I’ve been a little distracted, for which I apologize. Let’s revisit this moment from Miss Sasha’s wedding.

In the lobby, we line up and march in. Sharkey’s got me by one arm and good thing because I keep trying to sprint in silver brocade slippers with an adorable kitten heel. I sit down next to my former Mother-In-Law, who couldn’t be more marvelous if she were dipped in gold. Sharkey slides in next to me. My five-year-old nephews Tippycanoe and Tyler Two march to the priest with all the dignity ring-bearing little boys in suits can muster just before they need cookies and naps. The Fabulous Ex-Husband(tm) delivers the bride to her groom in an arcane series of steps. Yesterday, I described this to my sister Daria.

Tata: This. That. This. That. This. That. I said to the priest, “We will never, never remember all this.”
Daria: It’s that complicated?
Tata: This Virginia Reel had better have a really good caller.

He sits down next to his mother. The bride and groom turn to face the priest and then it happens. Simultaneously, every member of my family sits up straight and starts twitching. The priest talks. The choir sings. The priest talks. The choir sings. The priest talks and talks. The back of Miss Sasha’s wedding dress has my complete and undivided attention. A bow in the middle of her back appears to have unsnapped and it dangles. I whisper to Sharkey, “The whole left side of the church is trying to fix that bow telepathically.” Meanwhile, my former Mother-In-Law is narrating in the way only older people get away with.

fMIL: That is a lovely dress. Of course, she’s a beautiful girl. It’s too bad about the rain. Your cousins look marvelous in their gowns. Which one is your sister? Have you ever been in this church before? That’s your mother’s choir, isn’t it? They’re not with the church. What beautiful voices! Isn’t that Tom with the choir too? Is he singing? I’m so glad, that makes it special…

I am not at all encouraging her by asking questions. That would be rude.

A year later, the best man comes to escort me to the altar, where I am inexplicably trusted with something ON FIRE. Up the steps, off to the left and my wrist corsage gets caught on a flower arrangement behind me. The assembled gasp. I yank my arm free, though I fail to break anything. I light the candle and CLOP CLOP CLOP back to my seat. Everyone laughs.

fMIL: That really lightened the mood!
Tata: Thank you, darling!

This morning, my former mother-in-law passed away in Florida, on her own terms and at peace. My family, which never separated itself from the Fabulous Ex-Husband’s ™ after the divorce, will turn out for services in the coming days. We admired her greatly. This story illustrates why:

When Isabel and Ray fell in love in New York, it probably didn’t seem like it could work out. Isabel was from the wrong side of the tracks and Ray’s small family revolved around his mother, who wanted things just so. When Ray brought Isabel to meet his mother, they sat in the cramped kitchen until Isabel could stand it no more. She walked to the closed parlor were everything was covered in plastic slipcovers, pushed open the doors and said, “Why don’t we talk in here?”

From then on, the parlor doors were never closed again.

* * *

Travel in light, Poor Impulsives.

Pete and I have been working up to tiling the bathroom. I’ve never tiled before but after some instruction, I did the simple stuff while Pete cut tiles. We worked like a dog team for hours and tiled two-thirds of the shower in bright white with one slim, light gray stripe. The improvement over what we’re replacing is vast. Also today: I cut our lettuce down and tomorrow, I’ll plant three kinds of lettuces for the coming weeks.

Flying Spaghetti Monster! I can’t lift my arms!

My co-worker has been unloading spare plants. Yesterday, I turned the corner and my cubicle was full of hostas in a giant black trash bag.

If you’re asking yourself, “Hey Ta, did Topaz and Drusy leap and gambol about the plants in your living room, did you in fact pedal your bicycle from your place to Pete’s with those hostas in the basket, and did I hear you cackling from the other side of the Turnpike?” then the answers are yes, yes and yes, and if you didn’t know, a giant bag of plant life is freaking heavy.

In Pete’s front yard, we find two scrabbly patches busily eroding under the tall trees that line the avenue. Rumor has it hostas spread and take over, which wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to a scrabbly patch in full shade. My cubicle survived a narrow escape.

This morning, I opened my eyes and immediately started hacking and sneezing. Pete said, “What is wrong with you?” I coughed and snurked. “Ah! My extreme beauty! It’s not for everyone.”

This tree by the economics building was pink two weeks ago and today is is luxuriously green. Graduations are finally over. The little dickenses have departed for parts unknown, which is good for me. For the next week, those of us who actually live here can park our cars without a fist fight. After that, the town will be overrun by summer students who flunked geometry the first time, and these paying sweathogs park, sometimes on a z-axis. In June, New Brunswick looks like a festival of emergency orange traffic cones so in September garages are still standing.

I can’t explain that.

Chuan’s sisters, launching themselves briefly into unsuccessful orbit from this location on the Great Wall. No one was injured in this unfunded space program.

Astronauts of all kinds are heroes. It’s never too late to hold a spontaneous parade.

The blurry view from Pete’s kitchen door on 3 March. Note the living room’s irritating green trim and the infected snot yellow walls.

We’d painted the dining room a rich red and the trim a bright white. While the living room was that odd yellow and green, the dining room looked like it’d beamed itself inside the house from Planet Awesome and nested resentfully.

Today, the living room is a creamy pumpkin with bright white trim, which victory did not come easily. The green trim did not go quietly. No, it put up a squawky fuss for old paint. I spent a lot of time on a ladder with trays of white primer, a roller and a fine brush. Pete spent a lot of time refereeing the fight. Eventually, new paint – and by extention, I – won. Yay we! When I wasn’t looking today, Pete cleaned and oiled the leather couch. I suspect television viewers will slide off the sofa with Must See TV glee.

Pete fought a war all his own with the fireplace. Originally, the house came with four walls of mirrors above the mantle. Pete pulled down the mirrors, pulled down the tar construction adhesive (that took a week), spackled and sanded the walls. Then he stripped the simple oak mantle, sanded, sanded, sanded some more, stained, stained, stained and polyurethaned. In this case, I can’t assure you that what you see is what Pete sees – for one thing, because I’m too short to see this view without a ladder. What I can tell you is Pete positively beams when he looks at the mantle, which is about eight feet long. Don’t forget that wall in front of you is actually the same creamy pumpkin of the last image. Your colorful mileage may vary.

Go back to the first image. In the lower righthand corner, observe the dining room radiator. It is faded, dirty and blah. This afternoon, I was vigorously priming a blushing linen closet when Pete said, “Hey, lemme show you something.” I’d heard that line before but not outside a public park so I followed him to the dining room where the radiator was suddenly silver. I screamed! I cackled! I howled! Sweet fancy Vishnu, that radiator is exactly what I pictured when I proposed we paint the dining room red. The chair is a supple antique teak, as is the low china cabinet. These warm colors and textures together maybe shouldn’t work but – they do! It’s madness, but even more: directly behind a person examining this tableau is a door to the basement we took off its hinges and in the backyard I sanded into submission. Later, we stained it a few times and today Pete poly’d it. This room glows.

It’s not for everyone but it breaks my heart.

Hey, Panky!

Happy Friday. Whatever it is, start without me – I feel like dog chow.

The juxtaposition of these two items on RawStory is alarming.

VA official denies cover-up of veteran suicides

A top-ranking official at the Department of Veterans Affairs defends the agency’s treatment of disabled veterans and denies the agency has tried to cover up the number of veterans committing suicide.

Dr. Michael Kussman, a department undersecretary for health, testified during a trial in San Francisco federal court that will determine whether the VA is shirking its duty to provide adequate mental health care and other medical services to millions of veterans.

The two veterans groups suing the VA want U.S. District Court Judge Samuel Conti to order the agency to dramatically improve how fast it processes applications and how it delivers mental health care, especially when it comes to preventing suicides and treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

The groups contend that veteran suicides are rising at alarming rates in large part because of VA failures. In court, plaintiffs’ lawyer Arturo Gonzalez clashed Thursday with Kussman over how to compile and report the suicide rates.

For instance, VA Secretary James Peake told Congress in a Feb. 5 letter that 144 combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed suicide between October 2001 and December 2005.

But Gonzalez produced internal VA e-mails that contended that 18 veterans a day were committing suicide. Kussman countered that the figure, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, included all 26 million veterans in the country, including aging Vietnam veterans who are reporting an increased number of health problems.

And:

Joint Chiefs chair: US prepping military options against Iran

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Pentagon is planning “potential” military actions against Iran, reports The Washington Post.

Mullen criticized Iran’s “‘increasingly lethal and malign influence’ in Iraq,” writes Ann Scott Tyson for the Post.

Addressing concerns about the US military’s capability of dealing with yet another conflict at a time when forces are purportedly stretched thin, Mullen said war with Iran “would be ‘extremely stressing’ but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing specifically to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force,” Tyson notes.

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” she quotes the U.S.’s top military leader at a Pentagon news conference.

If you follow veterans’ affairs, you must be aware of how seriously this will fuck up the active military and wounded veterans in the future. We must prevent this madness born of hubris, thoughtless cruelty and greed. Please speak up and don’t shut up.

Crossposted on Brilliant@Breakfast.

Most days I have an idea of what I’ll write before I get a chance to do it, but not always.

Tata: Did you see the pictures of Pete’s dining room?
Mom: I heard you painted it red. Are you sure? Red?
Tata: It’s a deep red with blue tones, a kind of Chinese red. It’s not at all orange. The trim is ultra white, and you remember Sylvia’s modern teak furniture.
Mom: It’s an Italian color scheme, like the restaurant table cloths.
Tata: It’s not like that!
Mom: I can almost picture the flocked wallpaper.
Tata: Like one of those wedding palaces on Route 22?
Mom: Your father had relatives with red flocked wallpaper. They were so proud. They actually thought it was beautiful.
Tata: You thought it was –
Mom: Tragic.
Tata: Huh. No wonder I’m a raving bitch!

No, sometimes I’m bumbling along and a blog post happens.

Tata: My grandmother was a woman of exceptional taste. She had lovely furniture and jewelry. She was well-read and ran her own beauty salon. She had good taste.
Perplexed Co-Worker: How timely of you to mention it, since I was just wondering if your grandmother was a woman of good taste. But why do you say so?
Tata: My grandmother had a lovely apartment and, mysteriously, plastic fruit. After her death, we divided up the ancestral plastic fruit and I had a large collection. My friends and I took to pinning plastic grapes into our hair on festive occasions.
PCW: My goodness, that would be festive. Even so, I cannot say where this story is going.
Tata: Years ago, a friend borrowed some plastic fruit and misplaced it. She offered me dollar store substitutions but I would have none of it! I well know quality when I see it or the lack of it in plastic fruit and gave it back.
PCW: That’s right! You can’t lower your standards where plastic fruit are concerned.
Tata: Then last night I received a phone call from another friend. As she cleaned part of a room she hadn’t used much in some time, she unearthed two bunches of plastic grapes with hair pins still attached. My plastic fruit and I will be reunited tonight!
PCW: You must bring them to work so that I can see them.
Tata: Maybe someday. For now, the plastic fruit and I need time alone, as a family.

You’ll be happy to hear the plastic fruit are recovering nicely from their long ordeal.

Pete and I got up early and made a beeline for Sears, where we ran a paint salesman ragged, though he was definitely in on the joke, and while we were in the neighborhood, we picked up a few morsels to grill for dinner. Then we hightailed it to Pete’s, where we worked our rumps off.

This picture’s glare spots are a trick of the light and not at all representative of the actual glare, which is quite festive. The red dining room still needs work here and there. That pipe in the corner needs paint. A radiator you can’t see will be sanded and painted outdoors while the walls behind it will be rolled red and the trim white. Eventually, we’ll clear the rooms, sand the floors and apply polyurethane, but that’s down the road, and we’ve already started driving toward the living room. Today, Pete and I took down huge mirrors around the fireplace original to the house. They looked ghastly. I wondered why no one took a sledgehammer to the things eighty years ago.

This staircase has driven me crazier, since it’s ancient, filthy and almost impossible to clean. I scoured the banister for hours, the spindles for hours more and the surfaces – Flying Spaghetti Monster, the surfaces are miniscule, uneven and reachable if one were eight feet tall and 90 pounds. I am neither. We stained the banister, added a second coat and polyed. The banister and the column at the foot of the stairs glowed, as if the house approved. We painted the spindles white, and we’ll get to the stairs and the hallway, but for now, we’ll finish the dining room, paint the little living room before we move up into the hallway.

That green in the distance: it is my enemy, and it taunts me! I must vanquish its tealy evil!