Thanksgiving Weekend

The boss has some real oldies on the player today – Sam Cooke, “A Change is Gonna Come,” Tower of Power, “You’re Still a Young Man,” The Dells, “Oh What a Night,” The Flamingos, “I Only Have Eyes For You,” Gladys Knight, “Midnight Train to Georgia,” Minnie Riperton, “Lovin’ You,” and Peaches & Herb, “Reunited.” It’s the kind of music that makes me feel good to be alive.


There’s a current of electricity in the air today, since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the start of a four-day weekend for me. Because I am a curmudgeon who hates all holidays, this is surprising. I have always felt that holidays were days when people put on phony smiles and pretend to like everyone (that’s what I do, anyway). As an adult I have always felt like an outsider in my own family. The joy that I felt around holidays and birthdays as a kid has vanished, replaced by cynicism.

Wasn’t it all so great? First off, no school. Four days of lounging in my house, reading books or, when I was older, sleeping late and then hanging out with friends. Four days of no responsibility or obligations, and not even any Sunday School to spoil the weekend. Then the food – turkey, stuffing, cranberries, fancy desserts, and, best of all, leftovers. My dad made the best sandwich of leftover turkey, sliced radishes, cranberry sauce, and Durkee’s spread, which is hard to find now. I got to see aunts and uncles who didn’t live close by. I had the best aunts and uncles who were always up for jokes and games and were superior to parents in that they had no desire to discipline or make me do anything I didn’t want to.

All this goes away when you are an adult and all the aunts and uncles are gone and there’s no one to play with or cook for you. There’s no play at all, and if you want to eat you have to do your own cooking. Responsibilities and obligations do not take the weekend off. You can ignore them for a few days but they will be right back in plain view, bigger and uglier, on Monday.

But the old music is taking me back to those childhood Thanksgiving weekends when the possibilities glittered like sun on snow.

Stop the Stink!

Hey Lady! Your perfume stinks like a possum that crawled under the house and died. Sorry to be so blunt, but right now the stench is snaking into my olfactory system and bombarding the inside of my nose with tiny daggers of smell and burning my eyes like tear gas. My juicy, perfectly-cooked steak, which I was thoroughly enjoying in this fine restaurant before you sat down at the next table, now tastes like your perfume. Didja bathe in that crap? Wash your clothes in it? The only possible explanation for your outrageous, wanton, liberal use of such a malodorous scent is that you, yourself, have no sense of smell. Or else, your continued use of that foully reeking miasma has chemically cauterized the nerve endings in your own nose. Now I can’t even sit and enjoy dessert and a chat with my husband – I gotta get outta here now! And I know I will have a headache by the time I get home. Thanks for ruining a nice evening.


Restaurants: you need a no-stinking section.

Asked in the Airport

I work in an airport, and the comments I have heard over the years astound me. Either people become totally brainless when they travel, or they are innately stupid. Nothing else could explain these:


“Where can my dog go to the bathroom?”

“Who will get me from my house to the subway station?”

“What flight did my brother come in on?”

“My ticket says my flight leaves at 2215. Is that morning or evening?”

“I have a ticket to Salt Lake City, and I’m sitting at the gate, and I see there’s a flight to Indianapolis at the next gate. I’d rather go there. Can I just go through that door?”

“My chain saw will fit in the overhead compartment, but they’re telling me I can’t carry it on board.”

“Instead of paying for my ticket can I just donate that amount to the Red Cross?”

“Do I need a passport to fly to Hawaii?”

“Can I drive to Hawaii?”

“Can I find out who has the seat next to me?”

“Where’s level 3?” Me: You’re on level 3. “I wanted to get to level 3.” (Shakes head and walks away)

“I left my leather jacket in the cab. You’re going to have to get it for me.”

Sadly, these are all true.

Politics, politics, politics

I am so glad the election is over. In the end it doesn’t really matter who wins – they are all ego maniacs looking to win approval because daddy never gave them any. OK, there are a few who are probably altruistic – the Kennedys were, and Al Gore. And I used to admire Jimmy Carter until he went all anti-Semitic on me. The best part of the election being over is no more of those oversized postcards touting some candidate or proposition clogging my mailbox. And no more robo-calls! Yesterday, election day, three automated calls for one of the candidates came in the afternoon just minutes apart. A desperate waste of money that could have fed hungry children.


Politically I am (WARNING! WARNING!) pretty liberal. I was going to do a whole rant, but, thinking it over, decided not to. I’m willing to share the recesses of my emotional state and the failings of my body, but politics seems like too much of a hot topic. Eating El Camino is a no-foaming-at-the-mouth blog.

Baseball been bery, bery good to me

Yay, the Giants won the World Series. I admit to getting caught up in the excitement only during the playoffs. I used to love baseball, as a kid. During the summer there was always a game on TV or the radio, and that special sound, the hum of a stadium full of fans, was part of the texture of my childhood. Baseball is perfect for childhood, when the days seem endless and your life seems to stretch out into infinity. But at some point, probably around 1965, I suddenly realized that life just wasn’t long enough to sit through a scoreless game between the Cubs and the (pre-miracle) Mets.


I continued, however, to admire the idea of baseball – as a contest between worthy competitors, as a metaphor for the hero’s journey, as a symbol for the pure innocence that once was America. And I love baseball novels – The Natural, of course, and The Great American Novel and Bang the Drum Slowly, plus ones you might not have heard of, like The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Waugh, Prop. Sadly, the reality of modern baseball did not keep pace with the ideal. When I saw the new and improved Mark McGwire I wondered why no one seemed to be commenting on his Popeye arms. Forearms like that do not happen naturally outside of cartoons! And now critics are calling this baseball’s steroid era.

So I watched the World Series on TV, and boy, those commentators do not shut up! Since we can see what’s going on they feel they have to fill the silence with meaningless statistics. My dad used to turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the game on the radio, and I understand why. Radio broadcasters paint a picture of what’s going on, and it’s beautiful and poetic, plus they get excited: “The count is 0-and-2 and here comes the pitch, a high fastball, and Mays leans into it, and it’s back, back, back, it’s bye-bye baby!”

That was baseball.

NaBloPoMo

I signed up for National Blog Posting Month – NaBloPoMo, I think – because it might help me get back to blogging and, by extension, art journaling. I have no illusions that I will actually post every day, however, but they have this every month, so maybe something will click. And, I get to post my link on the NaBloPoMo website, so there’s a (slim) possibility that someone besides me will actually read this.

There are hundreds of blogs listed on their site, which is only a fraction of the bloggers out there in the general blogosphere. I clicked on some of the links. Some of the blogs are interesting, some not. For some reason I seem to always click on the ones that are about faith and daily affirmations, when I would really like to find the ones that are mean, nasty, and sarcastic – like me. Everyone thinks I am so sweet and nice, when at my core there is a block of ice.

I guess I am feeling icy right now because my mom (age 97) is failing on a daily basis and, according to Toasty, I am not facing it. I am in denial. He’s right, to a certain extent, but what I am really feeling is terrified. Watching someone you love fade away bit by bit is frightening. The person who was my mother is mostly gone, and it has happened so fast. It hasn’t been that long since she criticized something I was wearing. Now I’m just glad she recognizes me. She’s almost completely helpless and not eating much. I want my mother back! I want the mother who was brisk and competent and always made a pickled tongue when I came to visit.

It’s also terrifying because I see myself. Man, I do not want to become confused and helpless. I plan to live a long time AND go out on a high note. It can be done. My father, while failing physically, kept most of his wits and even cracked jokes just 2 weeks before he died – right before we put him under the care of hospice and let him slide away on a cloud of morphine. Mom doesn’t seem to be in pain, but that part of her that is still there is so miserable and unhappy. Such mixed emotions…