My loves,
“Be present.
Make love. Make tea. Avoid small talk. Embrace conversation.
Buy a plant, water it.
Make your bed.
Make someone else’s bed.
Have a smart mouth and a quick wit.
Run.
Make art. Create.
Swim in the ocean. Swim in the rain.
Take chances. Ask questions. Make mistakes.
Learn.
Know your worth.
Love fiercely. Forgive quickly.
Let go of what doesn’t make you happy.
Grow.”
~Paulo Coelho
Enjoy your holidays with wild abandon. Why not?
xox
| synonyms: | problem, difficult question, difficulty, quandary, dilemma; |
“I have a real conundrum”, was how he answered my standard nightly inquiry which goes something like this:
Me: “How was your day?”
Husband: “It was (fill in the blank).”
Usually, he says “good.” Other times I can tell by his face that I shouldn’t ask. More often than not there’s a story or a funny anecdote that starts a conversation that carries us through dinner.
But never, in the almost seventeen years I’ve asked the question has it been answered this way.
“Wow, really? A conundrum. What happened?”
He hedged.
I don’t like hedging. Hedging makes me anxious.
“I’ll feed the dog,” he volunteered.
When it comes to eating our dog is probably a lot like yours. Since she comprehends any sentence that has the word food or feed or treat in it — the “spinning around the kitchen” phase of the evening begins as she excitedly waits for her dish to be prepared.
“Come on! Tell me what’s up!” I urged as he shoveled kibble into warm water.
When he bent down to give our whirling dervish her dinner, I spotted some residual unsteadiness left over from the bout of vertigo he’s been battling for the past couple of weeks.
Slowly, he came back to standing, leaning on the kitchen counter directly across from me.
Those corners in the kitchen, those are sacred. Over the years they have become our preferred conversation spots.
If I think about it, almost every conversation, big or small, has a least started in those corners.
We may shift back and forth while we prepare dinner but it all begins in those corners.
If things get tense, we maintain our distance, like fighters in the ring.
But I have laughed my ass off and been flooded with tears (often at the same time) in the corners of our kitchen.
We hug a lot there too.I don’t know why, but kitchen corners are conducive to hugging.
Anyway, it took a while for him to explain.
“I wanted to get you a tree,” he said looking at me sheepishly.
“I wanted to surprise you…with a Christmas tree.”
“What?”
You see, since we met, Christmastime at our house can be…complicated.
For me, it is the BEST time of year. You can find me Ho, Ho, Ho-ing my way through December.
For my husband—not so much. No, No, No-ing is more like it for him.
It could be due to his horrible, Jesuit boarding school, Oliver Twisted childhood—no one knows for sure.
All I DO know is that Christmas can be a minefield, a subject we have litigated into the ground only to come away without any reasonable solution as to how we can navigate without blowing somebody up.
If you read my last blog post you know that I’ve decided to go treeless this year. It was a compromise I’ve never been willing to make—until no——made easy by some brilliantly timed post-holiday travel.
In an act of holiday self-care (which,I highly recommend for everyone) I decorated my sister’s tree on Tuesday which was a fix for this Christmas Junkie.
So, I’m good with it. Really.
And that’s the part that confused him.
He continued, “On Monday, I finally felt up to driving to that awesome nursery where we saw those live trees,” he said.
“The ones with the silver needles you like?
He could see the bewildered expression on my face but he kept going.
“So I had it in the back of my van and I was going to set it up this morning…until I read your blog.”
I still wasn’t following so he continued.
“You said you were happy that you didn’t have a tree. That you liked the ease and simplicity…”
“Well, yeah…but…”
“So I drove back there to return it, but they don’t take back Christmas trees.” I could see a look of chagrin trying to hide behind his sexy, white beard.
I started to laugh. “What? No you didn’t!”
“Yep,” he said, starting to see the humor. “You are the proud owner of a living, silver pine tree which has been driven all over hell and back the past two days and is now lurking in the back of my van trying not to feel rejected.”
“Awwwwww, come on! You did not!” My eyes filled with tears as I launched myself into his arms. I told you those corners were for hugging.
“Lemme see him!” I squealed.
“I’m sorry.” He nuzzled his face in my neck. “I just can’t seem to get it right.”
“Don’t be sorry. Ya did good.”
Sometimes when you let something go. Like really let it go with no residual bullshit–it hunts you down and lurks in a van in your driveway.
Bible.
Carry on,
xox
Hi All,
Recently, at the urging of my BFF, who sent me an email with six words: You need to submit to them — I dropped everything and submitted a short piece on my relationship with my tits, more specifically the contraptions that house them—bras. It was a fundraising event for a worthy cause, THE YWCA-GCR’s 7th ANNUAL BraVa! —an event held at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, located in Troy N.Y., that raises money and awareness for women in need. This event was bra/binder specific so they wanted stories, songs, and poems from women of all ages regarding our personal relationship with our bras. As you can imagine, I had a lot to say!
Three weeks later I was notified that my essay had been chosen to be read at their event. Hazzah! But since I had a scheduling conflict I couldn’t do it myself. F*#k! I mean…you know me so you know I died a thousand deaths over not being able to read this myself to a room full of rowdy women.
Anyhow, here it is, in all its glory, my essay on tits and their bras. If you’re a man, I’m sorry. But for extra cool points I think you should show this to your wife, girlfriend, or daughter—they’ll totally get it.
Carry on,
xoxJ
Every woman has a relationship with her bra.
Mine started as the pipe dream of a flat-chested seventh-grader who wanted more than anything to wear a bra. You see, Debbie had transferred to our school. And like some rare, exotic creature from a faraway land called The Bay Area, Debbie exposed me to the foreign notion that a girl my age could be “sophisticated”.
That she could frost her lips with Yardley’s Slicker Lip, wear shoes other than Mary Janes with her uniform, and gosh darn it, she could wear a bra!
It was 1970. Every Catholic schoolgirl worth her salt couldn’t wait to hit seventh grade and shed the shackles of the bibbed uniform. Bibs were for babies and we were seasoned twelve-year-olds. Young ladies. Women. Who were able to overlook having to wear the same thing every day, because the promised land of seventh grade promised the long-awaited liberation of a white blouse and a plaid skirt.
The wardrobe equivalent of the ‘adult’s table,’ at Thanksgiving, it carried with it all the cache you can imagine.
Enter Debbie, from the Bay Area. And her Brassier.
No longer content with the hint of a camisole or tank top under my white blouse, I wanted a proper bra strap to show. A wide one with at least one, preferably two, hook and eye closures in the back. You know, like all the sophisticated twelve-year old’s were wearing.
Unsurprisingly, I had a mother who pronounced Debbie “precocious”. She urged me to slow down. Enjoy being a kid. I was the oldest of three and she wasn’t ready to succumb to the realization that puberty was right around the corner. Nevertheless, after caving to the pressure of my constant begging, she took me bra shopping. Giddy with glee, I walked into the store imagining myself leaving with a bra, only to be told by the saleswoman that there was “one thing missing” — I had no breasts! Exchanging conspiratorial glances with my mother, she assured me that things would change and handed me a ‘training bra’. Similar in every way to a camisole, a training bra is a cotton consolation prize. A participation trophy for having the guts to walk in demanding a bra when you’ve got no tits.
Now, before you start feeling sorry for me, rest assured—my boobs came in.
And when they did they were… gigantic.
At a certain point in my mid-twenties, because my breasts had started to migrate out the top and sides of my Sears bra, I went to a fancy department store for a professional fitting by a retired ice skating judge from East Germany. Ulla, in front of my horrified BFF, pushed, pulled, moved, and measured my girls in ways I could have never imagined. Once she determined I’d been sufficiently mortified, she pronounced my cup size to be somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, charged me more than a fancy steak dinner for two brassieres—and sent me on my way.
From that moment until I turned sixty, all I wanted was to ditch the ugly beige, underwire, old lady bras, with cups the size of pasta bowls, that can stand in the corner by themselves. All I dreamed of in my thirties, forties, and fifties, was going free-range. Wearing a teeny tiny tank top or a pale pink flowered camisole with spaghetti straps instead of the wide, steel cables that nestled into the pre-existing grooves in my shoulders that have been worn there by decades of heavy lifting.
Now, at sixty-five, with my breasts at the mercy of gravity for decades, I’ve entered the realm of radical self-acceptance. I’m finally happy with my bra, size 38 DDD LONG.
I get it. Everyone wants bigger breasts, and while this may sound cliche, I caution you—be careful what you wish for and always, always be grateful for what you have.
“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough, and what might seem a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.” ~ Lemoney Snicket
Sunday morning dawned not with its usual slothful inertia, but with the same flurry of activity that had swarmed around me since he’d been admitted to Cedars Sinai late Saturday night. An endless stream of texts and phone calls double-teamed me, rendering me all at once distracted, informed, comforted, and overwhelmed.
In a nutshell, after a week of spiking fevers, some as high as 102.6 degrees, at the urging of our indispensable doctor friend, Jeff, Raphael had finally agreed to stop under-reacting, and “Just go to the damn emergency room!” Thursday he’d been put on a pretty gnarly antibiotic but not much had improved. Come to find out, the bacteria that had spent the week ravaging his immune system was antibiotic-resistant. Cue the BIG GUNS. A drug so strong it took seven doctors to reach consensus to even prescribe it. It had to be given as an IV drip and his blood and urine had to be monitored. Around the clock. For at least the first three days of the nine-day treatment.
So much for the quickie emergency room visit we both believed would chew up maybe two hours of his Saturday afternoon.
Clearly, we are two of the most clueless Pollyanna’s you’d ever have the misfortune to know. We also believe ice cream is good for you, dogs understand English, and the truth will always prevail. When you look up the word naive in the dictionary you see a picture of the two us, accompanied by the sound of uproarious laughter.
Anyhow, it was all so unexpected and laden with fuckery that by Sunday morning I was feeling a bit…unmoored. So, you ask, what do I do when I feel like that?
Buy donuts.
Into Ralph’s I marched, wallet and keys in hand. Laser focused as I strode down the aisle, past the produce, past the dairy section, looking for…what was I looking for? Head down, reading a text that was attempting to explain something unexplainable to anyone without a medical degree, I suddenly remembered why I was there—donuts. Pivoting in place, I swung a hasty 180— promptly knocking over a free standing display of Peet’s coffee that only a few seconds before had been loitering there, minding its own business. Shit, shit, shit, shit! Laying on its side, its guts spilled everywhere, it shamed me as I bent over to pick up all the bags of Peet’s.
Get your head in the game, Janet! It sneered.
Get off your phone!
Slow down!
Pay attention!
You’re acting like the sky is falling, Chicken Little.
He’s fine!
That’s when I noticed the additional set of hands helping me pick up the mess on aisle five.
“Oh, thank you, I’m so clumsy,” I said, just assuming the hands belonged to a store employee.
I could not have been more wrong.
Down on my knees, my hands filled with Peet’s, I looked up and smiled directly into the face of—a scary clown.
SERIOUSLY! A SCARY CLOWN!
There we were, ten thirty on a Sunday morning, and a woman over six feet tall, wearing a bright orange wig, her face painted like the joker, was helping me pick up coffee!
Me: dropping the coffee—Holy shit! You’re a scary clown!
SC: I am.
Me: Well, thank you…scary clown…for…wait…how are you a scary clown?
SC: smiling through painted black tears— Because sometimes scary clowns are there when you need ‘em.
MIC DROP
Scooping up the remaining bags of coffee, my brain surged into overdrive. How…why…what…huh?
Satisfied that the Peet’s coffee display would live to sell another bag, I brushed myself off and looked around only to watch the back of scary clown leave aisle five. “Thanks again!” I yelled, muttering the rest under my breath, “…freakin’ Sunday morning scary clown.
I think we can all agree, my life is absurd.
A random series of magical realities strung together like gumdrops, embellishing the Christmas tree that masquerades as my life.
Super deep universal truths delivered by scary clowns in supermarkets are absurd.
An antibiotic resistant bacteria that plays hide and seek for a week is absurd!
So is hospital food and compression socks and showers with non-existent water pressure.
So is fear. Fear is absurd.
It’s all a fucking clown show my friends—but it’s my life.
Carry on,
Xox JB
Friends,
Angels? Do you believe they walk among us? I sure do!
Read this and see what you think.
xox
As we rushed out through the smokey maze of the Casino at the old Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, it suddenly hit me that he had once again forgotten to give me my show bonus. The monetary incentive he used to physically wring me dry.
The realization stopped me in my tracks.
F*#&!
We had just finished a week-long, Estate Jewelry Show.
I was bone tired from being on my feet for over twelve hours a day—in heels, and to add insult to injury, our plane reservation left us no time to eat before the flight home, so to top it all off—I was hangry.
In other words—I was in NO mood for any fuckery!
We had grossed over one million dollars—in a week. The two of us. And I was about to fly home empty-handed, once again.
You see, I had a boss who hated to pay me. He just did.
And no carefully scripted notes or heartfelt talks, or angry outbursts on my part had done anything to change that.
I had coached him repeatedly on the merits of showing respect. It wasn’t difficult, all he had to do was pay me. And not make me ask for my money, which I HATED.
What would this be, the third time that day I’d had to ask him for my money? I was quite familiar with this humiliating power play, and I was sick of it! Listen, I had done everything I could think of to sidestep this idiocy! Even after years of his bonus structure consisting of whatever loose cash he had in his pocket, not his fat, overstuffed money clip mind you—but his pocket change, I had won one hard-fought battle by finally getting him to agree to a pre-set bonus amount.
“Why are you stopping?” he bellowed back at me impatiently. His aluminum wheelie suitcase, a rectangular R2D2, skipped from wheel to wheel, trying to keep its balance. I could’ve sworn it looked in my direction with a help me face.
He continued his frantic march through the casino toward the door.
“I’d love to get my bonus before we leave?” I asked for the third time, running to keep up. I knew that if I let it slide, even for a day or two, the odds of getting it would become so slim even a Vegas bookie would pass on that bet.
I wasn’t sure he’d heard me until in one fluid motion, he swung to the right, deftly executing a wide, sweeping, u-turn back in my direction. Still in motion, he reached into his murse (man purse) and dumped a handful of gambling chips in my direction. Surprised, I reached out with both hands in time to catch most of them. Several of them did make a break for it, the slippery little buggers rolling on their sides underneath the dollar slots nearby.
“That should cover it,” He insisted. “Now hurry up, we don’t want to miss our plane.”
I stood there red-faced and flabbergasted, knowing that he’d left me no time to cash them in. Quickly, I shoved the chips in my purse and proceeded to get down on my hands and knees to see if I could retrieve the ones that had made their escape.
A pot-bellied, middle-aged woman, with a cigarette with two inches of ash precariously dangling from her lipstick-stained lips, was straddling two stools in front of three slot machines. Without ever looking away from the rapidly rotating numbers she was counting on to change her life, her foot kicked the chips my way, like a bedroom-slippered hockey stick.
“Uh, thanks” I mumbled, crawling around on the ground in my skirt and heels, totally in awe of her unbroken focus.
“Janet, let’s go!” He chided from inside the automatic revolving glass exit doors before turning right to join the cab line.
I could hear the damn plastic chip clattering together in my bag as I ran to catch my flight back to LA.
In the hour it took to get from Vegas to Los Angeles, I began to seethe with rage.
Not only had he made me repeatedly beg him for money he had literally thrown poker chips at me in lieu of my bonus! I had never felt so disrespected. In. My. Life.
I don’t know about you, but when I get in touch with that level of anger, I have a tendency to burst into flames tears.
Hunched down in my middle seat toward the back of the plane, I cried and cried and cried. Big, wet, sloppy tears.
I decided I would rather die, covered in honey and tied on an anthill than take the prearranged ride home to Park La Brea with him and his wife. What I knew for sure was that someone was going to die if I got in that car with him. And I was way too overdressed to spend a night in jail.
As we exited the terminal, the crowd spitting us out onto the curb, I spotted his wife’s car to the left. Without making a sound, (or so much as an indecent hand gesture) I made a beeline to the right, jumping into a single cab that just happened to be waiting there for me.
The moment the door shut and we pulled away—I freaking lost it.
I began to ugly cry, complete with gasping for breath and rivers of snot running down my face.
There I was, trapped in a horrible working situation with no solution in sight. What do you do when you ask someone repeatedly to treat you with respect and they blatantly disregard that request?
I know what you’re thinking, quit! But I couldn’t. I had the kind of career everyone wanted. Travel, great pay, jewelry, prestige. Which led to a lot of financial obligations, AND I was thirty-seven and single. Wahhhhhhhhhhhh. That sad truth made me cry even harder.
As we wound our way through the late-night traffic on LaCienega, I spotted the dark, soulful eyes of the cab driver, staring at me in the rearview mirror. His deep brown skin, white turban, and singsongy accent gave away his country of origin. India.
“Beautiful lady, why you cry?” He cooed.
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, I’m just feeling so sad,” I boo-hooed. “I don’t know what to do.”
I watched his eyes search my face in the mirror as I inadvertently wiped snot into my hair with the back of my hand.
“Beautiful lady, don’t be sad, it can’t be that bad,” he murmured in his soothing, heavily accented voice.
“Ohhhhhhh it is, I think I hate my boss…he doesn’t show me any respect…he paid me with…”
I started to wail. Loudly. “With, with, poker chiiiiiiiiiiiiips!”
I grabbed a couple out of my bag and tossed them onto the front seat for dramatic effect.
“Beautiful lady, you have God’s respect and that’s all that matters.”
“Really? I mean, I guess…”
At that moment, the cab came to a slow, rolling stop in front of my high-rise apartment building.
Since I had cried the entire ride home, he had to wait as I scavenged around in my bag for cab fare. In the meantime, the lovely man retrieved my suitcase from where I had launched it, the driver’s side backseat, opened my door, and wheeled my bag inside the lobby, depositing it in front of the elevator doors. When he returned to the cab, I had composed myself enough to hand him his fare, including a generous tip for being such a good listener.
“Here you go, thank you for being so kind to me,” I said sheepishly through the tissue that was attempting to wrangle my false eyelashes back into place.
“Oh no beautiful lady, you keep that. This ride is on me.”
And before I could even argue with him, he pulled away into the dark Los Angeles night. As I watched his tail lights fade into the distance, I realized a couple of things that were not normal. And they gave me goosebumps.
They still do.
Number one: I never told him where I lived!
I just got in the cab and fell apart while he drove me home — to Park La Brea, a literal labyrinth of apartments, turnabouts, and one-way streets. My friends refuse to pick me up lest they never find their way out. Even with my best directions, many a cab driver has made a wrong turn and been spit back out onto Wilshire Boulevard.
Number two: There are ten high rises inside that complex. How is it that he had managed to navigate all the twists and turns and one-way streets and deposit me right at my door?
I’ll answer that. He was an angel. My angel. Plain and simple.
When I finally managed to come out of my stupor, slowly walking inside the lobby, I noticed he had propped the elevator doors open with my bag. Getting inside I was stunned to discover he’d also pushed the button to the ninth floor!
My floor! How did he know?
I really, truly believe that angels are everywhere and only show themselves when we need them.
THAT is the story of my Angel in a Turban.
Carry on,
Xox
“Miracles can happen, even to those who are small, flammable, and dressed all in black.”
― Lemony Snicket
Friends, I just found out like, last week, that my life fits into a literary genre — Magical Realism.
And being someone who never wants to fit into anything, ever—as it turns out, I may have to admit that the writing world may have figured me out. You see, within a work of magical realism, life is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world. Magical realism blurs the line between fantasy and reality (with a straight face—my words).
See what I mean? Then when you add some snark and a bit of humor you have…well…me.
Most of the writers I know write memoir. When I thought about my memoir, I was immediately reminded of this blog and all of the posts about the crazy shit that has happened, and continues to happen to me. And you know what? Those damn genre mavens were right! My memoir would actually sit comfortably on the shelf next to any work of magical realism!
I’ve been working on two magical realism novels, and much to my own amazement, all I’ve had to do is draw on my own experiences to give them the magic.
Looking back has given me the opportunity to recall all the events, places, people, and thousands of essays from my past. And when I sat down to remember, this was just one of many wild stories culled from my own life of mystical realism that came to mind.
Stay tuned, I’ll post more…
If you recall, I was having a hard time of it back in the early nineties.
I had a good life. Great job, money, travel, the whole shebang, but I had opened myself up to a very life-altering spiritual experience – awakening is a better word, and it had knocked me on my ass in every way imaginable.
With one foot on terra firma and the other one in god-knows-where, I was having a hell of a time staying grounded. Which has its own set of problems. Lost and alone in a world of my own making, I was completely void of humor, whimsy, or any other emotions besides fear and loathing. In other words, I found NO joy in life.
“If this is enlightenment, you can have it!” I’d yell to anyone who would listen.
It is my belief, garnered from the very extensive and exhaustive study of ME and my years of data; that in the midst of an up-leveling (as I like to call it) the Universe, in order to keep you in the game, lays a red carpet studded with mystical miracles at your feet. And in a blatant display of showoffery, these mystical experiences are so IN YOUR FACE that as whacked out and pissed off as you’ve become – you can’t miss them.
So, here’s how this one went down: I was a wacko with a big job, on my way to work a weekend jewelry show. Seeking joy in whatever way I could, I stopped at a drugstore along my route to get some Carefree peppermint gum, my favorite at the time, It came in a hurt-your-eyes, bright yellow package, with twenty-four sticks of minty yumminess. It was one of the few things that made me happy, so of course, the drugstore was out of it. Deciding nothing else could assuage my surly disposition, I left, gum-less and grumpy.
I pulled onto LaCienega Blvd. and waited at the light directly across from the Beverly Center. As I sat there, stewing in my own misery, I heard the radio blaring in the car to the left of me. Even with my windows up, it was unmistakable. Rod Stewart’s song Have I Told You Lately That I Love You. Annoyed, I shot the two young men with questionable musical taste, my best exasperated, too cool for school, are you fucking kidding me, stink eye. In response, the one sitting in the passenger seat motioned for me to roll down my window.
Did I mention they looked like a couple of angels who’d walked straight out of the pages of GQ?
It was West Hollywood in the nineties. All the men who looked like that batted for the other team, so, I just assumed they were going to ask me for directions.
Deciding to comply, I rolled down my window at the longest red light in history, and the beautiful GQ model/angel reached out to hand me something. I know I was wearing my resting-bitch-face as I pulled my whole body halfway out the window to be able to reach my arm far enough to take what he was so intent on giving me.
And there it was. Wrapped in a bright yellow wrapper. A stick of my favorite Carefree Peppermint Gum!
I kid you not.
I sat there slackjawed, holding the gum, while the drivers behind me began to honk. Apparently, in magical realism, life goes on. The light had been green for a second already. These real people were very important. And my magic was making them late.
The two smiley guys pulled ahead, the Rod Stewart song still hanging in the air like cheap perfume.
If you know that section of LaCienega heading south, you know there are several lights in quick secession that are synced up in such a way that they are perpetually red. It’s a sadistic joke, and if I hadn’t been on my quest for joy via some gum —I would have avoided it at all costs.
So, in less than a minute, I find myself stopped next to my new best friends. I glance over to find them still smiling so broadly, the whiteness of their teeth hurt my eyes. Meanwhile, Rod was still singing about how much he wanted me to know he loved me, and the entire scene was so ridiculous I’m surprised I was composed enough to remember my manners and mouth a quick Thank You while holding up the gum.
For three lights we stopped next to each other and they smiled and Rod sang. Until they finally turned left. Either the song had finished or they were embarrassed that they had given me their last piece of gum.
Okay, so, I added that to my growing list of things too weird to mention—and told no one. Which was no big hairy deal seeing that I had turned so dark and flammable at that point, dressing all in black with pennies in my shoes to ground me, that I don’t think anyone was taking me or anything I had to say very seriously anyway.
And here comes the plot twist.
After doing the show in Santa Monica for three days, when I got back to the shop I went about my usual mindless tasks, one of them being to check the answer machine. It was the early nineties, remember? Cell phones were the size and weight of bricks. We all had answer machines and the one that day at work told me it was full.
Machine Full—73 messages, it read for the first time ever.
Jeez. Okay. Must be some kind of jewelry emergency!
Press Play.
Have I told you lately that I love you?
Have I told you there’s no one else above you?
Fill my heart with gladness
Take away all my sadness
Ease my troubles that’s what you do
Yep. Rod Stewart, THAT song. Every message. All 73. Until the tape ran out.
Explain that away. You can’t because it’s magical realism! Boom!
Xox Carry on
Tell me about your miracles!
I couldn’t figure it out at first…
Apparently, Maria, our beloved, devout Catholic, long suffering housekeeper of over twenty years, who has tolerated, but WILL NOT touch, move, or dust our collection of nudes, or fish with tits—has somehow, just learned the word FUCK.
And since, as a friend of mine observed, our house is an actual fuck store, Maria is APPALLED—as evidenced by her silent protest which I’ve immortalized on my Insta page — @jbertolus.
Mia Culpa dear Maria
All of this reminded me of her backstory, a viewer favorite from 2017.
xox
Enjoy!
Our house is a maze of contradictions so, how can I blame Maria for being confused?
Maria is a our once-a-week housekeeper.
She came along with all the motorcycles, cars and dogs; in other words, the menagerie that was my husband’s dowry of sorts when we got married.
Now, after all these years of cleaning my toilet, and going through my medicine cabinet, and that drawer next to the bed—Maria qualifies as family.
She has to be. She is the keeper of all of our secrets.
And like any self respecting family member, she screws up and I want to kill her—here’s why: For the life of her, she cannot tell the difference between trash and a treasure.
I collect little pieces of nature which I’m lucky enough to find all around our property. Assorted nests, abandoned beehives in the eaves, fallen branches filled with hummingbird nests, heart shaped rocks, found scraps of paper, and even dollar bills with cryptic messages scrawled on them that I’m sure are just for me. I’ve stumbled upon old skeleton keys, petrified tree pods, pinecones, old worm wood, even animal skulls, bones and teeth.
Then I go out to flea markets and various other secret haunts to deliberately look for this kinda stuff. Afterwards, I cart home my finds to live among the seashells and rocks, beach glass and mermaids.
I also collect cool, rusty old metal mermaids.
And shiny. I can’t resist sparkly, shine stuff.
A sparkly mermaid would render me speechless with joy.
Then I go about artistically displaying all of my found treasures around the house on tables and bookshelves—as art.
I found them, I love, them, and I want to look at them everyday.
Saturday is the day Maria comes. It is a day of bittersweet agony.
The house smells of lemon pledge, Murphy’s oil soap and all things holy. It is spick and span’d within an inch of it’s life.
THAT is the sweet.
Now for the bitter.
Maria does not appreciate my taste in art. The woman is convinced I am batshit crazy.
For instance, I have the most realistic looking pair of ceramic fortune cookies displayed in my kitchen. I used to move them around at will. Sometimes they lived on the shelf next to the cookbooks, other times over by the oils and salts next to the stove.
Then, one Saturday night, I noticed they were missing. Did she break them? She has broken so many things—irreplaceable, expensive things—yet, she remains—because she’s family. Her habit, after she breaks something into a million pieces, is to put all the bits on a napkin, or if at all possible, prop it up, waiting to be discovered. In other words, she doesn’t dispose of it.
Still, my instincts told me to check the trash. There they were, outside in the black bin, my ceramic fortune cookies completely intact at the bottom of a plastic Gap Bag filled with vacuum cleaner hazarai .
When I asked her in my broken Spanish about it the following week, she looked at me as if I were wearing an Iguana as a hat, and carefully chose two words: STALE. TRASH.
For weeks she threw them away, until I finally was able to convince her they were…art.
My sweet Maria tries so hard to grasp this concept.
I get it. Nests, (even thought I’ve sprayed them with clear polyurethane) are hard to dust, animal skulls are supposed to be buried, and crumpled paper with sociopathic looking scrawl on it—well that’s just trash!
She has even put the five or six cryptic dollar bills I’ve collected IN MY WALLET. Where I’ve pulled them out and almost tipped a valet—with my own treasured art.
Last spring in Santa Barbara, I found an abandoned, giant bird’s nest. It is a masterpiece. A gift from God. Stiff with shellac, yet extremely delicate, I have it displayed in a place of prominence—as art. Nature’s art.
As many times as I’ve asked her not to, begged her to just skip over it; I know she picks it up and dusts because I find pieces of it which look suspiciously like random twigs, in the trash.
“It’s okay” I tell her, “Please don’t touch this, I’ll live with a little dust”.
But she cannot help herself—it’s not art to her, it’s a table full of dirty wood. And so the nest—my treasure—is dwindling away.
My collectables have confused her to the point that she leaves crumpled paper (legitimate trash) right where she finds it, and asks if she can throw away an overripe peach. I just have to laugh.
I have to mention the real art. The nudes. I collect vintage and current photographs and paintings of female (and one male) nudes.
To her that is Not art. It is pornography.
She does not go near them. She cannot bring herself to touch them, I can tell by the inch of dust they accumulate until I get around to dusting them.
And by-the-way, a mermaid is an abomination. It is topless fish. A dusty fish with tits.
To Maria, one thing is clear. I’m an iguana wearing pervert, who likes to collect trash, pornography, bones that should be buried, and stale food—and call it art.
And while I am certain she owns a Jesus painted on black velvet, that makes it easier to forgive her. Becuase art is subjective.
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Carry on,
xox
“What beliefs of yours are running your show?” ~ Somebody smarter than me
He snuck up behind me, his footsteps muffled by his baby blue crocks.
“What makes them magic wands?” He asked in an accusatory-tone more suited for a courtroom. Startled not only by his stealthy approach but also by the question, which oddly enough had, up until that moment gone unasked, I was unsure of how to begin. I mean, much like the punchline of a joke, if you have to explain it—the funny or the magic in this case, is lost.
“I suppose it’s the belief that they are that makes them so,” I replied, arranging the brightly painted pink and red wands of magic in the bucket.
He mumbled a few more pearls-of-jackassery like, “you’re crazy,” and “there’s no such thing,” as he shuffled away.
“Just so you know, dude, I’ve been called gullible, woo-woo, or a Pollyanna my entire life so you’re coming at me with a dull knife when you call me crazy. And for someone like me who’s spent most of their adult life believing in the unseen, things like magic wands require no explanation. They just are. Besides, folks who wear crocks outside of a hospital, restaurant kitchen, or garden have lost their right to judge others—I don’t make the rules!”
THAT was my imaginary response. In reality I said nothing.
So that happened three years ago when the bucket of wands was a summer staple in our front yard.
Kids and their parents would come from far and wide to take home those spiky little reminders of magic in the world. And because magic pays dividends, they left sweet cards and homemade thank you notes scribbled in crayon and all was right with the world, that is, until some soulless, shell-of-a-human-being took umbrage and stole the entire bucket of wands—not just once—but three times!
I tried like hell to remain not bitter but I failed. For three years, I refused to wand-up the hood.
Fuck it! I thought. Besides, all the kids are grown (they weren’t), all the magic is gone (it wasn’t) and anyway, I’m too busy for this shit (straight-up lie). But y’all, by the time the unreasonable facsimile for summer 2020 rolled around, I decided that if any year needed a bucket of fucking magic wands, it was this one! Only this time I went old school, leaving them in their natural state because I was out of paint and I think it was Jesus who once said,
“Wands are magic, no matter what color they are… Amen.”
Cut to: a couple of days ago, while I was in the front yard cutting the last few remaining stalks, a lovely, middle-aged woman tapped me on the shoulder interrupting the podcast about love, (yet another unseen force I fully subscribe to) that was playing in my ear. “I love that you’re doing the wands again!” she said, “I still have mine from a few years back!”
“You do?” I was truly impressed. Many others who’ve been gifted wands from me, told me that they eventually wither and die—albeit a very magical death. I’ve been told that if you mulch them the dust grows a unicorn. Again, I don’t make the rules.
“What do you call these flowers?” she asked.
“Agapanthus,” I replied.
“And is this the color they turn when they die?” She was twirling a green one in-between two fingers, admiring it like a fine glass of wine.
“Uh, well, they start off with blue flowers on the end and when those fall off I cut them and make them a wand…and then they die,” I answered.
“Well I have to tell you,” she moved closer to me so I could hear her whisper through her mask, “I don’t know if you believe in this kind of stuff, but I’ve experienced a miracle with my wands.”
I tilted my head to the side, not sure if I’d heard her correctly. Don’t believe this kind of stuff? Lady, I fill a bucket with dead agapanthus stalks and label them magic wands, I think that puts my freak flag about as high up the pole as it gets.
“Tell me more!” I said aloud.
“So, I have two of your magic wands and I’ve kept them alive for three years in a vase of water. The color hasn’t faded a bit which I’ve come to believe is a miracle, don’t you agree?”
I nodded. OMG. Was she for real?
“I’ve been so impressed by the fact that they’re still alive that I even took the purple one to Cedar’s when my mom was getting her chemotherapy. She improved so dramatically that everyone, even all of the nurses and doctors, were convinced it was the magic wand!”
Is she serious, she really thinks the purple and red are the natural colors? Colors like that are found in spray cans, not nature! How do I tell the crazy lady that it’s PAINT. Not a miracle. PAINT!
Holy Tin Foil Hat, what a nut!
“Anyway, I love that I got to meet you and thank you personally,” she chirped. And with that, the mother ship shot down a beam of light and transported her back to…wait, would you just look at me—I thought she was a kook because she believed in miracles! Nevertheless, I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.
I can’t be sure, but it appeared her belief in the extraordinary eclipsed even my own—and I’d turned into the crocks guy!
Carry on,
xox JB
Hello loves,
Yesterday, the analytics informed me that the algorithms had decided, that this ranks as the MOST read post since 2020 when Covid hit—so I thought you may enjoy a reprise.
Carry on,
xoxJ
“I have been so mean to my body, outright hateful. I disparage her and call her names. I loathe parts of her and withhold care. I insist on physical standards she can never reach, for that is not how she is made, but I detest her weakness for not pulling it off. No matter what she accomplishes, I’m never happy with her.”
~Jen Hatmaker Fierce, Free and Full of Love
In the ‘before-times’, right before Covid rocked our reality, I was listening to Jen Hatmaker’s book while on my morning walks with Ruby, our six-year-old boxer who, ironically enough, has the body confidence of a super-model. Most of the book had me laughing. Other parts had me shaking my fist at Audible for the fact that I couldn’t dogear a particular page, or highlight every other paragraph with yellow marker.
Like the one above.
This one stopped me in my tracks. It had me fumbling to hit rewind while juggling a full bag of poop (Ruby’s) all while eliciting deep unexpected sobs of recognition—in public. Sort of.
If you’d questioned me about my own body image a week earlier I’d have rated it as ‘pretty good’. Then I heard Jen wrestle with her own emotions while reading her extremely vulnerable admissions without choking on her own snot. Seriously. She did a far better job at keeping the full-blown ugly crying at bay than I did.
I too had been hateful.
I’d set unattainable standards.
I’d done all of the shitty stuff you can do to a body and as I’ve aged, I may have even been guilty of cranking up the volume on the insults.
Crepey skin, burgeoning neck waddle, old lady pillow tummy, ugh, HOW IS THIS MY BODY?
The five stages of grief were quickly overtaking me.
Denial— (Catches own reflection in storefront window) That’s not me, it can’t be. That’s my mother!
Anger— (Age spots appear as if by magic) Seriously? You’ve GOT to be kidding me!
Bargaining— If I drink the celery juice can I eat nothing but carbs on the weekends?
Depression— I feel bad about my boobs which are now a pair of 38 longs.
But I hadn’t quite gotten to the acceptance stage. Until I heard the words she wrote. THAT changed everything for me.
I apologized to my body. Profusely. Every morning and every night.
I saw her for what she was, my ally, not my enemy.
I looked at all the evidence and discovered she has ONLY EVER had my best interests at heart.
So, I started to lavish her with praise, compliments, and love. After a while, it became a habit.
Then the pandemic hit and being over sixty, I was considered to be at higher risk of complications so I upped my little ritual to include extreme gratitude for my continued good health.
Every morning when I woke up, I’d thank her for her stamina on the hikes, her cheerful disposition in the face of looming uncertainty, and her strong immune system. And as the Covid numbers in Los Angles rose, I assured her that even if she caught it, I wouldn’t hold it against her, on the contrary, we would fight it together and she would be fine.
It reminded me of experiments researchers have done with water and plants, the ones where they verbally abuse them or shower them with praise —and then study the results—which are astounding.
The ones that are praised, thrive, while the ones that are subjected to hateful speech/emotions, literally wither and die.
Which brings me to yesterday and my fall down the stairs.
Well, I didn’t so much fall, as get pulled down the flight of concrete steps by Ruby. To be fair, she’d spotted a discarded half-eaten cheese sandwich at the bottom, and who among us hasn’t lost their mind and sprinted toward cheese? Nevertheless, it happened too fast to even let go of the leash so I was knocked on my ass and pulled down the entire flight of stairs on my back until I managed to get her to stop—by yelling STOP at the top of my lungs. I know it was loud because it echoed back up the stairs and out onto the street before waking the dead.
Lying there in a heap, I assessed the damage. Ankle slightly twisted, elbows, ass, and back bruised and battered, but eventually, I was able to get up and walk —which I took as a good sign. Reflexively, I thanked my body for not breaking a hip or anything else for that matter and went on with my day. But as the hours passed, a deep soreness set in. At about seven in the evening I felt as if I’d been hit by a caravan of trucks carrying elephants. “Wait until tomorrow,” my husband warned, handing me the Motrin. “The next day is the worst.” Later, in bed, I tried not to move a muscle, lest I scream and wake the dog.
“You’ve got this,” I told her, lying there together in the dark. “Nothing is broken, which in itself is a miracle because YOU ARE A BEAST! You’re sixty-fucking-two and you fell down a flight of concrete stairs and barely missed a beat! You ROCK!” I tried to shift position and moaned. Everything hurt. Even my hair.
“I will take care of you,” I reassured her. “If you need bed rest, I will make sure you get it. If you need CBD rub or Motrin at regular intervals, you can count on me. We are in this together because I love you—now go to sleep!”
“How do you feel?” my husband asked through a grimace, expecting the worst, as I wandered out for coffee and a hug. “Actually, I’m fine,” I responded by doing a deep lunge and a high kick, twisting and lifting both arms to prove my point.
And I am. Fine. No aches, no pains, no bruises of any kind to speak of. I give all of the credit to my body and our recently renewed love affair.
Not a big story, not life or death, just proof to me just the same that Love really does work miracles y’all.
Carry on,
xox
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for over a week. It felt too negative to press send. Too raw and ragged. Not so much like me. I live to laugh, and this wasn’t funny.
You see, we ignored all the stories, signs, and butt clenches that should have warned us away from foreign travel this summer—so I’m here to reinforce any trepidation you may be feeling about going abroad. Listen to it. And if you must travel, temper your expectations, pack your patience (in your carry on with an air tag) and steal yourself against disappointment, because if you’re at all like me—it will be your constant companion. XOX
In her novel Eat, Pray, Love, Liz Gilbert immerses us in her love of all things Italian, including the language and how gorgeous the words are in their full expression. At the end of her year-long journey of self-discovery, Liz chooses her favorite Italian word, attraversiamo—at that point a word dripping with nuance, (the literal definition being, to cross over)—as the word that best defines her.
That being said, while I’d love nothing more than to brag to y’all that we are one millimeter as deep, insightful, and self-realized as Liz—we are not. Still, there are a couple of more pedestrian things my husband and I do share with Liz— her love of Italy, and the act of defining ourselves with a single Italian word. Ours is scarpetta.
Now, by no stretch of the imagination is scarpetta as gorgeous, sexy, or fraught with hidden meaning as attraversiamo.
Nope, the Urban dictionary considers scarpetta Italian ‘street slang’. In Italian, it means sopping up all the sauce left on your plate (or in the pot) with bread. Italian waiters love the word. Basically, anyone who feeds us in Italy (oh, who are we kidding, anywhere in the world), takes one look at us, hand us a basket of freshly baked bread, and whispers, “scarpetta” to us like a prayer. They identify us as kindred spirits. People who love to eat. Foodies. We are their kind of people—and believe me when I say—we do not disappoint. And while I am simultaneously humiliated and proud to admit that no plate has ever left our table that we haven’t scarpetta’d so clean they didn’t have to wash it—upon refection I like to think it says more about us and our quest to savor “everything good in life”, than gluttony, so please humor me.
Normally I would just leave us here, fat and happy, reminiscing about savory sauces, clean plates, warm bread, and everything wonderful about Italy.
But we just returned from a short visit, and while we happily scarpetta’d our faces off all through Tuscany, I could not help but notice that just like the rest of the world, post-pandemic Italy is different. Travel sucks. Service sucks. The infrastructure is a gazillion times more broken than it normally is. Covid is everywhere, our luggage was missing for three days, and the locals, who are normally delightful, were all out of shits to give. Oh, and it was hotter than the any place without air conditioning has any right being.
I honestly don’t know what I was expecting, but I gotta tell ya, it hit me hard.
Hidden just below the surface was so. much. shit.
Chaos, turmoil, anger, and grief.
And Italy reflected mine back to me in spades.
I have a bestie, Steph, who is obsessed with the etymology of words, their origin, and how their meanings have changed throughout the years. Normally I leave that up to her, but she’s rubbed off on me enough that I remembered that the literal meaning of scarpetta is, “little shoe, or child’s shoe” which comes from thinking that just like dragging bread across a plate will sop up every scrap, a shoe will pick up whatever is on the ground.
You know, the dregs, garbage…dirt…shit. And since that sounds awful, I’d always ignored that definition.
That, and the one that says, ‘scarpetta was born from scarcity. That the poor were only allowed the scraps’. Gahhhhhhh!
Those just didn’t jive with the “savoring the good” parts of my narrative—until last week. And now, in this year of our Lord 2022, I regret to inform you that I must add the word scarpetta to my list of things that have turned more bitter than sweet.
The world is nothing like it was in the before-times. Not yet. And maybe,(gasp) it never will be. Don’t get me wrong, everybody’s pretending it is, they’re wearing their best Mona Lisa smiles,(possibly obscured by a mask) but it’s all smoke and mirrors with a cauldron of I’m-not-sure-what-the-fuck-is-happening roiling just below the surface.
Sometimes it smells like fear, other times rage, mostly it reeks of disappointment.
But you know me, I’m the eternal optimist, the perennial Pollyanna, so I’ll be giving the world like, a hundred more tries to get it right. And I suppose that after a shit-ton of trials and errors, I’ll know right when I feel it. Until then, I’m determined to stay closer to home, manage my expectations, and hold out hope for the best.
Who knows, we have a wedding to attend next year in Positano. Maybe by that time, Italy, and the world, will be more warm bread than shit-shoe to me again.
Carry on,
Xox Janet
