We’re sitting inside a restaurant in Ramona. We’re supposed to be outside on the patio, but we aren’t. It’s a lush, warm day in our town and here we sit in the gloom at two rectangular, wooden tables. I long to be outdoors with the yellow butterflies and the breeze.

One of my old school friends who is sitting across from me says, “The other ladies decided it was too hot and they wanted to be in the air conditioning.”

I look around. There’s four of us sitting two and two across the table from each other. They are three of my former grammar school friends; Nancee, Lancey and Chips. We four and several more of us ‘girls’ go some place together every September and some of us meet in between times for lunch.

Today, there are a number of ladies I don’t know. However, it turns out I do know them. But, before I remember who they are, I look around. Damn. They are old. Several are in their 90’s. Some younger but still older than we four girls are.

I say, “Who are these people?”

Nancee says, “It’s all people you know, Venus. We meet every month. It started out as a card party with some of our mothers and then the mothers all died and we kind of took it over. I thought you girls might like to see them.”

A very blonde lady bounces over to us.
“You remember Tina,” Nancee says, “she used to baby sit us when we were kids.”

Another lady waves to me from the end of the table. It’s my junior high school gym teacher, now rollicking into her eighties.
“Remember me?” she shouts.

“Yes,” I say. I’m remembering the little black shorts we had to wear in her P.E. Class. I make a face at Lancey and say, “Every Sunday night we had to iron those shorts and iron that white cotton blouse. We had to iron the blouse with starch.”

“The blouse with the snaps down the front!” Lancey says.

Yes, I remember those snaps. It comes back clearly, the iron running bumpety-bumpety over those metal snaps.

“I hated P.E.” I shout to my teacher. “All that running, running, running you made us do. All we did was run.”

My teacher yells back, “I liked to run!”

How well I remember.

“But,” my teacher is saying, “when they moved me into the high school to teach I couldn’t teach P.E. anymore because I never had a teaching credential to teach Physical Education.”

Things were different back then.

One by one, my friends point to various ladies and tell me who they are. Age has changed them so much that I can barely find the resemblance I used to know.

Several are classmates four years ahead of me. Some are mothers of classmates; mothers that I knew well in our then tiny town.
One is the lady who used to own the fabric store. I spent many, many hours in that store, feeling and sniffing and choosing among the fabrics that were lined in stand-up rows. I remember all the sewing lessons, too, that this lady and my mother taught me.

I recall the 4-H project where we girls had to sew our 4-H project; another damn white blouse. By the time I got the button holes mastered, the blouse was grimy and I had outgrown it!

Eventually, I sewed all my clothes.

I’m remembering a few days ago when I went on a garden tour with my friend Faye.

We stopped at our friend Sally’s house, where her entire place is a cottage garden. Her twenty year old daughter stepped out of the house in a floaty, white, tiny daisy patterned sun-dress with a cummerbund. Immediately, I was thrown back in time to when I was fifteen and sewed myself a soft blue, tiny daisy patterned spaghetti-strap dress with a cummerbund. I am instantly overcome with longing for it. Where did it go? I don’t know and I suppose it doesn’t matter as I weighed 98 lbs then and today I might get my two arms into the dress and nothing else.

I sigh and look around the table in the restaurant at all these old ladies. I look at my friends. They look at me. We are thinking the same thing which is, ‘Gads. I don’t look that old. Do I?”

Chips is sitting next to me talking across the table to Nancee and Lancey. For a moment I am distracted by the eighty year old lady sitting to my right who is dissecting her roast beef sandwich with her spoon.

Chips is saying something of interest and I swing my head back toward her and say, “May Lou who? Who’s Mary Lou?”

My three friends stop chatting and look at me. I know I have missed something interesting but no one enlightens me so I persist.

“Mary Lou, who? Who’s Mary Lou?”

Chips looks at me and says, “Are you nuts? I said I wish I could remember who married who! Not ‘Mary Lou.’

Then we all break out laughing. I slap the table a few times and kick back in my chair.
Lancey tells us something strange that she misheard, but I can’t remember what it was so I can’t tell you what it was.

Our lives are getting more and more like this.

After the lunch, Chips comes to my house for a short visit on her way home down the mountain.

We’re sitting on the front patio under the huge wisteria that winds and leafs over the top of the patio. The dried purple flowers have dropped and are dropping all over the ground. They cover the chairs, fly into our faces and grab hold of our hair.

We talk about our childhood together. Chips reminds me of Coyote Jack.

“He was an old World War 1 Vet and he was an alcoholic. Remember him? My Dad let him live in a little shed on our ranch, right across the road from us; my Dad, my Mom and my brother and sister and me. At the end of every month Coyote Jack would get his government check and all his alcoholic friends would come over to the shed and drink his check up with him. Then they’d all run over or gallup horses around the property, shout and scream and shoot their guns into the air. It was really dangerous. It could have killed us but that’s how things were back then.”

“Remember when he went into town one night at The Turkey Inn, got really drunk and started walking home? Somewhere along the way he passed out, and his legs were slung onto the road and that lady in the big car ran over his legs? It didn’t even bother him.”

I do. We scream with laughter.

“What was that you said today, Chips, when I kept saying, ‘Mary Lou who’? I know it was very funny but I can’t remember what you really said.”

Chips can’t remember, either. We think and think.

“This is scaring me,” I say. “It was funny, why can’t we remember it?”

Then I tell her about suddenly remembering the blue sun dress that came into my mind the other day.

“It was so clear, Chips. I haven’t thought of that dress in 45 years and all of a sudden, there it is! I can feel it on my body, I can smell it and I felt like crying because I miss it so much. What is wrong with me? Is this normal? I’ve had other things lately, pop up from the far, far past that I haven’t thought of in years and years and years. Boom! There it is. Do you think this happens as the brain gets older?”

Chips doesn’t know, but it happens to her, too.

We puzzle some more over ‘Mary Lou.’ It is driving us nuts. We can’t remember the punch line.

Eventually, Chips stands up to leave. Her butt is covered with dried flowers and cat hair. This has been a fun day and we’ll see each other, again, in September at Lancey’s Northern California ranch.

Two hours later, the phone rings. It’s Chips. I can hear the wind whistling into her car from an open window.

“I’m driving down the freeway,” she shouts. “I wish I could remember who married who!”

“Why are you saying that?” I ask.

“That’s the answer to ‘who is Mary Lou!’”

Oh my gosh. I am so relieved. So is Chips. We will both be able to sleep tonight. No wrestling with trying to find a lost part of our day.

Simple things can mean so much.

My sister Polly calls me and urgently says, “I was just over at Mom’s. There’s two vacuum cleaner salespeople there; a young man and a woman. They want to shampoo Mother’s rugs for free and I told them ‘Mother can not buy anything without my sister Barbara’s approval. Mom can not afford a vacuum cleaner!’ They said, ‘we’re just going to shampoo her carpets.’”

You’re kidding!” I say. “Mom lives in such a dump there is no way anyone would want to shampoo her ratty carpets for free! It’s full of cat vomit and old gopher gut stains from the creatures the animals drag in. You need to go back over there and stop those people. They’re just trying to strong arm her into buying a big, expensive vacuum cleaner.”

Polly says she can’t go back as she is heading down the mountain and can I go over? I say I’m busy doing phone sessions with people. I suggest we call Mom now, on three way.

“Mom!” I shout when she answers the phone. “These people just want to sell you a vacuum cleaner and you can’t afford one and you don’t need one. You have a vacuum cleaner. Tell them to leave.”

I hear a man in the background laughing and joking with my mother. I think she has Polly and me on speaker phone!

Mom doesn’t say much, she’s kind of hemming and hawing and giggling along with this young guy. Polly and I hang up in disgust.

Polly calls me back and tells me she has called and is sending Sharon over to dispatch the salespeople.
Sharon is one of Mom’s tenants and knows how to tell people to get a move on.

It is 12:45PM.

An hour later, between my calls, I call Mom to see if she has gotten free of these people. She has not. They are still there and I am still on speaker phone.

I am saying, “Mother you can not afford that vacuum cleaner! If you buy it you won’t be able to buy that deck awning that you have been talking about wanting for months now.”

Mother is easily weaseled. She is easily weaseled into buying things from unscrupulous people. Last year she bought a pair of $4,000 hearing aides from a man who stopped at her door. The hearing aides didn’t work and we kids had a heck of a time getting her out of that deal. It was especially upsetting because she already had a pair of expensive hearing aides that didn’t work.

“Mother,” I’m saying, “how did these people find you?”

“Well,” Mom says, “the girl called me last night and said she used to live here and could she come over.”

“That’s nuts!” I yell. “You’re on some kind of old folk’s list!”

Over the speaker phone I can hear lively chatter and more laughing and some banging around.

“What’s banging?” I want to know.

“Oh, they’re taking my old vacuum apart and showing me how bad it is.”

“Mother, send them home!”

I have to go as I have phone clients waiting.

Apparently Sharon wasn’t able to convince them to leave and my raging over the speaker phone has had no effect.

Several hours later, between calls, Polly calls and says, “I just went by Mother’s house and the white van is gone so it looks like they left.”

After we hang up, I call Mom to make sure she didn’t get weaseled.

My golly, what do I hear? The young man, laughing merrily in the background and making fun comments.

“What!? Mom, he’s still there?! Why?”

“Oh,” my Mother says, “the girl went off and left him here. He’s vacuuming up lots of dirt and putting it on paper plates so I can look at it. He’s got them all over my dining room table and my kitchen counters.”

She sounds tired.

I call Polly.
“The guy is still there!”

Polly says, “I’ll send Sharon over, again, to toss him out.”

An hour later Mom calls me.

“Honey, the man wants to know if he can come over and shampoo your carpets?”

“Are you both insane?” I shout over her speaker phone. “I don’t have carpets anymore and I have a vacuum cleaner and I can’t believe that guy is still there!”

“Well,” mom says, “he says he wants to come over anyway.”

“NO!” is my reaction and I hang up.

I wait a bit and call Mom again. It is now 4:45PM.

Mom sounds exhausted.

“He’s gone,” she says. “He went too far. He exhausted me. I didn’t even get lunch. I’m just eating it now. I finally said to him, ‘When are you going home? When are you going to leave?’ But, he just went too far. He left all those piles of dirt on my tables and counters and he didn’t even clean them up!”

“Did you buy the vacuum cleaner, Mom?”

“No,” she says, “I didn’t. Because he just went too far. He did ask me for referrals.”

“My god, Mom, did you give him any?”

“Well…I gave him your brother’s number.”

After I hang up, I too feel exhausted.

I decide to have some white wine, a new kind I haven’t tried before. It is delicious!

I am out in the garden and I am thinking about how I still need to go to ‘Cheers’ and look for that hunky man I have talked about previously in my blog. You remember ‘Cheers?’ The place that is always surrounded by big trucks and lots of men with lots of testosterone and I have decided I have to go there someday at lunch and get one of their famous hamburgers and put myself in the company of men? To, you know, break the spell of this datelessness I’m having. Remember?

Well, I’m drinking this lovely wine and thinking of all these men in the trades, these bruisers, these great big guys and suddenly I burst into song! I’m signing as loud as I can, “I went to the Animal Fair, the birds and the beasts were there! The big baboon by the light of the moon, was combing his auburn hair!”

I pause and think, ‘Why am I singing this when I have just been thinking about ‘Cheers’ and these big guys?’ It occurs to me, even in my alcohol clouded mind, that there might be a connection.

I have another sip of the wine that makes me sing and I roll again into the same shouted song. Over and over and over. I’m still sober enough to wonder what my neighbors might be thinking so I go in the house where I continue to trill and warble the same words over and over.

My ex-boyfriend Bill opens the door from his attached studio and looks at me. I tell him that for some odd reason this new white wine is making me sing like this, when singing is very unusual for me.

I have an idea. I think I will go sit and sing on my beautiful new white cloth chair. The one with all the design work on it.

Eeegh gads! What’s this?! The cat has thrown up all over the top of it! It’s a disgusting, slavering pile of undigested cat food and grass chunks.

But…Oh well, it’s been a good day. Mother outlasted the vacuum cleaner salesman, I’m feeling pretty darn fine about that and I’m in a marvelous white wine mood, singing with abandon and loving life, so how bad is a stinking pile of drooly cat vomit on my new cloth chair?

It’s obviously all in how you look at things.
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One of my mother’s boyfriends died last week. She is sad at his passing but glad he isn’t suffering anymore. He was 80 something and had a bag load of pressing health problems.

Bill’s funeral is today. Mom says she is going to pick up her 90 year old friend, Inita and drive both of them to his memorial service at the local VFW hall, which I call a bar.

At the service there will be no body and no ashes. We have discovered that Bill has a fifth wife that he splint from decades ago and she won’t release Bill’s body until she locates his check books and gets his pension.

Bill is still refrigerated in the morgue at the hospital and it’s beginning to look like he might spend eternity in the basement.

Mom has been hinting all week that I take her to Bill’s service. I have been reluctant because when my dad was alive my job amongst us kids was The Funeral Duty. I have spent hundreds of hours at funerals for old folks and I am now all funeraled out.

But, today I’m feeling very low in my mind and my body has followed. I’m thinking, “Gads, I’m depressed. Maybe I need a good funeral experience to cheer me up.”

I also know my Mother is hoping I will come with her and Inita and that desire is fermenting in my mind.

I pull myself up off my shredded chaise lounge cushions where I have been idling in the sun for half an hour and go inside and get the phone.

When my mother answers I say, “Mom, would you like me to come and get you and pick up Inita and take you girls to the funeral?”

“Yes!”my mother shouts. “Oh Honey, yes! We want to be there early so can you get me at 2:00?”

I arrive at mother’s house at two exactly and by golly, she is almost ready.
I grab the clock off her living-room wall and set it to the correct time. I am tired of that clock always being fifteen minutes behind the rest of us.

Mom is wearing the hot pink velour work-out pants I gave her, the ones with the purple stripe up the sides. She has paired the pants with a silky, long-sleeved orange patterned shirt. She’s wearing her sturdy brown leather shoes and her white hair is in a pony tail with something red and gauzy twisted around the rubber band. She has the usual reading glasses and very dark sunglasses with the cords, dangling around her neck. The cords and glasses haven’t tangled up and trapped her, yet, but..they will.
She’s got her black fanny pack strapped to her waist and she’s clutching her water bottle.

We’re set to go, but first Mom calls Inita to tell her we’re on the way.

“Do you know how to get to Inita’s?” I ask.

“Of course I do!”mom says, “I’ve taken her home two or three times.”

We’re in the car now and whizzing down the road. Inita lives just around the bend.

“Do you know the name of the street, Mom?”

Well, no, she doesn’t but she’s been there. Inita’s street is right next to the Winery and across the street from the Deli.

I’m slowing down and nervous as this is a very busy road and cars are pushing me from behind.

“Is this it? Is this it?” I’m asking.

“Well…I don’t know, Honey. It could be.”

“Mom! I have to turn or we’re going to get clobbered here.”

“Oh yes, turn here, that’s the road!”

“Rancho de Oro?”I say.

“Yes, yes…..well, maybe. Yes!”

I turn onto Rancho de Oro.

“So, where does she live on Rancho de Oro?”

Mother doesn’t know!

“Mom, but you’ve been here!”

“Well, keep going….oh! Turn here.”

“Mother, that road takes us into the Winery. I know because I’ve been here before.”

Mother is sure it’s Inita’s road. I am sure it is not. We keep driving.

“Anything look familiar Mom?”

“No…”

“Moooommmm…”

The road is a small paved country road with houses spaced here and there, usually behind lots of trees. The road soon veers off in several directions. Mother has no idea which road to take. I choose and keep driving. Nope. Nothing.

Look for Inita’s mailbox,” Mom says.

“What’s her last name?” I ask. Maybe it’s on the mailbox and that will help us.

Mother can’t remember Inita’s last name!

“But, keep looking for her mailbox,” she suggests.

Mom has me double back and take the split off roads untaken. Then we double back again. And again. Nothing. I drive farther and farther into the hills.

“Take this road!” Mom says.

‘This road’ is dirt and travels up into what has become a mountain covered with brush.
I drive a ways until things seem too narrow and dangerous. Mom is urging me on.

“Do you remember her living up this road?”

Nope. She doesn’t.

I back the car down the tiny dirt, crooked path and we find another road just like it. My mother insists we drive up this one. I refuse.

“You know Mother, this is nuts.”

We have driven by a lady working with her roses, oh maybe three or four times now.

I stop and call out to her, asking if she knows an old lady named Inita. Mother adds that she lives with her daughter.

The Rose Lady is very nice but she says that everyone who lives back here is married with kids. I think, “well, what kind of damn neighborhood is this?!”

There is, she adds, no old lady who lives with any of them.

I’m thinking, ‘No single people and no old ladies. Why do I live in this town?’

(I’m getting pissy but I told you I was having a cranky day when we started this conversation.)

We drive on.
“Mom, I have my cell phone. Maybe it will work back here but maybe not. Do you happen to have Inita’s phone number with you?”

Mom immediately rattles the phone number off from memory! She can’t remember the woman’s last name and she can’t remember where she lives even though she has brought her home two or three times, but she’s got the phone number in her head, by golly.

I make the call. I get the answering machine.

“That’s because Inita is waiting out front for us,” Mom says.

I leave a message anyway, saying we are lost and where the heck is she and I leave my cell number. Then I put my head down on the steering wheel. I need a little rest.

“Mom, we’re going to be late to Bill’s funeral.”

Then I start laughing.

“Remember my old friend, Helen Duval?”

Of course Mom does. Helen was about mom’s age, eighty-five, when she died.

Helen had a much younger boyfriend named Ruben. When Ruben died, Helen told me she went to his funeral, of course. It was held outside in a big cemetery.

Helen was sitting in a folding chair with lots of other people gathered around the burial site. She told me it was the oddest thing, that as the service progressed she just kept feeling more and more puzzled. Finally, she turned to the woman beside her and said, “Who’s this damn Harry they keep talking about?!

Well, it was Harry’s funeral. Not Ruben’s. Helen had gone to the wrong service. She missed her boyfriend’s funeral, entirely. Helen said Rueben would have gotten a big kick out of that.

Mom shouts, “It’s Cobler! Inita’s last name is Cobler!”

“Listen Mom,” I say, “we’ll drive back to your place and I’ll go inside and look in the phone book. If we’re lucky Inita will be listed and it will have her address.”

I step on the gas and my cell phone rings. It’s Inita’s daughter. She tells me we’re on the wrong street. I shriek at Mother.

“We’re supposed to be on Wood Rock!”

As it turns out there are two Wood Rocks parallel to each other and of course I take the wrong one.

Two Wood Rocks and several phone calls later, we locate Inita’s house but no Inita. It turns out that she is waiting for us, hidden behind the horse trailer!

Inita is a tiny lady dressed much more appropriately then my mother but she does have a big, dazzling butterfly clip pinned in her white curly hair right in the middle of her head but very close to her eyes. The wings are on springs. One silver patterned butterfly wing flips and waves dizzily and, as it turns out, it waves and dips through out the entire memorial service and our time together. I am fascinated and hypnotized by it.

The service itself is uneventful and the food is tasty and home made. Or, maybe it’s not. A brownie sits in my stomach like a paper weight.

I do know that my former malaise has been lifted by my mother’s and my adventure in our hunt to find Inita…and is good.
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Remember my art teacher, Stan? He’s the one who is terrified he is losing his memory and runs around with his eyes closed, touching his finger to his nose to make sure he doesn’t have a brain tumor.

Today, at art Class as the four of us sat outside under Carol’s dried coconut fringe umbrella, discussing art and the state of Regina’s and my house re-model, Stan said,
“Well, yesterday I had to drive off the mountain and into the city. On the way, I stopped at a gas station to fill up my truck. I went inside the store and paid my money, walked out, got in my truck and drove off. Totally forgot to gas up.”

We think this is hysterical. Even Stan thinks so. It’s a good thing, because he needs a laugh.

His 99 year old mother is still alive but now she has a bad cold. He’s decided that he will, indeed, go up north and visit her. He has been afraid to go because she told him on the phone that she is only hanging onto life until he comes to see her, putting him in a bind of ‘if I go visit her, it may kill her.’

As it turns out, he’s having other family problems, too and so we all end up just chatting the morning away. No painting, today. Stan says not to pay him for the class but we insist. After 6 years he is our good friend and we consider this a great therapy session. As artists, we feel we need to clear out and fill up our inner well in order to do our best painting.

After class Regina and I take a walk on Carol’s property, down to the dam. We walk down an old, abandoned cement road that leads to the lake. Masses of purple wildflowers reach out for us, as do twining vines and white trumpet-like gourd flowers. It’s very hot and I take off my coral colored tee shirt.

Regina tells me I need a better bra, that I should wear one that lifts me up. She shows me her bra. It’s mainly padding so she has no trouble with ‘lift.’ Regina has gotten very skinny since her husband became ill and died. She doesn’t eat as much as she used to.

Right after her husband died she began wearing little tiny skirts and high heels that wobbled but now, a year later, she is back to wearing what we wear; jeans and tops and independent hair that has its own way of doing things.

She tells me as we’re walking that she thinks maybe she should wait another year or two, before she starts dating, before she starts seriously looking for a man. She has had a few stinker experiences with men since her husband passed and that seems to have brought her to her senses, or maybe what I mean is, she is just balancing out from all the grief she has experienced. Coming back to mid-line, so to speak.

As I write this, I am counting five men at my house.
Two are outside taping over all my windows as preparation for spray painting the house, while Chuckie is using a blower all around the outside to get the dirt down.

Now, who shows up but two more men to weed-whack the fields and mow. All the blowing dirt and weed stems may be a problem when Chuckie wants to start spraying the house paint on the walls.

There is at least one more man coming; Evan the linoleum man. He has been putting down the scarlet linoleum in my bathrooms for two days. He is a perfectionist.

For a year now, I’ve been teasing people by remarking that I have a man in every room. And, you know what? I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of all these nice men and all this noise and commotion and dirt and general clamor. I dream of again stripping naked every morning and lounging in the sun. I dream of once again swimming naked in my pool with only the pool man or an unexpected handyman, catching me at it.

I’m going out now to take a walk and get away from all this mess and all these men before the last door into and out of the house is taped over.
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Today, my front door is covered in plastic because Geranamo is painting the outside front of the house. My exterior house colors are from the 1950’s; a rich harvest gold with blue trim.

Because of the plastic wrapped door, the fellow who has brought the loan papers for me to sign has a bit of trouble finding a way into my newly renovated home. I run out and get him and lead him to the back of my house and into my new patio with the 6 foot high, stucco, harvest gold wall.

I have had a large outdoor round New Mexican style gas fireplace built into the wall, and a blue seated area in front of it. The patio floor is a reddish copper stamped concrete.

For extra class I have installed my 15 year old, tattered, used-to- be-green, battered outdoor metal table and chair set. The cushions hang in threads. I don’t know what happened to the umbrella.

Mike is thirty, dark haired, quite tall and as I find, he loves cats. When we get inside the house and I’ve pushed the cat hair encrusted table cloth off to the side of the table, he slaps down a huge stack of paper work on it. Then, he whips out his cell phone and shows me his cat’s photo.

He loves his gray, smiling cat.
“My ex girlfriend gave him to me and when we split up, you know how it is, I wanted to toss out all the things we had had together. But, I couldn’t, you know, toss Max. I couldn’t let go of him.”

My little red dog Bob, who is part small pug and part long haired doxie, has my gray haired cat, Sparkle down on the floor in a patch of sun. He is giving the cat a bath. Mike’s eyebrows lurch into his hairline.

“Oh my gosh!” he yells. “I have never seen a dog do that!”

“Oh,” I say, “Bob loves cats. He always bathes Sparkle.”

Suddenly, Sparkle grabs Bob’s head with her paws, holds it down on the floor and starts giving him a face bath.

Mike freaks, “Oh my god!! This should be on My Space. Oh my god, I have never seen this kind of thing. I’ve got to take a picture!”

Once again, his cell phone is out and he points it at The Couple. Bob lifts his head off the floor and looks at Mike.

“No, no, do it some more,” Mike is begging.

“Oh, this is nothing,” I say. “They give each other baths all the time and then they have big wrestling matches. Sparkle throws Bob on the floor and sits on him. I could probably get them on the TV show, Home Videos, and make some money.”

“Oh, you have to, you have to!” Mike is shouting. He is quite an enthusiastic person.

He finally manages to turn away from Bob and Sparkle and begins sliding papers at me to sign. There is a huge stack of them! I sign and sign and sign. It becomes mindless.

I am getting my first house remodel loan refinanced and feel darn fortunate that I have been able to do it. As the guy said who got the loan put together for me, “You are really, really lucky. The banks are losing billions and even people like you with great credit are getting turned down.”

He tells me today, on the phone, “I’m in the business and the banks are even working me over! They charged me $20,000 for something, sent me a letter about it and the next day they took it out of my account! There’s no way their letter could have even reached me that soon, so now all my other checks are bouncing and I’m in the business!”

I look at Mike as he is sliding more papers toward me, and I say, “Considering the work you do, I’m surprised you even have a job.”

Mike says, “Me too. But, I am losing my home to foreclosure. And, I’m in the business!”

My house remodel is winding down. My contractor Chuckie will be here a few more days, then he goes back to L.A. for a three week job. Geranamo, his sidekick, will stay here and paint the house and dig holes for me in the field and whatever else I can dream up for him to do to keep him busy until Chuckie returns to finish up the small stuff.

For a year now, I have enjoyed hearing Chuckie shout, all day long, when he needs him, “Geranamo! Geranamo!”

I am reminded of the Indian named Geranamo who led some big war against the whites and forever after people in the U.S. now shout, “Geranamo!” when leading some kind of attack.

(Well, if you don’t get it, it’s a cultural thing but it is fun and I will miss hearing Chuckie shout the charge, ‘Geranamo!’)

Tomorrow the men will finally be here to lay the scarlet linoleum in the bathrooms.

I’m thinking about all this as I am signing papers and looking around my house.

Mike and I are in the ‘Great Room’ which holds the shiny apple-red kitchen cabinets and the inlaid black appliances, dark blue-black counters and gold-swirled wall paper.

The sitting area where Bob and Sparkle are lounging has the same gold swirled paper and a shocking blue couch with several unusual chairs to the side of it. My favorite chair is patterned in a whimsical, cloth design. I have to be careful not to put it too close to the built in apple candy red desk where I feed the cat. If the chair gets too close, Bob hops up onto the back of the it and leaps into the cat dish to feed. He is very smart and able.

Mike and I are sitting at the big table in the ‘eating area’ looking directly at the vivid and wildly colored bird wall paper.

I’m thinking about my shocking pink art room with the yellow trim and my yellow-gold bedroom with the aqua sitting room.

When people come into my home and see it for the first time, unprepared, they actually often stagger at the sight. I thought Summer’s eighty year old mother in law might collapse the other day when she came into view the place. She lurched backward with her hand to her heart and whispered, “…woooow…..wow…oh, wow.”

I am thinking how talented and clever I have been with my house. How charmingly outrageous, when Mike looks at my living-room walls and says, “I like your blue walls.”

Gads. With it’s dusky light purplish-blue walls it’s the tamest room in the house! All my artistic work for naught? I’m shaken. But, then, men always like blue.

The papers are signed now and I have rolled my thumb in blue ink and stabbed it on a page with a row of 10 of my signatures.

Mike gets up to leave.

I tell him how sorry I am that he is losing his house. He says that he is kind of relieved. That the worry has just been too much for him.

I say, “You’re young. You’ll be fine. You will get this behind you.”

He’s shocked. “I’m 30! That’s old! This is terrible. I shouldn’t be at this point at thirty!”

Poor guy. If he thinks he has been finished off and labeled a failure at thirty, how might he feel at sixty after life has shaken him in it’s bottle and dumped him on a gritty table?

I tell him, “I’ve been knocked down hard, quite a number of times. I’ve lost everything more then several times but I always work to come back higher and better then ever. You will too. Life is just cycles. You ride the waves. You eventually learn to ride them with a certain amount of grace and courage.”

I don’t think he hears me, but, at thirty I couldn’t see the waves, either. I couldn’t see anything but my pain and my ‘massive failures’.

Age has some great benefits if you just let go and let it come, while doing the very best you can, always.
But, certainly I had to live my life my way and soak in it’s brine for quite awhile before I was able see that.

I wave good bye to Mike and wonder what will happen next in his life. I’m glad his ex-girlfriend gave him his smiling cat friend and dear companion, Max.

Life is a bit easier, and the waves seem more gentle, with a good friend.

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My ex boyfriend, Bill, as you know, is now my tenant.

(For how that happened see the first entry in my blog.)

We’re outside, early in the evening, under a large scrub oak tree. I’ve got the hose going on the fruit trees and Bill has just come home from work. He settles into a garden chair and grins.

“Well,” he says, “I washed my expensive sun glasses in the washing machine last night and I dried them in the dryer, too.”

I giggle. This is the man who gave me his reading glasses this morning and asked me to take them to his optometrist for repair. Once again, he has sat on them.

The very first weekend that Bill spent with me when we were dating, he lost his wallet.
I flew into a frenzy, calling the restaurant we had been to the night before and retracing all our steps. I went into a major search and find mode.

He asked me why I was so upset. With a bit of chit chat I finally grasped that he lost his wallet with regular regularity.
Eventually, we found the wallet, on the ground, in front of my mother’s ramp into her mobile home. It had apparently dropped out of his car door. How did that happen? It’s best not to ask.

A few years ago, he lost his wallet, again. This was maybe the tenth time he’d lost a wallet since I had known him. As it sometimes happens, we really couldn’t find it and Bill had to cancel all his credit cards, get a new driver’s license (which caused a host of frustrating problems including the fact that his bank wouldn’t give him money without his driver’s license!) and replace everything else he had in the wallet.

A week or so after all the changes were completed, he found the wallet tucked nicely into his office chair, right against his butt. In plain site. He had been sitting on it, every day.

Many of his shirts have been ruined with ink pens in the pockets as they go into the washer and dryer. And he always leaves kleenex in his pockets, and money. And matches, and other items of interest. You can imagine what sometimes happens inside my washer and dryer.

I am a very patient woman.

But, sometimes I explode and shout, “Eeeh gads! What planet are you on? Where are you?

When I met him, I noticed right off that he had some goofiness. Very early in our relationship when I went back east with him, to meet all his family, he borrowed a brother’s car to take me to get ice cream.

He managed to hit the curb outside the store and blew a tire clean off the car. I was horrified. He had to call his family to come and get us. Nobody seemed concerned about this odd happening.

Later, at the family gathering, I mentioned the car incident to his mother and some of the family and I shared with them how he had lost his wallet in my mother’s drive way.

His family sort of snorted and chortled and acted like, ‘This is news?’ Then someone said, “Oh yeah, and he has a nephew just like him.”

That’s when I began to think he had an oddity in his genetic stream.

But then, who doesn’t?

I was walking the other day with my friend and neighbor, Lynn. We were chatting about how a few years ago, her husband had a heart attack, died at the fire station down the street from us and was brought back to life.

Lynn said, “Yes, and my daughter and I were praying over him as he was dying and he looked up at us and shouted, ‘Stop that!!’
So, we went in the back room and prayed for him.”

I’m telling Bill this story about the neighbors after he has told me how he washed and dried his sunglasses and I have just told Bill he is a nut, for sure.

He’s good natured about my assessment.

Then we veer off into a conversation about my old boyfriend, John who lived with me for about 5 years, before Bill came along.

John still calls me every few months and sometimes comes to visit. He is happily, (hopefully, still?) with a lady now, but the last time he visited, he was single.

Bill and I are remembering and marveling about what happened on Christmas Eve when he was here.

Bill made a big prime rib dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy and peas and corn and salad and biscuits and blueberry pie. And wine and egg nog. As he’s getting ready to put it all on the table, John pops in from a shower all dressed and jumping around with nerves. He tells me he’s off to San Diego (an hour away) to go to some dance club.

I say, “What? It’s Christmas Eve! Bill made us a marvelous dinner! I thought we’d have Christmas Eve together. Why are you going to a place where you don’t know anyone and it’s Christmas Eve and nobody will be there, it’s Christmas Eve!!’

He couldn’t be dissuaded from his dance club idea but grudgingly, he sat down, ate fast, declined dessert and left.

I looked at Bill as John raced out the door and said, “That’s one reason he doesn’t live here, anymore.”

Several hours later, John was back and he was mad. There was almost no one at the dance club and the women who were there weren’t worth going for and he had wasted his time!

Duh?

OK, so it’s this kind of thing that makes people interesting. Maybe it’s just a matter of how interesting you can stand?

And, of course…I haven’t even mentioned all my quirks.
Oh wait. Maybe I will mention one. When I was 8 years old, polio was very popular. I developed a horrible fear of polio and as I realize now, almost everyone had the fear.

But, somehow, I got the idea in my little pointed head, that if I could kick my legs, one leg at a time, up against my butt, I didn’t have polio. I spent a lot of time walking around constantly kicking my butt!

And, just now, I got up off my tuffet to see if I can still kick my butt. I can. But not quite so well with my right leg. I will have to work on this.

My 5 year old grand daughter Lexi gets scarlet fever which is now called scarlatina. It is called by that name these days because it is much less alarming than the word, ’scarlet fever’. However, Summer, Lexi’s mom looks it up online and finds that it was called scarlatina during the middle ages.
We are not much relieved!

My sister Polly almost died with scarlet fever when she was six so my entire family flies into a frenzy with Lexi’s diagnosis.
Luckily, ten days of antibiotics kill it off before it kills Lexi. Praise God and the 21st Century.

When Lexi is well, Summer tells me, “Lexi had another loose baby bottom tooth. She was showing it to me and wiggling it when I heard myself say, “You know, Lexi, sometimes people swallow their teeth by accident but it’s OK because it just passes through your body and out your bum- bum.”

“I don’t know why I said that, but an hour later I’m brushing her teeth for bed and…the tooth is gone! Totally missing.

“Lexi had had one of her hissy-fits, a bit earlier, while eating a plum and she started gnashing and chomping it down and swallowed it fast so she could scream. I guess she swallowed the tooth, too.”

“Charles (Summer’s husband) asked me how I knew that Lexi was going to swallow her tooth and I said, ‘I don’t know why I said that.’

“We thought about it and Charles and I can’t think of one person who has ever swallowed a tooth!”

“But, I know we avoided a huge meltdown. If I hadn’t said that about swallowing baby teeth, Lexi would have freaked out. As it was, she just wrote a note to the Tooth Fairy explaining what had happened and asked if she could still get money under her pillow. Of course, The Fairy left the money along with a nice note.”
……..

Today my sister Barbara and I take our mother to the plant nursery that is close to her property. Mom is looking for big pots and maybe an avocado tree.
I am looking for a lime tree.

I’m told that the citrus trees are at the back of the property so we three trot back to look. There’s a bunch of them. I say, “Let me know when you find a lime tree.”

We look and look. My old Mother is the most industrious looker. Suddenly she calls out to us, “I found a bare ass lime tree!”

A what?!

Barbara and I hustle over as quickly as we can. Mom is saying, “I finally found one. It’s a bare ass lime.”

I grab the tag on the tree and look. Sure enough, it says, ‘Bearass Lime Tree.’

Barbara almost pees her pants laughing while I drop to my knees. Whenever I laugh really hard my legs give out. It is a very queer reaction, I know, but I have to do most of my laughing sitting down.

I’m going to have to have that tree, don’t you know?

Later, Mom, Barbara and I are having tea on Mom’s deck. Wet fog is swirling around us but occasionally a shaft of sun hits us and we wait for that.

Barbara says that her son and daughter are suddenly in love with people and both at the same time! She is all grins. She is the only one of us four sisters who doesn’t have married kids and grandkids.

Mother looks at me and Barbara and says, “But what about you girls? Are you in love?”

“Geesh, Mother, ” I say, “I don’t even know anyone.”

Barbara says, “It’s harder when you get older. The selection goes way down.”

I say, “Well..I have a plan. A friend of mine who is rather psychic, keeps telling me she ’sees’ a place in my town that has a dance floor and bands that come in and it’s a bar and that I need to go there, that I will meet someone special. The only place I can think of that sounds like that, is Cheers.”

Mom and Barbara look at me.

“Karen says I need to go in there by myself. I told her the place is loaded with big trucks and testosterone and that I just don’t know that I can walk in there by myself, although I keep thinking maybe I can do it at lunch time. Cheers hamburgers were voted the best in the county and you know it’s not a bad place. It’s a place where all the guys go and it’s often written up in newspapers as a great place, but I don’t know…..”

Yes, I’m babbling but the place scares me.

I say, “It’s just all those huge trucks and big men and all that testosterone, and I like guys like that but…”

“Eck,” Barbara says, “they aren’t my type.”

“I know, I know,” I say, “but I like real men. Candy always says that she’s glad she married her fancy plumber husband because men in the trades don’t seem to have the sex problems that the cerebral men do.”

Barbara looks at me like I am daft and low minded. She is very refined.

“I just don’t know if I have the nuts to walk in there, the only woman, with all those muscled men, to order an award winning hamburger, kick sawdust and look around.”

Mom laughs. “If anyone has the courage to do that, you do, Venus!”

It’s nice to know that my mother thinks I have nuts.

Mom’s boyfriend Bill, died a few days ago. She’s feeling sad but glad he is not suffering anymore. Another boyfriend, (who is my age!) just had major heart surgery and the 89 year old boy friend in Reno is just too stubborn for Mother to deal with.

We need to find a new man for my mother!

Maybe I will take her to Cheers with me for lunch? Men like her.
When we walk in the door, I’ll hold my old mother up in front of me like a human shield. What do you think?!
This could work!

I will let you know.