A Hate Relationship

A dog and a harness.

Our nine month old puppy loves to run and can now outrun us all. We always have her on a leash outside the house or back yard. She is also (head)strong and often pulls on her leash in her need for speed. We have been using a flexible collar, but she would rather lose her breath than slow down sometimes. In my compassion for her condition, I bought her a classy new collar and a new harness so that she could run and frolic without strain on her throat. We used a harness with her when she was a small puppy and it worked well.

We put the harness on yesterday morning. You would have thought we crippled her. The tail drooped and with head hung low she slowly limped back to the kitchen. This from a dog that has only ever strutted.

She didn't bark about it, or even whine. She went to bed. And stayed there.


Her toys were worthless. She did seem to keep her favorite toy near, but feigned disinterest whenever she thought we were noticing. The cats were irrelevant and didn't deserve a chase. We tried to take her for a walk. Forget about it. All four legs and her bottom braced against any forward motion. She reluctantly did her "business" if we carried her out to the grass and insisted.

Occasionally, she strayed from her bed all the way to the kitchen floor a foot away.


We teased, we laughed, we hand fed her hot dogs. The longer she pouted, the more ridiculous it was. We left the harness on, waiting for her to adjust. After all, she adjusted to the "cone of shame" that she had to wear for a week after her surgery. It just took a day, and then she was fine.

I've had similar experiences with our kids, particularly with seat belts, and I never lost those fights, always able to outlast the most stubborn rebel.

This afternoon, after thirty-six hours, we surrendered. I guess the harness worked. As long as she was wearing it she certainly didn't strain her throat. But the means couldn't justify the end, so we took the harness off and put the old collar back on.

Immediately she was upright and ready to go.


See the tail, up and curly? It's rather humbling to be bossed around by a small dog, but it was sure fun to watch her strut, leap onto the bed, wrestle with the cats and enthusiastically request a walk.

This is our shiba inu - three pounds of dog and thirteen pounds of attitude.

Get to Work

That's what I must do. Absolutely. Totally.

I'm in a profession that lives and dies by deadlines and one is looming. As a self employed person I must be my own self motivator.

If I say I'm going to get things done, write it down, post it for the world, that's what I'll do.

Right? Right.

Wish me luck. I'll let you know in a few days if this motivational technique worked.

Life in the Fast Lane

Yesterday we headed up to central Oklahoma in our trusty Tahoe, five of us full size people and a dog. We celebrated my dad's birthday and then headed home today, timing our three and a half hour drive so that we would be back in time for my son's soccer scrimmage scheduled for late afternoon.

As we were virtually stopped on the highway in a construction zone single lane, we were hit by a car from behind. That's okay. We have one of those "national cars of Texas." The person who hit us left a string of car parts a block long. Our car lost a trailer hitch cover and will have to have the bumper replaced. But other than that we were fine. The dog, in her crate in the back, didn't even bark. After a ten minute delay to get the other driver's insurance information, we were on the road again and made it to the soccer game with time to spare.

We bought our first Suburban in 1997. Since then we've had a second Suburban and now have "traded down" to a Tahoe, which is a Suburban without the third row of seats. As far as I'm concerned, it's the safest, most comfortable car on the highway, and you'll have to pry my cold, dead hands from the steering wheel before I'll give it up.

But continuing our family string of bad luck, for the third time in three weeks my husband gets to call our insurance agent to get a claim number for a wrecked car.

Another Love Hate Relationship

A dog and a laser pointer.

Telling It Like It Is

Some friends have asked what made me decide to start a blog. There are some family reasons, but what drives me is a desire to share stories and anecdotes after which I can say, "Me, too! I'm not the only one that's happened to."

Also, I want to explore ideas I just haven't had time to think about. My daily schedule is as full as ever, but my daily responsibilities have lessened. After a twenty-five year hiatus, I now have some capacity for thoughts of my own. Sure, my children have struggles and growing pains, but now the struggles are mostly theirs, not mine. I agree with Erma Bombeck when she said, "I take a very practical view of raising children. I put a sign in each of their rooms: 'Checkout Time is 18 years.'"

Erma Bombeck was my favorite columnist. She wrote things you could relate to, saying out loud what you were unwilling to say and embarrassed even to think. She wrote about such topics as irritating relatives, messy houses, being on time, leftovers, clothing malfunctions and body breakdowns. She dispelled the notion that grownups were supposed to take life seriously all the time. Reading her column gave you comfort that your own life was normal, you weren't crazy. Or at least there were other people out there crazy like you. She died in 1996, just when my own kids were becoming teenagers and I could have related even more. Today's columnists are too often writing for constituents who just want validation for their wacked out lives and poor choices. I moved on............

To the funny pages. (Remember that expression?) I love the comics, especially the comics that tell stories. After Erma Bombeck, my favorite source of comaraderie was Lynn Johnston's "For Better or For Worse." I devotedly followed the lives of Elly and John, she a homemaker with secret dreams and he a dentist running his own practice. The characters dealt with the unpredictable world of parents, kids, friends and neighbors. I could relate to their left turns of life - especially the blessed but very unexpected bonus child.

Like Erma, Lynn Johnston was both funny and relevant. I giggled at Elly's nightgown-flapping hot flashes and John's thought balloons about his wife's wildly unpredictable temperatures. I snorted at John's denial of his growing midriff and his fling with a sports car. I identified with Elly's decision to buy and later sell a book store and John's indecision about cutting back at work. I appreciated the story line on how to work with the family your child marries into. I also enjoyed the push-back to their grown children's presumptions that Mom and Dad would always be available at a moment's notice for a room to crash in or store stuff, a loan or a place to park the grandkids.

But then Lynn Johnston changed her comic strip, ending the ongoing story and reverting to the story of twenty-five years prior, life with young children. She said it was too wearing to keep all the story lines going with the adult kids and grandkids. Rats! I still read that comic, but it's a shadow of what it used to be. I wish, instead, she had downplayed the other characters and just continued Elly and John's story. There's plenty of humor and new situations to depict using characters that have become, to put it politely, middle aged.

There are a few other comic strips that give me little doses of real life adventures - comics that mix hilarity with truth. I enjoy "Crankshaft" and "Funky Winkerbean" which have common authors and often interrelate. "Luann" is surprising in that I can take empathetic turns between the mom, with her job and goofy family, and the high school age daughter who actually has a mature way of dealing with the peer pressure and awkward moments of growing up. I don't think we're ever done with peer pressure and awkward moments.

Probably my favorite strip right now is "Zits." The main character is Jeremy, a sixteen year old boy. Each day's panel reveals the constant fallout from his interactions with parents. My boys are twenty and fourteen. The character of the relationships between Jeremy and his mom and dad are so spot-on I can't believe a guy writes the strip. Today's presentation is a perfect example:

The coffee, the ipod, the questions, the shout, the response - they are all EXACTLY like it is in my house.

But the comics only take a few minutes a day, so I looked for something else to wrap my brain around. There are thousands of choices in the blogosphere, but they seem to congregate in just a few categories - parents of young children, religious moms, home-schooling moms, current events or politics. While I've found a few blogs to read and enjoy, they are not fulfilling.

I'm ready to move past reciting the cute, sweet things my kids did yesterday. I've had four little kids and been there, done that. My boys can still be outrageously funny, but now it's usually the type of humor best shared only with the very closest family and friends, if you know what I mean. And if a son is particularly sweet, I don't want to jinx it by calling him out publicly.

I don't want to have arguments or be pushy, either. That goal pretty much eliminates current events and politics as frequent themes, although I'll bring them up occasionally. While these topics can be intensely interesting, they are thin layers on top of who we are as individuals and families and citizens.

Instead, I want to talk about our whole lives, what I've learned and what you've learned and what is left to learn. I want a place to remember or confess both the serious and silly happenings of our days, just like it's done in the funny pages. That's Life in the Fifties.

(Comments on any topic or suggestions for future topics are always welcome, and you don't even have to leave your name.)

The Light Bulb Turned On

I use slightly more than half of a master bedroom closet that is more than enough to hold my clothes and shoes IF I organize it well. The biggest nuisance has been finding what I have. My side of the closet, especially toward the back, is too dark to see items clearly. The closet light is more on my husband's side of the closet because the attic stairs are on my side of the ceiling. It's particularly annoying when I need to find dark items or matched sets - jackets or blouses that go with particular pants or skirts.

I have tried various combinations of hanging the matched sets together, hanging all the short pieces that go with something together on the double rod side while hanging all the long pieces that go with something on the single rod side, etc. I've removed the dome of the light fixture to get more light, tried keeping a flashlight in the closet, and even mounted an extra battery operated flourescent light on the back wall. The results have been unsatisfactory.

Today, once again cruising the lighting department of a store to find an economical solution to my dilemma, my light bulb came on, literally. I replaced tbe three 60 watt bulbs in my closet with 100 watt bulbs and bought a dozen 67 cent regular shaped hangers that also have clips so I can hang my sets together.

Duh. I'm fifty something years old, with two master's degrees, and it took me ten years of living in this house to figure out how to adjust a closet!

Have you had a "light bulb" moment? I hope I'm not the only one.

Free Advertising

Well, dad and daughter and cat are home safe, but they had an adventure.

They started with a day and a half of hard packing and loading the truck and hauling trash. By the end, they were packing trash in the truck, since it was closer than the dumpster and the truck had extra space. The second night was camping out on the apartment floor. Dad went for the grunge look - didn't pack his razor and there was no shower curtain, therefore no shower.

Bright and early Wednesday morning they headed up Interstate 75, dad driving the Penske rental truck with daughter following in her little Hyundai Accent. About an hour and a half into the trip, even before a breakfast break, dad gets a call.

"My window exploded!" Daughter has pulled over to the side of the road and doesn't know what to do next. Dad has no clue what has happened since his side mirrors don't allow that view. He takes the next exit, four or five miles ahead, then doubles back ten miles to the exit he needs and finally comes up behind her. Her driver's window is shattered, with glass everywhere around her, and the side of the car looks like it's been sanded by a buzz saw.

Truly thank God for cell phones and tempered glass. When the Florida highway patrolman arrived, they together determined she had been side swiped by a semi-tractor trailer. The semi was likely moving back to the right lane after passing a rest stop. The box of the semi's trailer hit her window just before its wheels raked the body of her car. The trucker never knew he hit someone. She didn't see the truck since the shock of the breaking window was so distracting. The patrolman said a semi hits a car without noticing at least once a day on that stretch of interstate.

You often see cars on the side of the road, by themselves, and you wonder what happened. Now you know.

The car was driveable, so they made it the few miles to a nearby Penske dealership. Yes, there was a car trailer available but it was parked behind a truck with a dead battery. So more time ticked by as they replaced the truck battery to move the truck to get to the trailer to attach to our truck. Daughter had to drive the car up on to the trailer, since she was the only one small enough to squeeze behind the wheel. She did a good job for someone whose life really had just flashed before her eyes.

After the three hour delay, they were on the road again - a shaky dad and daughter and a nervous cat in the cab of a Penske truck pulling a car taped up with plastic to keep out the rain. Shortly after their re-start they drove into thunderstorms. Dad called to let me know he expected lightning to hit them soon.

But lightning didn't strike, the plastic covering on the car held, the truck and trailer performed admirably and now they're home.

So here's a plug for Penske, with quality equipment and enough locations to be quite handy. And major kudos to Hyundai, a company that builds tough little cars that know how to break in only the right places. It could have been so very much worse.

Sometimes the Good Die Young

Two years ago I spent the last weekend of July with my friend Sally in her Houston home. We had a great visit. I am thankful that I chose to go see her that time. Her home has been a retreat for me where we would relax together once or twice a year. We would gossip about our kids and our clients and even have fun discussing work related problems. (I know, I'm a nerd.)

Sally and I met while working together at that big accounting firm that can no longer be named. Both our husbands were attorneys. We were pregnant at the same time and shared the same obstetrician. My second child and her first child were born a few weeks apart. Our families vacationed together when our children were little. Sally and I left that accounting firm and started our businesses about the same time and continued to stay good friends for twenty years, even though I had moved north.

A week after Sally and I visited, she died while participating in an open water swim event. Sally's local swim club had traveled with spouses to have a fun-filled weekend, culminating with the swim club members racing from Alcatraz Island to the shore of San Francisco. Near the end of the race Sally quit swimming, about a hundred yards from the finish, and could not be revived. When her husband called me that Sunday afternoon and told me the news, I thought a boulder had landed on my chest. It was as devastating as when the doctor told me my daughter had a very serious and rare form of cancer that needed immediate treatment. When told about my daughter's condition, the bottom fell out of my life, but was soon restored with hope and activity. There were things I could do to help and save my daughter. But Sally, she was gone.

After hanging up the phone, I packed a bag and drove the 275 miles to Houston, still in shock. My daughter was living with Sally and her husband during a summer internship. We had to get her packed up and moved out of the way so that Sally's children could come home and have their space and privacy. It was an awful week of disbelief as I called Sally's clients and helped any way possible. Unexpected death is jagged and raw. It stays immediate and aches for a long time.

I will never know exactly how or why Sally died that day. I like to think that her death, by changing the end of summer travel plans of her college age children, kept one or both of them from a disastrous course. Sally would have traded her life for the life of her children in a heartbeat, and perhaps she did.

I do know that Sally was prepared. She had done her best to coordinate the assisted living care of her parents and was pushing her siblings to be more involved going forward. She enjoyed her children and they were thriving. A few years previously she threw a grand to-do in celebration of her 25th wedding anniversary. She had confided to me that she didn't want to wait for her 50th, since her husband's family's longevity record was not the greatest. She wanted to make sure she had the chance to celebrate her marriage and her family.

Sally and I often disagreed on politics and religion. I am a compassionate conservative. She was a compassionate liberal. I think she questioned the value of organized Christianity and the interest God had in her individual life, while I see God's hand everywhere. To me, it was no accident that her life was in such order. She had everything caught up so she could spend several weeks touring the Middle East with her daughter, a trip scheduled to start shortly after the San Francisco trip. It was no accident that I had visited her the week before and, in an unusual course of conversation, she showed me exactly how her work was organized and what was finished and what was left to be done. It was no accident that her husband was surrounded by close friends throughout his terrible ordeal. It was no accident that she had secure relationships with her children.

I miss Sally and always will. I miss having her on speed dial to share jokes or laments. I miss her sentimental attachment to pets. I miss her exasperating tendency to obsess over small details. I miss our shared future of grandchildren and retirement adventures. I'm still mad at her for choosing this particular adventure two years ago. I wish she had changed her mind at the last minute and just enjoyed the festive weekend without unnecessary risk. But it was not in her nature to back away from a challenge she had committed to.

The wise teacher Dumbledore said that the dead we loved never truly leave us. Because of who Sally was and how she lived her life, I now try to leave fewer things undone. Remembering the joy she had with her pets, even in the midst of their infirmities, helped me decide it was worth the trouble to have a dog. I have more friends and cherish them more, knowing how valuable real friendship is and how hard it is to let it go. And, to the relief of my husband, I have taken hang gliding off my list of things to do, at least until I'm eighty.

It is a trite expression to say you should live each day as your last. Instead, I encourage you to live each day more completely. Live without regret for what was or might have been. And when you have the opportunity for true friendship, hold on to it as tightly as you can.

Holding My Breath

Life as we know it is about to get crazy again. (Again?) Ricky is flying to Orlando today. Our oldest, a casualty of the sluggish Florida tourist industry, is moving back to Texas. Dad and daughter will fill up a truck and drive it and her car back home in a couple of days. They should be pretty closely bonded at the end of that experience - packing, loading, cleaning and driving 1200 miles with an apartment full of stuff and a cat.

We are excited about having her closer to us again so she can be part of things more than once or twice a year. Another positive side effect is the clean garage we have now in anticipation of storing her stuff and the clean garage we'll have again when she eventually gets settled into a job and an apartment. I'm also curious to find out if those "fore-arm forklifts, as seen advertised on TV" are all they're cracked up to be. If they are, I can't wait to rearrange our furniture!

Anyway, at least for a while, we'll be a household of two "mature" adults, two young adults, a teenager, a dog, three cats and a business office. The only thing missing is the revolving door.

Trigger Happy

This is how we were on our trip.

Wiley is taking a picture of us while we take a picture of him. And Mr. Photogenic knows how to take a picture without hiding his own charm and good looks. It's a wonder he avoided carpal tunnel syndrome, with all the button pushing he was doing. He took about 2,000 pictures on vacation. It would have been far more if he had not been limited by all the venues that prohibited photography. I shouldn't have been surprised. On Christmas Day he took over 800 pictures with his new camera.

Recording our lives is so easy now. Everyone has a digital camera or a cell phone camera and pocket size video recorders are common. Pictures are immediately posted and shared in so many domains and formats you can't list them all. On our trip we downloaded cameras to our laptop every night.

When I was twenty, I went to Hawaii with my family, accompanying my dad on a business trip. I took my Kodak pocket camera with my 24 exposure roll of 110 film and rationed my pictures over the week we were there. It took some deliberation to decide which scene was photo worthy. After returning from my trip I sent the film off for mail order processing, in order to minimize the significant expense of developing. I have some beautiful pictures of the Haleakala Crater on Maui that I still look at. The other pictures were special or unique in other ways. During my college years I only used a few rolls of film. Receiving prints back from the developer was an "event," allowing me to relive the moments photographed. Good times.

I have virtually no pictures from the first three years of marriage, living on one income while paying substantial law school costs. For my first birthday after the advent of dual gainful employment, I received a fantastic 35mm camera and began photography with abandonment. Shortly after that we inherited about $1,500 and used it to buy a video camera so that we could record family scenes with our new baby. I've taken and printed thousands and thousands of pictures and recorded hundreds of hours of video, upgrading cameras over the years. The closet under the stairs is completely full of photos and tapes. I am slowly adjusting now to images on screens rather than paper, and that's probably a good thing. I have no more closet space.

But, save special occasion like our recent London trip, I take far fewer pictures than in the past, even though technology makes it much easier. A few years ago I realized that sometimes you can be so busy recording life that you don't really get to enjoy it or appreciate it and have difficulty recalling it. Would I rather snap away during a kid's ball game, or would I rather watch it and watch the game and cheer and clap and focus on the effort and the expressions? What we see through a lens is not the same as what we see when we are involved. I would find myself trying to anticipate the next great photo shot rather than actually watching the game. Or I would be unnaturally quiet, not wanting to hear myself later on a video recording, rather than cheering and supporting.

In family gatherings I was often on the fringes, taking pictures rather than visiting and playing. Once I was so involved video-ing my children in a play pool in the backyard that it was probably a minute before I realized that my daughter was struggling and in real danger. I was so busy watching through the camera, making sure the picture was framed and centered, that I didn't notice my child was underwater.

So now my camera doesn't stay an arm's length away. Even on our vacation, I left it in the hotel room a couple of days. And our fourth child won't have as many pictures of himself doing cute or silly things. He won't have as many video recordings of his games as his siblings have. There should still be enough, I think, to vividly recall the past to mind, and that's what's important.

I'm not sure who will look at all those pictures and videos, anyway. We're too busy living, absorbing and being truly part of each others' lives to record and watch it all the time.

Bitter Sweet

Today is my mother-in-law's 70th wedding anniversary. It's the first anniversary without her husband, who died last August. I am honored to have joined this family thirty years ago.

Jim and Lucile had five children. Their first child, a daughter, died at birth with the cord wrapped around her neck. That wouldn't have happened in these times. I still can't comprehend the grief from that loss and the fear for each successive pregnancy.

The four survivng children are all married, with marriages ranging from twenty-seven to forty-two years. There are eleven grandchldren (six are married) and seven great-grandchldren.

I hope for a similar legacy, although I doubt I'll make it to a 70th wedding anniversary like Lucile has.

More than anything, I wish I could chat and joke with my mother-in-law about the ups and downs of being married to a Balthrop, of raising four kids and meeting their individual needs and what it's like to have eleven grandchildren. But she had a major stroke shortly before I met her, permanently paralyzing her right side and stealing her ability to speak.

For the first twenty-five years I knew her we had some fun. She has a wonderful singing voice and I always sat close to her in church to hear her hum the songs. Some of my children have inherited her voice. She was good at writing notes, laughing at the funny things my kids did and was generally encouraging and always appreciative. She made sure Jim behaved. (She and I could share exasperated looks behind the backs of our husbands.)

I do miss the ability to have a conversation with her about what it was like to have four kids, then four teenagers and finally grown children. I particularly miss the stories she has in her heart about each individual child - my husband and his brother and sisters. Jim wasn't paying attention to the same things a mom would pay attention to and while he told good stories, it wasn't what I hungered for. My faith tells me I will hear those stories some day, I'll just have to wait a little longer.

In the meantime I thank God for the marriage of my in-laws and the example they set for me, my husband and our children to follow.

Blessing in Disguise

I live in the flat world of north Texas. My son has a second floor bedroom, but I don't go there. I was not prepared for our vacation.

After being in London for a few days, I've climbed several thousand stairs.

How so? To begin with, London is hilly with a river running through it, so stairs and inclines are everywhere. Underneath London there is a network of tunnels for several layers of trains. Scooting around London on these "tube" lines means up and down stairs to change altitude. (Is it altitude if you are underground?)

Using a bus means a climb to sit on the top deck. The tourist sites include steps - whether it's climbing the turrets of the Bloody Tower or the White Tower at the Tower of London, climbing down to and up from Churchill's bunkers, climbing the steps from street level to bridge across the Thames, or climbing the 530 steps to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral.

And in a moment of insanity, I descended halfway down from the top of St. Paul's only to go back to the top one more time to take a picture I missed the first time. Actually, it was to take a picture my son decided he wanted. He owes me, big time. It is a neat picture, though, a picture of the floor of the cathedral you could take through a peephole, and I'm glad we have it.

Every time we eat fast food we order our food on the ground floor and then eat at tables either upstairs or downstairs. And there are 44 stair steps from the hotel lobby to our third floor hotel room, which we climb at least three times a day.

I cannot adequately describe how intensely my legs and ankles and feet hurt after five days in London.

On our sixth day, we take a day trip to Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury. The nearly two hour train ride, sitting down, is pleasant. The climb to the second level of the bus is manageable. The leisurely stroll around the gentle slope of Stonehenge is pleasant.

We spend some time at Old Saren Castle, with some slopes to climb, but nothing difficult. Then we head back to the town of Salisbury, with the primary agenda to see the Salisbury Cathedral. It's peak is the tallest in England. There are 345 steps up to the base of the steeple.

When we arrive at the cathedral we discover that the tower can only be climbed as part of the guided tour, which is already full for the day. So I'm left on the ground with the common folk, impressed and awed, but a little disappointed that the climb will have to wait for another time.

Disappointed, that is, until I wake up the morning of day seven and, miracle of miracles, nothing hurts!