Glooooo-ria
One of my good friends is a 60-something year old tiny little Indian woman named Gloria. She's not related to me, we honestly have very little in common besides styles of humor, yet I look forward to seeing her as often as I can and visit with her and her mother Celia (who is 90-something and a firecracker) whenever I can.
Gloria is a hoot. The first day I met her, I had volunteered with a group to do some work on her house (paint the garage, clean/repair her back porch, mend part of her fence) since she is arthritic and not able to do lots of manual labor. She had cucumber sandwiches waiting for us in a fine china plate on the plastic table and chairs that graced her dilapidated porch, and made us tea and salads. We painted and chatted, and when she learned that I was in school and struggling for cash she decided to appoint me her personal interior designer and handywoman. I was glad to do it, and soon grew able to look past her pink and purple decorating scheme and somehow (I still don't know how) got on the good side of her tiny poodle, Doody. Yes, Doody.
Over the years I have painted her bedroom, her two bathrooms, her laundry room, mowed her lawn, repaired a couple end tables, cleaned her gutters and windows, and helped her decide the color scheme for all of the painting projects and helped pick out bathroom fixtures and linoleum for professional installers to deal with (thank God). She'd pay me a little, but I never asked her to and never told her anywhere close to what my labor was worth the few times she did ask.
I've also learned that Gloria used to be a professional opera singer in New York and was quite the girl-about-town. She has photos from those years and a portrait that was drawn of her (it's gorgeous). She unfortunately damaged her vocal chords while still fairly young and had to go into the family business as a hairdresser. Gloria trained for a couple of years in Paris before moving with her mother to New York and eventually somehow winding up in the tiny town of Seattle.
Celia (her mother) has a fascinating life story, and one that I have heard probably four or five times now (it never gets old). She grew up in a Christian household in a Hindu country (India, of course) and got married right out of high school to a dashing young stranger with a motorcycle. His family had all sorts of money, and she went from a middle-class life to one where her servants wouldn't let her do anything on her own. She liked it. She never cooked or cleaned or worried about anything, and supported her own family as well as she could. Then her millionaire husband decided to invest in oil wells in the Carribean and made the horrible mistake of traveling out there to view his new investment. They exploded and killed everyone, leaving Celia to deal with a mother-in-law who had never really liked her in the first place and who kicked her and her child out of their own home with nothing to support themselves.
Celia and Gloria had fortunately made a friend in England, and went to live with him (what his relationship to the both of them is, I'm not sure. It wasn't romantic, more like a mentor) and decided to become a hairdresser. She was apparently very good at it, and supported them until she developed a dangerous allergy to the ammonia used in most of the procedures. She still can't stand most cleaning products, and as a result the two of them have developed an eccentric cleaning method for just about every surface (vinegar for 90% of them, from windows to vehicles). Somehow they made it over to New York, and Gloria and Celia have been inseparable ever since.
They are funny in so many different ways, it's hard to know where to begin. They keep scraps of aluminum foil in their oven to use instead of pan lids (which they have, but never bring out of the cupboard). They keep their few tools in a makeup bag in the very back of the cupboard in the laundry room, ashamed to own such "manly" things. They have covers over every piece of furniture (not plastic, but thick cloth) to protect them from, I suppose, themselves. They save everything, and have a pile of old newspapers in the garage that is four feet high and probably the same in diameter. They give me tracts from the bizarrely cultish brand of Christianity they practice, and tell me which prayers I should pray to get results ranging from a new job to shinier teeth. Gloria has been very upset that I'm not married yet, and has set me up twice now (without my foreknowledge) with 40-ish, unattractive, conservative men who I have frightened off with my youth and boldness. She has lectured both men for being such "wussies" and is actively searching for me again (God help me - what's the prayer I need to pray to avoid that?).
Gloria is also quirky in her fashion sense, and has a Halloween shirt with embroidered ghosts and rhinestones that she wears year-round. When someone on the bus had the nerve to comment on it (in June), she lashed into him and said she could wear her shirt any time she damn well pleased, and that she paid good money for those rhinestones. Celia also sneaks me clothing when Gloria isn't looking, since she's too nice to ask Gloria to return things that she's bought for her. She's slipped me an itchy sweater from Eddie Bauer that I ended up donating to charity, a very nice scarf that she just didn't like, some silk shirts that I have yet to wear, and one very memorable day she gave me some granny underwear that was the wrong size for her but she was sure they'd fit me. I'll have to get a picture of them, they have lace and would go up to my neck if I would ever be desparate enough to put them on.
I love them both, and hope that we can entertain each other for years to come.
Who gave HER the keys?
This is what I drove as a forest firefighter. Note the commercial-style truck front half. Note the Frankensteinish conglomeration of boxes, pumps, and a 600-gallon tank on the back half (trust me, it's under the parade banners). Imagine it in a bright, candy-apple red.
mmmm...BIG TRUCK! With a big horn! I was in Tonka-lover heaven.
I learned how to drive a stick shift using one of these, much to the future dispair of any other manual vehicle I would ever drive (in my mind, 4th gear is eternally way on the other side of the car. Not good when it is actually 2 inches away). The shift pattern filled a space that was about two feet high and three feet wide, and to shift into fourth gear I had to slide over in my seat (I was only an inch away from having to unbuckle). It also had a high/low button on the shift lever, which changed the 4-gear confusion into an 8-tiers-of-hell structure that almost guaranteed me being in the wrong gear at the wrong time. Once, when I tried taking the truck home by myself, I got stuck on the hill to my parent's house for a good ten minutes, frantically trying to get first gear (low) to kick in and almost breaking my arm on the emergency brake.
I rocked the logging roads in my big red engine. Though the steering wheel was a good 2.5 feet in diameter, I finessed around potholes like the Engine was a Ferrari and was constantly scaring my other crew members with the speed of my cornering. The one big problem I had was believing that the truck could somehow compress itself when faced with obstacles in the road. I had absolutely no sense of its size and relative fragility (it had a fiberglass shell, mostly. Found that out real quick) and was always scraping the roof on low-hanging branches. I ripped a bumper completely off on an innocent log once just driving through a campground we were monitoring. My vehicular infamy in the firefighting circles was just beginning, though.
The incident that brought about the greatest renown (and the greatest amount of lecturing afterwards) happened one day after a heavy rain, when we had a false alarm called into the dispatcher. It was supposed to be in a fairly remote section of the county, somewhere in the midst of a web of logging roads and very few houses (even fewer people, and none with all their teeth). Albert was driving the other engine making our fruitless quest, and both of us were getting frustrated at the lack of fire and twisting roads. Finally, after I'd lost sight of him for a while, he radioed that he'd found a clearing and that I should meet him there to eat lunch. I headed his direction and stopped at the edge of a swamp that had recently been a field, with Albert sitting on his truck on the other side. I was a little wary of the mud, but figured that if he could do it, I could too (ahh, pride).
I gunned the engine and took off roughly in the direction of the muddy road, and didn't see Albert frantically waving his arms above his head until my engine was past its hubcaps in mud, and sinking fast. Of course I had a full tank of water. Of course I'd gotten far enough into the swamp that the first two rescue attempts left one other engine with a torn-off bumper and a second engine stuck in there with me. The half-bumpered engine limped off to go find some more help, and we all sat on top of our engines laughing at the situation and trying to avoid the almost door-height mud. Well, I was laughing at the situation. They were mostly laughing at me, and my previous rationalization that somehow Albert had floated his engine over the swamp and, dammit, so could I. They finally found a farmer who happened to be working a few miles away, and he graciously agreed to drive his CAT tractor back and pull out both engines from the muck.
It was a long while before I lived that one down.
Christina Aguilera has got nothin' on me
P had a yearly tradition of going up to Vancouver, B.C. to blow off some hedonistic steam, renting a penthouse hotel room with 10-20 of his closest friends and hitting every club and strip joint in the city. My partying was light years away from his wild drinking/drugging extravaganzas. He would typically crack the first beer at 11 a.m. and not finish until he was unable to lift glass/can/bottle/unidentified-thingie-that-looked-like-it-contained-booze to mouth. But the year that we got back in contact, I decided that I had to see this Vancouver trip first-hand. I brought my friend K along, and she brought her boyfriend (this is the same guy who knows the entire musical offerings of Janet Jackson and is slightly less than masculine). The rest of the party was P's pals, a ragged bunch of Seattle dorks with sci-fi, computer programming day jobs and lecherous, alcoholic nighttime wanderings that I'm sure never made it to the water cooler at Microsoft.
We got to the penthouse and in the grand tour, the concierge mentioned that it had recently been rented out by Eminem and that Christina Aguilera had broken a wine glass there. The living room was incredibly tall, close to 3 stories high and overlooking downtown Vancouver. There was a small office, a big bathroom, a huge balcony with trees in pots (love those), a master bedroom (very early on claimed by P - no one complained, as his snoring prowess is legendary and the door would at least offer us a slight buffer), and a 2-person jacuzzi tub on a marble podium right off the living room. It also was painted the most horrific color of yellow I have ever experienced, and the decoration was a mishmash of tassled animal-print upholstery, purple velvet, and end tables and a coffee table built to resemble guilded Greek ruins. The end table was a squat little column with a carved inset covered by a disk of glass. It was the gaudiest thing, and in combination with the rest of the fashion explosion it made my head spin. Luckily that was the desired effect of the evening, and after the pre-func began and I'd had a few cocktails, the patterns made a little more sense.
The first strip club of the night was in the neighboring building, and was surrounded by "massage parlors" and gentlemen's clubs. I had never done the strip club thing before, and was excited to see the shiny, glittey, nekkid world that they show in movies (nudity doesn't do much for me, I have done figure painting for years and have seen hundreds of bare bodies. I wanted to see some pizazz! Pasties! Feet over heads!). The women were numb. They came out and did their things, showed off their tan lines and limited flexibility, and left the stage with eyes as dead as my enthusiasm. I started watching the T.V. on the side of the stage, which was featuring a snowmobiling race if I remember correctly (love that snowmobiling). I was determined to stick it out, since the guys seemed to be having a good time making snarky comments about boob size, but then the announcer stopped one of the dancers who was about to make her nude, listless way offstage and hollered into the mic, "Who's ready for some CUNNILINGUS?". A second dancer came onstage and brought the first back up to the end of the walkway, kneeling down in front of her. I decided that my life would be much better if I never saw what was about to follow, and got up and bolted from the club, followed by a stunned K and boyfriend (who seemed relieved to go).
We weren't up for the club scene after that, and decided to head back to the hotel room and drink there and wait for the rest of the group to tire of the ladies. We made quite a dent in the room's stash of booze, and after I fell yet again over the leopard-printed couch arm in an attempt to cross the room, I decided that it was party time. We cranked the music and started dancing around like preschoolers who have just learned that recess is all day today. When the boyfriend put on George Michael (such a manly man) I hopped up on the end table and boogied on down, exhausting my repertoire of dance moves and setting my monkey free.
Then I stepped wrong on the glass disk and completely shattered it, spraying the immediate area with thin shards of glass and cutting up my foot in the process. We giggled for a long time before the "oh shit, this is a hotel room and Jay's bleeding" realizations kicked in. I tried to clean up, cutting my hands as well as my poor foot, but it was no use. The hotel was not pleased the next morning when they found glass all over their purple carpet and customers who were barely able to agree about what had happened the night before. P assumed that someone had fallen, and I wasn't in a state to remember, much less recount, the events until later that afternoon. Luckily they bought his story before I could tell them that, in fact, it was a direct result of me shaking my thing in an inappropriate location (AGAIN). I don't know how they didn't see the footprints on the rest of the table.
They said that out of all the rock stars and celebrities who had rented that room, we had caused the most damage. Score!
Instant Reminder of Inherent Dorkiness
Monkey and I went to the off-leash park in Genessee yesterday for a little exercise. Exercise for both of us, since she refuses to bring a ball the entire way back to me (though her fetching is enthusiastic at first, she is easily distracted). Not even halfway most of the time. Most "fetches" are her sprinting to the ball, MAYBE picking it up with her mouth (sometimes just nudging it with a delicate paw), and then dropping all interest as another dog/bug/blade of grass nearby does something far more exciting. I get a lot of walking when we go to the park.
I have a chuck-it (http://store.yahoo.com/tailsbythebay/chuckit.html), not because she needs to fetch at a distance further than my arm can throw, but because I have seen where those tennis balls have been and am not inclined to touch them with my hand unless absolutely necessary. I am a self-ordained master of the chuck-it and have, after three years of almost constant use, developed a back-spin, curveball, and can hit targets from quite a long way off. One must stay entertained when one's dog takes half an hour to remember that she was supposed to be fetching something. Apparently, my chuck-ego had gotten a little too large for the gods-of-chuck yesterday, and they decided to extract a very interesting revenge on me in the form of a tennis ball that, while at first glance normal-looking, had a rip in it that made it compress to a non-standard size and therefore rendered it unchuckable.
I lowered the chuck-it and picked up the subtly defective evil ball. I cocked my arm back and threw what I thought was a medium-long toss to the waiting Monkey, the plastic curving up behind me in a graceful backswing. Monkey started her run and then stopped when she didn't see the ball, turning towards me with a confused look. I gave her one in return, then realized what had probably happened and looked up just in time to see the ball angling straight down at my head. I made the most ungraceful dodge I'd ever done in my entire life and staggered up to see Monkey laughing her dog-laugh at me and the nearer dog owners trying to mask their smirks within concerned glances.
I smiled and waved like Miss America.
Dear Automatic Re-Inking Perfectly Palm-sized COPY Stamp,
I just thought I should tell you before I go that you are truly the only thing I will miss about working at this corporation. Oh, the people are nice enough and the job is not as bad as I initially thought, but the only thing that gives me true joy and keeps me coming back here day after day is the chance that I might use you to smack your bright red COPY across a random document. On every page, strongly parallel to the edge, just in case there is any uncertainty.
I've been thinking about you a lot, and I don't think it's your text that draws us together. You could say "PAST DUE" or "SIGN HERE" or even "CANCEL" and I would love you just the same. It's the color, the way each stamping seems to contain everything from a strong, cheerful exuberant red to a darker, melancholy hue (depending on angle of approach and duration of stampage), and the solid all-caps sans serif font that screams "I AM IMPORTANT, AND NOT AN ORIGINAL". You're the best non-original ever.
Also, the re-inking thing is really cool. I'm sorry about testing your inking prowess by stamping that page a hundred times in a vaguely floral pattern. I didn't know you well enough to trust you then.
Maybe I can liberate you when I leave, bring you to my house and allow you a place of honor perhaps on top of the bookshelf so the Monkey-dog doesn't eat you or chew on your perfectly-fitted plastic cover. But I am afraid that my lack of a copy machine (and thus, copies) would make you feel useless and fall into a stamp depression, and I would have to resort to using you on non-copied material and make you question your very identity. No, it is best that you stay here where you are needed, if under-appreciated.
I will simply tell you now that you are the light in my cubicle, you are the marking object of my dreams, and I will be praying that your next user doesn't ever leave your protective cover off and never once uses you upside-down (sorry about that, by the way - I was young).
With a tear
and a hug
and a prayer for your future,
Janelle
Sharpshootin' with Gram
On one of my trips down to Colorado, my friend and I decided to make a stop in Utah to visit his family and to try a certain variety of raspberry shake that send him into happy delirium just remembering the taste. His parents and siblings, of course, were wonderful. Aunts and uncles, ditto. Paragons of humanity, with great senses of humor and only the most enchanting quirks. Then I met his grandparents, who made me wish five minutes after meeting them that I had thought ahead and brought a full documentary film crew along.
His grandfather was a kindly old man, who personified the puttering stereotype and spent his time messing with old musical instruments and Building Things In The Shop. He had a La-Z-Boy and made us pancakes, and smiled patiently as his wife slowly turned my mental image of "little old lady" upside down. She started almost immediately by sitting my friend and I down and filling us in on the latest conspiracy, which according to her was the recent (or was it recent?) use of the Denver Airport subterranean chambers as an imprisonment camp for good Christian people. She had ominous photos of the sweeping airport building on her fridge. Then she went on about Elian Gonsalez (this was a while ago) and how the CIA had a strong hand on immigration and only let in those that agreed with them on certain key nonsensical points. But her main topic was that evil airport, though I could never get out of her exactly WHICH group was holding those poor Christians hostage, and how she knew of it. So of course it's gotta be true.
When she offered to show us her gun collection, my friend winced and I almost leapt out of my seat with joy. This woman was my new hero, a perfect mix of dementia and violence all wrapped up in a curly-haired, floral-print-wearing bundle of sass. She was what I wanted every grandmother to be. Her weapons were many, I counted at least 20 guns and most were automatic and laser-sighted. She had one that was a working single-shot 22 hidden in a decorative belt buckle. There was a hidden latch that released the gun smoothly from the buckle. She demonstrated. I didn't ask if she'd had to use it. Gram had a favorite batch of weapons that she hid in the very back of her closet. There was a huge M-16, something else that was big and black whose name I can't remember (it was scary looking), and a few smaller silver guns that she explained were the most powerful of them all. She called one her "Para". We decided that the only logical next course of action was to go out shootin'. Since most of her guns were illegal (the source of another diatribe against government regulation), we had to go far out into the back hills of Utah and set up our own clay targets on a hillside remote enough that the explosions would not be heard. Gram apparently had had trouble with the law before. We took turns firing off the guns, testing automatic vs. non and working on my stance. When I fired the "Para", the kickback from that little thing almost knocked me over. The M-16 was much more fun, though I was having too much fun firing it to really concentrate on accuracy. Many small plants died that day. When Gram got her chance, her accuracy amazed me. 80+ or not, she hit almost everything she aimed at and had apparently won many sharpshooting contests in the area (she showed me her press clippings when we got back to the house).
Here are some photos of the guns. Note how I rock the scrunchie even while packing heat.
