Tunnel

For Weekend Wordsmith

image: http://inphotos.org/tag/road/

Memory: A tunnel that my father often drove through on the way home from the village.

The tunnel was made of close hand-laid moss-covered stone walls, rounded sides to the low ceiling, like a remnant of an ancient castle. It accommodated the road where it cut through a hill. Grass and brush grew up the banks on either side of the entrance and the exit; grass grew on top. Whenever we kids were with him, we would beg him to blow the truck horn as we passed through the tunnel; the sound's reverberation thrilled us. It wasn't a long tunnel; it was short enough that once we entered it I immediately became impatient for Dad to blow the horn lest we be out before I heard that sound. I liked the feeling of being in that tube of stone. I felt cozy and protected. There is a similar tunnel on one of the nearby twisty curvy country roads. When I drive through it I slow down and blow the horn. If the road there were wider I might park in there and enjoy the closeness.

I liked then, and I like now, tunnels and burrows. In the winter I liked to burrow into snowdrifts. Snug and warm in my heavy wool snowpants I would sit in my little rabbit warren snow house. I smiled little smiles to myself and admired the blue-white walls and and the absence of sound. I felt secreted and safe.

Sometimes on long winter days my sister and I would pull and carry every wooden chair in the house into the livingroom and turn them over on their faces, cover them with old quilts and crawl inside our homemade tunnel. It seems, in memory, that we had rooms in there, although there couldn't have been that many chairs or that much space but . . . we were small.

This love of small cozy spaces is apparently part of my inborn psychology: Prior to my birth I never turned upside down the way a getting-ready-to-be-born baby is supposed to. I came out butt first.

I wanted to stay where I was safe and cozy.

(Note to self: Read Franz Kafka's The Burrow)

Holiday catalog shopping

Christmas is coming, and so are the catalogs. My rural mailbox is several hundred feet up the road from my driveway (the United States Postal Service fears coming too far down the road for fear of a non-return trip) and I break several vehicle and traffic laws by pulling to the far side of the oncoming lane to open the box from my car. During the last week there's been a veritable avalanche of catalogs waiting to fall upon me (if I'm quick) or on the ground (if I'm not) when I pull down the mailbox door.

I love this.

I bring them all indoors and stack them next to my Evening Chair, and spend hours examining each picture and sensual description of the myriad gift items.

"5 handmade brushes, each with a different width and length. Our ink set contains 5 ink blocks in black, red, blue, gold(!) and white, each embossed with a golden dragon." I think it's the "embossed with a golden dragon" that grabs me. And the idea of blocks of ink . . . I imagine the smooth surfaces, the rich colors.

Winter-themed solar lights! I envision glowing fairylights out in the cold winter darkness, softening, to my eye, the edges of the ice shards blown by the biting wind.

These poor deer would be blown two fields away in a week of our winter wind...but aren't they pretty?

Brightly colored alphabet giraffe puzzles, the A at the animal's head, the Z at its hind foot . . . sixteen inches tall! I have no children for whom to buy gifts but I like it so much that I consider for whose child I might buy it. (I have always leaned toward the educational in gifts . . . a characteristic not much appreciated by my child gift recipients, I think. I remember a plastic clock I had when I was learning to tell time; I loved it. But that was in the olden days. I think many children now cannot read analog clocks, only digital.)

Personalized everythings . . . gift boxes, pen sets, parking signs... Smooth woods, glittering crystals, wit in red print on metal.

Stacked boxes of fruits and nuts, assorted coffees and jewels of jams and jellies.

Boxed sets of holiday greeting cards with dreamy pictures and sentimental messages.

I'm sucked in by all of it.

I turn over corners of pages as I go, mentally piling up all the lovely sparkling treasures.

I set the catalogs aside, and during subsequent evenings I go through them again and again, running through the fingers of my mind the opulence of these riches.

I order nothing, and in February throw out the whole stack.

More restaurant stories for Joe

Big kitchen. Big walk-in freezer. Old big walk-in freezer. Newer ones have handles you can punch if the door closes behind you. Old freezer. No handle. It took twenty minutes for the cook to figure out where I was. Trust me on this: No matter where you live and no matter how hard your winters are, they are nothing compared to being trapped in a walk-in freezer for twenty minutes.

The air conditioning had one zone and in summer we always kept it set it on STUN because the back of the house was so hot. One Saturday night a customer complained that she was freezing and wanted me to turn down the air conditioning. I said,

"If we turn down the a/c the cooks gon' pass out."

Customer didn't say a word.

One day during lunch one of the cooks did pass out. Right after he had an epileptic seizure and whacked his head on the corner of the oven on his way to the floor. Us waitresses picked our way carefully through the blood and walked across a broke-open cardboard box before we hit the carpet. The rest of the cooks worked around him until he came to and the manager took him in back.

Rule Number One: Ain' nobody call no amba-lance to no restaurant!

There was a back kitchen with three gigantic stainless steel sinks, the dreaded freezer, the walk-in cooler, and right in front of the door to the waitstation, the dishwasher. The dishwasher was a machine, not a person . . . us waitresses would run it in between scooping ice out of the icemaker and carrying it to the sink in the waitstation, picking up our orders, taking care of our tables, changing the soda canisters... The manager's desk was at the back end of a long tunnel-like room with its door just opposite the dishwasher. I was hustlin' from the back of the back kitchen with a bowl of salad for the salad bar. I got almost to the dishwasher when a chef's knife whizzed through the air past my face and stuck quivering in the wall between the dishwasher and the door to the waitstation. The assistant manager was in the office th'owin' 'at knife . . . he playin' wit' me.

He say he know he ain' gon' hit me . . . he know right where I wuz.

I lay him out in lavender. I tol' him jus' where the bear went in the woods. I tol' him just whut I do widdat knife do he play me like dat from here on forwar'. He ain' never play like dat wi' me again, I tell you dat.

Word.

New waitress in training.

Firs' thing she tol' me wuz her name. Secont thing she tol' me she havin' a baby.

I thought she meant right that minute.

Firs' few shif's, th' way it work she follow somebody 'round an' learn how to do evvything. She don' get no tips. Trainer get her tips. She get minimum wage until she get tips, then her pay go down. I wuz trainin' her. I tell her "Good idea go do this now, time to do that now...."

You can tell when they get it and when they don'.

I say, "Here . . . take this tray an' go clear that table."

She crinkle up her forehead and twitch up her mouth an she put on a mad face and say, "Tha's a lotta work. I'm havin' a baby."

I say, "That's the job."

She ditten move. I went and cleared the table. And took the tip.

Next night my friend trainin' this new girl how to close. Breakin' down the salad bar. Back on that two-foot square dishwasher tray go all the crocks fulla cottage cheese, slice cucumbers, salad dressing. Things always weigh a ton, but you balance it right ain' nothin'. Waitresses got good biceps and backs. Thirteen crocks, two dishwasher trays full, to go back to the cooler.

My friend loaded up both trays and said, "Okay. Now we take 'em back to the cooler."

New girl she say, "I can' carry dat. I'm havin' a baby."

My friend, she say, "You aren't havin' a baby. You're pregnant."

New girl didn't come back next shift.

One day as lunch was winding down I was refilling the salad bar. The kitchen was big and it was a long trek with a big square dishwasher tray of full two-quart crocks. I still had tables so I was beatin' feet. One of the cooks decided it was about just about the right time to mop the floor in the waitstation.

Quarry tile. Greasy quarry tile. Water on top.

I made it nearly to the diningroom carpet when my feet went up and my face went down. I don't know where the crocks went, but one of my fellow waitresses told me later she'd had to clean Russian dressing off everything . . . the cash register, the phone, the shelving...

Not five seconds after I hit the floor, while I was still facedown on the floor next to the cash register, a man was at the counter with his business card in his hand for the manager. He sold some floor treatment that would keep accidents like that from happening.

I mean . . . I'm layin' there and this guy's sellin' his wares.

Word.

Next morning I woke up feeling like a truck had run over me. I asked Husband to call in sick for me and went back to bed.

Two hours later the store manager phone. "June! Where you at? You op'nin' this mornin!" Husband forgot to call.

I said, "Wait a minnit." I looked in the mirror again. I had a baseball on my cheekbone and a black eye. I went back to the phone. "You gon' hafta fin' somebody else."

I did go to work the following day and all my customers thought I'd suffered domestic violence. I got good tips that day.

Election Day

As usual I am up and moving too early. I would like to think that with this extra time I will be up and out and voting on my way to work. More likely I'll fiddle around and waste this time and vote on my way home.

I know that I will be voting today.

Since I live two towns over from where I work, I won't be able to vote in the election that will affect my livelihood for a few years to come. Up for election, or in one case, re-election, three seats* on the board that governs the municipality for which I work.

The only position that holds any uncertainty is the top seat.

The result of this election will be governing board comprising:

• One convicted felon;
• One reasonable person;
• *One prince;
• *One apprentice prince;
• *And, in the center seat, either an unstable narcissist or an experienced, knowledgeable and realistic person.

It's an off year for national elections, but in my world this is it. There is a sense of gloom for those of us who anticipate these next few years with a board majority who thinks Nike's admonition to just do it is a valid mantra for governing. Just make the motions, pass the laws, demolish existing law . . . all without forethought, examination, or, indeed, any consideration of other laws violated by those actions.

The bottom line, and face time on camera, are all to this majority.

Cut the budget; give away the store.

Remove from the budget all funds to pay for training and for the books that delineate the law to be enforced.

Truck away equipment as cost-free gifts to neighboring municipalities.

Move adding machine departments into the same square footage as departments with a lot of noisy public exposure.

If all this results in employee inefficiency, the felon announces at a public meeting: "We'll just get rid of the employees."

And the irony of it all is that there will be no reduction in taxes.

So I will vote.

My vote will make little difference to most of the hours of my waking life.

I will vote, in my hometown, for people with whom I would like to work.

It is possible, after all, that that might come to pass.

Five words to ponder

GooseBreeder's recent entry has enticed me to try this five random word thing. The words to address are:

boldness

beauty

beat-up

bespoke

barely

boldness

Before I met the late great Marly dog, and had only petfinder.com pictures of her

with which I was trying to decide if I should consider adopting her, a dog-trainer acquaintance told me she had "a bold look."

Merriam-Webster defines bold as "showing . . . a fearless daring spirit." And, indeed, Marly was a fearless and daring soul. Boldness, like courage, isn't aggressiveness. Nor is it foolhardiness. Boldness is a willingness to face what is. Marly taught me a lot about that. She was expert in investigating and evaluating new people and new situations. Except for car-riding.

Her boldness did not extend to the interiors of moving vehicles. I suspect it was due to her never having gone anywhere better when moved from place to place. Her own four feet did fine for getting someplace better. By the time she came to live with us, the habit of vehicle nausea was well-ingrained and she never got over that, poor thing.

See that round-eyed straightforward curious gaze? That's bold.

beauty

Marly was beautiful to me. Or rather, she became beautiful to me. I had never owned a dog that color, and I had no frame of reference for the beauty of a red-gold coat and amber eyes. When she came here she was ribby, with a thin dry coat. Wherever she walked she left a trail of falling hair. A good life improved her coat, but what made her beautiful to me was less her nascent thick fluffy pelt than her slowly-revealed personality . . . her sense of humor, her devotion, her caring nature.

A person's beauty is like that too. Some decidedly physically plain people are beautiful to the eye that sees beyond the exterior to the warm soul inside.

beat-up

Oh, Marly had been beat up earlier in her life... Her bio provided by the woman at the rescue included her having been shipped by air, at six weeks of age, to a family who upon seeing her didn't like her color. They had apparently expected the usual brown or black kelpie, not cream. After several months the man of the family decided she either had to be given away or shot. She came here with that bold nature, but as well, a neediness, and a fear of men. Husband brought her around, with his warmth and playfulness and gentleness. At first she would recoil from his attention, and I remember the joy of watching the first time they played the game of peeking and chasing around the kitchen island.

It is my firm opinion that animals who are given a second chance for happiness grasp it and are forever grateful.

Just like people. More readily than people, really . . . animals being less inclined to hold grudges against life.

bespoke

What do I know about bespoke? ...except that I read recently in Vanity Fair magazine about Dominick Dunne's bespoke suits.

Husband has a few custom-made shirts, a luxury he indulged when he lost a lot of weight and deserved them.

Some years ago I worked at a state agency with an attorney who had an extremely successful Long Island Gold Coast practice waiting for him at the end of his tenure as a public servant. I can't recall what started a particular conversation about thrift in clothing purchases. Laughing, he said, "So I should start shopping at Macy's instead of Brooks Brothers?" I laughed back, my gasp of shock silenced before it escaped. Thrift, to me, meant Wal-Mart, or thrift store!

barely

I like walking barely: Barely are my feet. In the late spring, I wriggle with pleasure at the feel of the grass as I walk for the first time in months on the lawn. As soon as I come in the door after work, the shoes go off. And the socks. The former for comfort, the latter for safety: I have wood floors slippery as ice to sockfeet. Winter floors are cold to bare feet but still my toes go naked, if icy chill. For this preference I pay in calluses and plantar bruises from escapee kibbles from the dogs' food dishes. Still, I like walking barely.

Just an odd note about barely. You know how, if you look at some words long enough they begin to look strange? Barely is like that. It wants to be barley to my eyes. Or barrely (like a barrel).

Should anyone care to carry on, here are my suggested five words to ponder:

White

Curls

Goosebump

Fiddle

Election

Do with them as you like.

June do a blackcent

It wasn't fifteen years ago that I stopped waiting tables down in the city's gut. Anything you do for money is work, but that job was as much fun as a hard job can be. I got pretty good at the local dialect and body language, and I apparently have a face from which people do not expect such an accent.

An' you know whut? Ah steel gottit; Iss lite ridin' a byesthicuh...

A few weeks ago a young African American man came in to my office. He doin' he street strut, he dress in black and colorfully printed nylon running pants, a matching jacket and shades. He held out a business card to me, and asked if he needed a permit to operate a cab company.

"Where you plan on garaging these things?" I asked, and he told me they'd be garaged in an adjacent town, so I told him he needed no permit. He said he'd been operating his cab company in a town a little west, "...but they don' like me no more, so it time to move."

I slipped into the my old waitress persona.

"Why they don' like you anymore?" I asked him.

"Well," he say, "the KKK startet not too far away, and i' hasn' change much. At the end o' the day I'm still a black man, and this is a little closer to the city, so I figure it's diff'rent."

"I hea' dat," I said.

He doubletaked and said, "You hea' dat? Dat's gud." He noddet, satisfi'.

So many stories from my time in that restaurant, most of them fun.

One of the cooks innat city restaurant, he name Finesse. He real name Napoleon, but he din' like 'at so he wen' by he street name, Finesse. Finesse' brother, Ezon (as in ...Downna Road) work there too. One day some fine lookin' young women came in and Finesse tryta put some moves on. Dey wudden' havin' it, and when he back off, one woman, a curl to her lip, ask me,

"Whut he name?"

"Finesse," I say. "I don' know what that mean, but that what he call'."

"It mean 'fine,'" she say, "but he ain' fine."

The manager of the store was a black woman, the assistant manager a black man. One day during the after-lunch/pre-dinner lull, the three of us were leaning on the counter, watching traffic through the plate glass window. The manager remarked that the store had a lot of black employees. The assistant manager began to list the workers: "....he black . . . he black . . . he white

. . . she black... June . . ." he gazed at me for a second or two, "she pink."

We all dissolved in laughter.

I guess I wore excessive blush in those days...

Making peace with The Shoulds

Somebody recently asked how I got out of that horrible habit of The Shoulds.

The short answer is that I went to AA and got sober. The longer answer follows.

I got grateful.

I recently read that some study advises counting your blessings before you go to sleep. It concluded that your sleep would improve, and you'd wake up happier than if you'd gone to sleep thinking about your problems.

On my way home from work today I was feeling a little glum. Cloudy afternoon, tired and sore leg, end of the month chores coming up tomorrow at work. That kind of glum. On my way into the house from the car, hobbling slowly and carefully, having left my crutches in the car so I could carry three days' worth of mail inside, I was staring at the ground and thinking, "This is what it will be like when I am decrepit, and have to pick my way carefully all the time."

The flipside is that that slow progress gave me more time to observe, once I picked up my face and looked, the particular light in the sky at that time, in this season, on this day that will never be again. There is no rush except that which I impose upon myself.

At any given moment, I've learned that I can come up with a lengthy gratitude list. Here's one off the top of my head:

• I'm grateful that I'm sober.
• I'm grateful that, so far as I know, everybody I love is reasonably healthy.
• I'm grateful that I can see to write this.
• I'm grateful that my knee is healing.
• I'm grateful that I have friends with whom I laugh. A lot.
• I'm grateful that I'm not twenty-five, or forty, or even fifty; I wouldn't go back for anything.
• I'm grateful that Husband is not here right now and I have this quiet time.
• I'm grateful that Husband will come home.
• I'm grateful that I have the plants inside from the porch and the patio for the winter.
• I'm grateful that I have enough food, comfortable shoes, good pillows on the bed.

Once I start this kind of thing, I kind of lose sight of all the stuff that was making me feel bad.

I've learned to identify the real problem.

I don't have to win every argument.

I learned to honor my feelings and to know that I have choices.

I'm not that important.

I learned to say "I want to" instead of "I have to."

While I wended my way to the house tonight, the dogs were barking and jumping at the door and I didn't know how I would do with the stairs to the porch. Since I hurt my knee until this evening, Husband has been right here to stand in front of me as a brace. The problem was impatience. There's a way to do almost anything I want to do, and I wanted to get into the house. Fortunately now my leg has healed enough that if I take the time to balance my considerable weight I can do a few stairs.

If I did not get onto the porch and get to the door to let the dogs out, neither the dogs nor I would die.

(On Monday evening, I was in the throes of the sudden injury, but I could crawl. And did.)

Thank God for not having to argue with people! I recently read somebody's blog post about a half hour argument she had had with a friend over chasing down bargains at various supermarkets. The friend does that; the blogger does not. Why in the world would somebody waste a half hour of her life arguing about such a thing? What difference does it make where or how somebody else shops? It amazes me now that I used to have just such arguments. And I held resentments for long long times if I hadn't pummeled my companion into conceding my point of view. I know now why I did that. It was that I needed everybody to agree with me because I feared being wrong. In so many areas, wrong is relative. Right for me might be wrong for you. Right for you might be wrong for me.

Learning to honor my own feelings brought me a little way to seeing that it's okay for other people to feel defeated and sad and thorny. It is not a terrible threatening horror to feel lonely or afraid or sad or glum or angry. I remember my sponsor leaving quickly after a meeting, telling some people who wanted her to stay and chat, "I feel mean and miserable today." I watched in awe as she walked away and the others chuckled and went back to their conversation. People feel what they feel. And feelings, while very real, aren't facts.

What still gets me rolling is hearing constant complaining. Some folks' constant seeking for reasons to feel angry and miserable still makes me tired. I try far too hard sometimes to point out the silver linings among other people's clouds. It annoys me that people seem to look so hard for reasons to be unhappy. Life's too short. So . . . I still suffer from wanting to make people see my point of view, and that's useless. Sometimes people need to feel unhappy for a while. It is the valley that makes the mountain high. (I found that quote online a couple of days ago and neglected to note the author, so if somebody can enlighten me, I would be . . . grateful.) Why do I want people to stop complaining? Fear, I guess. Oscar Wilde said, "The basis of optimism is sheer terror." If I stop counting those blessings and looking for those silver linings for too long, I will stop seeing them, just as I conveniently do not see particles of dust on my baseboards, but to worse effect.

It was a major major deal for me to realize that people had topics, other than June, to discuss. If I didn't make supper and went to bed early, my husband would not spend his evening hours thinking of divorce but might actually enjoy having the alone time that I so enjoy. I have responsibilities and I honor them, but if I am sick enough to stay home from work, (a) my coworkers will not spend every spare moment talking about what a slacker I am, and (b) the work gets done. I learned that I could choose to ignore Eleanor Roosevelt's advice that I must do the thing that I am afraid to do. For a while. Until I am ready. And if I truly need to do it I will become ready.

The continuing joyful wonder is that since I have choices and I'm not that important, I don't need to carry around a lot of anger that I am oh so put upon and cheated . . . by others, by Life, by whatever bogeyman I used to pick out to be mad at.

One Saturday morning a couple of years ago (when I was still firmly planted in my fluffy pink cloud of new sobriety), Husband was sitting with hands clenched, looking grim. I asked him what was the matter and he said, "I have so much that I have to do this weekend, and there isn't enough time to do it!"

I smiled, and said, "There's enough time."

I stood smiling until he looked up at me.

"There is, isn't there?" he said.