Rubber Bands and Melted Butter

I have been thinking about rubber bands and melted butter. 

I started thinking about rubber bands when my dad told me, “I am cleaning out my file cabinets, and I need heavy-duty rubber bands.  You can’t buy heavy-duty rubber bands in this town.”  Dad lives in Tucumcari (New Mexico) with 5,362 other people.  Tucumcari is not to be confused with Tumacacori (Arizona), population 393.

Many people do confuse Tucumcari with Tumacacori.  I know this because a man, having learned that my dad lives in Tucumcari, told me that he’d visited the National Historical Park there.  I told him that I was pretty sure that Tucumcari didn’t have a national historical park.  He said I was wrong because he clearly remembered going to the hot springs there. 

I asked my dad if a national historical park and a hot springs I didn’t know about had sprung up in Tucumcari.  He said, “No.”

Then he told me about Tumacacori because several people over the years have tried to convince him that Tucumcari had a national historical park and a hot springs.  My dad is pretty stubborn, so you just as well forget about trying to convince him that he that he’s somehow overlooked a national park and a hot springs in a town of 5,363 where he’s lived for forty years.

So that springs me back to where I started: rubber bands.

I thought I would try to be a dutiful daughter and Amazon dad some rubber bands.  (I may be the first person to verbify Amazon.)  So I searched Amazon for rubber bands. 

Good grief!  I had no idea that rubber-band-buying was so complicated.  Postal-approved rubber bands are #64.  Did Dad need his rubber bands to be approved by the post office?

The most popular rubber bands are #19 and 33.  I was pretty sure that Dad didn’t give two hoots in hell about whether his rubber bands were popular.

I discovered that regular rubber bands come in sizes ranging from 7/8 X 1/16 inch to 7 X 5/8 inches.  That doesn’t include 112-inch-long rubber bands for bundling pallets.  I didn’t even know that people bundled pallets with rubber bands.  I can’t imagine why anyone would want to. 

I learned that you can buy rubber bands that are latex-free.   You can buy them in an assortment of primary colors.  You can buy them in small packages of a dozen or in big boxes of thousands.  You can buy them in handy Kleenex-type boxes so they pop out one after the other. 

Best of all, you can buy them in balls.  I’ve always wanted a ball of rubber bands.  I thought about Amazoning myself one just for the fun of it. 

I wondered whether the guy whose job is making rubber band balls would be 1) a fun guy to hang out with or 2) really, really anal. 

I learned that people do strange things with rubber bands, like Joel Waul, who holds the world's record for the largest ball of rubber bands: an 8-foot-tall, four-and-a-half-ton ball of 700,000 rubber bands.  He sold it to Ripley's Believe It or Not for a ton of money.  Believe it or not.

 

Some other things people do with rubber bands are even stranger. 

 

 

I had forgotten that my home of Hot Springs, Arkansas is home to Alliance Rubber Company (ARC), which makes rubber bands, but I was reminded of it as I was googling.  I learned that ARC is third-generation family-owned and the current owner is a woman.  I learned that ARC was one of two companies to win the US Department of Commerce’s Excellence in Innovation Award recently, and they are civic minded.  They ask people to Buy American by spending one additional dollar per day on American-made goods.  Maybe on their rubber bands.

I learned that ARC makes ergonomically-correct rubber bands.  I never knew that rubber bands could be ergonomically incorrect.

The only picture of the owner of ARC showed her sitting at a table in Nova Scotia with a live lobster. She was pointing to the big rubber bands on its claws.  She said the lobster was one of her favorite customers, Lawrence the Lobster. 

I’d bet five bucks that Lawrence the Lobster wouldn’t return the warm sentiment.  I’m pretty sure that if he could get loose from her rubber bands, he’d pinch her all the way from Nova Scotia to Tucumcari, where she ought to be civic-minded enough to send a ball of rubber bands since you can’t buy them there.  Or maybe he would pinch her all the way to Tumacacori, where she could visit the National Historic Park and treat him to a dip in the hot springs.  And then some melted butter.

On Hissy-Fitting and Lickety-Splitting

Great Big Baby Dog Woodrow, Old Lady Dog Callie, and I were lying on our bellies looking out my attic-bedroom window at 6:15 this morning.  Snuggling in bed with your dogs looking out the window together in the early morning is one of the great pleasures of life.  I commend it to you.

While we were gazing at the ice-covered woods, the dogs began throwing a hissy-fit.  If you are not from the American south, you may not know that a hissy-fit is a tantrum.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines hissy-fit as a sudden period of uncontrolled and silly anger like a child’s.  I do not think people from Cambridge throw hissy-fits. 

In addition, one does not HAVE a hissy-fit.  One THROWS a hissy-fit.  I do not know why.  

Perhaps it’s because throw is a strong verb.  A good hissy-fit is always thrown.  Most recently I threw a hissy-fit when I dropped my phone in the bath.

But back to the dogs’ hissy-fit.  They threw it because Young Red Fox was lickety-splitting down the cart path. 

The Oxford Dictionary defines lickety-split thus: as quickly as possible.  OD says lickety-split is an adverb, but I prefer it as a verb.  I know the word more intimately than the writers of OD do because I’ve been lickety-splitting all my life, and I doubt that anyone who ever worked on the Oxford Dictionary has ever lickety-splitted.  I can’t imagine a wizened don sitting in a dusty library telling another wizened don, “I need a definition of perspicacious lickety-split.”

Please note that I like verbing nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.  Lickety-splitting is a more powerful verb than running lickety-split.

Lest you wonder whether verbing is a verb, it is.  Antimeria/anthimeria is the act of changing one part of speech into another, such as verbing.    If you change the word, it’s a derivation.  If you don’t change the word, it’s a conversion or a zero derivation.

Lest you think this essay is pointless, let me assure you that I have a point: life is too short to throw hissy-fits by annoyances lickety-splitting through our lives.  Like other people’s antimeria:  Yesterday I was lickety-splitting past another white-haired woman who was throwing a hissy-fit about her daughter-in-law’s use of the word cocooning, as in, “We’re staying home cocooning this weekend.” 

I wanted to say, “Lady, at our age, life is too short for throwing hissy-fits.

“Instead, we should each go home and snuggle on our beds with our dogs and gaze into the snow-filled woods.” 

Dogs who get hissyfied by foxes lickety-splitting by.

Hissyfied?  One of my favorite antimeria is making predicate adjectives by adding fied to almost any part of speech.  So I hope you have been smartified today because I taught you about antimeria/anthimeria. 

And I hope you stop lickety-splitting for the rest of the day, get unhissyfied, and go snuggle with your dogs on your bed and stare out the window together. And thus be blessifed.

 

 

 

My Mother's Damned Egg Slicer

My mother hoarded stuff.  Mother and Daddy’s house didn’t look like the houses on the TV show Hoarders.  It looked like a fancy antique store bulging with exotic artifacts from Europe and Asia.  Except for the kitchen.  The kitchen looked like a stage set from the 1970’s: countertops and cabinets crammed with Veg-O-Matics, garlic peelers, avocado slicers, nut choppers, corn holders, pie birds, fondue forks, plastic butter tubs, tin pie-plates, and wax fruit.  I don’t think they even make wax fruit anymore.  If they do, they shouldn’t. 

Mother’s wax fruit was sticky with years of grime.  Several times over the years, I tried to get her to throw it out.  I’d say, “Mother, if you want a hanging basket of fruit in your kitchen, I’ll go to the store and buy fresh fruit.  Eat it and replace it.”

“Leave my wax fruit alone,” she’d say.  “If you don’t like it, don’t look at it.”

Each time I made the long trip home to see my parents, I tried to clean out one drawer or cabinet while they napped in the afternoon.  Once, my MIL had accompanied me on the 700-mile round-rip and was keeping me company when my mother caught me cleaning out the lowliest of her thirteen kitchen drawers.  The drawer was full of yellowed newspaper recipes from 1965, sandwich bags of bread-sack twist-ties, and orphaned plastic lids.  In the back, wrapped in decayed plastic wrap held together by a rotted rubber band, was an egg slicer.  I had tossed everything into a trash bag.

With few exceptions, I don’t own single-purpose kitchen items, yet I’m a competent cook.  I make mouth-watering chicken’n’dumplings, authentic Tex-Mex enchiladas, and savory finkadella, all without specialized kitchen utensils. 

Granted, I do own a knife sharpener, and it’s a single- purpose item.  Likewise my potato peeler (although I managed without one for years), and a toaster (ditto). 

I do not own a waffle iron, a Panini maker, or an apple corer.  I certainly don’t own an egg slicer.  I do own a vegetable knife, a butcher knife, and three handy-dandy paring knives that I use daily; an electric knife that I use weekly; and a serrated knife that I seldom use and have decided to get rid of.  Any of my knives can slice an egg.  I don’t need an egg slicer. 

But apparently my mother thought she did.

She grabbed the trash bag into which I had tossed the egg slicer and started digging through it.

“It’s all trash, Mother,” I said.  “Let it go.”

“No,” she said. “You are always throwing away my good things.” She glared at me.

She found the egg slicer in the trash bag and held it up triumphantly.  “There!” she cried.  “My egg slicer!  You were going to throw it away!”

She waved it around.  “I’ve been looking all over for it!”  She jabbed it toward my MIL.  “Look!” she cried, “She threw it away!”  My MIL covered her mouth to hide her laughter and shook.

I took a deep breath.  “Mother,” I said patiently, “This egg slicer has been in the back of this drawer for so many years that the plastic is yellow and the rubber band around it has rotted.  You don’t use it.”

“Well, I wanted to use it, but I couldn’t find it!”

“Mother, you have 35 knives.  Why do you need an egg slicer?”

“Because I might want to have a party, and I’d need it to slice the eggs on top of the potato salad!”  My MIL bit her lip while tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Mother, you are 85 years old, Daddy is 90 and has Alzheimer’s disease, and you haven’t thrown a party in twenty years.”

“Well, I just might, and if I do, I’ll need this egg slicer.”

So the egg slicer went back into the drawer, and there it sat until Mother died.

The day after the funeral, I called my MIL.  “Is there anything of Mother’s that you’d like to have as a memento of her?” I asked.

Yes, she said, there was.  And so I dug through the bottom drawer again, found the damned egg slicer, tucked it lovingly in my purse, and drove it 350 miles to its new home.

 

 

 

Funky

I arose at five this morning and Swiffer®ed my glass-block shower walls.  Stroke of genius.  I don’t know what possessed me to arise at five and Swiffer®, but that’s what I did.  I felt so self-righteous that I proceeded to Swiffer® the floor of my 30-square-foot shower.  I don’t recall ever having mopped a shower floor, much less Swiffer®ed one.

You can’t imagine the power you feel when you Swiffer® your shower.

Thus invigorated, I decided to clean the rest of my bathroom. 

My bathroom is funky, but not funky in a bad way; funky in a good way.  When I bought this house (Don was taking a Sunday afternoon nap.  When he awoke, I said, “I bought a house while you were asleep.”  He said, “Oh.  Do we have any chips and salsa?”) I told the contractor, “I want a huge bathroom in my bedroom in the attic.  Tear out the tiny bathroom, the two little hallways, and the mini-bedroom and make one huge, funky bathroom.  Huge.  And funky.”

He said, “I have been building and remodeling houses for 40 years.  Nobody has ever told me that they wanted a funky bathroom.”

“Well, I do.”

“I don’t even know what that even means.”

“You’re an old white guy.  Of course you don’t know what it means.  I’ll teach you.”   

I handed him pictures cut out of magazines.  A clawfoot bathtub and a pedestal sink.  Walls a color that no one has ever named, but are a cross between watermelon and terra cotta (I call it meloncotta).  Purple towels hanging from hooks on the walls; no towel rods.  Suntube.  Hidey-holes. A glass-block o-p-e-n European-style shower: clunky glass walls that don’t go to the ceiling; no door or curtain.  Big as a ballroom.  Mr. Carson from Downton Abbey could waltz in it.

Antique furniture instead of cabinets. 

Because I live in the attic, my sloping ceilings are already funky.

I looked up funky in an online etymological dictionary. 

First known use of funky: 1620’s. Definition: having an offensive odor.  This was not the funky I was going for.  Used in French from the Latin fumigare.  Smoky smell.  Evolved into meaning musty smell, especially as associated with cheese. Not what you want when you remodel your bathroom.  Not at all what I had in mind.

But in the 1900s, funky began to have a positive meaning associated with jazz: strong, earthy, deeply felt.  Earthy.  That’s going the right direction.  I wanted my bathroom to proclaim me as earthy.  I wanted it to evoke strong, deeply-felt earthy emotions.

By the 1960’s, funky meant fine, stylish, and excellent.  My definition was building. Stylish and earthy.

The Oxford Dictionary defined funky as modern and stylish in an unconventional or striking way.  People from Oxford should know. 

Merriam-Webster added: odd or quaint in appearance or feeling; unconventionally stylish.  That completed my ideal bathroom plan: A fine, odd, quaint, earthy, unconventionally stylish place.  A Deeply Felt retreat where I could take bubble baths and feel free and unenclosed by shower walls.

And so it is.

So the New Year will be here in a few hours, and I will have a freshly-scrubbed bathroom. I commend New Year’s Eve bathroom cleaning to you.  Clean your bathroom.  Swiffer® your shower. Then get funky and take a bubble bath.  Unless you think that’s hinky, of course.

Confessions of a Carnivorious Lexophile

I am an omnivore.  I wish I were not carnivorous, but I am.  I’m not proud of it.  But there you have it.

I tried being a vegetarian twice.  The first time was thirty years ago.  After four months, I was invited to the home of a couple for dinner.  They served steak.  They didn’t know I was a vegetarian, and I hadn’t thought to tell them.  I guess I wasn’t a very good vegetarian because I ate the steak.  The effect?  Like I’d taken a dose of heroin.  I was hooked again.

The second time I tried being a vegetarian was in 2003.  Husband Don agreed with me (he doesn’t like beef, and prefers sweets or chips’n’salsa to most anything), and we set upon a year of being vegetarians.  Then I got sick.

I went to my doctor.  She sent me to an O.D. neurologist, a Dr. V. Radkar.  He spent fifteen minutes with me and didn’t order any tests.  He patted me paternally on the knee and said, “You’ll be fine.  You’re just a busy little housewife with a lot on your plate.”  I swear on my mother’s grave that he said that.  I wanted to kick him. 

I got sicker and sicker, so after filling my bedroom and wardrobe with pink things for three months (I’d read that seeing pink produced important neurotransmitters), I decided that maybe my brain needed amino acids found in meat.  After a year as a vegetarian, I ate a big plate of liver and onions.  Then a steak.  And the vegetarian life style was only a memory. 

(Actually, I had a brain tumor, but by the time my family doctor sent me for an MRI a year after I presented with symptoms, I was a full-fledged meat-eater again.)

I wish I weren’t a carnivore.  I wish I didn’t eat the flesh of dead animals.  But I am, and I do.

So this morning I started thinking about the word carnivore, and I came up with the following definitions.

Carnivore- one who eats animal flesh

Coneivore- one who eats ice cream in a crispy, handheld container

Cornivore- one who eats maize

Caulivore- one who only eats the white member of the brassicaeceae family, which also includes broccoli, cabbage, and kale

Cannivore- one who only eats food in tins, such as Spam or canned tamales

Caneivore- an aggressive older woman with an Electra complex

Coneyvore- one who only eats hot dogs or rabbits

Canaryvore- one who eats small, yellow songbirds

Colavore- one who only drinks carbonated beverages in the coca family

Callivore- one who tries to eat Old Dog Callie, which is pretty much limited to Baby Dog Woodrow

Carneyvore- one who eats people who work on the midway at travelling fairs

Cannyvore- one who eats clever people

Carinivore- one who eats rocks, but only if stacked in piles

 

I ran these by my dad. He suggested:

Clandivore- one who eats in secret.  Probably on a diet, but cheats.

Comavore- one who could eat even if totally unconscious

Crankivore- one who gripes about whatever is on his plate

Cleanivore- one who eats so fastidiously that when he is finished eating, his napkin is still creased

        I added: But sometimes when he finishes his tidy eating, he licks his plate clean and then eats his napkin.

 

I finished with:

Commavore- a high school English teacher who slashes through inappropriate soft stops on students’ papers.  The Commavore is the sworn enemy of the class of student known as the Commakazi.

Happy New Year, my friends.  You know who you are.

Your Old Commavore

 

 

 

My First Cooking Disaster

For a week, I lay in bed at night and dreamed about preparing my first dish for my daddy.  Mother was a gourmet cook: people begged to be invited to parties where she served her Greek-style leg of lamb, the mouthwatering Onion Cheese Pie that she created, Cherries Jubilee.  When she gave me Betty Crocker’s Cookbook for Boys and Girls for Christmas, I was delighted.  At the tender age of eight, I was being invited to become a princess in this realm that my mother ruled as queen.

She said that the following Friday night, I would be allowed to prepare a dish from the book.  A salad, perhaps, or a vegetable.  I decided that I would prepare a salad that would please my daddy.  (You might have to be a southern girl to understand this.)  A vegetable would be lost on the plate beside the starch, bread, and entree.  A salad would be a first course that would be the center of attention.  And it was.

Mother announced to Daddy that I was going to prepare the salad course for him on Friday night.  My brother, who was three years older, would be at a party that evening, so this would be a special night for me.  Daddy asked me what I was going to prepare.  I said, “It’s a surprise.”  And it was.

The recipe was Candle Salad.  I set the table beautifully and hid the salads in the refrigerator.  When Daddy and Mother were seated and grace was said, I went to the refrigerator and with great dignity carried Daddy’s salad to the table and set it before him.  Then I brought Mother's.  Then mine.

By the time I arrived at the table with my salad, tears were running down Daddy’s cheeks.  He was biting his lower lip.  He began to shake.  Then he started to roar with laughter.  “Daddy!  Stop that!” hissed Mother.  But he couldn’t. 

I was devastated.  My daddy was laughing at my salad.  “What did I do wrong?” I cried, jumping up from my seat wanting to correct my mistake.

“Nothing!” he shouted, trying to control himself.  “Absolutely nothing!  It’s the best damn salad I’ve ever had in my whole damn life!” he cried.

“Then why are you laughing at it?” I whimpered. 

“Honey, I’m not laughing at the salad,” he said trying to regain control of himself.  Then he snorted and laughed harder.  In spite of herself, Mother started laughing, too.  I was not laughing.

Finally he got out, “I’m laughing because I’m so pleased that my little girl is learning how to cook from her mother!”

Affronted, I said, “Mother didn’t teach me how to make this.  I learned it on my own from Betty Crocker.” 

Daddy howled.

I did not figure out until years later what was so funny.

This is the recipe from the book.  You might want to try it yourself.  Or not.

 

Addendum to My Taxonomy of Urination

Knowledge is dynamic; research constantly reveals new truth.  That which was once impossible is now a reality.  New species are discovered.  Old taxonomies must be revised.  Ergo, I am revising my month-old Taxonomy of Urination with this addendum. 

A few days after I posted my taxonomy, my “like a second dad to me” junior high band director called.  He said, “I have read and been thinking about your taxonomy of urination.”

“So what have you been thinking?” I asked.

“It’s good, but I decided that I need to tell you that you left something out.”

“What’s that?” I asked, grabbing a pencil and notepad so I could get every word down correctly.

“Taking a piss,” he said.  “You left out taking a piss.  That’s an important omission.”

“Okay,” I said.  “I didn’t think about it at the time.  Talk to me.  I need you to do a semantic analysis to differentiate taking a piss from the other types of urination I listed.”

“Well,” he said, “When I was a young man, I could take a piss several times a day.  It’s what you do when you really have to go, and your stream is strong and vigorous, and you can pee a perfect arc up into the air.  You have a powerful feeling of relief.  You usually follow it with a big sigh and a smile.”

“It gives you great pleasure?”

“Oh, yes.  Taking a piss is definitely a great pleasure.”

“But you’re old now, Dad.  Can you still take a piss?”

“Only rarely.  Mostly I tinkle.  Sitting down.  But once in a while, I can take a piss, like after a long car ride.  And it’s glorious.”

“How does it make you feel now at your age?”

“Oh, it makes me feel like a young man again.  It’s a wonderful pleasure.”

“Got it, Dad.  Thanks.  I’ll update the taxonomy soon.”

So please add taking a piss to my Taxonomy of Urination. 

And thanks, Dad, for your contribution to science.  May you still be taking an occasional piss when you’ve turned 105.

 

 

A Taxonomy of Urination

Today I said widdle.  I have never said widdle in my life.  I was surprised to hear myself say it.

I said widdle to defend my new puppy when he dribbled a little urine on my Belgian rug.  I glared at Husband Don and snarled, “It’s okay.  He didn’t tinkle.  He just widdled.” Don backed away from me.

Because I wondered why I had said widdled, I constructed a taxonomy of urinary elimination.  Perhaps some scholar will find it useful.

When I was a little girl, I tee-teed.   But I knew that boys peed.  I preferred the word pee.  Pee.  Good, strong word.  Powerful word.  I wanted to pee.  But according to my mother, I could only tee-tee because that’s what girls did.

However, my fearsome grandmother was an RN, and she required that I say micturate.  I do not know another living soul who has ever said micturate besides Grandmother Martin and me.  But because she was a nurse, I assumed that this was the appropriate term to use with a physician. Therefore, when I was seven and my mother took me to the doctor for a UTI, I told him that it hurt to micturate.  He laughed at me.

As a teenager, I stopped tee-teeing and simply used the restroom. 

As a twenty-something until I was forty, I worked as a wilderness guide and horse wrangler in the summers. Horse wrangling is an intensely masculine culture, so in order to seem as tough as the men, I adopted their lexicon and began taking a leak.  (Now in my sixties, I leak when I sneeze, but I don’t intend to.)

When I started dating Husband Don, I peed and he tinkled.  This struck me as funny.  For 20 years, I have peed, and he has tinkled.  He has never succeeded in getting me to tinkle instead of pee, but he has succeeded in teaching me that dogs tinkle. 

Therefore, when we brought new puppy Woodrow home two days ago, I found myself cooing with exaggerated enthusiasm, “Let’s go tinkle!”  When he urinated outdoors, I jumped up and down, waved my arms, and hollered, “Woohoo!  Woohoo!  Good Woodrow!  Good tinkle!  Good tinkle, Woodrow!”   I pictured myself as Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur) from Golden Girls engaging in this absurd routine, and I felt ridiculous.  But I still kept doing it.

So that is my taxonomy.  Little girls tee-tee.  Little girls with fierce RN grandmothers micturate; or at least I and mine did.  Boys pee.  Teenage girls use the restroom.  Horse wranglers take a leak.  I pee if I am intentionally urinating, leak if unintentionally.  Husband Don and puppy Woodrow tinkle if intentionally urinating, and Woodrow widdles if unintentionally dribbling.  

Although I will feel ridiculous, I will keep woohooing whenever Woodrow tinkles outdoors, onlookers be damned.  Likewise, I will keep defending him when he widdles on the Belgian rug.  Because baby Woodrow is my dog, and a dog is a human’s best friend.  And after all, what’s a little micturition between friends?