Multicolored Checkered Vans

A few minutes ago I saw my son's shoes laying, of course, in the middle of the living room floor. These were the shoes he begged everyone for at Christmastime, the Vans skater shoes, size 9, black and white checkered but with cute multicolored checks in there too, just for fun. Kev wore these shoes all the time, everywhere, except for lawn mowing and rainy, muddy days. On his birthday in March he asked for Mr. Clean Erasers so he could keep the soles of his Vans clean. So I was kind of surprised to see them abandoned in the middle of my living room floor.

In the past several months of his eighth grade career, Kevin has turned from a black hoodie-wearing punk-rock-looking kid into something far more interesting. He doesn't try to spike his hair into mohawks any more, instead letting it grow out in a halo of blonde natural curls that he literally wets down and shakes out until it falls into his eyes in the mornings. He's discovered a wide array of wardrobe colors besides the black and he no longer drapes his pockets with chains every day. In one short year he's grown twelve inches in height, now looking me straight in the eyes with a twinkle in his own that says this is only a brief pitstop on his way to Six Feet Tallville. And the other day I had to buy him a new pair of shoes since his beloved Vans were getting just a little too tight for him, he said.

A few minutes ago, I put my feet into those too tight Vans and walked around. There was a gulf inside those shoes that my own feet wouldn't fill. I kicked the shoes off easily and watched them fall in a heap, one laying on its side up against the other. They will stay where I left them until Kev puts them away in his own room. But I can't get over that his outgrown shoes are too big for my feet. It feels like a sign of things to come as my 13 year old boy finishes middle school at the end of next month.

You Know it Only Gets 10-12 MPG

What kind of driver are you?

Do you drive peacefully, leaving yourself enough time to get to your destination, singing along to the radio or talking with your spouse or child or friends in the car with you?

Or are you a raging maniac who feels possessive of the road, not wanting to share with drivers around you in your morning commute?

I'm driver number one and this morning I encountered driver number two.

Driver number two, also known here as The Woman Driving the Tank, pulled right up behind me as we waited for the green light to cross Capital Blvd. Crossing Capital is stressful in any situation and the fact that they never have gotten the lights timed correctly doesn't help. So this WDtT is sitting on my back bumper and when the light turns green, she stayed there. Right on top of me.

I tried to do what my mother always told me and ignore her. I DID. I was going the speed limit and I was, in fact, keeping pace with traffic around me. I learned to drive in West Virginia where they teach you that in order to tell a tailgater to "back off" you tap your brakes at them. I have since learned that North Carolinians never got this paragraph in driver's ed and here the brake tapping causes the tailgater behind you to stomp their own brakes and then swerve mightily as if trying to anticipate to which lane you will be moving. It's not pretty.

But this morning I waited for this fool WDtT to get it through her head that I wasn't about to speed for her pleasure. When she didn't get it and continued to ride close enough to touch through the back window, I simply bided my time until we reached the school zone and then slowed down another ten miles an hour, tapping my brakes three or four times to get there. The cars in front of me did the same but the lane to the right opened up briefly and the idiot WDtT behind me swerved to the right and sped past in a blaze of idiot glory.

When she went past I stuck my tongue out at her which is what I do instead of flipping people the bird. I found long ago (about the time we moved here) that sticking out my tongue at a rude driver made me feel like laughing instead of making me feel as rude as they are. Plus you get the bonus of their surprise and I always wonder if perhaps it makes them feel a little foolish. Probably not, but at least it doesn't make me feel any angrier.

Tailgating is the worst driving offense a person can commit. It's both rude AND stupid, two of the all time worst things you can be in the south, and yet, people do it all the time here. As if they're actually auditioning for a NASCAR race.

My personal weapon against this is my occupation. I'm a writer. I'm a mother. I work from home. I have no time clock and no one ever asks me why I'm late. Tailgating me only makes me drive slower. And I have all the time in the world.

So to that idiot WDtT, hear this: I won't be rushed. I got up on time, I'm already speeding, and I don't have to hurry just because you're late. One day I'm going to stand up on my brakes and let you hit me. Let's see who the police and your insurance company thinks is in the right on that day.

Anyone else want to complain about driving? It helps….

Nerves of Steel

So you all know I'm a writer. I have books piling up by the year and have been actively agent shopping. Which is tough, you know, with all the rejections you're naturally going to receive. I now believe this is the reason I dated so very, very many people in my younger years: rejection preparation. It worked too! I get these form letters in the mail saying, "Sorry, don't think so," and I move right on to the next on the list and keep plugging away on my daily word count for the works in progress.

Exciting isn't it? I know, keep reading.

On June the 9th I have an actual face to face appointment to pitch with the next agent on my list. I'm scared out of my mind but excited, nonetheless. It's been arranged by my local RWA chapter (Heart of Carolina Romance Writers, if you'd like to know!) and I got my first choice of the agents who were going to be there.

What I'd like from you, my readers, is advice or warnings from those of you who have done this, support from anyone who hasn't, and prayers and happy thoughts uplifted daily from you all! I'll have roughly eight minutes with her and I need to wow this woman with my charm, wit, and wonderful characters and plot.

Help?

In further news, I'm off to pick up a bicycle I found on craigslist yesterday. I haven't ridden a bike in several years and the last time I did, I crashed it through a bush and into a fence. Snort. I'm not the very most coordinated of people. Wish me luck that it's cute and that I don't fall down!

The Broken RIGHT Hand

So yesterday I got a call from the guy at Lowe's who is going to deliver my new washing machine. It isn't due to arrive at the store for two weeks and he's sorry. He hopes he hasn't ruined my day.

I laugh and briefly tell him how I spent the morning going from the orthopedic doctor (in Wake Forest) to the orthopedic therapist (downtown Raleigh) to have my son's right hand put in a splint. That as soon as I arrived home I had a visit from the insurance adjustor to finally write me an estimate for the damages I had done to our car a few weeks back (a few blog posts down....) and how HE, the Lowe's delivery guy, was the least of my problems. It made him laugh, anyway.

It really has been quite a week. Kevin broke his hand last Friday. The first day in five years I have a job outside the house to go to and he calls as I'm walking out the door to tell me he's broken his hand. I picked him up from school, took him to work with me, and then later to the ER. Well, his fingers all moved and he could make a fist. Who knew he had a broken hand? The ER doc was even surprised.

Oh, and if you ask Kevin how he broke his hand (his RIGHT hand, of course) he's likely to tell you it was due to kung-fu. It was actually due to him drumming his hands on a metal bench and his right hand banging just right on the edge of the bench. A horrible percussion accident. Which makes me laugh and he groans every time someone asks him what happened to his hand.

So, to sum up, I have a kid with a broken hand, a car that needs a week to ten days of body work, a broken washing machine with no hopes of a new one for two more weeks, and a husband who had no work at all this week. I'm going insane.

Maybe this is why I'm not sleeping again

My Sister

Some of my frequent readers will have noticed that it's been awhile since I've posted a new blog. I like to have at least one new post a week and I'll admit to being slack these last couple weeks. But it's an odd time of the year for me. It's closing in on my sister's birthday, her thirtieth.

On my own thirtieth birthday I bought myself a tiara and a purple feather boa, mixed up a pitcher of margaritas and sat outside on the deck all day reading a romance novel. Beth called me to tease me about being "old." She's five years behind me so I only told her I had five years to plan my revenge for her own thirtieth if she didn't leave me be. She wasn't worried. She laughed and told me that she was never going to turn thirty.

Beth and I always had a contentious relationship. We had a brother between us and one sister five years younger than Beth, but it was the two of us who were mortal enemies growing up. I recall once throwing a shoe at Beth, her ducking out of the way, and it hitting my father in the chest. The fact that the shoes were hers in the first place and she was perfectly justified in making me give them back was of no consequence. She and I fought about anything and hated each other with a passion. It was only after Rich and I moved our little family to Raleigh that Beth and I realized we hated each other so much because we were just alike. It was quite a blow for both of us but we took it in stride and began a friendship that sustained as much volatility as our past hatred. I thank God all the time for that friendship because precious as it was, it was also very brief.

On June the 8^th, 2003, Beth died in a plane crash. She was a pilot with a good job lined up and the only requirement left was for her to take a weekend course and get her multi-engine license. She came to stay with us here in Raleigh, arrived the evening before her class started, left early in the morning and never came back. To this day I beat myself up for not getting out of bed that morning to hug her goodbye. Can't get the idea out of my mind that she was dead while her cell phone kept ringing as I left her messages to let me know if she would be home for dinner. And I can't even think about the day that I had to go up to the airport and pick up her car.

It was after her funeral before I could go get the car. And when I did, it was out of gas. I put a little into the tank and drove home with the radio blaring, singing at the top of my lungs and howling crying like a lunatic. But it wasn't just the gas. When I gathered up her things, all of her toiletries were empty or very nearly almost empty. Bottles of hairspray, conditioner, lotions down to the very last bit. Eye shadow used down to the last crumbly little corner. Lipsticks worn to a perfect flatness and then feathered into with brush lines. Perfumes nothing but a whiff of scent. Everything was used up. She had no money in her checking account and only nineteen dollars available on her credit card. No cash was on her and none was in her car. Not a cent. That utter finality still gives me chills. She just wasn't meant to come back that day.

But, much as I'd like to eulogize her properly, it's hard to think of Beth with sadness. She was a force of nature and though she was only twenty-six when she died, she had done more than many people do in a lifetime. She lifeguarded on the Atlantic Ocean when she lived in Myrtle Beach, she waited tables in a nightclub in Providence, she was based out of Syracuse when she was a flight attendant and she traveled to Puerto Rico for vacation and went to Europe twice. She's seen the Eiffel Tower, the Arch de Triomph, Anne Frank's home, and Notre Dame Cathedral. She dated an Italian man who brought her back Italian stilettos from Italy. She dated a fellow pilot, an Irish man who brought her to meet his family who lived in the Netherlands. She dated a minor league baseball player who had his team sign a baseball because she wanted one to give her nephew as a present. In twenty-six years she squeezed in a lot.

She had a fierce loyalty to her friends and inspired loyalty in others. Her wake was packed with people who flew in from all over the place to offer condolences to us, her family, whom they had never met. She had been scheduled to be a bridesmaid in a wedding the weekend of her funeral. I remember calling the bride and telling her Beth wouldn't be able to come. And the whole wedding party drove eight hours to show up at her wake, a day and a half before their wedding took place. Rich tells me he had never seen anything like what happened at her wake. Mom, Dad, Scott, Kristen and I were lined up, greeting people and apparently it went on for hours, hours and hours. There was a line outside and around the block of people waiting to come in. I heard it was on the news.

What else can I tell you about Beth? I've always been a Christian but it's only been since she died that I feel absolute proof of an afterlife. Sometimes her presence is as heavy as if she's right beside you telling a joke or telling you a secret or telling you that your new red hair dye is too bright. When I dream of her, I can smell her and once when I was wearing a shirt that used to belong to her, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw her face in place of my own. That was strange, but not nearly as odd as the next day when my baby sister Kristen called and told me about a strange thing that had happened to her the day before when she looked in her mirror. See? That's just Beth through and through, making jokes from Heaven. Probably just taking a break from teaching a little group of angels all about leather pants and the lyrics to "Sin Wagon" by the Dixie Chicks.

May 14^th would have been her thirtieth birthday. I made up a bouquet for her mausoleum marker and I wanted in the worst way to make it black and funereal and all grim with the sentiments of a thirtieth birthday. Mom and I laughed like loons over the very thought and how mad Beth would be about it. But we knew it would be awful for any other visitors to her site and so I went with pretty spring colors and her favorite green for ribbon. It's been almost four years since she died and sometimes the pain catches me by surprise and takes my breath away, but next Monday I'm pretty sure I'll be smiling at the idea of her grinning down from Heaven with an "I told you so" look as I shake my head and think of how weirdly right she was that she would never turn thirty.