Red Nose

Down The Aisle

Today is our 28th wedding anniversary.

Seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in my parents' home, drinking coffee and thinking about my upcoming nuptials, when my Pop walked down the steps clad only in his strapless t-shirt, his size 44 boxers, his shoes and socks, and the striped tie from his rented tux.

"Well, I'm ready!" he said.

That's my Pop.

I'd gotten my hair done the day before, so I put on my own makeup and got myself dressed. The three of us drove to the church in Pop's Chevy Caprice.

My sisters were waiting in their bridesmaid finery; the ushers were waiting in their tuxes. I couldn't stop smiling. Everyone was smiling!

I'd always had visions of a slow, stately procession down the aisle, with me smiling at the friends and family gathered to watch us take our vows. I'd blow a kiss to my best pals, wink at the children, giggle at anyone with misty eyes, and allow myself to be admired.

Nope. When the time came to walk down the aisle, Pop grabbed my arm and practically ran me up to the altar. We galloped down the aisle like we were running in the Kentucky Derby and coming down the homestretch.

But that jog down the aisle just meant I got to Joe faster, so I was okay with that.

And 28 years later, I'm still okay with that.

Oh Baby, Where Can You Bee?

The back door is open to let in the perfect late spring breeze on a cloudless Memorial Day. I am almost done cleaning the oven, a task I to which I committed myself (maybe I should have been committed) the other day when I put some meat in to broil and the kitchen filled up with greasy smoke.

Yeah. Time to clean the oven.

But that's not what I want to write about today. I want to write about a landmark institution of my summers of my childhood.

The Bee Place.

See, Memorial Day weekend in these parts means that the beach is open for business, so everyone needs to get going down 'ee ocean. Every summer my family went to Ocean City Maryland for vacation. There are two main routes to Ocean City, once you cross the Bay Bridge: Route 50, which takes you through Easton, Cambridge, and Salisbury; and Route 404, which takes you through Denton, Bridgeville, and Selbyville. My Pop always took Route 404 because it was 12 miles shorter and we'd get to the beach that much faster.

These days, that route is still 12 miles shorter, but it takes longer because it's mostly a two-lane road, whereas Route 50 is divided highway all the way.

Anyway, there was this burger and shake joint that we stopped at every time we went on this trip, just east of Denton, Maryland. It's official name was the Crossroads Drive-In, but we called it the Bee Place, because it was always awash with yellowjackets. It was one of the joints where you walk up to one window and order, then pick up your order at another window, and then find a picnic table where you could eat and swat at the dive bombing wasps. The management kept trying to keep the stingy creatures at bay by putting a little Coke in the bottoms of big glass jugs so that the bees would fly into them and get stuck, but it didn't really help, partly because people never really cleaned up after themselves. There were always leftover bits of burger, empty cups with remnants of milkshake, or pale green pickle slices shriveling in the hot sun, not to mention all the fresh food being eaten by those annoying humans. If I were a yellowjacket, I know what I'd choose, although there were always one or two or six victims drowned in the jugs of sweet, sweet cola.

Ah, Death! Where is thy sting?

We stopped there every single summer on the way to the beach, but never on the way home. On the way home, we stopped at the Howard Johnson's just west of the Bay Bridge.

Neither place remains. The HoJo is now some sort of medical building, and the Crossroads is an empty lot. But on those warm summer days on the way to the beach, it was definitely the place -- wait for it -- to bee.

Memoryworm

Once again I had a dream wherein I had to remember something. I was just conscious enough to puzzle it out, then recite it over and over and over in my head until I got it just right, and then I woke up.

It's kind of like an earworm, only with words instead of songs and tunes.

Anyway, for some reason I had to remember the spoken introduction to the old TV series Adventures of Superman, the one with George Reeves as Superman. I'm not sure why I had to recite this legendary opening, but I did. I worried over it, because I kept getting the very first parts wrong. I kept thinking, "Faster than a locomotive... no, that's not it. Hmm. Ah! Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive!" and then I'd move on from there, teasing the words out of the dark recesses of my memory.

Eventually I woke up, but the memoryworm stayed with me all day, poking at my mind as I tried to update a course on mortgage products. ("No wonder," I hear you cry.)

It's not all that odd that my subconscious would choose Adventures of Superman. I watched that show religiously in the 60s, when it was already in reruns. I wanted to be Lois Lane when I grew up. She was so smart! She was a reporter! I also had a crush on Clark Kent. He was so suave. Even though he was supposed to be mild mannered, I thought he was great. Of course, he always found a way to strip off his suit and glasses and leap out of the window when Superman's presence was required.

Be that as it may, I couldn't get the damn thing out of my head. So I opened up a new Word document and typed out what I remembered, without looking it up. This is what I typed:

Faster than a speeding bullet...
More powerful than a locomotive...
Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound...

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's SUPERMAN!

Yes, it's Superman, strange visitor from another planet, who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands, and who (disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper) fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way!

Then I looked it up.

HAH! So I punctuated it differently, but I got it right! Which only goes to show, I suppose, that I watched way too much TV when I was a kid.

Oh, Rob!

Well! No one gets two pats on the head!

Y'all are either too damn young or your memories are shot or you didn't watch one of the best television comedies of the 60s.

I refer, of course, to The Dick Van Dyke Show, wherein Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore play Rob and Laura Petrie. I loved this show; I still love it!

In this particular episode, Rob and Laura have a quarrel. Rob storms out of their New Rochelle rancher and goes to the movies to cool off. And the movie?

Why, it's The Guns of Navarone.

And Rob falls asleep during the show.

Unfortunately, a jewelry store nearby gets robbed while Rob's asleep in the theater. A witness recalls seeing Rob in the vicinity and fingers him as one of the crooks. Poor Rob! He's questioned by all kinds of people, from the cops to the neighbors to Laura (of course) to his coworkers, and he tells all of them that he couldn't have done it. He was at The Guns of Navarone. Naturally, they all ask him about the plot. Rob confesses that he fell asleep and doesn't know what the plot was.

And everyone exclaims incredulously:

You fell asleep during The Guns of Navarone?????

Now if you're a Seinfeld fan, you may remember the episode where Jerry and his girlfriend are trying to find a little privacy so that they can enjoy each others' company, but Jerry's folks are visiting. So they go to the movies and make out there, but that causes a big ruckus because the movie is Schindler's List.

So when Jerry tells his mother that he and his girlfriend got kicked out for making out in the movie theater, his mother exclaims incredulously:

You were making out during Schindler's List?????

Hmmmm...

Don't Ask Me Why, Because I Don't Know

Well.

Today is a weird anniversary. Thirty-five years ago today I was gang raped.

I've written about it before. I've even looked up the articles that appeared in the Washington Post when it happened; I was referred to as a "Maryland Coed." (Does anybody call female college students "coeds" anymore?)

I've gone through my Mom's collection of memorabilia and found a copy of a letter my Pop wrote to the DA praising the police officers who handled the investigation and the case. I never knew he'd written that letter, but that was my Pop.

(He did, however, give me a lug wrench that Christmas. I still have it; in fact, I used it to change my tire a couple of weeks ago. It's the only gift Pop ever gave me directly; Mom was the gift-buyer in the family.)

In spite of the fact that I've written about it before, I'm really not obsessed with it. I rarely think about it anymore -- after 35 years, it's become a footnote in my life. But a couple things stand out very very clearly in my mind.

First, I remember the feeling of absolute peace that came over me when I knew, with complete certainty, that I was going to die that night. I let go of all fear and accepted it. I remember hoping it wouldn't hurt too much, but it was a fleeting thought, a ripple in the peace.

Then -- and this has baffled my rational mind ever since -- in my head, silently on that cold, clear night, I forgave the rapists.

And that is all I will write about that.

I'm Going To War

Today is the day that Japanese war planes bombed Pearl Harbor, a day that is seared into the memory of everyone who was old enough to comprehend it. One of those people is my Mom, who was...

Well, let her tell it in her own words. I transcribed this section from her StoryCorps interview:

Well, we had been out to the movies and I had had my second child by then, a lovely boy. We'd been to the movies and when we came home my husband was listening to the radio, which he loved to do, because he claimed he could set his own stage when he listened to the radio and that television was just nonsense. You didn't bother to go out and have a screen and have somebody portray it for you; you did it for yourself, in your head, which he was very good at doing. And when we walked in he said, "Pearl Harbor's been bombed and I'm going to war." So with that announcement he immediately set out to get himself into this war, which he was gonna fight all by himself.

The Army rejected him so he went right in the Navy. And he spent his wartime in the Navy directing a group of young men who were from 18 to 20 and who were put on a ship. None of whom knew anything about a ship or how to run it or what to do on it, but the Navy ran the gun crews on our merchant ships, so he directed this group of young men on the merchant ship.

And he had many many experiences that way. For example, one of his crew fell off the side of the ship. And he was left to repair the damage -- this young man cut his face from his nose right down to his chin, and Joe had to stitch him up. He said he did pretty well until he got down to the lips and then that was very difficult. But he managed.

Fewer and fewer people are alive today who can remember this event. That's the way it is, of course. My brother says we all remember tragedy most clearly. We remember -- in great detail -- where we were and what we doing when the Towers fell; or when the students at Virginia Tech, Columbine, and Texas were murdered; or when John and Bobby and Martin were assassinated; or when the Murragh Building was bombed.

And we all say, "We will never forget!"

But eventually, the memory fades from the collective consciousness. The events become history, recounted in books or memorial plaques or made into movies. They lose their fierce and horrible immediacy, because you can't get that type of emotion and reaction from books or memorials or even movies.

Some things should not be forgotten, so we need to ask, and we need to tell, to keep the story going.

So what do you remember? What will you tell?

Snows Of Yesteryear

Ah, snow. I hear it's already snowed in various places in North America, places like Green Bay and Vancouver. Here in the greater DC metropolitan area, we got cold, nasty rain.

It's pretty hard to get excited about cold, nasty rain, especially when it's rolling down the back of your neck or when your windshield smearers aren't particularly up to snuff.

Snow, however, I can get excited about. I love it, as long as I'm home. We don't get a whole hell of a lot around here, but every few years we get hit with a doozy of a blizzard. At least, what we in the middle Atlantic temperate zone consider a blizzard.

In 1979, over President's Day weekend, a corker of a storm came through the area, dumping 19 inches of snow -- which, in this area, might as well be 19 feet of snow -- on top of an existing foot or so. I was supposed to start a new job on Tuesday, so of course I went out to the country (which is now a subdivision) to spend the weekend with a bunch of pals. The storm hit Saturday night and continued the whole next day. Way to start a new job -- a day late and slushy!

In 1983, we had another amazing snowstorm. SonnyeBoy was just a little over a year old. Again, the storm hit on Sunday night and dumped 16 feet inches of snow on us. It was so bad that the office was closed -- a real stunner for that company! We lit a fire in the fireplace, drank hot cocoa, and just snuggled up, a real Norman Rockwell family. Everything was closed. That's when I noticed that we were out of two crucial items: disposable diapers and (more importantly) coffee.

In 1996, a huge storm (Of the century! Why are they all Storms Of The Century?) dropped 17 yards inches on us. The whole city closed down; DC streets didn't get plowed for days. The kids had an entire week of snowdays. This time, when I heard the forecast, I stocked up on coffee. Luckily, we no longer had to concern ourselves with diapers.

In 2003, another 17 metric tons inches greeted us, again over President's Day weekend. I was supposed to take the train up to Philadelphia that Sunday to help with a week-long seminar. We ended up canceling it, so I didn't have to go, but I did have to call all the participants to tell them it was canceled. The folks from Minnesota were already there, of course, because 17 metric tons of snow? Piffle, say Minnesotans.

So... 2008 looms. Almost five years since the last really big storm. Uh-oh.

Minimalist Halloween

Last night, over half-priced burgers and full-priced beers, Joe said, "I guess we're not getting a pumpkin this year, are we?" And my Emergency Must Rescue Holiday hormones kicked in and I said, "Maybe we could get one on the way home! I could carve it tonight! Maybe I could pick one up tomorrow, or see about ..."

Joe intervened, just in the nick of time.

"Or we could not do anything."

And I realized I didn't really care all that much about carving up a pumpkin for the little kids in cute costumes who stop by early and the big thugs in black hoodies who stop by later. We have the candy; we have a big bowl to put it in. Minimalism, kids, minimalism.

We were actually good about Halloween decor when SonnyeBoy was small. When he was in his Punisher Is God stage I actually carved the Punisher skull into a pumpkin and did a damn good job of it. I know this because one poor tyke in some fanciful getup said, "That pumpkin is scary!"

Joe and I have put a lot of effort into costumery over the years. In college I went to a Halloween party where we were all supposed to come as concepts. One friend came as The God of A Thousand Eyes; the hostess was a calorie. I was taking a stage makeup course (such are the graduation requirements for drama majors), so I created a very lifelike, oozing, bloody gash down one side of my face. My concept? The Tragic Flaw, of course.

One year we went to a party as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Esmerelda; the short order cook at Tastee Diner recognized us right away. It was, of course, about two o'clock in the morning, so he'd probably already served several French hunchbacks and their erstwhile girlfriends by then. Another year Joe went as The Wolfman -- I glued theatrical hair all over his face and he put on Spock ears to seal the deal.

SonnyeBoy had some great costumes over the years too. He was a Ghostbuster one year, complete with backpack. Another year he was Groucho Marx (that one was my favorite, naturally). He was The Crow for a couple of years -- I got to do the makeup for that one, too. Thank goodness for clown white and black eyebrow pencil!

Now that we're old and cranky, though, we seem to have lost some of our Joie de Halloween. That's okay; I'll still put on my feathered Mardi Gras mask to dispense the Kit-Kats and Reese's cups.

I'm keeping the Snickers for myself.

If Only He'd Had A Bucket

From 1939 to 1942, the US built 13 observation towers along the Delaware shore. Soldiers in the towers used the narrow slits to search for Nazi ships and U-boats, triangulate their positions, and report them to the gunnery towers at Fort Miles at Cape Henlopen. No ships were ever sighted, but the coast was protected.

The walls are concrete, one foot thick. Inside were wooden observation platforms, accessed by ladders. One of the towers has been restored and is open to the public, but the rest are just tall concrete shells, covered with vines and home to vultures.

They were meant to last 20 years, but every single one still stands, 60 years later.

Every single year when we drove down to Ocean City for our family vacation, my Pop took the route through Delaware. It was 12 miles shorter, you see, so we got there that much faster.

Every single year, as we drove down Coastal Highway breathing in the salty sea air, we passed the tower in Fenwick Island. Every single year, Pop would point to it and say, with great gravity, "You know, a man died in that tower."

Every single year, we would gasp in horror. Every single year, one of us kids would say, "How did he die?"

And every single year, Pop would say, "He ran himself to death looking for a corner to pee in."

The Interview And A Mother Meme

But first, I saw this meme over at Bev's -- how could I not do it? I mean, it's like an order!

1. What kind of relationship do you     have with your Mom...why?

I have an excellent relationship with my mother; I always have. She can be difficult, no doubt, and she's a pro at wielding the guilt stick, but overall we have a wonderful relationship. She was always there for me when I was a kid; she dried my tears and helped me overcome a lot of pain.

And she let me run away and join the circus, despite her misgivings. How can you not love a woman like that?

2. What is one memory of her that makes you smile...why?

This is my favorite. We were at my Pop's wake. The funeral director came into the room to tell my Mom about a snafu at the cemetery -- my aunt's grave was encroaching on their double plot, which meant that there wasn't enough room for my folks to be buried side-by-side. They needed permission to dig the grave twice as deep, in order for the two to fit.

And my mother said, "After 57 years of marriage, I finally get to be on top."

I'm sure all the guest wondered why we were all roaring with laughter.

3. What is one memory you wish you could forget...why?

Unfortunately, my Pop's funeral was not a continuous laugh riot. When she first saw Pop laid out in his casket, she wept openly, touching his hands and smoothing his hair. It makes me cry every time I think about it.

4. Would you call your mother a saint? Why or Why not?

No, actually, I wouldn't call Mom a saint. She's too earthy for sainthood! But I would call her an amazing woman.

And now, voila! The StoryCorps interview, in its entirety, formatted as a podcast. It's about 35 minutes long, and it might take a minute to load, but there you go.

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