Mom: This is your mother, returning your call.

Damn it! Missed her again! It’s really my own fault I’ve been chasing Mom all over the countryside. I was trying to outwit my saucy future self by preemptively creping. Yes, I spelled that right. No, I can’t pick a verb tense. This story is happening in the past, present and the future. Adjust!

Over a month ago, Anya and I worked out a schedule for the store that looked harsh for everyone involved. Last weekend, I looked at my datebook and came to the inescapable conclusion once again that if only for my sake, Mr. Jesus should have retired to the coast to plant bottlecaps for future seaside pensioners armed only with metal detectors. Wouldn’t we all have been happier if Christmas came at the end of January anyhow and was celebrated with salt water taffy? I think so. Between now and the time I convince event planners to change that, the timing of Christmas will continue sucking. So I resolved – last week – to minimize the sucking by preparing for the inevitable last minute cooking request that will come my way – next week – when I will smile sweetly in the face of my family’s adoring death threats. Isn’t time travel wonderful?

Last year, Mom wheedled but eventually gave me the recipe for her mother-in-law’s manicotti. I turned my apartment upside-down searching for the recipe but I can’t find it. I wouldn’t throw it away deliberately so I must have put it someplace safe, even from me, which is especially exciting since I live alone. Thus, I’ve been trying to get Mom to loosen her grip on the family recipe box a second time. This effort is doomed. Fortunately, I formulated a backup plan involving the cookbook I never mention in front of the Soup Lady, for whom I am simply mad. (Turn a blind eye, Soup Lady!)*

This morning, I woke up feeling like my lungs were on fire, which is terribly unpleasant because I need those. Last night, Anya and I ran our shapely derrieres off at the family store as Corinne and the partners ran theirs off among the toys. I did four hours of stand up comedy as half the town bought shiny objects for December gift-giving holidays. Thank you very much, please try the veal piccata. The mayor was not at all offended by my schtick on the proper uses of sons-in-law since she’s meeting her son’s girlfriend for the first time for Hanukkah. Yeah, the mayor’s a woman. Mazel tov! This morning, I felt like I had either pneumonia or fur-lined bronchial tubes so I went back to bed, but as every woman running a household of any size knows, being at Death’s Door doesn’t mean there’s time to knock. When I got up just before noon, I dragged that – again: shapely – derriere to Costco with a list of ingredients.

While I wasn’t thrilled about departing from my grandmother’s recipe, I sucked it up and made batter anyway. Flour, eggs, milk, water, salt. It’s pretty close. This evening, batter blended and rested, I made about two dozen crepes. Another batter is resting in the fridge for tomorrow morning. In about ten days, I’ll make a vat of fresh marinara. Then, assemble the whole thing. For Italian Christmas Eve, we will have homemade manicotti. And death threats. Because that’s our tradition.

*It’s the Joy of Cooking

Yesterday, Dad sent me a common sense joke that caused an uproar here in la biblioteca.

A guy walks into a Glasgow library and says to the prim librarian, “Excuse me Miss, day ye hiv ony books on suicide?”

To which she stops doing her tasks, looks at him over the top of her glasses, and says, “Fuck off, ye’ll no bring it back!”

You see all kinds of things in libraries – and I mean it: all kinds. One time, I prevented a kid who’d gone off his scrip, painted himself Tempra red and cuffed himself to a briefcase from terrorizing equally unstable undergrads. Another time, my students found other students pretending to hear the call of Barry White behind the music room. And then there was the month I realized someone was crawling around inside the drop ceiling over the ladies’ room. To this day, I still examine ceiling tiles for, you know, faces in unexpected contexts. Though my particular outpost was especially punk rock, everyone’s got stories. A patron walked up to one of my co-workers and punched him in the face. We all thought this was very funny after, um, the charges were dropped. Still, it’s the everyday crap that gets a person and the only response is direct action. This happened right before finals.

Future Gum-Chewing Receptionist: My professor left material here for us to read.
Tata: Go to those notebooks. Look up your professor’s name. Write down what you want on the forms and –
FGCR: I don’t know his name.
Tata: What’s the class?
FGCR: I don’t remember.
Tata: What’s the subject?
FGCR: I don’t know.
Tata: Do you…talk about money? TV? The French and Indian War?
FGCR: I’m not sure.

I picked a slim volume out of the economics section and handed it to her.

Tata: Your professor left The Communist Manifesto. It’s a quick read and you’ll be out of here before your hairspray moistens.

Sure, it was a dirty trick but who else was going to broaden her horizons with a jackhammer? Likewise, we have arrived at a fork in the road, where one path is sunny and oh, look at the poppies and aren’t the butterflies beautiful? while the other path is the same dark highway to nowhere. The mile marker:

STOP THIS BILL! Mistake-riddled, LGBTI-phobic civil unions bill is moving forward!

Late Monday, after legislators and reporters left Trenton, Senate President Dick Codey introduced a discriminatory civil unions bill that’s an abject horror for the LGBTI community. The bill not only fails to provide us marriage equality, it’s also extremely weak for a civil unions bill as far as civil unions bills go.

Whereas the Vermont Civil Unions law at least calls gay couples “spouses,” Codey’s bill, now the one legislators want to pass, stays away from the term “spouse” and instead invents a new, ridiculous contraption of a phrase called “civil union partner.” That’s a cold, clinical, cynical term that doesn’t acknowledge the love and commitment that same-sex couples share. It’s also not a step up from “domestic partner” as the New Jersey Supreme Court intended. Now how constitutional is THAT?

I consider myself a pretty bright gal. My opinion of Me as a relatively smart human has been independently confirmed by testing services and annoyed administrators. And yet, I am completely, absolutely, 100% flummoxed where this seemingly simple state of – pardon me – affairs is concerned. I mean, what gives? What on earth is so terrifying about two people of whatever gender, color or ethnic extraction falling in googly-eyed love, picking jewelry and china patterns, and visiting each other in the hospital? As expectant grandparents, Dick and Lynne Cheney are about to demonstrate to the vile base, the answer is – wait for it! – nothing! – And some people are rewarded for their love with adorable babies whose toes will be tiny and heart-stoppingly cute. In Mr. Cheney’s case, all that human affection might be more boo-scary! than auditors grabbing that second set of Halliburton’s books.

The simple truth is love is love is love. Every human being wants to love and be loved without fear. There’s just nothing complicated about it, if you let yourself see how equal rights for everyone means you, too, whoever you may be.

At some point, I’ll spend an afternoon creating a blogroll. This seems so like making a list in French class of all the dreeeeamy boys I secretly think are supercute with way-awesome hair that I’ve avoided it the whole time I’ve blogged. Plus, my first love will always be Saturn, taskmaster, poet, dancer of the spheres. This is the picture of him on my desk. Saturn never gets my jokes.

NASA, winking courier between my love and me, explains:

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

Saturn shelters the sun, creating a view that illuminates planet and its ringsThe mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn’s faint rings.

Ring structures containing these tiny particles brighten substantially at high phase angles: i.e., viewing angles where the sun is almost directly behind the objects being imaged.

During this period of observation Cassini detected two new faint rings: one coincident with the shared orbit of the moons Janus and Epimetheus, and another coincident with Pallene’s orbit.

Yes, ours is a dark and difficult love I wouldn’t trade for all the stars in the sky, however often I’ve wished Saturn weren’t stubborn and uncompromising, and I weren’t so flawed a human being. I disappoint Saturn so often, though I love him so.

I hope stormy Jupiter doesn’t find out.

Recently, I gave in and sat for a photographer. He’d bugged me for years. Finally, I stopped bashing my head with this brick and sat for mildly interesting portraits. I don’t trust him and didn’t expect much from the sitting. Anyway, he sent me a print he liked and it’s not the fright I thought it’d be. He’s got a show opening on December 10th and this image, he says, will be in it. He wants me to go to the opening. I’d rather have a rash.

In better news, the resourceful Miss Sasha forwarded some exciting new ways to make the world a better place. If I hadn’t made her myself, I’d go on and on about how she couldn’t be more gorgeous under a dump truck full of tropical flowers. But modesty forbids. See:

Buy-Nothing Christmas

This Christmas we’ll be swamped with offers, ads and invitations to buy more stuff. But now there’s a way to say enough and join a movement dedicated to reviving the original meaning of Christmas giving. Buy Nothing Christmas is a national initiative started by Canadian Mennonites but open to everyone with a thirst for change and a desire for action.

Buy Nothing Christmas is a stress-reliever, and more people need to hear about it. You can change your world by simply putting up one of the posters (or make your own) in your church, place of worship, home or work. Be sneaky about it if you have to. The point is to get people thinking. It’s an idea whose time has come, so get out there and make a difference!

Canadian Menonites want you to stop shopping! Come to think of it, we have so much in common! Mennonites bake stuff; I bake stuff! Canadians like snow; I like snow someone else is shoveling! Mennonites like horses. I…have met a horse. It’s like we were separated at birth and I was raised by gourmet hippie opera-singing beauticians, and a monkey! What ideas should we consider? A few:

– Give fairly traded coffee, tea or chocolate, get beautiful items at garage sales or buy gifts from shops that support artisans in poorer countries.

– Make your own cards from recycled paper.

– Avoid commercial wrapping paper, ribbons, bows and tape, which are not recyclable, and opt for gift bags, tea towels or nice boxes, which are eco-friendly.

I can do that! I like the list of reader suggestions.

One year I made mini loaves of quick bread. I think it was pumpkin bread. One could make cranberry or whatever you like. I wrapped the loaves and placed them in small baskets that I picked up at yard sales over the summer months. I added packets of instant spiced cider, cocoa, or tea, and festive napkins. I then tied it up with a raffia bow along with a recipe card for the bread. Another year I made key chains out of beads that matched the color of each persons car. – Lisa Wilson

I can do that, too!

New American Dream has some good ideas but I think you probably have to ease your well-armed and gift-expecting family into a healthier and wholistic holiday season. I recommend you tell them one year how much you love llamas, the next year you tell them how much a llama means to a struggling family. If they don’t have you arrested on an unpronounceable charge, you buy them a llama they’ll never see. I personally have three and hope for a quartet. The neighbors are scandalized.

Operation Home Front is your ticket to a good deed even the Grinch wouldn’t argue. Operation Home Front matches veterans and military families in need to people able and willing to help. Maybe you think you have nothing to offer. Maybe in your town, a military family needs help getting to the grocery store. You can drive! It’s perfect! Maybe in your town, a sick veteran needs help mowing his lawn. Maybe you can mow! Mazel tov!

When you give of yourself, you really give an important gift. Notice that people I give Me to want more! Well, life is full of disappointments. But there are also llamas.

Let us try an exercise I learned when I was a Biblical Revisionary poet. Let us choose one moment, hold it in our hands, turn it around and see what we can learn. Let’s talk about this moment here.

I see a man photographing five women. I don’t know specifics about the rules of dress and male-female associations, so I don’t know if the man has to know these women or if he must be related to them. He could be a passerby. Maybe the women are related to one another but maybe not. I don’t know if there are rules about friendship between women. He is taking their picture, so what I see is a special occasion. The women are standing under a structure but they are still outdoors.

The color contrasts interest me. He is wearing white. The women are wearing black. His outfit suggests that he has recently been to prayer. The women have purses and little odds and ends, so they are not at home. This is public attire. The people walking around in the background are dressed very casually. One detail I can’t make out: if one of those two children is a girl, that would be interesting, too.

As a thoroughly Western woman looking at this picture, I had to struggle with my feelings about the burkas. I felt threatened by the idea of garments intended to conceal my female form, and I’m not going to get over that and everything that goes with it. In the context of the exercise, however, how fully-formed Me would feel if suddenly thrust into an all-veiled-all-the-time scenario is entirely useless. I had to put my feeling about Me aside. See? This is a lot like acting class, in that you have to consider the hopes and dreams of your character, the hurts and bumps along the way, the driving motivation, before you yell, “Stop thief!” The women in this image may or may not have grown up with these garments as part of their culture or they may have adopted the garments willingly. Some people do. Some women live in places where these garments have suddenly become necessary for survival. I can’t surmise what their story might be culturally – unless that kid in the background is a girl. One important consideration: the person who took the photograph of the scene we see thought it was either interesting or unusual enough to snap.

Heavy fabric aside, I see five women who are shaped differently from one another. If they were photographed separately, I might not notice distinctions. The woman on the far right stands separate from the group. Her posture is mature. The way her bag rests on her arm is the way a woman who has spent much time holding infants carries something efficiently. She considers how she is seen. If this group is a family, I think this woman is Mom, and Mom orchestrates everything. I also believe that whatever relationship the man has to the women funnels through Mom, so he may be Dad.

I sense that the woman immediately to her left is her mother. Grandma was in charge but now stands eclipsed by the force of her daughter’s personality. Even so, Grandma is no pushover. She doesn’t speak often but when she does, her judgment is sharp and unforgiving.

Moving to the far left, this is the baby of the family. She feels pinched often but she believes that if she is a good girl everything will turn out fine. She is hopeful but not realistic.

The woman second from left is probably the second daughter, probably a bit of a bully and has a temper. She has a tender heart and loves children. She is not kind to strangers.

The woman in the center is the overly emotional oldest daughter. She is our princess or she may have health problems, possibly both. She is aware that she is pretty.

I can’t verify any of this, of course, and I could be completely wrong. The thing that is most striking to the Western eye at first is the sameness of the figures: the women are wearing apparently identical, identity-concealing clothes. That is the joke element of this internet-circulated jpeg titled Pointless Family Photo of the Year. Go ahead, right click on the image and see that for yourself. That’s how it came to me. What the joke overlooks is that these women are individuals; the act of photographing them at this occasion in this dress assumes that the viewer of the picture that man is taking will be able to tell them apart. Kind of reminds you of picking out your friends in high school marching band, oui? And not that far a cry from putting men in weirdly shaped business suits, either.

But I’m looking at a picture of a man taking a picture of women – unless my eyes deceive me. What do you see?

My apartment is a bit of a mess, but a glamorous, gleaming, incense-perfumed mess, and tomorrow I get a chance to clean it. This idea excites me. Being fabulous isn’t all chinups and refusing to return phone calls. Sometimes, a diva’s got to tidy up the cat box.

Horoscopically speaking, today I will not achieve my dreams as I will be tied down to domestic responsibilities. I am amused by the notion in my vast old age because where once I dreamed of being the first Poet Laureate to wear Pennzoil on her warmups, I now dream of paid bills and clean carpets. Sort of. This morning, I dreamed I was watching young girls do tumbling runs across a mat. That is not an unusual dream for me. Girl after tiny girl, round off, back handspring, some form of somersault. What was different was this time I was lying in rafters overhead, unsteady and sometimes slipping. The second time a girl made eye contact with me in mid-somersault I almost fell out of the rafters and dropped the TV camera. I was way up. Then I was the last girl in line, and the girl in front of me grabbed my shoulder, “We’re not having any more of this shit.” Round off, handspring, twisting somersault. Then it was my turn.

I woke up thinking How long would I have to warm up before I did that? Short answer: forever! A few years ago, a woman who managed a gym and still practiced told me age was no longer a barrier in gymnastics. I could join a group that did power tumbling, she said. I asked if they took people on the verge of needing walkers.

Sure, I miss the sensation of flying. I do not miss the sensation of landing on my head, which I felt was highly overrated. In contrast, my dreams of a clean kitchen floor and fresh bread I baked myself seem achievable and even plausible. If I will achieve them, that remains to be seen.

Mary discovers little children get the big idea.

Mary: Did I tell you about the Divine One and her answer to the teacher regarding what the president does?
Tata: I…don’t know! But now I must! Tell me!
Mary: The class was going over leadership and for whatever reason her teacher opted to mention the current administration. When confronted with the question What does the president do? my little flower raised her hand and, using perfect enunciation, she said: “He bastardized our constitution.” I could not be prouder. For this my dad will shower her with dollar bills!
Tata: Oh. My. God. That child needs her own ACLU card for Christmas.
Mary: I KNOW! With all the crap we refrain from saying around her, who knew she would pick up on something like that? It’s better than her questioning the ladies at the door on Halloween regarding the ingredients of their treats! She is too much, man. Her friend has a peanut allergy so she tells people she does too. One lady actually took mints out of her purse and gave them to her instead of a Baby Ruth! It was that action at the door that made me ask, “What the hell was that about?” when she got to the bottom of the drive. My parents’ revenge is upon me!
Tata: I think you can quit worrying about embarrassing her in front of the other kids. The Divine One has things well in hand.

I for one would like to welcome our prepubescent overlord.