some hitchhiker might have offed him for his woody and the worldly goods.  Red thought he had probably gotten cold feet and took a powder.  I remember his mother and his wife shushing him when he expressed that thought.  They’d rather have Jim dead in a ditch, I guess, than absconded.

Red made it clear that Mama had to get on with her life and out of his house.  They worked out a deal for her to buy his business, Halstead Sundries, the place the town called the drugstore, though the pharmacy was in the next block south on Main Street.  Main Street was paved with red brick.  The floor inside the store was small hexagonal tiles set in geometric black and white patterns.  The high ceiling in there was dusty-looking once-white painted stamped tin, with wreaths of fruit and flowers embossed in the metal.

On the right was a soda fountain with seven red vinyl-covered swiveling stools, and between that and the door were a cigar case and a heated display of roasted nuts.  The opposite wall of the store was lined with shelves and a long row of shallow divided bins for everything from sewing notions to Carter’s Little Liver Pills.  The sundries stock extended the full depth of the store, more than twice the length of the soda fountain.  At the back of the store, tucked under a “balcony” floor the full width of the store and about 12 feet across, were a jukebox, three red leatherette booths, a magazine stand and two wire racks of paperback books.  In other words, heaven for any kid growing up in the fifties.

Too bad then, that I was living in my own little self-created hell.  Mama put a good face on it and joshed with the customers all day, and cried at night.  Now that Jim wasn’t there, she was back to crying for Daddy, too, along with crying for Jim.  She looked like hell:  pasty face, red eyes, a rictus of a grimace for a smile.  She had admonished me enough about being a good girl around Jim, and scolded me enough for being bad, that I was pretty sure he had gone away because of me.  First I widowed her, and then I repelled her long-lost childhood sweetheart.

I don’t look so good in my old pictures from the time, either.  I see the eye-pouches of kidney disease, the puffy features, and I remember how sick I was.  It was fairly soon, that first summer in Halstead, that I had my first serious sugar overdose.  Part of it was grape, artificially-flavored grape.  Between the Coke machine and the ice cream freezer behind the counter, were two drink syrup dispensers.  Each held an upended gallon jug of flavored syrup.  One was always orange, and the other would be lime sometimes, sometimes grape.

We had just opened the new jug of grape.  I had taken the doo-hickey that held the jug down and washed it, and then clamped it back onto the counter and Mama stuck the open jug in it.  She let me try a glass of it, a portion of the syrup over ice, and then fill the glass with water, either carbonated or plain.  She wanted me to have plain, so of course my preference was fizzy. 

It was hot outside and I got thirsty and came back for more… a lot more, and a few dishes of ice cream, because it was so hot.  Mama realized that I hadn’t had lunch and started looking in the fridge to see what was on hand.  I ate a sandwich:  a “salad” of minced ham, mayonnaise and pickle relish on white bread, and since by then I didn’t want to drink grape any more, I had a glass of Coke.  I was soooo sick!  Puking and sweating and cramping and headache, arrrgh!  Grape soda was never tempting to me again after that.

Okay…

so… I broke the “sacred motherhood” taboo.  I ragged on my mama, and was so crass as to do it on Mother’s Day, just because that’s the way things shook out, what with this being Mercury Retrograde and time to do my memoirs for a while, and Riott’s comment wondering why my step-father pulled a vanishing act, and all.

Well, folks, just in case you haven’t noticed yet, I do tend to crap on all taboos.  I’m an equal-opportunity iconoclast, with something on tap in the old word mine to offend just about anyone.  And just because Mother’s Day is past, don’t start thinking I’m done blasting motherhood.

It’s not sacred, y’know?  There was a time when men believed that motherhood was sacred, because they didn’t really know how babies were made.  Then, when they got hip to the fact that it takes two, and one of them has to be male, they flip-flopped the other way and thought that women were just the dirt in which they planted their seeds.  That made it really rough on mothers for a long, long time.

Yo’mama and/or some man with an unhealthy Oedipal bent taught you that motherhood is sacred because their mamas taught them that.  The mama that started it all was scared of being old and helpless and not having those pesky kids that she’d worked so hard to bring into the world and keep here, to take care of her when she could no longer care for herself.  So, when I reflect on it, I think it was all really a typo in the first place:  not S.A.C.R.E.D, but S.C.A.R.E.D.

The really scary thing, as far as mothers are concerned, is that the mating urge is hardwired in both sexes, but that nurturing urge that makes the vast majority of us go all gaga and googoo over any little big-headed, wide-eyed warm-blooded creature–and quite a few of the cold-blooded ones and invertebrates, too–that maternal instinct is reserved for the females of the species.  A nurturing man is a rare bird, indeed.  If you ever find one, find out how he got that way and set up a factory to produce more of them.

As with cats and many other mammals, human females will sometimes be so strongly wired that way that they will even adopt and care for the young of other mothers, and some even go so far as to steal other women’s kids if they don’t have their own.  Even those with a lesser dose of the mothering hormones are usually geared toward protecting and preserving their own DNA, and will rear their grandchildren, the offspring of their siblings, their own younger orphaned siblings, etc.

I have it on good authority that at least one male of this species finds this maternal instinct scary.  Any woman with two functioning brain cells to rub together ought to find a scary thought or two in there, too.  Just consider this:

• Guys look and smell good.  Girls are predisposed not to try too hard to outrun one if he happens to notice her and give chase.


• Once he gets his hands on her, if he’s not a hopelessly clumsy oaf, she’s a goner.  If he touches one of her hot buttons, she wants him to touch it some more–feels good.  If he stimulates that erogenous zone enough, not only does it open her up and lubricate her, but she’s paralyzed.  I’m not talking the intellectual and emotional paralysis of limerance here, but actual physical can’t-move-a-muscle paralysis akin to the sleep paralysis that keeps most of us from getting up and acting out our dreams.


• I don’t need to describe and explain to anyone who has ever experienced it, the hormonal soup that takes over our bodies and minds once we’ve been impregnated and there’s no use trying to explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.


• Then, unless you’re lucky enough to be abnormal, which can carry a bunch of problems all in itself, when the baby is born (not an easy feat in itself, either) you LOVE that little sucker like you’ve never loved before.  Sometimes you love the kid so much that the daddy gets disgusted at the lack of attention and walks out on his little family.  Of course “mother love” isn’t really true unconditional love.  It’s compounded of biological imperatives and ego.  That’s your DNA you’re loving, and unless you are intelligent, educated, enlightened AND well-intentioned, you’re likely to warp the little suckers with your attempts to turn them into yourself and/or to achieve your abandoned ambitions vicariously through them.


• Language and culture just complicate the whole mess by setting up rules and taboos and expectations, and using that problematic word, “love”, to label the lustful mating urge of the father, the protective nurturing urge of the mother, and the needy dependence of the offspring, as well as a few dozen other assorted crippling psychopathological states and several transcendent spiritual drives.  Scrap that word in favor of a variety of more descriptive terms, and the species would be better off… but I digress.

Oh, well, I guess I’ve got enough of that out of my system for a while….

I’ll be back later with the next installment of my memoirs, entitled:
“Dammit, Toto, it looks like we’re still in Kansas.”