Batty for Halloween.

Hilary Clinton is the 67th United States Secretary of State. Carol. W. Greider won a 2009 Nobel science prize for her discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase. Abigail Johnson, the world’s richest woman, oversees 161 Fidelity funds with more than $650 billion in assets. Me? I mould Twizzlers onto Oreo cookies in the hope that they’ll look like Halloween bats.

It’s not rocket science I know. And I’m certainly not going to win any awards for it. But I do take the annual school Halloween bake sale with a seriousness that other woman might use to solve world peace. I do it for the kids. The suffering children (mine) deserve a bit of effort. So they can point out to their friends: “ Oh my mom did those” with pride while spending their allotted $2 on the lazy mum’s 3-minutes-to-make Rice Crispy treats, which are, apparently, a continual best seller.

This year I spent no less than one week online looking for ideas. I devoted almost an entire day to make the cupcakes. And? Eh, they’re okay. I’m certainly no Martha Stewart, she clearly belongs in the first paragraph, but they’re good enough for the 3rd grader with the discerning palate and critical eye. What I did discover online is that I am not the only woman passing up the chance to fix corporate America or go to the moon. Far from it. There are hundreds of Halloween cupcake/cake/cookie/sweet makers out there who are devoting giant chunks of their lives trying to outdo moms like me. Possibly thousands.

And so I’m proposing a truce. That next year we all get together (on Google wave, yes kids your mom knows what that is, or rather I’ve heard the word I have no idea what it actually is) and use our combined talents to do something powerful, positive and good for the planet and humanity. No buying that? Okay Biyatches. I’ll see your crappy cupcakes at the bake sale table and raise you 2010 World Cup soccer-playing spiders.

The Clap.

Sometimes you just clap. I read this in a children’s book once and it stuck. And while I could be way more happy clappy and significantly less judgmental, these words have softened my criticisms a tad. When my husband asks me to comment on an advertisement he’s making (yes he’s one of the madmen) and I don’t like it, in the past I would have said something like, “That’s shit, straight-out-of-ad-school, first-thought crapola.” Lord knows why, but this used to irritate him?? But now I just clap. And he seems to be happy enough with that. If I really like something he’s doing I just clap louder.

Family vacation stories. Just clap. Your pals are moving and you are selfishly sad. Just clap. He said/she said? Just clap for whoever is doing the saying. Your friend’s new hair-do. Clap lots. The poor dear needs it. “My Johnnie’s so smart, his teacher says he’s the cleverest kid in the class, isn’t your daughter in that class?” Clap.

But isn’t that lying? No, no, no. You have it all wrong. A clap is just that. A congrats. A well done. Bravo to you. It comes with no more commitment than that. That’s why it’s such a perfect thing.

Thanks for reading this blog. Thunderous applause.

Monday. Again.

Love

It can’t be easy being a poet. The constant search to combine verse, rhyme, reason, repetition, switch words, muddle them, pull a middle finger at grammar, check your sonnet for it’s allotted 14 lines, your onomatopoeia for musical flow, your iambic pentameter’s shoe size.

Still, this cannot be the reason, or rhyme, why so many poets are a depressed, glum, angst-ridden, alcoholic lot. Keats, Faulkner, Byron, Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe, Tennessee Williams, Hemingway, Plath, Kurt Cobain. All suffered from bouts of depression and more than a few were raging alcoholics. The list is endless.

Dr James W. Pennebaker, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, theorizes that being a published poet is a high-risk occupation. More dangerous than being a fire fighter or deep-sea diver. (Disclaimer: I found this guy on the Internet so he could in fact be a postman doubling as a professor online.) Why? Because apparently suicide rates are much higher among poets than among authors of other literary forms (whew!), as well as the general population.

Now this is a blog about a wedding. I know. So far it doesn’t seem that way. But bare with me, the connective thread is coming like a lightning bolt, or at least a small, energy-efficient light bulb.

As you know I recently went to a wedding in Africa. My daughter’s Godmother married her soul’s mate. The wedding was sublimely beautiful. But there was one part in particular that touched me.

I was a bride’s maid. Part of my duty was hanging out with the bride and drinking champagne while she dressed. Terribly hard work.
So while I drank and we chatted and I drank, I watched my friend transforming from my pretty pal in her t-shirt and slouchy pants into the most beautiful bride I have ever seen.

Eventually the bride’s father came to walk his daughter down the aisle.

I am relatively okay with words. I’m certainly no ee cummings, but I do fine with an adjective or four. But the look I saw in his eyes rendered me without any. There is no way I could describe the love one sees in a father’s eyes the first time he sees his daughter as a bride. And it dawned on me. That’s why poets are such miseries.

They’ll spend a lifetime scouring, searching, seeking in head-banging-against-a-brick-wall vain, the words to capture what they never will. And trying to ensnare that achingly naked, true moment with quill, pen or type will render them miserable, alone, with a bottle of jack smashed on the floor and pills scattered like rose petals around them.

It’s not easy being a poet. Now you know it.

A country wedding. sniff.

I had a farm in Africa.

Very briefly. And it was really more like I went to a wedding in Africa and stayed at someone else’s farm. Ahhhhhh country life. Green sprawling pools of grassy swaying things that I suspect were corn but I couldn’t be quite sure because they weren’t wrapped in plastic. Hundreds of geese of the un-canned variety. Country roses the size of poodles. Croaking frogs, birds of a feather, cows so symmetrically designed they’re obviously being groomed for Herme’s bags. My husband pointed out majestic Blue Cranes lining our pathway as we drove the long and very less traveled dirt road to the venue. I would have taken a tourist shot but was holding onto my boobs for dear life, at my age I can’t take any gravity chances.

It was beautiful, romantic, captivating, awe-inspiring and breathtaking. The hosts were ridiculously gracious, the food droolingly sublime. But, as it turns out, I’m allergic to nature. All those geese roaming free? There are 3000 of them. Not there to add postcard value, but to provide soft, feathery cuddliness for a duvet. One of my worst allergies*. All around me tiny little pollen trespassers started setting up home in my nasal passages, and why not, they had the world’s most comfortable duvets. I was sneezing, sniffing, snorting, my nose had become the Mississippi, my eyes Rosemary’s Baby’s, my head was pounding like Ozzie before the senility. Those were not flowers I dropped down the aisle but crunched up bits of tissue, a Hansel and Gretel trail of Kleenex. None of it made for a very attractive bridesmaid.

Fortunately the Bride’s mom had some meds that saved me from projectile-snotting all over the priest, so crisis averted. And the moment I got back to New York I stuck my head behind the nearest taxi and inhaled. Allergies gone. My lungs acclimatized. Thank God for pollution.

What about the bride you all shout? Because really, no one cares about a snotty, sniffy, neurotic, Woody Allen-with-girly-parts, bridesmaid. Wait. Patience my readers. That blog is next.

www.kraal.biz

* A list of my allergies: nuts, sunflower seeds, strawberries, cats, dogs, hamsters, hairy pets, pine nuts, grass, feathers, dust mites, mould, intolerance and stupidity.

I wondered, while down on my hands and knees scrubbing my toilet lid so rigorously that its enamel is pealing, if I’ve always been this scared of germs? I seem to vaguely recall a happier time in my life when I played in mud, hardly ever washed my hands, picked my nose and ate it. Those times are gone. The surgeon general, fox news, and anxious mommy blogs the world over, have instilled in me the fear of microscopic bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa. Even though I can’t see them, I know they’re there. The Clorox ad tells me so. Out, Out damn, enlarged for TV, turd-looking Escherichia coli. OUT.

And the news networks lap up your fear lector-like. “Tonight at 5, why your tomatoes could make you sick.” “This morning at 9, Is your coffee table giving you diarrhea?” “We interrupt President Obama’s speech on healthcare, to tell you that your spinach could be giving you hives.” It’s scary stuff. I certainly haven’t eaten spinach in a while. And don’t even get me started on Jalapenos.

Unfortunately I’ve passed the fear onto my children. “Bye sweetie have fun at school.” “Mom, you forgot our Purell”. What I should tell them, with a wave and a strong shove, is: “Go, be free, enjoy the grossness that is childhood, dig for gold, play in the mud, hug your friends.” Alas, seconds before I set them out on the world, I remember that their friend had a runny nose yesterday and I lather them up. I certainly don’t want them bringing any germy hitchhikers home. I just spent 2 hours cleaning the toilet.