Personal Agendas

I’m drugged…legitimately…due to an abscessed tooth and an inflamed ligament in my jaw. It was one of the more interesting x-rays I’ve seen. So my father is driving me to pick up my son. We leave at 2:15pm. Only he says We’ll be leaving at 1:15 pm to go by Sam’s (my left ankle).

So I shower at 12:15 and my only plan is to dry and curl my hair before departing at 1:15. P.M. So, I exit the shower and step out on to the patio (there is still no shower in my apartment) to go dry my hair and Dad says, “ready to go?” He, of course, is ready to go. And, of course, it doesn’t take him any time to get ready.

I merely look at him with my drowned chia pet hair and say, “I think something needs to be done up top here.” And thinking some urgent errand waits us, I merely dry the hair and stow the rest of what I can use to make my hair presentable (at a wild hamster conference) in my backpack and scoot out to the car. When he hops in, the first thing he says is, “We gotta hurry, mom said they were hanging up Hawaiian shirts this morning at the Senior Citizens Center.” They close at three. So there’s your heart-squeezing sense of urgency.

I start to wonder what obstacle is going to prevent us from getting there. These are four of the most creative miles in Texas if you ask me. What obstacle could possibly prevent us from making it before our desired departure? Cattle. Done it. Horses. Done that. Bicycle race. Did that too. Pig. Yup. Stray child—that one almost shaved off fifteen minutes. Downed tree, hay bales, water….just water and lots of it, parades(not worth mentioning since they occur at night), school buses, mail personnel (whee!), and all sorts of rural road paraphernalia both as they were born and clothed.

And he found nothing he liked. Thank God for the SCC. 2:21pm Starbucks and Krogers for his Vente non-fat xtra-hot Latte and no doubt some clear containers of celery and a random item that he’s worked into his diet somewhere. Sam’s, of course, where the obligatory Dr. Pepper, bulk Spinach and wine were purchased.

(Here the author falls asleep. The wine had less to do with that than the drugs for the tooth.)

Besides we can’t pick up Squib until 3:45 p.m.

Scat

OW!

Ow, dammit, ow!!!!! O-U-C-H!

Abscessed teeth (or tooth) hurt like the dickens and there is no place on the face of this earth for things such as abscesses.

Don't feed me any of that "everything happens for a reason" or "circle of life" or even worse "this is your body's way of blah blah blah" crap. Just DON'T! I'm not hearing any of it! None I tell you!

Enough of your platitudes.

MY MOUTH HURTS ALREADY!!!!

Yes, you've got it correct, the milion dollar mouth is starting to fall apart. Painfully. I reserve the right to interject as many references to the painfulness of this process as I choose. So, OW!

No, I do not want to gargle essence of some tree root or swish with oil of whatever. I don't want to crush some odd oil distilled from plant found in Madagascar. I want to go to a dentist and get my tooth fixed already!!!!

Is that so odd?

I think not.

Dream Sequence #2: In Which I Become a Famous Novelist

...and churn out New York Times best-sellers at my leisure while living comfortably on my small ranch in East Texas.

The great thing about being such a well-known author is that I sell a ton of books! So when it comes to the crap ton of laundry and other things that must be done about the place, I can simply hire someone to do it. Mission accomplished! Except the mowing. I like jetting around on that go-kart of a mower. It's mine!! Mine, I tell you! Unless I'm at a book signing and then the....groundskeeper?....takes care of that.

As I've never seen myself any different from the maid (when I had one) or landscaper (again, when I had one) they are all invited to come in and partake of the coffee and whatever else the cook (def gonna have someone doing some of that) has laying around. We chat a bit around the table in the morning and then we wander off to our corners of the world.

Sometimes I write in my office in the corner of the first floor of the house. Sometimes I just take my laptop out to the porch and write there with it on my lap. I have to consult my notes occasionally, but they're a short walk from there. Other times I wander through the pasture trying to work out a scene or coming to terms with the fact that a character that I dearly love truly serves no purpose in my current project. Usually it's a character I've fallen in love with for their quirky wit and sense of humor. Familiar, no?

After I wrote my first book, I met Trevor at a book-signing party in New York.

"You put a lot of yourself in this book, didn't you?" He smiled but he really wasn't asking. He knew.

"Yes. Yes I did." I have a nasty habit of facing challenges head-on.

"So it's going to be tough to dig deep for an original character for your next book?" I remember his grin when he said that.

"Is that a challenge?" I confronted him.

"Why, yes. Yes it is." He smiled.

I signed his book with my name and date and "see you at my signing in one year." I actually saw him sooner.  I say he stalked me. He calls it networking. We ended up at the same party two days later and talked most of the evening. Long story short, he married be before the book challenge ever came to pass. And it was one month in advance of the date I'd committed to.

Anyone who will move from a comfortable family home in Manhattan to "the sticks" of East Texas has to be an odd individual. I never said Trevor was normal. By-in-large he manages his family's fortune. But what he really enjoys is individual investment counselling. And he has more letters after his name than a surgeon. What I really like about Trev, though, is that he doesn't judge an account by the amount of money that's being managed. You could have $1,000,000 or you could have $100. He takes people as they are and likes people in general and his job in particular.

You'd have to take me as I am and just like people as they are to be with me anyway, right? Yeah...so needless to say there was a giant field test of Trev's go-with-the-flow-ness about nine months after we were married. I was deep into book three and discovered by some miracle (truly) that I was pregnant. This was NOT supposed to happen. So he patiently attended my come-to-Jesus meeting with the OB-GYN who had done the tube tying after Squib was born. We heard the odds. I was not pleasantly surprised. And Trevor was fabulous down to the very last detail--and excited to say the least.

We acquired an au pair and the housekeeper works more hours. I even got an assistant to help out with my writing along with so many other things to make "things" as laid back as they possibly be. Massages. Mani/pedi's. You name it. Time off. Whatever. Trev became psychic. I took naps. Did my writing. Ate well. It was the most enjoyable pregnancy I'd ever had. Litlle Jordan joined us with no complications--a miracle--and a few days later we were all home. Tired, but home.

Squib and Beanstalk love Trevor and just call him by his first name since we couldn't figure anything else out. They are fascinated with Jordan and hold him and feed him like big brothers do. Trevor is doing more with them since I am out of commission.

Two years ago I couldn't see such a wonderful life for myself, but...


Scat

The Inglorious Return Of...Me

I know. I totally turned traitor and went over to WordPress where the world is widgety and GUI and nice. Kudos to the first Laundrette who can actually define nice apart from other, more meaningful words like kind, helpful, sweet, generous, and the like, because I certainly can't. Anywho. WordPress was a slice. Nice people or so I hear, but spookily silent. I kept trying to write there and it was always a little harder than it really needed to be. Certainly mostly user error.

Here's my list of all the very, very important details you missed while I was over there:

1. Everything grew. Hair, grass, kids, insurance premiums, you name it.

2. After years of searching, I finally found a hair stylist that I like along with a hair style. Years, I tell you!!!
3. Half of my left big toe nail is no longer attached to my toe. It doesn't hurt. It isn't, you know, fungal or anything. It's just weird. Are we surprised? No we are not.
4. My father and I are trying to kill each other (more on that later).
5. I'm older. In a seriously significant fashion (more on that later).
6. The Scat family trio became the Scat family duo. Boo cancer.
7. OSU beat OU. 3 lousy points. Bedlam, indeed.
8. Beanstalk continues to wage war against my nose. You know, just the presence of it. The intact-ness of it seems to be at odds with his existence.
9.Squib is just "sewious." "Vewy, vewy sewious." Go ahead. YOU keep a straight face.
10. Baba is fighting for her own independence. Again. Much like an adolescent. We lose her on occasion. So we did what anyone else would do. We armed her with money and a car (now I'm going straight to 'you-know-where').

It isn't as though I had nothing to say all this time. I did. I wrote a little while I was dabbling with WordPress. It just wasn't very "me" of me for a while. A long, long while. Even now I'm not certain that I'm back in any sort of saddle again. I'm pretty sure that the old saddle just doesn't exist anymore. I'm still quirky. Really odd stuff still happens to me on a daily basis. I still have my usual sarcasm and sense of humor, but when you lose someone who has been such a huge part of your life it's just fact that you're not the same as you once were.

Scat