Slither, Hiss and Scream - Part I

          I loathe air-conditioning.  I hate the thought of breathing regurgitated air with all windows and doors firmly shut while the effects of a stunningly clear blue sky is a pane of glass away.  For this reason, my idea of air-conditioning is an open window, an open door and a fan creating a soft breeze.

          Some years back and for a while, we lived in Virginia.  Our house was one of those cute two-storey jobs with a fully finished walk-out basement.  At the time, my husband and I were the proud owners of two adorable cocker spaniels and the basement was their turf.  Consequently, while I was locked up in an air-conditioned igloo upstairs, the basement door was left open so the dogs could come and go at will.

          And so it was on a balmy summer evening, with my husband away on business, I wandered down to check on my four-footed kids.  Despite the frigid conditions upstairs, I was dressed appropriately for a hot July night…shorts, t-shirt and bare feet.

          A small lamp which lit the basement all night…the better for the doggies to see their way in and out…cast a pleasing glow over the room.  Walking further into the room I noticed a fairly large stick lying on the floor.  Obviously, one of the dogs had dragged it in from our pocket-sized yard.

          Without much thought I gave the stick a kick, thinking to send it flying outside.  The stick immediately coiled, raised a full half of its body length upright and let fly with a glorious hiss.     

          Crikey!  And eeeek!!

          I stepped back and froze.  A furtive glance at my two canine heroes told me no help would be forthcoming from that direction.  They were both sitting up on a corner sofa ready to enjoy the show and no doubt bury my body in the yard if it became necessary.  So, what to do?

          Despite the fact I grew up in Australia, often publicized as a country with the largest number of venomous snakes, in all my years there I had never seen one.  Unless you include the overfed, snoring coils presented by Taronga Park Zoo.

          When you think you’re going to die, time does not stand still.  Instead it makes you stupid.

          I knew I had to get the snake out of my house…dead or alive.  But how?  Keeping my eyes on snake, I reached behind me and grabbing a can of spray, I emptied it over the snarling serpent.  What brilliance!  Did I really believe I could fly spray it to death?

          I think the snake coughed once.  It definitely gave me a dirty look as it again raised its body and showed me its teeth, or is that fangs?

          Here ends Part I… The continuing saga of snake, my doggies and me will continue in my next blog post.

           

Where The Heart Is...

          Living in Hawaii, people laugh when I say I’m planning a vacation to spend several weeks elsewhere.  After all, Hawaii for many is their dream vacation spot.  But when it’s also the place you call home with all the daily grind of housework, garden maintenance and even trash pick-up days, it loses a lot of its luster.  So for several weeks of the year I try to venture further afield; somewhere different I can enjoy new people, amazing food and a different culture.

          That’s not to say my mouth is watering for insects lightly poached in toilet water nor do I particularly want to visit a tribe of people with suspicious looking bones in their noses.  But a nice civilized place with museums, art galleries, a new language to try out after weeks of Rosetta Stone type cramming…this to me is bliss.

          And so it was last year that my granddaughter and I were in Paris.  We’d had days of seeing all the touristy stuff and were looking forward to a quiet dinner in a pretty local restaurant.  I have this penchant for patronizing little corner shops and hole-in-the wall eateries, mainly to encourage the owners.  After all, it can’t be easy to start a business and then watch it go down the drain due to lack of customers.  So, since every little bit helps, there I am handing over my measly euros.

          But, perhaps I should have been a little more selective about our choice of restaurant that day.  At the height of the dinner hour there were only two tables occupied and we were at one of them.  The rest of the room yawned empty around us.  And it appeared that our maitre d’ was also the waiter, the cook and the busboy.  But hey, why quibble…French food is known for its greatness!

          I can’t remember exactly what I ordered as an appetizer, but I do recall it was okay, if a little sparse.  So I was really looking forward to my main meal…in this case a dish made up of beef strips and noodles.  It looked yummy.  Unfortunately it didn’t taste as it looked.  The first bite was a chunk of gristle, the second a lump of something fatty and the third was obviously the cook’s belt cut into bite size chunks.  The dish was truly awful.

          But what to do?  I didn’t want the owner/cook to feel discouraged about his culinary efforts, yet I was nearly gagging at the thought of eating any more of the cut up cowhide.  So, with a sleight of hand that would make Houdini proud, I dumped the pieces of meat into my table napkin and pushed the entire mess into my handbag, much to the amused horror of my granddaughter who was quite enjoying her main course selection…obviously not beef and noodles!   

          It was suggested to me later that I should have complained and perhaps ordered another dish.  The problem with that is, since I’m not used to French food, perhaps the dish was meant to be as it was.  Perhaps beef with noodles in Paris is meant to be eaten only with teeth as sharp as a buzz saw.  And I certainly didn’t want to be accused of being an ignorant American!

          We left the restaurant with my bag bulging with a purple napkin stuffed with meat strips and a few noodles, which I dumped into a trash bin a block or so further up the street.

          I wonder if one of the many homeless people in Paris, found it later that night?  Dinner – yum.  Not only steak and noodles, but napkins as well!  How very French!

         

         

         

Getting My Feet Wet

          I love to swim.  Back in days of yore I used to ride a surfboard until my daughter, in fourteen year old horror, informed me that, ‘Mother’s do not ride surfboards, Mum!’  Apparently I should have been in the kitchen baking cookies.  So, although I didn’t drag out the Joy of Cooking recipe book, I did hang up my board and my board shorts and settled into plain old swimming as an acceptable alternative, thanking the movies and one lady in particular, for my ability to do so.

          When I was about ten, my little sister and I used to attend the Saturday afternoon offerings at our local cinema.  The special kid’s programs usually consisted of a couple of cartoons followed by a serial with a nail biting cliff-hanger.  Then an MC would appear on stage and encourage us all to ‘follow the bouncing ball’ as he led us in the theme song:

                   Here we are again

                   Happy as can be

                   All good pals and jolly good company

                   Never mind the weather, never mind the rain

                   As long as we’re together

                   Here we go again…

          There would be a brief interval during which the children usually ran amok laughing and screaming, rolling Jaffas sweets down the aisles or throwing them at each other and the ushers who were trying to keep some semblance of control, and then the main feature began.

          The mid to late 50’s was a time of movie musicals and light-hearted comedies.  We fell in love with Jane Powell and Debbie Reynolds, Gene Kelly and Ricardo Montalban as they sang and danced their way around the sound stages of Hollywood.

          But the star who completely mesmerized me was Esther Williams.  Her beautiful smile as she swam so gracefully in crystal waters, flowers in her hair, captivated me and prompted me to want to swim just like she did.

          That presented a problem since neither my sister nor I had ever stepped into a swimming pool or even an ocean.  However, we knew the local community pool was just around the corner from the movie theatre and so our decision was made.

          On the days the theatre showed an Esther Williams movie, we arrived  ready with swimsuits in our bags.  We saved our candy and magazine money and then, after watching Esther on screen and memorizing every move, we raced around to the pool, slapped down our entry fee and prepared to swim by copying everything we had seen.

          Needless to say we learned to swim underwater before we ever learned to swim on top of it.  We thought it was marvelous to start at either side of the shallow end of the pool and swim towards each other, underwater, with our eyes open and big smiles plastered over our faces.

          After we had mastered that, it was time to attempt backstroke, making sure our shoulders came up out of the water just like Esther’s, then turning from backstroke to breast-stroke…we had a wonderful time.

          Even today, I sometimes find myself copying Esther Williams’ moves as I swim around my local pool, smiling at the trees and shrubs, pretending to be just like my idol.  Memories are wonderful things.

         

         

         

Puff, Puff, Cough

            It seems that new laws related to smoking are being passed nearly every day.  Now there is something wending its way through the legislative process that would allow sports bars to once again have smoking areas.

          It took several years for smokers to be banned from puffing away in restaurants, offices and any space within fifteen feet of an entrance or exit.  And, mutterings of ‘stop the stink,’ were also being bandied about regarding smokers out on their own lanais in high rise condominiums, in parks and spread out on beaches, which more or less put paid to smoking anywhere humans congregated.

          My husband and I were smokers in the days when restaurants still allowed you to do so but only in designated areas.  It was this ‘designated area’ thing that put a stop to our cigarette addiction, smartly and once and for all.

          We were having a lovely evening out at one of the many great restaurants in Honolulu.  We chose the ‘smoking’ area because it was our usual thing to puff away on a ciggie while sipping our cocktails and waiting for our dinner to be served.  It was while doing this that I noticed we had been seated on a raised area of the restaurant, surrounded by empty tables…the only table occupied was ours.  The rest of the patrons were seated in the lower level…many tables and all filled with smokeless, happy diners. 

          Smoke rises and so did the disgusted eyes of the patrons seated at the lower level.  Each one staring at us as though we were visitors from an alien pongy planet and how long did we plan to stay?  In truth, with so many eyes upon us and seated higher than the rest of the patrons, I began  to think a neon sign proclaiming that the ciggie stink was not management’s fault but was caused by the two idiots seated under said sign, was blinking on and off over our heads.

          We became so self conscious that our dining experience became a race to see who could bolt the food down the fastest, and how long before we could get away from the accusing eyes of the other diners. 

          That evening at home, we emptied our individual packets of cigarettes onto the coffee table and sat smoking every single one down to butts.  It was our intention that once they were all puffed away, we would never buy another packet ever again.

          I was nearly green from all the nicotine sludging through my body by the end of the night but we stuck to our guns and remained smokeless and somewhat smug that we were able to do so.   In truth, it was not really difficult.  My usual mantra being that if you really  wanted to quit smoking it was a cinch…if you really didn’t but had to because someone else deemed it should be so, it was hell and practically impossible to do.

          Now, with this new legislation being bandied about I wonder how many will once again take up a habit that was so hard to overcome.  Remember people, if you start puffing away, the only place (apart from a Sport’s Bar) you’ll be able to legally do so, will be sitting on your toilet with all doors and windows shut.  Not the most elegant picture to contemplate is it?

         

           

         

Jump In My Car

          When, as a teenager I was taking driving lessons, my instructor told me that it wasn’t enough for me to know the road rules and drive accordingly, he advised that I should also drive for every other person on the road within my line of sight.  At the time I thought that was all a bit much, after all wasn’t it hard enough for me to remember all the stuff I was supposed to know without wondering if the blue-haired lady in the car next to me was also clued in?  And what if she wasn’t?  What then?

          Which of course was the whole point and, over the years, following his advice, I have been saved from some potentially nasty fender benders or worse. 

          All this was brought to mind when a friend emailed me the results of a brand new study recently published by the Society of Automotive Engineers.  It seems that after observing some 12,000 drivers over a period of a year, the study showed that 48% neglected to indicate lane changes and 25% zoomed around corners without the appropriate signals.  This lackadaisical approach to road rules when applied to US drivers as a whole, translated to 750 billion instances of signal neglect and an estimated 2 million road crashes per year.

          Now I’m fully aware that in this rotten economy a job that pays a living wage is a good thing to have.  But is it really necessary to do a study of something that is patently obvious to anyone who drives?  At least in Hawaii most drivers have no idea what the little lever attached to the steering column is for or, if they do have an inkling they’re not about to let other driver’s in on the secret by using it.

          I have been behind a driver who suddenly decided to change lanes, drove for a half block or so and then just as suddenly veered back into the lane in front of me; all this without once dropping a hint of his intentions.  The fact the driver was a police officer in a marked police car stopped me from doing anything dumb… although my mental tirade directed at the back of his head was quite brilliant.  And no, the gentleman in question was not on his way to apprehend some bad guys but, more likely, didn’t want to be late for lunch.

          This inability of driver’s to flick a little lever leaves me puzzled. 

          I can remember in days of old when cars weren’t equipped with such modern marvels and to indicate a turn was a major production.  The window had to be rolled down, the arm extended outside the vehicle in plenty of time to allow the car behind to see the flapping appendage.  Too bad if it was pouring down rain or the temperature was hovering around freezing, it was what you did to avoid getting smacked in the bum by the following car, and it was required by law.

          I’ve actually reverted to doing this on a certain road I drive quite often.  I need to do a left hand turn from the median, with an immediate second left hand turn into a driveway.  So that the driver behind me isn’t confused by my intentions, I indicate with my signal and also shove my arm out the window halfway through my first turn, hoping whoever is sitting on my tail gets the message.  So far I’ve been lucky.  I shudder to think what will happen the day a following car doesn’t understand what blinking lights or waving arms are all about and cruises up my backside.

          So, I’ve come up with this great idea.  Would some smart GPS guy ask the tiny woman who sits inside the gadget to add, ‘turn your indicator on..’ before advising any turns or lane changes?  If the driver didn’t do as instructed, a stinky gas would waft from the GPS unit.  This would surely encourage all the dingbats to do as they’re told in the future.  Well, wouldn’t it?

         

         

         

         

           

For My Mother

          As I read the various ads in the local paper all touting their programs to help us celebrate Mother’s Day next Sunday, I wished that I could shower my Mamma with some of their offerings; to pamper her and watch the delight on her face as she opened her gifts.   Did she enjoy her special day in years past?  I think so.  She certainly deserved the celebration.

          Mamma was born in Latvia and immigrated to Australia in the late 1940’s after many years of being shunted around the Displaced Persons camps of Europe.  She arrived with a battered cardboard suitcase, two small daughters and a handful of change she’d managed to acquire by selling off her few precious possessions.

          For years she worked long, grueling hours at the hardest, dirtiest jobs she could find because they paid more, with just one dream: to buy a house.  A house with a separate room for sleeping and one for eating; a house with its own bathroom and, maybe, even a yard.  Some place that was larger than the 10ft square curtained off area that had been our home for so many years in so many camps.

          Each morning she arose before dawn to walk the five miles to her job so she could save the money needed for tram fare.  After working a double shift in a factory, she took the train into the city for her evening job as a dishwasher.  She went home in the dark.  And, eighteen months later, she bought our first house – a tiny weatherboard with a pocket handkerchief back yard and a sliver of grass at the front.

          That first night, we three slept huddled together on the bare boards, wrapped in army blankets for warmth.  It was a wonderful house.

          Mamma’s dream expanded as she continued to work and save – a bigger house, with perhaps a sleeping room for each of us and a front garden where she could plant her roses.

          Mamma’s one extravagance during those years was a Saturday evening outing to the movies.  She would sit in the front stalls (the first ten rows from the front) because she wouldn’t afford herself the luxury of the higher priced back stalls, and be transported to magical places by her movie heroes.  How she loved the movies.

          She instilled in us a love of music and dance and taught us that freedom was a precious gift to be treasured and never taken for granted.  And too, that with hard work anyone could attain their dreams whatever they may be.

          In her later years she suffered through two unsuccessful hip replacement surgeries but, undaunted, took to her motorized wheelchair with gusto and became a well known and loved local ‘grandma on her bike.’

          Mamma loved God, her children, grandchildren and her pets; she loved to see her flowers grow and took joy in reading her Bible.  At 92 she was still learning; a little notebook on her nightstand was filled with new words and their meanings, quotes from interesting people, favorite parts of scripture, poetry and comments on books she had read.

          She was not sad to leave this world.  She knew exactly where she was going and who would be waiting to greet her there.

          We are less because of her passing, but, I know it is only… until we meet again Mummy. 

          And to all the Mothers out there…have a wonderful, blessed Mother’s Day!

This Sporting Life

          It is quite possible that I’m the only female on the planet who has absolutely no interest in sports.

          As a child I never participated in any sporting activities at school, mainly because I was too busy trying to learn how to read, write and speak English.  As an adult my first attempt at tennis resulted in a pulled groin muscle which had me limping around for weeks and put paid to any wild dreams I might have had about Wimbledon; my laughable foray around a golf course had my friends surreptitiously kicking my little ball towards the hole so we could finish before the moon rose in the heavens, and riding a horse was such an exercise in futility the riding instructor asked me to please only return when he was not on duty.

          Watching others taking part in this thing called sports leaves me confused and frustrated.  Despite having the game of football (gridiron) explained to me, I’m still at a loss to understand why the ball takes forever to move barely inches at a time and why all the men spend most of their time in a huddle, flashing their bottoms at the yelling crowd.  All this while grumpy looking gentlemen walk along the sidelines, mics attached to their faces, glaring at all and sundry and endlessly screaming at unseen bodies.

          I must admit though that baseball has, from time to time, tweaked my interest.  Usually it’s after I’ve spent a couple of hours drooling over Robert Redford hitting balls into the stands or the equally luscious Kevin Costner converting a cornfield into a baseball diamond because ‘if you build it, they will come.’ 

          After one such movie outing I was convinced that, in fact, I could become an enormous fan of baseball.  Non baseball aficionados advised me that the game was actually mind numbingly boring unless it was a game between the best of the best in the business, and then only if they were having a great run.

          But, not to be deterred, I gathered together a group of friends and we took ourselves off to Baltimore’s Camden Yards for what I was sure was going to be a truly exciting afternoon.  It had such potential.  Camden Yards had only recently been opened after either a refurbishing or a complete overhaul from the ground up (I can’t remember which one).  It was designed, so I was told, in the style of the old baseball stadiums of years gone by and thus carried with it all the nostalgia that such a building can produce.

          I must admit, sitting in the stands behind first base, I was quite fascinated with all the stuff happening that had nothing to do with the actual game.  Vendors with trays laden with peanuts, candy and cans and cans of beer, ran up and down the aisles hawking their wares; kids armed with baseball mitts jumped around practicing catching that big hit ball in their tiny hands; and the jumbotron screen homing in on unsuspecting fans, plastering their faces on the screen for all to see. 

          When a ball was actually hit into the stands and caught by an excited child, I loved the loud trumpet blare and the announcer suggesting to: ‘give that kid a contract!’  It really was fun.

          The game we attended was also the one at which the crowd gave Cal Ripken a standing ovation for, as he said, ‘just turning up for every game for the past 25 years,’ so there was an element of sentimentality there too.

          But sadly, the actual game was a disaster.  At halftime, one team was so far ahead, it appeared the other side was sleepwalking through their innings and, for that matter, their more frequent outings.  By the seventh inning most of the crowd had given up and started to head home.  I insisted we stay to the bitter end, and that’s exactly what it was… a bitter end.

          It’s probably not fair to judge a whole sport by one single game.  But, as our little group straggled to our car so terribly disappointed, we all had to agree, it was unlikely our next outing would be a baseball game.  Next time… dare we try cricket?