It would make one helluva country song

Sophie: Mommy, your breasts are flopping all around. You’ve got the floppiest breasts in town.

28 comments May 31st, 2006

Memorial Day is a good day to ask a ghost not to sit on your lap while you’re on the toilet

While you were at that barbecue yesterday, I was squatting awkwardly in a cemetery, muttering about my toilet to a headstone. Good times!

I was supposed to be tracking down sandals for Sophie at Wal-Mart. But Wal-Mart makes me want to huddle in a pile of clearance-rack size-6x Mary-Kate & Ashley sequined peasant skirts and gnaw my wrist veins open and spurt wanly at passing shoppers until store security guards get wind of my suicidal hijinks and drag my gray clammy body out back via the loading dock. I am always looking for a good reason to put off a trip to Wal-Mart.

Since it was Memorial Day, and I knew one of the Mr. Pipe & Mrs. Kitchen clan had served in World War I, I decided to take flowers to the cemetery where all of the former inhabitants of our home are buried. I cut the flowers from our garden-that-is-not-really-a-garden-of-our-own-doing. Plentiful dog poop is the reason forget-me-nots and violets have sprouted out back; purple creeping phlox that the family before us planted on the front lawn continues to make an appearance each year.

The only thing I have achieved personally, gardenwise, is clearing enough space a few weeks back to assure that many happy caravans of gypsy weeds could find a new place to call home. As I type this, they are propagating like bunnies and doing tarot card readings for the other weeds and complaining about my politically incorrect nomenclature for them. But as always, I digress.

We were talking about Norman. It was Norman’s headstone I was talking to. Norman and his family are the folks that we bought the house from, and Norman had all sorts of lung problems. At the closing, he was in his 80s, and hooked up to a portable oxygen tank. We’re pretty sure the bowling ball and the odd hospital-issue breathing apparatus we found several years back in the crawlspace in the upstairs bathroom belonged to Norman. We donated the bowling ball to a local artist who was creating a gigantic installation from found balls. There are many, many good jokes to be made, and I am sorely tempted to go skipping and chuckling through the funny, funny world of found ball art, but there are more serious issues we must cover today.

We threw out the breathing apparatus, as we were unable to interest the found ball artist in a found breathing apparatus project, but it may have been a bad move. Norman died in 2004, and I am getting the impression he’s maybe a little ticked off about our moving his bowling ball and his breathing stuff.

When Tree came to town and I gave her her first in-person tour of the house (her first two readings of the house were remote readings, which still makes my brain spin in two directions like the double window fan I got at Wal-Mart), she stopped cold in the bathroom, held her hand over our toilet, and said, “There’s someone here. Do you feel that? Oh. Wow.”

I did not want to feel that. I did not want to picture a ghost feeling me feeling it, right over our toilet.

But I stuck out my hand anyway, hoping I was not patting any ghostly privates. Nothing that I could discern.

Tree waved her hand over the loo again and shook her cute sweet head. “It’s gone now. But you should know . . .” I scanned her face frantically, the way I do with flight attendants. But Tree was smirking, so I wasn’t too freaked out. A smirking psychic friend is preferable to a wailing or shrieking or Exorcist-vomiting psychic friend. “. . . you really have a full house here.”

The bathroom of your home is not the best place to hear this sort of information, particularly when it is coming to you via a trusted source.

I asked Tree what my options were. I told her I did not like the concept of ghosts playing How Many Of Us Can We Fit In This Bathroom in our bathroom. I told her I did not like the concept of my face buried in Mr. Toilet’s ghostly hovering rump while I take care of business on the potty. I told her I did not like the concept of stripping for a shower while Mr. Toilet throws phantom wooden nickels at my naked Polish-American ass and sneers at the poor quality of the entertainment.

Tree was very helpful. She told me it was perfectly all right to have a room that was off-limits to spirits. I told her I wanted to have two or three or four rooms that were off-limits. “Is that allowed?”

Tree said it was allowed, and that I just needed to tell the ghosts that I needed Jenny Private Time. Jenny’s Privates’ Time. Either way, I needed it bad, and so I told the Toilet Ghost and any other par-TAY 24-7 ghosts in the vicinity that the bathroom and the bedroom were henceforth spirit-free zones.

But SOME SPIRITS WERE NOT LISTENING. I’ve never much liked being in our bathroom, particularly not at night, and I figured after my stern talking-to, I’d immediately feel like I was in Zero-Ghosts Spa Heaven. But no! No no no!

The scalp has been going off! My scalp goes off like a car alarm! No, you can’t hear it. Bad analogy, but they are my trademark, so I must not stop them, ever.

My scalp has been tingling ever since my second reading with Tree (the reading that happened RIGHT AFTER THE UPSTAIRS TOILET OVERFLOWED, AND MAY I REMIND YOU THAT IT OVERFLOWED AFTER SOPH AND I GAVE MRS. KITCHEN AN OFFERING OF A PAINTING AND SOME CHAMPAGNE, WAS MR. TOILET JEALOUS?). It does not tingle all the time, but it weirdly “goes off” at strange times…and it feels like someone is gently moving my hair.

It is very bad to feel like someone is gently moving your hair when you are going wee-wee. And occasionally, that’s what it feels like is happening. Mr. Toilet has not been listening! He is being brazen! I have been very displeased with Mr. Toilet. And I have told him so in the bathroom, and I have wrapped my naked body in blazing white light yadda yadda yadda and STILL the scalp goes off in the bathroom.

I can’t know for sure if Mr. Toilet is Norman, jonesin’ from the grave for a little oxygenated bowling, but considering the crawlspace is right smack where Tree stopped and stuck out her magic hand, well, I figured it was a good place to start.

I think I’ve told you before — there have only been three families in this house, and one of them is us. I have been spending an insane amount of time researching the first family who lived here, the Richmonds. So I’m wondering if Norman (the patriarch of the second family) is cranky about this and feeling left out. But his family is still alive — including his wife — so I’m not sure why he’d waste his Crossing Over moments in our bathroom, sitting on my lap while I heed the call of nature and leaf through Sephora catalogs. Life after death! Such a mystery!

I had found Norman’s grave by accident the last time I was at the cemetery, researching the Richmonds. And after I stopped by the Richmonds’ plot yesterday, I took my remaining forget-me-nots to Norman. And if you hadn’t gone to that barbecue and had instead been hiding behind a nearby tombstone, you would have caught snatches of this monologue:

Hello, Norman, sir. If you’re the one who’s been hanging around our toilet, that’s really going to have to stop, sir. I really don’t appreciate that sort of company. I know I’ve been talking about the Richmonds a lot, and I don’t want you to feel left out or anything, but look, you’ve got family nearby, and I’m sure they could use you around. We love the house, we respect you and your family, and we love the tulips and the phlox. The shed is great too. And everybody who visits talks about the screened-in porch. Tree and I also got a kick out of seeing all the puzzles you left upstairs in the attic.

So please, stay out of the bathroom, sir, and don’t make the toilet overflow and drip through the kitchen ceiling anymore. Mrs. Kitchen sure doesn’t appreciate it, and we’ve got our hands full around already. I’ll drop by and visit you here at the cemetery from time to time, but a lady needs her space where it counts.

33 comments May 30th, 2006

OH BOY THE LATEST IS A DOOZIE BUT JENN WILL HAVE TO TELL YOU HERSELF!

I am on the phone with my mother, The Mater. She is getting impatient.

“I keep waiting for you to post more about your ghost research,” she says pointedly. She has been leaving little nudgy comments here at the blog like “DON’T WORRY, THERE’S MORE TO JENN’S GHOST TALES BUT IT IS NOT MY STORY TO TELL!” and “WAIT TILL JENN TELLS YOU THE LATEST ABOUT HER GHOSTS BUT I DON’T WANT TO GIVE ANYTHING AWAY!” and “OH BOY THE LATEST IS A DOOZIE BUT JENN WILL HAVE TO TELL YOU HERSELF!”

“You should really stop telling everybody at my blog that I’m going to post more about the ghosts,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know if they want to hear about it.”

“Of course they want to hear about it. Everyone is leaving comments asking to hear more about the ghosts!”

“YOU are leaving comments asking to hear more about the ghosts. I think there were, like, two other people besides you who asked about the ghosts.”

She hmmphs. “There were more than TWO people, but okaaaay.”

I sigh. “Traffic took a nosedive after I brought up the ghosts.”

Stunned silence. “Really?”

“Yes. It still hasn’t recovered. I just don’t think this is what people come here for.”

She is skeptical on the other end of the line. “Well, I still think it’s a great story. But okay.”

“I just don’t even know how to write about it. I feel sort of protective. Of our ghosts.”

“Protective.”

“I just mean…I don’t know if I should go on about them if people aren’t into it. I think they come here to feel better about their own parenting. I think they come here to feel wealthy and appreciate their own kitchens more.”

“Well. Do what you need to do. I’ll stop asking about it.” She is feeling a bit miffy.

I backpedal. “I’m just not sure…they’ll think I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I need a separate blog. An anonymous one.”

“I still say they want more,” she says.

“Today I had lunch with Mrs. Kitchen,” I tell her.

A pause. “You had lunch with her.”

“I set out a plate for her and put some garlic bread on it. And poured her a glass of water. And then I sat across the table from her and we had lunch. Well, maybe we had lunch. I’m not really sure. But my scalp started to do the tingling thing, so I think she was there.”

Horrified silence. “Oh, you can’t write that.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“They’ll think you’ve lost it.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

Pause. “I’m worried about you. You fed her lunch.”

“That’s. What. I’m. Saying.”

81 comments May 27th, 2006

One whole year of breedy, weepy goodness!

There you are again! I peck at my laptop, I drool coffee on my T-shirt, I nudge the dog and beg him to stop licking, and I peck some more at the keys. And you keep showing up and reading my peckings. And you peck right back with your wonderful one-liners and buck up, camper advice and sassypants wisdom, and I read what you say and shake my head and drool some more and give the dog his phenobarbitol and think to myself, Isn’t life grand.

Bless you. Bless you dear folks for welcoming my tales of flawed mamahood and non-kosher wifelihood and poor housekeeping and frustrated finances and artsy-fartsy angst for 365 days straight. You make me want to be a better cook, a better writer, and a better mama, and you keep the flame of my cranberry-storm-door dream burning bright and beautiful.

You deserve gift bags, you really do. Maybe next year. Let’s plan on it.

62 comments May 24th, 2006

Stealth reader

“I didn’t realize Sophie was reading,” said a friend, the mama of one of Sophie’s pals, after Soph was over her house for an afternoon playdate.

“I didn’t either,” I said.

Soph had apparently been deciphering a slew of words for her buddy during their playdate. But at home, she gets mighty cranky if anybody asks her to read a word on a cereal box. Why is she hiding her Spidey powers? Why, I ask you?

Yesterday she opened a present from her cousins, which included a camera. She held it up and said, “Look! It’s waterproof!”

W-A-T-E-R-P-R-O-O-F. On the camera box.

“HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?” we yelled.

Sly shrug.

“YOU CAN READ?” we yelled.

“No.”

“WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO READ?”

“I’m not going to tell you that,” she said. She walked away with her W-A-T-E-R-P-R-O-O-F camera.

Is this how it happens? I have been cruelly shut out from her world of reading discovery. It’s bad enough she’s got her little sister calling me ‘Mom’ now instead of ‘Mommy.’ My heart can’t take it. She started reading and I missed it. My little stealth reader. I could W-E-E-P.

33 comments May 22nd, 2006

Rainy Friday. Calling all enablers.

The girls are at school, the New England rain keeps pouring down, and I am slumped in my big chair trying to decide between attempting to clean up the house (which is so bad our ghosts have headed to a local hotel) or climbing back into bed. The meds are working some, but last night I had such a coughing fit before bed that I wound up hurling the entire contents of my stomach into the toilet, including my first dinner in three days and last night’s dose of Prednisone and Azithromycinmaxinmississippian. Niiiiice.

There have been perkier Fridays. Tell me it’s okay to surrender and go back to bed. Will you tell me that? Will you? Yes, please. Be an enabler. Calling all enablers.

32 comments May 19th, 2006

cough cough panic cough

You guys, I am one of those people who says, you guys, especially before bad stuff. You guys! I have to have a chest X-ray in the morning because I can’t breathe and it could be pneumonia! You guys! I have been coughing for two and a half weeks and it’s getting worse, and my lungs hurt and my asthma gets really bad by nighttime and I start heaving and breathing with my shoulders and my back muscles and looking tragic and I get dizzy and panicky! You guys! I am so exhausted! They gave me a breathing treatment with a nebulizer and it made me breathe worse and wheeze worse and cough more, and now I have to have Prednisone and Zythromax and I’m getting panicky all over again because the sun is going down! Vampire pneumonia! Dracula pleurisy!

I said, hey, doctor, it gets worse at night, and he said, well, I don’t understand why it would get worse at night, to which I replied, right, well, I don’t either and I thought you were the guy to ask. No, it’s not my usual primary care physician. The warmth! Is it wrong to want a warm and fuzzy primary care physician to serve me hot tea and hug me and tell me I am not going to suffocate before dawn? Is it? You guys?

P.S. It was my beautiful David’s birthday yesterday. He would like all of you to know he just finished his Jesus year and it was a very exciting year.

36 comments May 17th, 2006

Please don’t make me be in the Olympics

Sophie is bouncing on her bed.

“Watch me!” she says. “Watch how high I can jump!”

“Wow,” I say, “that’s really something. You’re good at jumping.”

“Yeah.”

“And you run really fast.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then why did all your friends say you did in your ‘I AM SPECIAL’ book from school? They said you ran really fast and that you were great on the monkey bars.”

She thinks about this and smiles. “Oh, yeah.”

“Maybe you’ll be in the Olympics someday,” I say.

She sighs and slumps on her bed. “Do I have to be an Olympicker? I’m already going to be a dressmaker and a veterinarian.”

“No, you don’t have to be an Olympian.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to be that.”

Okay, then.

18 comments May 15th, 2006

Ghost Story Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday

I haven’t posted recently about the ongoing ghost stories unfolding at our humble abode, because I really don’t know how to pick up where I left off. It’s a good not-sure-where-to-pick-up, not I’m-so-freaked-out-I’m-afraid-to-write-about-it kind of thing. It’s all evolved into much more than just a good party story. LET’S JUST SAY.

After my house reading with Tree, my curiosity about Mr. Pipe and Mrs. Kitchen reached fever pitch. I packed up my little Nancy Drew notebook and headed for the local library, where I spent several afternoons hogging the microfilm machine and pestering the reference librarians to haul 1890s and early 1900s maps of our town out of the refrigerated vault.

Fortunately, the reference librarians were not skeptics. When I told them what I was up to, they in turn told me spun some excellent yarns about the library’s ghostly activity, including furniture that would move itself and barricade one staff member’s office so she couldn’t get in in the morning, a toilet that frequently flushed itself, and a dark-haired woman who liked to appear in the bathroom mirror from time to time. Needless to say, I waited to tinkle until I got home. Where I could be observed by our friendly ghosts. Much better.

So as I was saying, the librarians were absolutely super about helping me on my quest to figure out 1) who lived in the house before us and 2) what the hell the library had on hand that might help with that. It felt a bit like I was looking for a proverbial needle in a haystack, except I didn’t actually know that I was looking for a needle, and would probably have been happy to find a thimble or a Pomeranian in all that hay instead.

I hit the maps first, to see if our house appeared anywhere before 1903, which is when we were told the house was built. Surprise! Our house was on a 1900 map, with beautiful old penmanship on top: Beer & Dowlin.

To make a long story shorter, I found out with a little more Nancy Drew Nerdwork that Beer & Dowlin were attorneys and real estate developers at the time, and most likely neither lived in the house.

So I dove into the town directories. Without anything else to go on, the only thing I could figure out to do was scan the endless columns of names (and their occupations) and hope I saw our address somewhere before my eyes hemorrhaged and I died of that and paper cuts from the microfilm rolls.

I got lucky. My eyes held out, and then they nearly fell out when I found our address in the 1901 town directory. Our address, and a name: William E. Richmond. Occupation: engineer at the gas light company four blocks away from our home. His home.

If anyone had tried to take a turn on the microfilm machine at that point, there would have been another ghost walking around.

Crazy-excited, I then proceeded to scan through as many directories as I could. I am saying I WENT THROUGH A LOT OF TOWN DIRECTORIES. I scoured every directory I could find from 1894 to 1957, to see if there was anyone else besides Mr. Richmond (and presumably, his family). But there he was, every single year until 1944…when his widow began to be listed: Emma.

I followed Emma at our address until 1954, and then the directories skipped to 1957. I knew the name of the family who sold us our house, and it was their name listed from 1957 on. Which makes us, most likely, only the third family to live here.

In 1957, the Richmonds disappeared from the directory. They may appear in later ones, but I haven’t gotten past 1957 yet.

And that’s just the beginning.

Now, if you’re a person who likes spoilers, or you read the last page of a novel first, you should go read what dear, magic Tree wrote about meeting our house in person. Mind you, I had never before set foot in our attic, not once in the five years we’ve lived here. But with Tree, it was time, and it was more than okay.

Oh, heck, you should read it even if you don’t like spoilers, because I don’t know when I’ll get around to saying more. What gets me the most? By your thirties, you start feeling like you can’t be surprised by much anymore. And I have been surprised so grandly, well, I forgot how lovely it can be to really be surprised. And moved. Deeply. How about that.

33 comments May 10th, 2006

We laugh as his vision dims and his twinkie shrivels beyond all recognition

The Mater has been visiting, and our week together has been full of quotables like, Get the steak. I miss seeing you eat steak. Which is charming and baffling and eating-disorder-triggering and back to charming again all in the span of two microseconds. Life with my mother is a constant temptation to put up one of those quoteboards you find in the hallways of dorms inhabited by lots of drunk freshmen. This is a cute lady! You would love this lady! You see why I want her to move up here. Then we really would have to give in and put up a quoteboard.

Anyway, of course Mom and I watched David Blaine try to hold his breath for nine minutes tonight live on ABC in the Lincoln Center fishbowl. Live on ABC! LIVE! BUT NEARLY DEAD! Laughing it up over here! Seriously, we may use decent grammar, and she may say adorable things, but Mom and I have just as much schadenfreude coursing through our veins as anybody else. But we wouldn’t eat our young or anything. Well, Ma ate four of us but spared me and my one brother so I could write a blog someday and he could deliver babies and save people’s lives and have a really photogenic family.

But back to everybody’s favorite dumb-tushie, Mr. Blaine. The cameramen got a few up-close shots of Blaine’s now-corpse-like hands, which at this point had been submerged for like, six dumb days of total and complete watery dumbness.

My mother: I bet his little twinkie doesn’t look too great right now. [crying]

Me: [crying]

My mother and me: [more twinkie talk, more crying]

At this point, David was having considerable trouble marking papers in the adjoining room, the Den That Is Not A Den. So he gave in and joined the cacklers. And the conversation.

David: [skeptical] Are you sure he doesn’t have some tube going up his leg with oxygen?

My mother: I never heard of a tube blowing oxygen up your froufyhooha. [pause] It gives new meaning to the word ‘bl*wjob.’ [more crying]

Me: [more crying]

David: [staring at floor] Oh my. Just. Oh my.

We settled down a bit as David Blaine’s eyebrows started twitching and The Grim Reaper popped his head into the frame and did the heavy metal I-LOVE-YOU hands and yelled “WOOOOO F*CKIN’ A!” into the camera. My David didn’t see it but Mom and I totally did.

But David Blaine was just getting settled in for the long, dumb haul. Bor-ing.

Me: [disgusted] Oh, please. Now they’re playing freakshow angel music.

My mother: [nodding]

David: Uh, that’s Mozart’s Mass in C Minor. [pause] Oh. No, it isn’t. It’s the requiem they used in Platoon.

My mother: A requiem. They use them for DEATH.

Me: [silent]

David: [silent]

My mother: [nodding]

Now Mr. Blaine is wasting precious energy and brain cells trying to figure out why he added dumb handcuffs to his dumb underwater donkey show. We are also wasting precious energy and brain cells trying to figure out why he added dumb handcuffs to his dumb underwater donkey show. We are one.

My mother: See, I don’t know why you wouldn’t just do one or the other. He’s got to multitask. Too much multitasking.

Me: How will he get out of the dumb handcuffs? I hate that I am even asking that because HE WANTS ME TO ASK THAT.

David: It’s all about being double-jointed. [pause] No, he has keys.

Me: [coughing and wheezing from psychosomatic drowning episode as David Blaine starts inhaling water and bits of his own imploding lungs]

My mother: [worried] Don’t forget to take your Cingular tonight.

29 comments May 8th, 2006